Freia Lockhart's Summer of Awful (4 page)

It's only when he eases me back onto the bed, somewhere around song four, that I realise Boris has reclaimed his spot on my pillow. He opens one eye and then gives me a slow, disapproving blink as he closes it again and swats his tail against Dan's back.

“I think your cat's jealous,” laughs Dan. “I don't blame him – I wouldn't want to share you, either.” He runs his hand down my cheek and pushes the hair away from my neck as he leans in to kiss it.

And then there's a knock on the bedroom door.

“Shit.”

“Shit.”

Dan springs up from the bed, dragging my earbud with him and tucking in his T-shirt, despite it being untucked to begin with.

“Freia,” calls Mum. “Are you in there? The kitchen looks like a bomb's gone off!”

I straighten my clothes and open the door.

Mum is standing with her arms crossed and her lips tightly clamped in a thin, humourless line. It gets even thinner when she sees Dan. “I think it's time Daniel went home,” she says, not taking her eyes off me. “Freia, your father and I would like to see you downstairs in two minutes. Daniel, we'll see you soon, I'm sure.”

“I'm really sorry, Fray,” says Dan when she leaves.

“What for? It's not as if you dragged me up here against my will. Anyway, Mum said ‘Daniel, we'll see you soon', so at least she's not planning to put me in solitary confinement for the rest of the holidays.”

“Unless what she meant was ‘Daniel, we'll see you soon when we haul you back here with your father to punish you, too'.”

The thought of Mum and Dr Phil joining forces for a parenting uberlecture makes me shudder. “I'd better get down there. The longer I keep them waiting, the more time they have to stew on it.”

We walk down the stairs together but Dan continues to the front door and I go to the kitchen. Mum, Dad and Ziggy are all sitting at the table. Mum and Dad look … not so much angry but as if something's very, very wrong. Ziggy seems as confused by the situation as I am to see him there. I don't know why they think he needs to witness my telling off, unless it's meant to be some sort of moral lesson about the pitfalls of going into girls' bedrooms.

“Sit down,” says Dad. “We need to talk.”

“We were just listening to music,” I say as I pull out my chair. Then, when no one says anything in response, “Okay, and kissing a bit, but that's all. It's perfectly norm–”

Mum holds up her hand to stop me talking. “Not about that – although we
will
talk about respecting house rules later. There's something we need to tell you.”

Now I recognise her expression. She's not angry, she's sad. “What's wrong?” I ask. “Has something happened to Gran?”

“No, she's fine,” says Mum, “but I've got some news.”

Next to her, Dad's fiddling with the mechanical pencil he uses to fill in the cryptic crossword over breakfast, clicking the thin column of lead out and pushing it back in. It's the sort of thing that drives Mum batty, but she doesn't seem to notice. She smooths an imaginary wrinkle from the tablecloth and studies her hands for a few moments before continuing.

“I went for some tests last week – nothing special, just the regular check-ups Dr Chandarama insists on for all her patients when they get to my age: blood pressure, blood sugar levels, mammogram, that sort of thing.” Mum's talking faster than normal, running words together as if she's worried that if she pauses between them, she might not finish what she's saying. I've just about got my head around the fact that whatever this news is, it's medical, when she says, “They found something in the mammogram – a mass in my right breast. I went back on Monday and they took a cell biopsy and sent it to be tested.”

Monday. All I remember is that it was the day of my last PE lesson for the year. I don't recall Mum seeming any different. “Why didn't you tell us?”

“We didn't want to worry you if it turned out to be nothing. Dr Chandarama said that nine times out of ten a lump is just that: a lump. She thought it was probably a cyst that might need to be drained or could even go away by itself. Until the biopsy results came back, we weren't sure that there was anything to tell you about.”

“But now there is?”

She nods. “I got the results yesterday. It's what they call early breast cancer, which means that the doctors don't think it's spread beyond my breast … and possibly to the lymph nodes in my right armpit.”

Dad stops clicking his pencil and tilts his head back to look directly at the light above the table. It's an old trick to stop you from crying. It usually doesn't work.

“Are you going to have an operation?” I ask.

“To start with, yes. This afternoon we met with the surgeon Dr Chandarama recommended. I'm booked in for surgery at the Women's Hospital on the twenty-seventh.”

“You mean a mastectomy?” Just saying the word makes my stomach tighten.

“They won't know for sure until they see what's happening in there. Dr Bynes is hopeful that I will only need a lumpectomy, but I've told her to do whatever she has to.”

“The important thing is that Mum's getting the best care available,” says Dad, cleaning his glasses with his hanky. “She has a whole team of specialist doctors and nurses looking after her.”

I don't buy it. “It must be bad if they have to operate straightaway.”

“That's my choice,” says Mum. “I could've waited a few weeks, even a month, but I want to get it over with as soon as possible.”

Ziggy, who's been silent until now, mutters “cancer” under his breath. Then, “cancercancercancercancer” as if he's repeating an incantation over a bubbling cauldron.

Mum puts her hand on his shoulder to stop him. “Zig, I know this is a shock, but everything's going to be okay. In a few months my treatment should be finished and everything will be back to normal.”

“Bullshit,” says Ziggy, wrenching his body out of her reach and almost knocking over his chair as he stands. “That's bullshit, and you know it.”

Dad moves to follow as Zig runs from the kitchen, but Mum holds him back. “Leave him, love. He just needs some time to make sense of all this.”

He isn't the only one, but with Ziggy gone I can ask the question I've been holding in since Mum said the C-word. “Do they know … Have they said … what your chances are?”

Mum glances at Dad, but he's back to staring at the light. “No, and they won't until they've had a better look at the cancer and whether it has spread, and what sort of treatment it needs. The good news is that they've found it early and, statistically, women my age with this kind of cancer have a pretty good survival rate.”

I don't think Mum has any idea how unreassuring the phrase “pretty good” is. It's about as comforting as when I asked Nicky what the chances were of Mum letting me apprentice as a pastry chef instead of going to uni and she said, “Just make sure there are no sharp objects around when you bring it up.” Dad seems to share my doubts because he gets up from the table and mumbles something about making sure Ziggy's all right.

“Is there anything you want to ask, or to say?” asks Mum, in the same voice she used to give me the when-a-mummy-and-a-daddy-love-each-other-very-much speech when I was seven. I wish she'd stop being so bloody rational and just scream or cry or swear or something, because then I could, too. But she just keeps smiling patiently.

I shake my head.

We sit in silence for a few minutes before Mum nudges me. “I bet you never thought I'd have something in common with Kylie Minogue, did you?” She laughs, but her eyes don't join in.

When Dad and Ziggy return the first thing I notice is that Ziggy's eyes are red and puffy. The second is that his hand is wrapped in Dad's hanky, which is spotted with speckles of blood. Mum's gaze sweeps from Ziggy's hand to Dad, silently demanding an explanation.

“Zig had a little disagreement with a wall,” says Dad. “I think it's just a few scraped knuckles.”

Before Mum can say anything, Ziggy collapses onto his knees and buries his face in her lap. She leans over him, enveloping his body with her own, and rocks him back and forth, murmuring soothing words in his ear and kissing his head. Dad stands in front of them with his hands clasped tightly together on his chest, as if he's praying. He looks like he wishes he could trade places with Ziggy.

When Mum suggests we order pizza for dinner I know she's really sick. The last time we had takeaway pizza was after Ziggy's junior footy team won the district cup two years ago. Mum took two bites of her super-supreme before declaring that it was full of trans fats and nitrates. After that, she banned salami from the house and started making her own wholemeal pizza dough. It's not bad compared to, say, her beetloaf, but it's not the same as the real thing.

Despite the pizza being her idea, Mum only has one slice. While the rest of us eat she makes chatty small talk about having to go all the way to the organic butcher in Kingston to pick up the Christmas turkey, and whether Mr-Sumner-down-the-street will put his life-size nativity scene out on the nature strip again this year. I don't know what Dad said to Ziggy, but my sullen, grunting brother has been replaced by a boy who politely asks me to pass him another slice of pizza instead of reaching across to grab it, and helps me clear the table even though it's my week on the roster. It's unnerving.

After dinner, we play Scrabble. All I really want to do is go to my room and listen to some seriously LOUD music to cancel out all the noise buzzing in my head, but Scrabble is Mum's favourite game (because she always wins) and Dad obviously wants a night of family bonding.

The game isn't too painful, aside from Ziggy cracking it when he isn't allowed to put down “gangsta” and Mum's allowed “forsooth” on a triple word score, but I can't fake-smile my way through a second one. When Mum uses her last tile I yawn with exaggerated tiredness and declare that I need an early night.

I'd planned to go upstairs, take the phone into my room and call Dan, but when I reach for the handset on the little table on the landing I hesitate. What would I say? “Hi, my mum has cancer” isn't exactly a conversation starter. Anyway, I don't know if I'm ready to talk about Mum yet, and I don't think Dan would know what to say, either. I leave the phone where it is and go through the motions of getting ready for bed.

I brush my teeth, wash my face and pull on the T-shirt Dan lent me when we got caught in a sudden downpour on the way to his house. It hardly smells of him any more, but it's super soft against my skin. I peel back the quilt and nudge Boris to one side of the pillow to make room for my head.

The branches of the tree outside my window make shadows across my face in the moonlight. When I was little I thought they were the long, bony fingers of a witch, coming to snatch me from my bed. I couldn't go to sleep without the curtains tightly drawn or with the window open even a crack, and Mum had to double-check the window latch every night when she tucked me in, just to be sure. I can't remember when I stopped being scared, but I hardly even register the shadows these days.

Tonight though, I lie in the dark, staring at the spidery lines.
Mum has cancer
, I think, trying on the words to see how they fit.

Our mum has cancer
.

My
mum has cancer
.

I say it over and over in my head, as if that might make it feel more real. But it doesn't. I've seen enough quit smoking ads and children's hospital telethons and marches for the cure to know that the thing about cancer is that people die from it. Not everyone, but lots and lots of people, including Dad's father.

Pop was the first person close to me to die. I was ten when he got sick. I remember him complaining about a stomach-ache when he came over for dinner one night, and then the next time I saw him was in the hospice two weeks later. It turned out he had cancer of the stomach and bowel, but by the time he told anyone about the pain in his belly, it was too advanced to treat.