Hello God (7 page)

Today Nan moved in with us. We are building her a granny flat, her very own, in our back garden.

She’s sleeping in the baby’s bedroom, so I hope the baby doesn’t arrive early because if he does (I just
know
it’s a boy) Nan will have to sleep in my room.

I have a lot on my mind and it’s annoying having Nan wandering around the house asking me where she put her left shoe and things like that.

Yes, God, I know, we have to be kind to old people with bad memories, but I’m busy right now.

Mum’s tum is really big. I decided it was time to introduce myself to the baby. So I patted Mum’s baby bump and said, ‘Hey, I’m your big sister, and don’t forget it. Don’t mess up my bedroom when you learn to walk, and don’t do poos when I’m looking after you.’

Dad made a pretend microphone out of rolled paper and said to Mum’s tum, ‘Father calling baby. Father calling baby. Come in, baby.’

Then he waited a while and said, ‘What’s that you say? You’re running out of space in there. Hold on, baby. Soon it will be time for you to turn your ship around and make your way to the home base. Landing crew are prepared and waiting. Over and out.’

All this talk about the baby, God, you might wonder whether I sometimes forget about Steph. I don’t.

I visit every day after school and on the weekend. Today Matt and Adam came with me. Matt’s never been to a kids’ hospital before. He’s always been healthy and everyone he knows has been healthy. He was nervous and asked me what he should say to Steph.

I told him to just be himself and say what he’d say to her if she was well.

He bought her a bunch of heart-shaped pink balloons. How cool. How romantic. I wondered if some day someone would send me a bunch of heart-shaped balloons. I carried a container full of Anzac biscuits, which Mum and I had made for Steph and all the children in the ward.

When we got to the ward, Steph was reading her story to a group of children. A few other kids had come into the ward and were sitting on the
ends of beds in their pyjamas, listening. Her voice was soft but clear.

It was a magical moment. The small cat looked out of the cave at Sharmi sliding on the ice. She forgot that she was just a little cat and that she was so cold. She joined Sharmi, skating and dancing on the ice, while snowflakes covered their fur.

The little cat wasn’t meant to live in the wilds of Canada. She was meant to sit by a warm fire on someone’s lap, or curl up in a ball on a sundeck.

‘When the Spring comes, the ice will melt. There’ll be buttercups and daisies in fields that are now covered with snow. You’ll get strong, and we’ll play hide-and-seek again,’ her bear cub friend, Sharmi, told her.

The children sighed and made their way back to their wards or curled up in bed.

Steph looked at Matt and the balloons he was holding. She smiled shyly. She was really happy he cared. Matt tied the balloons to the bedrail and for
an instant they fluttered like they wanted to break free and fly high into the sky.

Adam talked to Steph then walked around, inspecting the kids’ drawings on the walls. He talked to the other kids in the ward. He was very comfortable. I remembered that he’d been in and out of hospital. They’d helped him no end since he first came in for treatment on his birthmark.

Stephanie will be helped too, won’t she, God?

Steph told me she couldn’t eat the Anzac biscuits. Her treatment gives her an upset stomach and everything tastes like sand. She said some of the other kids would eat them.

Matt shifted from foot to foot and told Steph that she’d get better soon. We were all quiet for a minute then Steph told us that her hair was going to fall out soon. That she was going to be a baldie. It would grow back, and maybe look even nicer than it was now and she’d grow it all the way down to her waist.

She laughed a really strange, false laugh. I blinked.

I noticed two of the children in her ward wearing beanies and this may sound silly, God, but up until that moment I thought they had cold heads.

Why does this have to happen to someone like Steph? Why do good people get sick when a lot of bad people don’t?

Steph tried to cheer us up by telling us, seriously, she’d look like a boiled egg.

‘Soft or hard boiled?’ Adam asked her, and we fell around laughing. I told her I’d buy her the best-looking beanie in town.

Adam offered to draw a face on her scalp. I wasn’t sure about that. There’s nothing funny about Steph losing her hair.

I began to hiccup. Steph sighed and pointed to the water jug.

We filled in Steph about everything that’s been happening at school, talked about the sports
carnival that’s coming up and the big ‘get well’ card the class was making for her.

When Stephanie’s parents arrived, Matt and Adam introduced themselves and chatted for a while.

Steph gestured to me to come closer and whispered in my ear how much she liked Matt. I whispered back how much he liked her.

You may not understand these things, you being a spirit, but it was a very special moment, God.

You’re needed. All this stuff about giving us the right to make up our own minds to do good stuff or bad stuff has nothing to do with Steph’s health.

She’s really sick. Really, really sick.

My mum’s tum is very big and she’s finished work at the library for now. She and Steph’s mum get into a huddle and drink tea at our house, and sometimes when I come home from school they
don’t even hear me drop my bag and walk into the kitchen.

Mum and Dad look serious when I mention Stephanie.

When I visit Steph, my heart feels like it has dropped all the way down to the pit of my stomach.

She gets sick a lot now, vomits, doesn’t eat much, and her hair is coming out in big clumps. She’s as thin as a beanstalk. She has seven beanies and wears a different one every day. A different colour for each day of the week. Today’s was red.

There is no need for this to happen.

Hey, God, do something. I know there are starving children in Africa, and bad people doing wrong things in the world, but save a bit of your time for Stephanie.

Please.

Send a sign that you’ve heard me.

Steph’s hair has dropped out completely, and everyone who visits has to be careful that they’re absolutely healthy. We wash our hands with special soap and water before we go into the ward, and if we even cough by mistake, a nurse will appear and tell us to get lost.

Steph’s resistance is low. While she’s on this medication she can catch almost anything, so we have to think of her, and only visit if we’re one hundred per cent healthy.

Most days Matt and Adam come with me.
Adam brought his magician’s hat yesterday. First he juggled a few balls, then he managed to pull the most extraordinary things out of his magician’s hat—scarves knotted together, paper kites, even a toy rabbit. I guess it had a secret lining inside, but it didn’t matter. All the kids’ eyes lit up, and everyone, including the nurse on duty, said, ‘Ooooooh.’

Steph let him paint a picture of Spider Man on her scalp. Now that was really cool. The nurse came and watched him. The nursing staff are great, like big kids. They never get angry, and join in and play with the kids if they have time. There’s even a school and a playroom for kids as they get better.

If you’re there and not having a tea break, you might want to know that Steph’s illness is having a huge effect on me.

I feel so helpless. I just had to do something.

I locked myself in the bathroom and hacked as much hair as I could with the scissors. Then I used Dad’s electric shaver. It was hard to see my brown popcorn hair shaved off, lying in little curly piles on the floor, and I couldn’t do the back of my head really well. I didn’t look pretty or have a well-shaped head that made the baldness
look better, but I gritted my teeth, and thought,
I can do this. I can really do this.
Mum was with Nan, so I wasn’t missed, even though I was in the bathroom for ages.

Still, I had to face my parents, so I thought I’d break it to them slowly. I put on my purple and red striped winter beanie, then walked into the laundry where Mum was loading the washing machine. Nan was beside her.

‘I can’t find my lipstick,’ Nan was saying.

Mum told Nan not to worry as she threw in my pyjamas and tops, she’d find the lipstick.

When Mum noticed me standing there, she straightened up and frowned at me. She wanted to know what I was doing with a beanie on my head in summer. She looked again and dropped a handful of washing onto the floor.

Nan stared at me vaguely and said what a pretty hat I was wearing.

I took off the beanie. Nan immediately asked me what had happened to my hair. Mum wrung her hands together, God, like I’d committed a major crime, and asked me what on earth had I done.

I explained that my hair was on the bathroom floor, that I’d used Dad’s razor. I told Mum not to go nuts about this, and that I’d sweep up the mess in the bathroom.

While Mum blinked in disbelief, Nan told me that I looked better with hair. Then she began to search in the washing for her lipstick.

Mum stumbled past the washing and Nan and the peg bag to where I was standing. She didn’t say a word. She just held me to her and stroked my bald scalp. It tickled.

‘I understand,’ she said.

A boy came into the wilderness. He had fair hair and eyes as dark as midnight. He didn’t look lost. He seemed to know just where he was, even though it was strange for a boy to be there in the snow and ice.
He wore a sailor’s cap, which was even stranger, for where was the ocean?

He quickly found the cave where the bears lived, and the small cat curled up in the warmth of Sharmi’s fur. He held out his hand to the cat. The cat looked up at the boy. She didn’t want to leave the bears. They were her family. But there was something about the boy; something that pulled her to him.

She struggled to stand upright, and though Sharmi and his mother and all the other cubs pleaded with her, she decided to follow the boy.