By Esther Vale
I took the train and walked the rest of the way through winding suburban streets to the little private hospital on the riverbank. Out of the trains’ weakly sputtering aircon and into the bloody furnace. It was gonna be the hottest summer since fuckin last year, cause of fuckin you-know-what. At least I was doing my part by finishing my Masters in enviro science and not burning millions of tons of coal. Here I go again; Soapbox Sally, Dad used to call me. Which was weird cause my name’s not Sally. I think he just wanted to shut me up.
Anyway, this place was right on the bend of the river, and it was all new. Stuck out from the old Queenslanders on either side like a sore thumb in too-pure white. Made me think of a hospital immediately which was weird because I thought the point of it was not to look like that. “It’s a calming place,” they said—yeah, sure. Probably better here than the uni, to be honest. My brother was still on the You-Beaut insurance plan Mum and Dad paid for, and the company worked out some deal with the brains running the clinical trial.
We got to meet up in the jacaranda-shaded courtyard with a view of the river. The purple flowers had long since fallen off and been swept away, at least the branches did something to protect us from the sun. I told him about how uni went, but unsurprisingly he didn’t have much gossip to share. Unlike a lot of siblings, we’d always gotten along pretty well, but given present circumstances… I didn’t have much to say. I felt guilty that he was there with all his potential on hold until they could get him better, and I was doing what, exactly?
So, he was going up to his room on the second floor, and I was going to head home. Total visit time: twenty-two minutes. That’s when I heard the click of a camera. I turned to find the culprit. I guessed at once that she was here for the same reason he was—skin sallow, having forgotten the taste of the sun, perhaps; fragile, but clinging to that old Kodak like life itself. Her narrow face was framed by a wisp of dark hair on either side, with the rest of it tied behind her. I wanted to undo it, let her hair fall around her.
“I’m going to make a movie when I get out of here, you know? The photos will be like a montage, but the rest of it I’ll shoot on Super-8. Nobody cares about your shit unless it looks artsy, right?”
“Yeah, no, for real,” I said.
She looked at me with black hole eyes. I was at the event horizon, and my last chance was left behind after my absurdly dumb follow-up: “Sounds cool.”
“Just because I’m holding the camera, doesn’t mean it’s about me,” she said. “In my head it’s very noir. I think I’ll be the femme fatal.”
“Fatale, you mean?”
“You’d think so,” she said. I didn’t know if she was fucking with me, or if there was a higher purpose to being so cryptic.
“Well, see you around.”
When I went back the next week I mentioned her extremely casually and normally. It turned out my brother knew her already; she was “the only cool person in this dump.” She didn’t get visitors though. I kept coming, taking the train every two or three days. Between uni break and barely getting any shifts at Coles, I didn’t have much else to do. I didn’t see her again until Christmas.
It was a scorcher, my brother and I didn’t even go outside. We just scarfed down ham and a store-bought pav by the window in the rec room, our paper plates on the tennis table that looked like it had never seen a game. Mum and Dad were somewhere in Europe right now: Germany, if the last photo they sent through was anything to go by.
“Bet it’s really, really cold there right now,” my brother said, green as the plastic needles on the tree in the corner.
“Hot cross your fingers they’ll be back by Easter,” I spat, perhaps a little more envious than him, but definitely funnier.
“Oh, hey,” he said, and I turned to see her enter.
She walked into the rec room, head high, shining brighter than an irradiated Twilight vampire under the inexplicable fluoros. My brother fixed her a plate while I went looking for my sunnies in my bag, eventually giving up on a bit that only I would have laughed at.
“Sorry I’m late. Nurse was caught up,” she said.
“We were just talking about the ‘rents traipsing through the snow without us,” he said.
“Lucky them.”
“How about you?” I asked. “Where’s your family for Chrissy?”
“Dad threw me out when he found the bra I left in the laundry. Fucking stupid. ‘I can get past the fag thing’–not really, hey–‘but I draw the line at this tranny shit.’ I thought he was going to kill me or keel over. One of those, definitely, but he didn’t do either. And Mum–well, I haven’t heard from her in a while.”
“Our folks were practically too supportive,” I said. “Happy to flash their woke card. Mum said, ‘let’s go shopping, buy you some flannels and a carabiner for your keys,’ and I was like, ‘I’m coming out as gay, not as stereotypical’. Plus, it’s too hot in Brissy to ever wear a flannel, though I did grab a carabiner a few weeks after that convo.”
“I had to couch surf for a couple months until I could get a rental,” she said.
“Yeah.”
My brother coughed and said, “To a new family,” raising a tiny plastic wineglass of Coke Zero. No alcohol for the patients. “After all, we said we’ll get married if the government cans gay marriage. For safety.”
He gave a little giggle at the inside joke. I looked at him, and then her, and that’s when I realised that by the only cool person he meant they had actually become close. I didn’t think he had the hots for her or anything, they were just pure friends.
Fifteen-minute scenes between us slowly pieced together. Falling for a sick girl is like Damocles looking up, opening wide like it’s the dentist, and loosening his throat muscles. Ready for the circus trick.
Well, it’s not like she was terminal.
I thought about her when I was lying in liminal consciousness on sweat-drenched sheets. 11:49pm–2:31am–4am flat, it was all the fuckin same those humid nights. It was like the sun never went down, like at the Poles. It got dark but never bearable.
They were already calling it Black January cause of the fires in WA, SA, and Vic. Smokey skies from coast to coast, apparently. Up here, we get a week-long storm and everything floods. We’re all living in the Brown Snake and whatever other brown stuff came up from the drains. Suddenly, it had been weeks since I last visited the hospital. I was mostly preoccupied while my ground-floor rental got fixed up, but shit, I missed those visits.
Come Feb and we’re not allowed in the courtyard yet as they’re still cleaning up the sludge the river left behind, so I have to hang with my brother in his little box of a room. The TV doesn’t even have Netflix, which made no sense in twenty-twenty-something. Treatment is going well, he said, since the last adjustment. And they’re about to start putting it in pills rather than by IV, so it might even make sense to stop the inpatient monitoring and just come by for checkups every few days. “Sweet,” I said.
“Where are you gonna go?” I asked her, when we’re finally allowed back in the courtyard; Monday of the week they were going to be allowed to go home. It still smells kind of rank out here–rotten fish and hopelessness–but it’s better than the street outside my unit, and she’s not complaining either.
“Not sure,” she replied. I still don’t know how she can afford to be here, given the rigmarole my brother had to go through. Maybe one of her folks died and she had a house somewhere.
I figured it’d be weird to say she can stay at mine, so I said, “I’ve got a friend who wants to sublet a room pretty cheap. It’s a bit shit, but it’s something.”
She said she’d think about it, so I left it at that.
“I’m embarrassed,” she said. “If I don’t make it–shush–if I don’t make it, I don’t want to die without ever being kissed…”
I nearly choked on my own spit, and probably went beet-red. “Well, I…”
“Fuck, you’re gullible.”
“You cunt,” I said, laughing.
“They say you are what you eat…”
“Shut up.”
“Make me,” she said, flashing her teeth.
I wanted to, but I chickened out because there was someone else in the courtyard and I didn’t want to look like a perv making out with sick-girl.
Her face fell, eyes dropped from mine. “Hey, um. I’m on the placebo,” she said.
“You don’t know that for sure,” I replied.
She didn’t answer for a while. I worried that she was feeling faint, and put a hand around her elbow, just in case.
“As soon as I get out of here on Friday, I’m going to start making my movie.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’ll be good. Super-8. For the festivals.”
“I’ll get a projector to play it for you two. Or maybe shoot on my phone and put it on YouTube. I don’t care anymore.”
“Projector,” I said. “In my backyard, after dark. You weren’t made for days like this. I want to see you in the moonlight.”
I think that was the first time I saw her actually smile, in a way that reached her eyes. I wish I had her camera to immortalise that expression. A thousand words for it, if not two.
Friday comes. I’m running late, of course. I half-jogged through the streets to make up some time, and when I arrived, I was sweaty and regretful. Straight through to reception.
“Sorry,” I said. “There’s paperwork, right? I’m here to collect my brother.”
The nurse looked at me like a deer in ten billion watt headlights. “I thought someone called you.”
I took a step in the direction of his room, but then my body froze up. The nurse kept talking. I couldn’t make out the words, but I didn’t need to.
The sun had set by the time I stumbled through the suburban hills to the station. My trusty thousand-ton steed was waiting, its row of windows lit in cigarette-stain yellow a film strip on the cutting-room floor.
