The Cuckoo's Child (10 page)

“Is there any more questions?”

“Oh God, oh God,” breathed Sheila.

“Then we'll adjourn. Perhaps the timetable committee could stay for a moment to arrange our next ad hoc gathering?”

“After the union meeting.” This from Ed, who was predictably keen on protocol. Huffily, the principal gathered up his files and withdrew.

With his disappearance, the room unbuttoned. People chatted, laughed, asked Sheila for the day's total—seventeen—fetched coffee and cracked open a window. The phone rang; the librarian answered it and immediately hung out of her office door, phone in hand.

“Livvy, it's for you.”

My immediate thought was that it must be Neil. No parent would bother to ring the school that late. Perhaps he wanted me to collect something from the store on the way home.

But it wasn't Neil. It was you, Stephen. Do you remember that conversation, I wonder?

“Liv. Got a minute?”

“Of course.” You sounded odd. Flattened, somehow. A little squeeze of fear in my chest. Then those words. Stiff. Almost self-conscious, as if they embarrassed you.

“I've had a bit of bad news today. The doctor just told me. I've got leukemia, Liv.”

The word clanged about in the stuffy little office. Leukemia. Stephen.

“Liv? You there?”

“Yes. Just trying to take it in.”

My mouth was dry, and the words stuck in my throat.

“It's a bit of a facer, isn't it? I don't know quite what to do with myself. What do you do with yourself when the doctor's just told you you're scuppered? I couldn't stay at the doctor's. I don't want to go home. Holly's still at work. There'll just be the kids. I can't talk to them, can't quite trust myself to sound normal. Can't stay here; it's bloody freezing.”

“Where
are
you?”

“Pay phone, near the Connaught.”

I could picture him, pinched and grey with cold, at the big intersection in Prince George, Woodward's car park corrugated with dirty snow ridges, and the wind howling down from Connaught Hill and the underground caverns of the public library, setting the traffic lights twisting and tugging at their restraints high above the ground.

“Go home,” I said. “Get warm. Let the kids babble, it'll be all right. Give me half an hour and I'll ring you back. I've got to get out of here too.”

That was no less than the truth. Weakness was stealing over me. My limbs were leaden; I couldn't even feel the floor. I might well have been levitating. A head swam across my vision, a large pale face turning slowly in my direction as its mouth began to open. Perhaps it spoke, but sound was lagging badly, distorted as it struggled through some thick, strange element.

I'm underwater
, I thought,
so I must be a fish
.
And so is Charley, and that's why his mouth keeps opening like that. He's just breathing.

The mouth drew nearer, gulping. The lips formed a little muscular O, over and over, pushing closer to my face.

He's like a grouper
, I thought remotely,
Groper the Grouper, Grouper the Groper. How appropriate
, I added to myself, as his fins brushed mine, clammy and cold, and his slab of a face and chilly eye slid closer.

From an immense distance, I heard my name—“Olivia, Olivia, Olivia”—a protracted sigh borne on a gust of stale breath.

Can fish use Listerine?
I wondered but managed no more than a mumble before sinking onto the floor.

The union meeting dissolved abruptly as Ella and Sheila hovered over me, issuing directives for ice cubes and water and more air. Miss Penfold produced a tiny green glass bottle of
sal volatile
from the little tapestry drawstring bag I always thought of as her reticule and waved it under my nose. Whether it was the fumes or the ice cubes Sheila was rubbing on my wrists that revived me, I was soon sitting up and sipping water while Miss Penfold used her agenda as a fan.

Charles Roper rumbled overhead.

“You gave us a scare. I could see you were going to drop. Are you ill?”

“It was the heat,” said Ed. “How many times have I told them to do something about the ventilation in this place? No wonder we get sick, tropical one minute and freezing the next, downright unhealthy, I call it. If they don't want us to walk off the job, what they need to do—”

“Yes,” said Ella firmly, “but what we need to do right now is get you home, isn't it, love?”

The weakness had evaporated more or less. All I wanted to do was escape. Think what to say to you.

“I'm okay now,” I insisted. “I can drive myself. Perhaps if you drove behind me, Ella? I'll be all right, really.”

The faces were doubtful, but I prevailed finally and hurried to fetch my coat. Ella went with me down the hallway where the custodians were already sweeping the day's debris into long, dark lines, flotsam left by a receding tide.

“What gives?” she asked quietly. “It was that phone call, wasn't it? It wasn't anything about . . . Daniel, was it?”

“No. Oh no,” I said, amazed at myself for that possibility had not occurred to me, “just almost as bad.”

Not much later, I sat by the phone and steeled myself to pick it up. Much depended, I thought, as Maisie cast herself across my lap, rolling onto her back and peeping coyly at me from underneath her right foreleg, on saying the right thing. But what was the right thing? What do you say to somebody who has just been told he has a life-threatening disease?

You must have been sitting by the phone, for your voice cut off the first ring.

“Can you talk?” I asked immediately. “Are the kids around?”

“No, they're watching the box.”

“Tell me, exactly what sent you to the doctor in the first place?” Cautious, feeling my way.

“Just feeling tired. All the time, for no reason, but absolutely flattened if I went running. Then I started getting these huge bruises, but I could never remember hitting myself or bumping into things. And nosebleeds! Real gushers. I haven't had nosebleeds like that since I was small. But it was chiefly the exhaustion, aching in every joint.”

I could hear it in your voice, monotone, dreary, as if even inflection were too much effort.

“Okay, now what exactly have you got?”

“Oh, it's got a grand-sounding name. Acute myelogenous leukemia.”

“Sounds bad enough to scare the living daylights out of anyone.”

“Well, Liv, it's not good. Bloody death sentence, in fact.”

“But they can treat it, right?”

“Oh yes, they can stretch things out a bit with chemo and stuff, but it'll just postpone the inevitable a few years.”

“And if they did nothing?”

“Three or four months.”

That hit like a punch in the stomach.

“Then it's worth a fight, isn't it?” I asked sharply. You hesitated. I could hear it.

“I'm not sure, Liv. I've only got about a twenty to thirty percent chance of long-term survival. Not very good odds. And I'd need a bone marrow transplant. I don't even know if that's possible yet. I don't know if it's worth putting Holly and the kids through all that, years of it perhaps, when I could just check out in a few months.”

“Hey!” I said. “Don't you think Holly and the kids might have different thoughts about losing you the day after tomorrow? I stuck around for you, kiddo; now it's your turn. You said you'll probably need a bone marrow transplant. Well, I'm the likeliest donor—siblings are the best bet, I think—and I'm ready and willing, so there you are.”

“Yeah, I know I'll go through all the treatments they can dream up. You do, don't you, if there's just a little bit of hope, but it doesn't stop the little voice inside saying, ‘What's the use? You know nothing's going to work. You've had it, mate.' It's hard to ignore. There doesn't seem much to look forward to.”

What do you say? You can't agree, can you?

“Perhaps you're being too long-sighted. Perhaps you have to be a bit myopic, and look at the nearer things if you want to see clearly. What I mean is, perhaps it would be better to look forward to Jason going into high school soon, rather than graduating from med school fifteen years from now. Lower your sights, you know. Fill your life with little steps rather than brooding over the big ones that might be unattainable.”

“Could be.”

“So your first one will be telling Holly. And don't forget to say I'm queuing to donate.”

“Okay.”

“Then the next one will be having the first lot of treatment. What's on the cards?”

“Chemo.”

“So the first milestone could be remission after the chemo?”

“Right.”

“Then that's what we set our sights on. Go for it, Tiger! Nobody ever had to prod you to stick up for yourself.”

“Well, that's true, and I've got the scars to prove it.”

A small joke. It felt like a victory.

“Shall I come up there?”

“No, no point. We'll keep you posted. I don't think I'll be a very gracious host for a while.”

“Host be damned! We don't need entertaining! If you need anything, you'll ask? Ring me tomorrow, okay? Any time, when you feel like it.”

“Right. Thanks.”

“It'll be all right, Stephen. It will. It has to be.”

“Yes.”

“I'll say goodbye for now, then.”

“Yes. Goodbye, Liv.”

“Go and hug your kids. Talk to you soon.”

“Yes. Goodbye.”

I held the receiver to my ear, listening to you listening to me, until I heard the clatter from your end as you hung up. The quiet of the room was punctured by the soft tick of the clock as the second hand swept the face. The fluorescent light hummed to itself. I could see myself reflected in the kitchen window, a stranger's sombre face turned outward as if weary of imprisonment. Beyond the glass, like a negative image, ghostly snowflakes drifted, trickled over the windowsill and clung, weightless as down, to the bare branches of the apple tree.

For the most part, life is undistinguished. We move through our days on fixed tracks, like the little players in a foosball game, not expecting surprises and rarely causing any, mechanically following the routine because that's what we've always done and it's easier to keep doing it than to think of something original. What percentage of our lives, I wonder, is dedicated to stodgy status quo? If we include sleep—and there's a third gone right there—eighty-five percent? Ninety? More? And I don't suppose it's any different if one is famous or a genius or a hero. A prima donna may sing in every opera house from Sao Paulo to Beijing in the course of a year, but then travel is her norm: living out of a suitcase, booking in and out of palatial hotels, fighting with conductors, worrying about her vocal cords, wearing outlandish costumes, and upstaging the tenor merely the daily trivia of her life.

In retrospect, she will probably find it very hard to differentiate between successful performances, but just let Mimi have a sneezing fit after she's died, or let an overly dramatic member of the chorus fall into the kettle drums during an aria, and the event takes on an indelible flavour all its own. Memories may just be our five percent of the extraordinary: the little foosball man twirled too hard, detaching himself from the rod, performing a graceful arc across the crowded bar, and landing slam dunk in a pint of Guinness on the far side of the room.

And if that sounds a trifle inebriated, hallucinatory, unreal, that was definitely the Flavour of the Year. Mum called that time “When Stephen Was Ill,” as if it had defined limits and was succeeded by another period called “When Stephen Was Well.” The capitals were appropriate, though. Our first exposure to acute illness, watching as you were caught up in the sprockets and rollers of the medical machine, reduced all our ordinary concerns to nothing. We lived and breathed Stephen. Work, shopping for groceries, marking, keeping dental appointments were simply ways of negotiating the voids between visits to the hospital, or bulletins on your progress, or detailed analysis of your doctor's latest pronouncement. We learned the disease; words like
leucocyte
,
platelets
,
anaemia
,
nonlymphocytic
fell nonchalantly from our lips. We discussed blood transfusions, bone marrow aspiration, chemotherapy, and
WBC
counts as if they were on special at Safeway.

In the end, of course, life with leukemia stopped being an extraordinary visitation in our dull lives and became the norm, a spectacularly trying one but routine nonetheless.

Even so, there are memories from When Stephen Was Ill that flare out of the darkness like the silhouettes of trees startled by lightning at midnight.

The lurch I felt, as if all my insides gasped as one, when I saw you soon after you told me you were ill. I hadn't seen you for six months, but I was completely unprepared for the change in you, your pallor, your panting at the slightest exertion, the way you'd shrunk inside your clothes.

Vanessa in tears after she had briefly visited the isolation ward, where you were suffering the ravages of nausea, wailing, “He doesn't look like my daddy any more.”

Mum awkwardly folding her arms round Holly and patting her like a horse that has to be soothed, crooning, “There, there, poor girl, poor girl, he'll be all right, you'll see.” That was the night we thought we'd lose you to pneumonia.

The
ICU
that same night, lights blazing, machines winking and bleating, rubber soles squeaking on the composition floor. How busy illness is, I thought, how noisy; you could only put up with it if you were so sick you weren't aware of anything.

The day I walked in on Holly when she was taking a pair of shears to her long blond hair. She had just cut a hank off one side and looked like Barbie making a change to Raggedy Anne.

“I worked it out,” she said seriously. “It takes me about an hour a day at least to keep my hair looking decent. Too long—I've got better use for the time. Wash and wear from now on.”