The daily injections Sam received in the week prior to the transplant had left her ill and in pain, with a throbbing deep in her bones, like her core was cracking. Her head ached, her stomach ached, and she vomited up her food. Mary made sure Sam was safely in a cab home after each day. Sam often fell asleep in the back seat, overcome with fatigue.
Faith was there to meet the cab outside the house every afternoon, fussing around Sam and insisting she rest. Sam knew she meant well, but the double dose of mothering from Mary and Faith just added to her exhaustion.
Fearing she had the flu, Sam presented to Professor Sung. ‘It’s the shots, not a virus,’ he told her. ‘The side effects will dissipate within a few days of the last dose. You’re not infectious, if that’s what you’re worried about. You’re no threat to Charlie.’
A swift flush of shame had burned Sam’s cheeks. Charlie. What were a few side effects compared to what her sister was going through? She silently put up with the dizziness, the nausea, the cramping in her limbs in the days that followed. At night, she lay awake and concentrated on mobilising stem cells from the centre of her bones – like a general, rallying her troops. She galvanised them, made them multiply, burgeon, pile up and up on themselves until they spilled through the bone-marrow barrier and crowded into her bloodstream.
If Faith noticed her daughter wandering about the house in the early hours, unable to sleep, she didn’t say anything; if she saw Sam in the garden at the compost bin, quietly disposing of her morning bowl of fruit and muesli, she didn’t ask how she was. It was like she was afraid to mention Charlie or the treatment at all.
Mary, on the other hand, had bothered to find out about the effects G-CSF injections might have on donors. She knew that they hurt, for one thing. This is going to sting, the nurse had said when she gave Sam the first one. Sting? Biting fire ants swarming over her stomach was more like it. The nurse was cheerful, peremptory, distracted. It was Mary who noticed the tears that Sam tried to squeeze back.
Mary waited for the nurse to leave the room after the injections, then produced a little pot of greenish-gold salve. She leaned forward, reeking of tobacco smoke, and gently lifted the front of Sam’s shirt. Sam screwed up her nose and touched Mary’s arm, ready to push her hand away, but Mary shushed her and applied the goo to Sam’s burning stomach. It brought instant relief. Sam relaxed back on the hard hospital trolley. ‘What is that stuff?’ she asked.
‘Organic aloe and calendula balm,’ said Mary, offering Sam the little pot. It looked homemade, and had pretty orange petals floating in it. ‘Your mother doesn’t make it, then?’
Faith didn’t make anything, except a spectacular entrance. Sam couldn’t tell if Mary was being sarcastic. If only she knew more about the woman.
‘I’ll give Faith the recipe, shall I?’ Mary sounded sincere enough.
‘Tell me how it’s made,’ said Sam. A test. For all she knew, Mary had whipped around to the nearest Body Shop and bought the stuff. That’s what normal people did.
Mary looked thoughtful, like she was actually trying to remember. ‘You pick two cups of marigold petals at noon on a sunny day, so they’re not the least bit damp …’
‘Marigolds?’ asked Sam.
Mary nodded. ‘Calendula, edible marigolds. Our garden at Brumby’s Run is full of them.’ Sam imagined a picturesque cottage with a rambling herb garden – chooks and flowers and fruit trees. She wanted to ask Mary about her home, about her life, not about the stupid ointment. ‘Put the petals into a small saucepan of sweet almond oil and heat for, oh, an hour or so? Add a cup of fresh aloe-vera jelly.’ Mary paused, and looked hard at Sam. She seemed to be deciding how detailed the instructions needed to be for her townie daughter. ‘You get that by scraping out the inside of the leaves,’ Mary said slowly, as if talking to a young child.
‘Go on,’ said Sam, fascinated.
‘Strain it all through a square of cheesecloth, unbleached cheesecloth. Warm the mixture again in a saucepan, with a quarter of a cup of melted beeswax, until it’s smooth. Tell your mum to pour it into sterilised jars, like she was bottling fruit – and she can mix in a few petals for colour, if she likes, before she seals them.’ Sam was speechless. ‘Would you like me to write it down for her?’ asked Mary.
Sam burst out laughing. There was obviously nothing normal about Mary. She’d passed her test with flying colours. ‘I’m not laughing at you,’ said Sam swiftly, concerned by the hurt on Mary’s face. ‘It’s just funny thinking about Faith bottling fruit, or going to so much trouble over anything, let alone something you could just buy at the chemist.’
‘Oh, but you can’t buy this at the chemist,’ said Mary earnestly. ‘It can only be made by a mother or a grandmother for a child. There’s a slightly different recipe for fathers, but they don’t often seem to bother.’ Sam smiled, unsure if Mary was making a joke. How could she remain so … so heartfelt and preposterous at the same time? ‘The magic of mother’s love is the active ingredient, that’s why it worked so well for you.’
Sam turned the strange little pot around in her hand, and examined it like she would an object from another world. It promised to be a very steep learning curve indeed with this woman, her birth mother.
Mary had been equally attentive to Sam’s other ills. Ginger tea for the nausea. Nettle soup for the yawning ache in her bones. Mary could identify the problem with one glance. ‘Here, take a couple of these,’ she said one day as Sam sat outside Charlie’s room, waiting for her sister to wake. Mary offered two little sticky tablets. A bit like miniature rum balls, they bore the characteristic green-gold colour of Mary’s homemade concoctions. ‘They’ll help with the headache, sweetie.’ Sam’s head was pounding, too furious for analgesic relief. Mary fetched a plastic cup of water, and Sam swallowed the odd little pills without question.
Mary’s treatments had proved at least as effective as conventional remedies. But what she liked most about these odd cures was hearing how Mary made them. Sam never wrote them down, and Mary didn’t seem to expect her to. She was a little girl listening to fairy stories. ‘I suppose you want the recipe?’ Mary asked after Sam had swallowed the pills, and Sam nodded. ‘Let me see … two tablespoons each of dried valerian, chamomile, peppermint and rosemary. Then the active ingredient – extract of feverfew.’ There was always an active ingredient, usually something rather dark-sounding, like skullcap tincture or devil’s shoestring. ‘Grind them together,’ Mary mimed the actions, ‘blend with enough bloodwood honey to bind. Break off pill-sized pieces and roll into balls. Then store them in a tightly sealed tin, on the sill of an open window overnight.’
‘Why do you put them by an open window?’
‘So they can absorb lunar peace,’ said Mary simply.
Marvellous. Sam imagined the country cottage. She felt she knew it quite well by now. Mary worked the mortar and pestle in a sunny kitchen, fragrant with fresh herbs. Charlie sat at the rough-hewn timber table, eating scones with homemade blackberry jam, warm from the wood stove. Sam’s headache had lost its grip as she imagined out the window to the herb garden. A mountain beyond. She’d not got so far before. A gum-tree gully, a rough paddock of native grass and bright alpine daisies. Some wide-horned cattle. Herefords, was that what Charlie had said? And a herd of wild horses, escaping up the distant hillside, necks arched, manes and tails streaming in the breeze.
By the time the course of injections was finished, Sam had a complete picture of Brumby’s Run in her head. Charlie and Mary hadn’t been much help. They couldn’t even show her a photo. Mary’s phone was ancient, too old to take pictures, and Charlie’s phone was broken. Mary talked a lot about her herb garden but that was all, and the intensive chemotherapy had laid Charlie so low she could barely speak. Sam spent every spare minute at the hospital, willing her sister to get well, craving the day when she could talk to Charlie properly.