Seven

I rang Simon up that night because I thought he should have the bad news broken to him gently. ‘Fiona’s done another drawing for me to give you,’ I told him.

‘Oh hell,’ groaned the voice on the other end of the line. ‘What’s it show this time?’

‘It looks to me like a mad strangler creeping up behind his victim,’ I said. ‘But she reckons it’s me pushing you in your chair.’

‘Some day, Nathan, that sister of yours is going to produce great works of art.’

‘Maybe, but this isn’t the day.’

‘Fair enough,’ agreed Simon. Then he said, ‘You were doing all right with Nelita on the way to school this morning. I couldn’t get a word in.’

‘I couldn’t get a word in, either!’ I told him. ‘Not to Nelita, or to you and Brady. She was the one I wanted to talk to.’

Simon chuckled. ‘You haven’t got a chance, boy. Any girl with taste is going to prefer me. I’ve got good looks, intelligence, sparkling conversation, a great personality –’

‘Modesty?’ I suggested.

‘That too,’ he agreed. ‘And anyway, a girl is naturally going to be impressed by a guy who’s got his own set of wheels.’

I laughed. ‘Wait till your battery runs down again and she has to push you.’

‘Anyway,’ Simon went on, ‘starting next week, you won’t have any competition for a while.’

An uneasy feeling crawled down the middle of my back. He was making out that he was joking, but his voice sounded flat.

‘What’s the story?’ I asked.

‘I’m going back into hospital for a while,’ Simon said. ‘Dr Mehta wants to do some more tests on me. I reckon I’ve had more tests than Eden Park.’

I wasn’t sure what to say. If you tell Simon you’re sorry, he bites your head off. If you try telling him everything’ll be all right, he accuses you of talking crap, which is true. So I just asked him about it.

‘Did Dr Mehta say for how long?’

‘About four days, she thinks. Maybe a bit longer. She said they’ve got a new drug that helps circulation, and they’re thinking of working out a dosage for me. Sounds like a Northern Spews headline, doesn’t it? TEENAGER ON DRUGS TRIP WHILE DOCTOR WATCHES.’

Because Simon’s muscles are gradually wasting away from the muscular dystrophy, and because he can’t do much exercise – except for his physio, which he bunks if he’s feeling lazy – he’s always got a problem with not enough blood getting round his body. He takes tablets which are meant to make his arteries and capillaries expand, so the blood can get around easier. ‘If you ever get blocked drains, just chuck one of my tablets down them,’ he says. ‘That’ll clear things, no problem.’

‘You haven’t had to go into hospital for a long time,’ I said over the phone.

‘I was in this time last year, remember? That was for another drug. I’ve had the drugs, now all I need is the sex and the rock ’n roll. You know, like in the song, Sex And Drugs And Rock ’n Roll?

‘Yeah, I know. Sounds better when other people sing it, though.’

‘Watch it, boy. I’ll tell Fiona to do you some drawings.’

‘When did you say you were going in?’

‘Sunday afternoon. Should be out about Thursday. Just think – I’ll miss three periods of Maths. Oh dear, how sad, never mind. Anyway, I’Il be at school the rest of this week. I’ll give you another lesson on how to chat up Brady tomorrow morning, if you like.’

‘Ha very ha. See ya, Simon.’

‘See ya, Nathan.’

We hung up. I’d made a secret promise to myself after the English lesson that morning that I was going to be kind to everyone, including dumb animals. So I went off to help Fiona the Moaner with her Science project. She’s doing Trees. Since she’s such a little sap, and since I’m trying to turn over a new leaf with her, it seems appropriate.

When we were in the third form, we had a discussion in Social Studies one time about hospitals, whether they did much good or whether it was better to be treated at home if you could.

Some of the girls said they were going to have their babies at home. Alex Wilson asked, ‘Laundry or airing cupboard?’, and got given an essay to write by Mr Rata. I thought it was quite clever, actually. Probably the wittiest thing Alex has said in his life.

Then someone asked Simon what he thought of hospitals, since he’d spent a lot of time there. I suppose it was a reasonable question, though you might as well ask Jason what he thinks of the school’s sickbay; he’s in there at least once a fortnight after damaging himself.

Simon looked blank for a moment. While he looked blank, Mr Rata looked nervous. Some teachers feel that way with Simon. He can come out with some fairly disturbing things. He’s probably too truthful for his own good.

Then he said, ‘I don’t like being there. But they found out what was wrong with me, and that was a relief, in a way. And they made me realise I was pretty lucky, really.’

I know I wasn’t the only one thinking lucky? Nelita did us all a favour and asked Simon what he meant.

‘Oh, we had kids in the Children’s Ward who had a much worse time than me. There were two of them with bad cerebral palsy – that’s where the part of your brain that controls your movements is damaged, and you can’t stop your head or your body from twitching and jerking.’

‘Is that like spastics?’ someone else asked. Alex Wilson started to go, ‘Duh! Spas-,’ then shut up when he saw Mr Rata was watching him.

‘Yeah, that’s right,’ said Simon, who was enjoying taking over the lesson. ‘Spastics are a sort of cerebral palsy. You’re not mentally retarded or anything. Some of the kids in our ward were really clever, even though you couldn’t understand what they were saying till you got used to them. But you can’t control your body movements. One cerebral palsy kid, when I was in there, had to wear a crash helmet all the time because his head kept banging and jerking against things. And then there were the spina bifida kids.’

‘A cousin of my cousin’s got that,’ Becky Klenner said. ‘She has to lie on her front all the time. She’s got this really weird wheelchair. It’s not like yours, Simon; it’s like a bed with a motor and wheels.’

‘Who knows what spina bifida is?’ Mr Rata interrupted. Nobody did, except for Simon and Becky.

‘It’s where you’re born with some of your backbone missing,’ Becky said. ‘Your spinal cord and the nerves and things, they hang right out of your back.’

‘It’s not always as bad as that,’ Simon corrected her.

Mr Rata seemed to decide the discussion was going fine without him. He found a spare chair and made himself comfortable.

‘We had one spina bifida kid in our ward who was like Becky says,’ Simon went on. ‘But there were other ones who looked quite ordinary, except they couldn’t walk or sit up. Some of them were waiting for an operation where the doctors slice a sort of canal in your back for the spinal cord to go in. (A few kids in the class turned white or green at this stage.) Then they build an artificial backbone round it. If the operation’s OK, some spina bifida kids can walk – after a fashion.’

‘How long were you in hospital for, Simon?’ Nelita likes asking questions almost as much as she likes cracking gross jokes. Brady and a few other kids rolled their eyes, but Simon didn’t seem to mind.

‘I was in for eighteen months, on and off, till they’d made sure I had muscular dystrophy, and they could work out my physio and drugs. They soon found out I wasn’t any good on crutches.’

‘Wha-?’ Todd Martin started to ask.

‘Because I didn’t have enough strength in my legs,’ cut in Simon. He stopped and looked pleased with himself at having guessed what Todd was going to say. ‘If you go swinging along on crutches, your legs have to to be strong enough to land on. Mine weren’t. Instead of going heave-thump, I kept going heave-crash. Anyway, crutches are useless in the wet; they slip on wet floors and paths. I was always skidding over.’

‘Simon – ?’ began Lana Patu.

‘Yes, Lana?’ said Simon, exactly like a teacher. Everyone laughed, including Mr Rata, who folded his arms and settled deeper in his chair.

‘Do you still see any of the kids from the hospital? Are any of them still there?’

‘Oh yeah,’ Simon told her. “Some of them won’t ever leave; they need hospital equipment and doctors all the time. I see them whenever I go back, and we phone one another up and send Christmas cards and that. There was another guy there the same time as me – he had MD too, worse than me, and we had the beds next door to each other for nearly a year. I used to go and see him a lot after I first got out.’

‘Is he still in hospital?’ asked Lana. (I thought for a moment she was going to say ‘Please, sir’ first, Simon was so much in charge of the discussion.) ‘Or is he back home like you?’

Simon looked blank again for a second. ‘Neither,’ he said. ‘He’s dead.’

There was a sudden scraping of a chair over on one side of the room. Mr Rata had unfolded his arms and was standing up again.