I want to say, “Please don’t.” I’m scared of the heat, but also of the cold. I don’t know if I can stand it.
I still can’t speak, though, so I have to lie there and suck it up. A strange thing happens. I can’t physically feel the cold, but my brain reacts by taking me on a memory trip to places where I’ve felt cold before: a skiing holiday, an ice rink where I held on to a plastic penguin, the hospital bed I was in the time my temperature plummeted after a surgery and I got uncontrollable chills, and then, of course, the canal water.
I remember how hard it was to move in the water, and the pull of the current. I remember feeling powerless, the way you feel when they dose your body so full of toxic drugs that you feel as if you’re as fragile as an eggshell.
The stem cell transplant was the worst and hardest treatment I had, by miles. It destroys you, strips you out. My mouth was on fire for days because it was one giant ulcer, and the morphine made me itch all over and hallucinate small creatures in the corner of the room. It was also degrading. They had to feed me with a tube and sometimes wash me like a baby.
It’s hard to look people in the eye after that.
Abdi wasn’t allowed to visit me, because those are the rules when you have a stem cell transplant. Because the treatment destroys your immune system, you have to be isolated for a good while, to avoid being exposed to other people’s germs. It meant that by the time I got back to school I hadn’t seen him for weeks.
I was really looking forward to seeing him again, so what happened was a shock.
I asked Mum to drop me at school early, because Abdi always got there right at the beginning of the day. I found him at breakfast club, our usual meeting place.
He was sitting with somebody else: a new boy. Abdi jumped up from his seat when he saw me and introduced us. The boy’s name was Imran Fletcher-Kapoor.
I don’t think Abdi meant to shock me as badly as he did, but the truth is, he could have been a lot more sensitive. He gave me no warning at all, just dumped the fact that he’d made a new friend right on top of me.
Imran was a strong boy, with thick black shiny hair. He talked fast and he was definitely a fast mover on the friendship front. I had to hand it to him on that count, actually. In just a few weeks, he’d already persuaded Abdi to drop IT club and go to badminton club with him instead. It was precocious.
They invited me to go with them and watch. I felt like a mongrel dog, compared to them. Unwanted, strange-looking, and kicked so many times I didn’t know how to do anything apart from cower. I sat on the benches beside the badminton court and clapped and cheered when they turned to me to celebrate after a good shot. At first I watched their high fives and fist bumps patiently, but when Abdi pumped the air with his arm and whooped, I thought, Really? Is that necessary to impress Imran?
I thought about Imran all night after I got home from school. I told Mum about him and she said, “Things change, Noah. Sometimes there’s nothing we can do apart from learn how to deal with it.”
It made me remember a conversation I overheard her having with Dad, soon after my first round of treatment, when I’d just restarted back at school.
“I can’t face the playground,” she said. “The competitiveness, the people who ask me about Noah who I know don’t really care, they just want something to gossip about. I find myself being really short with everybody. They’re going to hate me. They probably hate me already because they think I’ll infect them with our bad luck.”
Even I’d noticed her transformation from a chatty mum to a mum who kept herself separate in the playground.
“I can’t even answer their questions normally.” She mimics a conversation: “‘What did you do today?’ ‘Oh, I took my toddler swimming and made organic cupcakes for the fundraiser, and signed a petition against the new high street parking regulations. What did you do?’ ‘Oh, I flushed out my son’s Hickman line and returned the sharps bucket to the hospital. Then I felt really happy because he managed to eat half a chocolate bar, which frankly counts as excellent nutritional intake for us this week!’ I can’t have that conversation with anybody! Talking like that scares them away.”
“People will be there for you when this is over. The people who matter will, anyway.”
“That’s easy for you to say.”
On the day that Imran came into my life, Mum perked up when she thought through the implications of Abdi making a new friend: “If you don’t like Imran, you could try another friendship group . . .”
I would never do that. It was Abdi I wanted.
The next day, when we were in French class and Imran was finally out of our way because he was in a different set, I said to Abdi, “You don’t have to show off so much for Imran, you know.”
“I’m not showing off!”
He was about to say something else, but the teacher arrived and we stood up. He held himself very stiffly when we all said, “Bonjour, Madame.”
I didn’t make it to the end of the lesson. When I told Madame Moreau that I felt really wobbly, she got Abdi to take me to the school nurse. On the way there I said to Abdi, “Just one thing too many, you know.”
“I think you’ve been really strong today,” he said.
The next day, Abdi was hanging around Imran again when I arrived, along with a crowd of other boys who were impressed by a gross trick that Imran could do where he flipped his eyelids up.
I didn’t think it would work to talk to Abdi about it again, because he sounded so defensive last time, so I decided to test him, secretly. All I wanted to know was whether he was a good enough friend to stick with me or if he was done with me, just like Matthew was after he came to the hospital.
The very first test happened that afternoon. When I arrived at a science lesson, Imran beckoned me over to join him at his lab table. They were designed for two students. I snubbed him, though, and he stood there in his lab coat and goggles and held out his hands, palms up, like, “Oh, well, I tried.”
I thought he looked stupid. I took another workbench, by the door.
When Abdi arrived, he looked at Imran and then at me. You could tell he felt conflicted. I said, “I saved you a work space.” Annoyingly, he still seemed unsure about who to work with, so I said, “You promised we’d do the experiment together.”
“Did I?”
“You totally promised.” It wasn’t true.