The Brilliant Light of Amber Sunrise by Matthew Crow Page B

dinner.
    â€œJust have a biscuit or something,” she said when I moaned that I was hungry. It seemed cancer was not like having a cold, where everything was brought to you on a tray in bed. Because I was coping so admirably, Mum’s sympathies only stretched so far. Not so far as an afternoon sandwich, apparently.

    Later that afternoon Jacob visited for a bit and brought me a present.
    â€œThey’re from Mum, for when you go in,” he said.
    That was the other reason Mum had made Chris come around. It was Sunday. On Monday I was moving onto the specialist unit to start treatment. I had been trying not to think about it. For some reason the thought of trying to get better seemed scarier than everything that had gone before.
    The present was a pair of striped pajamas, which seemed like a bleak reminder to someone in my position, but I thanked him anyway.
    There was also a Get Well Soon card with a five-pound gift certificate from a local shop inside.
    I showed Mum the presents and she said it was very kind of Jacob’s mum. She liked her even less than she liked Jacob, thanks to an incident at our elementary school’s bakesale. Mum had bashed about some shop-bought cakes and sent them in for me to sell. Jacob’s mum had pointed out that they were on special offer at the grocery store that week, and when Mum found out she went off it.
    Mum is good at grudges.
    I told her I thought the five-pound gift certificate would perhaps pay for writing supplies—maybe a notepad and a fountain pen—that I could use to document the coming months, but Mum said I’d be lucky if a fiver would get me a carrier bag in that store these days, and that if I wanted a notepad and pen she’d buy them for me. After some bartering we came to an agreement whereby I would give her the gift certificate, so that it would afford her a magazine or similar, and in turn she would buy me whatever I wanted from the shop. Usually she’s far harder to bargain down.
    â€œHe’s not stopping for dinner, is he?” Mum had asked at the top of her voice when I’d gone into the kitchen to get Jacob some soda. I said no and she said, “Good, it’s a family meal tonight, so he can’t stay long.”
    It suited me down to the ground. We’d played a computer game even though I never really knew what I was doing with them. Mum had been given it free by one of the people she worked for, and handed it down to me in the hope I might find a hobby that was normal for someone my age. All I ever really used it for was to fill in the silences when Jacob came around, of which there were many that day.
    â€œYou scared?” he asked at one point.
    People kept asking me this. The stupidity of the question never seemed to dawn on them. There could be only two answers. Either the answer was no, in which case there was no point in talking about it. Or it was yes, in which case I certainly wouldn’t want to talk about it. Plus nobody really wanted to know. If I’d opened my mouth and told Jacob how I really felt at that point, he’d have bolted. He was going through the motions and I hated him for it.
    â€œNo,” I said, lying.
    At first it had all seemed slightly exotic, like a foreign neighbor or a famous family member. The words being thrown about were ones I only knew from films or TV. But the closer it came to moving onto the unit, the closer I came to wanting to burst into tears at every given opportunity. Treatment could only go two ways, I kept thinking. Nothing said it would go the right one. It didn’t help that luck hadn’t been entirely on my side of late.
    â€œI wouldn’t be either,” Jacob said, shooting me in the face with a machine gun.
    I paused the game and told him he had to leave because Mum was starting dinner.
    â€œBut I was winning,” he said.
    He was not. I was luring him into a false sense of security. That he’d fallen for it was proof of my