You'll Be Sorry When I'm Dead by Marieke Hardy Page B

started playing over the PA and everyone in the hospital paused and stood to attention.
    It was the Last Post.
    It was Remembrance Day.
    We were at this very moment supposed to be observing a minute’s silence and reflecting upon the blood that had been spilt during Australia’s wars. Gen had just been told she had breast cancer and was going to lose part of her body. And she was in the toilet. It was so absurd I couldn’t help myself. I started laughing. I laughed in sadness and shock and grief for her breast. Breast we forget. A man who had dragged himself to a respectful standing position from a wheelchair glared at me. It grew worse when I heard Gen’s infectious snort from inside the ladies toilet, followed by the sacrilegious sound of a flush. Her laughter set me off laughing even harder. The invisible thread of hysteria linked us through the concrete walls. We were in a restaurant again, thumping the table, shrieking, helpless, disturbing fellow patrons. Each paroxysm sending the other one off on another wave of collapse.
    The diagnosis had shifted us into free-fall now, a completely unknown realm. The poor taste jokes we had always made about racism and JonBenet Ramsay took on a breathless, fuck-you-world edge.
    It wasn’t my first experience with breast cancer. Years before, my father’s sister had developed the disease and battled on valiantly for what seemed to be a long while. I had experienced her demise with a cool detachment characteristic of self-absorbed teenagers. I knew nothing of the process of disease and acceptance. She had died slowly on the New South Wales coast, a hundred years outside of my orbit physically and emotionally. All I remembered of her now was a bird-like smile peeping out of oversized pillows.To my abject shame thoughts of her death stirred no real feeling outside of vague curiosity and a duty to share a morbid medical fact with new GPs. Is there a history of, yes I suppose so, you see my father’s sister . . .
    She had been a grownup. Cancer was for grownups. Gen was not a grownup. Gen was determinedly frozen in her rock ’n’ roll twenties. She would join me in illicit bloody marys on Wednesday mornings after some sordid evening spent screaming abuse at Big Brother contestants. We went on rollercoasters together. We sat naked in the Japanese bathhouse in Collingwood, dangling our legs in the steaming, clear water and emitting helpless cackles as we compared the prowess or lack thereof of boys we had once loved.
    The night before her operation we all got shitfaced in Gabi’s kitchen, planning a variety of comedy wigs Gen could showcase once she was in the depths of chemo. Her favourite was a Rastafarian beret with accompanying dreadlocks. She was desperate to wear it mostly so she’d have a legitimate chance to tell the number one joke in her terrible joke repertoire. (Q: What did the Rastafarian say when the marijuana ran out? A: ‘Who put this shit music on, mon?’) Gabi’s three-year-old daughter Delilah wouldn’t sleep, insisting on lying on a beanbag on the floor listening to ‘How Deep is Your Love’ on repeat. She called it ‘the quiet Bee Gees song’. As we poured endless wines and the jokes grew darker—one fairly poor taste routine involving how Gen was going to manipulate the Make-A-Wish foundation so Russell Brand would be forced to swing by the hospital and have sex with her—the brothers Gibb kept singing, on and on, in easy-listening tones.
    When I arrived in the hospital foyer the next day Gen was already there, waiting and grinning. ‘Mastecto-ME!’ she shouted at full volume. Passersby within earshot, some dense with illness and wheeling IV units out onto Royal Parade for a covert cigarette, turned with startled expressions. She was standing triumphantly, one hand on her hip, the other in the air. She looked more like somebody about to be presented with a washer-dryer set and