I shake my head slowly and then say, “What have you done?” I ask again, which makes him laugh. “Why?” I ask. “I mean, it suits you. You look like a young Jason Statham. But…why?”
“For you, man. Solidarity. I don’t know why it took me this long to think of it. I should have done it the same time we shaved your head.”
“But you had good hair,” I say.
“Thanks, man.” He looks pleased. “So did you. Yours will grow back, and then so will mine. I’m going to keep shaving it down until you’re over all this shit and yours starts coming back through.”
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. I swallow down a telltale lump in my throat.
“Don’t cry, man,” Grant warns with a smile.
I have cried so many times these past few months, but never in front of anyone.
“OK, I won’t,” I reply. I take a deep breath and, after I exhale, “Thanks” is all I can say.
“You’re welcome.” And then he confesses, “Remember when we shaved yours? And when the clippers ran through that first wave, sinking your hair to the floor and you shouted, ‘Fuck’?”
I nod.
“That is exactly what I did when I started on mine,” Grant says. “What a shock!” Mine is soft, downy, like baby hair now. Grant reads my mind and says, “I’ll shave yours again today if you want? Even it out?”
I nod again, make an appreciative noise, and we sit in silence.
“Thanks,” I say. And it’s both for him shaving my hair and for him shaving his. “You didn’t need to.”
“I know. So…” Grant starts. “How you doing? Really.”
“Not great,” I say, looking to the kitchen where my mom has retreated. I hope she can’t hear this. “I don’t think I’m going to do the last chemo round.”
Grant freezes. For once he has no words, no string of expletives. And then, “What?”
“You heard me.”
“Why not?” he asks.
“It hurts. It makes me want to die.”
“OK,” he says quietly. “I was in that first meeting with your oncologist when they told you what would happen at each stage.”
“My markers are down,” I say, ignoring the direction he’s tried to take the conversation.
“I don’t give a fuck. You’re having that chemo.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Yes, you are.”
“It hurts, Grant. It stings. It makes me feel more sick than I’ve ever felt in my life.”
“All this effort,” he counters. “And for what? To let the cancer take you just a few months later than planned.”
“Fuck you!”
“No. Fuck you, Davey. I’m not on this shit journey with you so that you can call it a day halfway through, you lazy…prick.”
I stand my ground. Quietly, I say, “Grant, I cannot tell you how much it hurts. I taste metal all the time. My ears ring with tinnitus. I can beat it. I can beat the cancer. Without chemo.”
“By yourself? Without drugs? What are you, a fucking hippie? You have the chemo or…I’m telling your mum.”
