The Bubble Boy (2 page)

‘I told you, I’m not worried about the mess, Joe. But
this
should be round your neck and not on the bed.’

‘Sorry.’ I take the panic button. The nurse asks Greg if he can manage. Greg nods and the nurse smiles at me as she leaves. I lie back a bit while Greg goes into my bathroom and
comes back out with a pair of pyjamas. I take my hand away from my nose.

‘Yeah, it’s good, mate,’ he says. ‘Change into these when you’re ready.’ He puts my pyjamas down then goes back to the bathroom. I hear the sound of running
water and smell disinfectant. Greg comes back out with a bucket. I swing my legs over the bed and take off my t-shirt as he wipes my blood from the window.

‘Maybe you should take it easy tonight, maybe just rest, no laptop or anything.’

I put my pyjama top on and look down as I do up the buttons. There’s a red mark on my white body where the blood has seeped through. I don’t want to shower tonight, though –
I’m too wobbly. Greg shakes his head, he knows I hate showers.

‘I saw nothing,’ he says.

I smile, and do up the last two buttons and change my bottoms while Greg mops the floor.

After he’s done he comes back and checks on me again, then watches the machine for a few moments before lowering the blinds and dimming the lights.

‘You want some music, mate?’ he asks.

I nod and he walks over to my laptop and he clicks on Spotify, but it plays so low I can hardly hear. I ask him to turn it up but he says it’s loud enough, then he walks towards the
door.

‘I’ll check back in an hour, maybe sit with you for a bit,’ he says.

‘You could stay now if you like.’

He looks at me like he wants to but it’s like someone has got hold of his arm and is pulling him outside.

‘In an hour, mate,’ he says, ‘if you’re still awake.’

I reach down by my side for the TV remote. Greg shakes his head and leaves me alone. Then I hear a buzz from my phone on the side table.

I smile. She said she’d be back the day after.

I turn on the TV, flick through the channels for five minutes then turn it off. I lie back and stare at the ceiling. The hiss of the air mixes with the music and with the footsteps and the
whispers as people walk the corridors while the lights on my monitors flash like aeroplanes in the night. I wonder what Beth is doing and who she’s with. I wish she was with me but most of
all I wish I could be with her in her flat. We could eat crisps, drink Coke and watch superhero films on TV. But I can’t go there, I can’t even walk outside onto the street, because if
I step outside of my room I could catch any disease in the world and die.

11 years, 2 months and 22 days

Greg is standing by the monitors when I wake up the next morning.

Heart rate
: 79

Body temp.
: 37.3C

Room temp.
: 18C

Humidity
: 7%

Air purity
: 98.0%

‘All right, mate,’ he says. ‘Let’s get this done.’ He leans over me and wraps a blood pressure cuff around my arm.‘Okay?’

I nod. He presses a button and the cuff inflates like a balloon. My arm throbs like it’s being blown up too.

Greg looks at the reading. ‘130 over 85,’ he says.

‘That’s okay.’

‘Well, it’s not too bad,’ he says. ‘Maybe a little bit high. We’ll just keep an eye on it.’ He types all the readings into his tablet while I check my pyjamas
to see if any more blood came in the night. I’m clean except for some dried blood on my fingers and a watery red stain on my sleeve. Greg slowly raises the blinds and for a moment he stands
there with his head tilted like he’s spotted something interesting on the street below. I ask him what he can see.

‘Nothing much, mate,’ he says. ‘Just some workmen getting ready to dig up the road.’

I lift my legs off my bed.

‘You don’t have to get up yet, mate.’

‘I want to,’ I say. ‘It feels like I’ve been lying here for ages!’ I put my hand on my bed to help me keep my balance then walk over to the window.

‘There’s not much to see, mate. But they’re right down there.’ Greg points to the end of the street. I see two blue vans and four men wearing orange jackets. Two of them
are setting up traffic lights; the other two are getting shovels and drills out of the van. I’d like to stay and watch for a while but my legs are beginning to ache. I turn and walk towards
the bathroom, past my poster of Thor holding up a bridge with one hand. I wish I was as strong as him today, but superheroes have to rest, Greg says. Even Spider-Man can’t be out saving the
world all the time.

I take off my pyjamas and get in the shower. I hear Greg sliding a chair across the floor – he’ll sit outside and check I’m okay. I press the water button, then another for
soap. The water is thirty-four degrees. The soap smells of nothing. While I wash, Greg shouts to me. He tells me about his girlfriend, Katie, that she’s been working late every night this
week and he’s looking forward to seeing her. There’s football on TV tonight but he doesn’t think he should watch it.

‘But it’s Man United!’ I shout back.

‘And she’s my girlfriend.’ He laughs and starts talking again as I put soap on my arms and my legs, then wash it off. I stop the water, check my skin for new bruises but I only
find old ones – two on my left shin from where I knocked against the radiator last week. I wish they would wash away like dirt. Greg’s still talking about football. I lift up my arm,
wash underneath and then the side of my body. I lift up my other arm and do the same. I feel a bump halfway down my ribs. I run my hand over it again. It doesn’t hurt but I just know that
it’s there. I turn the water off, check again, shout to Greg. He comes in, opens the shower door.

‘You okay?’ He hands me a towel. I wrap it around my waist.

‘I’ve found one,’ I say.

‘Have you? Show me.’

I lift my arm. Greg narrows his eyes, bends down, then gently presses his fingers against my ribs.

‘Must have got it when you fell yesterday.’

‘Against the monitor?’

Greg nods and presses the bruise again.

‘Do you think it’s okay?’

Greg makes an
umm
sound. ‘Yeah’ he says. ‘Pretty sure, it’s more brown than purple.’

I look again, count how many ribs the bruise covers. Greg looks up at me and ruffles my hair.

‘Hey, mate, it’ll be fine.’

I smile but I know that the doctors will want to check.

He leaves me to get dressed.

When I’m done, I find Greg standing in my room, checking the monitors and making notes. I sit in my chair with my laptop, look for messages on Facebook and Skype and wait for the doctors
to come in.

It’s 9.32 a.m. when they arrive – Dr Moore and Dr Hussein. They say good morning, ask me how I’m feeling and I tell them I feel okay and they check the charts. Dr Moore points
and traces the line across the graph with his finger. Dr Hussein nods and they whisper something I can’t quite hear. Dr Moore looks over the top of his glasses.

‘You sure you’re okay?’

‘Yes,’ I say. But then Greg gives me a look, so I tell them about my nosebleed and the bruise under my arm. They look at Greg’s notes, then up my nose and I wince when Dr
Hussein looks at my bruise and presses too hard.

‘Sorry,’ he says.

‘It’s just a mild contusion,’ I say. ‘The type you can get from falling off a ladder, or off a kerb, but not the type you get from getting hit by a car.’

Dr Moore smiles and shakes his head. ‘A mild contusion, Dr Hussein?’

Dr Hussein nods.

‘Then a mild contusion it is, young man.’ Dr Moore ruffles my hair. ‘Maybe we should all just read
Wikipedia
instead of studying at university for half our lives.’
He grins then he walks to the monitor and tells Greg to keep the temperature constant. Greg points to the air purity figure. It’s gone down to 97.5. They talk about filters and particles,
that maybe they should increase the cleaning or reduce the number of visitors.

‘Maybe we should,’ says Dr Moore, ‘. . . and maybe postpone the television people.’

‘Do we have to? Can’t you just change the filters?’

‘Just for a day or two, Joe. It’s not just that. We have to work out what’s going on inside of you at the moment.’

‘But I feel okay!’

Dr Moore bites on his lip as he looks at my chart again.

‘Joe, it’s the third nosebleed in eight days.’

I nod. I know that. I don’t need the chart to count – yesterday, then three days ago and four days before that. It’s the third one since they started the new treatment.
They’re trying a new drug to keep my white blood cells up. If it works, it won’t cure me, but it will stop my body getting so many infections and I won’t have to have so many
blood transfusions. I hate blood transfusions. It’s when they give me new blood. It doesn’t hurt but it makes me feel sick the day after.

Dr Moore takes a deep breath.

‘More blood tests?’

‘Yes, I think so, Joe, just to be safe.’

He tells Dr Hussein to arrange a test for tomorrow morning, then they press some buttons on the monitor and walk back towards the door. They say goodbye and tell me they’ll see me soon. I
look down at my bed. Greg sits back down beside me.

‘Hey, mate. It’s just for a day.’

‘But I love it when the TV people come!’

‘I know, mate. Let’s see how it goes.’

I look back at the monitors. I wish I could change the numbers with my mind. Make the air purity go up, make my temperature go down, keep my heartbeat constant. But I can’t control them.
My body does that. Not very well, though.

‘Does it mean Beth can’t come either?’ I ask.

‘Of course she can.’

I lie back on my bed, hear my breath and in the distance I can hear the low buzz of the workmen’s drills outside. Greg stays with me for ten minutes until his shift ends and the new day
nurse arrives.

The new nurse started yesterday. He doesn’t talk to me much. All I know is that his name is Amir and that he’s come to England from India. I only know that because it’s what
Greg told me, and he only told me that much because that was all Amir had told him.

Greg gets up and says ‘hello’ when Amir comes in and Amir says ‘hello’ back, but his words are muffled behind his mask. Greg shows him where stuff is, asks him if he has
any questions. Amir shakes his head and mumbles that he’s okay. Greg holds his arms out and shrugs behind Amir’s back. I want to laugh but I can’t because Amir is looking right at
me. Greg slides out of the door. I wait for Amir to say something but he doesn’t. He just walks around my room, slides the chair back into the corner, ties the string on the blinds, smoothes
his hand over the monitor, then presses his finger against the red light and for a moment it glows bright. I want to tell him that he looks like ET, but it’s hard to talk to strangers.
It’s easier if they talk to me first. People who come in from the outside have things they can say – they can tell me what they did last night, what time they got up, why they’re
unhappy, why they missed the bus. But I can’t tell them what I did yesterday because it was the same as the day before and the day before that. I could tell him that I don’t have
anything interesting to say but you’re not supposed to start conversations like that. And it’s even harder to talk to people who wear a mask because I can’t tell what
they’re thinking as easily. Some of the new people wear them when they first start. They say it’s to stop me catching things, but when they leave after a few days I think it’s
because they are more scared of catching things off of me.

Finally Amir walks over to the window and stops. He looks across at the grey building opposite, then up at the sky. A plane flies across it and he turns his head and watches it fly over the
Lucozade building towards Mercedes-Benz. Then he turns his head to look back to where the plane came from.

‘We’re on the flight path,’ I say.

Amir jumps and looks at me with his eyes bulging above his mask.

‘We’re on the flight path for Heathrow.’

He doesn’t say anything; he just looks at the planes in the sky. It’s only been a day but maybe he’s already wishing he was out there with them instead of being stuck in here
with me.