“You’re good at this,” Chiu says.
I shrug. “It’s a game of chance, you can’t be good at it.”
Chiu looks unconvinced. “No, I mean, weirdly good.”
“I’m not cheating if that’s what you mean.”
Chiu shakes his head. “I read something interesting recently.” He puts down his cards and rummages briefly among his pile of journals. “Here it is!” He thumbs the pages until he finds what he’s looking for. “Have you ever heard of blindsight?” Farah and I shake our heads. “If your striate cortex gets damaged, you can become cortically blind even though you are optically sighted.”
“Your straight what?” Farah says.
“Your striate cortex. It’s the part of your brain that processes visual information. Your sight.”
“What does this have to do with Uno?” I say.
“Sufferers who are cortically blind experience the world as if they’re physically blind. They have no conscious sensation of sight. But if you ask them to guess what colour something is, they know. They just don’t know how they know.”
“And this relates to Uno, how exactly…?” Farah says.
Chiu briefly glances at his hand and drops a yellow four. I have a yellow plus-two: just enough to hold Farah off for another round.
“The point is, your brain is capable of processing information that you are not consciously aware of. Like a sixth sense.” Chiu looks at us solemnly. “I think Kyle might have a sixth sense for Uno.”
Farah and I exchange a look before we burst into laughter.
“Worst. Superpower. Ever,” Farah snorts.
Chiu looks upset. “You can look it up,” he insists. “There was a really famous case study of a monkey, who—”
“Wait,” Farah says, swallowing her laughter. “Are you comparing Kyle to a monkey?”
“Chiu?” I say, in mock offence.
Chiu sighs and flicks a card at Farah.
“Uno!” I say, placing my penultimate card. And I know, because I’ve been counting the cards and not because I have a sixth sense, that neither of them can stop me winning.
Later, after Chiu is asleep, Farah and I lie on either side of the dividing blanket and she tells me about her parents and her grandparents, who moved here from Bangladesh in the sixties. Her dad works as an IT consultant, she says. They’re Muslim but she doesn’t know what she believes.
She tells me that she was diagnosed with a low-grade astrocytoma when she was twelve. “The good kind of brain cancer,” she says, glibly.
“But you’re cured now?” I say.
“I thought I was,” she says. “But … something put me here, didn’t it?”
“It could be anything,” I say, trying to sound reassuring. “Maybe you fainted. Maybe you developed epilepsy like me.”
Farah is silent for a moment. “You’re never really cured with the big C. They just give you statistics, follow-ups, five-year-survival rates.”
“What was it like?” I ask. “Being sick.”
“It’s normal,” Farah replies. “That’s the worst thing. Before I got sick I used to wonder what being sick was like. I’m not morbid or anything but you do sometimes, don’t you? Like … you see a show on television and you think: Oh, god, what if that was me? But then it happens and it’s … normal. A conversation in a hospital office, with posters of warts and sepsis on the walls. You’re still you. None of the other crap goes away. It’s awful, but it’s also … ordinary. Just another thing. I don’t know how to explain.”
I think about the moment when the consultant recommended surgery for me. Farah has it right: ordinary. No dramatic mood music, no darkening of the sky or crash zooms on my anguished expression. The consultant was a kind, patient, matter-of-fact man with gold-framed glasses that were too big for his face. Mum and I sat there while he told us it was a “relatively straightforward procedure” and “the majority of patients responded well”. I remember wishing desperately that my arms would stop trembling and my teeth would stop chattering.
“Were you scared?” I ask.
“I used up all my scared,” Farah says. “It sounds weird but I think I chose not to be scared.”
“You can’t choose not to be scared.”
“You can. If you have long enough. Maybe that’s why I was such a pain when I came back to school. I had no scared left.”
TWELVE
I dream that I’m being watched.
THIRTEEN
After my GCSEs, when I stopped going outside, my world got small very quickly.
I established a routine: wake, shower, toast and Marmite, back to my room for a couple of hours of online study, mid-morning break with YouTube and maybe a game, toast with beans (and sometimes Marmite) for lunch, a bit more revision, a movie to wind down and get me through the tricky afternoon-evening transition, then dinner (composed of frozen potato and meat products) sitting opposite Mum at our impossibly small kitchen table if she came home after work, or on my own if she went to a prayer meeting. I had everything I needed, even the illusion of a goal in the form of GCSE revision and watching YouTubes about physics and London. It was easy to take my sense of failure, the fear that I might never leave this place, and pretend it wasn’t real. This is just temporary, I’d tell myself. As soon as I get my GCSEs I’ll be off and life will begin.
In the hospital, I feel the same sort of routine setting in. Except it’s different because I have Chiu and Farah here. We play board games, lots of board games: chess and battleships … but mostly Uno. Chiu and Farah don’t seem to mind that I win every hand, even when I try my best to lose.
