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

texts, wouldn’t answer emails.
    â€˜I was having a bad day,’ she would explain with shrugs when asked about her lack of communication and we’d leave it at that, respecting the private moments she needed to howl at the moon and shake her fist at the sky and curse her stupid fucking dumb fucking unfunny lot.
    We took her to yoga classes and Chinese herbalists and sat with her on sober nights when everyone would have otherwise murdered a glass of wine to numb the bad feelings. We ached for her when she shut down and we wished sometimes that it had all happened to us instead, the whole damned thing, so that she could just go on playing guitar and making bad puns and being adorably obnoxious on her Saturday night radio show happily free of troubles. But it hadn’t worked out that way. Cancer chose Gen, and as an addendum it had chosen us. We may not have been able to duck out of its revolting clutches but by fuck we were going to tackle it on our own terms.
    Gen continues her treatment even now as I write this. Monthly rounds of hormone therapy, waiting to see how long it keeps the cancer at bay, if she’ll eventually have to submit to the hateful, pedestrian rituals of chemo and lose her vigour and her freedom to indulge in shitty haircuts. More appointments with oncologists, nobody telling us it’s going to be okay, this is just a passing phase, wait ’til I tell the guys at HQ you thought it was cancer. And through it all we will continue to crack wise, and make tasteless jokes about dry vaginas and ‘keeping abreast’ of the situation, and Albino Norwegian death metal cancer husbands singing us to sleep. In the face of this enormous, malevolent cloud, how else would we cope? We don’t know any other way. This is a funny cancer story because Gen is the funniest person I know. And this is how she chooses her story to be told. Forevz.

    Here I am. Immortalised in paperback. My fifteen minutes of fame are here and sadly, it’s because of the Darth Vader of disease: cancer. I would have much rather achieved it through the newspaper headline ‘Russell Brand leaves Katy Perry for mystery Aussie’, but alas destiny, in it’s infinite nincompoopery, has decided to be an utter bitch arse.
    Stop. Cancer time.
    My wonderful father, who is fighting his own cancer battle, told me of a cartoon drawing he remembered seeing of an eagle swooping to capture its prey, and a mouse, knowing that it was about to become brunch, standing there defiantly giving the hungry eagle the finger. This is how I feel about my cancer. I am going to be that mouse and stick my finger up at it at every turn. Of course, there are the frighteningly dark times. I am scared. I am angry. I am shocked. But I am ferociously loved.
    My strong, beloved family and my unbelievably giving, incredible, loving group of friends have acted as a collective net, and any time I have been even close to tumbling from an emotional sky rise, they have all been there manoeuvring the net into position to catch me wherever I may fall on any given day. I think that the laughter between us has made the intolerable mildly tolerable, and there is music in that.
    I would like it pointed out, however, that although I am quite fond of the Rasta wig, I am not afraid of being bald. I could make a nice living covering Sinead O’Connor’s early works, or as Tony Abbott’s testicles. I hear he is in need of some.
    I am anxious having my story ‘up in lights’ via this book, but it’s really the only way I would want this nightmare to be recorded. Although ‘in song’ would be nice. Are you feeling me, Beyonce?
    Now, ladies, do me a favour and get your baps checked.
    Forevz.



Maroon and blue
    Being a Victorian you are regularly asked—by taxi drivers, by distant relatives, by umbrella-toting strangers in the street—which football team you support. It is just one of those questions that arises when you