“What are you doing out of bed so early?” Kate asks Amanda as she drains the last of her coffee cup. “Not used to seeing you before noon.”

“Couldn’t sleep. Damn Tui outside my bedroom window kept chirping.”

“Budgies chirp,” I tell her. “Tuis sing. And beautifully. You should be grateful.”

“Yeah, so grateful that I’ll throw a shoe at it if it wakes me again tomorrow. I need coffee,” she groans.

“You have legs.”

“They’re on strike.”

“I’ll get it,” Kate laughs, poking Amanda’s thigh with her foot as she goes inside. “You are my guest, after all.”

Amanda has been living in the city for years. She moved there to kick-start her music career and never looked back, only returning for special occasions. Normally when she’s back for visits she’d stay with her parents, but when she knew I was going to be staying here she insisted on staying too.

“The three amigos, back together again,” she’d said, ignoring the fact that everything had changed.

I lean against the balcony railing and enjoy the feel of the sea breeze on my neck. My hair is up in a loose messy bun and I am still in my pajamas. Days like this I struggle to believe I am sick. I don’t feel sick. I certainly don’t look sick.

“Will my hair fall out again?”

That was one of the first questions I asked the day Mum dragged me back to see my oncologist and we decided on a course of action.

Not Will it make me sick? or Will it work?

Call me vain, but I’d hated the way I looked the first time around. No empowering head-shave parties for me; I clung to my locks for as long as possible, until chunks started to come out in my hand and there was no longer enough to do a comb-over and hope that no one would notice. I’d been expecting it, and it was hard to come to terms with. My hair, along with my breasts, represented my femininity. With one gone and one faulty and pockmarked by illness, I felt sexless. Unattractive. It rocked me to my core. What I hadn’t been expecting was the rest of the hair on my body to fall out too. My eyebrows, gone. Eyelashes followed, except for one stubborn one in the middle of my right eyelid. I waited and waited for it to declare defeat and fall out like the rest of them, but it never did. In the end I couldn’t stand looking at it, this one stubborn lash that mocked me every time I looked in the mirror, so I plucked it out myself.

I went wig shopping with Kate and Mum. We tried to make light of the situation by joking around and trying on different styles and colors that were so far removed from my pre-cancer look. I could be anyone, Kate said. Like an exotic spy. Yeah, right. Some spy. I couldn’t even stand for too long before I became exhausted and had to sit, like the invalid I was, in front of the mirror while they fetched wigs and tried hard to keep the pitying looks to a minimum. In the end I got one similar to how my hair was before in color, although much shorter. Less maintenance, Mum said.