The Spare Room

by Helen Garner

  I could see Nicola nodding and nodding, propping herself on the counter with trembling forearms.

  ‘What’s Professor Theodore actually doing, in China?’ I called out from my metal chair. ‘Because he did make a special point of wanting to examine Nicola before she started the program. Couldn’t he have let her know his plans had changed?’

  I was trying to sound courteous and firm, but the vibe in the room stiffened and an uncomfortable silence fell.

  Colette’s voice dropped an octave. ‘Oh,’ she murmured, ‘it’s a very important international conference.’ Her face radiated a timid solemnity. She spread her palms and lifted her shoulders and eyebrows: the obligations of this demi-god, her employer, were beyond her ken. No one looked at me. Nicola, credit card in hand, kept her back to me. I subsided, but my heart was thumping.

  By the time Nicola had filled in a thick form and forked out two thousand dollars for the opening week’s program, it was after five o’clock. ‘You’ll be seen in half an hour!’ cried Colette. We settled down to wait. In rooms beyond the reception area we sensed movement, heard voices. Once or twice a chubby man with a buzz-cut popped his head round the door and bestowed a benign smile on the people numbly waiting. Were we imagining it, or did the air of the clinic smell faintly pleasant? An elusive odour from nature, or even from our distant childhoods? Was it the scent of summer? We could not pin it down.

  Nicola folded her long legs under her in yoga position on her chair, and opened an Alexander McCall-Smith novel she had had the sense to bring. I flipped in silence through ragged back numbers of New Weekly, looking for cosmetic surgery disasters to sneer at. Once we would have gone into paroxysms together at a condition called trout mouth. Now, angry and full of fear, I kept it to myself.

  There was a water filter in a corner, and a tower of plastic cups, but nothing to eat. It had not occurred to us to bring food. Marj and Vin shared a sandwich wrapped in foil. At six I took the lift down to the street. In the low sun, city workers were still streaming along Swanston Street towards the station. I bought two bottles of fruit juice in a sandwich bar.

  When I rushed back in, the atmosphere of humble patience had not wavered. I thrust a bottle into Nicola’s hand and she guzzled its contents.

  At half past six Marj from Broken Hill shifted in her seat, leaned forward and began to cough. A hacking and a rending convulsed her; a tearing intake of breath followed each spasm. She discreetly spat the proceeds into a tissue and stowed it in a plastic bag. No one spoke. We had now been waiting for almost three hours.

  Just before seven, Colette burst out from an inner room and made a joyful announcement. ‘Hello, everyone! At seven o’clock we’re going to have a presentation. And after that, Nicola, Dr Tuckey will see you.’

  At last Tuckey wandered into the reception area. We raised our weary eyes to him. His face, floating on the sea of himself, was oddly disarming.

  ‘Half the staff are away this week,’ he murmured, ‘so we’re in a bit of chaos.’

  I raised my hand. ‘Can you tell us what effect on the week’s arrangements the absence of Professor Theodore is likely to have?’

  The other patients turned their heads listlessly, then withdrew eye contact.

  The doctor looked right at me, but he seemed almost shy. ‘You mean on the, uhm, quality of the treatment?’ he said.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I mean will things be better organised than they’ve been today? Because we need to know how to arrange our time. So I can deliver my friend here every morning and pick her up every afternoon. And keep our lives outside of here running in some sort of reasonable way.’

  Vin from Broken Hill flicked me a look, along which travelled what I read as a tiny current of solidarity. He didn’t believe in this rigmarole either. He had to pretend to because his wife was desperate, because he loved her. Tuckey murmured something reassuring, still far short of an apology. Again my heart was thudding. My cheeks were red. Nicola looked at me kindly, then away again. I felt I had shamed her. I held my tongue.

  The doctor set up a screen against a wall, opened a laptop on the counter, and stood resting one elbow beside it. Without having to be asked, we shuffled our chairs into better viewing positions. Somebody sighed. He pressed the first key and up came the title of his talk: ‘Cancer and It’s Treatments’. I didn’t dare look at Nicola: not because she would laugh, but because I was afraid she wouldn’t.

  ‘I’m going to tell you,’ Dr Tuckey began, ‘about our key cancer-killing therapies. You know how an octopus can break a big rock with its tentacles? Well that’s what a cancer cell’s like.’

  Did he mean the cell was like the octopus or like the rock? The doctor’s manner, as he worked his way down the dot points, was modest and amiable, almost soothing. Everything about him was spongy, without defence: you could not hate him. But his discourse had a stupefying effect. My mind veered about, seeking something to grip. I was tired, I was hungry. My concentration waxed and waned. Once or twice I nodded off. This was not the moment to zone out. I pushed my chair back a few feet and sneaked the notebook and pen out of my bag.

  ‘Stress,’ he said, ‘is the biggest cause of cancer in our society. Stress makes us vulnerable to whatever nasties we have lurking in our beings.’

  That wasn’t so outlandish. My thoughts coasted sideways to my sister Madeleine, her relentless grief and rage when her husband drowned in the surf: how she wielded without mercy the manipulative power of her suffering. Ten years later an untreatable cancer was found in her lung. She accepted her death sentence quietly, without mutiny; perhaps, we thought in awe, she even welcomed it. She laid down her gun. She let us cherish her. We nursed her. In less than a year, with her family near her, she put aside her knitting and died, in her own house, in the bed she had shared with her husband, while outside the window the shapely limbs of the trees they had planted together stood leafless in the late winter air.

  ‘If people are struck by lightning and survive,’ the doctor was saying, ‘their cancers shrink and disappear.’

  I glanced at the other listeners. No one seemed to find this strange.

  ‘A fissure in the earth under your house can disturb the electro-magnetic field. In Germany, quite a high percentage of cancer victims are living over one of these.’

  A fissure? Didn’t I read about that in the seventies? People whose living room floor collapsed into a disused mine shaft? Whose grand piano slid into the chasm and vanished forever? And on top of that they got cancer?

  Nicola’s head was cocked in a posture of intent listening.

  ‘The incidence of certain sorts of cancer is known to be much lower round the equator. This is good, solid research—published just a few months ago.’

  Now I was wide awake.

  ‘High dosage vitamin C will kill off lumps of cancer and boost the immune system. And our ozone sauna treatment is based on the old natural-therapy approach to cancer—sweating out the toxins. Most doctors don’t know this stuff. But it’s good science.’

  Nicola sat chin in hand, her handsome face suffused with an expression of deep pleasantness, offering the doctor generous eye contact, and nodding, always nodding.

  Vin from Broken Hill laid his hand on his wife’s legs, which were now resting across his lap. His tenderness moved something painful in me. It rebuked me in my suspicion and contempt. What did I know about cancer? Maybe there was something in these cockamamie theories. Maybe they were the future. Maybe Leo was wrong when he stated that vitamin C did not shrink tumours. Maybe it was unfair that these pioneers had fallen foul of the authorities and were obliged to treat their patients in shabby private clinics.

  But I couldn’t help sneaking looks at the loose swag of flesh that overlapped the waistband of Dr Tuckey’s trousers. His shirt buttons divided it into a double burden. It did not appear to be meaningfully attached to his frame. It swayed half a beat behind his movements: it trembled, it hung, a shapeless cargo of meat.

  At a quarter past eight that fir
st evening, four hours after the time of her appointment, Nicola was called in to see Dr Tuckey.

  ‘Come on, Hel,’ she said, stowing the novel into her shoulder bag and setting out for the inner room. I paused at the door but Nicola did not hesitate. She barged in and took the first chair she saw. I scurried after her.

  A cold fluoro strip lit a scene of disorder, as of recent arrival or imminent flight. The whole floor was taken up by cardboard cartons, some of them in toppling waist-high stacks, others split and spewing manila folders. Empty metal shelves stood about on pointless angles. The window was unshielded except for a broken venetian that hung derelict on one cord.

  The surface of the desk across which the doctor greeted us with a genial nod was strewn with electronic cables. He shoved aside a large TV monitor and made a narrow space for Nicola’s file, which he began to open and close with penguin-like flappings of his hands. She launched a coherent account of her cancer, the discovery of it in her bowel, her theories about its origins, the history of its progress through her body, and the array of treatments she had already undergone. Dr Tuckey listened with flowing gestures of comfort and sympathy, like an old lady hovering over the tea things: frowning and clicking his tongue and shaking his head and raising his eyebrows and pursing his lips. Then, when Nicola fell silent, he began to speak.

  ‘You sound like the perfect person,’ he said, ‘for our kind of approach.’

  She straightened her spine and leaned back in her chair. She was smiling.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I think you’ll respond to it very well.’

  That night Nicola wet the bed. I came upon her in the hall at two o’clock, backing out of the spare room with an armful of sheets. ‘I had a dream,’ she said, ‘and when I woke up in the middle of it I had piss running out of me. I made it to the toilet for the rest of the stream, but look. I’ve made a mess.’

  This was the closest I had ever seen her to embarrassment. We were old bohemians, long past shame at basic bodily functions.

  ‘Give me those,’ I said. ‘I stocked up on manchester before you came.’

  ‘Manchester? This is like an Elizabeth Jolley novel.’

  We started to laugh. She sat on the chair while I made up her bed afresh. I saw her bare feet on the rug and thought of my mother, how she would clean up after me when as a child I had what she called ‘a bilious attack’. I remembered her patience in the middle of the night, the precious moments of her attention, in the house full of sleeping children who had usurped my place in her affections. In a trance of gratitude I would watch her spread the clean sheet across my bed, stretch it flat and tuck in its corners, making it nice again for the disgusting, squalid creature I had become. Without revulsion, she would pick up my soiled sheets in her arms and bear them away.

  ON TUESDAY morning we took the train to the city. I showed her how to avoid the chaos of Flinders Street Station by getting off at Parliament; we walked down to the Theodore Institute together. Sensing wariness in Colette’s greeting, I left Nicola there to settle in for her first treatment, and went downstairs to get myself a coffee.

  Twenty minutes later, when I returned, the waiting room was empty. No one seemed to be in charge. I ran my eye over the framed diplomas on the wall behind the reception desk. Ah, here were Tuckey’s credentials: a lot of polysyllabic alternative stuff with curlicues, and a string of initials that looked medical. All right, but where the hell was he? Who was running this joint? I could hear Colette behind a partition, gaily bashing someone’s ear about her passion for figure skating. There was a bell on the counter. I rang it. She popped her head in and directed me to a side door.

  Beyond it, in a cramped space whose window, if you stood on your toes, gave a side view of the cathedral, I found Nicola enclosed to the chin in a sort of low tent; her grinning face poked out at the top through a hole that was sealed round her neck with a strip of plastic and a pink towel. The strange perfume from nature that we had remarked upon the day before hung in the air again.

  ‘What the hell is this? You look like a cartoon lady in a weight-loss clinic.’ Again we laughed.

  ‘It’s an ozone sauna. Look inside.’

  I unzipped the front of the tent and saw her seated on a white plastic chair, naked but for a towel, and holding in each hand a wand-like object wrapped in kitchen paper. The perfumed vapour oozed out in wisps. I closed the zip. She tilted her head towards a murky sheet of A4 paper pinned to the wall. I stepped up to look. It was a list of instructions on resuscitation. We regarded each other without expression.

  ‘What are those things you’re holding?’

  ‘Electrodes.’ She shut her eyes and leaned back.

  Electrodes. I held my peace. Morning sunshine fell into the room through the high window. The ozone smelled delicious, very subtle and refreshing, like watermelon, or an ocean breeze. I sat on a chair in the corner and pulled the lid off my coffee.

  An hour later, Colette bustled in and ushered Nicola to another room. There she lay on her back on a high, hard bed that was covered with flowered cloth, while the young woman applied Chinese cups to her shoulder, her neck and her belly. Like many people I knew, I had submitted to cupping once or twice, and thought nothing of it either way; but these cups had nipples with tubes running into them, through which more ozone was to be pumped from a large, rusty-looking tank attached to the wall by a metal chain around its girth.

  It seemed an intimate procedure and I kept offering to leave, but both Nicola and Colette urged me to stay. I pressed myself into a corner and folded my arms. The east-facing window gave on to an attractive jumble of spires and domes, and beyond them a sky packed with woolly spring clouds.

  ‘What does the ozone do, Colette?’ asked Nicola pleasantly.

  Colette, finished with the cups, was riffling through a file with her back to Nicola. Without turning around she replied in a distracted tone, ‘Kills cancer.’

  ‘Oh. Right.’

  ‘And the vitamin C,’ continued Colette, laying down the file and turning to make fierce clawing motions with both hands, ‘sort of scoops the cancer cells out of your body.’

  Once more, still smiling, Nicola let her eyelids droop. With a merry wave and a pert flip of her ponytail, Colette left the room. I drifted over to the bench under the window, where she had left Nicola’s file. Casually I slid the papers out of the manila folder. I turned a page and the heading Prognosis leapt at me. Under it someone had written, in a sprawling, immature hand, ‘Terminal, 1-3 years.’

  I dropped the sheet and leaned towards the window. Out there, on the west side of the cathedral, someone had carved gargoyles, and a couple of saintly men with staffs and stone haloes. My legs were quivering. I took a few deep breaths. What was going on? Hadn’t Dr Tuckey, the night before, assured Nicola that she would ‘respond very well’ to the clinic’s treatment? Surely he should have said, ‘Would you like me to tell you what I think your future is?’ And if she said yes, wouldn’t it have been more honourable to tell her the truth, and then say, ‘But we can offer you certain treatments that may shrink the cancer, slow it down, make it possible for you to live more comfortably in the time you have left’?

  Maybe he couldn’t do it while I was in the room. Maybe he didn’t have the authority, within their outfit, to speak about death. Maybe only Professor Theodore, the guru, had that power.

  Behind me on her high bed, Nicola’s eyes were still closed. I tidied the sheets of paper into the folder and lined it up with the edge of the bench.

  She spoke. ‘Helen. Would your sister Madeleine have come to a place like this?’

  ‘Not in a fit.’

  ‘Not even if she’d known about it?’

  ‘No way. She wouldn’t have contemplated it for a single second.’

  ‘Why?’

  Because she’d have seen immediately that it was a con. I couldn’t say that. I didn’t have the knowledge to make a judgment. And if I did condemn it, where could Nicola turn? What would be left? Drop all weapons and
face death? Who was I to tell her she had to do that?

  So I said, ‘Madeleine had been a nurse. Her husband was a surgeon. Her whole life was lived in the world of western medicine. She believed in it. Those were the terms and language she thought in.’

  She lay quiet for a while, with the cups bulging on her belly like a row of breasts. Then she opened her eyes and gazed towards the window.

  ‘I’m expecting an angel to drop out of those clouds at any minute,’ she said, and turned on me her cheekiest, most challenging smile.

  After lunch, which we imbibed in the form of large vegetable juices in a cafe, Colette dropped heavy hints that I should leave: apparently they were about to beam some kind of light on to her. I gathered up my things and made off. I went to David Jones’ food hall and bought a couple of flathead fillets for our dinner, then wandered round the city, priding myself on not squandering money. When I called for Nicola later in the afternoon, she was in good spirits.

  At home I went out the back to unpeg the dry sheets from the clothesline. She insisted on helping me. I could see it cost her something to raise her arms to shoulder height, but together we folded the bed linen perfectly and laid it in the cupboard. Then, following her instructions, I made the sort of fish soup with vegetables that a semi-vegetarian could eat. She ate with appetite, and even drank a glass of dry sherry. We watched the news and dissected with cheerful meanness the latest escapades of her old friend my ex-husband.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ she said at bedtime, as I handed her the hot water bottle wrapped in a clean tea towel, ‘they’re giving me some more vitamin C.’

  I looked up. ‘Want me to come with you?’

  She shrugged. ‘Bring a book.’