The Spare Room

by Helen Garner

  I heard her moving about not long after midnight, and came out to check. Her shoulder and neck were hurting. Again she was wet, but not with piss. It was sweat: the bed-clothes were soaked, almost through to the mattress, and even the pillow was sodden. Three times that night I tackled the bed: stripped and changed, stripped and changed. This was the part I liked, straightforward tasks of love and order that I could perform with ease. We didn’t bother to put ourselves through hoops of apology and pardon. She sat limply on the chair and watched me work.

  ‘I should have been a nurse,’ I said. ‘Like my sisters.’

  She gave a faint laugh. ‘Matron. With a rustling veil.’

  ‘Or maybe a detective. Why didn’t I join the police force in the seventies, instead of trying to be a bloody hippie? Which I was never any good at.’

  ‘You can be quite fierce. But they would have made mincemeat of you.’

  ‘What painkillers have you got, Nicola?’

  ‘Digesic.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘I can have eight a day. I’ll take some now.’

  I went for the glass of water and stood at the bed while she gulped down the pills.

  ‘What does gesic mean?’ I said.

  ‘Must be Greek.’

  ‘Must be. Rectogesic is for piles. Analgesic…’

  ‘Anal-gesic,’ she said, ‘should be for sore bums.’

  ‘Ha ha! And Di-gesic’—it came thundering down on us like a truck: no time to jump out of its way—‘is so you won’t die.’

  She laughed, closed her eyes, and lay back on the clean pillow.

  Just before daybreak, as I lay sleepless in my bed, a weird little storm exploded right overhead, dumped twenty drops of rain, and fled onwards at a clip. The street was quiet. The air was fresh and cool. Something tiptoed across the leaf mulch outside my open window and paused there, breathing, to groom itself.

  AT BREAKFAST time Nicola was in pain. Her shoulders were bent. It was hard for her to walk.

  ‘Shouldn’t we get you some stronger drugs?’ I said.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘It’s the treatments causing the pain—that’s how I know they’re working. It’s just the toxins coming out.’

  She chewed a morsel of toast with honey and drank a cup of tea.

  I took her into the city.

  This time an unsmiling middle-aged stranger with an Eastern European accent was on duty in the treatment room. His white coat and slow, almost tranquillised movements lent him an air of authority lacking in the endearing but twitty Colette. He did not bother to introduce himself, but told Nicola to lie on her back on the high bed, hooked a bag of clear fluid on to a tall metal stand, and prepared to plug a tube into the portacath on her chest. Nicola held up one hand.

  ‘The last nurse who gave this to me,’ she said, her voice high with tension and posher than usual, ‘did it too fast. It hurt me and I was awfully sick and weak afterwards. Can I ask you, please, to make sure it’s not going to run too fast?’

  The man in the white coat paused in his manipulation of the equipment. ‘I’m not a nurse,’ he said. ‘I’m a specialist.’

  I got off my chair and stepped forward. ‘Excuse me,’ I said. I cleared my throat. ‘Excuse me, doctor, but my friend’s had violent reactions to the vitamin C. Are you sure it’s appropriate?’

  The man didn’t look at me. He stood quite still with the tube in his hand. ‘It’s written here,’ he said, ‘that your friend is to have vitamin C today. And that’s what I will give her.’

  I moved further in so that my shoulder was beside Nicola’s and the man had to meet my eye. He gave me a long, measuring stare. I took a breath, but Nicola put her hand on my arm.

  ‘It’s all right, Hel. I just got a bit panicky for a second.’

  I felt her shoulder relax: all those years of yoga. She bathed the man in her patrician smile.

  ‘I trust you, doctor,’ she said. ‘I’m sure you know exactly what you’re doing. Carry on.’

  Carry on? The wind went out of my sails. I returned to my chair. The needle pierced the ring of stretched skin, the liquid began to swell and drip in its tube, and the man left the cubicle with his slow tread.

  ‘Did I take the wrong tone to him?’ whispered Nicola. ‘What did I do?’

  ‘He’s a fucking prick, that’s what’s wrong. He’s got a thing about your accent, and he probably thinks we’re dykes.’

  ‘I thought you were going to thump him. You’ve gone all red.’ She looked at me reproachfully. She even started to giggle.

  ‘He shouldn’t talk to you like that.’ I got out the lipstick and stabbed at my mouth.

  ‘Don’t hang around, Hel. Go home and do some work. I’ll text you when I’m finished.’

  I didn’t have any work: I had cancelled everything I could for her stay. But I ran down the nine flights of tiled stairs and tramped off to Flinders Street.

  I wasn’t used to taking the Broadmeadows train at mid-morning. It was empty and rather calming, forging along the river, past the Docklands stadium and out through North Melbourne. It racketed across the dry creek bed; it slid between the old warehouses and ran parallel with the steel-buttressed brick wall that held Bellair Street back from the railway line. I never quite trusted that wall not to collapse on to the tracks; yet there it stood, fifteen feet high and bulging but still stable, accepting the morning sun on its pocked and rosy surfaces. Something softened in my chest and I took the first proper breath of the day. All right. Let this ludicrous treatment be what it is. Go home and put your house in order.

  Nicola’s bedclothes were still askew from the night’s turmoil. I pulled off the damp sheets, then hauled the mattress off its base and leaned it against the open door to air in the sun. I was in the backyard pegging out the first load of washing when Eva sang out to me from her garden. I headed through the bean rows to the gap in the fence but she called in a croak, ‘Don’t come near me. We’re all down with stinking colds.’

  ‘What—even Mitch?’ Her husband was famous for never, ever getting sick.

  ‘All of us. It’s going round Hughie’s creche. I’ve been keeping the kids away from your house. Bessie misses you. She’s sitting in front of the TV gushing tears. We’re running out of food.’

  Stoical Eva stood barefoot in her nightie beside the guinea pigs’ hutch. Hughie drooped on her shoulder. He lifted his face from the tangled mass of her hair. His gaze was dull. Poor kids.

  I drove, I bought, I paid. I delivered to Eva’s doorstep cardboard cartons overflowing with organic foodstuffs. She wouldn’t even open the screen door till I had closed their front gate behind me.

  In my kitchen, dishes soon dripped in their wire rack. The bench-tops shone. Clean linen lay folded in sweet-smelling piles. I took a brief nap to prepare myself for another night of disturbance and lamp-lit labour. Then I lined up the ingredients for a dainty soup of dashi, tofu and noodles. How competent I was! I would get a reputation for competence.

  Nicola called me at five and announced in her grandest voice that the day’s treatments were done. She brushed aside my offers: she was about to take a taxi home. I arranged myself on the sofa facing the door, and waited for her.

  Towards six o’clock a key was laboriously inserted into the front door, and a silhouette came shuffling down the hall. Her shoulders were bowed, her knees were sagging; her head was thrust forward on a neck that was almost horizontal. Oh, what had they done to her? I jumped to my feet. But as she came into the light of the kitchen I saw on her face again that terrible smile, the grimace that said, Do not ask me any questions.

  ‘Not crash hot,’ she mumbled, gripping the corner of the bench with both hands. ‘Straight to bed.’

  ‘Will I bring you something to eat, in a minute? A thimbleful of soup? On a tray?’

  She shook her head. Every bit of visible skin bore a sheen of sweat, but she kept that smile screwed on, her eyebrows pushed high into her forehead. She turned and hobbled back along the hall to her
room. I heard the window slam.

  I boiled the kettle and wrapped the hot water bottle in its cloth. Her door was shut. Was I supposed to knock? I opened it and slid in. She was lying on her back on the bed, fully dressed, with her eyes closed. The late sun glared in off the wall next door, making the room comfortless and harsh.

  ‘What’s that smell?’ she said, without opening her eyes. ‘Is it me?’

  ‘I can’t smell anything.’ I laid the hot water bottle against her side.

  ‘Smells funny. Yuk.’

  I sniffed. With the window shut there was a smell, like a woollen jumper in the rain. I got down on my knees and took a whiff of the new Iranian rug.

  ‘It must be the dye in the carpet. Will I take it out?’

  She didn’t answer. I rolled it up and hauled it out into the corridor. Then I pulled the cord of the venetian blind and the room went dim. Still she said nothing. Her breathing was speeding up. She took a gasp of air and her teeth began to chatter.

  ‘Nicola. What do you need me to do?’

  ‘Sleep. I wanna sleep. Go out. Thanks.’

  I longed to slip her shoes off, to draw a cotton blanket over her. But I was scared to touch her. I was afraid of her weakness, afraid of her will. So I stepped out of the room and closed the door behind me.

  There was sweat in the night. There was pain in belly and shoulder. Each time I heard her moving about I would enter her room, without speaking. She tried to smile at me: she was pretending not to suffer. All she had to help her was the last of the day’s Digesic. I brought water in the china jug with the pink hydrangea pattern, and poured it into my prettiest glasses: I drank too, to keep her company. The intravenous vitamin C seemed to brutalise her spine: she could not hold herself erect. I nursed her, stripping and bundling, breaking out new linen, refreshing her bed and refreshing it again. While I worked she sat in the corner on the wooden chair, with her head hanging forward and her long, bruised hands clasped in her lap.

  At last she fell into a proper sleep. I crawled back into my bed, and the house was still.

  In the morning, stupid with fatigue, I was preparing breakfast when she walked into the kitchen. She moved very slowly, but her head was up. The glazed smile was back in place. She sat on a stool, accepted a dish of yoghurt and fruit, and spooned it up in tiny quantities.

  ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘Have you told the people at the clinic you’re in pain?’

  She looked up, surprised. ‘Oh, darling,’ she said, sounding almost bored. ‘They treat cancer. Pain’s a given. They’re not interested in my pain.’

  I turned away to the sink and yanked on the rubber gloves.

  ‘Sorry about last night,’ she went on airily. ‘It’s the vitamin C. That’s what the pain is—the cancer being wrenched out of me.’

  I kept my back to her and tipped the cutlery into the dishwater.

  ‘Still,’ I said. ‘You need more sleep than you’re getting. I’m wondering if you should see a GP—get a script for something a bit stronger than the Digesic?’

  She laid down her spoon. ‘Helen,’ she said. ‘I have to trust the vitamin C. By the middle of next week it’ll have the damn thing on the run. I need you to believe in it too.’

  Till this minute I had dodged the question by concentrating on simple tasks. Now I took my first real breath of it, the sick air of falsehood. I forced myself to nod. I lowered my eyes and scrubbed at the prongs of a fork. OK. It was Thursday. She copped the intravenous vitamins only on alternate days: this morning she’d have the more benevolent bullshit, the ozone and the cupping. But Friday night would be another horror stretch. I would have to get cunning.

  I dropped her at the Theodore Institute, then drove in a big arc along the river and out to Leo’s place. Maybe I could catch him between patients. I rattled the knocker. The dog’s nails skittered on the floorboards. Leo opened the door and looked at me in surprise. He glanced crossly at his watch, and at the gate behind me.

  ‘I’ll be quick. It’s about Digesic.’

  ‘Is that all she’s got?’ He took a long, slow breath. ‘Bad nights?’

  I nodded. A frantic lump rose in my throat. I gulped it down. ‘What’ll I do?’

  ‘That won’t be strong enough now. Eight a day’s the upper limit. Panadeine Forte might be better. Or morphine. But a GP won’t give an unknown patient morphine. Get on to her oncologist in Sydney. He can fax an authorisation down. And don’t hesitate to ask. Oncologists expect that sort of thing.’

  ‘Is it ethical for me to do that?’

  ‘She’s putting a lot of pressure on you. It’s perfectly kosher for you to get help.’

  The gate latch clinked and a woman in a business suit and heels came up the path. I stood back. Leo smiled at her, and gestured gracefully towards the open door. She kept her eyes away from mine as she passed me. Her discretion was exemplary but it irritated me. I felt like shouting at her, ‘I am not a patient!’ She stepped across the threshold and disappeared down the hall. I turned to leave.

  Leo put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Helen. You can’t be useful if you’re scared shitless. If you want to play hardball, why don’t you get in touch with the palliative people? They come to your house. I know it sounds drastic, but tomorrow’s Friday. Weekends can be scary unless you’ve got back-up.’

  I ran to my car. Where did he keep the dog while he worked? Did it have a beanbag in the kitchen to sleep on, a bone to gnaw, a flat bowl of fresh water? Was it happy? Were dogs supposed to be happy? Maybe the belief in the responsibility to be happy was the dumbest idea anyone ever had.

  Nicola came home that day all soothed and heartened. I didn’t mention pain and neither did she. She rested a while in her room, then we watched the TV news, and ate our dinner on the veranda. Against the shed wall the broad beans stood in their hopeful rows, a gratifying green. The sky flushed and turned dusky. The coloured lorikeets darting in and out of next door’s palm tree reminded us of the kookaburra that had swooped one day on her lunch table, snatched in its beak a fist-sized slab of expensive Danish butter, and soared away to a high branch: later we spotted the greedy bird standing in the undergrowth near the tank, leaning forward with its beak agape like a drunk outside a pub.

  ‘I wish I’d brought my uke,’ she said, wiping away the tears of laughter. ‘I don’t even remember the last time we had a play.’

  ‘How long since you’ve been home?’

  ‘Oh, months. I had to stay at Iris’s, to be near St Vincent’s for the radiation. And anyway I haven’t got the muscle to drag myself up the hill.’

  Nicola lived beyond the northern beaches of Sydney on a hillside that could be reached only by boat. For years she had chugged back and forth in a tinnie between Palm Beach jetty and the landing below her house, a ten-minute ride in fine weather. She would collect me from my car on the Palm Beach side, urge me down the white wooden ladder with the groceries, and make the outboard roar with one yank of the cord. Away we bounced. She sat at the tiller, erect and handsome as a duchess in loose garments that the wind ballooned and rippled, her silver hair streaming flat against her skull.

  Under her practical and good-humoured command, skimming across the water and hauling the bags up the steep bush track to the house, I was safe. On her territory I deferred to her and obeyed her. She knew about ticks and leeches, snakes, goannas; the names of birds and their habits; the movements of the moon; how to save water; how to manage an outdoor fire. She was older, taller, braver, and more free: she had taught herself to live alone.

  The first time I went to stay a weekend, she dared me to climb the bush-choked escarpment that soared up behind her shack to Kuringai Chase. We clawed our way to the top, grunting and cursing, and hauled ourselves, two filthy, panting hags, out of the scrub on to a track along which at that moment came strolling a city couple in pale, freshly ironed sporting clothes, with a Shih-tzu trotting on a leash. All afternoon we lay on our beds and read mighty works of literature, shouting to each other analytical or admiring rem
arks.

  That night we took the bottle of Stoly down the rough path to the landing where, sitting on our jackets in the dark, we launched the long conversation that would become our friendship. She told me about the only man she had ever lived with, Hamish, whose children she loved and was still in touch with, but who had been a brute to her; and an Aboriginal bloke who, in the days when she was doing a lot of acid and having a sort of crack-up in a rainforest, had wandered in from nowhere and saved her from starving herself to death.

  When she was about seven, she said, a neighbour in his twenties had come over the fence one afternoon while she was playing in the yard. ‘He ran away. I picked myself up and hid at the top of the back steps. I stayed out there till it got dark and I could hear my mother and my sister calling me. I knew I could never, ever tell anyone what had happened. And I never did.’

  I was already half drunk. I said, ‘Fuckin’ animal. Is he still alive?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘Don’t you want to hunt him down and bash the shit out of him? I’ll help you. We can look in the electoral rolls.’

  She uttered a laugh of good-natured scorn. We hunched on the end of the old timber wharf. Masts were jingling. On the black, restless water of the inlet, boats’ riding lamps were laying down what she said a poet had called stacked saucers of light.

  Now, on my back veranda, she said, ‘I want to go home as soon as I finish at the Theodore. I can’t wait to. But I’ve been too weak to pull the starter cord on the outboard.’

  ‘Couldn’t you get one of those self-starters? Where you just have to press a button?’

  ‘They only make them for thirty horsepower or more. If I had thirty in my tinnie it’d be vertical.’

  We sat on the bench doubled over. Oh, I loved her for the way she made me laugh. She was the least self-important person I knew, the kindest, the least bitchy. I couldn’t imagine the world without her. She would not admit it, but her house was unreachable now. Unless someone carried her there on his back, she would never go home again.