by Helen Garner
With our feet among the empty plates we talked about movies we might go to next week, once she had settled into the routine of the treatments; and we pretended not to hear the exiled Bessie bouncing on the trampoline behind the wisteria hedge, singing a melancholy song interspersed with bouts of juicy coughing.
WE WENT to bed early. I slept in jerky, shallow bouts, and dreamed confused tales of failure and frustration. When I woke at six and walked into the kitchen to raise the blinds I almost tripped over her: she was crouching on the floor with her arms round her knees, making tiny rocking movements. Her bed, when I went to look, was a twisted mess of wet sheets.
‘I didn’t want to wake you,’ she said. ‘God, I’m so sick of this pain.’
Together, not speaking, just working, we got her up and washed and dried and on to the couch. I threw open the windows and tucked a rug around her. Her face was white.
‘Can you tell me where it hurts?’
‘Here. Neck. Shoulder. I must have pulled a muscle turning over in bed.’
‘What did you take, in the night?’
‘Digesic. I only had two left. I’ve run out.’
‘Right. Today we’re getting you some proper painkillers.’
With difficulty she raised her knees. ‘The hospital in Sydney did give me a script for slow-release morphine.’
‘Great. I’ll take it to the chemist while you’re at the clinic.’
‘Yeah but Hel—I left it at Iris’s.’ She glanced at me with a crooked smile.
I couldn’t seem to close my mouth. I swallowed. ‘I’ll email her today, then, and get her to post it down.’
She stiffened. ‘How did you get her email? I don’t want you two hassling each other.’
‘What? Well, call your oncologist in Sydney. Get her to set up a source of morphine down here.’
She clicked her tongue. ‘Oh no, darling—I couldn’t call her. Anyway she won’t be there. She teaches at the university three days a week.’
‘Nicola. They have telephones at universities.’
‘No, I can’t bother her.’
‘Bother her?’ My voice shot up the scale. ‘You’re her patient. It’s her job, it’s her duty, to stop you from being in pain.’
She rolled her head on the cushion and looked out the window. I stood waiting at the bench with the dishcloth in my hand. And with a flick of her patrician manner she changed the subject.
‘You won’t need to drive me into town today, thanks, Helen,’ she said. ‘I’ll take the train.’
I wrung out the cloth with a violent twist and slung it into the sink.
‘What?’ She was all innocent, eyebrows up, head on one side.
‘Why are you blocking me? You’ve got to have some pain relief—even if you don’t end up taking it, we have to have something in the house.’
‘Oh Hel,’ she drawled, baring her teeth in a grimace of fatigued superiority. ‘It’s par for the course, with the vitamin treatment. It’s only the toxins—’
I cut across her. ‘It’s not the work. I’m glad to do that—I want to do it. But I’m scared when you’re in this sort of pain and you haven’t even got a pill that works. Maybe we should call the local palliative people. Just in case. So they know we exist.’
She raised both palms. ‘No. I won’t have anything to do with palliative.’
‘Why,’ I said dully, knowing the answer.
‘Because it’s the last thing before death.’
The word was in the room. I had dragged her to it. I looked at her there on the lavender sofa, fighting to hide her terror, and my heart contracted into a knot of pity, love and rage.
‘Listen,’ I said, in a voice I hardly recognised. ‘You’ve come to my house. You’ve asked me to look after you for three weeks, and I will, because you’re my friend and I love you—but I can’t do it on my own. I’m so tired, and we’re not even at the end of the first week. You’ve got to let me organise some help.’
White showed all round her pupils. ‘I don’t want anyone here but you.’
‘All right then. Let’s start with the drugs. If you don’t want to see my GP, we’ll get the Theodore people to recommend one in the city. And we’ll do it today.’
I picked up the empty compost bucket and shoved it under the tap. Water roared into it. A small vase stood near me on the window ledge. I had never noticed before the intensity of its redness. It wasn’t the sort of colour I was drawn to. Someone must have given it to me. When I turned round, Nicola was on her feet beside the couch. She lifted her head and looked me right in the face. I had forgotten how brown her eyes were. Her expression was calm and serious.
‘Sorry, Helen,’ she said. ‘I’ll be ready in ten minutes.’
That morning I didn’t trust myself to face Colette. I waited in the street with the smokers while Nicola went up in the lift to ask about a GP. She came out with the name of one whose rooms were five minutes away, in Bourke Street. Nicola’s neck was thrust forward again, her gait effortful: we walked slowly, and mounted the front steps of the building one-two, one-two, as toddlers do.
What sort of a nutcase would this new doctor be? But when she stepped into the waiting room and called Nicola’s name, I saw her and rejoiced. She was an elegant, stick-thin woman pushing forty, in a narrow jacket and skirt that skimmed her wiry frame; her ankles and arches were so bony that she had to scuff her feet to keep her high-heeled sling-backs on. Her hair was as springy as a pot scrubber, and her face was darkly lit by a half-smile of ferocious irony. If Tuckey was Nicola’s idea of a doctor, Naomi Caplan was mine.
I sat breathing in a forced rhythm while Nicola disappeared and the door closed. There was a silence of concentration, then the raising of the doctor’s telephone voice in impatient authority. I waited. I read a Women’s Weekly from cover to cover. A fax machine beeped and whirred. The doctor came charging out to the reception desk, snatched the page, and vanished again into the surgery. I could take any amount of this.
At last the two of them appeared. Nicola was holding a folded sheet of paper. Her smile was humble; the doctor’s glinted with steel.
‘Are you the friend?’ said Dr Caplan to me. ‘You won’t get morphine at short notice from a city pharmacy. I’d advise you to go out to the Epworth Hospital. They’ll fill it on the spot.’ She nodded, and turned on her slender heel.
I wanted to run after her, babbling thanks and explanations: It’s not my fault. I’m not like her. I’m sensible! The door clicked shut. Nicola toiled through her soft bag for a credit card. I went outside and stood in the air. The world sparkled unbearably bright.
We ordered a couple of vegetable juices in a cafe and sat quietly together at a table. When she looked at me it was with a face that was chastened, but closed. I didn’t ask what had happened in the room. At ten she shuffled back to the Theodore. I took a tram along Wellington Parade to East Melbourne.
I was ready for a fight at the Epworth pharmacy. Stupid rage flared in me as the tram chugged up the rise past the Fitzroy Gardens. I remembered visiting my friend Damien in a famous teaching hospital when he was slogging into the last stages of a twenty-year cancer: he had broken a bone and was about to have it pinned. While I sat beside his bed, he began to sweat and shift under the sheet. It was half past five. He begged me to go to the nurses’ station and remind them that in thirty minutes he would need his next dose of pills. Humouring him, I strolled up to the counter and passed on the superfluous message. I almost made a joke of it. But the nurse, a young man, was far from being offended. He breathed in through his teeth. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘we might be in trouble. The person with the key to the cupboard was supposed to be here two hours ago.’
A key? A cupboard? What century was this?
I asked him what the drug was. He named it. I remembered having seen three unopened packets of the stuff at Damien’s house the night before, when I was looking for toothpaste in the bathroom. ‘I don’t suppose,’ said the nurse, ‘you could possibly go to his house and get them?’
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br /> Damien’s place was half a mile from the hospital. There were no cabs. I ran. I tore along narrow lanes with my bag thumping on my back. His wife opened the door. We found the drugs. I grabbed the packets and turned around. I skidded into the ward at two minutes past six. ‘Give them to me,’ said Damien. ‘Give them to me now.’ I ran straight past him and threw them to the nurse. That was the last time I saw Damien. We never said goodbye. Three days later, he was dead.
I stepped off the tram and into the Epworth pharmacy.
A girl in a blue overall took the script, ran her eyes over me, and said indifferently, ‘It’ll take about ten minutes.’ I sat on a padded bench. Nicola’s name was called. I signed the form. They handed me the cardboard packet. Back on Bridge Road I stood in the sun at the tram-stop, dizzy from the speed of the transaction.
What was all this anger? I needed to be kinder to her. Dying was frightening. But it was easier to imagine being tender when I had a packet of slow-release morphine capsules in my bag.
Nicola came home from the clinic that night shuddering again with cold and weakness. Eating was out of the question. She needed to wash but the thought of water hitting her skin was too much. I helped her into bed and sponged her face and neck, and then her feet, with a damp washer. Then she wanted to be left alone. She was the kind of person who loved to sleep in free streams of air: she used to boast that at her boarding school in the Southern Highlands the girls had slept winter and summer in a dormitory on an open veranda. Her house off Palm Beach welcomed every passing breeze; her life there had been a kind of glorified camping. But now she wanted the room dark and stuffy, the window shut tight.
I cooked myself a plate of curly pasta and ate it in front of the TV. Halfway through the news I was asleep on the couch. The phone rang and I blundered to answer it. A young woman with a soft, anxious voice asked for Nicola.
‘She’s not feeling the best tonight,’ I said. ‘Could you ring in the morning?’
‘Oh, please let me speak to her,’ said the caller. ‘I only heard today that she’s ill. I’m Hamish’s daughter— I know she’ll want to hear from me. Couldn’t I just have a quick word?’
I carried the cordless along the hall to Nicola’s door. The lamp was on; I thought I heard her groan.
I opened the door and held out the phone. ‘Hamish’s daughter?’
She shook her head and raised one palm. I did some fast talking and hung up.
‘It’s my shoulder again,’ said Nicola. ‘My neck. And there’s a new pain. In the middle of my belly. I’m scared it might be my liver.’
I brought in one of the morphine capsules and raised it like a wafer between thumb and forefinger. She looked at it suspiciously.
‘Nicola. Take it.’
‘I don’t want to get addicted.’
‘You won’t get addicted. It’ll help you go to sleep.’ I poured a glass of water.
She shook her head. ‘I had the vitamin C again today. That must be why my shoulder’s hurting more. It’s the toxins tearing their way out.’
I put the pill and the glass on the bedside table. ‘OK. Can I get you something else?’
‘I feel a bit nauseated. I don’t suppose there’s any lemonade?’
I wheeled my bike down the side path and sped in the dark to the milk bar. Yes, the light was on. The young proprietor was mopping the floor. How did he maintain his lovely courtesy, in a job with such punishing hours? Next to the register stood a flat box of chocolate bullets. He and his pregnant wife must have spent hours out the back there with the lollies loose between them on the table, raking them in tens onto squares of cling wrap and sealing each tiny packet into a peak with sticky-tape. I grabbed one, then pulled a bottle of lemonade out of the wall fridge. Pedalling home along the empty street I steered the bike with one hand and shovelled bullets into my mouth with the other. The lemonade rolled about in the basket.
She accepted a glass of it, but the bubbles were still too strenuous, and she sat up in bed with her head forward like a tortoise, waiting for the fizz to die down.
‘I was thinking today,’ she said. ‘I should write something about the Theodore Institute. It might help them. They need publicity.’
I couldn’t meet her eye.
‘I don’t understand,’ I said, ‘how they can go on giving you the vitamin C treatment, when they know it has this terrible effect on you. What’s it supposed to do?’
‘But Helen,’ she whispered. ‘It’s the same with chemo and radiation. Nobody knows how they work, either, but people still do them.’
I had no answer. I sat in the corner on the hard chair.
‘Darling,’ she murmured after a while. ‘I think I will take the morphine now.’
Forty minutes later I heard her stirring. She was sitting up again, with her shoulders bowed right down over her knees.
‘What is it, old stick?’
‘I’m sure it’s just the bad stuff coming out. In a minute I might try lying on my stomach.’
‘All right. What’ll I do?’
She was silent. I waited beside the bed. Half a minute passed.
‘I think I’ll try it now.’
I stepped forward. How do you roll someone over when what’s hurting is her shoulder, her neck, her belly? Where do you take hold? I stood there helpless in my ignorance. In a while I heard her draw a determined breath. Expelling it in a series of hard grunts, she got herself on to her side, asked me to slide a pillow under her, and collapsed on to it belly down.
Soon after midnight she called me. Her bed was soaked with sweat. The pain seemed to have abated, though, so I sent her to lie on the couch in the big back room while I changed the sheets. When I came out she was propped against the cushions, dopey from the morphine, but lucid.
‘I was lying in there,’ she said, ‘thinking fuck. I shouldn’t have asked that GP for the weakest pill.’
She asked for the weakest pill.
My legs sagged. I sat down on the arm of the couch with my load of wet bedding.
‘Nicola,’ I said. ‘I’ve got something to say. I don’t think I can go on with this, unless you let me call the palliative people on Monday.’
She went rigid. ‘I told you—I don’t need that.’
‘It’s not the angel of death,’ I said. ‘It’s just some girls in a car.’
‘I said no.’
‘If we got ourselves on their list, they’d come to the house if we needed them. They can help people get through the night. They’re like the district nurse.’
She reared up on the cushions. ‘I don’t need a nurse.’
I let the bedding drop to the floor. Then I kicked it all the way to the laundry and stuffed it into the machine. Out there I folded the ironing board and stood it against the wall. I sorted a basket of dry clothes. I stayed among the equipment for imposing cleanliness and order until I had got a grip on myself. When I emerged, she spoke loftily from the couch, without opening her eyes.
‘I’ve decided what to do. I’m going to take a serviced apartment. Or move into some mad little hotel in South Yarra. I’ll only be down here for another fortnight. I don’t want to be a burden to anyone.’
I leaned against the fridge. The lumpy magnets, with their lists and reminders, pressed into my back. I turned and rearranged them into a rustic pattern: the lemons, the painted roses, the two golden bees that Hughie loved. I carried the hot water bottle to the kettle, filled it, and handed it to her on the couch. Her eyes were still closed. In the spare room I made up her bed again and puffed the pillows. Then I trudged back to my own room and crept under the quilt.
How had I got myself into this?
Death was in my house. Its rules pushed new life away with terrible force. I longed for the children next door, their small, determined bodies through which vitality surged. It was barely one o’clock and I was wide awake and staring-eyed. I thought I could hear movement in the kitchen, perhaps a voice murmuring, but it was a matter of urgency that I should get to sleep before t
wo, the hour at which the drought, the refugee camps, the dying planet, and all the faults and meannesses of my character would arrive to haunt me.
On the bedside table lay the manuscript of a novel by a Vietnamese woman that I was supposed to have read last week. I picked a page at random. The characters seemed to be working in a sweatshop, thanklessly sewing trash under the savage eye of a supervisor. ‘In empty times like this,’ the narrator remarked, ‘singing a half-remembered song helps to make the time pass.’
My ukulele was gathering dust on the floor. I drew it out of its case by the neck and cradled it for a while. Its stiff woody curves comforted me. It was still in tune. The bedroom door was open, but the morphine would surely have kicked in by now. I sat up in bed and played softly. Under my breath I sang ‘Tennessee Waltz’ and ‘After the Ball’: slow tunes in three-four time that gave me a chance to get my fingers on to the next chord and still keep the beat. Then I closed my mouth and just brushed the strings, barely making a sound.
I was laying the uke back in its case when she called out down the hall.
‘Hel?’
‘I’m here.’
‘Goodnight. We’ll call the palliative on Monday.’
GOD BLESS morphine. In the morning she was in bright spirits, affectionate in a slightly guilty way. At breakfast she swallowed another pill and sat at the table gazing out at the garden.
‘It’s a nice day,’ she cried, with a hectic eagerness. ‘We should get stuck into the garden. Do some weeding.’
‘Oh, bugger that,’ I said. ‘Let’s go to the nursery. You can tell me what natives to buy.’
The day flowed by in modest pastimes. We read, we dozed, we drove to the video shop and the supermarket. At the nursery on the banks of the Maribyr-nong she made me buy grevilleas ‘for their future dusty pinkness’. She found an envelope of nasturtium seeds in my pantry, took them outside and pushed them into the dirt with her thumbs, all along the front path.
Bessie tapped on the kitchen window and asked for yoghurt with nuts.