The Spare Room

by Helen Garner

  ‘I’m in a flamenco show tomorrow afternoon,’ she shouted. ‘On a stage.’

  I handed the food through the crack of the back door and she ate it on the veranda, smiling at us over her shoulder through the glass, then ran off to the gap in the fence, leaving the empty bowl and spoon on the doormat.

  Before dinner Nicola made a couple of magisterial gin and tonics and we drank them in front of the TV, to armour ourselves against the news of the world. Later we watched the DVD she had chosen, Million Dollar Baby. We loved the girl boxer leaping out of her corner with her fists up: let me at you! I privately thought the ending was sentimental; Nicola cried; and then we both praised Hilary Swank to the skies. This was the way we had always been together. It was easy.

  She took the morphine according to the instructions on the packet. In the absence of the intravenous vitamin C it worked its magic, making the night brief.

  But on Sunday my friend Peggy, with whom Nicola was remotely acquainted, called to invite us for morning tea.

  ‘That’s nice of her,’ said Nicola. ‘I thought you two had fallen out again.’

  ‘Oh, that’s our style. We get over it. We’re going to Europe in December, for a couple of weeks.’

  ‘Europe?’ She paused. ‘How divine.’

  We drove to Fitzroy. When Peggy, chic and smooth-haired, opened her front door, Nicola leapt through it and straight into the kitchen, grinning wildly, spraying compliments and exclamations in her poshest accent: it was a tremendous performance of being alive. It scraped on my nerves. A bowl of walnuts stood on the sideboard. I grabbed a couple and cracked them in my palms. I ate the first few kernels, but the cracking was so gratifying that after I had eaten enough I kept going, trying to find each nut’s weak point, grinding the hard shells against each other till they split.

  When Nicola paused for breath, Peggy ushered us out into the garden. We sat under a roof of blossoming white roses whose petals sprinkled down on to the embroidered tablecloth. She served us pleasantly and with grace: biscuits and a cake, coffee, and interesting kinds of tea. She and Nicola spoke with sighs and wry smiles about the difficulties of caring for their mothers, queenly dames in their nineties who were often balefully demanding. Mine, who had been small and sad and beaten, was already five years dead. I sat and listened.

  ‘So,’ said Peggy at last. ‘How’s it all going, over there?’

  ‘Well,’ Nicola began, leaning forward with a smile so glassy it tinkled. ‘It’s all going brilliantly.

  Helen’s a wonderfully severe matron. But we’ve had to get hold of some morphine the last few days. You see, at the Theodore Institute, which is marvellous, they give me a certain intravenous vitamin C treatment every second day.’

  She was settling in. Irritated, I tipped my head back and took a proper look at the roses. Quite a few of them were already drying up and drooping. The secateurs lay near me on the windowsill. I grabbed them and made a few furtive passes at the blossoms within reach.

  ‘It does knock one around somewhat,’ Nicola went on, ‘and I sometimes come home a wee bit under the weather.’ I felt my lips pursing. I stood up and moved away from the table, flexing the clipper as I went. An old wooden ladder was leaning against the shed wall. The little building was wreathed in the climbing roses, and every third flower was ready to be snipped.

  ‘Of course I know I’ll always come through it unscathed. I know it’s only the vitamin C savaging the tumours and driving them out. But,’ she said with a gay laugh, ‘to my utter astonishment, and to my shame for being so pathetically selfish, I was absolutely and totally unaware that to poor Hel it was a horrendous spectacle.’

  Clenching my teeth, I mounted the first three rungs and attacked the upper layers of the plant. Poor Hel. The blossoms fell from my blades in a steady shower of white. The brick paving was strewn with them.

  ‘So, late last night I rang my divine niece Iris, who I’d been staying with in Sydney for the last six months, and asked her if she’d found the shivering scary—and she said, “What are you talking about, woman? It’s terrifying. I was shitting myself every time. You look as if you’re about to die.”’ Her voice rose and broke in a trill of social laughter.

  I forced the safety catch shut on the secateurs and climbed down to the ground. Nicola moved along the bench to make room for me. Peggy filled my cup and pushed it across to me, without meeting my eye.

  ‘And so,’ said Nicola, swigging the dregs of her tea, ‘we’re going to ring the palliative care people tomorrow. I know we’ll never need to call them out. I’m sure the treatment’s shifting the cancer—within ten days I’ll be fighting fit and on the mend. The palliative thing’s just so Hel won’t feel completely alone and without back-up—my poor old Hel.’

  Blood rushed into my face. Nicola’s eyebrows shot up to her hairline. She bared her teeth at me and laughed again, a melodious, mocking gust of it from deep in her throat.

  ‘It’s the nights,’ I said, in a strangled voice. ‘The nights are long.’

  Peggy glanced at me. Horrified sympathy passed along her eye-beams. It weakened me. A huge wave of fatigue rinsed me from head to foot. I was afraid I would slide off the bench and measure my length among the cut roses. At the same time a chain of metallic thoughts went clanking through my mind, like the first dropping of an anchor. Death will not be denied. To try is grandiose. It drives madness into the soul. It leaches out virtue. It injects poison into friendship, and makes a mockery of love.

  After lunch at home Nicola lay down to rest, and I drove across town to the Hogar Español. Not wanting to be an embarrassment to my daughter and her husband, or to go home with crowd germs, I stayed at the back near the door. The Spanish families at the tables went on shouting and drinking with a cheerful noise, even once the old men with guitars across their knees had started to strum and the old women, their dyed hair piled high with combs and flowers, had set up their fierce clapping. On the ill-lit stage Bessie and her companions paraded forward in a bloc, their spines erect, their shoulders back and chests open. They flung up their arms, they twirled their wrists and fingers high and low. To the harsh cries of the singers, they battered the floor with their hard-heeled shoes and lashed about them with the deep, crimson flounces of their skirts. Tears burst from my eyes and I covered my face.

  Before Nicola could leave for the clinic on Monday morning, I called the Mercy palliative service. The voice of the woman who answered the phone was calm and friendly. Like Peggy’s glance of sympathy under the climbing roses, it almost undid me. I stammered out a truncated version of our situation.

  ‘Can I ask,’ she said, ‘what’s the actual diagnosis?’

  I carried the cordless to the stove, where Nicola was lowering an egg into a pan of boiling water.

  ‘I’ve got the palliative lady here,’ I said. ‘She needs to know what your actual diagnosis is.’

  She paused with her back to me, then turned, took the phone, and launched with courteous efficiency on the same history I had heard her offer to Dr Tuckey that first night at the clinic. I crossed the veranda and wandered down the yard, inspecting the broad beans and herbs. The air around plants was supposed to have beneficial properties, wasn’t it? I pushed in and stood breathing among the leafy stalks. Sheets and clothes from the day before were still hanging on the line. I unpegged them and slung them over my shoulder. The voice in the kitchen stopped. I stepped back across the threshold into a blast of Nicola’s white glare.

  ‘They wanted to come out this weekend,’ she snarled. ‘To assess me.’ She slammed the phone against the stove-top. ‘Oh, look at this. My fucking egg’s broken. I hate a broken egg.’

  Something violent sizzled in me. I forced myself to walk through the room with my eyes down.

  At lunchtime she phoned me from the clinic. She was merry, and warm. Guess what! Professor Theodore was back from China. She liked him! And he’d had a wonderful idea—that after the vitamin C treatment she should stay lying down in one of the rooms all aft
ernoon, to see if the cold shudders happened. So he could ‘monitor’ them. Not only that—he’d suggested she should try coffee enemas. He thought they might lessen her dependence on the morphine. So she was going to pop out, before they plugged in the vitamin C, to buy some organic coffee. Did I know where she could get some in the city?

  Wasn’t there a sort of light machine gun called an Uzi?

  ‘Try David Jones’ Food Hall,’ I said.

  ‘Thanks, darling. Don’t bother to cook anything tonight. I won’t be home till after eight. There’s a two-hour lecture here that I’m supposed to go to—byeeeee.’

  I sat on the back step and wrestled with the blackest, most glowering scepticism. I didn’t want to be a bigot. How could I detach from this? Serve her, yet detach? I rang my sister Lucy, the religious one, the former nurse, and arranged to meet her at the Waiters’ Club at six o’clock.

  That afternoon a woman from the Mercy palliative called me. No, they were not just for cancer patients or the dying. They were part of the free District Nursing Service. She had offered to come over on Saturday morning to meet us both, but apparently Nicola was not so keen. Her name was Carmel, and yes, she had a moment to talk with me now.

  I rattled off the short version. When I trailed away she left a tactful pause before she spoke. Western medicine, she said, when it had reached the end of what it had to offer, would usually throw in the towel and say so; but outfits like the Theodore Institute tended to keep people linked to them in cloudy hope, right to the end.

  Right to the end.

  ‘Does Nicola have any religious beliefs?’

  I went quiet.

  When my former husband had first introduced me to her, fifteen years ago, I took to Nicola at once. Everything about her, the way she placed food on the table or rolled a cigarette or slung a length of coloured fabric around her neck, was carefree and graceful. In her presence, things slowed down and opened out. I admired the Indian-tinged style of her house and the things she wore. I did spot a couple of photos of a hot-eyed guru lurking in a dark corner of the bookshelves, but she never referred to him, and I didn’t ask. I assumed she was an old hand at meditation and yoga, and that if she had any particular beliefs they were so ingrained that she didn’t need to speak about them, just as I kept quiet about my adventures in churches.

  Then in recent years, shortly before she became ill, Buddhist terms had entered her discourse. She knew how to pronounce rinpoche and where to get a ticket when the famous ones were coming to town. She subjected herself to ten-day vipassana boot camps in the Blue Mountains: her accounts of these speechless ordeals were shaped to make me laugh, but she always came back to the city elated. She referred casually to weekend teachings, and to new friends with names that sounded made up; she had taken to wearing little thread bangles, or a string of knobbly, dark red wooden beads. So I imagined that somewhere in her free-wheeling nature she was quietly equipping herself, as everyone must, with whatever it is one needs to die.

  ‘It depends,’ I said at last, ‘on what you would call religious.’

  ‘It’s just that in my work,’ said Carmel, ‘I’ve learnt that there are people who never, ever face the fact that death’s coming to them. They go on fighting right up to their last breath.’ She paused. ‘And it is one way of doing it.’

  Again the vast weakness sifted through me. I saw that I had been working towards a glorious moment of enlightenment, when Nicola would lay down her manic defences; when she would look around her, take a deep breath, and say, ‘All right. I’m going to die. I bow to it. Now I will live the rest of my life in truth.’

  ‘And from what you’re telling me,’ said the nurse, in her soft, unreproachful voice, ‘I’m wondering whether you should try to accept that Nicola might be one of these. That she might…die in this state.’

  I came up the steps from Parliament Station and spotted Lucy cruising into Little Collins Street on her touring bike. It had big, reliable-looking panniers and, although the sun had not set, she had turned on one of those fast-blinking tail-lights that illuminate the countryside for miles around. By the time I caught up with her, she was chaining the bike to a railing. Even as early as six we weren’t the first customers at the Waiters’ Club: at the top of the wooden stairs, the joint was jumping. We ordered a couple of grilled flounder. The waitress brought wine in tumblers and I began to gulp it down. Lucy saw from the look on my face that I was going to have to hog the conversation. I started with the enemas.

  ‘If she’s constipated,’ she said, ‘an enema could move stuff along—that might relieve the pain in her belly.’

  ‘Yes, I can see that. I’m the last person to have a problem with enemas. But coffee ones? Is coffee good for pain? And apparently the coffee has to be organic.’

  ‘For God’s sake! It’s going up her bum—isn’t instant good enough?’

  ‘The boss of the clinic said it might reduce her reliance on morphine.’

  ‘What reliance? Is she shovelling it down? Bombed out of her brain? Queuing up first thing every morning at the doctor’s?’

  Oh, the crazed relief of dobbing, of disloyalty.

  We drank; we devoured the flat, pale fish; we polished off a salad and a pile of pancakes with lemon juice, and while we ate I jabbered and Lucy split her sides. When the espresso arrived we both calmed down, and she began to analyse.

  ‘I’m not surprised she laughed at your fear. Laughter like that’s a sort of aggression, don’t you think? You’re the messenger with the bad news. She’d like to kill you for trying to carry it to her. She’s fighting to keep it away—as if the message itself might kill her on the spot.’

  ‘So why did she choose me to stay with?’

  ‘She must trust you. You could take it as a compliment.’

  ‘I do. But there are clinics in Sydney where you can get these loony treatments. She’s got heaps of friends up there—people from long before I met her. They’d have no trouble at all with ozone and cupping. And they wouldn’t keep pulling the rug out from under her. I’m scared she’s going to turn me into a horrible, punitive mother.’

  Lucy drained the tiny cup of coffee. ‘When I worked with cancer patients, years ago, there was a man I used to sit with sometimes, who was dying, but his family was pretending he was going to get better. He got attached to me, I think. I liked him a lot. We used to have long, existential conversations and I looked forward to them. On this particular day it was past the end of my shift—I was tired, my feet were sore, I should have been out of there already. I just popped my head round his door on my way home, and he hit me with it: “I haven’t got long to go, have I.” I wasn’t prepared—I gave a pat answer. He turned away and said in a bored, dismissive tone, “If you say so.” I was upset. He’d given me an opening and I’d missed it. I went off feeling I’d failed him. But when I got home I realised it didn’t matter how pathetic my response was. Because there was a silent understanding between us. There was nobody else in that room with him, no one else in his life at that time, who would “say so”.’

  She smiled at me with her head on one side. I only just bit back the words, ‘Gee, you look like Mum’: this was not considered a compliment between us.

  ‘You mean I have to say so and yet not say so?’

  ‘Maybe she’s picked you for that exact job.’ She screwed up her paper napkin and shoved it into a glass. ‘Or maybe…consciously or otherwise…she’s come to your house to die.’

  I looked up in dismay. ‘But I’m going away in December. I’ve paid for my ticket.’

  ‘Don’t panic,’ said Lucy, undoing the clasp of her fat leather purse. ‘No one can plan these things. Stage four can go on for years.’

  ‘But you don’t really think that’s why she came, do you?’

  ‘It’s a long way to come for a treatment. And she sounds as if she’s getting quite a grip on you. That’s when mothers get punitive. When their shift never ends.’

  She laughed, and pointed at my hands clasped on the tabl
etop. The knuckles were white.

  ‘You’re fighting,’ she said, ‘to hold on to what’s been precious in this friendship. But you don’t want to go crazy, or lose your grip on reality the way she has. It is a sort of madness. And it’s quite common.’

  We split the bill, piling notes and coins on the sticky tabletop, and thumped down the stairs into the lane.

  ‘Do you ever go to communion?’ she asked as she unchained her bike from the car-park railing.

  ‘No. I can’t find a church I can stand. I hate it when they’re ponderous.’

  ‘Go to the Catholics, then. They really rip along.’

  We laughed. A warm breeze puffed among the rubbish bins.

  ‘Hey Luce. Can I ask you something? Would you bless me?’

  She paused, with the straps of her helmet dangling beside her smooth cheeks. She made as if to take it off.

  ‘Leave it on,’ I said. ‘It makes you look official.’

  ‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘there’s only one prayer to say. Lamb of God. You take away the sin of the world.’

  I stood in front of her, listening and nodding. She put her palm against my forehead. Have mercy on us. Then she made a little twirl with her thumb, maybe the sign of the cross, I couldn’t see.

  ‘May the Lord bless you and keep you,’ she said.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘And make His face to shine upon you.’

  She buckled up her helmet, flicked on her lights, kissed me on both cheeks, and pedalled away in a westerly direction.

  WHEN I walked into the kitchen, the lamp was on and Nicola was standing at the bench, chewing, with one hand plunged into a large, squat, brown paper bag.

  ‘Look at these!’

  She held out a cupped palm full of creamy white pips. ‘They’re apricot kernels. You know—the bits you smash the stones to get out, and put it in the jam to make it set?’

  ‘Pectin?’

  ‘Laetrile. It attacks cancer, Professor Theodore says. I have to eat twenty a day.’ She raised her palm to her mouth and nibbled from it with her front teeth. ‘Have some.’