The Spare Room

by Helen Garner

  I picked one out of the bag: there must have been two kilos of the things. It had a peculiar flavour; delicious, but wild and with a distant after-taste, like something that might be poisonous if you got the quantities wrong. I ate several more. She gave me a companionable smile and we stood there, munching.

  ‘How did you go today?’

  ‘They plugged me into the vitamin C,’ she said, ‘and I lay there all afternoon waiting for the cold shudders and sweats to start. Not a squeak. Not a quiver. I felt a complete idiot. Like when you take your car to the mechanic and suddenly it’s running perfectly.’

  We started to laugh.

  ‘Did you ask them about the pain?’

  Once more she brushed it aside. ‘Lay off, Hel—these people deal with cancer every day. Pain’s not something they want to hear about.’

  I let it pass. I had to learn to let it pass.

  ‘Remember Marj from Broken Hill?’ she said cheerfully. ‘The bald lady in the little black toque, that you liked? Do you know how she heard about the Theodore? In a seance. And that’s why she came all this way. And next week some people are arriving from Canada! To do the treatments!’

  She grinned at me, stuffing in another handful of pips. Mine were starting to make me feel a bit sick. I dropped them back in the bag. Under the bench I found a huge jar with a red screw lid, and tipped the kernels into it. Packed behind the clear glass they radiated a meaningless glamour, like a photo in a lifestyle magazine.

  ‘The clinic’s closed tomorrow,’ she said. ‘It’s the Melbourne Cup. How about we go to the movies?’

  The morning was grey and gentle, with doves. The racecourse was half a mile from my house, and in Cup Week the roads of our suburb were packed morning and evening, so we chose a movie that was screening across the river in South Yarra, and took our lunch to the Botanic Gardens. The sun came out, the day grew bright. We chose a palm tree that cast a shadow of perfect roundness, and settled on the grass within its perimeter. I laid out our sandwiches and our bottles of water. Nicola always looked relaxed when she sat on the ground: her hips were looser in their sockets than other people’s. Her long legs sprawled gracefully under her faded sky-blue cotton skirt.

  ‘This whole thing’s hard on you, Helen, isn’t it,’ she said.

  ‘Harder than I’d expected.’

  ‘What’s the worst part? Is it the sweating?’

  Here was my chance. ‘No—it’s feeling we’re in bad faith with each other.’

  Her head swung round. ‘Bad faith? Us?’

  ‘You won’t like to hear this.’

  ‘Go on.’

  She took a neat bite of a sandwich, and shifted so we were sitting side by side, facing in the same direction. By breaking eye contact she freed me, as one is free to spew up true things in a car on a long night drive.

  ‘I’ve got serious doubts,’ I said, ‘about the clinic.’

  She let her gaze rove over the soft, well-kept lawn that sloped all the way down to the lake.

  ‘I can’t say I’m surprised,’ she said, with a small laugh. ‘I always knew it wouldn’t be your speed. Darling, don’t worry. I know you do your best.’

  ‘Yes, but I’m getting the same vibe off these treatments as I did off that cabbage juice guy up in the Hunter Valley. I can’t help feeling they’re charlatans. Either that, or they’re deluded.’

  Calmly she shook her head, smiling, chewing, always smiling. ‘You saved me from the biochemist— I’m eternally grateful for that. But he was a crook. These people are different. I believe in them. Their theories are solidly based. And they really, really care about me.’

  ‘So where was the boss,’ I said with difficulty, ‘that morning you arrived? He told you to come a week early, and then he stood you up.’

  ‘It’s his research, Hel. He has to keep abreast of international developments.’

  I bored on, miserably. ‘What about the rest of them, then? They’re hardly what you’d call impressive, are they? How can you trust those people?’

  ‘But Helen,’ she said, turning her face to me in earnest surprise. ‘I have to trust them. I don’t have a choice. I’ve got to keep myself revved up and directed and purposeful.’

  ‘That’s what’s hardest for me. The revving.’

  She looked down at the grass. I was hurting her.

  ‘But it’s the only way,’ she said. ‘If I don’t have faith, the only alternative is to lie down and say OK, I give up. I’m dying. Cancer, come and get me.’

  A dry breeze puffed up the slope. It lifted her hair and showed the pitiful thinness of her neck. I put down my sandwich and grabbed her hands.

  ‘Nicola,’ I said. ‘Those are the two absolute extremes.’

  ‘Yes, well, that’s what I’m facing.’

  Her tone was almost huffy. She wouldn’t meet my eye. She tried to take back her hands, but I hung on. I squeezed them, I shook them.

  ‘There’s got to be a path between the two,’ I said. ‘Can’t we try to find it?’

  She pulled away from me and stared out at the lake.

  ‘I can’t give up,’ she said. ‘I won’t give up.’

  ‘Would it have to be giving up, though? Could you think about taking it one day at a time? Like they do at AA? Not say I’m dying or I’m not dying—just say I’m alive today? ’ ‘You don’t understand. It’s different for you.’

  ‘Why is it different?’ I said. ‘Aren’t we all the same, before…’ Before death or before God was what I wanted to say, but it would have sounded melodramatic.

  ‘You’ve done things,’ she said. ‘You’ve worked. You’ve been married.’

  ‘Married?’ I almost laughed. ‘Those train wrecks?’

  ‘You’ve made a family. I’ve wasted my life,’ she said. ‘Look at me. I’m sixty-five. What have I got to show for it?’

  Her mouth writhed, but she controlled it.

  ‘I’ve had amazing good fortune,’ she said. ‘Born with reasonable good looks. A family with money. A few talents. But I threw it all away. I made nothing of myself. I was sloppy. I never stuck at anything. I failed and just kept moving. I wasted my good luck. I pissed it up against the wall. It’s no wonder I’ve run out of it now.’

  I could have poured out a thousand flattering protests, but her back was bolt upright, her hands were folded, and in profile she looked so dignified that it would have been impertinent to try to comfort her. So I sat beside her on the grass, and followed her gaze; and the lake, the lawn, the elms, the sailing flat-bottomed clouds, and the summer day itself darkened and disintegrated before our eyes.

  The cinema was quiet and empty, and so were we, by the time we took our places. The film was Sally Potter’s Yes, with dialogue in iambic pentameter. We saw at once that in this country it could only be a commercial disaster. Our bruised hearts rushed to it in solidarity, and it came to our rescue. We sighed, we cried. We poked each other with our elbows. We snorted with laughter behind our hands. We wanted to be Joan Allen, or at least to stride about in her silky garments and classy little Italian knits. And we cheered when the cleaning woman delivered straight to camera the film’s closing lines:

  …in fact I think, I guess,

  That No does not exist. There’s only Yes.

  ‘Ah Helen,’ said Nicola as we sped back along Punt Road. ‘That film was dropped into our laps by some god or other. I’d like to write the director a fan letter. And this very night I’m going to give myself a coffee enema.’

  Just as we were about to open a bottle of wine and slouch in front of the TV for the racing news, my son-in-law Mitch and his friend Locky from Torquay emerged from my back shed, where they had been working together on their crazy paintings, and came to the kitchen door: two smiling surfers with clear, bright eyes and hair like straw.

  ‘Can we come in?’ said Mitch shyly. ‘My cold’s better.’

  Nicola liked young men, and they liked her. She favoured these two with a kind and questioning smile, as they popped their stubbies and
settled into armchairs.

  ‘I know you’ll tell us if this is out of line,’ Mitch went on. ‘But I happened to mention to Locky that you were sick, Nicola, and he wondered if…’

  ‘I’m a sort of consultant,’ said Locky, ‘for a company that sells, uhm…’

  He laid a bag on the floor and pulled out of it several flat strips of a rubbery, silver-grey material. He spread them on the coffee table. Some were circular, some were foot-shaped. We looked at them politely.

  ‘What it’s for,’ said Locky, ‘is it puts your immune system back into its optimal state. So everything in your body’s running smoothly.’

  Nicola shifted in her seat. The wattage of her smile decreased. Mitch flicked her a nervous glance. The door opened and Bessie bounded in. Her cold, she said, was gone; but her fair hair was tightly plaited and pinned in a coronet, in the style that betokened an attack of nits. She sat on her father’s knee and bent her brow over the objects. A short silence fell.

  ‘I know it sounds weird,’ said Locky. He looked up at Nicola and flashed his dazzling teeth. ‘I never dreamt I’d be sitting in somebody’s lounge room with a bag full of magnets.’

  I laughed.

  ‘Magnets!’ said Nicola, sparking up.

  ‘They replicate the earth’s magnetic field,’ said Locky. ‘I don’t exactly understand how they work, but I swear they do. You ladies got any ice in your fridge?’

  I brought him a cube of it and he set it down on one of the circular shapes. The ice began at once to melt: water pooled around it at unnatural speed on the grey rubbery surface, then overflowed on to the tabletop. Locky whipped a tissue out of his pocket and mopped it up.

  Bessie’s mouth was hanging open. ‘That should go in a magic show!’

  ‘It’s like watching a cartoon,’ said Nicola.

  Mitch looked happily from face to face. ‘Remember how my feet used to ache, Helen?’ he said. ‘I put the insoles in my shoes and now they never hurt at all.’

  ‘They make mattress covers too,’ said Locky. ‘We sleep on one at home. I used to have terrible back pain. But now it’s gone. And if I ever leave one of the mats on the floor, I come back and find the bloody dogs are lying on it.’

  We were all laughing, sitting forward.

  ‘Can it do arthritis?’ I asked. ‘My big toe joints hurt like hell.’

  Locky handed me a pair of insoles, far too big for me. I laid them on the carpet, pulled off my sensible red sandals, and placed my bare feet on the rubbery stuff. Its surface was oddly pleasing: smooth and soft, but with an underlying firmness. I sat waiting for whatever it was to take effect. My eyes came to rest on the leg of the kitchen table. Locky talked on, in his drawling, slangy way, about the excellence of the company’s special silver-stone filter: the water it produced, he said, had a sort of silky quality. His kids drank it all day, couldn’t be stopped, whereas before, they’d had to be forced to swallow even a single glass of tap water. His voice faded to a pleasant, soothing element of the ambient noise. I was quite alert, not at all sleepy; yet when he dashed out the front and lugged in a sample filter from the boot of his car, I had to guide my mind back to the matter in hand.

  Nicola, meanwhile, sat hunched in the white armchair, listening to Locky’s tales of exemplary hydration and freedom from pain, with her eyebrows up and her smiling mouth half open. I almost laughed: she looked so lovably innocent and gormless, like a beldame at a travelling minstrel show.

  By the time Locky stood up to leave, we had agreed to take a big water filter and various items of bedding for a fortnight’s obligation-free trial. Nicola, a convert, declared she was going to buy me the filter for five hundred dollars. I had paid up front for a pair of the magic insoles, and was already trying to trim them down to fit my sandals. As the back door clicked behind Bessie and the men, I looked up and saw with surprise that outside it was already dark. They had been entertaining us for two hours.

  As it happened, I knew how to administer a neat, simple and clean enema: I had once undergone a course of colonic irrigations at a health spa on the island of Koh Samui. My account of that week had sent us into endless laughing fits; but Nicola seemed to have forgotten it now, and this did not seem the moment to start throwing my weight around. Still, when I saw her brewing the organic coffee in the kitchen after dinner, I said tentatively, ‘Do you need a hand to set it up? I can…’

  She shook her head, too busy to listen.

  ‘I wonder, though,’ I said, as she forged off to the bathroom with the equipment. ‘Is it a good idea to have a coffee enema at bedtime? You don’t think the caffeine might keep you awake?’

  ‘Why on earth would it do that, darling?’ she said breezily. ‘I won’t be drinking it—I’ll only be putting it up my bum.’

  I backed off. From behind the closed door I heard thumping and splashing, then a silence, then a volley of curses. I went to my room and got into bed.

  My mobile rang. It was my friend Rosalba in Newcastle. For ten minutes we boasted about our grandchildren, taking it in turns and offering each other full attention. I told her I had a friend staying with me who was very sick with cancer, and that this meant I hadn’t spent as much time with the kids as usual.

  ‘Ah, poor woman,’ said Rosalba. ‘But you say she lives in Sydney? Why she staying with you?’

  I explained about the clinic and its treatments. She clicked her tongue. ‘Three weeks. That’s a long time. Where’s her family?’

  It was a simple question, but I hesitated.

  ‘She not married?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No children?’

  ‘No. I’ve never got to know her family. She’s got a couple of nieces she’s close to. Some great-nephews that she loves. An ancient mother. And an older sister who lives in the country, with troubles of her own.’

  A light stream of silent incomprehension, even disapproval, flowed down the line. I began to flail around.

  ‘She’s what you’d call a bohemian, I guess.’

  ‘Bohemian? What’s that?’

  ‘Someone who believes in freedom. Thinks it’s important to be an artist. That sort of thing. Not interested in getting married, or having families in the usual way.’

  ‘Freedom?’ said Rosalba. ‘Huh. When you sick, you go to your family.’

  By midnight, when I went to the toilet, a bucketful of soaking towels was standing in the bath, and the whole house smelled like an espresso bar.

  At dawn Nicola stumbled into the kitchen, haggard and shaky. She had hardly slept. I served the breakfast without comment. Soon she had the smile pasted on and her eyes staring wide. In future, she said, she would do the enemas only in the mornings.

  Next morning she emerged from the bathroom dishevelled and exasperated.

  ‘I don’t think I’ll do any more. It’s so hard to hold your sphincter shut and get up off the floor and on to the toilet in time to let go—I’m fed up with washing towels. I wish there was a way to get my bum right over the toilet, so I could do it in a more relaxed way.’

  In a very small voice I said, ‘There is. I tried to tell you on Tuesday, but you wouldn’t listen.’

  She stopped and looked at me, half smiling, abashed. It was a hollow victory.

  That evening she came home from the clinic in high spirits, and reported that she had been seen by a new bloke: ‘he was a real doctor.’

  ‘How could you tell?’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘just by looking. He said that the increased pain is definitely being caused by the treatments jazzing the cancer up.’

  I listened, and nodded, and smiled because she was pleased. But I wondered what he had really said to her, and in what language, for jazzing up sounded like one of her own expressions, drawn from the same posh, old-fashioned lexicon as carry on, crash hot, my divine niece and some mad little hotel in South Yarra.

  The low dose of morphine was losing its grip. That night Nicola was in steady pain, concentrated in her neck and shoulder. She came up with an inexhaust
ible flow of bright explanations: she had twanged a muscle turning over in bed; her usual thick flannelette nightie was in the wash; a breeze had come in through the window and chilled her shoulder. When she talked like that I thought my head was going to burst. But we slogged on. Somehow we slept a little; somehow the daylight came.

  ON FRIDAY morning Nicola set off for the clinic pale with fatigue but happy and excited: the divine niece Iris and her boyfriend Gab were to fly down from Sydney that evening, and would stay with us till Sunday night. I pedalled to the shops and prepared a vegetarian meal, then hauled out the double futon and set it up on its slatted base in the room with the bookshelves: reading lamp, flower in a bottle, folded towels.

  Towards five o’clock a taxi pulled up at my gate. A tall, thin, very long-legged young woman in loose cotton clothes stepped out, followed by an equally thin and tall young man: they might almost have been siblings, except that her hair was a mass of wild brown curls and his was smooth and black. They hesitated with their bags under the plane trees, looking for the house number. At the sight of their shy, intelligent faces, my weariness and fright overwhelmed me. I rushed down the front path and threw myself into the divine niece’s arms.

  I got the Absolut out of the freezer and the three of us hunkered down over the shot glasses, trying to make a plan before Nicola got home.

  ‘I suggested to her the other night,’ said Iris, ‘when she called me about the shuddering fits, that she should think about coming back to Sydney after two weeks instead of three. Did she tell you?’

  ‘Not a word,’ I said.

  ‘I was appalled by the idea of her staying three weeks with you. She hasn’t the faintest clue what she asks of people. That enraging brightness—even twenty-four hours can drive you round the twist. But she jacks up if you put things to her directly. So I thought, if I booked her a ticket on the sly and just discreetly planted the idea on the phone, it might sprout during the week, and by Sunday she’d be ready to come home with me and Gab. But she wouldn’t have a bar of it. She kept saying, “I know I’m going to get better—and if I don’t keep doing the treatments, I’ll die.”’