The Spare Room

by Helen Garner

  We grimaced at each other.

  ‘What are the treatments, exactly?’ asked Gab.

  I tried to describe them without prejudice, taking into account what I imagined their beliefs about alternative medicine might be. But when I got to the ozone sauna with the electrodes, they could no longer keep straight faces. We squirmed on the couches, unable to look at each other. In the middle of our spasms, the back door opened and Bessie stepped in.

  ‘Hello young girl,’ said Iris, wiping her eyes on her sleeve. ‘Who are you? Come here.’

  Bessie marched straight to the couch and squeezed herself in between the visitors. She subjected them to a thorough sartorial examination, turning her head smoothly and scanning them up and down. Iris put an arm round Bessie’s shoulders and we went on talking and laughing.

  The phone rang. Bessie leaped for it. She listened, with a puzzled look, then handed it to me. At first there was silence, then a hoarse croak, something fighting to sound like a voice.

  ‘Who’s this? Nicola? Is it you?’

  She choked out a few incoherent words.

  ‘Where are you?’

  She was at the Theodore. She wasn’t well. She didn’t know how to get home. I was on my feet, reaching for the car keys, when Colette came on the line.

  ‘Helen?’ she chirped. ‘Hello there! How’s your day been? Now, Nicky’s had a reaction to the vitamin C. She’s a tiny bit shaky—but don’t worry—everything’s fine. Listen, though—we’re just about to close for the day.’

  Something in me exploded. ‘How long has she been in this state?’ I shouted. ‘Why haven’t you called me before this? It’s peak hour. The roads are jam-packed. It’ll take me an hour to drive into the city!’

  Three faces stared up at me from the couch.

  ‘Now Helen, don’t get excited,’ said Colette. ‘Nicky’s here beside me. She’s smiling. She wants me to tell you she’s quite all right.’

  ‘What sort of an outfit is this?’ I said shrilly. ‘Surely you don’t think you can just shove her into a taxi, in this state? Tell me how you think we’re going to get her home.’

  A muffled confab took place just out of my hearing.

  ‘Good news,’ cried Colette. ‘Professor Theodore lives out your way. He’ll drive her home. They should be there in half an hour.’

  I banged down the phone. ‘He’s coming here. That wanker who runs the clinic. He’s driving her home.’

  ‘Who? Who? Who?’ said Bessie.

  ‘Let’s be ready for him,’ said Gab. ‘You fix Nicola’s room and we’ll clear up out here.’

  I took Bessie by the hand and dragged her protesting to the gap in the fence. ‘I might have to be very rude to someone,’ I said. ‘I don’t want you to hear it.’

  Then I skidded into my office and dialled the number of a lawyer I knew. She was still at her desk.

  ‘Listen. I need to make a complaint about a shady alternative health clinic. What’s the government body to approach?’

  ‘That would be the Health Services Commission, I believe,’ she replied calmly. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘I need to make some threatening noises and I don’t want them to sound hollow.’

  Half an hour passed; an hour. I kept running out the front door and looking up and down the street. No sign of them. By seven I was in a panic. I found the clinic’s card and called the number. The answering machine was on: the office was closed until Monday. In the bottom corner of the card was a mobile number. I dialled it. A man answered.

  ‘I’m looking for my friend Nicola, a patient at the Theodore Institute,’ I said. ‘Someone’s driving her home and I’m worried about her—do you have any idea where she is?’

  ‘Yes, Nicola’s with me,’ said the man. ‘We’re just turning into Mount Alexander Road.’

  ‘Is she all right?’

  ‘She’s fine. We should be at your place in about ten minutes.’

  ‘Are you Professor Theodore?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘I need to talk to you very seriously,’ I said, ‘about Nicola’s treatment.’

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Whatever it is you want to say, you’d better say it right now.’

  I could hear the rush of traffic. ‘I’m not going to have this conversation with you on a mobile, while you’re driving my friend in your car.’

  ‘Last chance, I’m afraid,’ he said languidly. ‘I’m going overseas first thing tomorrow morning.’

  What? He was off again? My hands began to shake.

  ‘When you get her to my house,’ I said, ‘I think you’d better come in.’

  The line went dead.

  Iris stepped out of the bathroom, smelling fresh and lemony. Her crazy curls were tied back with a rag of bright cotton. She smiled at me, and plumped up the couch cushions. Gab came into the room in a clean T-shirt.

  ‘All right, Helen,’ he said. He had dark brown eyes set in deep sockets. ‘Ready to rock.’

  I wanted to dissolve in sobs of gratitude. They were young, they were sane, and they were in my corner.

  Nicola came through the screen door first. A man in a suit was trailing behind her. She stumbled down the hall towards her room with both hands out and her teeth bared, panting, fighting to speak.

  ‘Water. Gimme some water. And one o’ those— one o’ those—’

  ‘You want morphine?’

  She lurched to her bed. Her knees buckled and she fell sideways on to it.

  The man hovered close to the front door, as if ready to bolt. I ran to the kitchen for water and back to her room. Her teeth were chattering, she was streaming sweat. I worked the sodden clothes and shoes off her. She was grunting in pain, gasping with it; but on her poor face, as she seized the glass of water and gulped down the pill, she was still managing to stretch from ear to ear that frightful, agonised, social smile.

  I took the glass and settled her back against the pillows. She looked up at me anxiously in the half dark, trying to speak.

  ‘Now I’m going to sort out that arsehole,’ I said. I turned and made for the door.

  ‘Hel,’ she croaked after me. ‘Hel. He hasn’t done anything wrong.’

  Gab and Iris had ushered the professor into the big back room and established him in an armchair. He was leaning back with his knees apart and his hands spread on the armrests. We inspected each other with narrow eyes. I had pictured someone glamorous, a sun-tanned globe-trotter in a hemp jacket, but in his tight suit and slip-on shoes he looked more like a salesman or a preacher, balding, fading, but ready to brazen it out.

  Iris brought a tray and laid it on the low table between us. China and glass clinked in the awkward silence.

  ‘I’m afraid I can only stay a minute,’ said the professor in a distant tone, taking a sip of tea. ‘I’m off to a conference in Mexico, early in the morning.’

  ‘How come you’re always leaving town?’ I burst out. ‘And why did you say on the phone just now that she was fine? She’s beyond speech, she’s in pain, she’s desperate—is that what you call fine?’

  From the corner of my eye I saw Gab drop his face and look at his hands. I grabbed a glass of water and swigged it.

  ‘Anyone with experience of the treatments,’ said the professor, ‘would know that such reactions are…fleeting.’

  ‘I have experience. I’ve been picking up the pieces for the past fortnight. I need you to tell me why you keep brutalising her like this.’

  He looked at me levelly. ‘Many cancer treatments can look “brutal” to the untrained observer,’ he said.

  ‘Yes but what’s it all based on? What’s the evidence that vitamin C works? And why aren’t there any properly qualified staff supervising it?’

  He looked surprised. ‘Our staff are perfectly qualified to administer the treatments. One of them’s a specialist.’

  I switched tack again and blundered on. ‘Why don’t you tell the truth to people? She thinks her cancer’s going to get better. You must know it’s not.’


  ‘We don’t offer our patients prognoses,’ said the professor, setting his cup in its saucer.

  ‘Well that’s a lie,’ I said. ‘I looked in her file. It said right there, in big fat letters, terminal. How can you lead people on like this? It’s shameful. Shame on you.’

  Iris leaned forward and laid her hand on my knee. I tried to control myself, but when the professor raised an ironic eyebrow I began to bluster.

  ‘You won’t get away with it this time, because I’m going to report you.’

  ‘And who,’ he drawled, tilting his head, ‘were you thinking of reporting me to?’

  I slapped down my pathetic ace. ‘To the Health Services Commission.’

  He gave a casual little hiccup of laughter. ‘And uhm—what exactly, might I ask, are you going to “report”?’

  I was no use to anyone in this state, poisoned and choking with rage. Hot-faced, I sat back in my chair.

  Gab took a deep breath. ‘Look, Professor Theodore,’ he said in his mild, reasonable voice. ‘Both Iris and I are if anything rather in favour of alternative treatments. But we’re concerned by the state Nicola comes home in. And we’re wondering if you could explain to us the scientific basis for the treatments your clinic offers, specially the vitamin C. We’d like to look into it. Maybe get on to the internet and read up on it. Can you give us any pointers?’

  As the professor began to lay out his authorities, I got up and stumped out across the back veranda. I picked my way between the vegetable rows and put my head through the gap in the fence. The next-door yard was empty. They must be inside having their tea. Kids’ junk was strewn about on the dry grass. A pink ballet shoe lay on the rubber bed of the trampoline. The swing dangled from a fig tree branch. One of the guinea pigs bustled across the asphalt near the barbecue with a long blade of grass poking out of its mouth. Dully I looked at its pop eyes, its thick neck and hulking shoulders. What were guinea pigs for? They were just lumps with fur on them. In Peru people roasted and ate them, but here they looked prehistoric, left behind by evolution, and pointlessly busy, with all that moronic nibbling and chewing and scuttling and mating. A waste of space and energy.

  What was the matter with me? How could I hate a creature for leading its tiny, inoffensive life in the corner of somebody’s yard?

  Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,

  And thou no breath at all?

  I slunk into the kitchen just in time to see the professor’s back retreating down the hall. I caught up with him as he passed the closed door of Nicola’s room. There he turned to me and said, ‘Don’t you want to check if she’d like to see me, before I leave?’ Even in the dark hall I saw his expression: he was scoring a point, suggesting I had been remiss. I opened her door and tiptoed in.

  She was awake, but terribly white and groggy.

  ‘Professor Theodore’s off now. Want him to pop in and see you before he goes?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said in a faint, slurred voice. ‘Tell him I’m fine. And Hel—would you thank him? Say thank you very much.’

  Somehow I got myself out the door. He was standing there waiting, his features arranged in a configuration of professional solicitude. I repeated her words. He nodded, and strode off towards his car. As he clicked the front gate shut behind him, he tossed a parting remark over his shoulder.

  ‘Much better weather we’ve been having this week, isn’t it.’

  NICOLA slept, or we assumed she was sleeping, for she did not stir from her room. Iris and I lay on the couches in our pyjamas, drinking soda water, clipping and painting our toenails, and blankly watching TV, while Gab ransacked the internet. Towards eleven he emerged. He was the sort of man who could stretch his spine and make it crackle all the way down.

  ‘I can’t find anything substantial to validate the vitamin C,’ he said. ‘Everyone got very excited about it in the sixties. But then they hit it with proper randomised trials. Double-blind, placebo-controlled. And it all went pretty much pear-shaped. Theodore mentioned what he said was an important paper by some guy called Webster.’

  ‘A paper?’ said Iris. ‘What—just the one?’

  ‘Well I found the guy, but all the magazines that run his research are super alternative. Some of them seem to be owned by him. But one thing I did find out about Theodore—he’s a vet.’

  He threw himself on to the couch and laid his head on Iris’s lap.

  ‘A “research scientist”, he calls himself,’ he added.

  We sprawled there in a complicated silence.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ said Iris, ‘about why Helen got so angry.’

  Oh God. I was going to have to account for myself. I sat up. ‘I’m so sorry. I lost it. It’s the worst thing about me—I’m an angry person. Anger’s my default mode.’

  Gab uttered a muffled laugh, and looked up at Iris. Her cheeks had gone pink. She glanced over her shoulder towards the hall door and lowered her voice.

  ‘You have to understand,’ she said, ‘that I love Nicola very much. She’s been a huge figure for me, ever since I was a child. But I’ve never been so angry in my life as I was when she came to stay at my place. I really thought I was going to have to kill her myself, and save the cancer the trouble.’

  ‘I knew she was with you too long,’ I said. ‘I used to spend hours composing diplomatic emails: “Don’t you think you should rent yourself a little place of your own in Elizabeth Bay? Get out of Iris’s hair?” And she’d answer in that high-handed tone-“Darling, Iris adores me. She loves having me there.”’

  We all laughed, painfully.

  ‘She’s been there since April,’ said Iris. ‘And she’s got no plans to leave. Melbourne’s just a holiday. All her gear’s still piled in my front hall.’

  ‘It’s a one-bedroom flat,’ said Gab, without rancour. ‘Iris gave Nicola the bed. We’ve been sleeping on the living room floor.’

  ‘Want to hear my theory?’ said Iris. ‘There’s a lot of horribleness that Nicola refuses to countenance. But it won’t just go away. It can’t, because it exists. So somebody else has to sort of live it. It’s in the air around her. Like static. I felt it when she walked into the house tonight. It was like I suddenly had a temperature. My heart rate went up.’

  I stared at her. ‘You mean it’s not just me?’

  ‘No way. I know exactly what you’re feeling. It’s terrible. It’s like getting a madness injection.’

  ‘I get prickling,’ I said, ‘in the backs of my hands.’

  ‘She’s cast us as the carriers of all the bad stuff— and somehow we’ve let her. She sails about with that ghastly smile on her face, telling everyone she’s going to be better by the middle of next week, and meanwhile we’re trawling along the bottom picking up all the anguish and rage that she’s thrown overboard.’

  ‘Can people do that?’ said Gab, propping himself on his elbows.

  ‘Remember, Gab?’ said Iris. ‘The first time she had the vitamin C? She was catatonic—like tonight— but they turfed her out and she had to drive herself home. Across the Harbour Bridge at peak hour. I couldn’t believe it. I was insane with rage. I wanted to go straight over to that clinic and hurl a grenade through their front window. But the next morning she was so offhand about it that I ended up thinking I must have over-reacted. She patronised me. I felt a fool.’

  ‘It was pretty deflating,’ said Gab.

  ‘That’s what she does here,’ I said. ‘She almost makes fun of me.’

  They looked at me. Iris’s lips were quivering.

  ‘I’ve hardly had a night’s sleep since she arrived,’ I said. ‘I shop, I cook, I clean. I field her unwanted phone calls. I’m a hand-maiden. A washer-woman. I lump her fucking mattress around and prop it in the sun. And all that’s fine—it really is—I’d do anything for her. But then last week she made it abundantly clear to me that she “doesn’t need a nurse”.’

  We had to press our faces into the cushions to stifle our laughter. Gab soon sobered up, but Iris and I went o
n and on, in fits that would not stop. He sat patiently by, with his hand resting on the back of her neck, and watched us gasp and groan.

  I had always thought that sorrow was the most exhausting of the emotions. Now I knew that it was anger. I lay galvanised on my bed for the rest of the night, seething and staring into the dark. Whenever I nodded off for a moment, the professor with his watery eyes and high colour slouched in and stood by the bed, grinning like a defrocked priest.

  At last the morning slid between the slats of the venetian blind. In the kitchen I filled the kettle and tore open the newspaper. Nicola came shuffling along the hall. Her head was high, the eyebrows arched, the smile huge and riveted on. She greeted me tunefully.

  ‘Goooood morning, darling friend!’

  ‘Don’t speak to me, Nicola,’ I muttered, turning away to the bench. ‘I can’t even look at you, I’m so livid.’

  ‘Oo-wah.’ she trilled, in a mocking girlish treble.

  ‘And don’t give me that oo-wah shit. Don’t you dare.’ Sweat broke out under my pyjama top. I glanced down at my chest and saw the ugly flush rising.

  She paused in the doorway in her nightie, holding the red wool shawl round her like a peasant.

  ‘What’s wrong, Hel?’

  The crimson of her shawl was leaking into the air around her, staining it.

  ‘There’s something I would like to know,’ I said. ‘When are you going to get real?’

  Her mouth fell open. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Don’t act dumb. I nurse you, I wait on you hand and foot, and then you turn around and laugh at me. You laughed at me.’

  ‘When? What are you talking about?’

  ‘At Peggy’s. You laughed at me for being scared at night. You made a joke of it. Poor old Hel.’

  ‘Oh, that?’ she said. ‘A week ago.’ She put out one hand to me, palm up, and drew in her chin. Her eyebrows formed an inverted V of patronising concern. ‘I’m so sorry, darling. I had no idea I’d offended you.’