The Spare Room (2 page)

I swept with the dustpan and brush, I beat with the millet broom, I hoovered in cunning angled strokes. The fragments of mirror were mean-shaped and stubborn, some so minuscule that they were only chips of light. They hid against the rug’s scalp, in the roots of its fur. I got down on my knees and picked them out with my fingernails. When the daylight faded and I had to stop, my sister Connie rang me.

‘A mirror broke? In her room?’

I was silent.

Then she said, in a low, urgent voice, ‘Don’t. Tell. Nicola.’

‘Three weeks she’s staying?’ said my friend Leo, the psychiatrist. That Saturday evening I sat in the spartan kitchen of his South Yarra place and watched him cook. He poured the pasta into a strainer and flipped it up and down. ‘Why so long?’

‘She’s booked in to do a course of alternative treatment down here. Some outfit in the city. They’ve fast-tracked her. She’s supposed to present herself there first thing Monday morning.’

‘What sort of treatment?’

‘I was loath to ask. She talks about peroxide drips, awful stuff. She’s already been getting big doses of vitamin C in Sydney. Eighty thousand units, she said. Intravenous. With something called glutathione. Whatever that is.’

He stood very still with the dripping colander in his hand. He seemed to be controlling himself: I had never before noticed the veins in his temples, under the curly white hair. ‘It’s bullshit, Helen.’

We started to eat. Leo let a shrink’s silence fall, as he forked in food. His terrier, black and white, squatted by his chair and gazed up at him with helpless love.

‘It is bullshit, is it?’ I said. ‘That’s my instinct. Get this. When the bowel tumour showed up on the scan, she asked the oncologist to hold off treatment for a while. So she could take a lot of aloe vera. He said, “Nicola. If aloe vera could shrink tumours, every oncologist in the world would be prescribing it.” But she believes in things. She’s got one of those magnetic mats on the floor behind her couch. She says, “Lie on the mat, Hel. It’ll heal your osteoporosis.”’

Leo didn’t laugh. He looked at me with his triangular brown eyes and said, ‘And do you lie on it?’

‘Sure. It’s restful. She rents it from a shop.’

‘So chemo didn’t work.’

‘She walked around carrying a bag of it plugged into the back of her hand. She’s had surgery. She had radiation. They’ve told her they can’t do any more for her. It’s in her bones, and her liver. They said to go home. She spent five days at a Petrea King workshop. I’d heard good things about that, but she said it wasn’t her style. Then she went to someone she called a healer. He said she had to have her molars out—that the cancer was caused by heavy metals leaking out of her fillings.’

Leo put his head in his hands. I kept eating.

‘Why is she coming to you?’

‘She says I saved her life. She was about to send a lot of money to a biochemist up in the Hunter Valley.’

‘A biochemist?’

‘A kinesiologist told her this bloke’s had a lot of success with cancer. So she phoned him up. He said he wouldn’t need to see her. Just have a look at her blood picture. She was supposed to send him four grand and he’d post her the exact right herbs to target the cancers. “Essence of cabbage juice” was mentioned.’

I let out a high-pitched giggle. Leo looked at me steadily, without expression.

‘And he told her she shouldn’t worry if she heard unfavourable things about him, because he had enemies. People who were out to get him. I was trying to be tactful, so I asked her, “How did you feel, when he told you that?” She said, “I took it as a guarantee of integrity.”’

My cheeks were hot. I knew I must be gabbling.

‘I was scared she’d accuse me of crushing her last hope. So I went behind her back and called a journalist I know. He ran a check. Turns out the so-called biochemist’s a well-known conman. He makes the most outlandish claims. Before he went into alternative health he’d spent years in gaol for armed robbery. I rang her just in time. She had the cheque book in her hand.’

It took me a moment to calm down. Leo waited. His kitchen was bare, and peaceful. I wondered if any of his patients had ever been invited into it. Outside the sliding glass doors an old concrete laundry trough sat on the paving, sprouting basil. The rest of the tiny yard was taken up by his car.

‘You work with cancer patients,’ I said. ‘Does this sound bad?’

He shrugged. ‘Pretty bad. Stage four.’

‘How many stages are there?’

‘Four.’

The bowl was empty. I put down my fork. ‘What am I supposed to do?’

He put his hand on the dog’s head and drew back its ears so that its eyes turned to high slits. ‘Maybe that’s why she’s coming to stay. Maybe she wants you to be the one.’

‘What one?’

‘The one to tell her she’s going to die.’

We listened to an old Chick Corea CD, and talked about our families and what we’d been reading. When it was late, he walked me to my car. The dog trotted at his heel. As I drove away up Punt Road I saw them dart across at the lights and plunge into the big dark gardens.

Rain fell in the night, quiet and kind. I woke at six with a sense of something looming, the same anxiety I felt before a writing deadline: the inescapable requirement to find something new in myself. Nicola would arrive today. I lay there under the shadow.

But I planted two new geraniums in a window box and hooked it on to the side fence outside her room. The bud-points, furled inside their leaves, reminded me of sharpened lead pencils. Their redness arrested my gaze before it hit the ugly palings.

Bessie came in from next door, squeezing through the gap in the fence while I was making a sandwich for lunch. She demonstrated a new hairclip application that kept her fringe still when she jumped up and down. Her nose was running and I kept wiping it on kitchen paper. The TV was on.

‘Is that Saddam Hussein?’ she said. ‘What did he do, Nanna, to make him a baddie?’

I explained what a tyrant was. We began to philosophise. She pointed out that many people in the world were very poor. Then, tucking into the bowl of yoghurt and nuts that I placed before her, she observed that days differ from one another.

‘Some are happy,’ she said, ‘but others are bad. I don’t know why. Can I come to the airport with you? I want to tell Nicola I’m five-and-a-half. I think she’ll be very surprised.’

We parked in plenty of time. The sun was out and the air was mild: we remarked gaily on the spring. As we marched hand in hand towards the Virgin Blue gate lounge, a crowd came surging out of it: Nicola’s plane must have landed early. I broke into a trot, hauling Bessie behind me and scanning the approaching travellers for a tall, striding woman with prematurely white hair. We were almost on top of her before I recognised her. She was tottering along in the press of people, staggering like a crone, dwarfed by a confused young man who was carrying her Indian cloth bag over his shoulder. Bessie got a tighter grip on my hand.

‘Hello darlings!’ said Nicola. She was trying for insouciance, but her voice was hoarse, only a thread. ‘This is my new friend Gavin. He’s been so helpful!’

Gavin handed me the bag, murmured a farewell, and made for the exit. I took hold of Nicola’s arm and steered her towards a row of hard chairs. She collapsed on to the first one. Bessie pressed closer to my other side, staring across me at Nicola with a look of fascinated panic.

‘OK,’ I said brightly. ‘Let’s sit here for a second and collect ourselves.’

But Nicola couldn’t sit up straight. Her back was bowed right over, her neck straining as if under a heavy load. She was stripped of flesh, shuddering from head to foot like someone who has been out beyond the break too long in winter surf.

‘Bessie,’ I said. ‘Listen to me, sweetheart. See that lady over there, behind the counter? Past the toilets? I want you to walk up to her and tell her we need a wheelchair. Right away. Will you be a big girl and do that?’

She stared at me. ‘What if they don’t have wheelchairs at airports?’

‘Bess. I need you to help us.’

Nicola turned on her a smile that would have once been beautiful and warm, but was now a rictus.

‘But I don’t want to go without you,’ said Bessie on a high note.

‘All right. You stay here with Nicola, and I’ll go.’

‘Nanna.’ She gripped me with both hands.

‘We have to get a wheelchair. Go to that lady and ask her. Otherwise I don’t know how we’ll get out of here.’

I pushed her away from me. She set out along the carpeted hall with stiff, formal steps. I saw her rise on to her toes and try to show herself above the counter’s edge. I saw the uniformed woman bend to hear her, glance up to follow her pointing finger, and turn to shout an order.

We got home to a house that still thought spring had come: all the windows up, the rooms flooded with mild, muggy air. Nicola hobbled down the hall on my arm while Bessie ran in front with her bag. We led her into the spare room and she sat shivering on the edge of the bed. I banged down the window and switched on the oil heater. No, thank you—she didn’t want to drink, or eat, or wash, or go to the toilet. She was silent. Her head hung forward, as if a tiny fascinating scene were being enacted on her lap. I ran to the kitchen and put the kettle on for a hot water bottle. Bessie dawdled at the back door.

‘Go home, sweetheart. I can’t play with you now. Go home.’

She scowled at me and stumped off across the vegetable patch to the gap in the fence, where she hesitated, glaring at me over her shoulder, long enough for me to see her pearly skin, the vital lustre of her pouting lower lip.

In the spare room the oil was dripping and clicking inside the heater. I crouched in front of Nicola and pulled off her soft cloth shoes. Her bare feet were mottled, and icy to the touch; her ankles were laced with a pattern of blue veins. I hauled the jeans off her. She never wore knickers and she wasn’t wearing any now. I opened the bag. The few garments she had stuffed into it—a wool spencer, a faded pink flannelette nightgown, a large hemp T-shirt—were grubby and neglected, full of holes, like the possessions of a refugee.
No one’s looking after her. She’s already lost.

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let’s get this nightie on to you.’ Like a child she raised both arms. I drew off her worn-out cashmere jumper and rag of a singlet. I thought I was keeping up a nonchalant pace, but when I saw the portacath bulging like an inverted bottle-top under the skin near her collarbone I must have missed a beat, for she began to whisper and croak: ‘Sorry, Hel. Ghastly. So sorry.’