The Spare Room (7 page)

Nicola lived beyond the northern beaches of Sydney on a hillside that could be reached only by boat. For years she had chugged back and forth in a tinnie between Palm Beach jetty and the landing below her house, a ten-minute ride in fine weather. She would collect me from my car on the Palm Beach side, urge me down the white wooden ladder with the groceries, and make the outboard roar with one yank of the cord. Away we bounced. She sat at the tiller, erect and handsome as a duchess in loose garments that the wind ballooned and rippled, her silver hair streaming flat against her skull.

Under her practical and good-humoured command, skimming across the water and hauling the bags up the steep bush track to the house, I was safe. On her territory I deferred to her and obeyed her. She knew about ticks and leeches, snakes, goannas; the names of birds and their habits; the movements of the moon; how to save water; how to manage an outdoor fire. She was older, taller, braver, and more free: she had taught herself to live alone.

The first time I went to stay a weekend, she dared me to climb the bush-choked escarpment that soared up behind her shack to Kuringai Chase. We clawed our way to the top, grunting and cursing, and hauled ourselves, two filthy, panting hags, out of the scrub on to a track along which at that moment came strolling a city couple in pale, freshly ironed sporting clothes, with a Shih-tzu trotting on a leash. All afternoon we lay on our beds and read mighty works of literature, shouting to each other analytical or admiring remarks.

That night we took the bottle of Stoly down the rough path to the landing where, sitting on our jackets in the dark, we launched the long conversation that would become our friendship. She told me about the only man she had ever lived with, Hamish, whose children she loved and was still in touch with, but who had been a brute to her; and an Aboriginal bloke who, in the days when she was doing a lot of acid and having a sort of crack-up in a rainforest, had wandered in from nowhere and saved her from starving herself to death.

When she was about seven, she said, a neighbour in his twenties had come over the fence one afternoon while she was playing in the yard. ‘He ran away. I picked myself up and hid at the top of the back steps. I stayed out there till it got dark and I could hear my mother and my sister calling me. I knew I could never, ever tell anyone what had happened. And I never did.’

I was already half drunk. I said, ‘Fuckin’ animal. Is he still alive?’

She shrugged.

‘Don’t you want to hunt him down and bash the shit out of him? I’ll help you. We can look in the electoral rolls.’

She uttered a laugh of good-natured scorn. We hunched on the end of the old timber wharf. Masts were jingling. On the black, restless water of the inlet, boats’ riding lamps were laying down what she said a poet had called
stacked saucers of light
.

Now, on my back veranda, she said, ‘I want to go home as soon as I finish at the Theodore. I can’t wait to. But I’ve been too weak to pull the starter cord on the outboard.’

‘Couldn’t you get one of those self-starters? Where you just have to press a button?’

‘They only make them for thirty horsepower or more. If I had thirty in my tinnie it’d be vertical.’

We sat on the bench doubled over. Oh, I loved her for the way she made me laugh. She was the least self-important person I knew, the kindest, the least bitchy. I couldn’t imagine the world without her. She would not admit it, but her house was unreachable now. Unless someone carried her there on his back, she would never go home again.

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?’

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.