The Spare Room (10 page)

‘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 tabletop. 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.’

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: