The Spare Room (14 page)

Iris leaned back against the couch and surveyed her with a soft face.

‘Bullshit, darling,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, but that is so not the way to live.’

For a moment no one moved, or spoke.

‘You think your life’s been wasted,’ I said.

‘It has.’

‘I would like to dispute that.’

‘So would I,’ said Iris.

‘Why do people love you?’ I said.

Nicola stood in the patch of light, wearing an almost comical expression of surprise.

‘You don’t suppose it could be because of your character?’ I said. ‘Like for example what a faithful friend you are? Who has never been known to bear a grudge?’

She took a breath to make little of it, but I spoke over her.

‘Or your bottomless generosity? The way everything you touch becomes beautiful?’

‘What about how funny you are?’ said Iris, warming to it.

‘And those play-readings we used to have, that were your idea? When we did
She Stoops to Conquer
and
The Seagull?

’ ‘All the work you do for people and never ask for payment? Reading their novels—draft after draft? Rewriting whole plays?’

‘Yes, and the way you listen when people talk? You even remember the details. When people are with you they feel free. Don’t you know that? You think this is waste?’

There was another long silence.

Iris crossed the room to the windows, and raised the blinds. Rectangles of sunlight fell across the table. I opened the back door. Everything out there lay serene. The air that touched the cheek was fresh. Sun was warming the flat sides of things, the old brick paving. The fly curtain sprinkled its beads against the door frame, and once more hung motionless. ‘

I wish I still smoked,’ said Nicola. ‘I’d go out on that veranda and I’d bloody well roll myself one.’

She brushed through the beaded strands. Iris followed her.

The kettle boiled and I brought the tray.

We sat on the back step in a line, and drank our tea. Someone said, ‘Isn’t it a lovely morning!’ And someone said, ‘Will we buy some fish for dinner?’ Nicola rested her shoulder against mine. We looked each other in the eyes and away again, open and free. It was like being submerged to our chins in calm water. Our limbs were weightless, and so were our hearts. I looked at the clock. It was only half past eight.

RAVAGED she might have been, but Nicola scrubbed up like a dream. All it took was an afternoon of dozing behind the faintly tapping wooden blind, then a shallow bath, a subtle whisk of makeup, and a morphine capsule gulped on the wing: by eight that evening she was manoeuvring her sore body into the car beside me, grunting with discomfort, but scarved and perfumed, as game as a duchess in exile. How long could this truce last? I wanted to trust it. Gaily we sped across the river to South Melbourne, where a young German magician whose show I had promised to review was to perform at a weird little bar called the Butterfly Club.

We carried our drinks into the high-ceilinged side room where the show would soon begin, and took the two seats I had bagged in the front row, only a couple of feet from the magician’s austere baize-covered table. It was exciting to be out together, to sit there in the best chairs while a dozen strangers filed in behind us and settled whispering and clinking in the half dark.

The magician in his loose old pin-striped suit entered the room without fanfare, sliding in at the back and approaching the table on soft shoes, so that his presence washed through the room like a wave. Everyone sat forward. He set down his suitcase and clicked open its brass hasps. Smiling at us, he took out of it a metal cup, a white ball the size of an apricot stone, and a short, dark wand tipped with brass at either end. He placed them on the green cloth.

He avoided my eye, but looked straight at Nicola.

‘The most beautiful things,’ he remarked to her in a German-tinged drawl, ‘happen secretly and privately.’

A broad, eager grin spread across her face. She was his. He had chosen her; he would use her.

He pushed back his cuffs and picked up between thumb and forefinger the tiny white ball.

‘There are many ways,’ he said to Nicola, ‘to make a thing disappear. Do you want me to show you the fast way or the slow way?’

She smiled, and nodded many times, but did not reply. He twinkled his handsome dark eyes at her, and pursed his lips; then his hands executed a sinuous flurry. The white ball darted up the cuff of his left sleeve and reappeared two beats later on his right palm. On the baize table he covered the ball with the metal cup, tapped the cup with his wand, and made a magic twirl. When he raised the cup, the white ball had vanished into the ether. Next time he raised the cup, there it was again—but it was red. He clapped the cup down over it.

‘Red or white?’

‘White?’ said Nicola.

We all sat forward. He raised the cup. The red ball had quadrupled in size and turned into a lemon.

People rocked back in shouts of laughter. Nicola bit her bottom lip and rounded her eyes at me.

He worked on us for twenty rapt minutes that passed like seconds, caressing our ears with a patter full of charming grammatical mistakes. He sprayed a deck of cards through space, in an arc as smooth as water. He made coins change denomination in mid-air. He asked a man to pick a card from his pack, then with both hands flung the entire deck to the sky. It slammed against the ceiling. We craned up. Cards showered down on our heads and shoulders. Only one stuck to the high plaster.

‘Have you ever saw this card before?’

‘It’s my card!’ cried the man.

Next the magician produced from his suitcase two small, dark red globular objects that he identified as ‘genetically modified Dutch tomatoes’. Again he turned to Nicola.

‘Your hand, Madame?’

She offered it. He turned it palm up and placed on it the two red globes.

‘Please, Madame, if you would squeeze? Squeeze as hard as you are able.’

Nicola squeezed. She squeezed until her hand trembled. Then she opened it. On her palm lay three Dutch tomatoes.

Some women behind us let out a shriek. Men were stamping their feet. Nicola held the red things out to him. He took them from her tenderly, with a bow. She flashed her shining face at me. The room hushed.

Then the magician drew from his little suitcase a length of soft, pearl-white cord. He showed it to us: it was about a metre long, and quite limp. He stepped back against the wall, and without a word began to do things with the cord that were not possible. It had a life and will of its own: he was its servant, its guardian. It broke in two, in three and four. It tied itself in and out of knots which glided this way and that. It grew long, it grew short. It disintegrated—Nicola gasped and gripped my arm—and then it comforted us by turning back into a perfect white O that hung free from his small, muscular hands.

On a tide of joy he surfed out of the room, waving. The door clicked shut behind him. We all stayed in our seats. It was unbearable that he had left us. In the sudden silence I heard Nicola pull in a quivering line of breath. Her spine was starting to sag forward: she was flagging.

We flew home along King Street, just as the haunts of drunken footballers and identical blondes were opening their doors for the night’s business. We were quiet, thinking about what we had seen. Then, as we passed the North Melbourne pool, she spoke.

‘Hel, which bits did you believe?’

‘All of it. There must be an explanation for everything he did. But I don’t want to know what it was.’

‘Which was your favourite bit?’

‘Oh, the white cord,’ I said. ‘The cord, no contest. That was transcendental.’

I took the green arrow into Macaulay Road.

‘What did those Dutch tomatoes feel like?’ I asked.

‘Spongy. Like foam.’

‘How on earth did he make the right card stick to the ceiling? And the way he turned that ball into a lemon.’

‘I loved all of it,’ she said. ‘But Hel. My absolute best bit was at the very start, when he looked right at me and said, “There are many ways to make a thing disappear”.’

I said nothing. She kept her eyes down. I heard her stifle a gasp of pain as the car thumped over the railway tracks and crossed the Moonee Ponds Creek in the dark.

On Sunday, trying to sleep in, she delayed taking a pill, and the pain got on top of her. By lunchtime it had sunk its claws into her left arm and shoulder. She fought it back with the morphine, but the afternoon was long and frightening. Iris spent more than an hour in the spare room with her, and emerged in tears.

‘She won’t come home. She says there’s no point bolting after two weeks if the treatment’s based on three. She says she wants to keep faith with Professor Theodore.’

Gab came in from the garden, and they packed their bags in sombre silence. At dusk I drove them to the airport.

‘I feel we’re abandoning you,’ said Iris at the check-in.

‘Let’s see how we go,’ I said.

‘Can you keep doing this?’

‘I think so.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘No. But I want to try. Only six more sleeps. Where’s she going to live, when she comes back to Sydney?’

‘My place, I guess,’ said Iris.

‘It’s gone way beyond that, Iris. You’re a teacher, for God’s sake. You can’t hold down a job and handle this as well. She needs a place of her own, but within reach of people who can take it in turns. It’s time for your mother to step in.’

Iris made a flinching grimace. ‘Nicola wouldn’t hack that,’ she said. ‘She’d take it as interference— from Mum, or from anybody.’

‘Let her. She’s got to have steady, relentless looking-after now, whether she wants it or not. Couldn’t your mum rent her some nice sunny little flat in Elizabeth Bay?’

Iris had gone pale. ‘She’d arc up. Mum’s life wouldn’t be worth living. And leases are long.’

‘One foolproof way to get out of a lease,’ I said tartly, ‘would be to die.’

The girl’s eyes filled with tears. She dashed them away. Gab strode towards us across the ocean of shiny tiles. He shook my hand and hugged me.

‘Goodbye,’ said Iris. ‘Goodbye, Helen. We’re friends now, aren’t we.’

‘We’ve got to be,’ I said. ‘I’ll miss you. You’re a pair of troupers.’

In two days I had come to depend on their company: Gab’s good-natured calm, Iris’s reedy voice and droll expressions. When she stooped to kiss me, I caught a whiff of her soap. The tarry scent of it got under my guard. I hated seeing their two tall figures, smooth-headed and curly, pass through security and disappear.

In the car I was lonely and scared. I let out a couple of dry sobs. On either side of the freeway, the lights of new industrial parks were flicking on. I wound the window down and punched the radio button. Cat Empire: ‘Nights Like These’. Once I had overheard a spiteful girl dismiss that band as just a bunch of private schoolboys: what would they know about the end of everything? But the clattering percussion. Those horns, the creamy thread of trumpet. I cranked it up and began to yell the words.
I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m aliiiiiiiive…

Nicola had fallen asleep, but when I looked round her door she stirred. The bed was dank with sweat, the pillow a packed lump. I worked to make things right. I brought her a juice and a clean nightie and another pill.

‘Tomorrow we’ll get stronger morphine,’ I said. ‘We’ll go back to Dr Caplan.’

Monday was my birthday. At breakfast Nicola showered me with gifts large and small that she had secretly arranged for Iris and Gab to buy in the city during the weekend. Her
pièce de résistance
was a splendid juicer. She sallied forth that morning in high good humour, chattering keenly, as we drove to Dr Caplan’s rooms, about the birthday dinner Mitch and Eva had planned for me that evening.

When we were called into the surgery I dived for the seat near the door, and Nicola shuffled to the patient’s chair beside the doctor at her desk.

‘I think I need stronger morphine,’ she announced, with a smile so sheepish it made her look like a simpleton.

Dr Caplan stared at her, incredulous, almost laughing. Her eyes shone with a furious intelligence. I was scared of her. I wanted to shout
Please help me.