The Spare Room (9 page)

‘Of course I know I’ll always come through it unscathed. I know it’s only the vitamin C savaging the tumours and driving them out. But,’ she said with a gay laugh, ‘to my utter astonishment, and to my shame for being so pathetically selfish, I was absolutely and totally unaware that to poor Hel it was a horrendous spectacle.’

Clenching my teeth, I mounted the first three rungs and attacked the upper layers of the plant.
Poor Hel.
The blossoms fell from my blades in a steady shower of white. The brick paving was strewn with them.

‘So, late last night I rang my divine niece Iris, who I’d been staying with in Sydney for the last six months, and asked her if she’d found the shivering scary—and she said, “What are you talking about, woman? It’s terrifying. I was shitting myself every time. You look as if you’re about to die.”’ Her voice rose and broke in a trill of social laughter.

I forced the safety catch shut on the secateurs and climbed down to the ground. Nicola moved along the bench to make room for me. Peggy filled my cup and pushed it across to me, without meeting my eye.

‘And so,’ said Nicola, swigging the dregs of her tea, ‘we’re going to ring the palliative care people tomorrow. I know we’ll never need to call them out. I’m sure the treatment’s shifting the cancer—within ten days I’ll be fighting fit and on the mend. The palliative thing’s just so Hel won’t feel completely alone and without back-up—my poor old Hel.’

Blood rushed into my face. Nicola’s eyebrows shot up to her hairline. She bared her teeth at me and laughed again, a melodious, mocking gust of it from deep in her throat.

‘It’s the nights,’ I said, in a strangled voice. ‘The nights are long.’

Peggy glanced at me. Horrified sympathy passed along her eye-beams. It weakened me. A huge wave of fatigue rinsed me from head to foot. I was afraid I would slide off the bench and measure my length among the cut roses. At the same time a chain of metallic thoughts went clanking through my mind, like the first dropping of an anchor. Death will not be denied. To try is grandiose. It drives madness into the soul. It leaches out virtue. It injects poison into friendship, and makes a mockery of love.

After lunch at home Nicola lay down to rest, and I drove across town to the Hogar Español. Not wanting to be an embarrassment to my daughter and her husband, or to go home with crowd germs, I stayed at the back near the door. The Spanish families at the tables went on shouting and drinking with a cheerful noise, even once the old men with guitars across their knees had started to strum and the old women, their dyed hair piled high with combs and flowers, had set up their fierce clapping. On the ill-lit stage Bessie and her companions paraded forward in a bloc, their spines erect, their shoulders back and chests open. They flung up their arms, they twirled their wrists and fingers high and low. To the harsh cries of the singers, they battered the floor with their hard-heeled shoes and lashed about them with the deep, crimson flounces of their skirts. Tears burst from my eyes and I covered my face.

Before Nicola could leave for the clinic on Monday morning, I called the Mercy palliative service. The voice of the woman who answered the phone was calm and friendly. Like Peggy’s glance of sympathy under the climbing roses, it almost undid me. I stammered out a truncated version of our situation.

‘Can I ask,’ she said, ‘what’s the actual diagnosis?’

I carried the cordless to the stove, where Nicola was lowering an egg into a pan of boiling water.

‘I’ve got the palliative lady here,’ I said. ‘She needs to know what your actual diagnosis is.’

She paused with her back to me, then turned, took the phone, and launched with courteous efficiency on the same history I had heard her offer to Dr Tuckey that first night at the clinic. I crossed the veranda and wandered down the yard, inspecting the broad beans and herbs. The air around plants was supposed to have beneficial properties, wasn’t it? I pushed in and stood breathing among the leafy stalks. Sheets and clothes from the day before were still hanging on the line. I unpegged them and slung them over my shoulder. The voice in the kitchen stopped. I stepped back across the threshold into a blast of Nicola’s white glare.

‘They wanted to come out this weekend,’ she snarled. ‘To assess me.’ She slammed the phone against the stove-top. ‘Oh, look at this. My fucking egg’s broken. I hate a broken egg.’

Something violent sizzled in me. I forced myself to walk through the room with my eyes down.

At lunchtime she phoned me from the clinic. She was merry, and warm. Guess what! Professor Theodore was back from China. She liked him! And he’d had a wonderful idea—that after the vitamin C treatment she should stay lying down in one of the rooms all afternoon, to see if the cold shudders happened. So he could ‘monitor’ them. Not only that—he’d suggested she should try coffee enemas. He thought they might lessen her dependence on the morphine. So she was going to pop out, before they plugged in the vitamin C, to buy some organic coffee. Did I know where she could get some in the city?

Wasn’t there a sort of light machine gun called an Uzi?

‘Try David Jones’ Food Hall,’ I said.

‘Thanks, darling. Don’t bother to cook anything tonight. I won’t be home till after eight. There’s a two-hour lecture here that I’m supposed to go to—byeeeee.’

I sat on the back step and wrestled with the blackest, most glowering scepticism. I didn’t want to be a bigot. How could I detach from this? Serve her, yet detach? I rang my sister Lucy, the religious one, the former nurse, and arranged to meet her at the Waiters’ Club at six o’clock.

That afternoon a woman from the Mercy palliative called me. No, they were not just for cancer patients or the dying. They were part of the free District Nursing Service. She had offered to come over on Saturday morning to meet us both, but apparently Nicola was not so keen. Her name was Carmel, and yes, she had a moment to talk with me now.

I rattled off the short version. When I trailed away she left a tactful pause before she spoke. Western medicine, she said, when it had reached the end of what it had to offer, would usually throw in the towel and say so; but outfits like the Theodore Institute tended to keep people linked to them in cloudy hope, right to the end.

Right to the end
.

‘Does Nicola have any religious beliefs?’

I went quiet.

When my former husband had first introduced me to her, fifteen years ago, I took to Nicola at once. Everything about her, the way she placed food on the table or rolled a cigarette or slung a length of coloured fabric around her neck, was carefree and graceful. In her presence, things slowed down and opened out. I admired the Indian-tinged style of her house and the things she wore. I did spot a couple of photos of a hot-eyed guru lurking in a dark corner of the bookshelves, but she never referred to him, and I didn’t ask. I assumed she was an old hand at meditation and yoga, and that if she had any particular beliefs they were so ingrained that she didn’t need to speak about them, just as I kept quiet about my adventures in churches.

Then in recent years, shortly before she became ill, Buddhist terms had entered her discourse. She knew how to pronounce
rinpoche
and where to get a ticket when the famous ones were coming to town. She subjected herself to ten-day vipassana boot camps in the Blue Mountains: her accounts of these speechless ordeals were shaped to make me laugh, but she always came back to the city elated. She referred casually to weekend teachings, and to new friends with names that sounded made up; she had taken to wearing little thread bangles, or a string of knobbly, dark red wooden beads. So I imagined that somewhere in her free-wheeling nature she was quietly equipping herself, as everyone must, with whatever it is one needs to die.

‘It depends,’ I said at last, ‘on what you would call religious.’

‘It’s just that in my work,’ said Carmel, ‘I’ve learnt that there are people who never, ever face the fact that death’s coming to them. They go on fighting right up to their last breath.’ She paused. ‘And it is one way of doing it.’

Again the vast weakness sifted through me. I saw that I had been working towards a glorious moment of enlightenment, when Nicola would lay down her manic defences; when she would look around her, take a deep breath, and say, ‘All right. I’m going to die. I bow to it. Now I will live the rest of my life in truth.’

‘And from what you’re telling me,’ said the nurse, in her soft, unreproachful voice, ‘I’m wondering whether you should try to accept that Nicola might be one of these. That she might…die in this state.’

I came up the steps from Parliament Station and spotted Lucy cruising into Little Collins Street on her touring bike. It had big, reliable-looking panniers and, although the sun had not set, she had turned on one of those fast-blinking tail-lights that illuminate the countryside for miles around. By the time I caught up with her, she was chaining the bike to a railing. Even as early as six we weren’t the first customers at the Waiters’ Club: at the top of the wooden stairs, the joint was jumping. We ordered a couple of grilled flounder. The waitress brought wine in tumblers and I began to gulp it down. Lucy saw from the look on my face that I was going to have to hog the conversation. I started with the enemas.