The Spare Room (13 page)

She was awake, but terribly white and groggy.

‘Professor Theodore’s off now. Want him to pop in and see you before he goes?’

‘I’m fine,’ she said in a faint, slurred voice. ‘Tell him I’m fine
.
And Hel—would you thank him? Say thank you very much.’

Somehow I got myself out the door. He was standing there waiting, his features arranged in a configuration of professional solicitude. I repeated her words. He nodded, and strode off towards his car. As he clicked the front gate shut behind him, he tossed a parting remark over his shoulder.

‘Much better weather we’ve been having this week, isn’t it.’

NICOLA slept, or we assumed she was sleeping, for she did not stir from her room. Iris and I lay on the couches in our pyjamas, drinking soda water, clipping and painting our toenails, and blankly watching TV, while Gab ransacked the internet. Towards eleven he emerged. He was the sort of man who could stretch his spine and make it crackle all the way down.

‘I can’t find anything substantial to validate the vitamin C,’ he said. ‘Everyone got very excited about it in the sixties. But then they hit it with proper randomised trials. Double-blind, placebo-controlled. And it all went pretty much pear-shaped. Theodore mentioned what he said was an important paper by some guy called Webster.’

‘A paper?’ said Iris. ‘What—just the one?’

‘Well I found the guy, but all the magazines that run his research are super alternative. Some of them seem to be owned by him. But one thing I did find out about Theodore—he’s a vet.’

He threw himself on to the couch and laid his head on Iris’s lap.

‘A “research scientist”, he calls himself,’ he added.

We sprawled there in a complicated silence.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ said Iris, ‘about why Helen got so angry.’

Oh God. I was going to have to account for myself. I sat up. ‘I’m so sorry. I lost it. It’s the worst thing about me—I’m an angry person. Anger’s my default mode.’

Gab uttered a muffled laugh, and looked up at Iris. Her cheeks had gone pink. She glanced over her shoulder towards the hall door and lowered her voice.

‘You have to understand,’ she said, ‘that I love Nicola very much. She’s been a huge figure for me, ever since I was a child. But I’ve never been so angry in my life as I was when she came to stay at my place. I really thought I was going to have to kill her myself, and save the cancer the trouble.’

‘I knew she was with you too long,’ I said. ‘I used to spend hours composing diplomatic emails: “Don’t you think you should rent yourself a little place of your own in Elizabeth Bay? Get out of Iris’s hair?” And she’d answer in that high-handed tone-“Darling, Iris adores me. She loves having me there.”’

We all laughed, painfully.

‘She’s been there since April,’ said Iris. ‘And she’s got no plans to leave. Melbourne’s just a holiday. All her gear’s still piled in my front hall.’

‘It’s a one-bedroom flat,’ said Gab, without rancour. ‘Iris gave Nicola the bed. We’ve been sleeping on the living room floor.’

‘Want to hear my theory?’ said Iris. ‘There’s a lot of horribleness that Nicola refuses to countenance. But it won’t just go away. It can’t, because it exists. So somebody else has to sort of live it. It’s in the air around her. Like static. I felt it when she walked into the house tonight. It was like I suddenly had a temperature. My heart rate went up.’

I stared at her. ‘You mean it’s not just me?’

‘No way. I know exactly what you’re feeling. It’s terrible
.
It’s like getting a madness injection.’

‘I get prickling,’ I said, ‘in the backs of my hands.’

‘She’s cast us as the carriers of all the bad stuff— and somehow we’ve let her. She sails about with that ghastly smile on her face, telling everyone she’s going to be better by the middle of next week, and meanwhile we’re trawling along the bottom picking up all the anguish and rage that she’s thrown overboard.’

‘Can people do that?’ said Gab, propping himself on his elbows.

‘Remember, Gab?’ said Iris. ‘The first time she had the vitamin C? She was catatonic—like tonight— but they turfed her out and she had to drive herself home. Across the Harbour Bridge at peak hour. I couldn’t believe it. I was insane with rage. I wanted to go straight over to that clinic and hurl a grenade through their front window. But the next morning she was so offhand about it that I ended up thinking I must have over-reacted. She patronised me. I felt a fool.’

‘It was pretty deflating,’ said Gab.

‘That’s what she does here,’ I said. ‘She almost makes fun of me.’

They looked at me. Iris’s lips were quivering.

‘I’ve hardly had a night’s sleep since she arrived,’ I said. ‘I shop, I cook, I clean. I field her unwanted phone calls. I’m a hand-maiden. A washer-woman. I lump her fucking mattress around and prop it in the sun. And all that’s fine—it really is—I’d do anything for her. But then last week she made it abundantly clear to me that she “doesn’t need a nurse”.’

We had to press our faces into the cushions to stifle our laughter. Gab soon sobered up, but Iris and I went on and on, in fits that would not stop. He sat patiently by, with his hand resting on the back of her neck, and watched us gasp and groan.

I had always thought that sorrow was the most exhausting of the emotions. Now I knew that it was anger. I lay galvanised on my bed for the rest of the night, seething and staring into the dark. Whenever I nodded off for a moment, the professor with his watery eyes and high colour slouched in and stood by the bed, grinning like a defrocked priest.

At last the morning slid between the slats of the venetian blind. In the kitchen I filled the kettle and tore open the newspaper. Nicola came shuffling along the hall. Her head was high, the eyebrows arched, the smile huge and riveted on. She greeted me tunefully.

‘Goooood morning, darling friend!’

‘Don’t speak to me, Nicola,’ I muttered, turning away to the bench. ‘I can’t even look at you, I’m so livid.’

‘Oo-wah.’ she trilled, in a mocking girlish treble.

‘And don’t give me that oo-wah shit. Don’t you dare.’ Sweat broke out under my pyjama top. I glanced down at my chest and saw the ugly flush rising.

She paused in the doorway in her nightie, holding the red wool shawl round her like a peasant.

‘What’s wrong, Hel?’

The crimson of her shawl was leaking into the air around her, staining it.

‘There’s something I would like to know,’ I said. ‘When are you going to get real?’

Her mouth fell open. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Don’t act dumb. I nurse you, I wait on you hand and foot, and then you turn around and laugh at me. You laughed at me.’

‘When? What are you talking about?’

‘At Peggy’s. You laughed at me for being scared at night. You made a joke of it.
Poor old Hel
.’

‘Oh, that?’ she said. ‘A week ago.’ She put out one hand to me, palm up, and drew in her chin. Her eyebrows formed an inverted V of patronising concern. ‘I’m so sorry, darling. I had no idea I’d offended you.’

She tilted her head, stretched her lips, and there it was again, plastered across her face like latex—the smile.

The last of my self-control gave way.

‘Get that grin off your face. Get it off, or I’ll wipe it off for you.’

It faded of its own accord. She took two steps backwards, gaping at me. ‘Why are you so angry?’

‘This house is full of anger! Can’t you feel it? The rooms are stuffed with it. And a lot of it’s got to be yours.’

Her mouth was half open, her cheeks hollow. Everything I looked at was blood-coloured. I couldn’t stop now.

‘Everyone’s angry, everyone’s scared,’ I shouted. ‘You’re angry and scared. But you won’t admit it. You want to keep up this masquerade, so you dump your shit on me. I’m sick with it. I can’t breathe.’

She cowered against the arm of the couch.

‘That creep who brought you back here last night. Can’t you see what a quack he is? He’s taking you for a huge ride.’

‘Darling,’ she stammered. ‘He’s helping me. They’re the only ones who are helping me.’

‘Oh, they’re not helping you. That airhead Colette, the sappy fat guy. And the famous specialist. They’re so creepy and repulsive. Why won’t they do anything about your pain? They don’t even seem to notice that you’re suffering.’

‘Suffering?’ she said. ‘Helen, there’s a woman in there with only one leg.’

‘What about yesterday? They would have shoved you into a taxi if I hadn’t kicked up a stink. They know what the vitamin C does to you—why wasn’t anyone monitoring you?’

‘One of the other patients was,’ said Nicola. ‘She’s a nurse. She was keeping an eye on me.’

‘And they charge you two grand a week for this? Leaving it to another patient to look after you?’

She bridled. ‘Janine’s not just any old nurse. She’s an intensive care nurse.’

Where was this rage stored in me? It gushed up like nausea.

‘Can’t you use your brains? Look what they’re doing. Their treatments are bullshit, Nicola. They’re ripping you off. They can’t cure cancer.’

‘They can so.’ She raised her chin and glared at me. ‘They can.’

‘If you can prove to me that intravenous vitamin C cures cancer,’ I said, ‘I’ll give that sleaze-bag professor a million bucks. Show me the evidence.’

‘There was a man up in Grafton,’ she said. ‘A sculptor. He got better.’

‘That’s not evidence. That’s an anecdote.’

‘There’s plenty more,’ she said. ‘Pages and pages of it. I didn’t bring it but I’ve got it at home.’

‘Yeah right,’ I said savagely, ‘and it must be true, because you got it off their website.’

My heart was beating so hard that black spots danced at the edge of my vision. Against the red shawl Nicola’s face had turned grey and sagged out of shape. Behind her, Iris appeared at the hall door. She paused on the threshold in her flannel pyjamas, a light presence, her arms folded across her chest. Shame choked me: I was a bully, caught in the act.

‘I can’t go on with this,’ I said, in a high voice. ‘I can’t stand the falseness. It’s making me sick. I’m going off my head.’

Nicola’s shoulders slumped. Her neck came forward and her head bowed. Iris padded forward into the room. She sat on the arm of the couch beside Nicola, put one arm round her shoulders, then turned her face up to me and mouthed with exaggerated lip movements, ‘Keep. Going.’

Shocked, I stared at her. She was holding Nicola upright, but nodding at me, her eyes clear and steady, her mouth in a straight, determined line.

I took a couple of big gulps of air, and drove on.

‘After that professor went home, Nicola,’ I said, ‘I wanted to come into your room and say to you, Wake up.’

‘I was awake,’ she whispered.

‘I wanted to say this. You’re using that bloody clinic to distract yourself.’

Like an old, tired dog she heaved up her head. ‘Don’t say it, Hel.’

‘From what you have to do.’

She raised one palm. ‘Don’t tell me.’

‘You’ve got to get ready.’

Her head drooped lower. Iris took hold of her in both arms. Nicola gave in, and let her head tip sideways into the curve of the girl’s shoulder. I could see her face distorting, her mouth clenching, the tears starting to run. The fight drained out of me. My limbs felt chalky and weak.

‘We can’t find you any more,’ I said. ‘We miss you. Where have you gone?’

She let out a thick sob.

‘We can’t bear what you’re going through,’ I said. ‘We can’t bear to lose you. We want to look after you. You’re so dear to us. But you crack hardy. You hold us away. We can’t get to you. You fight us off. And you make us feel silly for getting upset.’

She let Iris support her head, while tears swarmed out of her eyes and dripped off her cheeks. Soon the breast of the girl’s pyjama jacket was darkly soaked. Iris kept her grip, holding on with both arms, saying nothing, but every few seconds looking up at me and nodding, nodding.

‘You wear us out, when you keep on being stoical,’ I said. ‘It’s like a horrible mask. We want to smash it. We want to find you.’

‘We can’t bear the smile, darling,’ said Iris gently. ‘You don’t have to smile.’

Nicola wept on, in her niece’s embrace. Gab came to the door, looked in, and crept away. But Iris held my gaze without a flicker, her sober face tilted up towards the bench behind which I stood wringing the dry dishcloth in both hands.

In a little while Nicola stopped crying. She took a few quivering breaths, and freed herself from Iris’s arms. Iris reached for a clean tea towel and handed it to her; she dabbed at her eyes, folded it, and laid it on the bench.

Then, in a hoarse voice, she said, ‘But see all my life I’ve never wanted to bore people with the way I feel.’

We were silent.

‘No one wants to know about it, if I’m sad or frightened.’

Again we said nothing.

‘I’ve learnt,’ she went on, ‘to shut up. And present an optimistic face.’

She got off the couch arm and stood in her cotton nightie in the middle of the room. Light from the high window blurred her white hair. The shawl hung like two red curtains from her bony shoulders.

‘Anyway,’ she said. ‘That’s what life has taught me.’