The Spare Room (16 page)

Nicola was already home that afternoon when I got back from Moonee Ponds with a carload of food. Her sopping Chinese slippers were propped over the laundry trough, and the runners she had bought at Target were on her feet. She displayed them with ostentatious disapproval. I laughed.

‘Did you write your article?’ she asked.

‘Nope. Didn’t write a word.’

‘What? That’s really bad,’ she said roguishly. ‘That’s naughty
.
You’ll be telling people it’s naughty Nicola’s fault that you’re not doing any work.’

The air in the room thickened. Keeping my eyes down, I lugged the baskets of food into the kitchen and dumped them on the floor.

‘I didn’t waste the day.’ I heard in my voice the pathetic attempt to dodge her accusation. ‘I answered some letters and made some phone calls. I just didn’t write the story. I’ll do it on Thursday.’

But she had already lost interest.

‘Anyway my news,’ she said, ‘is that they’ve persuaded me to have the vitamin C again tomorrow after all.’

I straightened up and looked at her in silence.

‘A very low dose,’ she added, watching me.

‘Whose idea?’

‘Another doctor who came in today. He said he’d never, ever seen anyone react to the vitamin C the way I do.’

‘Really. Have other people had negative reactions?’

‘No—no one’s had the reaction I have.’

‘Yes, I understand that, but has anyone ever reported any other sort of bad reaction to it?’

‘No. Nobody’s ever even heard of anyone reacting the way I do.’

Take a breath. Let it pass.

‘Hang on, though—isn’t tomorrow your appointment with the oncologist?’

Her brow crinkled. ‘Yes, but that’s at half past eleven. He’ll probably just run his eye over me. I’ll go straight back to the clinic afterwards. If you can drive me.’

‘OK. So you think you’ll be right to fly home on Saturday?’

‘Sure to,’ she said. ‘Three more days of the treatments and I’ll be as fit as a Mallee bull.’

She smiled, and her eyes glazed over. I had to turn away.

I didn’t want to go in with her, but she made me.

The oncologist Dr Maloney was a neat, slight, friendly man in his fifties, with the springy body language one sees in modern medicos whose wives make them jog, swim, and eat low-fat cereals. He faced us pleasantly across his desk. Behind him a window gave on to a cold grey courtyard fringed by a low hedge of box. He kept his gaze strictly on Nicola’s face while she spoke at length about her illness and its treatments: not once did he betray her by glancing at me. I sat beside her, exasperated, fascinated, watching the river of her trust re-direct itself and flood towards him. Did he feel it coming? Was he used to this?

‘The shuddering fits,’ he remarked at last, in a dreamy tone, ‘sound to me like what…we…call… rigors.’

We looked at him in silence. He snapped into focus and started to scribble on a pad.

‘I need an MRI and a bone scan. Go straight over to the Mercy Private. I can get you in there right away. Call me the minute you get the results.’

In the car Nicola too was dreamy.

‘I like him,’ she said. Her face had softened and lost definition. ‘He cares about me. He’s clever. Can you call Colette and tell her I won’t be coming in today? Do you like him, Helen? What do you think of him?’

‘Yes, I like him.’ Was this all she was hungry for? A stream of sympathetic attention from a man?

That afternoon at the Mercy, while technicians with distracted faces took charge of Nicola, I sat on a plastic chair in the hall outside the private suites and refreshed my expertise in the scandalous lives of celebrities. Time passed without meaning. I went hunting for food and drink. I tried to be discreet in my curiosity about the patients who limped and staggered by, or were wheeled past in chairs or on gurneys. One woman, middle-aged, slim, pretty and frantic, kept pacing up and down the hall near where I sat. She collapsed on the chair next to mine, sprang up, sat down, leafed through a magazine, threw it aside and took off again along the long carpeted passageway.

Towards five, just before they called Nicola in for a bone scan, she rang Dr Maloney on her mobile to arrange to bring the test results to his rooms. She turned to me with a thrilled smile.

‘He says he’ll come to us. He’s coming here to see me!’

Her scan was still in progress when Maloney in his good suit came bounding along the hall. I waved and jerked my thumb at the suite door
.
He grinned at me, and was about to take the chair next to mine when the anxious woman appeared round the corner and made a beeline for him. He got up at once and went to her side. He took her arm and made her sit down. He leaned right in towards her, almost touching her forehead with his. He pointed to her upper chest, and said in a clear, audible voice, ‘Yes, Debbie— there is something there.’

Her face went blank. Then she burst out sobbing, and covered her eyes with one hand. ‘Oh no. I can’t do it again. I just can’t
.

’ Very sweetly he took her other hand, still looking her right in the face, and said in a voice of passionate gentleness, ‘I know. I know.’ She sprang to her feet and rushed away. He turned to me with a helpless shrug.

‘Brutal, isn’t it. And I have to tell her here
.

’ He sat down beside me and took a pad and pencil out of his pocket.

‘You need to know this. Look.’ He sketched part of a spine in deft lines and curves. ‘This is Nicola’s vertebra C7. Know where that is?”

‘Neck?’

He nodded. ‘C7’s been almost totally devoured and replaced by tumour. Which is now bulging out towards the spinal cord.’ He cross-hatched vigorously: a crude lump almost touching a long canal of darkness. ‘If something can’t shrink the tumour, or if the remains of the vertebra aren’t cut out and replaced with metal, she’ll end up quadriplegic.’

I gaped at him.

‘I won’t tell her the quadriplegia part now,’ he said. ‘But she is not to do yoga, right? She’s not to lift heavy or awkward things, or carry them. Understand?’

He shoved the pad into his jacket pocket, and looked at me with a twisted little smile.

‘What about the Theodore?’ I said. ‘What if she wants to go back there?’

He puffed out air through his lips like a Frenchman. ‘I’ve never met this Theodore guy, but he’s given me a lotta grief. They send people on to me. The treatments in there are bullshit.’

At that moment the suite door opened and Nicola stepped out. Like a suitor, Maloney leapt to his feet. Her dazed smile of greeting faded. He put out his hand to her, and led her to a chair.

We drove home, stunned and silent, through peak hour traffic. As we swung on to Flemington Road she said in a low voice, ‘I don’t think I’ll go back to the Theodore any more.’

‘Good,’ I burst out, jerking the wheel. ‘They’ve brutally wasted your energy. And your money. You should demand a refund.’

She turned away. There was no point in apologising. We were both stricken, in shock. At home I scraped together a meal, and we picked at it with faces down-turned. She retired to her room with the cortisone and Panadol she had been prescribed by Maloney, and shut the door. Before long I heard her snoring: it sounded like someone choking.

I called Leo.

‘C7?’ He breathed in sharply.

‘She’s seeing a surgeon on Friday, for an opinion.’

‘Who’s the surgeon?’

‘His name’s Hathaway.’

‘Hathaway! I knew him at high school. Oh, he’s very good. The best.’

‘Maloney says he’s technically brilliant. But apparently he tends to be a bit…abrasive.’

‘You’ll like him, Helen. He’s the Charlton Heston of neurosurgery.’ He laughed. ‘Those guys have to be very brave
.
It’s a bit much to expect charm as well.’

In the night she needed me. She was sweating hugely from her head and neck. Her pillow was a puddle. I changed the bedding again and again. It was labour. It was
Let me turn the mattress
. It was
Here, drink this
, and
No, you must drink
, and
What else can I bring you?
And
Lie down now
, and
Go back to sleep
. It was hard and I was tired, but rarely had I felt so useful. I knew I only had to haul myself to the end of the week: Maloney had told us that once the cortisone kicked in for the pain she would be fit to fly home.

I would go in to the Theodore Institute and say her farewells. I would be carrying a bag full of hand grenades.

When I looked in at dawn she had run out of dry clothes and was asleep in her damp bed wearing nothing but a holey old rose pink cashmere jumper.

After breakfast I hauled her mattress into the sun, and ran load after load of sheets through the machine. She came out into the yard as I was hanging them on the line. I put down the pegs and turned to her. I was not tall enough to contain her as a mother or a husband would, but I held out my arms. She stepped into them and stooped to rest her head on my shoulder: oh, her terrible thinness. We both cried. Her hot tears ran under my collar.

‘I thought I was on the mountain top,’ she said in a voice that splintered. ‘But I’m only in the foothills.’

All day she kept dissolving into quiet weeping. Sometimes I would put my arms around her; sometimes we would just go on with what we were doing. The hard, impervious brightness was gone. Everything was fluid and melting. There was no need for me to speak. She looked up at me and said it herself, as I put a cup into her hand.

‘Death’s at the end of this, isn’t it.’

MR HATHAWAY the neurosurgeon had rooms in an old red brick house behind the Epworth Hospital. He was a large, powerful-shouldered fellow with thick hair and delicate hands that toyed, on his timber desk, with the fattest, blackest, shiniest Mont Blanc pen I had ever laid eyes on, twice the normal length and thickness of barrel, and sporting a colossal golden nib.

He did not spare Nicola.

‘I’ve had a good look at your scans,’ he said. ‘If you should fall or stumble, if you jerked or jolted or twisted your neck, the lump of tumour that’s replaced your C7 vertebra might collapse. And if it does, it’ll squirt tumour and scraps of destroyed vertebra all over the place, in there.’

From my seat near the door, scribbling madly in my notebook with a shaking pencil, I saw her gulp and swallow. She made no other response, but sat as upright as she could, looking him straight in the eye.

‘If that happened,’ he went on, ‘you’d immediately become quadriplegic. And that’d be the end of you.’

He told her that he was the only neurosurgeon in Australia who could put in a titanium post, as distinct from plastic or a bone graft, to replace the cancer-devoured C7. He listed for her, and I noted, the days of the week on which he operated. He told her she would have to wear a neck brace for three months after the operation. Then he shoved back his chair, and sat regarding her from under his brow, dexterously rolling the mighty fountain pen between his finger and thumb.

He lacked Maloney’s sweet, almost tender style; but I could not help liking him, and I admired his merciless candour. Surely it couldn’t be true though, I thought, putting away my notebook, that he was the only one who could do this procedure. It was out of the question that he should be the only one. No—Maloney would find his counterpart in Sydney and she would fly home tomorrow morning, as she had originally planned.