The Spare Room (17 page)

Nicola stood up carefully, with a small sigh. She gave him her hand, and said, ‘We’re going back to see Dr Maloney. We’ll make a plan with him. I’ll call you this afternoon.’

He got to his feet. ‘I would most seriously advise you,’ he said, ‘not to delay.’ Picking up her old-fashioned manners, he almost bowed us out.

Nicola climbed out of the car in front of Maloney’s building and I drove on, looking for a park. I found a spot at once, but I sat in the car for ten minutes, filing my nails, full of dread. I called on the mobile a respected health journalist I knew in Sydney.

‘Of course she can have the surgery up here,’ she said, astonished. ‘Only yesterday at St Vincent’s a friend of mine had cancerous vertebrae replaced—a bit lower down the spine—three of them. Her husband told me they were very impressed with the result. You can’t be expected to deal with this on your own. Where’s her family?’

Her impatient toughness should have strengthened me, but in fact it gave me an urge to defend Nicola, to find excuses for her. How would anyone dare not to be impressed? Anything else would be too terrifying.

When I got to Maloney’s waiting room, I found Nicola settled on a chair beside a middle-aged woman who was draped in fanciful, brightly coloured clothes. They looked conspiratorial, murmuring urgently to each other, their bowed heads bobbing and bumping. As I approached, the other woman was called in. I took her empty seat. Nicola greeted me with a hectic smile.

‘That was Melanie,’ she said. ‘She’s from the Theodore too.’ She lowered her voice to a hiss. ‘She was telling me about a sort of alcohol treatment that can be injected straight into the tumour. She said doctors are allowed to do it in Africa, but not here. And she said she’s read on the internet about a special camera. In Russia! That might be available here, soon.’

‘A camera.’

‘Yeah—she says it picks up cells that are irradiated by spirulina. The only trouble is, it can’t tell you whether the cells that glow are cancerous or pre-cancerous.’

I stood my bag on the carpet.

‘I should go back to the Theodore, anyway,’ she rattled on, shifting awkwardly on the hard chair. ‘I haven’t paid them for the third week yet.’

I folded my arms and closed my eyes. Let me pass out now. I want to lose consciousness. Please, Dr Maloney, take me to a hospital. Put me in a bed and spread a cotton blanket over me. Let me lie there alone in silence till this is over.

‘Actually,’ said Maloney from behind a desk that was half the size of Hathaway’s, ‘it is true. He practically invented this particular titanium post. If that’s what you want, Nicola, he’s your man.’

‘Yes, Doctor John,’ she said fervently. ‘That’s what I want. It really is what I want.’

‘In that case,’ said the doctor, ‘you’ll be having the surgery in Melbourne, at the Epworth. Probably early the week after next.’

Maloney must have seen my face drop. For a couple of beats he sat motionless. Then he said, ‘Now you two had better go home and have a brutally frank talk with each other.’

I hardly trusted myself to get behind the wheel. I drove in a dumb panic, stupefied; I kept grinding the gears, and could not picture the route home. We went droning north along Nicholson Street. I could feel her looking at the side of my face.

‘Nicola,’ I said. ‘You can’t have the operation in Melbourne. You’ve got to go home to Sydney and have it there.’

‘No no no no darling,’ she said, ‘I want to have it here. Hathaway’s the best in the country. Dr John said so.’

I raised my voice. ‘Nicola. This is crazy.’

‘I trust Dr John,’ she said. ‘If I have it here, Dr John will come to me.’

‘But we don’t have the back-up. There’s no one here to help me.’

I glanced at her as we bounced over the railway line. She was staring straight ahead, grinning like a lunatic.

‘Dr John’s not like the other doctors,’ she crooned. ‘He really likes me—I can tell. He cares about me. I need him to look after me.’

She refused to hear me. I would have to sink the knife.

‘Will you fucking listen to me
?
’ I said shrilly. ‘I. Can’t. Do it.’

She sat very still.

‘I paced myself for three weeks,’ I said. ‘I thought I could just about make it through to tomorrow. But now you’re assuming I’ll run the next lap as well, and the one after that. I’m trying to tell you: I’m worn out. I can’t go on.’

She stared through the windscreen. I thought I might have to stop the car and throw up in the gutter.

Then she took a quivering breath, and in her noblest tones began to praise me. ‘And what a splendid relay runner you’ve been! What a fabulous race you’ve run, darling. Of course you can hand the baton over. I know what I’ll do! I’ll rent a serviced apartment. Or I’ll move into a motel.’

My palms on the steering wheel began to sweat. ‘You will not, you cannot
,
’ I said, ‘move into a serviced apartment or a motel.’

‘Of course I can. There must be charming places over there near the hospital. I can look after myself. All I have to do is wear a neck brace.’

‘Listen to me, Nicola. This is not about a neck brace. You’ll need a team of people to care for you every day, and through the night—to change your sheets and wash them, and buy food and cook it. Your family and friends will not let you move into a motel. It’s not going to happen. You must go home to Sydney.’

‘I’ll fly home in the morning. You’ll come with me, won’t you. I can’t fly alone. I’ll organise things with Iris, and pick up a few things I’ll need. Then I’ll be back here next week. I have dozens of darling old school friends who live in Melbourne. They’ll take me into their homes with all their hearts!’

A wave of sickening rage swept through me. I wanted to smash the car into a post, but for only her to die—I would leave the keys in the ignition, grab my backpack, and run for my life.

The house, from the moment we pushed open the front door, began to hum with ugly feelings. Anger and fear, rigidly suppressed, sang in the air. The fridge was empty. I rode to the shop and bought food for our lunch. As I chopped and toasted, I made an awkward twisting movement and pulled a muscle in my lower back. Even as the grunt of pain crossed my lips I flushed with shame. What pathetic rivalry, a tweaked back muscle versus a tumour that threatened to collapse and fill Nicola’s body with debris and poison. But she didn’t hear me. She was lying on the couch, raving in a febrile excitement.

‘There’s Verity,’ she cried. ‘And Tory and Flick, but she might have moved to Paris. Verity married that barrister who was so successful, I forget his name. They used to own a divine little cottage across the road from their house. And the au pair lived in it. I could move in there!’

‘How long is it since you were last in touch with them?’

‘Oh, only a few years.’

‘Nicola,’ I said, ‘shouldn’t you maybe check with Verity? To see if this is real?’

She beamed right into my face, with glazed eyes. ‘Oh no, darling. I know she’d have me at the drop of a hat. She adores me.’

‘But it’s a twenty-four-hour commitment. Maybe she’s got, you know, family responsibilities, or a job?’

She froze for a second, then clicked her tongue and made a brushing motion with one hand. She seized a pencil. ‘Well, if that doesn’t suit, I’ll—I’ll book everyone into a hotel. The Windsor. I’ll take a suite at the Windsor.’

‘Everyone? Who’s everyone?’

She began to scribble down the names of the Sydney friends and country relatives who she
knew
would rush down to Melbourne, in shifts, to care for her. Her sister Pip would be there in a flash. Iris would drop everything and come. Clare would leave her kids in Byron and jump on the next plane south. Harriet would hoon in from Yass. Everyone would be on deck! Nicola would fly them to Melbourne, Nicola would book the tickets, Nicola would pay!

I stood at the griller, giddy with panic. ‘But that’ll cost—’

‘Anyone who puts themselves out to look after me,’ she declared with a regal gesture of her pen hand, ‘deserves the best that money can buy. Now. I’ll be in hospital for three days, so that means—’

‘Three days? Didn’t Maloney say seven to ten?’

‘Nonsense, Hel. I’ll be out of there so fast. OK, which were the days Hathaway operates? Tuesday and Friday?’

For this at least I had evidence. I pulled the notebook from my bag and read out in an authoritative tone what I’d written in his rooms: ‘He operates on Mondays and Fridays.’

Her brow came down. She shook her head. ‘No. It wasn’t Monday. It was Tuesday.’

She picked up the cordless and called his receptionist. As she listened, her cheek-bones went pink. Power surged through her. She tossed the handset on to the carpet. ‘I knew I was right. It’s
Tuesday
.’ She hauled herself upright against the cushions and hit me with a bright stare of triumph. ‘By the way—while you were at the shop Bessie knocked at the door. I pretended there was nobody home.’

I put the rubber band round the notebook, limped off into my room, and lay on the bed. From there I could hear her on the phone, jabbering, bursting into fountains of laughter, organising the troops, lining up reinforcements. In a while she called to me from the hallway: she was going to take the train downtown to settle her account at the Theodore Institute. The slammed door shook the house to its foundations.

Somehow I dozed off. Soon after four o’clock there was a light tap at my window: Bessie’s eyes gleamed between the blind slats. I got up and opened the front door. She stood on the mat staring up at me, the dark brim of her sun-hat pressed back off her brow like a cavalier’s. She bounced straight on to my bed and we lay down. She had been thinking; she wanted me to hear the fruits of it.

‘When a person dies,’ she said, ‘a little bit of them flies away from their body.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ve heard people say that. What a beautiful idea.’

‘It’s called a soul.’

She took hold of my wrist and gently moved the skin up and down over it. I felt the crepy looseness of what covered me, the fragility of the joint.

‘Everyone has to die,’ she said. ‘Even me. Even Hughie. And Nanna, if we died, you’d die too. Because you’d be so sad.’

I DIDN’T know then, as Bessie and I lay on my bed and reasoned about fate and the universe, that Nicola’s mad dream of flying her carers down to Melbourne and putting them up at the Windsor Hotel would come true, and that in ten days she would return to Sydney for good with Mr Hathaway’s titanium post flawlessly implanted in her spine.