The Spare Room (18 page)
Authors: Helen Garner
I didn’t know yet how many times I would fly to Sydney to play my small part in the remains of her care, or how often, when I buzzed at Iris’s apartment, the door would be opened by Harriet from Yass, her round, weather-beaten face sweating and wild with fatigue, or by Marion the Buddhist, white, composed and stoic after a five-day stint without relief. I had not prepared myself to sleep on the floor beside Clare from Byron, when Iris, half out of her mind, pulled on a backpack and fled north, on foot, along the coast of New South Wales.
I could not imagine the urge to start drinking that would seize me every time I entered the high, airy rooms of the apartment and found Nicola enthroned on the sofa where, propped against its hard padded arm, she woke and slept and laughed and coughed, commanding the stewing of Chinese herbs, planning brown rice fasts and drastic alkaline diets, turning her face up each morning to the sun that streamed in through the uncovered windows. Nor could I foresee that one day, with her swollen legs propped on a stack of cushions, she would announce brightly, ‘I’ve suddenly realised why I feel so terrible—I must be anaemic.’ Or how dull my life at home would seem between my visits to Sydney, how I would write to her on a postcard: ‘I miss you. I’m bored. I’d rather be scrubbing shit off Iris’s bathroom tiles.’ For this too would be required of me: like her other carers, whom I came to love in the intimacy of our labour, I would have to help carry her to the lavatory, where I learned to wash her arse as gently as I had washed my sister’s and my mother’s, and as some day someone will have to wash mine.
I might have guessed that she would resist the hospice until the contents of her lungs began to bubble up into her nose and throat, until everyone around her was deranged with exhaustion, fury and despair. She relented only when Marion said to her, ‘Don’t regret the things you haven’t done. That’s the past. Let it go. Rejoice: you’re our teacher now.’
But for all my anxious readiness I was still shocked by the summons. It reached me at Writers’ Week in Adelaide. On the plane to Sydney everything I looked at—strangers’ hair, the weave of their garments—glowed with a forceful value. When I tiptoed into her hospice room, preparing to be solemn, she took my hand with her slow, puffy one and croaked, under the oxygen cannula, ‘Did you nick off from the festival? Any gossip?’ I told her how the big names had scrambled to see the Nobel Laureate get his Australian citizenship in a tent, and gleeful laughter rose off her in a shimmer. Feebly she squeezed my fingers and murmured the last thing she said to me: ‘Don’t go, will you.’
I did not foresee that two Buddhists would chant her out of there: that with Clare and Iris I would crouch shuddering in a corner of the dim hospice room, and listen to the thrilling alto drone of the women’s voices, calling on all compassionate beings to come to that place, to come to Nicola, who like each of us in this life had been sunk deep in the mud of unbearable suffering; for whom the light of this life had set, who was entering a place of darkness, a trackless forest; who had no friends, who had no refuge, who was poised on the lip of a precipice, a frightful chasm into whose echoing spaces she would plunge and be swept away by the mighty wind of karma, the hurricane of karma. I glanced up from this scalding vigil and saw her sister’s face in profile against a black curtain, patient and stark, as grand in the remnants of its beauty as was the face that lay gasping on the pillow.
Nor could I foresee that at her memorial celebration, days after her ashes had been scattered in the presence of those who had been closer to her than I, a beautifully clad woman with the order of service in her hand would address me thus, in a voice with a nasal, frosty edge: ‘I’m Verity. I was at school with Nicola. I see you’re to speak, and I was curious to know—what exactly was your connection to her?’
I had no idea that, before she left my house, Nicola would write me a valedictory letter of such self-reproach, such tenderness and quiet gratitude, that when I came across it, months later, in its clever hiding-place, I was racked with weeping, with harsh sobs that tore their way out of my body, as she had fancied her toxins would rush from hers. I did not know that the investigator would come to my house, that I would pour my story of the Theodore Institute into his tape recorder and never hear from him again. Nor did I guess that one evening at the end of the following summer I would pass Dr Tuckey trundling a small suitcase along Flinders Lane in the perfumed dusk; that when I saw him pause with an ungainly movement to hitch up his hopeless trousers I would pity him for the fact that all his patients must die.
The one thing I was sure of, as I lay pole-axed on my bed that afternoon beside the child with her loosening nit-plaits and her new philosophy, was that if I did not get Nicola out of my house tomorrow I would slide into a lime-pit of rage that would scorch the flesh off me, leaving nothing but a strew of pale bones on a landscape of sand.
That night, her last one in my house, I couldn’t sleep for the tremendous snoring that sawed through the closed doors of her room and mine. I lay under the quilt with my fists clenched in an ecstasy of despair. Was it the Valium Maloney had given her? The steroids? Was it death itself playing with her, making free with her poor tired passageways and membranes? I was sick with shame, raging at myself for raging, raging at death for existing, for being so slow with her and so cruel.
But in the morning we rose in an exhausted peace. She said she was not in pain. We packed her few things in the cloth bag. I shouldered it, and picked up my own. We took a taxi to the airport, checked in, and drank a coffee there, beside a wall of glass. Across the sky a breeze combed the high, streaky clouds of spring.
The flight was short. We sat barely speaking, watching the light tremble and flutter across the silver wing. Sometimes she turned to me and smiled. Iris was waiting at the other end. When I spotted her wild hair and witty face floating in the crowd I could have gone down on my knees to her. She greeted us. I handed her Nicola’s bag, and stepped back; for though our farewells when I left Iris’s apartment next day were loving, though Nicola held both my hands and kissed my cheeks and looked me in the eyes, and though now the three of us walked shoulder to shoulder like sisters across the terminal to the car, I had already left my place at Nicola’s side.
It was the end of my watch, and I handed her over.
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