The Spare Room (5 page)

That night Nicola wet the bed. I came upon her in the hall at two o’clock, backing out of the spare room with an armful of sheets. ‘I had a dream,’ she said, ‘and when I woke up in the middle of it I had piss running out of me. I made it to the toilet for the rest of the stream, but look. I’ve made a mess.’

This was the closest I had ever seen her to embarrassment. We were old bohemians, long past shame at basic bodily functions.

‘Give me those,’ I said. ‘I stocked up on manchester before you came.’

‘Manchester? This is like an Elizabeth Jolley novel.’

We started to laugh. She sat on the chair while I made up her bed afresh. I saw her bare feet on the rug and thought of my mother, how she would clean up after me when as a child I had what she called ‘a bilious attack’. I remembered her patience in the middle of the night, the precious moments of her attention, in the house full of sleeping children who had usurped my place in her affections. In a trance of gratitude I would watch her spread the clean sheet across my bed, stretch it flat and tuck in its corners, making it nice again for the disgusting, squalid creature I had become. Without revulsion, she would pick up my soiled sheets in her arms and bear them away.

ON TUESDAY morning we took the train to the city. I showed her how to avoid the chaos of Flinders Street Station by getting off at Parliament; we walked down to the Theodore Institute together. Sensing wariness in Colette’s greeting, I left Nicola there to settle in for her first treatment, and went downstairs to get myself a coffee.

Twenty minutes later, when I returned, the waiting room was empty. No one seemed to be in charge. I ran my eye over the framed diplomas on the wall behind the reception desk. Ah, here were Tuckey’s credentials: a lot of polysyllabic alternative stuff with curlicues, and a string of initials that looked medical. All right, but where the hell was he? Who was running this joint? I could hear Colette behind a partition, gaily bashing someone’s ear about her passion for figure skating. There was a bell on the counter. I rang it. She popped her head in and directed me to a side door.

Beyond it, in a cramped space whose window, if you stood on your toes, gave a side view of the cathedral, I found Nicola enclosed to the chin in a sort of low tent; her grinning face poked out at the top through a hole that was sealed round her neck with a strip of plastic and a pink towel. The strange perfume from nature that we had remarked upon the day before hung in the air again.

‘What the hell is this? You look like a cartoon lady in a weight-loss clinic.’ Again we laughed.

‘It’s an ozone sauna. Look inside.’

I unzipped the front of the tent and saw her seated on a white plastic chair, naked but for a towel, and holding in each hand a wand-like object wrapped in kitchen paper. The perfumed vapour oozed out in wisps. I closed the zip. She tilted her head towards a murky sheet of A4 paper pinned to the wall. I stepped up to look. It was a list of instructions on resuscitation. We regarded each other without expression.

‘What are those things you’re holding?’

‘Electrodes.’ She shut her eyes and leaned back.

Electrodes. I held my peace. Morning sunshine fell into the room through the high window. The ozone smelled delicious, very subtle and refreshing, like watermelon, or an ocean breeze. I sat on a chair in the corner and pulled the lid off my coffee.

An hour later, Colette bustled in and ushered Nicola to another room. There she lay on her back on a high, hard bed that was covered with flowered cloth, while the young woman applied Chinese cups to her shoulder, her neck and her belly. Like many people I knew, I had submitted to cupping once or twice, and thought nothing of it either way; but these cups had nipples with tubes running into them, through which more ozone was to be pumped from a large, rusty-looking tank attached to the wall by a metal chain around its girth.

It seemed an intimate procedure and I kept offering to leave, but both Nicola and Colette urged me to stay. I pressed myself into a corner and folded my arms. The east-facing window gave on to an attractive jumble of spires and domes, and beyond them a sky packed with woolly spring clouds.

‘What does the ozone do, Colette?’ asked Nicola pleasantly.

Colette, finished with the cups, was riffling through a file with her back to Nicola. Without turning around she replied in a distracted tone, ‘Kills cancer.’

‘Oh. Right.’

‘And the vitamin C,’ continued Colette, laying down the file and turning to make fierce clawing motions with both hands, ‘sort of scoops the cancer cells out of your body.’

Once more, still smiling, Nicola let her eyelids droop. With a merry wave and a pert flip of her ponytail, Colette left the room. I drifted over to the bench under the window, where she had left Nicola’s file. Casually I slid the papers out of the manila folder. I turned a page and the heading
Prognosis
leapt at me. Under it someone had written, in a sprawling, immature hand, ‘Terminal, 1-3 years.’

I dropped the sheet and leaned towards the window. Out there, on the west side of the cathedral, someone had carved gargoyles, and a couple of saintly men with staffs and stone haloes. My legs were quivering. I took a few deep breaths. What was going on? Hadn’t Dr Tuckey, the night before, assured Nicola that she would ‘respond very well’ to the clinic’s treatment? Surely he should have said, ‘Would you like me to tell you what I think your future is?’ And if she said yes, wouldn’t it have been more honourable to tell her the truth, and then say, ‘But we can offer you certain treatments that may shrink the cancer, slow it down, make it possible for you to live more comfortably in the time you have left’?

Maybe he couldn’t do it while I was in the room. Maybe he didn’t have the authority, within their outfit, to speak about death. Maybe only Professor Theodore, the guru, had that power.

Behind me on her high bed, Nicola’s eyes were still closed. I tidied the sheets of paper into the folder and lined it up with the edge of the bench.

She spoke. ‘Helen. Would your sister Madeleine have come to a place like this?’

‘Not in a fit.’

‘Not even if she’d known about it?’

‘No way. She wouldn’t have contemplated it for a single second.’

‘Why?’

Because she’d have seen immediately that it was a con.
I couldn’t say that. I didn’t have the knowledge to make a judgment. And if I did condemn it, where could Nicola turn? What would be left? Drop all weapons and face death? Who was I to tell her she had to do that?

So I said, ‘Madeleine had been a nurse. Her husband was a surgeon. Her whole life was lived in the world of western medicine. She believed in it. Those were the terms and language she thought in.’

She lay quiet for a while, with the cups bulging on her belly like a row of breasts. Then she opened her eyes and gazed towards the window.

‘I’m expecting an angel to drop out of those clouds at any minute,’ she said, and turned on me her cheekiest, most challenging smile.

After lunch, which we imbibed in the form of large vegetable juices in a cafe, Colette dropped heavy hints that I should leave: apparently they were about to beam some kind of light on to her. I gathered up my things and made off. I went to David Jones’ food hall and bought a couple of flathead fillets for our dinner, then wandered round the city, priding myself on not squandering money. When I called for Nicola later in the afternoon, she was in good spirits.

At home I went out the back to unpeg the dry sheets from the clothesline. She insisted on helping me. I could see it cost her something to raise her arms to shoulder height, but together we folded the bed linen perfectly and laid it in the cupboard. Then, following her instructions, I made the sort of fish soup with vegetables that a semi-vegetarian could eat. She ate with appetite, and even drank a glass of dry sherry. We watched the news and dissected with cheerful meanness the latest escapades of her old friend my ex-husband.

‘Tomorrow,’ she said at bedtime, as I handed her the hot water bottle wrapped in a clean tea towel, ‘they’re giving me some more vitamin C.’

I looked up. ‘Want me to come with you?’

She shrugged. ‘Bring a book.’

I heard her moving about not long after midnight, and came out to check. Her shoulder and neck were hurting. Again she was wet, but not with piss. It was sweat: the bed-clothes were soaked, almost through to the mattress, and even the pillow was sodden. Three times that night I tackled the bed: stripped and changed, stripped and changed. This was the part I liked, straightforward tasks of love and order that I could perform with ease. We didn’t bother to put ourselves through hoops of apology and pardon. She sat limply on the chair and watched me work.

‘I should have been a nurse,’ I said. ‘Like my sisters.’

She gave a faint laugh. ‘Matron. With a rustling veil.’

‘Or maybe a detective. Why didn’t I join the police force in the seventies, instead of trying to be a bloody hippie? Which I was never any good at.’

‘You can be quite fierce. But they would have made mincemeat of you.’

‘What painkillers have you got, Nicola?’

‘Digesic.’

‘Is that all?’

‘I can have eight a day. I’ll take some now.’

I went for the glass of water and stood at the bed while she gulped down the pills.

‘What does
gesic
mean?’ I said.

‘Must be Greek.’

‘Must be. Rectogesic is for piles. Analgesic…’

‘
Anal-
gesic,’ she said, ‘should be for sore bums.’

‘Ha ha! And
Di-
gesic’—it came thundering down on us like a truck: no time to jump out of its way—‘is so you won’t
die.’

She laughed, closed her eyes, and lay back on the clean pillow.

Just before daybreak, as I lay sleepless in my bed, a weird little storm exploded right overhead, dumped twenty drops of rain, and fled onwards at a clip. The street was quiet. The air was fresh and cool. Something tiptoed across the leaf mulch outside my open window and paused there, breathing, to groom itself.

AT BREAKFAST time Nicola was in pain. Her shoulders were bent. It was hard for her to walk.

‘Shouldn’t we get you some stronger drugs?’ I said.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘It’s the treatments causing the pain—that’s how I know they’re working. It’s just the toxins coming out.’

She chewed a morsel of toast with honey and drank a cup of tea.

I took her into the city.

This time an unsmiling middle-aged stranger with an Eastern European accent was on duty in the treatment room. His white coat and slow, almost tranquillised movements lent him an air of authority lacking in the endearing but twitty Colette. He did not bother to introduce himself, but told Nicola to lie on her back on the high bed, hooked a bag of clear fluid on to a tall metal stand, and prepared to plug a tube into the portacath on her chest. Nicola held up one hand.

‘The last nurse who gave this to me,’ she said, her voice high with tension and posher than usual, ‘did it too fast. It hurt me and I was awfully sick and weak afterwards. Can I ask you, please, to make sure it’s not going to run too fast?’

The man in the white coat paused in his manipulation of the equipment. ‘I’m not a nurse,’ he said. ‘I’m a specialist.’

I got off my chair and stepped forward. ‘Excuse me,’ I said. I cleared my throat. ‘Excuse me, doctor, but my friend’s had violent reactions to the vitamin C. Are you sure it’s appropriate?’

The man didn’t look at me. He stood quite still with the tube in his hand. ‘It’s written here,’ he said, ‘that your friend is to have vitamin C today. And that’s what I will give her.’

I moved further in so that my shoulder was beside Nicola’s and the man had to meet my eye. He gave me a long, measuring stare. I took a breath, but Nicola put her hand on my arm.

‘It’s all right, Hel. I just got a bit panicky for a second.’

I felt her shoulder relax: all those years of yoga. She bathed the man in her patrician smile.

‘I trust you, doctor,’ she said. ‘I’m sure you know exactly what you’re doing. Carry on.’

Carry on
? The wind went out of my sails. I returned to my chair. The needle pierced the ring of stretched skin, the liquid began to swell and drip in its tube, and the man left the cubicle with his slow tread.