The Spare Room (6 page)

‘Did I take the wrong tone to him?’ whispered Nicola. ‘What did I do?’

‘He’s a fucking prick, that’s what’s wrong. He’s got a thing about your accent, and he probably thinks we’re dykes.’

‘I thought you were going to thump him. You’ve gone all red.’ She looked at me reproachfully. She even started to giggle.

‘He shouldn’t talk to you like that.’ I got out the lipstick and stabbed at my mouth.

‘Don’t hang around, Hel. Go home and do some work. I’ll text you when I’m finished.’

I didn’t have any work: I had cancelled everything I could for her stay. But I ran down the nine flights of tiled stairs and tramped off to Flinders Street.

I wasn’t used to taking the Broadmeadows train at mid-morning. It was empty and rather calming, forging along the river, past the Docklands stadium and out through North Melbourne. It racketed across the dry creek bed; it slid between the old warehouses and ran parallel with the steel-buttressed brick wall that held Bellair Street back from the railway line. I never quite trusted that wall not to collapse on to the tracks; yet there it stood, fifteen feet high and bulging but still stable, accepting the morning sun on its pocked and rosy surfaces. Something softened in my chest and I took the first proper breath of the day. All right. Let this ludicrous treatment be what it is. Go home and put your house in order.

Nicola’s bedclothes were still askew from the night’s turmoil. I pulled off the damp sheets, then hauled the mattress off its base and leaned it against the open door to air in the sun. I was in the backyard pegging out the first load of washing when Eva sang out to me from her garden. I headed through the bean rows to the gap in the fence but she called in a croak, ‘Don’t come near me. We’re all down with stinking colds.’

‘What—even Mitch?’ Her husband was famous for never, ever getting sick.

‘All of us. It’s going round Hughie’s creche. I’ve been keeping the kids away from your house. Bessie misses you. She’s sitting in front of the TV gushing tears. We’re running out of food.’

Stoical Eva stood barefoot in her nightie beside the guinea pigs’ hutch. Hughie drooped on her shoulder. He lifted his face from the tangled mass of her hair. His gaze was dull. Poor kids.

I drove, I bought, I paid. I delivered to Eva’s doorstep cardboard cartons overflowing with organic foodstuffs. She wouldn’t even open the screen door till I had closed their front gate behind me.

In my kitchen, dishes soon dripped in their wire rack. The bench-tops shone. Clean linen lay folded in sweet-smelling piles. I took a brief nap to prepare myself for another night of disturbance and lamp-lit labour. Then I lined up the ingredients for a dainty soup of dashi, tofu and noodles. How competent I was! I would get a reputation for competence.

Nicola called me at five and announced in her grandest voice that the day’s treatments were done. She brushed aside my offers: she was about to take a taxi home. I arranged myself on the sofa facing the door, and waited for her.

Towards six o’clock a key was laboriously inserted into the front door, and a silhouette came shuffling down the hall. Her shoulders were bowed, her knees were sagging; her head was thrust forward on a neck that was almost horizontal. Oh, what had they done to her? I jumped to my feet. But as she came into the light of the kitchen I saw on her face again that terrible smile, the grimace that said,
Do not ask me any questions
.

‘Not crash hot,’ she mumbled, gripping the corner of the bench with both hands. ‘Straight to bed.’

‘Will I bring you something to eat, in a minute? A thimbleful of soup? On a tray?’

She shook her head. Every bit of visible skin bore a sheen of sweat, but she kept that smile screwed on, her eyebrows pushed high into her forehead. She turned and hobbled back along the hall to her room. I heard the window slam.

I boiled the kettle and wrapped the hot water bottle in its cloth. Her door was shut. Was I supposed to knock? I opened it and slid in. She was lying on her back on the bed, fully dressed, with her eyes closed. The late sun glared in off the wall next door, making the room comfortless and harsh.

‘What’s that smell?’ she said, without opening her eyes. ‘Is it me?’

‘I can’t smell anything.’ I laid the hot water bottle against her side.

‘Smells funny. Yuk.’

I sniffed. With the window shut there was a smell, like a woollen jumper in the rain. I got down on my knees and took a whiff of the new Iranian rug.

‘It must be the dye in the carpet. Will I take it out?’

She didn’t answer. I rolled it up and hauled it out into the corridor. Then I pulled the cord of the venetian blind and the room went dim. Still she said nothing. Her breathing was speeding up. She took a gasp of air and her teeth began to chatter.

‘Nicola. What do you need me to do?’

‘Sleep. I wanna sleep. Go out. Thanks.’

I longed to slip her shoes off, to draw a cotton blanket over her. But I was scared to touch her. I was afraid of her weakness, afraid of her will. So I stepped out of the room and closed the door behind me.

There was sweat in the night. There was pain in belly and shoulder. Each time I heard her moving about I would enter her room, without speaking. She tried to smile at me: she was pretending not to suffer. All she had to help her was the last of the day’s Digesic. I brought water in the china jug with the pink hydrangea pattern, and poured it into my prettiest glasses: I drank too, to keep her company. The intravenous vitamin C seemed to brutalise her spine: she could not hold herself erect. I nursed her, stripping and bundling, breaking out new linen, refreshing her bed and refreshing it again. While I worked she sat in the corner on the wooden chair, with her head hanging forward and her long, bruised hands clasped in her lap.

At last she fell into a proper sleep. I crawled back into my bed, and the house was still.

In the morning, stupid with fatigue, I was preparing breakfast when she walked into the kitchen. She moved very slowly, but her head was up. The glazed smile was back in place. She sat on a stool, accepted a dish of yoghurt and fruit, and spooned it up in tiny quantities.

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘Have you told the people at the clinic you’re in pain?’

She looked up, surprised. ‘Oh, darling,’ she said, sounding almost bored. ‘They treat cancer. Pain’s a given. They’re not interested in my pain.’

I turned away to the sink and yanked on the rubber gloves.

‘Sorry about last night,’ she went on airily. ‘It’s the vitamin C. That’s what the pain is—the cancer being wrenched out of me.’

I kept my back to her and tipped the cutlery into the dishwater.

‘Still,’ I said. ‘You need more sleep than you’re getting. I’m wondering if you should see a GP—get a script for something a bit stronger than the Digesic?’

She laid down her spoon. ‘Helen,’ she said. ‘I have to trust the vitamin C. By the middle of next week it’ll have the damn thing on the run. I need you to believe in it too.’

Till this minute I had dodged the question by concentrating on simple tasks. Now I took my first real breath of it, the sick air of falsehood. I forced myself to nod. I lowered my eyes and scrubbed at the prongs of a fork. OK. It was Thursday. She copped the intravenous vitamins only on alternate days: this morning she’d have the more benevolent bullshit, the ozone and the cupping. But Friday night would be another horror stretch. I would have to get cunning.

I dropped her at the Theodore Institute, then drove in a big arc along the river and out to Leo’s place. Maybe I could catch him between patients. I rattled the knocker. The dog’s nails skittered on the floorboards. Leo opened the door and looked at me in surprise. He glanced crossly at his watch, and at the gate behind me.

‘I’ll be quick. It’s about Digesic.’

‘Is that all she’s got?’ He took a long, slow breath. ‘Bad nights?’

I nodded. A frantic lump rose in my throat. I gulped it down. ‘What’ll I do?’

‘That won’t be strong enough now. Eight a day’s the upper limit. Panadeine Forte might be better. Or morphine. But a GP won’t give an unknown patient morphine. Get on to her oncologist in Sydney. He can fax an authorisation down. And don’t hesitate to ask. Oncologists expect that sort of thing.’

‘Is it ethical for me to do that?’

‘She’s putting a lot of pressure on you. It’s perfectly kosher for you to get help.’

The gate latch clinked and a woman in a business suit and heels came up the path. I stood back. Leo smiled at her, and gestured gracefully towards the open door. She kept her eyes away from mine as she passed me. Her discretion was exemplary but it irritated me. I felt like shouting at her, ‘I am not a patient!’ She stepped across the threshold and disappeared down the hall. I turned to leave.

Leo put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Helen. You can’t be useful if you’re scared shitless. If you want to play hardball, why don’t you get in touch with the palliative people? They come to your house. I know it sounds drastic, but tomorrow’s Friday. Weekends can be scary unless you’ve got back-up.’

I ran to my car. Where did he keep the dog while he worked? Did it have a beanbag in the kitchen to sleep on, a bone to gnaw, a flat bowl of fresh water? Was it happy? Were dogs supposed to be happy? Maybe the belief in the responsibility to be happy was the dumbest idea anyone ever had.

Nicola came home that day all soothed and heartened. I didn’t mention pain and neither did she. She rested a while in her room, then we watched the TV news, and ate our dinner on the veranda. Against the shed wall the broad beans stood in their hopeful rows, a gratifying green. The sky flushed and turned dusky. The coloured lorikeets darting in and out of next door’s palm tree reminded us of the kookaburra that had swooped one day on her lunch table, snatched in its beak a fist-sized slab of expensive Danish butter, and soared away to a high branch: later we spotted the greedy bird standing in the undergrowth near the tank, leaning forward with its beak agape like a drunk outside a pub.

‘I wish I’d brought my uke,’ she said, wiping away the tears of laughter. ‘I don’t even remember the last time we had a play.’

‘How long since you’ve been home?’

‘Oh, months. I had to stay at Iris’s, to be near St Vincent’s for the radiation. And anyway I haven’t got the muscle to drag myself up the hill.’