The Spare Room (8 page)

Nicola came home from the clinic that night shuddering again with cold and weakness. Eating was out of the question. She needed to wash but the thought of water hitting her skin was too much. I helped her into bed and sponged her face and neck, and then her feet, with a damp washer. Then she wanted to be left alone. She was the kind of person who loved to sleep in free streams of air: she used to boast that at her boarding school in the Southern Highlands the girls had slept winter and summer in a dormitory on an open veranda. Her house off Palm Beach welcomed every passing breeze; her life there had been a kind of glorified camping. But now she wanted the room dark and stuffy, the window shut tight.

I cooked myself a plate of curly pasta and ate it in front of the TV. Halfway through the news I was asleep on the couch. The phone rang and I blundered to answer it. A young woman with a soft, anxious voice asked for Nicola.

‘She’s not feeling the best tonight,’ I said. ‘Could you ring in the morning?’

‘Oh, please let me speak to her,’ said the caller. ‘I only heard today that she’s ill. I’m Hamish’s daughter— I know she’ll want to hear from me. Couldn’t I just have a quick word?’

I carried the cordless along the hall to Nicola’s door. The lamp was on; I thought I heard her groan.

I opened the door and held out the phone. ‘Hamish’s daughter?’

She shook her head and raised one palm. I did some fast talking and hung up.

‘It’s my shoulder again,’ said Nicola. ‘My neck. And there’s a new pain. In the middle of my belly. I’m scared it might be my liver.’

I brought in one of the morphine capsules and raised it like a wafer between thumb and forefinger. She looked at it suspiciously.

‘Nicola. Take it.’

‘I don’t want to get addicted.’

‘You won’t get addicted. It’ll help you go to sleep.’ I poured a glass of water.

She shook her head. ‘I had the vitamin C again today. That must be why my shoulder’s hurting more. It’s the toxins tearing their way out.’

I put the pill and the glass on the bedside table. ‘OK. Can I get you something else?’

‘I feel a bit nauseated. I don’t suppose there’s any lemonade?’

I wheeled my bike down the side path and sped in the dark to the milk bar. Yes, the light was on. The young proprietor was mopping the floor. How did he maintain his lovely courtesy, in a job with such punishing hours? Next to the register stood a flat box of chocolate bullets. He and his pregnant wife must have spent hours out the back there with the lollies loose between them on the table, raking them in tens onto squares of cling wrap and sealing each tiny packet into a peak with sticky-tape. I grabbed one, then pulled a bottle of lemonade out of the wall fridge. Pedalling home along the empty street I steered the bike with one hand and shovelled bullets into my mouth with the other. The lemonade rolled about in the basket.

She accepted a glass of it, but the bubbles were still too strenuous, and she sat up in bed with her head forward like a tortoise, waiting for the fizz to die down.

‘I was thinking today,’ she said. ‘I should write something about the Theodore Institute. It might help them. They need publicity.’

I couldn’t meet her eye.

‘I don’t understand,’ I said, ‘how they can go on giving you the vitamin C treatment, when they know it has this terrible effect on you. What’s it supposed to do?’

‘But Helen,’ she whispered. ‘It’s the same with chemo and radiation. Nobody knows how they work, either, but people still do them.’

I had no answer. I sat in the corner on the hard chair.

‘Darling,’ she murmured after a while. ‘I think I will take the morphine now.’

Forty minutes later I heard her stirring. She was sitting up again, with her shoulders bowed right down over her knees.

‘What is it, old stick?’

‘I’m sure it’s just the bad stuff coming out. In a minute I might try lying on my stomach.’

‘All right. What’ll I do?’

She was silent. I waited beside the bed. Half a minute passed.

‘I think I’ll try it now.’

I stepped forward. How do you roll someone over when what’s hurting is her shoulder, her neck, her belly? Where do you take hold? I stood there helpless in my ignorance. In a while I heard her draw a determined breath. Expelling it in a series of hard grunts, she got herself on to her side, asked me to slide a pillow under her, and collapsed on to it belly down.

Soon after midnight she called me. Her bed was soaked with sweat. The pain seemed to have abated, though, so I sent her to lie on the couch in the big back room while I changed the sheets. When I came out she was propped against the cushions, dopey from the morphine, but lucid.

‘I was lying in there,’ she said, ‘thinking fuck. I shouldn’t have asked that GP for the weakest pill.’

She asked for the weakest pill.

My legs sagged. I sat down on the arm of the couch with my load of wet bedding.

‘Nicola,’ I said. ‘I’ve got something to say. I don’t think I can go on with this, unless you let me call the palliative people on Monday.’

She went rigid. ‘I told you—I don’t need that.’

‘It’s not the angel of death,’ I said. ‘It’s just some girls in a car.’

‘I said no.’

‘If we got ourselves on their list, they’d come to the house if we needed them. They can help people get through the night. They’re like the district nurse.’

She reared up on the cushions. ‘I don’t need a nurse.’

I let the bedding drop to the floor. Then I kicked it all the way to the laundry and stuffed it into the machine. Out there I folded the ironing board and stood it against the wall. I sorted a basket of dry clothes. I stayed among the equipment for imposing cleanliness and order until I had got a grip on myself. When I emerged, she spoke loftily from the couch, without opening her eyes.

‘I’ve decided what to do. I’m going to take a serviced apartment. Or move into some mad little hotel in South Yarra. I’ll only be down here for another fortnight. I don’t want to be a burden to anyone.’

I leaned against the fridge. The lumpy magnets, with their lists and reminders, pressed into my back. I turned and rearranged them into a rustic pattern: the lemons, the painted roses, the two golden bees that Hughie loved. I carried the hot water bottle to the kettle, filled it, and handed it to her on the couch. Her eyes were still closed. In the spare room I made up her bed again and puffed the pillows. Then I trudged back to my own room and crept under the quilt.

How had I got myself into this?

Death was in my house. Its rules pushed new life away with terrible force. I longed for the children next door, their small, determined bodies through which vitality surged. It was barely one o’clock and I was wide awake and staring-eyed. I thought I could hear movement in the kitchen, perhaps a voice murmuring, but it was a matter of urgency that I should get to sleep before two, the hour at which the drought, the refugee camps, the dying planet, and all the faults and meannesses of my character would arrive to haunt me.

On the bedside table lay the manuscript of a novel by a Vietnamese woman that I was supposed to have read last week. I picked a page at random. The characters seemed to be working in a sweatshop, thanklessly sewing trash under the savage eye of a supervisor. ‘In empty times like this,’ the narrator remarked, ‘singing a half-remembered song helps to make the time pass.’

My ukulele was gathering dust on the floor. I drew it out of its case by the neck and cradled it for a while. Its stiff woody curves comforted me. It was still in tune. The bedroom door was open, but the morphine would surely have kicked in by now. I sat up in bed and played softly. Under my breath I sang ‘Tennessee Waltz’ and
‘
After the Ball’: slow tunes in three-four time that gave me a chance to get my fingers on to the next chord and still keep the beat
.
Then I closed my mouth and just brushed the strings, barely making a sound.

I was laying the uke back in its case when she called out down the hall.

‘Hel?’

‘I’m here.’

‘Goodnight. We’ll call the palliative on Monday.’

GOD BLESS morphine. In the morning she was in bright spirits, affectionate in a slightly guilty way. At breakfast she swallowed another pill and sat at the table gazing out at the garden.

‘It’s a nice day,’ she cried, with a hectic eagerness. ‘We should get stuck into the garden. Do some weeding.’

‘Oh, bugger that,’ I said. ‘Let’s go to the nursery. You can tell me what natives to buy.’

The day flowed by in modest pastimes. We read, we dozed, we drove to the video shop and the supermarket. At the nursery on the banks of the Maribyr-nong she made me buy grevilleas ‘for their future dusty pinkness’. She found an envelope of nasturtium seeds in my pantry, took them outside and pushed them into the dirt with her thumbs, all along the front path.

Bessie tapped on the kitchen window and asked for yoghurt with nuts.

‘I’m in a flamenco show tomorrow afternoon,’ she shouted. ‘On a stage.’

I handed the food through the crack of the back door and she ate it on the veranda, smiling at us over her shoulder through the glass, then ran off to the gap in the fence, leaving the empty bowl and spoon on the doormat.

Before dinner Nicola made a couple of magisterial gin and tonics and we drank them in front of the TV, to armour ourselves against the news of the world. Later we watched the DVD she had chosen,
Million Dollar Baby
. We loved the girl boxer leaping out of her corner with her fists up:
let me at you!
I privately thought the ending was sentimental; Nicola cried; and then we both praised Hilary Swank to the skies. This was the way we had always been together. It was easy.

She took the morphine according to the instructions on the packet. In the absence of the intravenous vitamin C it worked its magic, making the night brief.

But on Sunday my friend Peggy, with whom Nicola was remotely acquainted, called to invite us for morning tea.

‘That’s nice of her,’ said Nicola. ‘I thought you two had fallen out again.’

‘Oh, that’s our style. We get over it. We’re going to Europe in December, for a couple of weeks.’

‘Europe?’ She paused. ‘How divine.’

We drove to Fitzroy. When Peggy, chic and smooth-haired, opened her front door, Nicola leapt through it and straight into the kitchen, grinning wildly, spraying compliments and exclamations in her poshest accent: it was a tremendous performance of being alive
.
It scraped on my nerves. A bowl of walnuts stood on the sideboard. I grabbed a couple and cracked them in my palms. I ate the first few kernels, but the cracking was so gratifying that after I had eaten enough I kept going, trying to find each nut’s weak point, grinding the hard shells against each other till they split.

When Nicola paused for breath, Peggy ushered us out into the garden. We sat under a roof of blossoming white roses whose petals sprinkled down on to the embroidered tablecloth. She served us pleasantly and with grace: biscuits and a cake, coffee, and interesting kinds of tea. She and Nicola spoke with sighs and wry smiles about the difficulties of caring for their mothers, queenly dames in their nineties who were often balefully demanding. Mine, who had been small and sad and beaten, was already five years dead. I sat and listened.

‘So,’ said Peggy at last. ‘How’s it all going, over there?’

‘Well,’ Nicola began, leaning forward with a smile so glassy it tinkled. ‘It’s all going brilliantly.

Helen’s a wonderfully severe matron. But we’ve had to get hold of some morphine the last few days. You see, at the Theodore Institute, which is marvellous, they give me a certain intravenous vitamin C treatment every second day.’

She was settling in. Irritated, I tipped my head back and took a proper look at the roses. Quite a few of them were already drying up and drooping. The secateurs lay near me on the windowsill. I grabbed them and made a few furtive passes at the blossoms within reach.

‘It does knock one around somewhat,’ Nicola went on, ‘and I sometimes come home a wee bit under the weather.’ I felt my lips pursing. I stood up and moved away from the table, flexing the clipper as I went. An old wooden ladder was leaning against the shed wall. The little building was wreathed in the climbing roses, and every third flower was ready to be snipped.