The Spare Room Read online

  PRAISE FOR HELEN GARNER

  AND THE SPARE ROOM

  ‘A perfect novel, imbued with all Garner’s usual clear-eyed grace but with some other magnificent dimension that hides between the lines of her simple conversational voice. How is it that she can enter this heart-breaking territory—the dying friend who comes to stay—and make it not only bearable, but glorious, and funny? There is no answer except: Helen Garner is a great writer; The Spare Room is a great book.’

  PETER CAREY

  ‘Swift, beautiful and relentless.’ ALICE SEBOLD

  ‘No one writes these reports from the suburban front-line with quite the passion, the abrupt insights and kitchen table candour of Helen Garner. The Spare Room is a quietly devastating book, written with superbly refined ordinariness, on ageing, women’s friendship and how to look death in the eye.’

  ROBERT DESSAIX

  ‘Sensitive, sad, funny and alive.’ DIANA ATHILL

  ‘My favourite discovery of the year, Helen Garner has a voice of great honesty and energy.’ ANNE ENRIGHT

  ‘Honest, unsparing and brave.’ New York Times

  ‘This is Garner at her best. A must read. The hard-won simplicity of the language is brilliant, not a word wasted…compellingly honest and utterly authentic. Once you start reading, you won’t be able to put it down.’ ALEX MILLER

  ‘The Spare Room illuminates the big questions of what it means to be human, and makes me glad I am a reader.’

  Australian Literary Review

  ‘Luminous, moving and profound: a novel that seems to transcend fiction.’ Guardian

  ‘A combination of wit and lyricism that is immensely alluring…a burningly passionate account of the one experience we all will share—the journey out of life.’

  Observer

  ‘The subject matter is compelling, and Garner’s writing so assured and compassionate that any reader will be enthralled and swept along…Few Australian writers would be bold enough to take this on as a subject for a novel, but we know Helen Garner relishes a challenge. It’s her triumph to pull it off.’

  Australian Bookseller & Publisher

  ‘A vivid jewel of a book…Garner’s elegantly furious comedy unfolds at a tremendous pace and demands to be read at a sitting.’ New Statesman

  ‘The Spare Room is a story of tough love and friendship and amazement at the bravado and resourcefulness of human beings in the face of death, written in a prose that has surgical precision. Read this novel. It is truer than non-fiction.’ Weekend Australian

  ‘Garner is a beautiful writer who winkles out difficult emotions from difficult hiding places.’

  Sunday Telegraph

  ‘The reader will be wrenched by The Spare Room, and enlarged by it, and feel deeply privileged to be at this particular bedside.’ Dominion Post Weekend

  ‘A profound portrait of long-term female friendship… the writing exudes the raw authenticity of lived experience. Its readiness to confront painful realities, both emotional and physical, make this a wise and affecting book.’ Daily Mail

  ‘Garner writes with the cool authority of personal experience, and apprehends Helen and Nicola’s loving and warring worlds in such fine and sensuous detail that pain itself is rendered beautiful.’ Sunday Telegraph

  ‘A daring and dazzling novel…Garner writes with a diamond drill, depicting human relationships with such brutal clarity they seem to be rendered for the first time.’ LA Times

  Books by Helen Garner

  FICTION

  Monkey Grip (1977)

  Honour and Other People’s Children (1980)

  The Children’s Bach (1984)

  Postcards from Surfers (1985)

  Cosmo Cosmolino (1992)

  NON-FICTION

  The First Stone (1995)

  True Stories (1996)

  The Feel of Steel (2001)

  Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004)

  FILM SCRIPTS

  The Last Days of Chez Nous (1992)

  Two Friends (1992)

  Helen Garner was born in Geelong in 1942. Her award-winning books include novels, stories, screenplays and works of non-fiction. The Spare Room is her first work of fiction in sixteen years.

  The

  spare

  room

  Helen Garner

  TEXT PUBLISHING MELBOURNE AUSTRALIA

  The paper used in this book is manufactured only from wood grown in sustainable regrowth forests.

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  www.textpublishing.com.au

  Copyright © Helen Garner 2008

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published 2008 by The Text Publishing Company

  This edition published 2009

  Typeset by J&M Typesetters

  Printed and bound by Griffin Press

  Design by Chong Weng-ho

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

  Garner, Helen, 1942-

  The spare room / Helen Garner.

  ISBN: 9781921520280 (pbk.)

  A823.3

  The Spare Room is a work of fiction. Any similarity between the characters in this book and real people, living or dead, is coincidental.

  ‘It is a privilege to prepare the place where someone else will sleep.’ ELIZABETH JOLLEY

  FIRST, in my spare room, I swivelled the bed on to a north-south axis. Isn’t that supposed to align the sleeper with the planet’s positive energy flow, or something? She would think so. I made it up nicely with a fresh fitted sheet, the pale pink one, since she had a famous feel for colour, and pink is flattering even to skin that has turned yellowish.

  Would she like a flat pillow or a bulky one? Was she allergic to feathers, or even, as a vegetarian, opposed to their use? I would offer choice. I rounded up all the extra pillows in the house, slid each one into a crisply ironed slip, and plumped them in a row across the head of the bed.

  I pulled up the wooden venetian and threw open the window. Air drifted in, smelling leafy, though you couldn’t see a leaf unless you forced open the flywire screen and leaned right out. She had been staying for months with her niece Iris, on the eighth floor of an art deco apartment block in Elizabeth Bay whose windows, I imagined, pointed due north over a canopy of massive Sydney figs, towards the blue field of the harbour.

  The immediate view from my spare room, until I could get some geraniums happening in a window box, was of the old grey paling fence that separated my place from my daughter Eva’s. The sash window faced east, though, and the light bouncing off the weatherboard side of Eva’s house kept the room bright till well into the afternoon. Also, it was late October, which in Melbourne is supposed to be spring.

  I was worrying about her feet. The floor of her room was bare timber, except for a worn kilim full of rips. What if she snagged one of her long, elegant toes in it? What if she fell? Slippers were among the things she didn’t bother with, along with suitcases, bras, deodorants, irons. I rolled up the dangerous kilim and threw it into the back shed. Then I drove over to a shop opposite Piedimonte’s supermarket, where my friend Peggy, who knows about these things, said they sold tribal rugs. Straight away I spotted a pretty one: blossoms of watery green and salmon twining on a mushroom ground. The bloke told me it was Iranian, vegetable dyed. I chose it because it was faded. She would hate m
e to buy anything specially; to make a fuss.

  Would she want to look at herself ? It was months since I had last laid eyes on her: all I knew was from our emails. Every time the news sounded bad under her chirpy chatter, I would suggest flying up to Sydney. But she put me off. She was going out to dinner and couldn’t change the date, or there wouldn’t be a bed for me, or she didn’t want me to waste my money. She might take it the wrong way if her room lacked a mirror. Behind the bookshelf in my workroom I found one I’d bought in an Asian import shop at Barkly Square and never used: a tall, narrow, unframed rectangle of glass, its back still equipped top and bottom with strips of double-sided adhesive tape. I selected a discreet spot for it, just inside the door of her room, and pressed it firmly against the plaster.

  On the bedside table I fanned out some chord charts to have a crack at on our ukuleles—‘Pretty Baby’, ‘Don’t Fence Me In’, ‘King of the Road’. I arranged the reading lamp on a gracious angle, and placed beside it a mug full of nameless greenery that I’d found near the back shed. Then I went along the corridor to my room at the front of the house and lay on the bed with my boots on. It was four o’clock in the afternoon.

  What woke me, ten minutes later, was a horrible two-stage smash, so sickening, so total, that I thought someone had thrown a brick through the side window. I rushed out all trembly and ran along the hall. Nothing moved. The house was quiet. I must have dreamt it. But the edge of the old hall runner, halfway to the kitchen, was weirdly sparkling. I stepped over it and into the spare room. The mirror no longer existed. The wall was bare, and the Iranian rug was thick with the glitter of broken glass.

  I swept with the dustpan and brush, I beat with the millet broom, I hoovered in cunning angled strokes. The fragments of mirror were mean-shaped and stubborn, some so minuscule that they were only chips of light. They hid against the rug’s scalp, in the roots of its fur. I got down on my knees and picked them out with my fingernails. When the daylight faded and I had to stop, my sister Connie rang me.

  ‘A mirror broke? In her room?’

  I was silent.

  Then she said, in a low, urgent voice, ‘Don’t. Tell. Nicola.’

  ‘Three weeks she’s staying?’ said my friend Leo, the psychiatrist. That Saturday evening I sat in the spartan kitchen of his South Yarra place and watched him cook. He poured the pasta into a strainer and flipped it up and down. ‘Why so long?’

  ‘She’s booked in to do a course of alternative treatment down here. Some outfit in the city. They’ve fast-tracked her. She’s supposed to present herself there first thing Monday morning.’

  ‘What sort of treatment?’

  ‘I was loath to ask. She talks about peroxide drips, awful stuff. She’s already been getting big doses of vitamin C in Sydney. Eighty thousand units, she said. Intravenous. With something called glutathione. Whatever that is.’

  He stood very still with the dripping colander in his hand. He seemed to be controlling himself: I had never before noticed the veins in his temples, under the curly white hair. ‘It’s bullshit, Helen.’

  We started to eat. Leo let a shrink’s silence fall, as he forked in food. His terrier, black and white, squatted by his chair and gazed up at him with helpless love.

  ‘It is bullshit, is it?’ I said. ‘That’s my instinct. Get this. When the bowel tumour showed up on the scan, she asked the oncologist to hold off treatment for a while. So she could take a lot of aloe vera. He said, “Nicola. If aloe vera could shrink tumours, every oncologist in the world would be prescribing it.” But she believes in things. She’s got one of those magnetic mats on the floor behind her couch. She says, “Lie on the mat, Hel. It’ll heal your osteoporosis.”’

  Leo didn’t laugh. He looked at me with his triangular brown eyes and said, ‘And do you lie on it?’

  ‘Sure. It’s restful. She rents it from a shop.’

  ‘So chemo didn’t work.’

  ‘She walked around carrying a bag of it plugged into the back of her hand. She’s had surgery. She had radiation. They’ve told her they can’t do any more for her. It’s in her bones, and her liver. They said to go home. She spent five days at a Petrea King workshop. I’d heard good things about that, but she said it wasn’t her style. Then she went to someone she called a healer. He said she had to have her molars out—that the cancer was caused by heavy metals leaking out of her fillings.’

  Leo put his head in his hands. I kept eating.

  ‘Why is she coming to you?’

  ‘She says I saved her life. She was about to send a lot of money to a biochemist up in the Hunter Valley.’

  ‘A biochemist?’

  ‘A kinesiologist told her this bloke’s had a lot of success with cancer. So she phoned him up. He said he wouldn’t need to see her. Just have a look at her blood picture. She was supposed to send him four grand and he’d post her the exact right herbs to target the cancers. “Essence of cabbage juice” was mentioned.’

  I let out a high-pitched giggle. Leo looked at me steadily, without expression.

  ‘And he told her she shouldn’t worry if she heard unfavourable things about him, because he had enemies. People who were out to get him. I was trying to be tactful, so I asked her, “How did you feel, when he told you that?” She said, “I took it as a guarantee of integrity.”’

  My cheeks were hot. I knew I must be gabbling.

  ‘I was scared she’d accuse me of crushing her last hope. So I went behind her back and called a journalist I know. He ran a check. Turns out the so-called biochemist’s a well-known conman. He makes the most outlandish claims. Before he went into alternative health he’d spent years in gaol for armed robbery. I rang her just in time. She had the cheque book in her hand.’

  It took me a moment to calm down. Leo waited. His kitchen was bare, and peaceful. I wondered if any of his patients had ever been invited into it. Outside the sliding glass doors an old concrete laundry trough sat on the paving, sprouting basil. The rest of the tiny yard was taken up by his car.

  ‘You work with cancer patients,’ I said. ‘Does this sound bad?’

  He shrugged. ‘Pretty bad. Stage four.’

  ‘How many stages are there?’

  ‘Four.’

  The bowl was empty. I put down my fork. ‘What am I supposed to do?’

  He put his hand on the dog’s head and drew back its ears so that its eyes turned to high slits. ‘Maybe that’s why she’s coming to stay. Maybe she wants you to be the one.’

  ‘What one?’

  ‘The one to tell her she’s going to die.’

  We listened to an old Chick Corea CD, and talked about our families and what we’d been reading. When it was late, he walked me to my car. The dog trotted at his heel. As I drove away up Punt Road I saw them dart across at the lights and plunge into the big dark gardens.

  Rain fell in the night, quiet and kind. I woke at six with a sense of something looming, the same anxiety I felt before a writing deadline: the inescapable requirement to find something new in myself. Nicola would arrive today. I lay there under the shadow.

  But I planted two new geraniums in a window box and hooked it on to the side fence outside her room. The bud-points, furled inside their leaves, reminded me of sharpened lead pencils. Their redness arrested my gaze before it hit the ugly palings.

  Bessie came in from next door, squeezing through the gap in the fence while I was making a sandwich for lunch. She demonstrated a new hairclip application that kept her fringe still when she jumped up and down. Her nose was running and I kept wiping it on kitchen paper. The TV was on.

  ‘Is that Saddam Hussein?’ she said. ‘What did he do, Nanna, to make him a baddie?’

  I explained what a tyrant was. We began to philosophise. She pointed out that many people in the world were very poor. Then, tucking into the bowl of yoghurt and nuts that I placed before her, she observed that days differ from one another.

  ‘Some are happy,’ she said, ‘but others are bad. I don’t know why. Can I
come to the airport with you? I want to tell Nicola I’m five-and-a-half. I think she’ll be very surprised.’

  We parked in plenty of time. The sun was out and the air was mild: we remarked gaily on the spring. As we marched hand in hand towards the Virgin Blue gate lounge, a crowd came surging out of it: Nicola’s plane must have landed early. I broke into a trot, hauling Bessie behind me and scanning the approaching travellers for a tall, striding woman with prematurely white hair. We were almost on top of her before I recognised her. She was tottering along in the press of people, staggering like a crone, dwarfed by a confused young man who was carrying her Indian cloth bag over his shoulder. Bessie got a tighter grip on my hand.

  ‘Hello darlings!’ said Nicola. She was trying for insouciance, but her voice was hoarse, only a thread. ‘This is my new friend Gavin. He’s been so helpful!’

  Gavin handed me the bag, murmured a farewell, and made for the exit. I took hold of Nicola’s arm and steered her towards a row of hard chairs. She collapsed on to the first one. Bessie pressed closer to my other side, staring across me at Nicola with a look of fascinated panic.

  ‘OK,’ I said brightly. ‘Let’s sit here for a second and collect ourselves.’

  But Nicola couldn’t sit up straight. Her back was bowed right over, her neck straining as if under a heavy load. She was stripped of flesh, shuddering from head to foot like someone who has been out beyond the break too long in winter surf.

  ‘Bessie,’ I said. ‘Listen to me, sweetheart. See that lady over there, behind the counter? Past the toilets? I want you to walk up to her and tell her we need a wheelchair. Right away. Will you be a big girl and do that?’

  She stared at me. ‘What if they don’t have wheelchairs at airports?’

  ‘Bess. I need you to help us.’