The Spare Room Read online

  Nicola turned on her a smile that would have once been beautiful and warm, but was now a rictus.

  ‘But I don’t want to go without you,’ said Bessie on a high note.

  ‘All right. You stay here with Nicola, and I’ll go.’

  ‘Nanna.’ She gripped me with both hands.

  ‘We have to get a wheelchair. Go to that lady and ask her. Otherwise I don’t know how we’ll get out of here.’

  I pushed her away from me. She set out along the carpeted hall with stiff, formal steps. I saw her rise on to her toes and try to show herself above the counter’s edge. I saw the uniformed woman bend to hear her, glance up to follow her pointing finger, and turn to shout an order.

  We got home to a house that still thought spring had come: all the windows up, the rooms flooded with mild, muggy air. Nicola hobbled down the hall on my arm while Bessie ran in front with her bag. We led her into the spare room and she sat shivering on the edge of the bed. I banged down the window and switched on the oil heater. No, thank you—she didn’t want to drink, or eat, or wash, or go to the toilet. She was silent. Her head hung forward, as if a tiny fascinating scene were being enacted on her lap. I ran to the kitchen and put the kettle on for a hot water bottle. Bessie dawdled at the back door.

  ‘Go home, sweetheart. I can’t play with you now. Go home.’

  She scowled at me and stumped off across the vegetable patch to the gap in the fence, where she hesitated, glaring at me over her shoulder, long enough for me to see her pearly skin, the vital lustre of her pouting lower lip.

  In the spare room the oil was dripping and clicking inside the heater. I crouched in front of Nicola and pulled off her soft cloth shoes. Her bare feet were mottled, and icy to the touch; her ankles were laced with a pattern of blue veins. I hauled the jeans off her. She never wore knickers and she wasn’t wearing any now. I opened the bag. The few garments she had stuffed into it—a wool spencer, a faded pink flannelette nightgown, a large hemp T-shirt—were grubby and neglected, full of holes, like the possessions of a refugee. No one’s looking after her. She’s already lost.

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let’s get this nightie on to you.’ Like a child she raised both arms. I drew off her worn-out cashmere jumper and rag of a singlet. I thought I was keeping up a nonchalant pace, but when I saw the portacath bulging like an inverted bottle-top under the skin near her collarbone I must have missed a beat, for she began to whisper and croak: ‘Sorry, Hel. Ghastly. So sorry.’

  Uttering comforting, hopeful sounds, I fed each of her arms into a sleeve and pulled the threadbare nightdress down to cover her. I got her under the doona. She couldn’t find a position to lie in that didn’t hurt.

  When the two hot water bottles were ready I brought in a second doona, my thick winter one. I wrapped her, I swaddled her, I lay behind her spoonwise and cuddled her in my arms. Shudders like electric shocks kept running down her body. Nothing could warm her.

  But the heater gained command of the room. In a while she seemed to relax, and doze. I began to sweat. I eased back off the bed, turned the venetian blind to dark, and tiptoed out of the room.

  How long had she been this bad? Why hadn’t someone warned me? But who? She was a free woman, without husband or children. No one was in charge. I got a vegetable soup simmering in case she woke up hungry, and then I looked up her niece Iris in the Sydney phone book, and called her. A wheelchair? Oh no—this was way new. Could it have been just the strain of the flight? Oh God. We should absolutely stay in touch—here was her email address. Iris and her boyfriend Gab could come down, but not till the weekend after next—the school she was teaching at wouldn’t give her any more time off. If it all turned out to be too much for me, they would take her home.

  Too much for me? My pride was stung. I was supposed to be useful in a crisis.

  Something rustled at the back door. Bessie slid into the kitchen, beaming, in a floor-length flounced skirt and fringed shawl.

  ‘No, sweetheart—sorry. Not now.’

  Her smile faded. ‘But I’ve got a new dance to show you.’

  ‘Nicola’s asleep. She needs a very quiet house because she’s terribly sick.’

  She stared at me, sharply interested. ‘Is Nicola going to die?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘Tonight?’

  ‘No.’

  She began to twist the doorknob, writhing and grizzling. ‘I need you to play with me. I’m bored.’

  ‘Don’t push it, Bess. You heard what I said.’

  ‘If you don’t let me come in, I won’t be able to stop whining.’

  ‘Run home. Come back in the morning when she wakes up.’

  ‘It’s not even night-time yet!’

  ‘She’s asleep.’

  ‘If you don’t let me in, I’ll whine more. I’ll go berserk and do it even worse.’

  I shoved back my chair. Its legs screeched on the boards and she bolted. Her flamenco heels went click-eting across the brick paving and she vanished behind the rocket bed.

  I stopped on the back veranda. Further down the yard, beyond the shoulder-high broad beans with their black-and-white flowers, a small butternut pumpkin sat on the shed windowsill in what remained of the afternoon’s sun. It had rested there, forgotten by both our houses, for months. If it hadn’t dried out I could put it into the soup. I waited till I heard Bessie slam her back door, then I sneaked out and grabbed the pumpkin from the windowsill. It was suspiciously light. I stood it on the chopping board and pushed the point of the heavy knife through its faded yellow skin. Pouf. The blade sank through it. The pumpkin fell into two halves. The flesh was pale and fibrous, hardly more substantial than dust. I hacked it into chunks and shoved them into the compost bin.

  The night, when it came, was long. I woke many times. Once I heard the soft patter of rain. I parted the blind slats. A single light burned in the upper flat across the street: my comrade, that wakeful stranger. Towards four I crept along the hall and stood outside Nicola’s closed door. Her breathing was slow and regular, but coarse and very loud.

  I thought about the rattle that came out of my sister Madeleine’s throat ten minutes before she died. ‘Listen,’ I said to her son who was sitting red-eyed by her bed with his elbows resting on his knees. ‘She’s rattling. She’ll die soon.’

  ‘Nah,’ he said, ‘it’s just a bit of phlegm she’s too weak to cough up.’

  In the kitchen I switched on a lamp. There was a banana on the bench. Someone had started to peel it, eaten half, and lost interest. The rest of it lay abandoned in its loose, spotty skin.

  THE BACK of my house faced south, but a triangular window had been set high into the roof peak, so that north light flooded into the kitchen. I was standing in a patch of sun when Nicola made her entrance. I looked up, ready to rush to her. Her hair was damp and flat against her skull. Her nightdress, dark with moisture, clung to her body. But her shoulders were back, her neck was upright, and she was smiling, smiling, smiling.

  ‘Hello, darling!’ she carolled, in her blue-blood accent. ‘What a glorious morning! Oooh, there’s that banana. I think I’ll have it for breakfast. How did you sleep?’

  My mouth hung open. ‘How did you?’

  ‘Oh, I was fine, once I dropped off. Actually I did perhaps sweat a bit. I’ll run the sheets through your machine in a tick.’

  She strolled in and established herself on a stool opposite me at the bench. Lord, she was a good-looking woman. She had the dignified cheekbones, the straight nose and the long, mobile upper lip of a patrician: the squatter’s daughter that she was.

  ‘My God, what a flight,’ she said. ‘I had a family with four kids behind me, and they fought all the way to Melbourne about who’d sit next to the mother.’ She mimicked a high-pitched whine. ‘I want to sit with you, Mummy. Look after me, Mummy. I don’t love you any more, Mummy. I don’t even like you. I hate you, Mum!’

  She tossed her red wool shawl round her shoulders, raised her chin, and sparkled at me as if we wer
e settling in at the Gin Palace for a martini and an hour’s gossip.

  ‘Now,’ she said. ‘Where’s your phone? Professor Theodore told me to call him first thing.’

  ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘He’s the big cheese,’ she said grandly. ‘The whole thing’s inspired by his theories. He’s got to go overseas on Friday, though—that’s why he made me come down a week early. He insists on seeing me this morning before I start the treatment.’

  I passed her the cordless, went into the bathroom and closed the door. I could hear the tune, if not the words, of her telephone manner: innocently imperious, but sweetened by a confidential note, a bubbling stream of laughter. They’d be eating out of her hand. I turned on the shower.

  When I emerged in my towel, she was sitting on the stool, holding the black handset in her lap. The flesh of her cheeks, what was left of it, had collapsed.

  ‘He’s already gone.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘To China. They said he left yesterday.’

  A violent thrill ran down my arms and seethed in my fingertips. I closed my eyes. When I opened them, her smile was back in place.

  ‘But it’s all right. They said to come in anyway. A different doctor will see me. At four o’clock.’

  ‘I’m coming with you.’

  ‘Oh no, darling—I’ll take the train. Just point me in the direction of the station.’

  ‘You’re not in any condition to walk to the station.’

  ‘Of course I am! Look at me!’ She spread her arms. The dark red shawl was draped becomingly this way and that.

  ‘What about yesterday? I didn’t know what to do. You could hardly put one foot in front of the other.’

  ‘Oh, Hel! Did I give you a fright?’ She gave a gusty laugh. ‘You mustn’t worry when I get the shivers. It’s only a side-effect of the vitamin C driving out the toxins.’

  ‘You mean you’d had the vitamin C yesterday? Before you went to the airport?’

  She nodded, smiling hard, with her lips closed and her eyebrows high up into her forehead.

  ‘Jesus, Nicola—is it always that brutal?’

  ‘That was nothing. You should have seen me the first time. I had an afternoon appointment at a clinic on the North Shore. They pumped a bag of it into me. When they’d finished with me I was pretty shaken up. I needed to lie down for a while. But it was five o’clock and they were keen to close the rooms. They said to go home. I went out to the car but I knew I couldn’t drive. I could hardly even see. I felt so sick, all I could do was crawl into the back seat and lie down. I thought I’d stop shaking if I could get control of my breathing. But it kept getting worse. In the end I just got behind the wheel and drove home.’

  ‘From the North Shore to Elizabeth Bay? At peak hour? You drove?’

  She shrugged. ‘Had to. Iris was a bit taken aback when I staggered in.’

  She reached out for the remains of the banana, took a small bite and began to chew it carefully, with her front teeth and her incisors, right at the front of her mouth.

  ‘Are your gums sore?’

  ‘They’ve pulled out a couple of my molars.’

  ‘Give us a look.’

  She gulped down the scrap of banana and opened her jaws wide. I leaned across the bench on my elbows and peered in. Her tongue was quivering with the effort of lying flat. Halfway back, on either side, gaped a pink and pulpy hole. In the depths of each one I could see a lump of something white.

  ‘Is that pus? Have you got an infection?’

  ‘No, darling,’ she said, wiping her lips on a tea towel. ‘It’s just bone. The gum hasn’t grown back over the gap. I can only chew with my front teeth, like a rabbit.’ She laughed.

  ‘But is it going to heal? Did they say it would?’

  ‘Just watch me, babe. By the middle of next week, once the Theodore Institute’s on the job, I’ll have turned this whole damn thing around. The cancer will be on the run.’

  Again the bright laugh, the twinkle, the eyebrows flying up towards the hairline. I couldn’t meet her eye. I turned aside and looked out through the glass panels of the back door, into the yard. A streak of frilled fabric was darting along the path behind the broad beans. Oh no. Flamenco shoes rapped on the bricks, thundered on the veranda. The back door burst open.

  ‘Here I am! Are you ready for my show?’

  Nicola couldn’t turn her head. She had to swing her whole body around. ‘Who is this glorious señorita?’

  Bessie leaned back from the hips and flung her arms in a high curve round her head. The blood-red nasturtium she had stuck into the elastic of her ponytail trembled there, its juicy stem already drooping. She bent her wrists and began to twine her hands round each other. Her fingernails were grimy, her palms padded with thick calluses from the school-yard monkey bars. She lowered her brow in a challenging scowl and paced towards us, flicking aside the bulk of her skirt with every step.

  Nicola reared back on her stool. ‘Stop. What’s that cack on your lip?’

  Bessie dropped her arms and ran the back of one hand under her nostrils. It left a glistening trail across her cheek.

  ‘Oh shit.’ Nicola got off the stool and backed away. ‘I’m sorry, darling, but you can’t come in here with a cold. I’ve got no resistance left. Helen, you’ll have to send her home.’ She shuffled as fast as she could down the hall into the spare room, and pulled the door shut behind her.

  I picked up a pencil and took a breath to start explaining cell counts and immune systems, but Bessie didn’t ask. She stood in the centre of the room with her arms dangling. Her face was blank. I heard the neighbour over the back lane slam his car door and drive away. At once his dog began its daily barking and howling. We had adapted our nerves to its tedious racket and no longer thought of complaining, but maybe the wind that morning was blowing from a new direction, for the high-pitched cries floated over the fence and right into our yard, filling the sunny air with lamentation.

  Nicola wanted me to walk her to the station that afternoon and teach her the ticketing system so she could get to the clinic by herself each day, but it was her first consultation with these new people, and I’d heard it said that in such situations you needed a friend with you, someone less panicky than you and not deaf with fear, who could hear what the doctor said and remember it afterwards. I didn’t mention any of this. I pressed her to let me drive her into the city, just this once, to show her the least confusing, the handsomest way to get there.

  We parked under the Hyatt and strolled down Collins Street. The plane trees brushed their fresh leaves against the facades of the old-fashioned buildings. To Max Mara and Zambesi, Ermenegildo Zegna, Bang & Olufsen we paid no attention. She kept an eye out for juice shops and coffee bars. Umbrellas fluttered over the pavement tables. Big coaches from the country throbbed outside The Lion King. The chiming trams on Swanston Street excited her. I saw the beauty of my city and was proud that she saw it too.

  We turned into the cool canyon of Flinders Lane. She snapped the rubber band off her bulging old Filofax and checked the number. ‘This is it.’

  The old building was tall and square and substantial, like the bank-shaped money-boxes we had as children, but its street frontage had been taken over by discount opal shops and fast food outlets: its white-tiled entryway was dilapidated, its grand mirrors speckled and scarred. As women in their sixties learn to do, we averted our eyes from our reflections, and made straight for the glass-fronted list of tenants: nine floors of people engaged in modest, honourable trades—button suppliers, bridal costumiers, milliners. The Theodore Institute: top floor. We peered through the lattice into the huge lift well with its swaying cables. Nicola pulled an apprehensive face. In the ancient cage as it clanked upward I felt too close to something fragile in her, something I could damage with my scepticism.

  ‘This could be the Faraway Tree,’ I said. ‘I wonder what Land we’ll find, at the top?’

  She flashed me a tiny, grateful smile, and returned her gaze to the li
no. I thought, I will kill anyone who hurts you. I will tear them limb from limb. I will make them wish they had never been born. Almighty God, I thought, to whom all hearts are open. The lift landed with a bump. It was four o’clock on the dot. The door slid open and we stepped out.

  The hallway was dark and narrow. Each door had a panel of bathroom glass at eye level. One room was open: as we passed we glimpsed a girl with bowed head, sewing something under a cone of lamplight, while Tom Waits croaked away beside her on a radio.

  We found the Theodore Institute at the very end of the hall. An empty wheelchair blocked the entry. The door was locked. We pressed the bell. No answer, though I sensed a vague commotion. I put my eye to the brass letter slot. Then a buzzer sounded beside us, and the door swung open. I stood back and Nicola led me in.

  The room within was painted a strange yellow, the colour of controlled panic. Jonquils had dried in a vase on the reception counter, behind which a female attendant flustered at a computer. Several people sat on a row of folding chairs with their backs to a blank wall. One haggard woman, who had lost a leg, sat in silence with her hands clasped and her eyes down. Another was busy trying to thread a bright metallic scarf through the loops of a little black toque she wore on her bald head. I sat down while Nicola presented herself at the counter.

  The toque woman caught my eye and smiled. ‘I’m Marj. This is my husband Vin. We’ve come all the way from Broken Hill.’ They both shook hands with me. Vin was a big, slow-moving bloke in shorts and tightly pulled up white socks. Marj went on tugging and pushing at the scarf.

  ‘I like your hat,’ I said. ‘It’s elegant.’

  ‘Well,’ she said with reckless gaiety, ‘if you gotta go, you might as well go out sparkling.’

  We all laughed, except the one-legged woman, who had not raised her eyes from the remainder of her lap. Meanwhile I could hear the attendant, a plain, brown-haired girl with a high ponytail who had introduced herself as Colette, chattering away to Nicola at the counter.

  ‘I know it’s a disappointment for you, but Professor Theodore suddenly had to go to China! And he won’t be back till next week. Don’t you worry, though, because we’ve got another doctor. He usually only comes in on Fridays to make a presentation, but this week he’ll be here on a Monday. And he’ll see you!’