Читать книгу The Spare Room - Helen Garner - Страница 8

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 were 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 lino. 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!’

I could see Nicola nodding and nodding, propping herself on the counter with trembling forearms.

‘What’s Professor Theodore actually doing, in China?’ I called out from my metal chair. ‘Because he did make a special point of wanting to examine Nicola before she started the program. Couldn’t he have let her know his plans had changed?’

I was trying to sound courteous and firm, but the vibe in the room stiffened and an uncomfortable silence fell.

Colette’s voice dropped an octave. ‘Oh,’ she murmured, ‘it’s a very important international conference.’ Her face radiated a timid solemnity. She spread her palms and lifted her shoulders and eyebrows: the obligations of this demi-god, her employer, were beyond her ken. No one looked at me. Nicola, credit card in hand, kept her back to me. I subsided, but my heart was thumping.

By the time Nicola had filled in a thick form and forked out two thousand dollars for the opening week’s program, it was after five o’clock. ‘You’ll be seen in half an hour!’ cried Colette. We settled down to wait. In rooms beyond the reception area we sensed movement, heard voices. Once or twice a chubby man with a buzz-cut popped his head round the door and bestowed a benign smile on the people numbly waiting. Were we imagining it, or did the air of the clinic smell faintly pleasant? An elusive odour from nature, or even from our distant childhoods? Was it the scent of summer? We could not pin it down.

Nicola folded her long legs under her in yoga position on her chair, and opened an Alexander McCall-Smith novel she had had the sense to bring. I flipped in silence through ragged back numbers of New Weekly, looking for cosmetic surgery disasters to sneer at. Once we would have gone into paroxysms together at a condition called trout mouth. Now, angry and full of fear, I kept it to myself.

There was a water filter in a corner, and a tower of plastic cups, but nothing to eat. It had not occurred to us to bring food. Marj and Vin shared a sandwich wrapped in foil. At six I took the lift down to the street. In the low sun, city workers were still streaming along Swanston Street towards the station. I bought two bottles of fruit juice in a sandwich bar.

When I rushed back in, the atmosphere of humble patience had not wavered. I thrust a bottle into Nicola’s hand and she guzzled its contents.

At half past six Marj from Broken Hill shifted in her seat, leaned forward and began to cough. A hacking and a rending convulsed her; a tearing intake of breath followed each spasm. She discreetly spat the proceeds into a tissue and stowed it in a plastic bag. No one spoke. We had now been waiting for almost three hours.

Just before seven, Colette burst out from an inner room and made a joyful announcement. ‘Hello, everyone! At seven o’clock we’re going to have a presentation. And after that, Nicola, Dr Tuckey will see you.’

At last Tuckey wandered into the reception area. We raised our weary eyes to him. His face, floating on the sea of himself, was oddly disarming.

‘Half the staff are away this week,’ he murmured, ‘so we’re in a bit of chaos.’

I raised my hand. ‘Can you tell us what effect on the week’s arrangements the absence of Professor Theodore is likely to have?’

The other patients turned their heads listlessly, then withdrew eye contact.

The doctor looked right at me, but he seemed almost shy. ‘You mean on the, uhm, quality of the treatment?’ he said.

‘No,’ I said, ‘I mean will things be better organised than they’ve been today? Because we need to know how to arrange our time. So I can deliver my friend here every morning and pick her up every afternoon. And keep our lives outside of here running in some sort of reasonable way.’

Vin from Broken Hill flicked me a look, along which travelled what I read as a tiny current of solidarity. He didn’t believe in this rigmarole either. He had to pretend to because his wife was desperate, because he loved her. Tuckey murmured something reassuring, still far short of an apology. Again my heart was thudding. My cheeks were red. Nicola looked at me kindly, then away again. I felt I had shamed her. I held my tongue.

The doctor set up a screen against a wall, opened a laptop on the counter, and stood resting one elbow beside it. Without having to be asked, we shuffled our chairs into better viewing positions. Somebody sighed. He pressed the first key and up came the title of his talk: ‘Cancer and It’s Treatments’. I didn’t dare look at Nicola: not because she would laugh, but because I was afraid she wouldn’t.

‘I’m going to tell you,’ Dr Tuckey began, ‘about our key cancer-killing therapies. You know how an octopus can break a big rock with its tentacles? Well that’s what a cancer cell’s like.’

Did he mean the cell was like the octopus or like the rock? The doctor’s manner, as he worked his way down the dot points, was modest and amiable, almost soothing. Everything about him was spongy, without defence: you could not hate him. But his discourse had a stupefying effect. My mind veered about, seeking something to grip. I was tired, I was hungry. My concentration waxed and waned. Once or twice I nodded off. This was not the moment to zone out. I pushed my chair back a few feet and sneaked the notebook and pen out of my bag.

‘Stress,’ he said, ‘is the biggest cause of cancer in our society. Stress makes us vulnerable to whatever nasties we have lurking in our beings.’

That wasn’t so outlandish. My thoughts coasted sideways to my sister Madeleine, her relentless grief and rage when her husband drowned in the surf: how she wielded without mercy the manipulative power of her suffering. Ten years later an untreatable cancer was found in her lung. She accepted her death sentence quietly, without mutiny; perhaps, we thought in awe, she even welcomed it. She laid down her gun. She let us cherish her. We nursed her. In less than a year, with her family near her, she put aside her knitting and died, in her own house, in the bed she had shared with her husband, while outside the window the shapely limbs of the trees they had planted together stood leafless in the late winter air.

‘If people are struck by lightning and survive,’ the doctor was saying, ‘their cancers shrink and disappear.’

I glanced at the other listeners. No one seemed to find this strange.

‘A fissure in the earth under your house can disturb the electro-magnetic field. In Germany, quite a high percentage of cancer victims are living over one of these.’

A fissure? Didn’t I read about that in the seventies? People whose living room floor collapsed into a disused mine shaft? Whose grand piano slid into the chasm and vanished forever? And on top of that they got cancer?

Nicola’s head was cocked in a posture of intent listening.

‘The incidence of certain sorts of cancer is known to be much lower round the equator. This is good, solid research—published just a few months ago.’

Now I was wide awake.

‘High dosage vitamin C will kill off lumps of cancer and boost the immune system. And our ozone sauna treatment is based on the old natural-therapy approach to cancer—sweating out the toxins. Most doctors don’t know this stuff. But it’s good science.’

Nicola sat chin in hand, her handsome face suffused with an expression of deep pleasantness, offering the doctor generous eye contact, and nodding, always nodding.

Vin from Broken Hill laid his hand on his wife’s legs, which were now resting across his lap. His tenderness moved something painful in me. It rebuked me in my suspicion and contempt. What did I know about cancer? Maybe there was something in these cockamamie theories. Maybe they were the future. Maybe Leo was wrong when he stated that vitamin C did not shrink tumours. Maybe it was unfair that these pioneers had fallen foul of the authorities and were obliged to treat their patients in shabby private clinics.

But I couldn’t help sneaking looks at the loose swag of flesh that overlapped the waistband of Dr Tuckey’s trousers. His shirt buttons divided it into a double burden. It did not appear to be meaningfully attached to his frame. It swayed half a beat behind his movements: it trembled, it hung, a shapeless cargo of meat.

~

At a quarter past eight that first evening, four hours after the time of her appointment, Nicola was called in to see Dr Tuckey.

‘Come on, Hel,’ she said, stowing the novel into her shoulder bag and setting out for the inner room. I paused at the door but Nicola did not hesitate. She barged in and took the first chair she saw. I scurried after her.

A cold fluoro strip lit a scene of disorder, as of recent arrival or imminent flight. The whole floor was taken up by cardboard cartons, some of them in toppling waist-high stacks, others split and spewing manila folders. Empty metal shelves stood about on pointless angles. The window was unshielded except for a broken venetian that hung derelict on one cord.

The surface of the desk across which the doctor greeted us with a genial nod was strewn with electronic cables. He shoved aside a large TV monitor and made a narrow space for Nicola’s file, which he began to open and close with penguin-like flappings of his hands. She launched a coherent account of her cancer, the discovery of it in her bowel, her theories about its origins, the history of its progress through her body, and the array of treatments she had already undergone. Dr Tuckey listened with flowing gestures of comfort and sympathy, like an old lady hovering over the tea things: frowning and clicking his tongue and shaking his head and raising his eyebrows and pursing his lips. Then, when Nicola fell silent, he began to speak.

‘You sound like the perfect person,’ he said, ‘for our kind of approach.’

She straightened her spine and leaned back in her chair. She was smiling.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I think you’ll respond to it very well.’

~

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.