Читать книгу The Spare Room - Helen Garner - Страница 9

ON TUESDAY morning we took the train to the city. I showed her how to avoid the chaos of Flinders Street Station by getting off at Parliament; we walked down to the Theodore Institute together. Sensing wariness in Colette’s greeting, I left Nicola there to settle in for her first treatment, and went downstairs to get myself a coffee.

Twenty minutes later, when I returned, the waiting room was empty. No one seemed to be in charge. I ran my eye over the framed diplomas on the wall behind the reception desk. Ah, here were Tuckey’s credentials: a lot of polysyllabic alternative stuff with curlicues, and a string of initials that looked medical. All right, but where the hell was he? Who was running this joint? I could hear Colette behind a partition, gaily bashing someone’s ear about her passion for figure skating. There was a bell on the counter. I rang it. She popped her head in and directed me to a side door.

Beyond it, in a cramped space whose window, if you stood on your toes, gave a side view of the cathedral, I found Nicola enclosed to the chin in a sort of low tent; her grinning face poked out at the top through a hole that was sealed round her neck with a strip of plastic and a pink towel. The strange perfume from nature that we had remarked upon the day before hung in the air again.

‘What the hell is this? You look like a cartoon lady in a weight-loss clinic.’ Again we laughed.

‘It’s an ozone sauna. Look inside.’

I unzipped the front of the tent and saw her seated on a white plastic chair, naked but for a towel, and holding in each hand a wand-like object wrapped in kitchen paper. The perfumed vapour oozed out in wisps. I closed the zip. She tilted her head towards a murky sheet of A4 paper pinned to the wall. I stepped up to look. It was a list of instructions on resuscitation. We regarded each other without expression.

‘What are those things you’re holding?’

‘Electrodes.’ She shut her eyes and leaned back.

Electrodes. I held my peace. Morning sunshine fell into the room through the high window. The ozone smelled delicious, very subtle and refreshing, like watermelon, or an ocean breeze. I sat on a chair in the corner and pulled the lid off my coffee.

~

An hour later, Colette bustled in and ushered Nicola to another room. There she lay on her back on a high, hard bed that was covered with flowered cloth, while the young woman applied Chinese cups to her shoulder, her neck and her belly. Like many people I knew, I had submitted to cupping once or twice, and thought nothing of it either way; but these cups had nipples with tubes running into them, through which more ozone was to be pumped from a large, rusty-looking tank attached to the wall by a metal chain around its girth.