The Spare Room. Helen Garner

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