The Spare Room. Helen Garner

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.

      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