Free The Spare Room by Helen Garner

through the room with my eyes down.

    At lunchtime she phoned me from the clinic. She was merry, and warm. Guess what! Professor Theodore was back from China. She liked him! And he’d had a wonderful idea—that after the vitamin C treatment she should stay lying down in one of the rooms all afternoon, to see if the cold shudders happened. So he could ‘monitor’ them. Not only that—he’d suggested she should try coffee enemas. He thought they might lessen her dependence on the morphine. So she was going to pop out, before they plugged in the vitamin C, to buy some organic coffee. Did I know where she could get some in the city?
    Wasn’t there a sort of light machine gun called an Uzi?
    ‘Try David Jones’ Food Hall,’ I said.
    ‘Thanks, darling. Don’t bother to cook anything tonight. I won’t be home till after eight. There’s a two-hour lecture here that I’m supposed to go to—byeeeee.’
    I sat on the back step and wrestled with the blackest, most glowering scepticism. I didn’t want to be a bigot. How could I detach from this? Serve her, yet detach? I rang my sister Lucy, the religious one, the former nurse, and arranged to meet her at the Waiters’ Club at six o’clock.

    That afternoon a woman from the Mercy palliative called me. No, they were not just for cancer patients or the dying. They were part of the free District Nursing Service. She had offered to come over on Saturday morning to meet us both, but apparently Nicola was not so keen. Her name was Carmel, and yes, she had a moment to talk with me now.
    I rattled off the short version. When I trailed away she left a tactful pause before she spoke. Western medicine, she said, when it had reached the end of what it had to offer, would usually throw in the towel and say so; but outfits like the Theodore Institute tended to keep people linked to them in cloudy hope, right to the end.
    Right to the end .
    ‘Does Nicola have any religious beliefs?’
    I went quiet.
    When my former husband had first introduced me to her, fifteen years ago, I took to Nicola at once. Everything about her, the way she placed food on the table or rolled a cigarette or slung a length of coloured fabric around her neck, was carefree and graceful. In her presence, things slowed down and opened out. I admired the Indian-tinged style of her house and the things she wore. I did spot a couple of photos of a hot-eyed guru lurking in a dark corner of the bookshelves, but she never referred to him, and I didn’t ask. I assumed she was an old hand at meditation and yoga, and that if she had any particular beliefs they were so ingrained that she didn’t need to speak about them, just as I kept quiet about my adventures in churches.
    Then in recent years, shortly before she became ill, Buddhist terms had entered her discourse. She knew how to pronounce rinpoche and where to get a ticket when the famous ones were coming to town. She subjected herself to ten-day vipassana boot camps in the Blue Mountains: her accounts of these speechless ordeals were shaped to make me laugh, but she always came back to the city elated. She referred casually to weekend teachings, and to new friends with names that sounded made up; she had taken to wearing little thread bangles, or a string of knobbly, dark red wooden beads. So I imagined that somewhere in her free-wheeling nature she was quietly equipping herself, as everyone must, with whatever it is one needs to die.
    ‘It depends,’ I said at last, ‘on what you would call religious.’
    ‘It’s just that in my work,’ said Carmel, ‘I’ve learnt that there are people who never, ever face the fact that death’s coming to them. They go on fighting right up to their last breath.’ She paused. ‘And it is one way of doing it.’
    Again the vast weakness sifted through me. I saw that I had been working towards a glorious moment of enlightenment, when Nicola would lay down her manic defences; when she would look around her, take a deep breath,