Free The Spare Room by Helen Garner Page A

and say, ‘All right. I’m going to die. I bow to it. Now I will live the rest of my life in truth.’
    ‘And from what you’re telling me,’ said the nurse, in her soft, unreproachful voice, ‘I’m wondering whether you should try to accept that Nicola might be one of these. That she might…die in this state.’

    I came up the steps from Parliament Station and spotted Lucy cruising into Little Collins Street on her touring bike. It had big, reliable-looking panniers and, although the sun had not set, she had turned on one of those fast-blinking tail-lights that illuminate the countryside for miles around. By the time I caught up with her, she was chaining the bike to a railing. Even as early as six we weren’t the first customers at the Waiters’ Club: at the top of the wooden stairs, the joint was jumping. We ordered a couple of grilled flounder. The waitress brought wine in tumblers and I began to gulp it down. Lucy saw from the look on my face that I was going to have to hog the conversation. I started with the enemas.
    ‘If she’s constipated,’ she said, ‘an enema could move stuff along—that might relieve the pain in her belly.’
    ‘Yes, I can see that. I’m the last person to have a problem with enemas. But coffee ones? Is coffee good for pain? And apparently the coffee has to be organic.’
    ‘For God’s sake! It’s going up her bum—isn’t instant good enough?’
    ‘The boss of the clinic said it might reduce her reliance on morphine.’
    ‘What reliance? Is she shovelling it down? Bombed out of her brain? Queuing up first thing every morning at the doctor’s?’
    Oh, the crazed relief of dobbing, of disloyalty.
    We drank; we devoured the flat, pale fish; we polished off a salad and a pile of pancakes with lemon juice, and while we ate I jabbered and Lucy split her sides. When the espresso arrived we both calmed down, and she began to analyse.
    ‘I’m not surprised she laughed at your fear. Laughter like that’s a sort of aggression, don’t you think? You’re the messenger with the bad news. She’d like to kill you for trying to carry it to her. She’s fighting to keep it away—as if the message itself might kill her on the spot.’
    ‘So why did she choose me to stay with?’
    ‘She must trust you. You could take it as a compliment.’
    ‘I do. But there are clinics in Sydney where you can get these loony treatments. She’s got heaps of friends up there—people from long before I met her. They’d have no trouble at all with ozone and cupping. And they wouldn’t keep pulling the rug out from under her. I’m scared she’s going to turn me into a horrible, punitive mother.’
    Lucy drained the tiny cup of coffee. ‘When I worked with cancer patients, years ago, there was a man I used to sit with sometimes, who was dying, but his family was pretending he was going to get better. He got attached to me, I think. I liked him a lot. We used to have long, existential conversations and I looked forward to them. On this particular day it was past the end of my shift—I was tired, my feet were sore, I should have been out of there already. I just popped my head round his door on my way home, and he hit me with it: “I haven’t got long to go, have I.” I wasn’t prepared—I gave a pat answer. He turned away and said in a bored, dismissive tone, “If you say so.” I was upset. He’d given me an opening and I’d missed it. I went off feeling I’d failed him. But when I got home I realised it didn’t matter how pathetic my response was. Because there was a silent understanding between us. There was nobody else in that room with him, no one else in his life at that time, who would “say so”.’
    She smiled at me with her head on one side. I only just bit back the words, ‘Gee, you look like Mum’: this was not considered a compliment between us.
    ‘You mean I have to say so and yet not say so?’
    ‘Maybe she’s picked you for that exact job.’ She screwed up her