Free The Spare Room by Helen Garner Page B

paper napkin and shoved it into a glass. ‘Or maybe…consciously or otherwise…she’s come to your house to die.’
    I looked up in dismay. ‘But I’m going away in December. I’ve paid for my ticket.’
    ‘Don’t panic,’ said Lucy, undoing the clasp of her fat leather purse. ‘No one can plan these things. Stage four can go on for years.’
    ‘But you don’t really think that’s why she came, do you?’
    ‘It’s a long way to come for a treatment. And she sounds as if she’s getting quite a grip on you. That’s when mothers get punitive. When their shift never ends.’
    She laughed, and pointed at my hands clasped on the tabletop. The knuckles were white.
    ‘You’re fighting,’ she said, ‘to hold on to what’s been precious in this friendship. But you don’t want to go crazy, or lose your grip on reality the way she has. It is a sort of madness. And it’s quite common.’
    We split the bill, piling notes and coins on the sticky tabletop, and thumped down the stairs into the lane.
    ‘Do you ever go to communion?’ she asked as she unchained her bike from the car-park railing.
    ‘No. I can’t find a church I can stand. I hate it when they’re ponderous.’
    ‘Go to the Catholics, then. They really rip along.’
    We laughed. A warm breeze puffed among the rubbish bins.
    ‘Hey Luce. Can I ask you something? Would you bless me?’
    She paused, with the straps of her helmet dangling beside her smooth cheeks. She made as if to take it off.
    ‘Leave it on,’ I said. ‘It makes you look official.’
    ‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘there’s only one prayer to say. Lamb of God. You take away the sin of the world.’
    I stood in front of her, listening and nodding. She put her palm against my forehead. Have mercy on us. Then she made a little twirl with her thumb, maybe the sign of the cross, I couldn’t see.
    ‘May the Lord bless you and keep you,’ she said.
    ‘Thank you.’
    ‘And make His face to shine upon you.’
    She buckled up her helmet, flicked on her lights, kissed me on both cheeks, and pedalled away in a westerly direction.

WHEN I walked into the kitchen, the lamp was on and Nicola was standing at the bench, chewing, with one hand plunged into a large, squat, brown paper bag.
    ‘Look at these!’
    She held out a cupped palm full of creamy white pips. ‘They’re apricot kernels. You know—the bits you smash the stones to get out, and put it in the jam to make it set?’
    ‘Pectin?’
    ‘Laetrile. It attacks cancer, Professor Theodore says. I have to eat twenty a day.’ She raised her palm to her mouth and nibbled from it with her front teeth. ‘Have some.’
    I picked one out of the bag: there must have been two kilos of the things. It had a peculiar flavour; delicious, but wild and with a distant after-taste, like something that might be poisonous if you got the quantities wrong. I ate several more. She gave me a companionable smile and we stood there, munching.
    ‘How did you go today?’
    ‘They plugged me into the vitamin C,’ she said, ‘and I lay there all afternoon waiting for the cold shudders and sweats to start. Not a squeak. Not a quiver. I felt a complete idiot. Like when you take your car to the mechanic and suddenly it’s running perfectly.’
    We started to laugh.
    ‘Did you ask them about the pain?’
    Once more she brushed it aside. ‘Lay off, Hel—these people deal with cancer every day. Pain’s not something they want to hear about.’
    I let it pass. I had to learn to let it pass.
    ‘Remember Marj from Broken Hill?’ she said cheerfully. ‘The bald lady in the little black toque, that you liked? Do you know how she heard about the Theodore? In a seance. And that’s why she came all this way. And next week some people are arriving from Canada! To do the treatments!’
    She grinned at me, stuffing in another handful of pips. Mine were starting to make me feel a bit sick. I dropped them back in the bag. Under the bench I found a huge jar with a