by Helen Garner
When we were called into the surgery I dived for the seat near the door, and Nicola shuffled to the patient’s chair beside the doctor at her desk.
‘I think I need stronger morphine,’ she announced, with a smile so sheepish it made her look like a simpleton.
Dr Caplan stared at her, incredulous, almost laughing. Her eyes shone with a furious intelligence. I was scared of her. I wanted to shout Please help me.
‘Who’s co-ordinating your treatment?’ she snapped. ‘Who’s handling your pain?’
She twisted on her swivel chair, twining her bare, skinny legs around each other under the desk.
‘What do you think—what’s your name? Helen?’ She flung a scornful look at me over her grey linen shoulder. ‘How are you experiencing all this?’
I floundered. ‘Nicola doesn’t like to hear me say it,’ I said. ‘But they’re negligent. They don’t have proper supervision. They—’
She cut across me and turned back to Nicola. ‘Who referred you to them?’
‘My GP in Sydney,’ said Nicola. Her head was hanging forward like a crone’s. ‘He specialises in cancer.’
The doctor lowered her face so she could look Nicola in the eye.
‘Most people with an illness like yours,’ she said, articulating with textbook crispness, ‘and who went interstate for treatment, would take with them a letter from their oncologist. A documentation of their condition and the treatments they’ve already had. I can’t tell what your cancer’s doing. You need to go to an oncologist here. And you need someone to put proper pain-management in place.’
She pulled a pad towards her and drove her pen across it.
‘I’m sending you straight to this oncologist,’ she said. ‘His name’s John Maloney. I’m going to call him and tell him you’re coming. You’re to make an appointment. Today. Is that clear?’
Again she raked me with a look. It stung me to be included in her contempt. I almost burst into a whine: It’s not my fault! You don’t understand what I’m up against.
She tapped out a script for stronger morphine and handed it to Nicola. We walked back to the Theodore Institute with our tails between our legs, and I set off again for the Epworth.
At five o’clock Nicola slid through the front door and straight into her room. Half an hour later she limped out to the kitchen, where I was playing with my new juicer. She had the shudders again, she said, and the pain in her arm was bad. In a quiet, unstrained voice she asked me for help.
In her room I closed the blind and switched on the heater. She lay down groaning and shivering. I brought her a glass of water and she swallowed one of the new morphine capsules. She turned on to her side.
‘My shoulder’s killing me. And it was probably just the steam, but this morning when I was getting out of the shower I couldn’t catch my breath.’
‘Did you call the oncologist?’
‘Yep,’ she said. ‘Seeing him Wednesday morning. The Theodore people have heard of him. Colette says he can get a bit snaky.’
I lay down behind her, with my whole front against her back, while she waited for the morphine. Cold shudders rippled down her torso and along her limbs.
‘I don’t think I’ll do the vitamin C any more,’ she murmured. ‘It’s too hard. I’m too weak for it, at the moment.’
This was what I had been fighting for, but my heart began to ache.
‘Hel,’ she said, after a long time. ‘Thanks for letting me stay.’
‘My house is your house.’
‘I knew I was almost out of energy. It was all I could do to get to you.’
‘Go to sleep, now.’
‘And thanks for yelling at me in the kitchen. It was brave.’
‘Brave? I don’t know how you can forgive me. I monstered you.’
‘Yeah, but it worked.’
A tremor of laughter ran through her.
‘When I was having a nap afterwards,’ she said, ‘I had a really vivid dream. There was this cute puppy, like a cartoon dog, with floppy sweet little ears.’ Her voice softened. ‘And as I looked at it, a great big pair of scissors appeared and went snip! snip! Cut off both its ears.’
Aghast, I stared at the nape of her neck.
She made a blurry sound, half laugh half grunt. ‘It’s good, darling. Cutting off all that childish crap.’
We lay in the dimmed room like two felled logs. I could feel her torso loosening, giving in.
‘Hel,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t think I’ll make it to the dinner. You go. Have a drink for me. Happy birthday, ol’ bean ol’ pea.’
Light rain was falling. I picked my way through the vegetables to the gap in the fence and up the yard. The house next door was in turmoil. Some cousins with their three children had come for the meal. The fathers were locked in conference about the roasting lamb, the mothers were laughing on the couch with their heads together, and the toddlers, their hair standing on end like dandelion fluff, were thundering among the furniture beating each other with rolled-up newspapers. Bessie was lost in a fit of melodramatic weeping for which no one could find a motive. Her cousin Frank, a thoughtful child to whom she was passionately devoted, loitered just outside the room, disconcerted, bored and patient.
‘Come on, Bessie Boop, you’ve got to stop crying,’ I said.
She heard the mechanical note in my protest and redoubled her howls.
‘You must stop,’ I said pointlessly. ‘Stop now.’
I carried her front to front into the laundry where between her heaves and gasps I managed to insert a question about a new shelf her father had built there. Instantly she snapped out of it, and engaged me in a cheerful discussion of how I might have exactly such a shelf installed in my laundry. We went out to the back veranda, sat on its edge with our feet on the steps, and watched the drizzle.
Frank wormed in between us. They looked at each other fondly. Soon they invited me to play a game they had invented called Going to Lands.
‘How about we go to Shoeland?’ said Frank.
‘In Shoeland,’ Bessie explained to me, ‘everything has to have a shoe on it. Water has a shoe on it.’
‘Air has a shoe on it.’
‘A roof has a shoe on it.’
‘Even poo,’ said Frank, ‘has a tiny shoe on it.’
Thus we comforted and entertained ourselves. The rain kept gently falling. Mitch brought me a glass of sparkling shiraz. Soon the dinner was on the table. All was orderly and festive. There were sixty-four candles. The effort to blow them out made my head spin.
Every half-hour I ran home to check on Nicola. The first few times she was asleep. Then I found her sitting on the edge of her bed in the dark, eyes closed, spine bowed, hands folded in her lap. Her loneliness pierced me.
‘What can I bring you, old girl?’
‘In all the world,’ she said in a slurred voice, ‘I most would love a glass of orange juice.’
I squeezed the last two fruits we had, and brought her the foaming glass. She drank it sip by sip.
‘That,’ she whispered, ‘was the freshest, most delicious orange juice I’ve ever drunk in my life.
’ I tucked her back into bed, and she subsided with a sigh.
When at ten o’clock I came home for good, I stood outside her door for a long time and listened to her slow, snoring breaths. One day soon they would stop. Would I be with her when she went? I was her friend, yes, and I loved her, but I was a recent friend: I had known her for only fifteen years. Surely her dearest, her oldest friends were Sydney people. In a couple of days, when her three weeks with me were over, she would fly home to them, and to her family: they would take over, and I would go back to my role as darling Hel in Melbourne, the practical type with a handy authoritarian streak, who had work to do and a ticket to Vienna in December.
ON TUESDAY morning, to escape the attentions of Bessie, I planned to take my laptop to the State Library and knock over the magician review there. Nicola and I could catch the same train to the city.
The station was a seven-minute walk from my house, twenty if you had cancer. It was still lightly raining. I dug out my two umbrellas. As I pulled the front door shut behind us, I glanced at Nicola’s feet. On them was her usual pair of Chinese slippers made of thin black cotton fabric.
‘Hey, dingdong,’ I said. ‘Notice water falling from the sky? You can’t wear those.’
‘Don’t be silly, darling. I’ll be fine.’
‘Nicola. The street is full of puddles. You’ll have wet feet all day. You’ll catch cold.’
‘But I haven’t brought anything else.’ She made as if to step out on to the darkened bricks.
‘Put on your Dunlop Volleys.’
‘They wore out,’ she said. ‘I went to Gowing’s for a new pair, but they don’t make the originals any more. I refuse to buy those ugly modern ones.’
She came to me with no proper shoes. The backs of my hands set up their treacherous prickling. The rain continued to fall, hitting the mulch with soft, sparse pats. I closed my eyes and rapped out an order.
‘You must go out at lunchtime today and get yourself some runners. Go to Sam Bear, or Target in Bourke Street. I don’t care if they’re original or retro or whatever the fuck they are—you’ve got to have a decent pair of wet weather shoes.’
‘All right, Matron,’ she said, humbly. Then she sparked up. ‘I know. We can drive to the station.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but there’s only one-hour parking. I’ll drive you to the station, and come back here and leave the car, then I’ll catch the next train.’
‘Oh, but that’s such a nuisance for you, darling.’
‘There’s no choice,’ I said. ‘Hop in.’
Outside Newmarket station I sat behind the wheel and watched her shuffle doggedly up the ramp in her inadequate footwear. I was free now till late afternoon. The State Library seemed a thousand miles away. How could I drag myself that far? I parked the car and took the laptop into the cafe on the corner. I had never written anything in a cafe and I wasn’t going to start now. My heart was full of holes. Everything strong and purposeful was draining out of me. When my coffee came I could hardly lift the cup. I drove home. My desk was buried under sliding heaps of unread and unanswered mail. I had lost control of my life. I laid the laptop down and began drearily to sort things into some sort of order.
Deep in the pile I found a scrap of paper bearing the scribbled words Health Services Commission. A worm of energy stirred in me. I looked it up in the phone book and called the number. A woman answered. I told her I wanted to make a complaint about an alternative cancer clinic that I believed was a fraud.
‘Are you the patient?’ she asked.
‘No. I’m the patient’s friend.’
‘Then I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do for you,’ she said, in a kind but finalising tone. ‘We can only take complaints from people who’ve undergone treatment.’
‘Wait. Wait,’ I said. ‘I can understand that—but I don’t imagine I’d be the only person objecting to this joint. Maybe you could take down what I witnessed, and use it as corroboration for other complaints.’
‘No, I don’t think so,’ she said.
‘Is there any other government body I could approach?’
‘Not that I know of.’
‘Well—what am I supposed to do, then?’
‘What’s the name of the place?’ she said, humouring me.
‘The Theodore Institute.’
An electric silence. Then she said, in a voice whose sudden aliveness she could not conceal, ‘Would you hold the line a moment?’
I waited. When she came back she was fully present.
‘Yes, we would like to hear what you’ve got to say. I’m going to give you the name of an investigator. You should call him and make an appointment.’
He was driving on the freeway when I reached his mobile. He pulled over immediately. He sounded like a cop. I told him the story and he listened without a single interruption.
The Theodore Institute, he said, had been under investigation for some time. It was acceptable for me to make a complaint without Nicola’s permission, as long as I myself had seen who administered the treatments. ‘
Will your friend speak to me?’
‘No way. She thinks they’re going to save her life. I’m doing this behind her back.’
‘I could come to your house next week. Would you be prepared to talk on tape?’
‘Is the Pope a Catholic?’
He laughed. Was that the roar of freeway traffic, or the distant hoof-beats of the cavalry?
Nicola was already home that afternoon when I got back from Moonee Ponds with a carload of food. Her sopping Chinese slippers were propped over the laundry trough, and the runners she had bought at Target were on her feet. She displayed them with ostentatious disapproval. I laughed.
‘Did you write your article?’ she asked.
‘Nope. Didn’t write a word.’
‘What? That’s really bad,’ she said roguishly. ‘That’s naughty. You’ll be telling people it’s naughty Nicola’s fault that you’re not doing any work.’
The air in the room thickened. Keeping my eyes down, I lugged the baskets of food into the kitchen and dumped them on the floor.
‘I didn’t waste the day.’ I heard in my voice the pathetic attempt to dodge her accusation. ‘I answered some letters and made some phone calls. I just didn’t write the story. I’ll do it on Thursday.’
But she had already lost interest.
‘Anyway my news,’ she said, ‘is that they’ve persuaded me to have the vitamin C again tomorrow after all.’
I straightened up and looked at her in silence.
‘A very low dose,’ she added, watching me.
‘Whose idea?’
‘Another doctor who came in today. He said he’d never, ever seen anyone react to the vitamin C the way I do.’
‘Really. Have other people had negative reactions?’
‘No—no one’s had the reaction I have.’
‘Yes, I understand that, but has anyone ever reported any other sort of bad reaction to it?’
‘No. Nobody’s ever even heard of anyone reacting the way I do.’
Take a breath. Let it pass.
‘Hang on, though—isn’t tomorrow your appointment with the oncologist?’
Her brow crinkled. ‘Yes, but that’s at half past eleven. He’ll probably just run his eye over me. I’ll go straight back to the clinic afterwards. If you can drive me.’
‘OK. So you think you’ll be right to fly home on Saturday?’
‘Sure to,’ she said. ‘Three more days of the treatments and I’ll be as fit as a Mallee bull.’
She smiled, and her eyes glazed over. I had to turn away.
I didn’t want to go in with her, but she made me.
The oncologist Dr Maloney was a neat, slight, friendly man in his fifties, with the springy body language one sees in modern medicos whose wives make them jog, swim, and eat low-fat cereals. He faced us pleasantly across his desk. Behind him a window gave on to a cold grey courtyard fringed by a low hedge of box. He kept his gaze strictly on Nicola’s face while she spoke at length about her illness and its treatments: not once did he betray her by glancing at me. I sat beside her, exasperated, fascinated, watching the river of her trust re-direct itself and flood towards him. Did he feel it coming? Was he used to this?
‘The shuddering fits,’ he remarked at last, in a dreamy tone, ‘sound to me like what…we…call… rigors.’
We looked at him in silence. He snapped into focus and started to scribble on a pad.
‘I need an MRI and a bone scan. Go straight over to the Mercy Private. I can get you in there right away. Call me the minute you get the results.’
In the car Nicola too was dreamy.
‘I like him,’ she said. Her face had softened and lost definition. ‘He cares about me. He’s clever. Can you call Colette and tell her I won’t be coming in today? Do you like him, Helen? What do y
ou think of him?’
‘Yes, I like him.’ Was this all she was hungry for? A stream of sympathetic attention from a man?
That afternoon at the Mercy, while technicians with distracted faces took charge of Nicola, I sat on a plastic chair in the hall outside the private suites and refreshed my expertise in the scandalous lives of celebrities. Time passed without meaning. I went hunting for food and drink. I tried to be discreet in my curiosity about the patients who limped and staggered by, or were wheeled past in chairs or on gurneys. One woman, middle-aged, slim, pretty and frantic, kept pacing up and down the hall near where I sat. She collapsed on the chair next to mine, sprang up, sat down, leafed through a magazine, threw it aside and took off again along the long carpeted passageway.
Towards five, just before they called Nicola in for a bone scan, she rang Dr Maloney on her mobile to arrange to bring the test results to his rooms. She turned to me with a thrilled smile.
‘He says he’ll come to us. He’s coming here to see me!’
Her scan was still in progress when Maloney in his good suit came bounding along the hall. I waved and jerked my thumb at the suite door. He grinned at me, and was about to take the chair next to mine when the anxious woman appeared round the corner and made a beeline for him. He got up at once and went to her side. He took her arm and made her sit down. He leaned right in towards her, almost touching her forehead with his. He pointed to her upper chest, and said in a clear, audible voice, ‘Yes, Debbie— there is something there.’
Her face went blank. Then she burst out sobbing, and covered her eyes with one hand. ‘Oh no. I can’t do it again. I just can’t.
’ Very sweetly he took her other hand, still looking her right in the face, and said in a voice of passionate gentleness, ‘I know. I know.’ She sprang to her feet and rushed away. He turned to me with a helpless shrug.
