Room for a Stranger

by Melanie Cheng

  Though this was the explanation Andy planned on giving the university—he’d written almost the entire letter in his head by the time the doctors had finished explaining the diagnosis—he knew it wasn’t true. ‘I was close to failing last semester when I was living on my own—far away from you and Atticus.’

  ‘Well, it can’t have helped,’ Meg insisted.

  Andy pressed a red button on a remote, which loudly and slowly lowered the head of the bed.

  ‘You must be tired,’ Meg said. She picked up her handbag. The doctors hadn’t said anything about Andy’s discharge or his future housing arrangements, but she understood now that any hope of a cure hinged on him staying away from Atticus. If there had been any doubt before, there could be none now—Andy would have to move out.

  38

  Pam, the homeshare coordinator, arrived twelve minutes early. Meg had just finished tidying up and was putting on her lipstick when the doorbell rang.

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ she asked as she escorted her visitor down the hallway to the kitchen.

  Pam dabbed her forehead with a tissue. ‘I could do with a glass of water.’

  Meg pulled out a chair and Pam sat down. As she retrieved a glass from the cupboard and poured ice-water from the fridge, Meg felt the woman’s eyes roaming around the room.

  ‘How long have you lived here?’ Pam asked.

  ‘All my life.’

  Pam took a notebook from her satchel and opened it on the table. She used the palm of her hand to break the spine and flatten the pages. She scribbled a short note inside it. ‘I’ll need you to take me to the place where the incident happened.’

  Meg placed a coaster printed with native flowers on the table and put the glass on top of it. Some water spilt onto the table. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  ‘I’m sure you understand how important it is for us to minimise the chance of this type of thing ever happening again.’

  Meg lowered herself into the chair opposite Pam. ‘I understand.’

  The woman took a sip of her water before standing up. ‘Shall we?’

  Meg felt like a criminal directing a detective to a body. Earlier that morning she’d got down on her hands and knees to scrub the floor and the toilet. She’d even put a small plate of potpourri next to the soap dish. But her efforts went unnoticed by the inspector, who was focused solely on the cabinet above the basin.

  ‘And is this where the offending medication was kept?’

  ‘If you mean my sleeping tablets, then yes.’

  Using her phone, Pam took a photo of the cabinet. ‘The pills responsible for the near-fatal overdose.’

  Meg felt her head spin. She sat down on the closed lid of the toilet.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Pam asked, her face cold.

  Meg nodded. She was afraid to open her mouth for fear of what might come out.

  ‘Perhaps I sounded a little harsh before,’ Pam said. ‘I didn’t mean to. It’s just that we take great pride in our reputation for positive outcomes. When a result falls short of our high standard, we work hard to understand why.’

  ‘I thought he was dead when I first found him,’ Meg said, and Pam winced at the word dead. ‘He was crumpled here, in this gap between the toilet and the bath.’

  ‘But he was okay.’

  ‘Years ago I found my mother’s body. The doctors had warned me that she might die that night, so it wasn’t completely unexpected.’ Meg saw Pam snatch a look at her watch, but she didn’t care—she would make her listen. ‘You know how sometimes you see a mannequin that looks so alive you think it might move at any minute? That’s how it was for those first few hours with her body here in the house. I kept expecting her to sit up and wave her arms and laugh. I’m not a religious person. Too many bad things have happened to too many good people for me to believe in a god. But the longer I looked at my mother’s dead body, the more I remembered how full of life she’d been, and the harder it was to accept that she’d just been switched off, like a light bulb. I found myself believing that something had left her body that night—some kind of invisible bubble or ball of energy that was the essence of my mother.’

  Pam’s lips tightened. Meg estimated her to be in her early fifties. Surely she couldn’t have got this far in life without losing someone close to her.

  ‘Luckily, on this occasion, there was no fatality,’ Pam said, and opened the cabinet. She peered inside and picked up a bottle of blue nail polish remover. ‘But if you’re going to have another companion in future, we’ll have to make some changes. You are planning on taking another companion, aren’t you?’

  But Meg didn’t reply. She was remembering the quiet ceremony they’d had for her mother in the backyard. A handful of close friends and relatives drinking wine and listening to Judy Garland’s ‘Over the Rainbow’ as they took turns to scatter her ashes beneath the jacaranda.

  39

  Life was easy at the hospital. The food was awful, but it was still better than what Mrs Hughes served up at home. Andy enjoyed the jelly, too—his parents had never let him have jelly as a child. He didn’t study. The doctors had told him to rest, and he knew that a trip to the ICU would be enough to get him special consideration. The ward provided free wi-fi and he streamed Cantonese shows on his laptop. The medication appeared to be working—everything seemed less cloudy. For the first time in months he felt ready to confront the future.

  Kiko arrived on Friday. Andy had been in hospital for four days. He was so engrossed in one of his shows he didn’t even hear the door open. She glided in silently, like a phantom. At first, with her black hair and petite figure, Andy mistook her for the Filipina nurse who did the afternoon shift. When he saw Kiko’s big brown eyes above the bouquet of daffodils his heart soared.

  ‘Ming told me you were sick,’ she explained before he could say anything.

  Andy took off his glasses and cleaned them with the edge of the sheet. Kiko sat down on the chair beside the bed and laid the bouquet neatly across her legs.

  ‘Nobody’s ever bought me flowers before,’ Andy said.

  Kiko frowned.

  ‘It’s nice,’ Andy said, but the frown remained.

  Kiko pulled softly at the yellow petals of the flowers. She didn’t ask Andy how he was or what was wrong with him. She spoke nervously but with purpose, as if there was something she needed to get off her chest. ‘Ming wasn’t sure of the exact day you were admitted.’

  ‘It was the day of the microbiology exam,’ Andy said.

  Kiko pulled her water bottle from her bag and took a sip. ‘I was thinking,’ she said, her voice breaking, ‘did you make it to the pho place?’

  Weak as he still felt, Andy sensed that the power had shifted in his favour. He was surprised and a little ashamed at the joy he derived from watching Kiko squirm. If only she knew what had really happened, he thought—how bad she would feel then. He opened his mouth to reply, but Kiko didn’t wait.

  ‘The whole way here on the tram I tried to come up with an excuse,’ she said. ‘A car accident, gastro, a family emergency.’

  Watching her lovely face contort as she spoke, Andy felt something turn sour inside him. All of a sudden everything about her seemed forced and artificial—the pout of her lips, the lushness of her eyelashes, her childlike voice.

  ‘But then I decided you deserved the truth.’ Her mouth trembled, but her eyes were dry. ‘I just don’t need a boyfriend in my life right now.’

  Andy didn’t remember ever asking to be Kiko’s boyfriend. ‘It was just some beef noodle soup,’ he said.

  Kiko stared at Andy, her mouth no longer trembling, her thick lips pressed into an unwavering line.

  He acquiesced. ‘Don’t worry about it.’

  Kiko relaxed. Her frown disappeared. This was what she had been searching for—absolution. ‘When do you get out of here?’ she said, chirpy now.

  Andy shrugged. ‘When I’m feeling better.’

  ‘I hope you feel better soon.’

  She staye
d for five minutes, making small talk about the exams and her upcoming trip to Japan, before leaving him alone with his bouquet of yellow flowers.

  40

  When Meg woke up the next morning, there was a puddle of blood between her legs. The shock of seeing the stain on her sheets was so great, she had to lie in bed for ten minutes before getting up to strip the mattress. She threw the bedding into the washing machine with a few spoonfuls of Vanish washing powder. She couldn’t face scrubbing it by hand—watching the slow fade of the blood from the cream-coloured cotton. She remembered that Jillian had had two miscarriages before finally giving birth to her daughter. She wondered if she too had woken up, terrified, in a pool of her own blood.

  Meg didn’t feel hungry, but—remembering the ICU nurse’s advice—she defrosted some sausages she found in the freezer. It might just have been her imagination, but she even felt a little better after eating them. She was still trying to take in what the doctor had said about Atticus causing the disease in Andy’s lungs. Alveolitis. It was too beautiful a word to describe a life-threatening illness. It sounded like the name of an exotic flower or an expensive anti-ageing skin cream.

  As she ate, Meg watched Atticus. He was perched on the windowsill next to the sink, scratching himself with his beak. She couldn’t bring herself to lock the cage anymore—he was free to wander about the house as he pleased. He’d been quiet since Andy had been admitted, only occasionally singing ‘Humpty Dumpty’.

  When Helen had died, Atticus had been a great source of comfort to Meg. He’d been close to Helen from the start—always eager to impress her with his repertoire of nursery rhymes. After she died, it was as if Helen had lived on in the parrot and his poetry. Now, in the wake of Andy’s illness, Meg saw Atticus in a different light. She couldn’t forget the way he’d jumped around the bathroom while the paramedics were working on Andy—competing for their attention, distracting them from their task. She was reminded of an Emily Dickinson poem she’d studied during high school:

  A bird came down the walk:

  He did not know I saw;

  He bit an angle-worm in halves

  And ate the fellow, raw.

  And then, he drank a dew

  From a convenient grass,

  And then hopped sidewise to the wall

  To let a beetle pass.

  She’d written an essay about how the poem demonstrated the efficient and practical nature of animals—how they took what they needed without remorse, but how they never took more than they needed. Meg recalled that she’d got a very good mark for that essay, but she also remembered that, even as she wrote it, she could think of numerous examples that contradicted Dickinson’s position—the neighbour’s cat, who killed a mouse after hours of tormenting it; the ducks at the creek who ate more than their fill of bread before chasing the other ducks away. In Meg’s opinion animals were more like humans than humans gave them credit for. Atticus, who knew nothing of the wild or how to survive it, had flown away from her the first chance he got. Maybe Helen, too, would’ve escaped, if given the opportunity.

  The washing machine beeped to let her know the cycle had finished. As she hung her wet sheets on the line, the doorbell rang. She wondered if it was Pam, returning to cast her forensic eye over the place again. Meg took her time, clipping the last peg over the sheet before going in to answer the door.

  ‘Jill,’ she said, surprised.

  ‘Well, you certainly took your time. I was about to call the police.’

  Meg couldn’t tell if she was joking.

  ‘I brought coffee,’ Jillian said, and held up a cardboard tray containing two takeaway cups. ‘And cake.’

  Meg opened the screen door. Jillian followed her down the hall to the lounge room. As Meg turned on the light, she suppressed her shock at all the dust and cobwebs. She’d been so preoccupied with Patrick, and Andy, she hadn’t cleaned in weeks. Even the windows, expertly polished by Andy not long ago, had regained their earlier cloudiness. But she would not apologise to Jillian. She sat stiffly in one of the armchairs.

  Jillian tried her best to arrange herself elegantly on the lounge, but the laxity of the springs and the softness of the cushions made it difficult. Meg sat back and enjoyed watching her friend disappear into the couch.

  ‘Greg told me he saw you at the hospital. Visiting a friend,’ Jillian said, once she’d found a comfortable position.

  ‘Yes.’ Meg knew what Jillian was thinking: But you don’t have any friends, except me.

  ‘Did something happen to the Chinese boy?’

  ‘His name’s Andy. And he’s not a boy.’

  ‘I knew it.’

  Meg leant forwards and picked up one of the takeaway cups Jillian had set down on the coffee table. ‘Why are you here, Jillian?’ she said. ‘To say sorry? Because this doesn’t feel much like an apology.’

  Perhaps it was the surprise of seeing Meg so assertive, or perhaps it was just tiredness—whatever the cause, Jillian surrendered.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. It was the first time in their seventy years of friendship that Jillian had apologised to Meg. ‘Something happened to me when Anne died. It was so abrupt, so unexpected. It rattled me to my core. And then a few weeks later the doctor called to say they’d found an abnormality on my mammogram. It was nothing in the end, but it was bloody terrifying.’

  Meg felt her hands move to her lower abdomen, as if to shield Jillian from the sight of her bleeding uterus. Tears stabbed her eyes. Meg couldn’t remember ever seeing Jillian as honest and vulnerable as this, and she didn’t quite know how to deal with it. On the one hand it was reassuring to know that someone as strong as Jillian shared her fears, but on the other hand it was frightening to realise that the rock she’d clung to for so long was itself brittle.

  ‘I’m sorry too,’ Meg said, hating herself just a little. Sometimes she felt as if she’d spent half her life apologising, when most of the time she’d done nothing wrong. But today, watching her once-formidable friend look small and lost on the couch, she was sorry. Sorry they were getting old. Sorry they were scared. Sorry death seemed to be waiting for them around every corner.

  Jillian stood up, instantly resuming her invincible air. She sat on the edge of Meg’s armchair and draped her long arm around Meg’s shoulder. At her friend’s touch, Meg dissolved. The words and the tears came hot and fast. She told Jillian everything. She told her about finding Andy wedged between the toilet and the bath. She told her about Atticus’s dramatic escape and quiet return. She told her about her dirty getaway with Patrick that she’d called off before it had even begun. She told her about how she was slowly haemorrhaging from her unused womb. With each confession, Meg felt Jillian grow stronger beside her. She watched her friend’s spine become straighter, her neck longer, her shoulders squarer. It was just what they needed. A restoration of order.

  41

  There was something reassuring and predictable about hospital life. Andy felt like a little cog in a clunky but reliable machine. Every morning at six-thirty, a nurse measured his blood pressure. An hour later, breakfast was delivered by a round woman with a brassy laugh. Sometime between eight and nine o’clock, the doctors did their ward round. Every day a nurse checked to make sure Andy had passed urine and opened his bowels. Every day a doctor examined Andy for early signs of malfunction. Rather than degrading or infantilising, the attention was liberating for Andy. He was free from worry because there were lots of other people—professional people—doing the worrying for him.

  He knew it couldn’t last forever, but he was caught off guard when the doctors told him he was about to be discharged. The news created a stir of panic. Where would he go? He couldn’t go back to living with Mrs Hughes and Atticus. Ming was an option, but they’d had those harsh words only the week before. His aunt had called a couple of times, but she lived all the way out in Geelong and had children of her own. Winnie said his father was on his way, but Andy didn’t know where he planned to stay, especially after spending so much m
oney on an air ticket. The last thing Andy wanted to do was dig his dad even deeper into debt. His health insurance was paying for his hospital stay, and so long as he remained an inpatient, he could hide behind his illness.

  Andy thought back to his discussion with the psychiatry registrar the day before. He’d been truthful with her, denying any thoughts of suicide when she’d asked him, but if he’d known they were planning to release him five days after his near-fatal overdose, he would’ve lied freely and excessively.

  There was something else too. Andy enjoyed being cared for. As long as he could remember, his father had worked long hours, and his mother, when she was home, was always busy, chopping vegetables for dinner and finding some new surface that needed cleaning. Most of Andy’s childhood, when he wasn’t at school, had been spent in his room, playing computer games and assembling model aeroplanes. Andy had been glad of the company of his yeh yeh, who’d grown gentle with his advancing dementia. Thinking of his grandfather now had a calming effect on Andy. He closed his eyes and remembered the topography of the old man’s hands—the mushroom-coloured spots, the meandering veins, the bowed and knotted tendons.

  Andy was roused minutes later by a loud knock at the door to his room. Through the blue screen he saw the silhouette of a small woman with gigantic hair.

  ‘Auntie!’ he said as a brightly made-up face peeked from behind the curtain.

  ‘Fresh chicken congee,’ Winnie said by way of a hello and placed a large Tupperware bowl on the tray in front of him. ‘Better than any medicine.’

  Andy put his hand on the bowl. It was still warm.

  ‘I put it in an esky in the boot with lots of bubble wrap to keep it hot and stop it from spilling.’

  ‘Very clever.’

  His aunt looked him up and down. ‘You’re so pale,’ she said, and pinched his cheek, hard, in an attempt to inject some colour.

  Andy wondered how much the staff at the hospital had told her over the phone while he was unconscious.