‘We have to get a wheelchair. Go to that lady and ask her. Otherwise I don’t know how we’ll get out of here.’
I pushed her away from me. She set out along the carpeted hall with stiff, formal steps. I saw her rise on to her toes and try to show herself above the counter’s edge. I saw the uniformed woman bend to hear her, glance up to follow her pointing finger, and turn to shout an order.
~
We got home to a house that still thought spring had come: all the windows up, the rooms flooded with mild, muggy air. Nicola hobbled down the hall on my arm while Bessie ran in front with her bag. We led her into the spare room and she sat shivering on the edge of the bed. I banged down the window and switched on the oil heater. No, thank you—she didn’t want to drink, or eat, or wash, or go to the toilet. She was silent. Her head hung forward, as if a tiny fascinating scene were being enacted on her lap. I ran to the kitchen and put the kettle on for a hot water bottle. Bessie dawdled at the back door.
‘Go home, sweetheart. I can’t play with you now. Go home.’
She scowled at me and stumped off across the vegetable patch to the gap in the fence, where she hesitated, glaring at me over her shoulder, long enough for me to see her pearly skin, the vital lustre of her pouting lower lip.
In the spare room the oil was dripping and clicking inside the heater. I crouched in front of Nicola and pulled off her soft cloth shoes. Her bare feet were mottled, and icy to the touch; her ankles were laced with a pattern of blue veins. I hauled the jeans off her. She never wore knickers and she wasn’t wearing any now. I opened the bag. The few garments she had stuffed into it—a wool spencer, a faded pink flannelette nightgown, a large hemp T-shirt—were grubby and neglected, full of holes, like the possessions of a refugee. No one’s looking after her. She’s already lost.
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let’s get this nightie on to you.’ Like a child she raised both arms. I drew off her worn-out cashmere jumper and rag of a singlet. I thought I was keeping up a nonchalant pace, but when I saw the portacath bulging like an inverted bottle-top under the skin near her collarbone I must have missed a beat, for she began to whisper and croak: ‘Sorry, Hel. Ghastly. So sorry.’
Uttering comforting, hopeful sounds, I fed each of her arms into a sleeve and pulled the threadbare nightdress down to cover her. I got her under the doona. She couldn’t find a position to lie in that didn’t hurt.
When the two hot water bottles were ready I brought in a second doona, my thick winter one. I wrapped her, I swaddled her, I lay behind her spoonwise and cuddled her in my arms. Shudders like electric shocks kept running down her body. Nothing could warm her.
But the heater gained command of the room. In a while she seemed to relax, and doze. I began to sweat. I eased back off the bed, turned the venetian blind to dark, and tiptoed out of the room.
How long had she been this bad? Why hadn’t someone warned me? But who? She was a free woman, without husband or children. No one was in charge. I got a vegetable soup simmering in case she woke up hungry, and then I looked up her niece Iris in the Sydney phone book, and called her. A wheelchair? Oh no—this was way new. Could it have been just the strain of the flight? Oh God. We should absolutely stay in touch—here was her email address. Iris and her boyfriend Gab could come down, but not till the weekend after next—the school she was teaching at wouldn’t give her any more time off. If it all turned out to be too much for me, they would take her home.
Too much for me? My pride was stung. I was supposed to be useful in a crisis.
Something rustled at the back door. Bessie slid into the kitchen, beaming, in a floor-length flounced skirt and fringed shawl.
‘No, sweetheart—sorry. Not now.’
Her smile faded. ‘But I’ve got a new dance to show you.’
‘Nicola’s asleep. She needs a very quiet house because she’s terribly sick.’
She stared at me, sharply interested. ‘Is Nicola going to die?’
‘Probably.’
‘Tonight?’
‘No.’
She began to twist the doorknob, writhing and grizzling. ‘I need you to play with me. I’m bored.’
‘Don’t push it, Bess. You heard what I said.’
‘If you don’t let me come in, I won’t be able to stop whining.’
‘Run home. Come back in the morning when she wakes up.’
‘It’s not even night-time yet!’
‘She’s asleep.’
‘If you don’t let me in, I’ll whine more. I’ll go berserk and do it even worse.’
I shoved back my chair. Its legs screeched on the boards and she bolted. Her flamenco heels went clicketing across the brick paving and she vanished behind the rocket bed.
I stopped on the back veranda. Further down the yard, beyond the shoulder-high broad beans with their black-and-white flowers, a small butternut pumpkin sat on the shed windowsill in what remained of the afternoon’s sun. It had rested there, forgotten by both our houses, for months. If it hadn’t dried out I could put it into the soup. I waited till I heard Bessie slam her back door, then I sneaked out and grabbed the pumpkin from the windowsill. It was suspiciously light. I stood it on the chopping board and pushed the point of the heavy knife through its faded yellow skin. Pouf. The blade sank through it. The pumpkin fell into two halves. The flesh was pale and fibrous, hardly more substantial than dust. I hacked it into chunks and shoved them into the compost bin.
The night, when it came, was long. I woke many times. Once I heard the soft patter of rain. I parted the blind slats. A single light burned in the upper flat across the street: my comrade, that wakeful stranger. Towards four I crept along the hall and stood outside Nicola’s closed door. Her breathing was slow and regular, but coarse and very loud.
I thought about the rattle that came out of my sister Madeleine’s throat ten minutes before she died. ‘Listen,’ I said to her son who was sitting red-eyed by her bed with his elbows resting on his knees. ‘She’s rattling. She’ll die soon.’
‘Nah,’ he said, ‘it’s just a bit of phlegm she’s too weak to cough up.’
In the kitchen I switched on a lamp. There was a banana on the bench. Someone had started to peel it, eaten half, and lost interest. The rest of it lay abandoned in its loose, spotty skin.
THE BACK of my house faced south, but a triangular window had been set high into the roof peak, so that north light flooded into the kitchen. I was standing in a patch of sun when Nicola made her entrance. I looked up, ready to rush to her. Her hair was damp and flat against her skull. Her nightdress, dark with moisture, clung to her body. But her shoulders were back, her neck was upright, and she was smiling, smiling, smiling.
‘Hello, darling!’ she carolled, in her blue-blood accent. ‘What a glorious morning! Oooh, there’s that banana. I think I’ll have it for breakfast. How did you sleep?’
My mouth hung open. ‘How did you?’
‘Oh, I was fine, once I dropped off. Actually I did perhaps sweat a bit. I’ll run the sheets through your machine in a tick.’
She strolled in and established herself on a stool opposite me at the bench. Lord, she was a good-looking woman. She had the dignified cheekbones, the straight nose and the long, mobile upper lip of a patrician: the squatter’s daughter that she was.
‘My God, what a flight,’ she said. ‘I had a family with four kids behind me, and they fought all the way to Melbourne about who’d sit next to the mother.’ She mimicked a high-pitched whine. ‘I want to sit with you, Mummy. Look after me, Mummy. I don’t love you any more, Mummy.