Helen Garner, The Spare Room, Picador 2010


Rhona said I had to read it.

Right away, on my way back from the library, idling at the red lights, I started. The friend is readying for Nicola’s visit—pushing the bed around so it’s on a north-south axis, and deciding on pale pink sheets, and casing and plumping the pillows in their crisp slips.

Rhona knows me. (Though I’d never think to align a bed according to the polar regions.)

But the thing turns out not to be the room, exactly. Nicola is expecting the three weeks of quack treatments she’s flown to Melbourne to undergo—ozone saunas and intravenous vitamin C—to wrench her tumors from her body. She’s already had a pair of molars removed because maybe heavy metals leaking from her fillings caused the cancer. There was a cabbage-juice remedy, too, she wanted to try, but the friend stopped her from sending the $4,000 check.

More than the room, it’s the caregiving, the suffering, the rage.

 


 

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