Excerpt from The Spare Room by Helen Garner, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I swept with the dustpan and brush, I beat with the millet broom, I hoovered in cunning angled strokes. The fragments of mirror were mean-shaped and stubborn, some so minuscule that they were only chips of light. They hid against the rug's scalp, in the roots of its fur. I got down on my knees and picked them out with my fingernails. When the daylight faded and I had to stop, my sister Connie rang me.

"A mirror broke? In her room?"

I was silent.

Then she said, in a low, urgent voice, "Don't. Tell. Nicola."





"Three weeks she's staying?" said my friend Leo, the psychiatrist. That Saturday evening I sat in the spartan kitchen of his South Yarra place and watched him cook. He poured the pasta into a strainer and flipped it up and down. "Why so long?"

"She's booked in to do a course of alternative treatment down here. Some outfit in the city. They've fast-tracked her. She's supposed to present herself there first thing Monday morning."

"What sort of treatment?"

"I was loath to ask. She talks about peroxide drips, awful stuff. She's already been getting big doses of vitamin C in Sydney. Eighty thousand units, she said. Intravenous. With something called glutathione. Whatever that is."

He stood very still with the dripping colander in his hand. He seemed to be controlling himself: I had never before noticed the veins in his temples, under the curly white hair. "It's bullshit, Helen."

We started to eat. Leo let a shrink's silence fall, as he forked in food. His terrier, black and white, squatted by his chair and gazed up at him with helpless love.

"It is bullshit, is it?" I said. "That's my instinct. Get this. When the bowel tumor showed up on the scan, she asked the oncologist to hold off treatment for a while. So she could take a lot of aloe vera. He said, 'Nicola. If aloe vera could shrink tumors, every oncologist in the world would be prescribing it.' But she believes in things. She's got one of those magnetic mats on the floor behind her couch. She says, 'Lie on the mat, Hel. It'll heal your osteoporosis.'"

Leo didn't laugh. He looked at me with his triangular brown eyes and said, "And do you lie on it?"

"Sure. It's restful. She rents it from a shop."

"So chemo didn't work."

"She walked around carrying a bag of it plugged into the back of her hand. She's had surgery. She had radiation. They've told her they can't do any more for her. It's in her bones, and her liver. They said to go home. She spent five days at a Petrea King workshop. I'd heard good things about that, but she said it wasn't her style. Then she went to someone she called a healer. He said she had to have her molars out—that the cancer was caused by heavy metals leaking out of her fillings."

Leo put his head in his hands. I kept eating.

"Why is she coming to you?"

"She says I saved her life. She was about to send a lot of money to a biochemist up in the Hunter Valley."

"A biochemist?"

"A kinesiologist told her this bloke's had a lot of success with cancer. So she phoned him up. He said he wouldn't need to see her. Just have a look at her blood picture. She was supposed to send him four grand and he'd post her the exact right herbs to target the cancers. 'Essence of cabbage juice' was mentioned."

I let out a high-pitched giggle. Leo looked at me steadily, without expression.

"And he told her she shouldn't worry if she heard unfavorable things about him, because he had enemies. People who were out to get him. I was trying to be tactful, so I asked her, 'How did you feel, when he told you that?' She said, 'I took it as a guarantee of integrity.'"

From The Spare Room by Helen Garner. Copyright Helen Garner. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt maybe reproduced without written permission from the publisher.