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

My cheeks were hot. I knew I must be gabbling.

"I was scared she'd accuse me of crushing her last hope. So I went behind her back and called a journalist I know. He ran a check. Turns out the so-called biochemist's a well-known conman. He makes the most outlandish claims. Before he went into alternative health he'd spent years in jail for armed robbery. I rang her just in time. She had the checkbook in her hand."

It took me a moment to calm down. Leo waited. His kitchen was bare, and peaceful. I wondered if any of his patients had ever been invited into it. Outside the sliding glass doors an old concrete laundry trough sat on the paving, sprouting basil. The rest of the tiny yard was taken up by his car.

"You work with cancer patients," I said. "Does this sound bad?"

He shrugged. "Pretty bad. Stage four."

"How many stages are there?"

"Four."

The bowl was empty. I put down my fork. "What am I supposed to do?"

He put his hand on the dog's head and drew back its ears so that its eyes turned to high slits. "Maybe that's why she's coming to stay. Maybe she wants you to be the one."

"What one?"

"The one to tell her she's going to die."

We listened to an old Chick Corea CD and talked about our families and what we'd been reading. When it was late, he walked me to my car. The dog trotted at his heel. As I drove away up Punt Road I saw them dart across at the lights and plunge into the big dark gardens.





Rain fell in the night, quiet and kind. I woke at six with a sense of something looming, the same anxiety I felt before a writing deadline: the inescapable requirement to find something new in myself. Nicola would arrive today. I lay there under the shadow.

But I planted two new geraniums in a window box and hooked it onto the side fence outside her room. The bud points, furled inside their leaves, reminded me of sharpened lead pencils. Their redness arrested my gaze before it hit the ugly palings.

Bessie came in from next door, squeezing through the gap in the fence while I was making a sandwich for lunch. She demonstrated a new hairclip application that kept her bangs still when she jumped up and down. Her nose was running and I kept wiping it with a paper towel. The TV was on.

"Is that Saddam Hussein?" she said. "What did he do, Nanna, to make him a baddie?"

I explained what a tyrant was. We began to philosophize. She pointed out that many people in the world were very poor. Then, tucking into the bowl of yogurt and nuts that I placed before her, she observed that days differ from one another.

"Some are happy," she said, "but others are bad. I don't know why. Can I come to the airport with you? I want to tell Nicola I'm five and a half. I think she'll be very surprised."





We parked in plenty of time. The sun was out and the air was mild: we remarked gaily on the spring. As we marched hand in hand toward the Virgin Blue gate lounge, a crowd came surging out of it: Nicola's plane must have landed early. I broke into a trot, hauling Bessie behind me and scanning the approaching travelers for a tall, striding woman with prematurely white hair. We were almost on top of her before I recognized her. She was tottering along in the press of people, staggering like a crone, dwarfed by a confused young man who was carrying her Indian cloth bag over his shoulder. Bessie got a tighter grip on my hand.

"Hello darlings!" said Nicola. She was trying for insouciance, but her voice was hoarse, only a thread. "This is my new friend Gavin. He's been so helpful!"

Gavin handed me the bag, murmured a farewell, and made for the exit. I took hold of Nicola's arm and steered her toward a row of hard chairs. She collapsed onto the first one. Bessie pressed closer to my other side, staring across me at Nicola with a look of fascinated panic.

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.