in a high curve round her head. The blood-red nasturtium she had stuck into the elastic of her ponytail trembled there, its juicy stem already drooping. She bent her wrists and began to twine her hands round each other. Her fingernails were grimy, her palms padded with thick calluses from the school-yard monkey bars. She lowered her brow in a challenging scowl and paced towards us, flicking aside the bulk of her skirt with every step.
Nicola reared back on her stool. ‘Stop. What’s that cack on your lip?’
Bessie dropped her arms and ran the back of one hand under her nostrils. It left a glistening trail across her cheek.
‘Oh shit.’ Nicola got off the stool and backed away. ‘I’m sorry, darling, but you can’t come in here with a cold. I’ve got no resistance left. Helen, you’ll have to send her home.’ She shuffled as fast as she could down the hall into the spare room, and pulled the door shut behind her.
I picked up a pencil and took a breath to start explaining cell counts and immune systems, but Bessie didn’t ask. She stood in the centre of the room with her arms dangling. Her face was blank. I heard the neighbour over the back lane slam his car door and drive away. At once his dog began its daily barking and howling. We had adapted our nerves to its tedious racket and no longer thought of complaining, but maybe the wind that morning was blowing from a new direction, for the high-pitched cries floated over the fence and right into our yard, filling the sunny air with lamentation.
~
Nicola wanted me to walk her to the station that afternoon and teach her the ticketing system so she could get to the clinic by herself each day, but it was her first consultation with these new people, and I’d heard it said that in such situations you needed a friend with you, someone less panicky than you and not deaf with fear, who could hear what the doctor said and remember it afterwards. I didn’t mention any of this. I pressed her to let me drive her into the city, just this once, to show her the least confusing, the handsomest way to get there.
We parked under the Hyatt and strolled down Collins Street. The plane trees brushed their fresh leaves against the facades of the old-fashioned buildings. To Max Mara and Zambesi, Ermenegildo Zegna, Bang & Olufsen we paid no attention. She kept an eye out for juice shops and coffee bars. Umbrellas fluttered over the pavement tables. Big coaches from the country throbbed outside The Lion King. The chiming trams on Swanston Street excited her. I saw the beauty of my city and was proud that she saw it too.
We turned into the cool canyon of Flinders Lane. She snapped the rubber band off her bulging old Filofax and checked the number. ‘This is it.’
The old building was tall and square and substantial, like the bank-shaped money-boxes we had as children, but its street frontage had been taken over by discount opal shops and fast food outlets: its white-tiled entryway was dilapidated, its grand mirrors speckled and scarred. As women in their sixties learn to do, we averted our eyes from our reflections, and made straight for the glass-fronted list of tenants: nine floors of people engaged in modest, honourable trades—button suppliers, bridal costumiers, milliners. The Theodore Institute: top floor. We peered through the lattice into the huge lift well with its swaying cables. Nicola pulled an apprehensive face. In the ancient cage as it clanked upward I felt too close to something fragile in her, something I could damage with my scepticism.
‘This could be the Faraway Tree,’ I said. ‘I wonder what Land we’ll find, at the top?’
She flashed me a tiny, grateful smile, and returned her gaze to the lino. I thought, I will kill anyone who hurts you. I will tear them limb from limb. I will make them wish they had never been born. Almighty God, I thought, to whom all hearts are open. The lift landed with a bump. It was four o’clock on the dot. The door slid open and we stepped out.
The hallway was dark and narrow. Each door had a panel of bathroom glass at eye level. One room was open: as we passed we glimpsed a girl with bowed head, sewing something under a cone of lamplight, while Tom Waits croaked away beside her on a radio.
We found the Theodore Institute at the very end of the hall. An empty wheelchair blocked the entry. The door was locked. We pressed the bell. No answer, though I sensed a vague commotion. I put my eye to the brass letter slot. Then a buzzer sounded beside us, and the door swung open. I stood back and Nicola led me in.
The room within was painted a strange yellow, the colour of controlled panic. Jonquils had dried in a vase on the reception counter, behind which a female attendant flustered at a computer. Several people sat on a row of folding chairs with their backs to a blank wall. One haggard woman, who had lost a leg, sat in silence with her hands clasped and her eyes down. Another was busy trying to thread a bright metallic scarf through the loops of a little black toque she wore on her bald head. I sat down while Nicola presented herself at the counter.
The toque woman caught my eye and smiled. ‘I’m Marj. This is my husband Vin. We’ve come all the way from Broken Hill.’ They both shook hands with me. Vin was a big, slow-moving bloke in shorts and tightly pulled up white socks. Marj went on tugging and pushing at the scarf.
‘I like your hat,’ I said. ‘It’s elegant.’
‘Well,’ she said with reckless gaiety, ‘if you gotta go, you might as well go out sparkling.’
We all laughed, except the one-legged woman, who had not raised her eyes from the remainder of her lap. Meanwhile I could hear the attendant, a plain, brown-haired girl with a high ponytail who had introduced herself as Colette, chattering away to Nicola at the counter.
‘I know it’s a disappointment for you, but Professor Theodore suddenly had to go to China! And he won’t be back till next week. Don’t you worry, though, because we’ve got another doctor. He usually only comes in on Fridays to make a presentation, but this week he’ll be here on a Monday. And he’ll see you!’
I could see Nicola nodding and nodding, propping herself on the counter with trembling forearms.
‘What’s Professor Theodore actually doing, in China?’ I called out from my metal chair. ‘Because he did make a special point of wanting to examine Nicola before she started the program. Couldn’t he have let her know his plans had changed?’
I was trying to sound courteous and firm, but the vibe in the room stiffened and an uncomfortable silence fell.
Colette’s voice dropped an octave. ‘Oh,’ she murmured, ‘it’s a very important international conference.’ Her face radiated a timid solemnity. She spread her palms and lifted her shoulders and eyebrows: the obligations of this demi-god, her employer, were beyond her ken. No one looked at me. Nicola, credit card in hand, kept her back to me. I subsided, but my heart was thumping.
By the time Nicola had filled in a thick form and forked out two thousand dollars for the opening week’s program, it was after five o’clock. ‘You’ll be seen in half an hour!’ cried Colette. We settled down to wait. In rooms beyond the reception area we sensed movement, heard voices. Once or twice a chubby man with a buzz-cut popped his head round the door and bestowed a benign smile on the people numbly waiting. Were we imagining it, or did the air of the clinic smell faintly pleasant? An elusive odour from nature, or even from our distant childhoods? Was it the scent of summer? We could not pin it down.
Nicola folded her long legs under her in yoga position on her chair, and opened an Alexander McCall-Smith novel she had had the sense to bring. I flipped in silence through ragged back numbers of New Weekly, looking for cosmetic surgery disasters to sneer at. Once we would have gone into paroxysms together at a condition called trout mouth. Now, angry and full of fear, I kept it to myself.
There
