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can deliver my friend here every morning and pick her up every afternoon. And keep our lives outside of here running in some sort of reasonable way.’
    Vin from Broken Hill flicked me a look, along which travelled what I read as a tiny current of solidarity. He didn’t believe in this rigmarole either. He had to pretend to because his wife was desperate, because he loved her. Tuckey murmured something reassuring, still far short of an apology. Again my heart was thudding. My cheeks were red. Nicola looked at me kindly, then away again. I felt I had shamed her. I held my tongue.
    The doctor set up a screen against a wall, opened a laptop on the counter, and stood resting one elbow beside it. Without having to be asked, we shuffled our chairs into better viewing positions. Somebody sighed. He pressed the first key and up came the title of his talk: ‘Cancer and It’s Treatments’. I didn’t dare look at Nicola: not because she would laugh, but because I was afraid she wouldn’t.
    ‘I’m going to tell you,’ Dr Tuckey began, ‘about our key cancer-killing therapies. You know how an octopus can break a big rock with its tentacles? Well that’s what a cancer cell’s like.’
    Did he mean the cell was like the octopus or like the rock? The doctor’s manner, as he worked his way down the dot points, was modest and amiable, almost soothing. Everything about him was spongy, without defence: you could not hate him. But his discourse had a stupefying effect. My mind veered about, seeking something to grip. I was tired, I was hungry. My concentration waxed and waned. Once or twice I nodded off. This was not the moment to zone out. I pushed my chair back a few feet and sneaked the notebook and pen out of my bag.
    ‘Stress,’ he said, ‘is the biggest cause of cancer in our society. Stress makes us vulnerable to whatever nasties we have lurking in our beings.’
    That wasn’t so outlandish. My thoughts coasted sideways to my sister Madeleine, her relentless grief and rage when her husband drowned in the surf: how she wielded without mercy the manipulative power of her suffering. Ten years later an untreatable cancer was found in her lung. She accepted her death sentence quietly, without mutiny; perhaps, we thought in awe, she even welcomed it. She laid down her gun. She let us cherish her. We nursed her. In less than a year, with her family near her, she put aside her knitting and died, in her own house, in the bed she had shared with her husband, while outside the window the shapely limbs of the trees they had planted together stood leafless in the late winter air.
    ‘If people are struck by lightning and survive,’ the doctor was saying, ‘their cancers shrink and disappear.’
    I glanced at the other listeners. No one seemed to find this strange.
    ‘A fissure in the earth under your house can disturb the electro-magnetic field. In Germany, quite a high percentage of cancer victims are living over one of these.’
    A fissure? Didn’t I read about that in the seventies? People whose living room floor collapsed into a disused mine shaft? Whose grand piano slid into the chasm and vanished forever? And on top of that they got cancer?
    Nicola’s head was cocked in a posture of intent listening.
    ‘The incidence of certain sorts of cancer is known to be much lower round the equator. This is good, solid research—published just a few months ago.’
    Now I was wide awake.
    ‘High dosage vitamin C will kill off lumps of cancer and boost the immune system. And our ozone sauna treatment is based on the old natural-therapy approach to cancer—sweating out the toxins. Most doctors don’t know this stuff. But it’s good science.’
    Nicola sat chin in hand, her handsome face suffused with an expression of deep pleasantness, offering the doctor generous eye contact, and nodding, always nodding.
    Vin from Broken Hill laid his hand on his wife’s legs, which were now resting across his lap. His tenderness moved something