We Own the Sky

by Luke Allnutt

  Making memories, they said on Hope’s Place, and those two words had never made any sense to me. They would be our memories, mine and Anna’s. They wouldn’t be Jack’s.

  I snapped out of it, painted on my smile. Making memories, making memories. We had been at every point in the cabin now, looking down toward Canary Wharf, the Shard, the cozy huddle around St. Paul’s.

  “Daddy,” Jack said, putting his camera down on the blanket on his lap, and his voice sounded strangely lucid—the Jack I remembered from a few weeks ago. “It’s very high here.”

  “It is, isn’t it? Do you like it?”

  Jack nodded and smiled. “When I’m better, are we going to climb more tall buildings?”

  “Of course we are.”

  “The Ivor Tower in Paris?”

  “Yes,” I said, putting my arm around him.

  “And the one in Oompa-Loompa?”

  Anna laughed gently, put her hand on Jack’s shoulder. “Yes, sweetheart, Kuala Lumpur.”

  “Yes,” Jack said, looking down the Thames. “Kuala Lumpur.” I knew what he was thinking about now: all the tall buildings, the ones he had seen in his books, in the pictures on his wall.

  “And the one in Dubai? Because that’s the biggest one in the whole world, Daddy.”

  I paused, fighting back my tears, because I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t let him see me cry now. “We can go up all of them, Jack, every single one,” I said, my voice beginning to crack.

  “Because you know, Daddy, you know, when you’re so high, you go up past the clouds, and it’s like being in an airplane and then you can see the spaceships and the sun and all of the stars...”

  As Jack’s words tailed off, a bolt from the setting sun lit up the cabin, like the light from a distant, silent explosion. We crouched down and listened to the clinks and clanks of the gears, our arms wrapped around Jack’s shoulders, staring at what was left of the sunset. And then, without warning, Jack slowly pushed himself up out of his wheelchair. He wobbled a little, steadied himself on the handrail, and started taking photographs again. The dim flare of city lights against the velvet-red sky. Peaks and troughs, luminous mountains of clouds. He made sure he got it all.

  * * *

  We decided that Ashbourne House was a good place for Jack to come to die. We had chosen it in the same way that we had chosen Jack’s school. We looked through the brochures and then went to tour the facilities. We discussed the various merits of the staff, the size of the playroom, the communal dining options.

  While it was a Victorian-era institution, it did not give a foreboding impression. Its brickwork was light, with a reddish tinge; the gardens were lovingly tended, full of flowers and curiosities; the corridors were light and airy, bedecked with the residents’ own artwork, wide enough for several wheelchairs to pass each other at ease. In our room, we had a double bed artfully separated from Jack’s by a removable division. We slept there, as a family, the way we once had when Jack was born.

  Jack had mostly withdrawn from the world. As the tumor pressed on the vital parts of his brain, he became more detached, less able to express emotions. Now there was no more chemotherapy, his hair had grown longer, a little unruly once again. He had a haunted, faraway look in his eyes, a look that should never be seen on a child.

  The art classes, the wake-’em-up karaoke, the superhero day, were all lost on Jack. He didn’t even recognize his pictures anymore: the buildings, the panoramas, we had taped around his bed. It was the speed that shocked me. The cavalier way his own body betrayed him.

  Then, something else changed in Jack’s brain. The tumor shifted, or grew, or colonized a new lobe, and suddenly, while we thought he still understood what was being said to him, Jack could no longer speak. Now he just slept, his body already in death’s custody.

  To watch a death, to see it close up, to see the pallor of Jack’s skin change, his hair mat into greasy knots despite our best efforts with a sponge. All the body’s outer signs of decay—the sourness of his breath, the flaking of his skin, the horizontal lines appearing on his fingernails—were just prim reminders of the horrors that were taking place within his body.

  How long, how long? That was what we asked the doctors, the ward nurse, anyone who might know, anyone who would listen. I felt like we were betraying him.

  I didn’t know how I knew it was coming, but I knew. We both knew. I put my head on Jack’s chest, encasing his small body with my arms, and then I felt Anna’s arms fold around me, or perhaps Anna had been there first, and we stayed like that for ten, twenty, thirty minutes, our bodies, like wings protecting a young bird.

  I would like to say that Jack held out his hand and reached over and traced the outline of mine, my knuckle, the curve between my thumb and forefinger. Or that he looked up at me with loving eyes, but he did not. His hands were like clammy ice. His eyes glassy and opaque, no longer of this world.

  And then we heard a soft rasp, like an echo of a breath, and our arms tightened around him, and we waited, waited, held our own breaths so we could hear his and we waited, waited, hoping he would and hoping he wouldn’t. I listened again and again, and this time I knew that his breath was not coming; this time I knew he was gone.

  I removed myself from Jack’s body and looked around the room. People cling to their death stories: their cozy myths of seeing the soul depart the room. But at Ashbourne House, everything was still the same. There was no beam of light or gentle rattling of the windowpane. The day was still gray outside. Jack’s Minions water bottle remained undrunk on the table. I could hear the chirp of hospital bells in the distance, and I thought for a moment that their frequency, their pitch, was somehow different. I listened again. No, it was the same.

  In the quietness of the room, my breathing suddenly seemed very loud. Anna was still lying on the bed with Jack, her arms cradling his head and neck. He had come from her body, and she would stay with him for as long as she could.

  I looked at Jack. Sometimes people spoke of the body after death looking empty, as if it was neutered by the absence of a soul, like the discarded skin of a snake. But it was still him; it was still Jack. He didn’t look to be at peace—that was just the delusion of the living—but his face was mostly without expression. The only thing I could categorically say about his expression was that it was his. It was him; it was still him.

  I rang the emergency bell after that. For Anna, not Jack. Because after she pried herself away from Jack’s body and fell to her knees, and after I put my arms around her, to encase her like we had done Jack, she broke away and slammed her head against the wall, again and again, so hard that her nose started to drip blood onto the yellow tiles.

  * * *

  The balloons had been Lola’s suggestion. After the reception, just before dusk, we would all gather in the garden and let off helium balloons into the sky. Each person would write their own tribute to Jack, in colored marker, and then on the count of three, we would all send them up to the heavens.

  The idea had not appealed to me. There was something ostentatious about it, cloying even. The idea that every dying child had to have something, something that defined them—as if his love for balloons was the final way that Jack would be remembered, as if that was it, that was the sum of his existence: a balloon.

  Jack would definitely not approve. He would have thought that was messy, somehow improper—why would you write on a balloon like that? Balloons were not meant to be scribbled on.

  “Perhaps we should do it without the messages, the writing,” I said to Anna. “Or just get some from Carphone Warehouse, he always loved those.”

  “It’s just balloons,” Anna said. “It doesn’t matter where they’re from. And I think the writing is a nice idea.”

  I was sullen, silent.

  Jack’s funeral. I don’t remember much about that day. The banal sea of people, the way they clasped my hand. Anna’s mother,
a specter in a wheelchair, and how I resented her presence, her very living, that she was given a second chance.

  The day passed in a haze of Xanax and whiskey. A church on a hill—“lovely setting, so Jack, so very Jack”—a service where everyone, except the elderly, were expected to wear color, “because that’s what Jack would have wanted.” Laughs when the Spider-Man theme came on. Laughs at a little boy’s funeral. “He would have loved that, Oh, Jack would have loved that.”

  “He loved to smile, your Jack, didn’t he?” They were wrong. They knew nothing about Jack. He was frugal with his smiles, as if he thought they were being rationed. He didn’t dish them out for anyone.

  Jack was buried because we could not bear to have him cremated. It was a ritual fitting for the old but not for the young. And he was always terrified of fire. When he was little, we had taught him to be scared of the pot bubbling away on the stove and, dutifully, he was. He took comfort in the blinking red light on the smoke alarm in his room.

  I watched as he was lowered into the ground, the earth tipped over him. All I could think was that there was Jack in that wooden box, dressed in his Spider-Man pajamas with Little Teddy, his flashlight, all of his Pokémon cards by his side. Coffins should never, ever be made in that size.

  We got some lovely cards, Anna said, in the car on the way back to the house. I flicked through them, in pastels, light blues, mauves, the colors of an old woman’s cardigan. In the messages, they all called Jack a fighter, a warrior. An angel in heaven. A living saint. They said he touched people’s hearts. Bits of folded paper bought for 1 pound 20 from Smiths.

  Oh, they loved to make it about them, didn’t they? Did they think we didn’t see their Facebook posts? Hug your children tonight, they wrote, spend a few extra minutes before bed. And then they posted pictures of Jack. Our Jack.

  It makes you realize, they said, just how precious life is, how we have to cherish what we have. Did they not think about the implications of what they were saying? That their children were still very much alive, and they would hug them tonight and breathe them in and listen to them sing as they woke. Poor little Jack, they said. He was in a better place now. He wasn’t, though. A better place was here with us. Jack was just gone. There were no playdates in heaven. He was no warrior, no angel, watching over us all. Jack did what he could and never once complained. He bore his illness quietly with a type of stoicism I had never associated with a child.

  Back at the house, there were perhaps twenty or thirty people in all, family, friends, a few older children. Anna made some of Jack’s favorite things and there was cake. A few others brought nibbles. Photos of Jack cycled through on the big TV screen.

  When it came to balloon time, it was raining and the wind had picked up. After the adults had written their messages and the children had drawn their pictures, we counted down and then released the balloons into the sky. With black marker, I wrote:

  Jack, we will never forget you, Love, Daddy.

  The coldness, the brusqueness of my message was an act of defiance, so angry was I about the idea that I was being told how I should remember my son. I didn’t know what Anna wrote, and I didn’t want to look.

  I stood next to Anna, close but not touching. Someone, not me, had put a coat around her shoulders because she was shivering. The balloons didn’t go very far. A few of them never even made it off the ground and just bobbled around the backyard. Some got lodged in the eaves under the garage roof. One of them popped on the branches of the apple tree and, at that, I couldn’t help smiling. Jack would have liked that.

  * * *

  I liked to think of Jack’s death another way. In Greece, I would sometimes go for a walk with him after lunch. We walked away from the hotel, down a hidden path through the tall grass, which meandered toward the sea like a stream, until we got to the second beach, the beach with the boats and the fishmonger who always made Jack laugh.

  One day, the promenade was deserted and the sun was relentless, so we took shelter under a lone tree and drank water from a plastic bottle. Jack was beginning to feel sleepy and rested his head on my shoulder.

  We sat like that for a while, listening to the sounds beyond the wind. Cicadas, the rattle and chirp of a yacht’s mast in the distance. New smells. Jasmine grass. Hot dust. Lamb being grilled on an open flame. Eventually Jack started to fall asleep. His eyes went, then his head slowly slid to the side. That was how I liked to imagine his death. A slow, gentle sleep. The kiss of the wind. The sound of the sea.

  19

  It was not wise to be a childless man around a children’s playground. So I was careful about choosing my positions. A bench at an indirect angle, partially blocked by trees. A seating area in Camden where office workers ate sandwiches, directly across from some trampolines and a death slide.

  My favorite spot, though, was the Parliament Hill playground, not just because I used to come here with Jack, but there was a café and it didn’t seem strange to sit here, alone, without kids. With Anna now back at work, my days were empty. They offered her compassionate leave, but she said she needed something to occupy her mind.

  I sat with my laptop in front of me and watched a boy, around five years old, playing on the swings. His father was leaning on a tree, one eye on his son, one eye on his phone. There was a gangly boy, tall for his age, perhaps about ten or eleven, with a shyness in his face that reminded me of Jack. He was playing with a football, occasionally smashing the ball into a wall.

  I always drank Diet Coke at the café. I would buy a bottle at the counter, and then switch it with the one in my bag—the one I had already prepared, the one half-full with vodka. I started drinking more because I couldn’t sleep. I would lie awake next to Anna, annoyed by the quiet symmetry of her breathing, the apparent ease with which she slept. I watched the tree branches dancing in the lamplight; I listened to the mournful howls of the neighbor’s dog. So I started getting up and going downstairs, tiptoeing around in my bathrobe, stepping over the creaky stair, silently opening the latch on the drinks’ cabinet. At first a few large whiskeys were enough, but then it became four or five. Soon I was taking sips from the drinks’ cabinet during the day, as I had done as a teenager, taking nips from my parents’ sideboard before a night out.

  It had started to spit with rain, and people were leaving the playground. I needed to buy more vodka, so I walked down the hill to the Tesco Metro. I went straight to the booze counter, not allowing my eyes to wander. I could not go down the cereal aisle anymore, nor where the children’s magazines were stacked. I had learned to avert my eyes as I passed the Marmite, the Babybel cheese. Once, I began to weep when I saw Jack’s little pots of Petit Filous.

  When I got home, Anna was somewhere in the house. We moved around like ghosts, rarely speaking, wordlessly passing each other on the stairs. We did our crying alone, in the shower, the car, at the sight of a lone robin sitting on Jack’s favorite tree.

  We did try to come back to each other. We attempted to eat together on the weekends, as if Icelandic scallops or an aged rib-eye steak would help us forget Jack’s empty place at the table. Once, on a Saturday, we went to the cinema together, but Anna had to leave after seeing a trailer for a children’s movie.

  There were boxes in the hallway, things from Jack’s room, things I assumed she wanted to clear out. It shouldn’t have been like that. Because when your child dies, you are meant to leave their bedroom untouched. A shrine to the before. A sanctum for those quiet moments, which are now so achingly frequent. A place where you go to smell their clothes, to lie down in their rocket bed, to stack away their toys again and again.

  I told her this, asked her why she was clearing out his room, but there was no point in reasoning with her. So instead, one day, when she was at work, I took the remainder of his things—his backpack, his camera, his sticker books—and snuck them away in one of the cupboards in the spare room.

  I lay on the sofa
in the living room, happy that Anna was upstairs, that I could drink my vodka in peace. This was now where I spent most of my days, on my laptop, my phone, staring at the wall. Scott had finally sold the company and I didn’t have a job, not that it mattered anyway. I withdrew, like a wounded insect, coiling and curling into a ball. Once, I played a little mental game, to see if I could remember who the prime minister was, or where the last World Cup was held. I had no idea. Nothing. I no longer lived in the world.

  * * *

  I woke on the sofa to find Anna staring at me.

  “Rob, we need to talk.”

  “Okay,” I said. The vodka bottle was still on the coffee table.

  “We can’t go on like this. You can’t go on like this.”

  “Like what?”

  “The drinking. What you’re doing to yourself.”

  I didn’t say anything. “Sorry,” I finally managed. “It’s just my way of getting through it. I’ll be fine.”

  “I know,” Anna said, putting her hand on my leg. “It’s a horrible time, but you can’t keep on like this. You have to start doing something. Maybe doing some work again, taking on a new project...”

  “I can’t just jump back into work like you, Anna,” I said.

  She had gone back not long after Jack’s funeral. A couple of weeks later, I was sitting in the kitchen listening to the news on the radio. Suddenly Anna’s voice was echoing around the kitchen, talking about the likelihood of an interest-rate hike. I listened to her tone, her intonation. It wasn’t the voice of someone who had just lost their son.

  “And does that mean I don’t care, Rob, because I went back to work? Should I do what you’re doing? Sitting around drinking every day.”

  “Thanks for mentioning it again,” I said, turning my head away from her. “What do you want me to say? Yes, I’m drinking too much. I know it’s not ideal, but it’s my way of...”