Missing Christopher

by Jayne Newling

  Dr Eccles stressed that Christopher must inform his girlfriend urgently as it was particularly harmful to women. I wondered if there was more than one girl.

  After a few hours Nic was allowed to go home. He would be back in two days for the second treatment. When Christopher came in from school I told him about Dr Eccles’s phone call and to let his girlfriend Annabel know, and anyone else who may be an ‘interested party’. He rolled his eyes and smiled, giving me a little pat on my back. Then he rubbed Nic’s head and asked him if the zapping hurt. Nic stuck his tongue out and let it loll. He dropped his head, forcing two drops of dribble to roll down his T-shirt. He looked up at his brother, crossed his eyes, threw his head back then jerked his body into a frenzy. When the performance ended Christopher grabbed him around the neck and, laughing hysterically, they made their way upstairs.

  I laughed with them, too, then out of sight I cried silently into my teatowel.

  chapter 8

  The blind possum died two days after Christopher. The mound of bananas and apples was left uneaten. Shadow, our golden retriever, wouldn’t eat either. She was sick with grief for Christopher, vomiting every meal. She was so sad she whimpered for most of each day while she lay at my feet with her head on her paws and she became distressed if left alone. She, too, would die a year later from cancer.

  Lisa, our cat, frightened by the crowds, disappeared for two days.

  Christopher loved all animals. He was eight years old when he asked to go to Waratah Park, a famous Sydney wildlife park and home to TV’s Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, on one of our ‘kidnap’ days. Each year I would secretly arrange with their teachers to take them out of class for a day. I’d whisper in their ears that I was kidnapping them. Their eyes would open wide and they’d hurry to pack up their little satchels. We’d hold hands as we ran down the driveway into my waiting car. They got to choose where they wanted to go.

  Christopher loved Waratah Park. He especially wanted to see the wombats, his favourite animal. We darted around the bush tracks, laughing, exploring and feeding the animals. Then we sat on the park bench to eat our peanut butter sandwiches.

  When we got home that day Christopher asked for an animal of his own.

  Shadow was Ben’s dog and Nic had a cage full of mice in every stage of development. Lisa belonged to the whole family. Christopher wanted a rabbit which he would name Lawnmower. Often he’d take his stuffed bunny to his real bunny so Lawnmower wouldn’t feel lonely.

  I wanted to bury the blind possum but I couldn’t find its body. I didn’t believe in souls and reincarnation but Christopher did, and somehow it was important that the animal’s decrepit little body was safe in the warm earth, away from predators.

  Christopher found solace in the spiritual world and believed in the afterlife. He loved the Buddha he kept on his bedside table and surrounded it with moonstones and incense.

  The day before we had to view Christopher’s body I snuck into his bedroom and locked the door behind me. I had to find something to place in his coffin. His room felt warm and airy in contrast to the heavy, claustrophobic cloak which had fallen over the rest of the house.

  Loss, the dead weight of it, had enfolded our lives, our grief making us strangers to each other and the outside world. Silence filled the empty rooms as we all crouched in darkened corners looking for something to do, something to say. We could feel each other’s misery as we watched, through suspicious eyes, our former selves fail at simulating life as we knew it a few days past.

  My first instinct was to pack everything in boxes so I’d never have to look at them again. If the reminders were gone, I would not have to grieve as hard or for as long. Then I remembered what a friend had told me a few years earlier about the death of her niece. Her sister had not touched her daughter’s room since her death twenty years ago. Each night she would light a candle, pray by her bed and often sleep in it, curled in a foetal position clinging to her daughter’s doll. It was a shrine no one was allowed to enter. Nothing had blunted her grief and when I first heard the story I thought it was because of her shrine, but then as I stood in Christopher’s five-day-old lifeless room, it hit me. Nothing mattered now. It was over.

  I could do whatever I wanted because nothing would mollify my grief.

  I picked up the diary which was next to his daily pack of inspirational cards on his desk, opened on page 241, August 29th, 2002.

  There was also a book filled with his rugby training notes and long-forgotten school assignments. I scrutinised all the notes looking for clues. His school diary revealed his unhappiness and uncertainty, his apathy and despair. His personal diary began on October 15th, 2001, and ended the next year on February 15th. The first thing he wrote was: ‘Why am I off track: no goals, no certain future, no track to follow.’ After that, the pages were blank. Perhaps after that, he had already decided life would soon be over. The four months of notes showed his fight to find some sense in his troubled thoughts, to change the negatives, to find the will to live. Each week ended with a famous quote.

  Tumbled together in his top drawer were a box of condoms, letters from girlfriends, his boyhood Matchbox cars, a candle and a book I gave him when he was five—I’ll Always Love You by Hans Wilheim.

  It’s a story about Elfie, ‘The World’s Best Dog’. The boy and Elfie grew up together and when Elfie was naughty and she was scolded, the family didn’t tell her that they loved her anyway. They thought she just knew. As the boy got taller, Elfie got older and bigger. The boy carried her upstairs to his room each night and laid her on a soft pillow. Before they went to sleep he would say to her, ‘I’ll always love you.’ He knew she understood. Soon after, Elfie died during the night. The boy’s brother and sister loved Elfie a lot and were sad but they had never told her they loved her. The boy was very sad, too, but it helped to remember that he had told her he loved her every night.

  On the inside cover I had written: ‘To my beautiful Cricket. I’ll always love you—Mama.’ Next to it was a tiny lock of Christopher’s hair under a yellowing piece of sticky tape.

  I know I told him I loved him but maybe as he got older, not enough. I was angry and yelled at him a lot. Don’t go! Do this! Go! Come! Stop! Stop! I yelled at him when Ally, the girl he was living with, dyed his hair black. I was angry when he talked on the phone till the early hours of the morning, leaving his unfinished homework in a pile on his desk. I was upset that many of his depressed, heartbroken or unhappy girlfriends asked him for his counsel when he was desperately sad himself. They didn’t know he needed help and he never asked for it. We fought for days over his insistence to have an eyebrow ring and when Ben’s girlfriend Sarah reluctantly told us she had seen him swigging beer while driving, he denied it and I got angry because he had lied. I was most angry that he made us worry about him when we had so much stress with Nic.

  Christopher’s tattered blue bunny had fallen between his two pillows. Its fur was matted, the stuffing leaking out from the back of its flattened head. One cheek was threadbare from too much loving and the tag which little Christopher used to rub around his ear and nose while sucking his thumb had long gone. I lay down next to it and held it tightly to me. I wondered how many tears Bunny had absorbed over the years.

  What would become of Bunny; who would love it now?

  I lay on Christopher’s bed, hugged his pillow to me and inhaled the lingering traces of him. Tomorrow, I promised myself, I’d wash his sheets, pack up his things then close the door. I told myself I must never go back in. I didn’t for a few days, but when no one was at home I’d go in just to be with him, to smell him. I slid between his sheets and willed the world to stop. I knew, in time, this room would send me mad; this empty, deathly, soundless crypt, the black and cream striped curtains he chose, pulled together tight to block out life.

  In time there would be nothing left to see, touch, smell or hear.

  Diseased senses, hidden fears, putrescent moments and useless monuments collected over a short life, all crushed and
shrivelled into plastic boxes—keepsakes for the children he would never have.

  I scoured over each item, every piece of paper, hoping for a clue as to why he needed to die. Was there a hidden meaning in a letter from a friend who begged him to leave his girlfriend for her? Another pleaded with him to bear his soul, to trust her with his problems.

  Was there a sign in the memorial card from the funeral of a mate who threw himself off a bridge four months earlier?

  His rugby bag, found in the boot of his car at the headland, was by his bed. In one pocket was a crinkled tube of Dencorub, his mouthguard, anti-inflammatory pills and an anti-anxiety drug. In another, Panadeine, bandages and a water bottle. In the bag itself were his headgear, boots and tracksuit. Hidden underneath were the notes from his session with the psychologist the day before he died.

  Seeing his small, neat and masculine handwriting shocked me.

  But it was what he wrote that devastated me when I realised how sad and confused he really was, how quickly he had plummeted into dark despair. He was lonely and frightened and he couldn’t reach out to anyone. He had visited a friend, Emma, the night before, on August 28th. Her parents had asked him to stay for dinner but he said he had to get home. It was Emma he was talking to as he stood on the headland’s precipice the following night. Emma heard the phone go dead as it smashed on the rocks below. She would tell me much later that when she last saw him, he had hugged her tightly and it felt to her like a goodbye.

  On August 29th he rang another close friend, Lara, to ask if he could come over to watch The Footy Show with her, a Thursday ritual they often enjoyed together, but she had to work.

  On August 27th he and Ally were lying in bed watching Pulp Fiction. He wrote about the movie on the back of a Cognitive Distortions Test that I found in his rugby bag.

  ‘All the conversations are pointless,’ he wrote. ‘Why do they do that? It is depressing that people talk about completely uninteresting things just to avoid an uncomfortable silence. It seems like they’re only interested in superficial and petty topics.’

  When asked to describe his fears about being away from home and living with a sixteen-year-old girl, he wrote: ‘I was lying down next to her and started getting really agitated. I couldn’t get myself to feel anything but disgust and I had a sick feeling in my stomach. Her breath smelt. Why? What causes that? I’ve noticed it a few times before but it’s gone overboard now. It’s happened too many times. Why can’t it be fixed? I realise no girl will ever be flawless.’

  He wrote about his girlfriend Annabel, her beauty and his fear that she would leave him. He was ‘anxious’ that others found her attractive and that she was aware of her allure. He had lost all confidence. His self-esteem was so low he now saw himself as a failure. His world had contracted into the small space in his head. He thought he was going mad.

  ‘I don’t know if anything is real. I’m unsure if what I think is good or what I’m told is good is really good. Maybe what is good is really bad and what is bad is really good.’

  That would be the last sentence he would ever write, final thoughts—the thoughts we didn’t hear.

  From Christopher’s diary: October 15th, 2001

  Treat today as if you won’t exist tomorrow.

  OG MANDINO

  chapter 9

  There is a moment in everyone’s life, a prophetic awakening when you instantly understand with the clarity of a sage what defines you, the reason for life itself. It’s the fork in the road, the right or wrong path. It will change you, enlighten you, set you free or brand you forever. This was my moment as I stared down into Christopher’s lidded eye sockets. I knew my life was over. I knew I couldn’t live without my son.

  It was Tuesday. Christopher had been dead for 110 hours. A shaft of lightning illuminated the divine figures huddled in prayer in the leadlight windows of the small suburban chapel. Thunder suspended the deathly silence and rattled the frames and the entry bars on the heavy, mahogany doors. In the distance a train arrived at the station then honked a slow departure.

  We stood behind the closed doors—waiting.

  I knew this would be the last time I would ever lay eyes on my son.

  Two men in shiny black suits looked down respectfully as they signalled entry. Phil and I shuffled, hand in hand, down the short aisle, past empty pews and the sad floral arrangements from last Saturday’s wedding. I looked up to the altar and stumbled as my legs locked. I couldn’t walk, and Ben and Nic each took an arm and led me at a halting pace.

  A photo of Jesus hung from the back wall, his gaze aimed at Christopher’s lifeless body. We approached slowly then stared down at him with horror. His big, tanned hands, the only part of his body not gouged by the autopsy knife, were shrivelled and pasty. His large, muscly frame was brittle and had collapsed and shrunk like a two-day-old balloon.

  The damage his brutal death caused had been masked with a white shroud, which I wasn’t asked to choose. It concealed his twisted, broken leg and the livid bruises, stark upon his alabaster skin; the gaping wounds of the jagged rocks; his damaged organs, wrenched from their anchors, mingled in a thick, plastic bag in the vacuum of his eviscerated stomach. The hairline gash, sewn to conceal the gaping hole from which his brain had been cleaved from his spinal cord, was air-brushed with pasty makeup. It would never heal. His once-blond hair was dirty and limp and hung in dull strands over his sunken skull. That was not the way he wore it. His cheeks had collapsed under the weight of fractured bones and his full lips were now withered and thin. His sockets had shrunk to accommodate the prosthetic marbles, much smaller than the blue orbs I could stare into forever. He was the colour of concrete.

  I bent down to kiss him—one last time. He was frigid and rigid and reeked of formaldehyde, not the familiar Giorgio Armani for Men Annabel had given to him for his sixteenth birthday. He wasn’t there. He was a paper cut-out. He was someone else’s son.

  I collapsed, slithered to the floor like a deflating blow-up doll. Hands pulled at me, lifted me, dragged me away along the polished floorboards.

  The doors closed behind our backs. The two black-suited men would take our son out of his coffin, put him back into his plastic womb and slide him into the steel morgue drawer. It would shut with a loud clank, rattling the corpses, the neighbours on either side. It would be cold and dark in there. He would be lonely. I wished I could be with him, lie with him, keep him warm. He didn’t like to be cold; he hated to be alone and hated the dark.

  I wished I had taken a lock of his hair.

  We drove home in silence, Daisy at the wheel. Nic had an ear infection. I rang our doctor to order a prescription for antibiotics.

  Daisy pulled into the bottle shop in Avalon. Nic and I waited in the back seat. He pulled me to him and hugged me.

  ‘You okay, Mum?’

  I nodded then rested my head against the headrest.

  ‘Don’t worry. He’s with God now.’

  ‘I don’t want him to be with God. I want him to be here with us.’

  ‘You will be together again but you have to believe.’

  ‘In what, Nic?’

  ‘God. God says we are all reunited in death. Life isn’t the end of the story. You have to find God, Mum, or we’ll never be together again.’

  I closed my eyes and sighed. How could I tell Nic I didn’t want God, any god. I just wanted my son back. And how could I find God when I couldn’t even find my feet?

  chapter 10

  The funeral: family and close friends gathered in the alcove of one of the many chapels at the Northern Suburbs Crematorium. I was sure it was the same one where we came to see my brother Jim before he was cremated. Christopher’s coffin was by the altar, the gold crucifix ablaze in the early afternoon sunlight. I couldn’t look at it and, yet, couldn’t stop my mind picturing my son, hands clasped to chest in death’s comedic pose in the dank carapace under the wooden lid. I had time. He was still whole. If I wanted to I could hold him, kiss him one more time. I could still get a lo
ck of his hair.

  Shore’s reverend, Matthew Pickering, who would marry Ben and Sarah seven years later, stood at the lectern and cleared his throat. Christopher, he said, was a lovable, sensitive and vulnerable boy who often came to him for pastoral and spiritual guidance. When Christopher was in trouble, the reverend would try to find a way to help him. He told the congregation of the time Christopher came to school with dyed black hair and was thrown out of class by an exasperated maths teacher. Seeing him sitting outside the headmaster’s office, Reverend Pickering rescued him and took him down the road to the barber for a short back and sides. I knew that Christopher idolised Reverend Pickering and there were many more rescues. But as Christopher started to drop out of life and eventually school, the contact became minimal.

  I gripped my chair as a prayer was read. It was getting close to the end. I was frantic. How could I get someone to open the lid? I needed one more minute with him. I needed to hold him one more time. I needed to get his hair. I didn’t have any scissors. Who would have scissors? My head was screaming. Time was running out . . .

  ‘When the boys were young,’ Reverend Pickering continued, ‘Jayne would kidnap them individually from their classrooms and take them to a fun place of their choice.’

  He looked down over Christopher’s coffin and then at me in the front-row pew and said: ‘God has now kidnapped Christopher.’

  I hated God then. How dare He presume?

  We all stood to place white long-stemmed roses on top of the coffin then watched as it was wheeled to the automated furnace track. Someone in the back room pushed a button and the track clunked into gear. The coffin shuddered as it started the journey then suddenly stopped as though Christopher had changed his mind. I sucked in a mouthful of air and then, just as suddenly, it jerked forward towards the black velvet curtain. Then it disappeared. Gone. Over. Nothing. The space, the years, the love, the laughter had been replaced with an emptiness, as if his existence had been vacuumed into a dark vault where secret men did secret things which no one ever talked about. I wondered if they burned him straight away or waited till they finished their afternoon tea. As everyone slunk into waiting cars I stood and waited but could see no smoke from the chimney stack.