The Cookbook of Common Prayer

by Francesca Haig

  Francesca Haig grew up in Tasmania and is an author and academic, whose poetry and YA/crossover fantasy have been widely published. She lives in London with her husband and son.

  Published in hardback in Great Britain in 2021 by Allen & Unwin, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  Copyright © De Tores Ltd, 2021

  The moral right of Francesca Haig to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Hardback ISBN: 978 1 91163 090 6

  Trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 91163 091 3

  E-book ISBN: 978 1 76087 480 3

  Printed in Great Britain

  Allen & Unwin

  An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

  Ormond House

  26–27 Boswell Street

  London

  WC1N 3JZ

  www.allenandunwin.com/uk

  For James Upcher, 1979–2017.

  Always brilliant,

  always beloved.

  Prologue

  Dark water rising.

  It comes up faster than you’d believe, but it doesn’t wait for your belief, or need it – the water is its own permission. It’s black, and cold enough to make your lungs clench. If you scream, or shout, you don’t hear it over the indifferent water. It swallows your words, swallows the world.

  The water tells only one story, and it’s the story of water.

  Teddy

  It’s Papabee who taught me to understand stories. My grandpa read me so many stories that I learned how they can come outside of their pages, until a story is something you can move around in, like a house, or a forest, all dark up above and sideways and down below too.

  When I was small (even smaller than I am now), Papabee used to read me The Lorax, and the bit at the start went into my head and never came out.

  If you want to hear the story of the Lorax, the book says, you have to go and ask the Onceler. The Onceler’s a sort of monster-person that you never even see properly – just a glimpse of green hands, or a peek of eyes through a window. From way up high in his creepy tower, he sends down a bucket on a rope, and the only way to hear the story is to put in exactly the right things: fifteen cents, one nail, and a snail shell. Not just any snail shell, either – it has to be from an ancient snail, a grandfather four times over.

  Papabee used to read me The Lorax over and over – it was one of our very best books. So since all the bad things started happening, and our house started to fill up with stories that nobody will tell, I’ve known exactly what to do. The stories are building up, like the dust in Dougie and Sylvie’s bedrooms. Mum and Dad are stuck, and Sylvie’s stuck, and Dougie’s stuck too, in his own way. Our whole family’s stuck tight, and nothing can be fixed until they find a way to make their stories word-shaped.

  And everyone’s so busy being stuck that nobody notices me at all any more. I’m only small, after all – eleven years old and mainly knees and elbows, and always in the way, like SausageDog.

  I know it’s not easy to make people tell the truth. I’m still learning about how there are different kinds of truths: the right ones and the wrong ones. When our cat died, my teacher said, ‘I’m sure she’s gone to a better place.’ I said, ‘I think he’s in the freezer at the vet’s.’ That’s the wrong kind of truth, apparently, because Mrs Conway made me pick up rubbish in the playground at recess, for being rude.

  But I know how to fix my family, and how to shake the stories loose. Because of The Lorax, and Papabee, I understand something about stories that the others don’t: if you want someone to tell you their story, you have to find the price, and pay it.

  Gabe

  When we named him Douglas, we didn’t know that it meant dark water. Those were the days before endless online forums about baby names, and we chose Douglas without much deliberation, because it had been my grandfather’s name, and he’d died only a year before Gill got pregnant. I’d been close to my grandfather in a way I never was to my father. And Gill and I both liked how the name sounded: Douglas. The solidness of it; those reliable, hard sounds. When he was born, our first child, bunched up and wrinkled as a tissue that’s been through the wash, the name seemed to suit him.

  It was only nineteen years later, after Dougie had died, that I found out what his name meant. I was staying up late every night, scouring the web for more details than the official accounts had given me. There’d been a flurry of coverage in the first few days – long articles in the local press, and short ones in the big national papers. After the first week, the reporting died down, and my nightly search threw up the same articles, which I could recite like scripture.

  That night, nearly two weeks after he’d died, I typed in my usual search (Douglas Jordan Dead Cave Floodwater) and one of the hits, several pages deep into the search results, was a listing on a baby names website. Douglas (boy). Means: Dark water.

  Ever since then I’ve blamed myself and Gill, accidental prophets. I blame us for choosing a name that turned out to be a promise.

  PART ONE

  Omelette for the day the police come to

  your house to tell you that your son is dead

  Take six eggs (large; ideally free range).

  Crack them, one by one, carefully separating

  the yolks and whites into two large bowls.

  Throw them away.

  Gill

  This is how it happens:

  There’s a knock on the front door. It’s Sunday, mid-morning. Teddy’s gone to soccer practice with Papabee and I’m back in bed with the papers, SausageDog asleep across my legs. Gabe, still in his dressing gown, is in the bathroom.

  I get up, the dog protesting. I see them as soon as I reach the corridor. One man, one woman, their blue and white uniforms unmistakable even through the dappled glass panels of the door. I’m surprised it’s the police – in the past, whenever Sylvie’s gone downhill, the hospital has always called us. That’s how I know it must be really bad.

  For a second I want to hide. If I never let them in – if I freeze, or drop very slowly to the ground so they can’t see my silhouette, and crawl back into the bedroom and never answer the door – then they’ll never be able to tell me the news.

  They knock again, and call out, ‘Mr and Mrs Jordan?’

  I can’t move. I’m frozen in a crouch, staring at the pattern on the hallway rug and trying to ignore the hammering on the door. From the bathroom I hear Gabe, voice thick with toothpaste. ‘Gill? Can’t you get that?’

  I’m still stuck there, half-crouched on the rug, when he comes out from the bathroom, holding his toothbrush. He sees me, sees the police at the door.

  ‘Shit,’ he says, and goes straight to the door, and opens it.

  Will I ever be able to forgive him for opening that door? If he’d just left them outside, and stayed here with me, the police would never be able to come inside and say the words, Your daughter has died.

  But it isn’t our daughter. It’s our son.

  When Dougie first went away for his gap year, I didn’t really grasp
that he’d moved out until the pasta fell on me. The corner shop used to do a special pasta deal: five packets for five dollars. When Dougie was in high school, I’d pick up a pasta deal at least once a week. From the instant he hit puberty, he was always eating. He ate WeetBix in a pasta bowl because it was bigger than a cereal bowl; ten WeetBix at breakfast, and sometimes the same after school. Our fridge was crammed with cartons of milk, and still we couldn’t keep up. His friends were always coming over after school, and they’d cook pasta before heading off to hockey or basketball practice. Jars of cheap tomato pasta sauce; mounds of grated cheese. I was forever buying cheese – huge bricks of cheddar. Gabe and I used to laugh about it. ‘Jesus,’ he said, when we were out of cheese and milk again. ‘It’d literally be cheaper to buy a cow.’

  Then Dougie left for his year away. After he’d been in England for five weeks, I still hadn’t consciously changed my regular shopping routine. One afternoon I opened the pantry and twenty-five packets of pasta came tumbling down on me from the top shelf. I sat on the cold tiles of the kitchen floor and cried. I wasn’t hurt – not even bruised. But it was the first time I really understood that Dougie had left home.

  Now there are two strangers in my house telling me that he’s dead, and I think: I need a moment like the falling pasta to make it real. He’s already been away for more than four months. We’ve become used to not having him here, and it will take something as tangible as twelve and a half kilos of pasta falling on my head to prove to me that this is different. Then I could hold the fact of his death, as solid as all those crinkling packets of spaghetti and penne that I had to pick up from the floor. Instead, all I have are these police officers in their neatly ironed uniforms, and their words that I can’t make sense of: accident; caving; flash flood; coroner.

  They use phrases that I’ve heard on TV shows – Perhaps you should sit down; We’re terribly sorry to have to tell you; Every effort was made – but the officers seem sincere. The man even has tears in his eyes while he explains what happened. He’s very young, probably only early twenties, with a few spots still lingering on his forehead. He sits opposite us, leaning forward as he talks, his shirt coming untucked at the back. I remember Dougie’s school uniform shirt, always untucked. I find myself comforting the policeman, saying, ‘It’s OK, don’t cry. Don’t cry.’

  The dog, excited to have visitors, is trying to lick the policewoman’s ankle. His tail’s wagging, not just from side to side but round and round like the crank on my coffee grinder.

  ‘Do you have someone who can be with you?’ the policewoman asks, trying to push SausageDog away without being rude.

  ‘Sue,’ I say, at the same time as Gabe says, ‘We’ll be fine.’ I want Sue here – my best friend. I want somebody to translate the police officers’ words into something that I can understand. There’s a ringing in my ears. Several times I ask Gabe, ‘Can you hear that?’ and he keeps shaking his head.

  I give the policeman my phone and he calls Sue. I hear his voice from the corridor. ‘If you can come straight away, I think that would help.’

  ‘We have to be there,’ Gabe says. ‘In London. I’ll book flights.’ He wipes the back of his hand across his eyes. ‘We’ll ask Sue if she’ll keep an eye on Teddy and Papabee. And Sylvie, too.’

  ‘Oh God,’ I say. ‘Sylvie. This’ll kill her.’

  Gabe

  The policeman gives us the number of the Buckinghamshire police. I get put through to a woman and I put the phone on speaker so Gill can hear too. The lady is nice – terribly, convincingly nice, as if what happened to Dougie is an unprecedented shock, even though it’s presumably her job to deal with death on a regular basis.

  ‘I’m afraid I can confirm that they found Douglas’s body last night.’

  ‘It can’t be him,’ Gill says immediately. Her eyes are jammed tight shut, her fists too. ‘It can’t be,’ she repeats. ‘It must be somebody else.’

  ‘There’s been a preliminary identification, and—’

  Gill interrupts her. ‘Who?’

  ‘We’re confident that it’s Douglas, Mrs Jordan.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant,’ says Gill. ‘Who identified him?’

  There’s a shuffling of paper. ‘A Rosa Campbell,’ the woman says.

  ‘Dougie’s mentioned her,’ I say. ‘She’s his girlfriend. She teaches there, at the school where he works.’ Should I say worked? Through which hole in language has my son slipped from the present to the past tense?

  ‘She could be wrong,’ Gill says. ‘How can she be sure it’s him?’

  ‘They know him.’ I look down at my hands. ‘Rosa’s his girlfriend, for God’s sake. If they’re sure, they’re sure.’ And it’s not as though the caves under the Home Counties are crammed with the bodies of young men, I want to add, but it seems too flippant, too harsh.

  ‘You can view Douglas’s body at the hospital,’ the woman says.

  ‘The hospital?’ I echoed, stupidly. I was expecting it to be a morgue, or a funeral home or something. Why is he at the hospital? He’s dead. He’s already been dead for – I counted hurriedly in my head – at least twenty hours. There’s nothing they can do for him at a hospital.

  ‘The deceased are kept at the hospital,’ she explained. ‘Until they can be released to the care of a funeral home.’

  She gives me the number for the hospital, and the address of her own office. Gill’s crying more noisily now, so I end the call quickly, with apologies that the woman politely brushes away.

  I’m angry at Gill for forcing me to be the sensible one. For taking all the hysteria for herself, and for leaving me to handle things: talking to the police; booking the flights. Meanwhile, Gill sobs, and rocks herself forwards and backwards, and the policeman says something about making us sweet tea, for the shock.

  I walk to Gill and lean close to her, my forehead against hers.

  ‘How are we going to tell Sylvie?’ I ask.

  Gill

  ‘How are we going to tell Sylvie?’ he asks.

  I have no answer for him, so it’s a relief when Sue arrives, a shriek of brakes outside. She lets herself in the back door, all noise and tears. ‘Fuck,’ she says. ‘I can’t believe it. I can’t fucking believe it’s real. Is it real? You poor loves. My loves. How can it be real? Fucking fuck.’

  She grips my hand and I grip back and I’m glad that she’s punctured the orderly calm of this scene, and the rehearsed condolences of the police officers. She clutches me to her, then Gabe, and then me again. My lungs are an accordion being squeezed. An atonal gasp bursts from me.

  ‘I’ll pick up Teddy and Papabee,’ she says.

  I nod. I haven’t even been able to think properly about them yet. Teddy, and my dad.

  Once, years and years ago, we left Teddy behind at the hockey club’s end-of-season barbecue at the reservoir. My sister, her partner, and their kids were staying, so there were four adults and six children. It was chaotic – Dougie had eaten too many chocolate bars and thrown up, and we were rushing to get home, herding the kids into two cars, everyone assuming Teddy was in the other car. We got halfway down Waterworks Road before I realised. When we rushed back we found Teddy, unaware we’d even left, playing with his friends among the trees by the water’s edge. For weeks afterwards I’d wake at night picturing him in the reservoir, the water closing over his little face.

  Standing at the counter, I crack the eggs, one after another. I separate the yolks and whites, cradling each yolk in my palm while the white slips through my fingers to the bowl below.

  ‘I don’t think I can eat,’ Gabe says. ‘Can you?’

  ‘No,’ I say, and I keep cracking the eggs. When they’re all done, the yolks make a slurping noise as I tip them into the bin. The police officers must have gone; I didn’t even notice Gabe showing them out.

  Footsteps outside the back door – Sue’s brought Teddy and Papabee back. She hasn’t told them anything yet, and my dad’s as oblivious as ever, but Teddy already knows something�
�s up.

  ‘Sue wouldn’t say what’s happened,’ he says, looking from Gabe to me and back again. His transparent plastic soccer mouthguard is still in his hand, like the teeth of a ghost.

  We tell Teddy and Papabee together, because they do everything together and it doesn’t seem fair to separate them for this. Papabee doesn’t say anything at first, while Teddy cries, and collapses into Gabe’s embrace. Then Papabee says, ‘Why don’t you telephone Dougie? I’m sure if we just ring him, he’ll be able to sort all of this out.’ He picks up the remote control from the coffee table and holds it out to me. ‘Gillian – just telephone him.’

  ‘We can’t, Papabee,’ Gabe says, and eases the remote from my dad’s hands. ‘He’s dead.’

  Then Teddy cries so much that he wets himself, which he hasn’t done for more than five years, and I’m grateful to have something to do, rushing to put on a load of washing and run him a bath. I sit on the edge of the tub, stroke his hair and tell him that we love him, which is true, and that it will be all right, which is not.

  ‘Teddy. Teddy-bear. Teddy,’ I say, kissing the top of his head.

  He was never meant to be called Teddy. We named him Edward, Papabee’s name. Except we never called him that – people called him Teddy from the very start. At first, we always corrected them, said ‘No, it’s Edward.’ Then, when we started calling him Teddy too, we promised ourselves it would be just for a few years. Teddy’s OK while he’s little, we agreed; It’s cute for a baby – but not for a big boy, let alone a man.

  But we didn’t ever get around to making the change. On his first day of school his teacher called him Edward, and Teddy didn’t answer because he didn’t even know that was his name.

  I sit on the edge of Teddy’s bath. He’s lying on his back, staring at the ceiling. ‘Mum? Was it dark?’