The Cookbook of Common Prayer

by Francesca Haig

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘In the cave,’ he says. He fiddles with his flannel, draping it over his bony knees. ‘Would it have been dark?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ I try to make my voice gentle. Teddy looks very small there, in the water.

  ‘I think it must have been dark,’ he says, ‘if it was a cave underground.’

  I bend my head to his and stay there for a long time.

  When I go back out to the kitchen, Sue’s making us sweet tea. Gabe’s taken Papabee into the living room, patiently explaining again and again what’s happened. Papabee says, ‘How extraordinarily sad,’ and ‘Quite, quite dreadful,’ over and over, but then he stoops to pat SausageDog, straightens again, and asks Gabe, ‘Will Sylvie and Dougie be joining us for dinner this evening?’

  ‘I know you won’t feel like it,’ Sue says to me, ‘but you should eat something.’ She opens the fridge. ‘Any eggs?’

  I shake my head. ‘We’re all out,’ I say. I can’t explain why they’re all in the bin.

  ‘When are you going to tell Sylvie?’ Sue asks.

  Teddy

  I can hear Mum and Sue in the kitchen now, talking about Sylvie.

  ‘I don’t know how to tell her,’ Mum says. ‘Jesus Christ. This’ll be the end of her.’

  ‘Don’t say that,’ Sue says. ‘Sit down. Drink some tea. We’ll get through this.’

  ‘How?’ Mum says. ‘How, though?’

  I lean my head back and let the water fill my ears, so I don’t have to hear Mum talking like that. I used to think Mum and Dad had all the answers. You think that, when you’re little. I’m still little – I can still stretch out in the bath and get my whole body underwater and my knees don’t even make an island – but lately I’m not so sure about Mum and Dad and answers.

  When Mum and Dad were trying to tell me and Papabee about what had happened to Dougie, I couldn’t stop looking at the big pile of eggshells on the counter. I was trying to understand what Mum and Dad were saying, but I was also thinking about the eggshells, and why there were so many of them. And when an egg cracks, is it broken or is it coming true?

  Papabee kept saying, ‘Quite, quite dreadful,’ but he said it like ‘Quate’ because he used to live in England, so his voice is posh even though he’s not posh at all. And I remembered how Dougie used to do a really good Papabee voice, when Papabee wasn’t around: Quate, quate extraordinary, Dougie would say, and do his big Dougie laugh. So I was hearing Papabee’s voice and Dougie’s at the same time and Mum and Dad’s too – until I couldn’t hear anything properly at all.

  After a while, my ears got less muddled and noises started to creep back in. I could hear two seagulls outside doing their croaky seagull yells. The seagulls must know about Dougie, I thought. They get it. What the gulls were saying made more sense than all of Mum and Dad’s words. The seagulls were telling the whole truth about Dougie being dead. They were yelling, carrrrrr carrrrrr carrrr, and it sounded exactly right.

  Then I did so much crying that I let go of everything, even my wee, all hot down my legs, way hotter than you’d think, and Mum was trying to clean me up and a bee had come in the window and Mum was saying to Dad, ‘For God’s sake can you deal with that?’ and it didn’t seem right that this moment should have become about wee and getting the washing on and chasing the bee out the window instead of Dougie being dead, which was The Big Thing.

  While Mum was helping me out of my wet trousers and wrapping me in a towel, I listened to the gulls, and I thought, How do they know? How can they know this exact feeling? If I were a gull I’d fly away. Miles away. I’d fly straight up up up until our house is just a square of roof like on Google Maps and all the people are tiny LEGO-people, then tiny ant-people, then nothing at all. Right up as high as I could go and all I’d take with me would be my own gull-voice that sounds like gone gone gone.

  I’d rather be Bird-Teddy, even if it meant eating worms. Warm mouth, worm mouth. I’d rather be any Teddy than this one. If I was Bird-Teddy, all my thoughts would be bird-thoughts and all my questions would have bird-answers, and none of my questions would be about caves.

  I swish the bathwater with my fingers, then hold out my hand and watch the drips falling off the end of my fingers. How does the water always know how to point down? How does it find the way? How did it find Dougie, and what did he do? Dougie always seemed so big to me, but he’s never seemed bigger than now. My big brother drank the river, all the clouds and their rain. The whole wet sky and everything underneath. He drank all of it.

  I lean my head back and close my eyes. I’m trying to figure out how Dougie being dead is going to work, and what language I can miss him in because I don’t know the words for this in English. Through the door I can hear that Mum and Dad and Sue are back to talking about Sylvie and how they’re going to tell her. Part of me wants to yell at them: Dougie’s dead! Why are you talking about Sylvie? I want Dougie’s death to belong all to him. But I know that it can’t – no chance – because everything that we do ends up being about Sylvie. It’s been like that for three whole years. Like a computer game that’s stuck on a loop, and everything always ends up back at the same bit: Sylvie. Sylvie.

  The water’s dripping off my hands, little plink plink sounds, and I make up a little rhyme in my head, in time with the drips. A rhyme like in The Lorax or one of my other old picture books. Mum and Dad have two sons and a daughter. My sister in the Boneyard, my brother in the water.

  There’s a word for Sylvie’s sickness, but I know a secret: it’s not really a disease at all. It’s a place.

  It’s a place because we all live in it now, and there’s no outside of it. I call it the Boneyard. It smells of hospital (which smells like a toilet that’s just been cleaned), and it tastes of nothing, and if it had a colour it would be grey-blue, the exact colour of her skin and the hospital floor. That’s the Boneyard. We live there, since she got sick. I suppose Dougie lives there forever, now. He’s stuck in the Boneyard for good.

  I have a sister. I have a brother. A sister in the Boneyard, a brother in the water. In the black water in the blackest cave. I have a sister made of books and bones. I have a brother made of dead.

  I’d like to give Dougie back his own death, like a present. It’d be the worst present ever – even worse than socks, which is what Papabee always gives me for birthdays and Christmas. But if I can’t stop Dougie being dead, then at least I can try to give his death back to him.

  That broken game again, stuck on a loop, round and round – because to give Dougie his death back, I have to fix Sylvie. Three years ago, something happened to my sister. Something broke in her. Just like that: snap. I never knew until then that a person can break, like a zip or a rubber band. I never knew a whole family could get broken too. I never knew a disease could be a place, and a whole family could live in it.

  If I want to know what happened to Dougie, in the deep down blackness of that cave, I need to know what happened to Sylvie. I need to find out her story.

  Sylvie

  PART TWO

  Gill

  It doesn’t start out as such a big lie.

  ‘We can’t tell Sylvie yet,’ I say.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Gabe asks. He’s finally got off the phone from the airline, and the phone’s still in his hand. Sue’s gone, and Teddy’s in his pyjamas, playing cards with Papabee at the dining table.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Gabe says again. ‘We don’t have a choice.’

  ‘It’ll kill her.’

  He’s silent, so I go on.

  ‘I’m not being melodramatic. The shock could literally kill her. You heard what they said about her heart.’ The nurse told us just last week, when she checked Sylvie’s obs, that if somebody came to A&E with a heart-rate like that, they’d be sent straight to intensive care.

  When people say that the heart is a muscle, it’s not just some inspirational meme about love, circulated on Facebook by your annoying aunt. It’s a fact: the hea
rt, that vigilant muscle, wastes away along with the rest of the body. If your body is starved for long enough, the heart loses mass. The walls get thinner, and weaker. The heart can’t pump enough blood, or stay steady. There’s only so long that the body can sustain that sort of strain. Ever since the day Sylvie stopped eating, her heart is a timer, counting down. The nasogastric tube keeps her alive by carrying food directly down her nose into her stomach, but whenever I look at it hanging from her nostril, I can’t help but see a fuse.

  ‘We can’t lie to her,’ Gabe says. I envy his faith in what’s right. He’s a good man. I knew it thirty years ago, when we were walking home from our second date and he bent to pick up a snail from the wet pavement and move it to the grass so it wouldn’t be crushed.

  But I’m not a good person like he is. I’m a mother.

  ‘I want to do the right thing too,’ I say. ‘Of course I do. But not at any cost. It’ll kill her. You saw what happened, after Katie P died.’

  Katie P was in the same ward as Sylvie. After Katie killed herself, Sylvie’s silence grew more and more implacable. The row of perfectly straight cuts on the inside of her left arm moved higher and higher. For her brief stays at home, we’d learned to hide all the knives and medicines in a locked box under our bed. But she used whatever she could lay her hands on. A chisel from the shed; a loose screw from the desk in Dougie’s room. Each time the doctors said she had to be readmitted, I felt guilty at my own relief. At least in hospital they could keep her safe.

  Gabe shakes his head. ‘It’s not the same as when Katie died. Sylvie needs to know. He’s her brother, not just some girl she used to see around the ward.’

  ‘Exactly,’ I hiss. ‘If she was that bad after Katie died, imagine how badly she’ll cope with hearing about Dougie. She got sick right after your dad died, for God’s sake. She doesn’t exactly have a great track-record of dealing with loss.’

  ‘We can’t lie to her about this.’

  ‘We won’t be lying. We just won’t tell her yet.’

  So my first lie is to Gabe, not to Sylvie. Because I already know that it will be more than just omission.

  ‘She’ll hear about it. Christ, Gill, this is Hobart. There aren’t any secrets here.’

  ‘How could she hear? There aren’t any laptops or phones allowed on the ward. No internet. She’s in isolation. Nobody can visit her without our permission – and we’ll tell our friends why they can’t say anything just yet.’

  Paediatrics 3 is a completely controlled environment. Locked doors, and windows that don’t open. No mobiles, no internet access.

  ‘It’s not just the dodgy stuff online – all those pro-ana websites,’ the nurse had explained to me, when Sylvie was first admitted, and they made me take away her phone. ‘There are privacy implications for other patients, too, now that every phone has a camera. And stuff gets nicked all the time, so we discourage people from having valuables on the ward – that includes phones. And then there’s the cords.’

  ‘The cords?’ I asked.

  ‘Charging cords,’ she said. ‘You know, for phones and laptops.’

  I still didn’t get it.

  She raised her eyebrows and lowered her voice. ‘They’re a hanging risk.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. But even as I said it, I was thinking, How did this become an ‘Of course’ moment? How have we arrived in a place where it’s considered obvious that our daughter will try to kill herself with anything she can form into a noose?

  I grab Gabe’s hand. ‘It’ll only be a few days. We’ll tell her later. Just a few days. Maybe a week, while we get over to England and sort this out.’

  Gabe doesn’t need to say it out loud. He just looks at me, and lets my words marinade in their own stupidity: Sort this out. As if it’s a muddled hotel booking, or a broken toe, and not my son in a morgue somewhere on the other side of the world.

  ‘Just a week,’ I repeat. ‘Just until she’s a bit more stable.’ Sylvie’s obs have been bad since last weekend. Heart-rate jumpy, blood pressure low. Before weigh-in on Tuesday a nurse caught her loading up with water, straight from the bathroom tap, and now she isn’t even allowed to go to the toilet unaccompanied.

  ‘Don’t make it more complicated than it already is,’ says Gabe.

  ‘Is there a simple way to do this?’ I snap. ‘I’m not an expert in dealing with my son’s death.’

  ‘Our son’s death,’ he says quietly.

  Gabe’s right, of course. My grief leaves no room for his. There is only room for me and Dougie, just as there was when he was born, his face outraged, wrinkled and purple as the cross-section of a red cabbage. For weeks, a baby’s eyes can’t even focus enough to make out anything beyond the orbit of their mother’s face. It was just me and Dougie, so hungry that he almost took my left nipple off with the urgency of his suckling.

  I’d never imagined that the fierce intimacy of those newborn days could be recreated, but now I learn that I was wrong. This is the same: the same reeling sleeplessness; the same raw-skinned, ripped-open love. It allows for nobody and nothing else – not even Gabe. I don’t claim that it’s right, or fair. But it’s a fact. Nobody warns you, before you give birth, about the savagery of that love – a love that starts when you’re still bleeding and does not stop.

  I know that I have not lost a son. I’ve lost a thousand sons: the baby, milk-drunk and heavy-headed. The toddler, with his absolute determination to swallow stones. The six-year-old, with his growing fluency in his own body. The fourteen-year-old, mortified when I hugged him in public. The seventeen-year-old, who let Teddy beat him in arm-wrestles. The nineteen-year-old whom we put on the plane in January, hiding his nervousness behind bravado. The man he would have become, and the father he might have been, and all the hundreds of futures I’d imagined for him. I’ll never be able to count the many Dougies that were lost in that cave. It’s too much – too much for me, and certainly too much for Sylvie.

  ‘We can’t tell her,’ I say again.

  ‘Gill,’ Gabe says. ‘Love. You’re not thinking straight. You know we have to.’

  ‘I will not bury two of my children.’ My words are a freshly sharpened blade.

  This time he doesn’t correct me, doesn’t say Our children.

  Teddy’s quiet at bedtime. I figure it’s best if we keep to our normal routine as much as possible, so I brush his hair, and Gabe reads him two chapters of The Horse and His Boy and kisses him goodnight.

  I know how to do this, I think, as we go through the evening’s rituals with Teddy. I know how to ease the knots from his curly hair. I know to put a clean glass of water on the bookshelf next to his bed, and to leave the door open just enough for SausageDog to get in and out in the night. I know how to be his mother.

  But I don’t know how to be a mother to a dead child. What can I do for Dougie now? What does he need from me?

  And how can I be a mother to Sylvie, who wants nothing from me except to be allowed to die?

  ‘Is it real?’ Teddy asks us, before I turn out the light. ‘Is he really dead?’

  ‘Yes, sweetheart,’ Gabe says. ‘I’m afraid so.’

  For hours, Teddy’s question and Gabe’s answer rattle around in my head, the words coming loose. Is it real? Really? I’m afraid so. I’m so afraid.

  Gabe

  All through that night we barely sleep, and when I do slip into the oblivion of dreams, waking is a new torture.

  ‘Where has he gone?’ I say into the dark, not expecting an answer. ‘Where has he gone?’

  I feel the shaking of Gill crying, her back pressed tight against mine.

  In the morning, we drive to the hospital, leaving Teddy with Papabee.

  Gill turns to me, before we get out of the car. ‘How do I look?’

  ‘You look beautiful.’

  ‘You know what I mean. Do I look like I’ve been crying?’

  ‘A bit,’ I say. ‘We both do. But it won’t be the first time she’s seen us like this.’ We’ve done plenty of cry
ing in the parked car outside the hospital over the last three years.

  It’s only going to be for a little while, I say to myself, as we walk up the hospital stairs. A white lie; a stopgap, until Sylvie’s stronger. Until Gill and I can say Dougie’s name without our breath faltering. We’ve spoken to Louise, Sylvie’s doctor – she’s agreed that we can’t break the news to Sylvie until we’re back from London to support her. Louise has given the order to the nurses – nobody to say a word.

  Sylvie has lied to us every day, for years. Yes, I drank my Sustagen. No, the doctors said I could exercise as long as it’s only an hour a day. Yes, I put butter on my toast like the dietitian said. I don’t hold it against her – it’s part of her illness, we know that. But it still makes it easier to justify this lie.

  Anorexics are wonderful liars. They’re accomplished magicians. Watch for the meals slipped to the dog, or into a hand, or a sleeve, and palmed off into the bin. The little parcels of food concealed everywhere.

  And the greatest lie of all, the climactic disappearing trick: the body itself, vanishing.

  How did Dougie learn this trick, to disappear so completely?

  Gill

  We try to hug Sylvie, but she’s adept at leaning away from our embraces, and turning her face from our kisses. Today, I barely notice. I’m concentrating on not sobbing. I start the words that I practised in my head, all through last night.

  ‘Sweetie, we have some bad news.’ It isn’t all lies you see – it’s a version of the truth. ‘There’s been an accident, on a caving trip that Dougie was doing. A flash flood, and he was hurt. Nothing serious, thank God, but he broke his leg. It’s been a nasty scare. He’ll be in hospital for another few days, and he’ll be stuck on crutches for at least six weeks. Probably more.’

  She looks very young, her mouth opening and staying open.

  ‘Jesus,’ she says. ‘Is he OK?’

  ‘He’s fine,’ I say, a little too quickly. ‘The leg’s painful, and it was a frightening experience, but he’s going to be fine. But we really ought to go – just to help him get back on his feet. He won’t be able to work for at least a month. And when we told him we were coming, and we’d be there for my birthday, he went online and got us tickets to the Chelsea Flower Show.’