Gabe shoots me a look at this unexpected piece of improvisation. I think, Sylvie’s not the only accomplished liar in this family. Just watch me.
‘I’ve always wanted to go,’ I say.
‘I can’t think of anything worse than being dragged around the Chelsea Flower Show,’ Gabe says, and rolls his eyes. ‘The things I do for your mother.’
I know he isn’t talking about the flower show, and I squeeze his hand.
‘But Dougie’s OK?’ Sylve asks. It’s the first time in a long time that she’s asked for anything from us. She and Dougie have always been so close. How can I refuse her?
‘Of course.’ I lean closer and say conspiratorially, ‘But I think he’s missing us, though he’d never admit it. He tries to act so grown up, but this whole thing’s given him a shock. And it’s a bad break, the leg. There might be more operations needed, depending on how it heals. So we’re flying out tonight.’
‘OK,’ she says, nodding. Even through her pyjama top I can see her ribs poking out, a birdcage made of bones. I try not to think about her bones, or Dougie’s.
Gabe sees me pause and picks up where I left off. ‘Papabee will help out with Teddy,’ he says. ‘And Sue and Dan are going to keep an eye on both of them, and you too.’
But already Sylvie’s withdrawing from us again, and she just shrugs. The nasogastric tube comes out of her right nostril, is taped in place across her cheek, and tucked behind her ear. It’s connected to the feeding pump that hangs from the drip-stand by the bed. The pump makes its rhythmic, gassy hum. Shhhhh. Shhhhh.
On the drive back home, I rest my hand on Gabe’s leg. He’s wearing old corduroy trousers, the ridges soft under my fingers. He puts his hand on top of mine and squeezes tight. The lie we’ve told feels more irrevocable than a promise. More than a marriage vow.
Sylvie
Mum and Dad leave me with my silence, and it rises around me like water.
(Doing this to myself isn’t the hard bit. The hard bit is doing this to them.)
Did it hurt, when Dougie broke his leg, and how much? Was he afraid? I know about fear (don’t ever make the mistake of thinking I am not afraid). I know all the shapes of it. If Dougie were here, and if I could find my way back to talking, I’d like to ask him about the shape of his fear, when the water flooded the cave.
I can’t imagine Dougie laid up with a broken leg. He’s always doing something. Always the basketball bouncing on the driveway; the cricket ball thrown against the side of the house. Visiting me in the hospital, he could never sit still. He’d rock backwards and forwards on his chair; sometimes he’d borrow a wheelchair and balance on the back wheels at the same time as talking to me. I hardly ever spoke back, but since he went away, I miss those visits. I used to watch him from my hospital bed, and think: How does he do that? How does he occupy his body without thinking about it?
He’s always been like that. I used to be like that too.
Nothing changes. Everything changes. All those summers at the old house at the Neck, always the same and always different. The tin dinghy tied under the jetty was there one year and gone the next. Still the same bit of loose carpet tripped us on the stairs; the same shelf in the fridge was broken. One year the sea was full of jellyfish, suspended in the water like kites, trailing their tentacles, and only Dougie dared to swim. For an entire summer it didn’t rain, the huge tin water tanks nearly empty, so that if a cricket ball hit them they rang like a gong. Papabee got sunburnt on his bald spot, and when we tried to rinse the sand from our feet, the outside tap was too hot to touch. The creek near the blowhole disappeared, then returned with the autumn rains. Teddy got too big for me to carry. Still the cockatoos gave the same cry from the pine tree behind the house. Papabee offered to make the lunch and on the beach we unwrapped nine very neat marmalade and lettuce rolls. Sue and Dan’s daughter Ella was away that year, on a school exchange to Spain. Dad’s dad, Papa J, came down from Sydney for the whole summer. Ella came back again. With a rolled-up newspaper I squashed a mosquito high up on the bathroom wall. The mark stayed there all summer – a black smear, with a tiny splat of my own blood.
Gill
It’s dark when Sue arrives to watch the sleeping Teddy, and we take a cab to the airport. Gabe loads the suitcase into the boot. I can’t remember anything that I packed, though we must have done it. We must have stood in our room and chosen things, and put them in the case. How is it possible that we did this? Gabe will have taken care of it, I think, though I know it’s unfair to expect him to be any more lucid than I am.
I close my eyes and let myself imagine that, instead of the airport, we’re going to Eaglehawk Neck – to Sue’s family’s beach house, where we’ve been going since before our kids were born. Instead of this taxi, I imagine we’re in our rusty white station wagon, Papabee and the kids in the back. Dougie and Sylvie are elbowing each other for more space, and SausageDog’s drooling on Teddy’s lap. There at the Neck, that thin stretch of land linking the Tasman Peninsula to the rest of Tasmania, the old house will be waiting for us, the broken fly-wire on the windows curling at the corners. Sue and Dan, with Nathan and Ella, will be there already, and we’ll park in the shade of the macrocarpa trees, and everything will be just as it always was. Spiders will scoot between cracks in the walls; the stack of boogie-boards will be leaning against the shed. Dougie and Nathan will cheat at cards, and Sylvie and Ella will sunbathe on the water tanks, and Teddy will fall asleep on the couch, trying to stay up as late as the big kids. My children will go barefoot on the beach, and the air will smell of sun cream and distant bushfires. Nothing will have changed.
I force my eyes open. We’re going to the airport, not the Neck. The taxi sweeps past Cornelian Bay and along the riverfront, the city ahead of us, spread out along the river’s western shore, and the mountain looming above it. Then we turn onto the bridge, and I lean my forehead against the glass window, watching the other lanes of traffic and the river beyond.
The Tasman Bridge fell once, in the mid-seventies. A ship crashed into the pylons and brought half the bridge down, killing twelve people. I wasn’t even living here then, but if anyone in Hobart ever tells you they haven’t thought about that crash as they drive across the bridge, they’re lying. We’ve all done it – imagined that forty-five metres of falling. Asked ourselves: What if the kids were in the car? What would I do? Would my last words be Brace, or Get out, or I love you? How would I spend my last breaths, my last moments? We’ve all done it – prodded ourselves in the tender places of our hearts, trying on somebody else’s heartbreak. Edging as close as you dare to somebody else’s disaster. Until you wake one day in your own disaster, a perfect fit.
The letter ambushes me while we’re waiting at the boarding gate, and I’m rifling through my handbag for an aspirin. There are various bits of paper in there – my boarding pass, half-finished recipe notes, old receipts. Then I see Dougie’s handwriting. The letter is addressed to Sylvie Jordan. I remember taking it from the letterbox a few days ago and putting it in my handbag to take to Sylvie in hospital – but after the news I completely forgot.
Sitting in the plastic chair beside Gabe, I hold the envelope like it’s a bomb, or a gift. Dougie’s writing across the front; his saliva on the seal on the back.
Since he went to England, he’d written to Sylvie every couple of weeks. Real letters, because she isn’t allowed any internet. For all my moans of ‘Would it kill you two to include Teddy?’, I’ve always been quietly proud of how close Dougie and Sylvie were. Before she got sick, I used to love seeing them walking on the beach at the Neck, those two sets of footprints close together, and Teddy trailing behind. I liked hearing the big kids talking in Dougie’s room, after dinner. I even liked the way their voices stopped when Gabe or I walked past the door.
If they hadn’t been so close, her descent into silence wouldn’t have hit him so hard. If they hadn’t been so close, I’d be able to contemplate telling Sylvie the truth.
He always sent the lett
ers to the house, because she’d changed wards a few times, and we’d learned that the hospital mail room was unreliable at best. So the letters came to the house, and we’d take them into hospital for her.
‘Gabe,’ I say, nudging him. ‘Gabe.’
He knows it straight away for what it is. When he takes the letter from me he holds it as though he should be wearing gloves, like a curator at a museum with some priceless artefact. He swallows, then clamps his eyes shut.
‘Jesus,’ he says. ‘Jesus.’ He presses the envelope to his forehead, leaning forward and rocking slightly.
‘This must be the last one, right?’ I ask. ‘If it came just the other day?’ Gabe straightens, and we check the postmark. It was posted a little over a week ago. Dougie wrote to Sylvie regularly, but not weekly. There will be no more.
Gabe’s still holding the envelope, but he makes no move to open it. ‘Keep it safe,’ he says. ‘We’ll have to give it to her when we’re back.’
Teddy
In the morning, Mum and Dad have gone, but I don’t even have any room to be sad about it because all my sadness is full up with Dougie.
Even though it’s Monday, Sue says I don’t have to go to school today. I tell her that Papabee can drop me at the hospital instead.
‘Are you sure you want to go?’ Sue asks.
I nod. Definitely. It’s definitely better than sitting at home watching Sue try not to cry, or watching her try to tell Papabee again and again what’s happened. Going to see Sylvie is the opposite of that, because there isn’t allowed to be any telling about Dougie.
‘It’s not that we want to lie to her,’ Dad said before they left last night. ‘But she’s just not well enough to deal with it. We need to think carefully about how to tell her, and when.’
I get it. I know what he and Mum are thinking about, because when Sylvie first got sick I Googled anorexia and it says twenty per cent mortality, which is one in five. And it seems like Sylvie might be the one in five, because her words stopped, ages ago, and her skin’s all grey and kind of scaly, like the feet of the pigeons that hang around the rubbish bins in Franklin Square. On her left wrist there are scars I’m not meant to notice, all purple and shiny. If she dies, as well as Dougie, then the Boneyard will never finish for us. We’ll all be there forever.
I never used to think I could do anything to change Sylvie, because if three years and a whole enormous hospital and all the doctors and dietitians and grown-ups haven’t fixed her, then obviously I couldn’t. She’s been in hospital for more than a quarter of my life, after all.
I used to think, too, that if anyone could fix Sylvie, it’d be Dougie. Because they were the big kids, the two of them, always together, always talking. So I thought maybe Dougie could teach her how to eat again, the same way he’d taught me how to swim and ride my bike. I always thought that he could do anything – that’s what big brothers do, especially Very Big Brothers like Dougie, always so far ahead of me. I used to hear him and Sylvie while I was falling asleep, when they were talking next door in Dougie’s room. I knew all the sounds of their laughing, and even their arguing – Sylve’s yelling (Jesus Christ, Dougie – you’re so immature), and Dougie’s yelling (Why the hell are you such a pain?).
But when Sylvie stopped eating, the talking stopped, and even Dougie couldn’t fix her. After he went away, I started thinking that it might have to be me that fixes her after all.
‘If you’re sure you want to go see Sylvie,’ Sue says, ‘d’you want me to come with you?’
‘No,’ I say, then (quickly), ‘thanks.’ I’ve got a job to do, and I can’t do it if anyone else is there.
‘Remember what your parents said, about not telling her just yet. Not a word, OK? I know it’s hard, but she just can’t handle the news while they’re away.’
‘I know.’ I don’t think she’ll handle it when they’re back, either, but I don’t say that out loud.
I take my school backpack with me to the hospital and I hang on tight to both shoulder straps as I walk through the hospital corridors. I hear my footsteps – clonk clonk on the hard shiny floor – and that rhyme comes back, in time with my steps: Sister in the Boneyard, brother in the water.
I press the buzzer to be let in through the big locked doors of Paediatrics 3. The doors slide open, and as I pass the nurses’ station a nurse squeezes my shoulder in a way that makes me know for sure that she’s heard about Dougie.
‘How’re you doing, sweetie?’ she asks, and I just say ‘Fine, thanks,’ and keep walking, because if I tell her the truth I’ll start crying and then I won’t be able to lie to Sylvie. Maybe it’s good practice, lying to the nurse: it’s like a warm-up for the big lie I have to do in Sylvie’s room.
The rooms on each side of the corridor have glass doors, and all the way along I count the girls – I count them every time, because of the one-in-five. Six girls today. Dougie used to call them the rexiles, all the anorexic girls in Sylvie’s ward. But today I squish Dougie-thoughts out of my head, because if I cry in front of Sylvie I’ll ruin everything.
She’s in the last room, sitting in her bed. She looks just like all the others: like her head’s way too big for her body. I pull the curtains around her bed so the nurses can’t see us through the glass.
She doesn’t say hi, just asks, ‘Any news about Dougie?’
‘Nope,’ I say, and it’s not a lie, because there really isn’t any news. Once somebody’s dead, that’s the end of news for good.
Yesterday I heard Sue say to Mum that it’s a bad idea, not telling Sylvie about Dougie. But looking at Sylve now, I get why we have to do it: Dougie’s death is just so big, and Sylvie’s made herself so small. It’s obvious – there’s no way it could fit inside her. She’s always been the one with secrets, but now it’s us. Sylvie’s made of nothing but bones, and Dougie’s death would snap her bones right open.
But I’m only small too. What will it do to me?
‘Mum and Dad are in the air right now,’ I say, to fill up the silence. She doesn’t answer. Normally it would annoy me that she’s not even interested, but this time I’m glad she’s not going to ask lots of questions.
I take one last peek at the gap between the curtains. There’s nobody nearby, so I pull the brown envelope out of my schoolbag and pass it to Sylvie. She scrunches her nose as she rips open the flap to look inside.
‘Jesus, Teddy.’ She shuts the envelope, looking quickly to the gap between the curtains. ‘What are you doing? Have you been dealing drugs or something?’
‘It’s my Papa J money,’ I say.
Papa J is the reason Papabee is called Papabee. Papabee had to be Papa B, for Barwell, because there was also Dad’s dad, Papa J, for Jordan. But Papa J lived on the mainland and hardly ever came down to Tasmania, except for the last summer before he died. Then he had a brain haemorrhage and died on his loo. That was three years ago, and now all that I have of Papa J is the framed photo in the kitchen, of him and Dad on the beach, and five thousand dollars, which he left each of us grandkids. Mum and Dad set up a bank account for me, because I didn’t have one yet. The money’s mine, and I have a bank card with a PIN and everything, but when I asked them if I could use it to buy some Technic Lego, they did a big speech about university and charity and compound interest.
So I didn’t tell Mum and Dad when I began taking out my money. I started nearly two weeks ago – before Dougie had even died. Every day on the way to school I went to the ATM next to the bus stop, and got out six hundred dollars. That’s the most you can take out in one day, unless you go actually inside the bank and ask for your money – and I was too scared to do that, in case they said no, or called Mum or Dad. So it took me eleven days – nine school days, plus the weekend when I couldn’t get to the ATM without anyone noticing. I kept the money in an envelope, and by the fifth day it was already getting full, stuffed with notes. By yesterday, when Dougie died, I already had all the money ready – but my plan feels even more urgent now.
A nurse wal
ks past the door, peeks through the curtains and smiles. Sylvie ignores her, and keeps her hand on top of the envelope.
‘What are you doing, bringing this here?’ she hisses, when the nurse has gone. ‘You can’t just walk around with five thousand dollars in your schoolbag. What if you got mugged? What if you lost it?’
‘Well, I didn’t. Anyway, it’s not for me.’ I wait for a second. ‘It’s yours.’
‘My Papa J money’s in the bank, same place yours should be.’
I shake my head. ‘I’m giving mine to you.’
‘What for?’ She sounds tired instead of curious. But she keeps looking at the money. Even if this isn’t the right price for Sylvie’s story, it’s still doing something. Because she’s talking – way more than usual. For such a long time she’s been a snail in a shell made of silence. But now she’s talking. It’s the huge chunk of money on the bed between us that’s done it. You can’t ignore it. You can’t argue with it. It looks so solid – such a big, fat chunk of notes. She can’t just pretend it isn’t there.
I push the envelope a bit closer to her.
‘It’s the whole lot – five thousand,’ I say. ‘You can count it, if you like. It’s for you – if you’ll tell me why you stopped eating.’
‘Jesus,’ she says again.
She picks up the envelope very carefully, folding the top over twice, holding it between the very tips of her finger and thumb like it’s something dirty – like it’s one of SausageDog’s poo bags. She reaches for my schoolbag, drops the envelope inside, and zips the bag shut.
The Cookbook of Common Prayer Page 3