‘I don’t want his money. Take this to the bank tomorrow morning. Don’t tell Sue – get Papabee to take you. You might need your passport, or bank card or something, for ID. Put it all back in, right away, and don’t ever do anything this stupid again.’
‘I want you to have it. You don’t even have to start eating again right away. Just tell me why you stopped.’
‘You idiot,’ she says. She leans forward and hugs me. It should be nice – it’s been ages since she’s hugged me. But the bones of her arms are poking my sides, and I’m scared of the tube up her nose touching me. Worst of all, she has this gross smell all over her. It’s called ketosis, Dad told me – the fat in her body burning. I hope she doesn’t notice me holding my breath.
She’s the one who ends the hug, pushing me away.
‘So you’re not going to take the money?’ I ask.
‘That’s not how it works.’
‘So how does it work, then?’
‘Go home, Teddy.’ She sounds tired again.
I got it wrong today – the price for Sylvie’s story isn’t money. But now Dougie’s dead, and Mum and Dad have gone away, it’s up to me to find out what the price is. In the doorway I turn back and look at Sylvie’s face again. Skull too big, skin too small. It doesn’t even look like a face any more. Sister in the Boneyard. Brother in the water. I don’t have long.
You put a tooth under your pillow for the tooth fairy and hang the stocking on the fireplace for Santa, and I know none of those things are real but the price still matters. So what’s the price for Sylvie, and to make Dougie’s death fit into the world? What’s her price because I will pay it, no matter how many teeth or anything else. I will pay it.
Sylvie
Cordelia. Nothing, my lord.
Lear. Nothing?
Cordelia. Nothing.
Lear. Nothing will come of nothing. Speak again.
‘Tell me why you stopped eating,’ Teddy says.
Speak again. Speak again, they say. Mum, Dad, Dougie, and now Teddy. For God’s sake, Sylvie, when are you going to start speaking again?
Everyone is always so hungry for my story, my secrets. It’s a relief that Mum and Dad are away. When they come to see me, they don’t stop talking. Mum especially, pointedly, each word aimed at my silence.
If I spoke, I would say: Stop trying to fill my silence. Stop trying to fix it.
Listen.
We’re not girls any more, here in Paediatrics 3. We’ve made ourselves into martyrs, saints, tiny bone-gods. Visitors come to us with offerings. I sit cross-legged on my hospital bed and, month after month, they come: Mum with her tears, and her plastic containers of home-cooked food, which I don’t open. Dad, with his own quiet sadness, unmistakable as his beard. Papabee, with his bafflement. Dougie’s letters from England, always so determinedly cheerful. And Teddy, little Teddy, coming here today with his ridiculous envelope of cash.
I can only offer them Cordelia’s nothing.
I can only give them someone else’s words. My own are all broken.
PART THREE
Gabe
I can’t work out, at first, why everyone’s being so nice to us. At Check-in, the lady looks at our boarding passes, consults her computer, and immediately starts speaking to us in a hushed voice.
‘We’ve upgraded you to Premium Economy,’ she says confidentially, ‘and I’ve seated you in a row with no other passengers, so that you’ll have some privacy.’ She gives us new boarding passes, with COMP printed in the corner. I’d seen the same thing when I’d printed ours at home and had wondered what it meant. Complimentary? (Hardly – I paid thousands for those tickets yesterday when I called Qantas, barely coherent and with no time to shop around, telling the man over and over, My son has died and we need to be in London now.)
I ask the woman behind the check-in desk, and she explains that COMP is a code: Compassionate. It turns out that if an airline knows you’re flying because of a death, or some other horrible circumstance, they put this code on your boarding pass, so the staff will take special care of you.
Then she asks me whether we have frequent flyer numbers.
‘No,’ I say. ‘I mean, we do, but I don’t know where they are, and—’ I peter out.
‘Don’t worry about it. You’ll have twelve months to claim the points,’ she says, as though that will be a tremendous relief for me. As though there’ll come a time when we’ll care again about frequent flyer miles.
All the way through the journey, we’re treated with the same solicitousness. At Security, the man looks at the boarding pass and waves us through to the fast-track lane. At boarding, one of the flight attendants takes us aside before the main boarding call and leads us through the empty gate, all the way to our seats. She gives us her name, which I promptly forget, and she squeezes Gill’s hand and tells us to call her if we need anything at all.
On the plane, food comes and goes, on neat little trays – I even manage to eat something, with a vague thought that I’ll need the energy. I don’t know for what – I don’t know what a death like this involves; what will be required of me. But there will be things to do, things to organise, I tell myself, forcing myself to chew and swallow. And Gill will need me. She’s not eating; she’s sitting there, her bag clutched on her lap, and her whole body weirdly rigid. At one point she starts a movie, but she doesn’t even put her headphones on. Just sits there, staring at the screen while the actors gesture sincerely at one another.
She’s hardly spoken, but after we change planes at Dubai, she turns to me suddenly and bangs at her chest, as if trying to knock loose something lodged in her windpipe.
‘It hurts here,’ she says. ‘Do you feel that? Right here?’ She strikes her sternum again, hitting hard enough that she leaves small red marks on her skin.
‘I know,’ I say. ‘But we’ll be OK. We’ll get through this.’
I have no idea whether that’s true. The pain she’s talking about, I feel it too – a compression, my whole chest encased in concrete. I’m sure I’ve seen articles about people literally dying from heartache. Something about blood pressure, or a change to the ventricles. Maybe that’s happening to us now. A heart attack at 35,000 feet would seem no more strange or terrible than anything else that’s happened since the police came to the door more than forty-eight hours ago. Ever since then, the world is a jerky old movie, grainy and monochrome, the sound out of sync. I grip the armrest tighter and watch the flight attendant patrol the aisle, dispensing coffee as if it, or anything else, matters.
Gill
I used to roll my eyes at people who sprang up as soon as the plane landed. I’d stay in my seat, smug, watching them scurrying for their bags and standing, hunched over, in the aisle, even though it never got them off the plane any faster. Now, at Heathrow, it’s me ignoring the seatbelt sign and wrenching open the overhead locker while we’re still taxiing to the gate. I turn my phone back on, and while it’s loading I play in my head all the scenarios I’ve imagined on the flight. The missed calls from the consulate, and from Sue. Thirty voicemails. A terrible mistake. It was another boy. I can almost see the messages: The body wasn’t Dougie after all. It’s a miracle – he’s been found. An air pocket. A hidden tunnel. Another exit from the cave. And a voicemail from Dougie himself. Mum. Dad. It’s me – I’m fine. I’m so sorry to have got you so worried. Gonna have some great stories to tell!
That’s what I was imagining, all through that endless flight – even while I tried to distract myself by watching a movie. There was a pain in my chest. I could feel every membrane of my heart, and the whole thing being slowly and deliberately pulled apart, like a ball of mozzarella being shredded for a salad. From time to time I let my hand grope in my bag for Dougie’s letter to Sylvie. I pressed it between my thumb and forefinger and rubbed it. I ran my fingers along the envelope, front and back, as though I could read the letter inside like braille.
I’m queueing in the plane aisle when my phone finally boots up. I scroll pas
t an automated message from my mobile provider. Welcome to the UK. There’s text from a UK number. This is Elena, from the Australian High Commission, just confirming that I’ll be available tomorrow to speak to you and explain the consular assistance we can offer. Please call this number when you’ve arrived and we can arrange a time at your convenience.
A text from Sue. All OK here, darling. Sylvie and Papabee both fine (mad, but no madder than when you left them). Teddy fine too. Sending all the love. Call any time – bugger the time zones.
Eleven texts from other friends, which I only hurriedly scan – they’re all variations on sorry for your loss, interspersed with questions about the funeral date. Why is everyone in such a rush to commit my son to the dirt? I shut my phone back off.
I hate them all: the phone company; the helpful woman from the High Commission; my friends; even Sue. I hate the man ahead of me as we file off the plane, for walking so slowly, and I hate the two blonde children in front of him, for being alive, when one of mine is dead and another is doing her best to be.
Gabe
From Heathrow we take a taxi to the flat that Sue booked for us before we left home. ‘I found somewhere close to Dougie’s school,’ she’d told me. I wasn’t sure if we should base ourselves there, or closer to the caves, or the morgue, or the coroner’s office. But I just thanked Sue and took the piece of paper on which she’d scrawled the address. In the back of the taxi I squeeze it so tight that the ink on Edgware has smeared. Beside me, Gill barely speaks. The stiffness in her body has given way to a gentle shaking. She’s like a gong that’s been struck, shaking until she almost shimmers.
‘I can’t make it stop,’ she says, and I’m not sure whether she’s talking about the shaking, or Dougie’s death. It doesn’t make any difference.
We’ve been in the cab for half an hour when I realise we have no English money, and I have to ask the driver to stop at an ATM, all while Gill sits there shaking, her head pressed against the window. I don’t mind, now, that she isn’t coping, because it forces me to cope. It gives me something to do with my hands: loading the bags into the boot; counting the money; checking that our passports are zipped into her handbag.
We drive past a restaurant, Ottolenghi, and I recognise the name from Gill’s cookbook shelf. I’m about to point it out – a kind of habit, my old life momentarily forgetting that it’s over. I lower my hand and close my mouth before the words are out. We aren’t tourists, here for restaurants and walking tours and gawking at monuments and palaces.
‘She going to be all right?’ the driver asks, gesturing to Gill as he helps me hoist the suitcases from the boot. She’s crying silently, people detouring around her on the pavement and pretending not to stare.
‘It’s not been a good day,’ I say, and pay him far too much because I’m not sure how much to tip in England, and I don’t have any change.
‘You take care now,’ he says, with a pat on the arm, and a look that might be sympathy, or might just be a response to that wad of notes, fresh from the ATM.
The suitcases are heavy – it takes me two trips to get them up the stairs. So heavy that I don’t see how the clothes I threw in can account for it. I imagine the cases loaded with the lie that we told to Sylvie. We’ve brought it with us, that great unwieldy lie. I’m hauling it up the stairs, the suitcase handle cutting into my hand. It’s here with us, in the small rented apartment on the first floor.
Gill stands in the middle of the living room as though she’s forgotten how to sit down.
‘My baby boy,’ she says, and it sounds strange, because that’s what she often calls Teddy. I’ve forgotten, until she says it now, that she used to call Dougie that, all those years ago.
‘I want to see him,’ I say. ‘I want to know how it happened.’
She doesn’t seem to hear me.
I run a glass of water, and put it down, undrunk.
‘I guess we should try to sleep,’ I tell her.
‘I can’t.’
The flat has the immaculate dullness of all rented flats. The kitchen is basic, and there’s no food in the cupboards except olive oil and a box of sugar cubes. I pace the kitchen, from the sink to the empty fridge and back again.
‘I’ll make something for dinner,’ says Gill.
‘We don’t need to cook,’ I tell her. ‘We can go out. I’m not even hungry.’
But Gill says she wants to cook, and I can see that she can’t keep her hands still, so I find my way to the nearest supermarket. The woman at the till asks, ‘How are you?’ and I don’t know how to begin to answer. I don’t say anything, of course – I just mutter the obligatory ‘Fine, thanks.’ I need the airline compassionate code for everyday life. A small tattoo on my forehead – COMP – so that people would understand. They’d look at me and right away they’d know I’m the father of a dead son.
I come back to the flat with a bag full of veggies and a supermarket baguette that’s already turning stale. Even while we’re too dazed to make words, Gill fills the sterile kitchen with cooking smells. I’m grateful for the noise of the onions browning on the stovetop, to fill the silence. But neither of us can eat.
‘We should call that woman, at the High Commission,’ I say, staring at my food.
‘I’ll wash up,’ says Gill, picking up the untouched plates.
‘Do you want me to put it on speaker, so you can listen?’ I call after her, but she doesn’t hear me over the clatter of dishes in the sink.
Gill
Over the sound of the kitchen tap running, I can hear him on the phone in the next room, still talking to the High Commission.
My bag is on the kitchen counter. As I wash up, I keep looking at it. Twice I put down the sponge and move towards the bag; once I even go as far as drying my hands. But each time I stop myself, sinking my hands back into the water. It’s too hot, my skin turning a broiled red.
Before today, I would never have dreamed of opening one of Dougie’s letters. I never even peeked – it wouldn’t have occurred to me. It would have been like eavesdropping on my own children – like creeping barefoot up the corridor and pressing my ear to Dougie’s bedroom door when he and Sylvie were having one of their endless chats.
But this is different. Of course I’m going to give Sylvie the letter – I’ll do it as soon as we’re back. But she won’t know its significance. That it might be the last thing he ever wrote. Gabe doesn’t seem to understand it either – that somehow the cave has changed it from a letter into a testimony.
Gabe’s still talking in the living room. Why did it take so long to recover the body? he asks, and I lean over the sink, trying not to throw up. I put the last glass in the draining rack, dry my hands on a tea-towel, and pull the letter from my bag. I slide a fingernail under the flap and give a tentative tug. Nothing. I remember that, in the spy novels I read as a child, people were always steaming letters open, so I boil the kettle, but all that I manage to achieve is a soggy envelope, and a scorched right wrist. In the end I ease a sharp knife under the crease and peel it open that way, a little at a time. I stand with my back to the kitchen door, in case Gabe comes in, but he’s still on the phone, still asking for details.
The letter’s typed, not handwritten, which shouldn’t have surprised me – Dougie and his generation use laptops for everything, even for taking notes in class.
Dear Sylve,
Missing you lots and hope all OK there (relatively speaking – you know what I mean).
Went to Bath last weekend and met up with
Lucas Kane, who was at school with me (red hair, remember?) – he’s doing a gap year at a school there. I used to think he was a tosser at school, and I was only catching up with him because I don’t know anyone else in Bath. But actually we ended up having a really good time. Bath’s v posh, and Jane Austen everywhere – you and Mum would have loved it, but I never finished Emma for English in grade 10 even though I wrote an essay on it – thank you, Wikipedia! (DON’T EVER TELL MUM. SERIOUSLY. OR SUE.) And actual
ly I think Lucas is OK. Really interested in Aus politics so we had a good chat about that, a nice change after the students at my school here who don’t care at all or (worse) think Tasmania is Tanzania (!! – so much for the expensive education they’re getting…). Anyway, it was good to see Lucas. You’d say maybe it was me who was the tosser at school…probably you’re right.
I can still hear Gabe’s voice – something about viewing the body, and the morgue. I want to run out of the kitchen, interrupt him, wave the opened letter at him. Drag him away from that Dougie – the one of coroners and bodies and morgues – and offer him this Dougie instead. Our Dougie.
But what if Gabe doesn’t understand? What if he tells me I’m wrong? By reading the letter, am I keeping faith with Dougie, or betraying him?
So I stay where I am, my back to the kitchen door. I run my thumb over and over the typed words, and read on.
Things with Rosa are v good, though it’s a bit weird working together (have to call her ‘Miss Campbell’ in front of the kids! etc.). But I’m actually missing home more than I expected. I miss the Neck – miss being in the sea. And I swear you can actually TASTE the pollution in the air in London. Tas is one of those places you can’t wait to leave, and then afterwards you start to appreciate it from a distance.
And I worry about you, and Mum and Dad too and T and P (not Sausage, cheeky little bastard, who will probably outlive us all, like the cockroaches). I know you have your own stuff going on, but try not to freeze out the parentals. Yes, they drive us up the wall sometimes, but I also know they worry about you and miss you like crazy.
Lots of love
Dougie xx
The parentals. I’d forgotten that he used to call us that. How much else have I forgotten already?
PS: Off next week for an excursion – Outward Bound sort of thing, for some of the younger kids. Caving, archery, rock-climbing (all crucial life skills for contemporary urban rich kids!). Will be good to have a break from usual school routine (and school meals!) – and Rosa’s coming too, though a coach-load of 12-yearolds means it’s not exactly a romantic getaway…
The Cookbook of Common Prayer Page 4