Right through that summer on the beach, while the others were talking and eating and chucking the tennis ball around, I watched Sylvie carefully. I made myself into a detective, or a spy. I watched her bones get bonier and her skin get more and more grey. And I figured out that the magic at the Neck must have gone wrong. All that time I was watching her and wishing for her to be fixed, Sylvie was staring at the sea and putting her own wishes into it. And the Neck made Sylvie’s wish come true, instead of mine. Because she wanted to disappear, and she did.
After she was in hospital, we couldn’t go to the Neck as much, and when we did there were only three big kids left: Dougie, Nathan, and Ella. Ella was by herself in the girls’ room now. In the boys’ room, Dougie and Nathan had the top bunks, and they’d talk in whispers, and keep their big-boy secrets up there, too high for me. And in the day, most of the time they were off with Ella, doing their big-kid things, and I was with Papabee, or by myself. I didn’t mind. I’m lower down than all the others, so I see things that they don’t see. In the corners of the house I found the dead bodies of slaters, curled up into little dry balls. Under the shallow water I saw the holes in the sand, and learned where the crabs were waiting. When the tide went out, the crabs came out like they were looking for the water. I watched how they moved – fast, slow, fast – across the sand. I’ve always liked crabs because they’re full of crab – full up right to their shells, busy with being nothing but crab. Dougie was like that: he was always exactly Dougie. Even after Sylvie disappeared, Dougie was still the same. Out of everyone at the Neck, Dougie was always the loudest, the funniest, the fastest. Best at swimming, best at snapping tea-towels in the kitchen, and best at rowing the dinghy. Strongest of the big kids, even though Nathan was actually older. When Dougie was there he was the most there of anyone – he was the exact opposite of disappearing.
If I was a crab, I could understand how Dougie disappeared. I’d be Crab-Teddy, moving sideways and seeing the world sideways out of googly eyes. I’d wait in my hole and when the tide came in the water would be my sky. I’d keep my soft body inside the shell like a secret. Does a crab even know about the secret of its own body?
I lie in my bed and think about secrets and bodies and the different ways a person can disappear. Next to my feet, SausageDog’s dreaming about chasing rabbits, his little legs dig dig digging. Maybe somewhere a rabbit is dreaming about being chased. Down the corridor, Dougie’s room and Sylvie’s room are empty.
I’m the littlest – I’m used to being left behind. But not like this. How can I catch up with Sylvie and Dougie now?
Sylvie
I used to be a girl, instead of a body or a patient or a ghost.
I used to live in my body without thinking about it. Imagine that. It didn’t used to be a weapon, or a secret, or a bomb ready to detonate. It didn’t used to be an anchor, heavy with yearning for the bottom of the sea. It didn’t used to be any kind of metaphor at all. It was just my body: a thing I lived in. I was as careless of it as any child is. I scraped my knees on the gravel of the driveway of the Neck, racing against Dougie; I carried Teddy to the water when the sand was too hot for his little feet. I bit my nails (I still do this).
Listen: I don’t know how to stop looking for answers in the knife drawer. I don’t know how to let my body be. I don’t know how to trust my body to be itself.
It never gets dark in the ward – not properly. All those Exit signs and backlit machine monitors, and the strip lights in the corridor. It’s never quiet, either – drips and feeding pumps and the cleaner’s trolley trundling along the lino floor.
In the not-really-dark, I dream I’m at the Neck again. I’m standing at the front door, the fly-wire sagging at the right-hand corner. Somewhere, a black cockatoo is screaming; further away, I can hear the sea.
Dougie and Teddy are already inside. They stand there, holding the door, waiting. SausageDog is there too, ears raised, waiting for me.
Are you coming in? Dougie and Teddy ask. Aren’t you coming in?
Watermelon and feta salad for when
you’re in London but can’t stop thinking of
Tasmania
Wash the mint first, so it has time to drain before you add it (you don’t want water diluting the sweetness of the watermelon juice).
Cut away the watermelon rind. If the black seeds in the melon bother you, flick them out with the tip of a knife. Chop the melon into satisfyingly solid cubes, about an inch wide, and the feta into slightly smaller chunks.
Tear the mint (patting it dry with a clean teatowel if it’s still damp) and add it to the melon and feta. It’s important to rip, rather than to chop – it releases more flavour, but it also keeps your hands busy for longer.
With a fork, whisk together the juice of a couple of limes, a quarter cup of olive oil, a lot of ground black pepper, and a miserly pinch of salt. Pour over the salad, tossing through only very gently, preferably with your hands.
Gill
I write down the recipe on the back of one of the forms that the coroner woman gave us. Then I fold it in half, and in half again.
These new recipes are mad – I know that. I’m not writing them for a cookbook, or for the magazines or newspaper supplements that usually publish me. I’m writing them because I can’t seem to help it.
I shove the tightly folded paper between the pages of my unread novel, where Dougie’s letter is still hidden. I don’t want Gabe to see the letter again until I’ve found some glue to reseal it. And I can’t do that yet, because it would mean no more sneaking off to re-read it on the toilet, or under the covers at night by the light of my phone, while Gabe sleeps. So for now I keep the letter hidden, along with my recipe notes.
I place the huge glass bowl of salad in the middle of the table. It’s so bright – the green mint and the pink melon, their colours so unabashed. I’ve made too much – enough for a whole family.
Earlier, Gabe rang the coroner again, so I went to the shops for the melon. The last of the spring blossom was mounting in the gutters, and the late-afternoon sun was bright on the shopfronts and vans of Edgware Road. The horizon was blurred with smog, and I thought of Dougie’s letter – And I swear you can actually TASTE the pollution in the air in London. I carried the melon home in my arms, heavy as a baby.
Gabe and I stare at the salad in its glass bowl. I think of Teddy at home, and Sylvie in her hospital bed, and Dougie, cold in the basement of a hospital. In Hobart it will be dark now, the thick darkness of the descending autumn. The dolerite of the mountain will be lichened with frost.
Here, in London, the windows in the flat are locked shut, the room too stuffy. Outside, a man shouts something, and a woman laughs. The afternoon light refuses to be ugly. Watermelon juice cool in my mouth, and my heart out of season.
Gabe
I phone the hospital to make an appointment to visit Dougie.
‘Ordinarily, the appointments are for half an hour,’ the man on the phone says. ‘But you can make another appointment for the following day.’
‘Just half an hour? Can’t it be for longer? It’s our son. We’ve come all the way from Australia.’
He pauses. ‘It’s to protect the deceased.’
Nobody says dead, I’ve noticed. It’s always deceased.
‘We have to maintain them at a suitable temperature,’ he continues.
It hasn’t occurred to me to think about temperature. Somewhere, probably beneath the hospital, there’ll be a morgue, with refrigerated drawers. When I put the phone down I steady myself against the kitchen counter.
Gill doesn’t want to go with me. She shakes her head convulsively. ‘I can’t do it.’
‘Are you sure?’ I ask. ‘I mean – you might not have a chance later. Don’t you think you might regret not seeing him?’
‘I can’t,’ she says, still shaking her head as if shaking something off. ‘If I see him like that, it’ll be in my head forever. I won’t be able to unsee it.’ She grabs my wrist with both of her hands
. ‘Are you sure? You definitely want to see him?’
‘I want to.’ What I should have said: I need to.
Before I go, I ask her, ‘Are you going to be OK?’
‘OK?’ she says, and the word hangs in the unfamiliar air. ‘Am I going to be OK?’
In her voice, my words sound exactly as absurd as they deserve to.
It takes two trains and a bus to reach the hospital, which is outside London, and I’m so tired that a car nearly reverses into me as I cross the car park, and I find myself apologising to the driver. Inside, after I’ve found the right wing, a chaplain is called to the reception desk to meet me. She introduces herself but I immediately forget her name. I was expecting something like a priest, but she’s determinedly non-denominational in her clothes and her words. I’ve never been at all religious, but I wouldn’t have objected to a dog collar, or even an offer of prayers. I would take anything I could get.
‘How does he look?’ I ask, once she’s ushered me along a corridor and into a small waiting room.
‘Douglas looks fine,’ she says. ‘He looks as though he’s sleeping. But you should prepare yourself for the fact that Douglas has some bruising on his face.’ She’s diligent about using his name. It feels a bit too conspicuous – like somebody who’s gone to a networking seminar and been instructed that using people’s names creates rapport.
‘Some of the bruising might be from injuries Douglas sustained; some of it’s likely due to the body’s natural process after death, when the blood begins to pool.’
I swallow, and nod. ‘Are his eyes open?’
‘No, they’re not.’
That’s that, then: I won’t see Dougie’s eyes again. I keep stumbling against these new losses, each of them tiny and vast.
‘The other thing that you need to know,’ the chaplain says, ‘is that, if you choose to touch Douglas, he will feel very cold. You need to be prepared for that, because it’s not a natural feeling, and it can come as a shock.’
I’m not sure what could constitute a shock, after all that’s happened. I feel incapable of being shocked.
‘But I can still do it?’ I ask. ‘I can touch him?’
‘Of course.’
‘OK,’ I say. That’s something, at least.
‘Douglas is currently covered by a sheet. Do you have any particular clothes that you’d like him to wear? For when the body is released, after the post-mortem?’
‘Not yet. I have to go to the school – where he was living – and get some of his clothes.’
‘That’s not a problem. You can bring them in any time, and we can dress him for you. Or you can dress him yourself, if you like, but family tends to find the process difficult. His body won’t move in the way that you expect.’
‘No, that’s OK. You do it, please.’ It’s been years since Dougie let us see him naked – I don’t want to intrude on him now.
On the far side of the waiting room is a small window, with curtains drawn across it, and a door.
‘Is he—’ I gesture towards the window.
She nods. ‘If you don’t feel ready to go in, you can view Douglas through the window first. We can pull back the curtain.’
‘No. I’d rather just go in.’ I don’t want those pleated beige curtains being pulled back. I don’t want to view my dead son like something in a Punch and Judy show.
She stands. ‘Are you ready?’
When Dougie was a baby, I used to be paranoid that his breathing had stopped. He was our firstborn, and I worried all the time. I’d go into his room three or four times at night, to check on him. If he was lying still, I’d creep closer, risking the creaking floorboards, until I could hear his breathing. I’ve never forgotten the relief, each time I could finally make out the rise and fall of his chest.
Looking at Dougie’s body, lying on the trolley in the centre of the small room, I understand how wrong I was. There’s no mistaking a dead body for a sleeping one. This is a totally different kind of inertness. Absolute stillness. His body, neatly arranged, has become a place outside of time.
It takes me three steps to reach him. I reach for his hand. I’m glad that the chaplain warned me about how he would feel. His hand isn’t only cold, but also hard. Nothing yields in my grip. His nails are broken, and there are scratches on his hands, but the wounds look bloodless and oddly clean.
There’s a bruise across one side of his face, a deep red-purple blotchiness – but I can’t read his body for clues of what happened. Nothing of what I see makes any sense. His body is written in a different language now.
I bend down to kiss him on the forehead, and leave my lips pressed against his cool skin for a long time. He doesn’t smell like himself. He smells of nothing.
The chaplain has followed me and is hovering by the door.
‘He doesn’t look bad – not as bad as I expected,’ I say.
‘Most of the head wounds are at the back,’ she says. I’m thankful for the straightforward words, and the no-nonsense tone of her voice.
He looks so clean – soaked and scrubbed. He’s very pale, except for where the bruising has left his face reddened in precisely delineated patches. Even his hair looks lighter, as though it’s been bleached. It’s fluffy – none of the gel that he used to add. Somehow that’s the hardest thing – not the wounds, but this baby-chick fluffiness of his hair. He always hated it, that fluffiness. From the age of about twelve he put stuff in it to make it spikier. We used to tease him about it – about how long it took him, standing in front of the bathroom mirror rearranging the strands. And if I hugged him, or if Teddy was roughhousing with him, Dougie would shield his hair with his hand, or yell, ‘Not the hair!’
‘He always put stuff in it,’ I say, touching Dougie’s hair now. ‘Some kind of gel. I don’t suppose I could fix his hair for him?’
It feels like a very frivolous request – such a trivial thing, compared to the fact of Dougie’s cold body. I’m learning to do these small things, because they’re all that I can do.
‘That’s no problem at all,’ she says. ‘We have a selection of hair products.’ She goes away for a few minutes and returns with a lidless shoebox containing a collection of jars and sprays. She chooses a blue jar, passes it to me. ‘This kind of thing?’
The words on the jar are gibberish to me: Volumising, Texturising, Wet-look.
‘Is this the kind of thing that young men use?’ I ask, blinking blindly.
She nods.
‘Do you think you could do it?’ I say. ‘Please? I’ve never done it for him. I don’t know how.’
She scoops a small amount of the gel into her hand, rubbing it between her palms to soften it. Then she bends forward and runs her fingers through his hair, gently teasing it upwards.
I take deep breaths. The gel smells a bit like the stuff he used to use. The chaplain works patiently at it, the two of us leaning together over this silent baptism.
Back in the flat, Gill hasn’t moved from the armchair by the window. The dark has come, but she hasn’t turned on the lights.
‘He looked—’ I search for words. None of the ones that people usually use to refer to dead people seem to fit. He hadn’t looked calm, or peaceful. Neither of those emotions, nor any others, had anything to do with him any more. What could I say to her about the scratches on his hands, or the bruises? The awful stillness of his face.
I want to say, Do you remember, before the kids were born, when we swam in Lake Rowallan? The hydroelectric company made the lake by flooding the valley. The drowned trees remain, ghost trunks that pierce the water’s surface, as though the lake is always dreaming of trees.
I want to tell her: Dougie’s face now is no more a face than those white spars of wood are trees.
Instead I say, ‘He looked OK. Not badly roughed up, honestly.’
‘I can’t hear about it,’ she says, still looking out the window. Her hands are on her stomach, and I remember the day she went into labour with Dougie; how she’d pressed her hands to h
er stomach as the contractions first started, saying, Shit, I think it’s really happening. It’s really happening. Her laugh, giddy with pain and excitement, her hands pressed just where they’re pressed now.
When we Skype Teddy, he’s eating breakfast, Sue moving in and out of the shot behind him, dropping things in the kitchen.
‘Have you been to the Tower of London?’ he asks. ‘Did you see the Beefeaters, and the ravens?’
‘It’s not that sort of trip,’ Gill says.
‘What about Dougie? Did you see him?’
As if Dougie’s body is one of the sights: Be sure not to miss the National Gallery, your son’s dead body, or the Tower of London.
‘I saw him,’ I say. ‘Mum didn’t feel up to it.’
He doesn’t ask anything else for now, and I’m relieved.
‘Are you OK, sweetie?’ Gill asks him.
Teddy shrugs. ‘I don’t know. Sue and I are crying quite a lot. Sometimes we take turns. Sometimes we do it together.’
‘That sounds fair enough,’ I say. ‘We’re crying a lot here, too. How’s your sister?’
Another shrug. ‘Same as usual. We haven’t been doing any crying when we go to see her. We haven’t said anything about Dougie.’
‘Good boy,’ says Gill.
When Sylvie began to disappear, the vet was one of the first clues. Three and a half years ago, SausageDog suddenly started getting fat, despite being fed the same amount as always.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Sue said when she came around. ‘From a bird’s eye view, that animal is basically circular.’
Then, one Saturday, I’d made a stew for lunch, and thrown in a few handfuls of alphabet pasta. It’s the kind of basic meal that I usually make – when you’re married to a chef, you get lazy. But Teddy had always loved the pasta letters, and Papabee enjoyed them too, playing a kind of scrabble with Teddy on a side-plate. Dougie was sixteen then, so of course he spelled out rude words on his plate – BALLS SHIT BUM – nudging Sylvie to show her, and Gill and I pretended not to see because it was nice to have Sylvie giggling, Sausage sitting on her lap. Nice to see Sylvie and Dougie laughing together. They used to be like that all the time: the big kids – those two conspirators. But lately those moments seemed to be getting rarer; Sylvie had been so teenagery – thirteen, and full of eye-rolls. My dad, Papa J, had come down from Sydney for the summer just gone – a nice change, as he’d never bothered to spend much time with his grandkids until after his second wife died. But Sylvie had been sulky for most of his visit, and I’d felt embarrassed by her behaviour, because for once my dad was actually making an effort.
The Cookbook of Common Prayer Page 8