‘Maybe we had it coming,’ I’d said to Gill, when Sylvie had stormed off to her room after I tried to tell her she shouldn’t be so monosyllabic with Papa J. ‘Dougie’s given us such an easy ride.’
It was true – Dougie had cruised through his teenage years relatively unscathed, except for acne. He was too busy with his friends and his sports to tie himself into knots of teenage angst.
‘I know,’ Gill said. ‘It’s only fair that one of them should have a chance to be a shit. God knows, I was a nightmare at that age.’
So it was good, that day, a few weeks after my dad had left, to see Sylvie laughing with Dougie, and cuddling the dog. Good to see her forgetting, briefly, that she thought her family was deeply uncool and boring.
Half an hour later SausageDog ate some grass and threw up on the kitchen floor. There, among the barely chewed grass, was a perfect array of alphabet stew, a jumble of letters that spelled out nothing, and said everything.
I can’t stop feeling that I’m in the wrong place, or the wrong time. That Dougie’s death is some kind of mistake. Because it’s Sylvie who wants to die, not him.
When Sylvie first stopped eating, I didn’t know that it could kill her. Like most people, I thought eating disorders were a kind of rite of passage, a worrying phase that teenage girls tended to pass through, these days. Skipping a few meals, losing weight, wanting to be like models in magazines. So when we found that she’d been slipping all her food to the dog, I wasn’t too panicked. Even her weird period of frenzied baking didn’t worry me unduly. But after the first few doctors’ appointments, and then the first hospital admission, it became all too clear that Sylvie didn’t want to lose a few kilos. She wanted to disappear. The doctors talked to us about osteoporosis; infertility; liver enzymes; muscle wastage; heart damage.
‘People die from this,’ I said to her. ‘Is that your end goal? You don’t eat, you die. That’s not me being dramatic, that’s a basic fact.’
She said nothing.
When her friend Katie P killed herself, I hoped it might wake Sylvie up to the reality of what she was doing. But she and the other girls in the ward were more single-minded than ever. I should have guessed it. Anorexics aren’t friends to one another, or even allies. They’re competitors. That’s why they keep them in isolation in Paediatrics 3 – they can’t mingle at all. But even then, in the corridors and through the curtains and glass doors, they’re always watching each other. On Tuesdays and Fridays, weighing days, the ward is thick with suspicion, as they eye each other off while they shuffle through the ward to the weighing room, wheeling their drip-stands.
For those girls, every new low weight is a new precedent, a new goal. And Katie P, cremated and reduced to ash, became the ultimate goal weight. She was the gold standard anorexic: the one who achieved perfection.
In those first months, I used to tell Sylvie all the time, You could really die from this. It could kill you. I never say it any more. After the first suicide attempt, and the second and third, I learned that she didn’t hear it as a threat, but as an offer.
‘We can’t leave Sylvie and Teddy any longer,’ I say when we’ve hung up. ‘Or Papabee.’
‘I know.’
‘One of us needs to go back. Tomorrow, probably.’
‘I know.’
I call the airline.
What we really meant, though we didn’t need to say it to one another: Gill’s going back. There are things to be done here that Gill can’t do: dealing with Dougie’s body; organising the cremation; monitoring the inquest. And things to be done at home that I can’t do: maintaining a semblance of ordinariness for Teddy, Sylvie, and Papabee.
So she’ll go, and I’ll stay. My job, as a research physicist, can be done remotely, at least for now – my boss has been accommodating, and I can work on my datasets from England.
The next morning we go together on the tube to the airport. The Piccadilly Line to Heathrow takes more than an hour, but I don’t mind. We sit there holding hands, which we don’t do often these days, and she leans into my shoulder.
At the entrance to Security, I say, ‘Give Teddy a huge hug from me.’ No point telling her to hug Sylvie – Sylvie hasn’t let us hug her properly for years.
Gill kisses me, the kind of slow kiss on the forehead that she gives to Teddy when he’s had a nightmare. One of us is crying, and I don’t know which one.
‘When are we going to tell Sylvie?’ I ask.
‘We’ll see how she’s doing once I’m back.’ She hitches her bag higher on her shoulder. ‘We’ll see what the doctors say.’
‘We can’t put it off forever.’
‘We’ll talk about it once I’m home,’ she says.
Gill
I don’t have the magic COMP code on my boarding pass this time. Gabe comes out to Heathrow with me, and before I check in he asks me, ‘Do you want me to speak to them at the desk? I want to make sure that they’ll take care of you.’
But I don’t want to be taken care of, least of all by these glossy flight attendants, their big grins painted on with red lipstick, their hair weirdly unmoving, lacquered into shape. I don’t want to be subjected to the scrutiny of their pity.
Onboard, I have a window seat, and I lean against the side wall and pretend that I’m flying for any other reason. A holiday. A book tour. A research trip. Anything but this.
‘Heading home?’ the man next to me asks.
‘Yes,’ I say, and I smile, and it feels almost real. I can’t wait to see Teddy. I’m even looking forward to seeing Sylvie. I want to imagine that everything can go back to normal, even if normal means sitting by Sylvie’s hospital bed so that she can ignore me.
The man smiles back and puts on his headphones, in the way that signals that the conversation is over. When Gabe and I flew out together, the whole row to ourselves, we’d had nowhere to hide from our grief. This time, next to a stranger, I can pretend. I sit back and put my own headphones on, and try to watch a documentary about Antarctica. I don’t read Dougie’s letter again, but I take out the book that contains it and I hold it to my stomach like I’m keeping pressure on a wound. When I cry, I keep my eyes closed and wipe my face surreptitiously with my cuff. For some reason it seems terribly, terribly important that this stranger next to me not think that anything is wrong. I don’t want to have to explain to him, or to see the look on his face that shows he’s reclassifying me as that woman – the one with the tragic story; the one he’ll tell his wife about when he lands; the one who’ll make him hug his kids tighter and think, Thank God it’s her and not me.
It’s mid-morning on Monday when I land in Hobart. I ought to be exhausted, but I’m tingling with brittle energy. I can’t stop moving my hands, fidgeting my feet. Teddy’s at school, and Papabee will be at his flat. Sylvie will be sitting cross-legged in her hospital bed, reading. I called her before I left London to tell her I’d be back today; I wonder if she’s remembered.
Sue picks me up from the airport. My suitcase topples over when she runs to me, and I let it lie there in the gutter while we hug. We drive across the bridge, the late morning sun throwing its light against the mountain. The mountain that watches over Hobart has a real name – Mount Wellington, or (earlier) kunanyi – but everyone in Hobart calls it the mountain. People from the mainland find that quaint – the same way they laugh at the fact that Tasmanians call it the mainland. It doesn’t matter – the mountain remains the mountain, the city’s hulking witness, and we all live in its shadow. On the side of the mountain facing down towards Hobart are the striated cliffs, the Organ Pipes, vertical columns of dolerite.
When Dougie started high school and was learning about metaphor, I used the Organ Pipes as an example: ‘That’s a metaphor,’ I told him. ‘They’re not really the pipes of an organ, like you’d see in a church – they just look like them.’
‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘but after a while, doesn’t the metaphor become the thing? Like, if somebody says organ pipes to me, I don’t think of an actual ch
urch organ. I think of the mountain.’
What did it do to my children, growing up on this island at the bottom of the world, in this city trapped between mountain and water, in a place where metaphors become solid?
Sue helps me lug my suitcase up the steps to the house, where the dog greets me as if I’d been gone years, and not a week. There’s a pile of mail on the kitchen table – not the usual collection of bills and circulars, but handwritten letters and cards. Word spreads quickly in a place like Hobart. I have a moment of gratitude that Sylvie’s in the hospital, quarantined from the gossip of the real world. Then I feel sick – what kind of thing is that to be grateful for?
I open some of the letters. They’re all variations on the same thing: We’re so sorry for your loss. Let us know if there’s anything we can do.
Sue never asks me what she can do to help – she just does it.
‘There’s cheese and milk in the fridge,’ she says, ‘and half of Hobart has dropped off casseroles – they’re in the freezer. I didn’t change the sheets on the bed, because it was only me, so bugger that. But I’ve ironed Teddy’s school shirts, and I’ve done a few loads of washing. There’s one load that hasn’t finished yet – you’ll have to hang it out when it’s done.’
‘OK.’ I’m glad to have something normal to do. Something to fill the hours.
‘I won’t be turning my phone off at night,’ she goes on. ‘Call me any time, OK?’
‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘Jesus. What would I do without you?’
‘Don’t be too thankful,’ she says. ‘I ate all the good chocolates, and I dropped your iron and now it’s making a weird rattling noise. But that’s the least of your problems right now.’
We both laugh, then hear ourselves and stop.
‘I’ve got to get to a meeting,’ she says. ‘Then Ella’s violin thing, after school. You sure you’ll be OK here by yourself?’
I nod. ‘I’ll pop up to check on Dad before I go into the hospital. And Teddy’ll be home in a few hours.’ I’m longing to drive to the school and pick him up early, and squeeze his little body to mine, but he doesn’t need more disruption in his life right now, or his mother weeping hysterically in front of everyone in the school car park.
When Sue goes, I can’t get used to the quiet. In the London flat the traffic sounds never stopped, and there was always a siren in the distance. Here there are only the sounds of birds, and the washing machine chugging. Three hours until Teddy gets home from school. I should go into the hospital soon, but I’m lurking in the kitchen, looking for excuses to delay. I ring my dad, but he’s out – he usually goes for a walk in the afternoons. I try his mobile, but he doesn’t answer. He hardly ever does. His phone is an ancient Nokia that used to belong to Gabe. The kids call it ‘The Brick’, but it works, and it’s simple enough that we were able to teach Papabee how to use it, though he still avoids it whenever he can. It only has three numbers saved in it: mine, Gabe’s, and Teddy’s.
I check my voicemail: five messages from friends, all with the same refrain – I’m so sorry. Let me know if you need anything. There’s also a six-minute voicemail from Papabee, who does this every few weeks – calls one of us by accident from his mobile and leaves a long voicemail that’s just silence, or the sound of him humming as he moves around his flat. Usually I delete these straight away, but today I listen all the way through. It’s oddly comforting.
Leaning on the counter, I open more of the letters. One of them’s from my sister Amy, in Perth, and she’s enclosed a self-help book that she found useful when our mum died – a manual about grieving, with a soft-focus picture of lilies on the cover. Amy’s always gone in for that sort of thing. Over the last few years she’s given me several self-help books about anorexia. Gabe and I bought some books of advice ourselves, back when Sylvie first got sick. Reassuringly fat books full of sensible advice, by sensible people with impressive medical qualifications. I’d devoured them, even underlined some sections, and read them out loud to Gabe. None of it made any difference to Sylvie – and, anyway, there are no books about doing both at once: about losing my son at the same time as trying to hang on to my daughter.
I tuck the book underneath the other cards. I shower, hang out the washing and empty the dishwasher. Then I stand in the kitchen with a tea-towel hanging limply from my hand, and stare at the door frame where we’ve always marked the children’s heights. Inch by inch, those little horizontal marks creep up the painted timber and through the years. Then, three years ago, Sylvie stopped growing and went into hospital: Sylvie Jan 2013 is the last record of her.
Dougie kept growing. Now I stand facing the door frame, pressing my forehead against the wood, against Dougie Jan 2016, measured just before he left for England. I remember it perfectly. Dougie standing there, his back to the wood. Teddy saying, ‘He’s cheating! He’s on tippy-toes!’ until Dougie lowered his heels. Gabe rested a cookbook on Dougie’s head and marked the line with the pencil.
We still have that cookbook (Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake Book). We probably still have the same pencil, in the mug with the broken handle next to the phone. How can we still have those things, and not have Dougie?
I’d like to cook something, but Sue was right – the freezer’s full of meals dropped off by friends and neighbours. I peel back some of the foil lids, and squint through the frosted Pyrex dishes. Baked puddings; macaroni cheese; lasagne. It’s all comfort food – the kind of things that are supposed to make us feel better, along with the cards and letters. I’m touched by their effort, their kindness. But I don’t want comfort. There isn’t any comfort. Instead, I dice three chillies for a meal that we don’t need. Standing there at the chopping board, I look down at my red-stained hands and wipe them, very deliberately, in my eyes. I rub them across my gums, and jam my fingers up my nostrils, to feel the soft tissue there burning. I start to sweat, and that’s the only thing that feels true: my body shrieking Alarm. Alarm. I let the oil in the pan get hot, and I toss in the cumin seeds and listen to their spiteful hiss as they spin themselves from gold to brown. When the oil spits at me, I don’t snatch my hand away. I step closer to the pan, and I have to stop myself from spitting back.
When the unnecessary curry is cooling on the counter, I unpack. From the pages of the still-unread novel, I fish out my scrawled recipe notes, and Dougie’s letter. I read it one last time, although by now I know it by heart. 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.) Then I find an old glue-stick in Teddy’s desk drawer, and carefully re-seal the envelope flap, pressing down hard. I put it in my handbag to take to Sylvie at the hospital.
Teddy
Mum’s there when Papabee brings me home from school. She cuddles me so tight that my face is squished against the buttons of her shirt, and I don’t even care.
‘When’s Dad coming home?’ I ask.
‘Soon,’ she says. ‘There are some things he needs to sort out, that’s all. Stuff to do with Dougie, and the inquest.’
‘Inquest’ has ‘quest’ in it, which sounds like something from Lord of the Rings. I picture Dad on a mission, to save Dougie somehow, a bit like my own mission with Sylvie. I like the idea that Dad and I are both busy with important quests.
‘Christ,’ Mum says. ‘It’s only been a week, but I swear you’ve grown.’
I’ve always wanted to get taller, and catch up with the big kids. I was always behind them – too young, too slow, too little. Then I turned ten last year, and I started growing fast, and getting thinner, like my body didn’t know any way to go except up. ‘He’s having a growth spurt,’ Mum said to Dad, and I didn’t hear her properly and thought she said, ‘growth squirt’, and that stuck and became one of those things we say, like napple, from when Sylve was little and used to say she wanted ‘a napple’ instead of ‘an apple’.
But now I don’t want any more growth squirts. Because Sylvie doesn’t eat napples n
ow, or anything else, and she’s stopped growing, and Dougie can’t ever grow any more either, which means one day I’ll overtake them, and that doesn’t seem right, because what happens if the big kids aren’t bigger any more? What happens if people’s names don’t even fit them?
In the car on the way to the hospital I practise all my answers in my head, in case Sylvie asks questions. Practising all my lies, so that I won’t mess it all up. But when we get to her ward she just says ‘Hi,’ without even looking up properly, and it’s Mum who does nearly all the talking. Sylvie asks, ‘How’s Dougie? How’s his leg?’ and Mum starts talking at Sylvie, on and on. She talks to Sylvie like she’s hitting tennis balls over the net to someone who just won’t hit them back, and the balls just bounce and drop and lie there around Sylvie’s feet. Mum does so much talking that I think she’ll give it away for sure, but Sylve just ignores her, the same as usual, and I remember that Sylvie’s too busy looking at herself to look at anybody else. I never understand how her body can take up so much space – in her head, and all of ours too – when it’s so little.
The Cookbook of Common Prayer Page 9