‘So he’s OK?’ Sylvie asks. ‘It’s going to be OK, after the operation?’
The rhyme’s going through my head again, in time with the swoosh swoosh of the feeding pump: Sister in the Boneyard, brother in the water. I’m almost worried that I’ll say it out loud. But Mum’s off again, talking talking talking.
‘They’re still not sure if he’ll need another operation. But for now, he’s relying pretty heavily on Dad. Dougie can’t even manage in the shower by himself – hard to say which one of them’s finding that more embarrassing.’
Mum’s really good at this – all the lying. She lies like it’s her superpower.
What’s the difference between a secret and a lie? Is a lie just a secret that’s gone wrong? Mum’s talking about operations, hospitals, plans, and the lie’s getting bigger and bigger.
Papabee sits quietly doing his little smile and sometimes his humming. Sometimes he shakes his head, like he’s seeing Sylvie for the first time, and says, ‘My dear, it strikes me that you don’t look well. Do you feel unwell?’
‘I’m fine, Papabee,’ she says.
Mum used to jump in and say, ‘She’s very sick, Dad. We’ve talked about this.’ But she doesn’t any more – she just lets it go.
Later, when we’re walking back to the car, Papabee says, ‘Does it occur to you that Sylvie’s looking rather too thin?’
‘We know, Papabee,’ says Mum, the vein in her jaw poking out. It does that more and more ever since she got back from London.
‘I expect it’s the hospital food,’ Papabee says. ‘Ghastly stuff.’
That night, when Papabee’s gone home, I get my notebook and start a list:
Napple.
Growth Squirt.
Don’t be shellfish. (That’s what I used to say when
I was too little to talk properly, and the big kids
wouldn’t share their toys with me.)
Papabeen-and-Gone (That’s what Dad calls it when
Papabee wanders into a room and wanders out
again, chatting to himself.)
On top of the page I write TOP SECRET, and I tuck it in my drawer where my Papa J money’s still hidden. I want to make sure I have a list of all our family’s private words. Dougie’s dead. Sylvie’s trying really hard to die, and she hardly talks anyway. Dad’s on the other side of the world. Papabee doesn’t always understand, and Mum’s too busy talking at Sylvie to listen to me.
What happens to a family’s whole private language, if nobody’s left who speaks it? Where do the words go, then, and what do they mean? What if I’m the only one left, shouting Napple Napple Growth squirt, and nobody understands?
I know it isn’t really Sylvie’s fault, but when I think of Dougie, who isn’t even allowed to have his own death because of her, I want to yell at her, Don’t be shellfish.
‘I need you to help me look through some photos,’ I say to Papabee. Usually we go to his flat after school, but today I ask if we can come straight to the house. Mum’s out – hospital, probably – and I take him into the study, and show him the boxes and albums that we need to go through. He doesn’t ask why, or ask what we’re looking for. He just says, ‘Photographs! How delightful,’ and helps me lift down the boxes that I can’t reach.
A couple of years ago, Mum and Dad finally got a digital camera (‘Wow,’ Dougie said. ‘Finally joining the twentieth century, now that we’re well into the twenty-first’). But I don’t bother getting the laptop out and going through those photos. The one I’m looking for is way older.
There are proper photo albums from when Dougie and Sylvie were little. There’s Dougie as a fat baby, looking surprised. Sylvie as a baby on Dougie’s lap, with Dad helping Dougie to hold her. Mum breastfeeding Sylvie (I quickly turn to the next page, because it’s embarrassing to see Mum’s boob, and double-embarrassing because Papabee’s right there next to me).
A silverfish runs out from between the pages of the album and goes under the bookshelf. I can see the tiny holes in the page, where silverfish have chewed through. I’d like to be Silverfish-Teddy, down the cracks, in all the smallest places. I wouldn’t be seen (I’m good at that). Nothing could be hidden from me. I’d wriggle into gaps between pages, little paper places, and I’d eat up the paper and become the stories.
I keep looking. We get older as the photos get newer. There’s Dougie and Sylvie about my age, on the beach at the Neck with Nathan and Ella. Sylvie’s buried in the sand, except for her neck, and Ella’s making her a mermaid tail covered in shells. There’s Dad when he still had lots of hair, standing next to the dinghy. Sylvie with her mouth open, and Papa J laughing at whatever she’s saying.
It’s almost dinnertime when I find the photo I’m looking for. It’s not of a special occasion – just a picture of Sylve at the table in the back yard. She’s doing that big smile, the one that shows her gums as much as her teeth. She’s smiling like she actually means it, her chin pushing up and forwards. She looks like she used to look, before she went into the Boneyard. It’s the last photo I can find of her smiling. There are a few photos of her where she looks older, but in all of them she’s thinner and thinner, and angrier and angrier. And then she disappears from the photos altogether.
I show Papabee the photo of Sylvie smiling. He holds it a long way away from his face. ‘And which of my lovely children – or grandchildren – is this?’
I don’t say anything, because it feels like saying Sylvie wouldn’t be true, and I don’t want to do any more lying than I already have to.
Sylvie
I stare at the window. Not through it, because it’s light in the ward and dark outside, and even if I wheel my drip-stand over to the window and press my face to the glass to peer out, there’s nothing to see but the black windows of the office building opposite, and the pigeons squabbling over a bin, four floors down. So I stare at the reflections on the glass itself. The ward’s ceiling tiles, mirrored so that they go on forever. The curtains around my bed, which make it look as though I’m on a stage.
‘Off next week for an excursion,’ Dougie’s latest letter said. I try not to think of the crunch of his leg breaking. Or the water getting higher, eating up the air. I try not to think of what could have happened if he hadn’t got out in time. About those moments when things change – when the water is at the mouth of the cave, and the world holds its breath and makes a choice: this way, or that way.
In last night’s dream we were all back at the Neck. It was the summer that Papa J was down from Sydney. The year that an echidna snuffled its way out of the marram grass and sat near us on the beach for an hour. I found an empty abalone shell lying on the rocks, like a bowl full of sky. It was the year that Nathan hauled up an octopus on his fishing line, and Ella was so disgusted she jumped out of the dinghy and swam back to shore. The year Teddy started learning French and put Post-it notes on everything in the house, little yellow labels fluttering to the floor in the heat: La porte. Le four à micro-ondes. L’armoire.
In my dream we’re all at the beach, and Papa J says he wants to walk to the promontory. Are you coming? he asks me. Then time stops: the waves are held just like that, propped up by an offshore wind that no longer blows. Ella’s frozen where she kneels in the sand, helping Papabee and Teddy make a moat for their sandcastle. The moat never fills or empties. That gull in the sky stays suspended at the exact point where two clouds touch. Dougie, Dad and Nathan are held in place in the middle of their game of cricket, Dougie’s arm reaching to the sky as he bowls. His raised foot never lands; the ball is never released.
Gabe
With Gill gone, I get a short-term rental on a smaller furnished flat. It’s dark, and there’s a patch of mould creeping from the corner of the bathroom, but it’s cheaper than the first flat, and it’s on the top floor, three storeys above the High Street in Barnet. I find myself doing that, these days: seeking higher ground.
The estate agent, a young man in a shiny grey suit, asks me why I don’t have a UK credit histor
y. I tell him I’m from Australia, and explain why I’m in London. He stops, and stammers something about having been to Australia once, beautiful country, beautiful. Beautiful beaches, and then he stops himself again, as if even the mention of water might set me off, unmoor my grief and let it flood his fancy office with its reproduction Eames chairs and its row of gleaming Macs. I think he rents me the flat just to get rid of me and the contamination of my grief.
On my first evening in the new flat, I eat nothing but a packet of salt-and-vinegar chips for dinner. I picture how much Gill would hate this, and how much Teddy would adore it, and I miss them with a suddenness that almost knocks the breath from me. I miss Sylvie, too, though that’s nothing new – I’ve been missing her for years. I should be with them, now – I wish it for my own sake, selfishly, as much as for theirs. But Dougie’s alone in the morgue, and the date for the post-mortem still isn’t even confirmed. I can’t leave him here alone.
All through the night the shower drips noisily, and I get up four times to check it. I spread the bathmat inside the shower to muffle the sound, but the hushed, rhythmic dripping still sends my heart skittering. The next day I take the bus into town at dawn and walk for hours. Crossing the Millennium Bridge, I find myself sweating, my breath loud in my head and my eyes clenched against the sight of the black river on each side.
I used to love swimming. All those days on the beach at the Neck; all those hours of playing with the kids in the sea, throwing them in the air and letting the water catch them. I can’t imagine it now. I cannot forgive the water.
The second day after Gill left, I ring Northdale House, the boarding school where Dougie was living and working. They’ve obviously been expecting me to call, because I’m only halfway through explaining who I am when the secretary says, ‘Oh, oh, Mr Jordan, of course – let me put you straight through to Mr Overton.’
A deep voice comes on the line.
‘Mr Jordan – this is Jacob Overton. I want you to know that the thoughts of the whole school have been with you.’ He keeps going, unhesitating – it’s like he has access to a script. ‘As parents ourselves, my wife and I have had you in our thoughts. And I can assure you that, in his short time here, Douglas made an immeasurable contribution to the school community.’
I wonder how I can get a copy of his script – how I can find out what I ought to be saying in this situation. Then I think of Sue’s reaction, at home, when the police called her and she’d arrived at our house, her car parked nearly sideways across the street. ‘Fuck,’ she’d said. ‘How can it be real? Fucking fuck.’ And I prefer Sue’s outburst to Overton’s polite spiel, which is still going.
‘And at an appropriate time, when you and your wife feel ready, we’d like to discuss how we might create some sort of lasting memorial on the school campus. We had several ideas – we thought perhaps a memorial bench on the South Lawn? Or there’s a new scull being purchased for the boys’ eight, and we thought it could be named after Douglas. Only with your permission, of course.’
‘A skull?’ I ask.
‘A rowing boat. It’s traditional for them to be named after esteemed members of the school community. And Douglas was involved in coaching the first eight this season—’
‘Can I come to the school?’ I interrupt him. I can’t listen any more to this talk of boats, or to that accent, posher than Papabee’s. Posher than the Queen. ‘I’d like to see Dougie’s things.’
‘Of course,’ Overton says. ‘You’ll be welcome here whenever it suits you to come.’
So the next day a taxi takes me through the high black gates, down the long driveway with trees on each side, playing fields to the left. Probably an avenue, not a driveway, I correct myself. Driveways are for normal houses – not this huge Victorian pile in its landscaped grounds. We’re still in North London, but it feels like the countryside. The taxi traces the gravel loop to deposit me at the front door. Overton and his wife are already coming out to greet me.
‘Mr Jordan,’ he says. ‘Jacob Overton – please, call me Jacob. And this is my wife, Miranda. I only wish we were meeting in different circumstances.’
I shake his hand, then hers. She wraps her other hand over mine.
‘Douglas was such a lovely young man,’ she says. ‘I can’t tell you how sad we are. Such a tremendous loss.’
‘A tragedy,’ Jacob says. ‘We’re all heartbroken.’
I notice that they say everything except ‘sorry.’ Sue’s husband Dan’s a lawyer, and he’s warned me about that.
‘They’ll have lawyered-up,’ he said, when he rang last night. ‘They’ve probably been advised not to admit liability. They’ll be shitting themselves that you might sue. It already looks bad for them, publicity-wise – Dougie dead, students injured. They’ll be dealing with lots of mummies and daddies scrambling to withdraw little Isabella and Sebastian.’
But as Miranda guides me through to Jacob’s office, she has real tears in her eyes. I wave away her offer of tea or coffee.
‘How are the others?’ I ask Jacob. ‘The other children, from the cave? And the teacher. Are they doing OK now?’
‘They’re recovering very well,’ he says. ‘Superficial injuries only, thank God.’ A tiny shake of the head from Miranda to him, perhaps to remind him that I might not be feeling like thanking anyone, least of all God. ‘Grazes,’ Jacob continues hurriedly. ‘A sprained wrist, two cases of hypothermia. And they’re all very distressed, naturally. The injured students were all discharged from hospital within a few hours. But we’re providing counselling, not just for the children on the excursion, but for any student who feels affected.’
He’s slipped back into glossy-school-prospectus mode.
‘I’m glad,’ I say. ‘Glad they’re all doing OK, I mean.’
There’s more small talk – more platitudes about Dougie, whom they keep calling Douglas.
‘We saw relatively little of Douglas in the day-to-day running of the school,’ Jacob says. ‘Though we were left with no doubt of his popularity with staff and students alike. That’s why we thought that you might like to meet some of his colleagues – particularly those who live on campus. They were closest to him, and I know many of them would like to give you their condolences in person, if you feel up to it. Your wife, too, if she cares to visit.’
‘She’s had to go back to Australia,’ I say. ‘Our other children—’ I trail off.
‘Of course.’
He leads me through to the staffroom where ten or fifteen teachers are waiting, on chairs and couches dragged into a rough circle. Several have work with them, papers hastily slipped under their chairs when we enter.
Jacob introduces me, and suggests that the assembled staff might like to tell me some of their memories of Dougie. Some of the teachers are emotional – several cry while they tell me their stories. One young PE teacher had worked with Dougie to coach the rowing team. ‘He was rubbish at the early mornings,’ he says. ‘The alarm clock didn’t cut it. I used to chuck gravel at his window from the driveway.’ Jacob looks nervous at the mention of Dougie’s flaws, but I encourage the teacher with a smile. ‘Then he’d rush down with his tracksuit on top of his pyjamas,’ he says.
One by one they speak. It’s like a group therapy session, but I’m not sure who it’s for. Jacob’s still here, standing by the door, and nodding sympathetically as each teacher talks. He’s watching me – they all are. I feel that I’m expected to offer them something in exchange for these tidbits of memories and anecdotes. Gratitude, or absolution.
The anecdotes keep mentioning Rosa. ‘He and Rosa would come to the pub with us, sometimes, after Prep,’ one teacher says, glancing at the pale young woman perched on the arm of the couch on the far side of the circle from me. Another woman mentions something about ‘after he and Rosa came back from Prague at Easter’. But Rosa herself doesn’t speak. Her left arm is in a sling, and there’s a graze on her cheek. She keeps swinging one leg. A bell rings in the corridor outside, followed by a flurry of f
ootsteps and children’s voices, which subsides after a few minutes.
When the reminiscences have dried up, Jacob dismisses the staff, and they shake my hand one by one as they leave. It feels like the receiving line at a wedding, or a funeral.
When it’s Rosa’s turn, I hang on to her hand.
‘I’d love to speak to you properly,’ I say. ‘I know we haven’t met, but my wife and I heard a lot about you. We knew you were his girlfriend.’
Jacob interjects, lowering his voice and glancing at the other teachers. ‘The school has certain policies, on relationships between staff. It’s a delicate situation.’
‘Not any more,’ says Rosa, and I catch myself giving a snort of laughter, then slap my hand over my mouth.
‘Rosa’s been through a very difficult time, obviously,’ Jacob continues. ‘But the senior management team wasn’t aware of any relationship, if that’s what it was, before the accident.’
‘That’s what it was,’ says Rosa. Her Irish accent is conspicuous among all these plummy teachers.
‘Well, as I said,’ Jacob goes on, ‘Rosa has been through a very hard time, and the school is supporting her as well as we can.’
Rosa says nothing.
‘I’d really like to see Dougie’s room,’ I tell her.
‘Certainly,’ Jacob says, as though I’d been addressing him.
‘I’ll show you,’ Rosa says. ‘If you like.’
Jacob looks from her, to me, and then to his wife, who’s hanging back in the doorway.
‘Rosa,’ Miranda says. ‘You don’t think you ought to be resting?’
‘I’ve been resting all week,’ says Rosa.
‘I’d be grateful if you’d show me his room,’ I say to her. ‘I’d like to talk to you, if that’s OK. I know you were close to Dougie.’ Close – a neutral term, for Jacob’s benefit. ‘And I need to pick up some of his clothes, for him to be dressed in.’
The Cookbook of Common Prayer Page 10