A pause. Jacob looks from me to Rosa, and back to me.
‘OK then,’ he nods. ‘Thank you, Rosa. I’d appreciate you showing Mr Jordan to Douglas’s room, and helping him find anything he needs.’ He turns back to me. ‘Spend as long there as you’d like. If you need anything else, I’ll be in my office.’
Rosa and I don’t talk on the way. I follow her higher and higher through the corridors of the huge Victorian mansion. It’s rundown in the way that only posh places can get away with – flaking paint on old radiators, worn carpet, scuffed walls. We pass doors open to dormitories, the beds all neatly made. A clash of different doona covers: football teams; superheroes; cartoon animals.
On the upper floors the corridors are narrower and the ceilings lower. The doors here are closed, with staff name-plates. Then there’s another flight of stairs, so narrow that Rosa has to turn sideways to avoid bumping her injured arm.
‘The gap students always get the worst room,’ she says.
At the top of the stairs is a single door. She opens it for me and steps out of the way.
It smells of him. Not even in a nice way, but that familiar smell of dirty sneakers and deodorant. Maybe every teen boy’s bedroom smells the same way – but his is the only one I know, and I have to stop myself from kneeling right here and burying my face in the carpet, taking great undignified gulps.
‘We haven’t changed anything,’ Rosa says. ‘The cleaners come round on Wednesdays to vacuum, but that’s it.’
For a minute neither of us speaks. I don’t know what to say to Rosa. When I said we’d heard a lot about her, I was lying. Dougie mentioned her a few times, but in a deliberately casual way. There’s a girl here, from Ireland. Rosa. She’s an assistant teacher, basically my age. She’ll be travelling over summer too, so we might meet up. Gill had raised her eyebrows when I’d read her that bit of the email, holding the iPad on my lap in bed, and she’d nudged me whenever Rosa’s name had come up during Skype calls. But he’d been reticent – of course he had. He was a nineteen-year-old boy.
Rosa starts to cry. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, sniffing.
What’s she sorry for? That she’s crying? That he’s dead? Or is it for something that she’s done?
‘I’m sorry too,’ I say. There’s a t-shirt draped over the back of the chair. I want to pick it up and smell it, but not with her standing there.
‘How’s the arm?’ I ask.
She wrinkles her nose. ‘It’s not serious – just annoying. It only hurts when I bump it. But when I do that it hurts like mad.’ She stops suddenly. ‘Sorry – it’s nothing, really. I mean, compared to—’
‘It’s OK.’
‘You said you needed to choose some clothes?’
I nod, grateful to her for changing the subject. ‘Something for him to wear, for the cremation.’
She swallows. ‘Cremation? I wasn’t sure what you were going to do.’
‘We thought that was the best option.’ It sounds ridiculous. Best option, like choosing a new dishwasher from a website. Not choosing what to do with your son’s body.
She turns to the wardrobe. ‘So what kind of thing do you want him to wear? Something smart, or just normal?’
‘I don’t think he’d want to dress up. Not a tie, or anything like that. That would seem weird, don’t you think?’
She looks surprised to be asked. ‘Maybe. He has a tie – we have to wear formal clothes for some stuff here. Prizegiving, and chapel. But I think you’re right. It’s not really him, you know?’
‘I know.’
She opens the cupboard. His clothes on the shelves aren’t folded so much as tossed. That detail gets me right in my chest, and I have to put a hand against the wall and concentrate on my breathing.
‘He liked this one,’ she says, holding up a grey-blue t-shirt. I notice that she uses the past tense. ‘He wore this a lot.’
‘I remember that one.’
I pick some boxer shorts, too – the grey Bonds ones he always wore – and some black socks.
‘And he had some grey jeans that he liked,’ she says. ‘I think they might be in my room.’
‘OK.’
‘Were they the ones with holes in them?’ I say. ‘It’s just that Gill – his mum – always hated it when he wore things with holes.’ It wasn’t that she minded him looking scruffy. It was the idiocy of paying for jeans that were already ripped. You’re bound to go through the knees in a month anyway, she used to say to him. I’m not paying an extra fifty dollars just for jeans that start off like that.
Rosa smiles. ‘Nope. No holes. I promise.’
She’s young – maybe twenty-one or twenty-two – and very pale, her hair more white than blonde, and a face full of freckles. I picture her there in the cave, the water rising, her face showing up white in the darkness. Her face above the water, his face beneath it.
I blink the picture away.
‘Would you mind if I take those jeans then, please?’
‘I’ll get them.’
Alone in his room, I walk back to the desk. On the wall above it, photos are Blu-Tacked to the wall. An old one from the Neck, showing our family and Sue’s, together on the beach. Rosa, smiling on a bridge in Prague. Dougie with his school friends at a party, their faces flushed with beer or sunburn or both. Teddy and Papabee in the garden. Even a photo of Sylvie that he must have taken last year, on one of her brief home visits. She’s on the verandah, scowling at the camera, one hand already raised to stop him.
His desk is as messy as his desk at home used to be. There are scrunched receipts, a snapped rubber band, envelopes and bits of paper with half-decipherable lists:
Dubrovnik hostel?
Stamps
Rowing sheds 11–12:30 Thurs
Toothpaste Phone charger Deodorant
I’ll have to sort this all out at some stage; work out what to throw out, and what to ship home. The stuff on the desk is the kind of detritus that you’d ordinarily toss without thinking, but now I can’t imagine getting rid of any of it, not even the broken rubber band. Perhaps this is what happens when somebody dies: everything they’ve touched becomes a relic.
I pick up the t-shirt from the back of the chair, and hold it to my face, gulping deep breaths. It’s been worn, and it smells of Dougie in a way that Dougie’s body in the hospital did not. Sweat and salt and his skin and the warmth of his breath.
I’m still there, sitting on the bed with my face pressed against the t-shirt, when Rosa comes back.
‘I’ve done that too,’ she admits. It feels an oddly intimate thing to say.
‘I can’t imagine ever wanting to wash this stuff again.’
She sits next to me on the bed. ‘Here,’ she says, passing me Dougie’s grey jeans, neatly folded. ‘I don’t like to think of him lying there in nothing but a sheet.’
‘You went to see him?’
‘Of course,’ she says. ‘Twice.’ She’s watching me. ‘Is that OK?’
‘Of course,’ I echo her. ‘I just – it hadn’t occurred to me, that’s all.’ I pause. ‘It’s different for everyone, I guess. Gill didn’t want to go.’
‘I wanted to see him. I’m glad I did.’
‘Me too,’ I say.
I think about asking her how she found it, that strange room with its curtained window, and the terrible stillness of Dougie’s body. But it’s enough just to know that she’s seen it as well.
‘You were with him in the cave, at the end, weren’t you?’
She nods, but doesn’t say anything.
‘I’d like to know,’ I say. ‘Anything at all that you can tell me, about what happened.’
‘Really?’ she asks.
‘Really.’
She shrugs. ‘I don’t remember all that much about it. It all happened so fast. The doctors said it’s normal not to remember much. And the bits that I do remember don’t seem important.’
‘They’ll be important to me. Anything at all.’
She turns to me. ‘Just befor
e it happened, I remember we were joking about peeing in our caving suits. It was so cold, you see. He said something about how at least we didn’t have to worry about sharks smelling the pee – not like Australia.’
I’m smiling and crying at once. It’s something Gill and I used to say to the kids when we were at the Neck: Don’t wee in your wetsuits, it attracts sharks. I can’t remember, now, if it’s even true, or just something we told the kids to stop them from being revolting.
‘And then?’
She shakes her head. ‘I don’t remember. I’m sorry. I don’t remember anything after then.’
It’s the sincerity in her apology that makes me doubt her. She’s sorry for something, but I’m not sure it’s amnesia. But I can’t push her on it – not here, and not now, when all I want to do is turn my face to the bed and breathe in the smell of my son.
‘So what will you do next?’ I ask.
‘I don’t know.’ She gestures downstairs, in the direction of the staffroom. ‘They’ve given me time off, but officially staff members aren’t meant to date, so they can’t say why they’re giving me special treatment. Lots of muttering about We know you and Douglas were close, or about my arm, and then awkward silence. So I’m kind of drifting around.’ She hesitates.
‘I think they’d probably quite like to fire me, for breaking the rule. Or at least they’d like not to renew my contract in September. But they feel bad, now Dougie’s dead. And they’re worried that I’m going to sue them, because of this.’ She jerks her left arm, in its sling and plaster cast. ‘And they don’t really want me around the students, with the sling, because they’re trying to play down the whole thing. So they don’t want me working yet, but I still live here. So I’m sort of here, but not here.’
‘Is there somewhere else you could go, even just for a while? Your parents?’
‘No,’ she says immediately, and then she speaks too quickly. ‘I mean, they came down from Ireland straight away, when they heard the news. They were worried, obviously. But I didn’t need them to stick around. I was only in hospital for a few hours.’ Another silence. ‘We don’t talk much, normally.’
‘This isn’t really a normal time.’
‘We don’t talk much, ever, is what I should have said.’
I think about trying to contact her parents. What would I say? I hardly know this girl.
‘I thought about going to stay with them for a bit,’ she says. ‘But they live on the west coast of Ireland, and they’re both working, so I’d be stuck in the arse end of nowhere, with nothing to do. And my sister’s in Mexico – she married a Mexican guy. She offered to come out, but her baby’s only six months old – I said not to bother. And I want to be here. Closer to—’ She pauses, waves her arm around the room. ‘I don’t know. It felt weird to go. And people here have mainly been nice, even if most of them don’t really know what to say.’
I nod, thinking of the attempts of our own friends and relatives, in the emails and voicemails that had been arriving ever since Dougie died. The cards and letters at home, too, that Gill’s told me about. All those sound bites, skirting around the edge of what happened: Sorry for your loss. We heard the sad news. So sorry to hear about your son. Nobody saying the words Dougie is dead.
Before Rosa shows me downstairs, I take a blank piece of paper from Dougie’s desk and scribble my phone number, and the address of the new flat. ‘I know you probably don’t want to talk about it. But when you’re ready – if you’re ready—’
‘I told you,’ she says. ‘I don’t remember.’
She leaves me at the door to Jacob’s office. It’s late – the secretary’s gone, but Jacob’s still there, waiting for me. He calls me a taxi, and sees me to the door.
‘Let us know, whenever you decide how you’d like to deal with packing up Douglas’s things. We’ll help, of course, in any way that we can. And there’s no rush.’ He shakes my hand again. ‘If there’s anything that we can do, please let us know. Anything at all.’
What can I say? Go to that hospital and take the lift down to the basement. Find my son, get him to stop being dead, then bring him back to me.
‘Thank you,’ I say. I seem to be spending the whole day thanking him. I’m not sure exactly for what. After all, this is the school that organised the caving trip that killed my son. But I’m not angry with them. I feel very distant, that’s all. As if Jacob and all those teachers, in this huge mansion, with their fancy voices, are creatures from a BBC Sunday night drama. Not Rosa – she seems different, and real, at least, with her freckles and her accent and her bluntness. But the rest of them – what can they possibly have to do with Dougie, or with me?
Dessert for a house with no teenagers
This is too simple to be a recipe. It’s really just a way of passing half an hour. Because lately time has turned slow and viscous – molasses-thick. And the bananas are going brown, tiny flies starting to circle above the fruit bowl like miniature vultures. When you had a teenage boy in the house, bananas never got the chance to go brown. You couldn’t keep enough bananas in the house. The fridge was always open; a loaf of bread would last half a day; you were always running out of Vegemite, milk, cheese.
Things are different now.
Heat the oven to 200°. Take four bananas, ideally slightly overripe (but not black or soggy – they need to hold their shape).
Don’t peel them. Make a slit, longways, in the side of each banana, being sure not to go all the way through to the skin on the other side. Into the slit, press several pieces of dark chocolate or, for full nostalgic effect, some slices of whichever chocolate bar your children used to prefer, however revolting (for me: Milky Way). Resist the temptation to overstuff – it will only ooze out when it cooks. You should be able to close the slit once again, before wrapping the whole thing firmly in silver foil.
Bake on the top shelf of the oven for no more than twenty-five minutes, or until the foil darkens and the banana, when gently squeezed, has the texture of tightly packed wet sand. If you had teenage children at home, they’d make jokes about squeezing bananas. But you don’t have teenage children at home.
Now (and this is the important part): eat this alone. Use a spoon if you want (I don’t). If you concentrate hard on what you remember, and on what you want to forget, you can probably get through at least two whole bananas before you sit back, hands on your stomach, looking around at the leftover food and the empty table. This is very good practice. You need to get used to this.
Gill
I eat the bananas in the late morning, alone in the house while Teddy’s at school. Then I make a shepherd’s pie for tonight, putting some in a small container to take to the hospital tomorrow. Every day, I take Sylvie some of whatever I’ve cooked the night before. It’s become habit now, whenever I cook a meal: a Tupperware for Papabee to take home for the next day’s lunch; a smaller container for Sylvie. I only give her a tiny amount – barely five or six spoons’ worth. I take the container in, and she ignores it, and the next day I take away the unopened container and replace it with a new one.
‘Isn’t it just a waste of food?’ Dougie asked me once. ‘You know what you and Dad used to say, if we wouldn’t eat something: There are starving children in Africa.’
His imitation of me was always good.
‘Sylvie’s starving too,’ I told him.
Even Sylvie’s doctors are unconvinced by my daily deliveries. ‘I’m not sure it’s productive,’ her main doctor, Louise, told me. ‘It’s a lot of pressure. If we see progress, it’s going to be small – keeping down her Sustagen. Drinking half a glass of skim milk. She’s not going to wake up one day and wolf down a serve of risotto.’
So far, Sylvie doesn’t even open the containers, let alone eat the food. But I don’t expect her to. I tried to explain to Louise that it’s not about what Sylvie does. It’s about what I do: I don’t give up on her. I want to show her that she’s still part of this family. Each of those battered plastic containers is an act of faith
.
Gabe calls at noon – it must be the wee hours there. He tells me that there still isn’t a date for the post-mortem.
‘Something to do with a shortage of pathologists, apparently,’ he says. ‘I’m chasing the coroner’s office about it.’
Why? I want to say. Why do you want it to happen? Instead I change the subject and get off the phone as fast as I can, my hands shaking.
I go into Sylvie’s room. At the hospital she only has one small bedside table to store her things, so on her desk at home are the piles of things we’ve brought home for her over the last few years: books; letters; schoolwork.
I rifle through her papers for Dougie’s letters. I find fourteen – there might be a few more at the hospital, but I don’t dare ask Sylvie for them. I hold the pile of envelopes close to my face. I want to know if they smell of him – of that awful deodorant that used to make him and all his friends smell the same. But these smell of nothing but dust.
Before, I would never have contemplated reading her letters. There were a lot of things I would never have done, before the police came to the door that morning with the news about Dougie and split our lives into before and after.
I sit on the floor, spreading the envelopes out on the carpet. I don’t even sort them into order before I start pulling out pages and turning them over hungrily.
Rosa and I had a BIG night on Sun in town – only just caught last train back to the school. Thought I was literally going to die the next morning when I had to help with rowing training at 6 am. You haven’t truly suffered until you’ve been trying not to spew in a rowing boat while it’s still dark outside. Reminds me of last year when Nathan overdid it at his 18th and spewed into his own sleeve in the back of the car when Sue was driving us home. Ask Ella – she’ll tell you how gross it was.
He writes as if it was an ongoing conversation – except it wasn’t, because Sylvie never wrote back. We asked her, lots of times, if she wanted to – we told her we’d bring in stamps, and post the letters for her. She just used to shrug. ‘That’s OK, thanks.’ It makes Dougie’s letters seem more poignant, that he kept on sending them in the face of her silence. I think of my own daily tubs of food for her and I miss him with a new sharpness.
The Cookbook of Common Prayer Page 11