The Cookbook of Common Prayer

by Francesca Haig

  Starting to get serious about planning travels over summer. Thank God for the Papa J money – otherwise I’d be having a scenic tour of European bridges to sleep under! Even as it is, time (and money) are tight – two months travelling seems a lot longer until you start to plan it. Lots of Aussies come over here and say they’re going to ‘do Europe’ in, like, a 10-day bus tour (only thing worse than that: Richie Yang from school who I caught up with in London last week. He’s spent about three months in Scotland, and is putting on a THICK Scottish accent, I shit you not).

  I rip one of the pages as I yank it from its envelope. I can hear Dougie’s voice as though he’s talking in the next room.

  The food at the school is genuinely foul – Mum would have a heart attack if she saw what they’re capable of doing to a Sunday roast. Mainly gristle, and so dry that every now and again you just have to give up and take out a chewed-up wad of meat and put it back on your plate. Classy! And they’re OBSESSED with potatoes. Dinner (except they call it High Tea) for the students yesterday: mashed potato, with potato wedges, and potato gems. Thank God for gravy, and garlic salt. Looking forward to getting scurvy.

  Lots of love

  D xx

  PS: Remember at the Neck that time when Papabee mistook a raw potato for an apple and just took a huge bite?

  PPS: (Sorry if all that food stuff is weird for you to hear about – but honestly this place is enough to turn anyone anorexic.)

  PPPS: (Too soon for anorexia jokes? I’ll try again next year, when you’re out of hospital and all of this is behind you.)

  Hours must’ve passed, and I’ve read all the letters at least three times. I try to clear my head by taking the dog for a walk before Teddy gets home from school, but Dougie’s voice follows me all the way to Cornelian Bay, and through the scrubby bush that surrounds the foreshore path. When I come home, his voice follows me down the side path and in the back door.

  Seen much of Ella or Nath? Nath’s rubbish at emails. Would be brilliant if you were out by this summer, when I’m back, so we’d all be together at the Neck, like the old days (still on the kids’ table, no doubt – even though Nath is like 6 foot 2 by now!).

  His letters are full of moments like that – his optimism as reliable as his appetite.

  Have you thought about doing something like this, some kind of gap year, when you’re better? (Not England. Seriously. Winter here is grim as fuck. Spain, maybe?)

  Is Papabee still driving? (If you can call it that?) When you’re out of hospital you can get your licence. I’ll give you some lessons when I’m back.

  I wonder if he really believed that she would get better, or whether he was just performing hope for her. Was he lying to her, just as we are? Or was this his act of faith? Is there a difference?

  Teddy

  Dad Skypes me on Saturday morning, but Mum’s already at the hospital with Sylvie.

  ‘How’s she doing?’ he asks.

  ‘Sylvie or Mum?’

  ‘Both, I guess.’

  I think about it. ‘Mum’s OK. She’s cooking a lot.’

  ‘Lucky you,’ says Dad.

  I don’t know how to tell him that some of the stuff Mum’s been cooking is a bit weird. Yesterday when I came home from school there were seven bananas wrapped in foil on the counter, cooked and then gone cold again.

  ‘And Sylvie’s the same as normal,’ I say. I can’t even remember what normal used to be, before she went to live in the Boneyard.

  ‘She doesn’t really like talking, when I ring her,’ Dad says. ‘You know what she’s like.’

  ‘Is she mad at you and Mum?’

  ‘She’s always mad at us.’ He’s smiling, trying to make it into a joke.

  ‘Is she mad at you for keeping her alive?’

  He stops his joking face, and he does that thing I like, where he takes my questions seriously.

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I think she is.’

  I’m not supposed to know that Sylvie’s tried to kill herself. I’m not supposed to know a lot of things. That’s the thing about being the littlest: you notice more than people realise. I notice the scars on her arm, and the sharp knives and the medicines being locked snap click shut in the box every time she’s allowed to come home from hospital. I worked it out for myself.

  And it makes sense, because not eating is just killing yourself slowly. So it’s not a big shock that Sylvie’s tried a quicker way.

  ‘How do we know it’s definitely better to be alive?’ I ask Dad. Because I’ve been trying hard to save Sylvie, but she’s always been the smart one – even smarter than Dougie. So if she wants to be dead, I have to check whether she’s right.

  I like that Dad doesn’t rush to say, ‘Of course it is.’ Instead, he thinks properly about what I’ve asked.

  ‘I think it’s hard to be alive, sometimes,’ he says. ‘There are a lot of difficult things, and a lot of sadness. So much, since Dougie died.’ He rubs his face, and his hands pull his skin down and for a second he looks a million years old. ‘And I think it’s extra hard for Sylvie, these last few years, because her brain’s not working properly, because of her sickness. But even after everything that’s happened, I still think being alive is better. There’re so many good things – amazing things.’

  ‘Like SausageDog?’ I say. ‘And the Neck. And McDonald’s.’

  ‘I’m not sure that I’d count McDonald’s. But yes, those other ones. And more things, too. People, most of all.’

  ‘Papabee. And you and Mum.’

  ‘Definitely. And all of our friends. But most of all, for me and your mum, at least, it’s the three of you: you and Dougie and Sylvie. I’ve never wanted to be dead, because that would mean not being with you guys.’

  You’re not with me now, I think, but I don’t say it, because even though it’s true, I think it might be one of those kinds of true that you’re not meant to say out loud.

  I think about all the things I can’t say, and all the things Sylvie doesn’t say. Sylvie, with the bones on her back poking out like spikes – like the echidna that we sometimes see at the Neck. I’d like to be Echidna-Teddy, even though Dad always says they’re covered in fleas. I’d make my own sky out of spikes and use it to keep the world away. Everything inside the spikes would be me, or mine, even the fleas. I’d dig tunnels and a little burrow just big enough to turn around, and that would be the world, exactly shaped like me. I would be all claws and paws, waddling at my own exact pace because Echidna-Teddy couldn’t be hurried. The world would wait for me.

  I get Papabee to drop me at the hospital later that morning. Usually on weekends Mum takes me in the afternoon, but she’s in the study with the laptop click click clicking and she doesn’t even ask why I want to go in early, by myself.

  ‘Remind Papabee where he’s heading,’ she yells out. ‘And make sure you get him to do the loop and drop you on Argyle Street.’ It’s easier for Papabee to find his way home if he’s already pointing the right way.

  I say hi to the nurses on the way in. I’ve got the photo in an envelope tucked under my jumper, because I don’t want anyone asking me what it is.

  ‘Why are you in here so early?’ asks Sylvie. ‘Shouldn’t you be in school?’

  ‘It’s a weekend.’ I forget, sometimes, how cut off she is from the real world. I look at the thick windows, locked shut. They don’t even get real air in here. When Mum brings Sylvie’s pyjamas home to wash, they smell like hospital.

  ‘Where’s Mum?’

  ‘She’s coming in later, so I can go home with her.’

  ‘Guess you’d better settle in, then,’ she says.

  I sit on the side of the bed, and slide the envelope out of my jumper.

  One of her eyebrows goes up. ‘You a magician now?’

  ‘It’s for you.’ I hold it out to her.

  ‘What’s this?’ she says. ‘Not another bribe?’

  ‘Not exactly. It’s different.’

  She just leaves the envelope on the bed. She’s not ev
en looking at it, so I pick it up again and open it myself.

  ‘There.’ I hold up the photo so she can see it. ‘It’s you.’ That doesn’t feel right, so I try again: ‘It was you.’

  She takes the photo for a second, looks at it, and puts it down nearly straight away. She does it casually, like she’s not interested in the photo at all, but I notice that she makes sure to turn it over so that it’s face-down.

  I turn it back over so that her face is smiling at the hospital ceiling.

  ‘D’you have to do that?’

  ‘Yes,’ I tell her. That feels like quite a brave thing to say: Yes. I have to do this. I do. So I go on, feeling even braver. ‘You were different then.’

  ‘Fat, for one thing.’

  That’s stupid, because you can hardly even see her body in the photo, and the bits that you can see (her face, her neck, the top of her arms) aren’t fat at all. But she’s talking, at least, so I keep going.

  ‘You were really happy.’

  ‘Nobody’s happy all the time.’

  ‘Sure,’ I say. ‘But you weren’t grumpy all the time, I mean.’

  She doesn’t argue with me.

  ‘You were fun.’ I’d almost forgotten about that, until I saw this photo. She used to let herself be silly. Jumping through the sprinkler with me on hot days in summer, in our undies, screaming from the cold water. Telling me made-up stories about a dragon called Teddy, who did farts so bad that they set fire to the curtains in the castle.

  ‘I’m not here to entertain you. That’s not my job.’

  ‘I know,’ I say. That’s Papabee’s job. ‘But you were different then.’

  ‘Of course I was. Then I grew up.’

  She makes it sound like this is the way it always works: like spending three years in hospital is a totally normal part of growing up. Like everybody does it.

  But she hasn’t grown up – that’s the thing. She hasn’t done any of the things that you do when you grow up. She hasn’t got taller, or gone through higher grades in school, or done any new things at all. Even the pyjamas she’s wearing, the pink ones with the sausage dogs on them, are the same ones she had years ago.

  ‘That’s got nothing to do with me,’ she says, jerking her chin towards the photo, and I think maybe I’ve got it wrong, like last time with the Papa J money. That I shouldn’t have come today.

  I pick up the photo again. ‘How old were you?’ I ask, as I slide it back into the envelope.

  ‘Thirteen and a half.’ It’s the way she says it – quickly, automatically – that makes me see that the photo hasn’t been a waste of time after all. She says it so fast, like she knows exactly when she started to change.

  ‘Listen to me, Teddy.’ She’s sitting up a bit, staring right into my eyes, and her voice is really sharp. ‘Whatever you’re doing – bringing me things, sniffing around – whatever it is, you need to stop it.’

  It feels like we’re playing that game we used to play sometimes, me and Dougie and Sylve, when one of us would hide something and then guide the others: warmer, warmer, cooler, warmer, hotter. But it isn’t like that game, really, because this time she doesn’t want me to find it. Hotter, hotter, hot. She knows it’s too hot. It burned her right up. What will it do to me, when I find it?

  Sylvie

  Teddy’s here again, poking around at the edges of my secrets. He picks at my silence the way I pick at the scabs and scars on my left wrist. He can’t leave it alone.

  I think of King Lear, and Cordelia’s silence. She couldn’t heave her heart into her mouth. Shakespeare knew about hunger. He understood that my mouth must be empty for this. That nothing is a promise that I make to myself, as well as to the world.

  Teddy’s come here twice, now, with his strange little offerings. I think of Lear: And my poor fool is hanged.

  What if the circle of silence that I’ve drawn around myself turns out to be a noose?

  Outside, it’s getting cooler, and the trees are forgetting their leaves. Down on the street, people are wearing coats. From my window I can just see the hospital’s main entrance, where the smokers cluster. The wind snatches the smoke from their cigarettes and smears it across the sky.

  Down at the Neck, the sea will be grey. If Sue and Dan go on the weekend, they’ll light the fire, and the slaters will scuttle out of the firewood and hide under the carpet. The pine trees behind the house will scratch their needles against the windows, and walkers on the beach will have to squint their eyes against the sand that the wind throws in their faces. Waves will break against the headland at the end of the beach, and spatter it with salt spray. The high tide will leave dark clumps of kelp on the beach, each one heavy as a drowned body.

  PART FOUR

  Gill

  ‘How’s Dougie?’ Sylvie asks.

  Since I got back from London, she asks about him every day. It makes a change from her usual reluctance to speak at all. I know that if I tell her the truth, she will slip back under the surface of her silence.

  ‘Oh, you know,’ I say. ‘Grumpy, actually – I think it’s hard for somebody like him, being laid up like that. He’s usually so active. I think he’s taking it out on your dad a bit.’

  The details come easily. I can picture it: Dougie negotiating corners in his wheelchair, scraping impatiently against the edge of door frames. Driving Gabe mad by endlessly bouncing a tennis ball against the foot of the hospital bed.

  Keeping the secret from her seems no more outrageous to me than the outlandish fact of her hospitalisation itself. If I can get used to that, I can get used to anything. If this can be real – my daughter interring herself in a hospital bed for three years – then anything can be real. I’m as stubborn as Sylvie, after all – she gets that from me. And the lie isn’t forever. Only until she’s stable; until she’s reached the goal weight that the doctors have set for her; until she’s been discharged.

  ‘Another week and he should be out of the chair and on crutches,’ I say to her. ‘And hopefully out of the hospital. He’s counting the days – but Gabe’s worried that he’ll overdo it, push himself too fast. You know what Dougie’s like.’

  What I mean: I know what he’s like. My son. I know him well enough that it’s as if I’m watching the story happen, rather than creating it. I know, with perfect certainty, how it would be.

  ‘They still haven’t ruled out another operation, if the leg doesn’t recover the full range of motion.’

  Sylvie shifts on her bed. The nurses have removed her feeding tube temporarily, to insert a clean one, but I can still see the telltale sign: a small hairless square on one cheekbone where the tube is usually taped in place.

  ‘But he’s OK? I mean, his leg’s going to be OK, right?’

  ‘Of course,’ I say. Because for three years she has wanted nothing from me, and now she wants reassurance, and I can give it.

  Should I feel guilty? Remember that she’s been lying to me for years. How long has it been, really, since Sylvie and I have been able to tell each other the truth?

  Before I leave, I shift the books on her bedside table to make room for the tiny serve of gnocchi I cooked last night, and I pick up yesterday’s untouched container, as light as the body of a baby bird.

  On the way out, Sylvie’s doctor, Louise, catches me and asks me to come into her office. It’s down the corridor from Paediatrics 3, and so small that when I sit, I have to turn my knees sideways so they don’t bump her desk.

  She’s reluctantly agreed to keep hiding the news from Sylvie until Gabe’s return, but even though Louise is at least a decade younger than me, I feel as though I’ve been called into the headmistress’s office.

  ‘You know I care about you and Gabe. Teddy too. I understand why you’re doing this, for now. But first and foremost, I have obligations to my patient.’

  ‘Do no harm,’ I say. ‘Isn’t that what doctors have to promise? You know the news will harm her.’

  ‘It’s a bit more complicated than that,’ she says, sitting back. ‘
But yes: there are serious risks in telling her. But there are risks either way. We’ll have to work together to plan the safest way to tell her, when she’s stable. When Gabe’s back.’

  ‘Of course. When he’s back. Of course.’

  That night, when Gabe calls me, he asks, ‘Are we doing the right thing?’

  I appreciated the generosity of that we. We both know that it’s my idea, and that he’s mainly going along with it because I’ve insisted.

  ‘I don’t care about what’s right,’ I say. ‘I only care about keeping her alive.’

  When Sylvie quit food like a bad habit, and gave us no answers, we went looking for our own. She was in hospital, turning her head away from our questions, and staring at the pigeons doing laps of the sky. So, instead, I interrogated her doctors. Books about anorexia piled up on my bedside table. We dragged the whole family to therapy sessions, where Sylvie continued to say nothing, while Gabe and I blathered, saying too much and still coming up with nothing.

  I blamed everything. Magazines; TV; school; the internet; the six months of ballet lessons that Sylvie took when she was eight; the fashion industry; the advertising industry; the patriarchy generally.

  I even blamed the dirt beneath us, and the rocks, and the unforgiving sea. This island, where we had raised our kids. The thing about Tasmania is that it never forgets. The ground is thick with memories and bones. This island, drifting on the edge of a nation founded on that extraordinary lie: Terra Nullius. No Man’s Land. What could grow on such a soil?

  The longer Sylvie was silent, the more I hurled myself at answers, like a moth battering at a closed window. I allowed myself to blame everything, except for Sylvie herself. This is what Gabe and I learned to tell ourselves: You can’t blame an anorexic for being sick, any more than you could blame somebody with pneumonia. That’s what the doctors, the dietitians, the counsellors and the self-help books tell us. That’s how we always explain it to Teddy. Her brain’s just not working properly, sweetheart. It’s a disease. It’s not her fault.