The Cookbook of Common Prayer

by Francesca Haig

  On the other side of the world, Gill is making her own daily hospital visits. I suspect hers are nearly as silent as mine – Sylvie hasn’t spoken properly to either of us for a long time. Her silence is harder to bear, in some ways, than Dougie’s. His silence isn’t directed at us. It’s not a choice, or a weapon.

  I ought to be at home to navigate Sylvie’s silences with Gill. I ought to be there with them all. But how can I leave Dougie here alone? How can I abandon him when there are still questions unanswered, his story unfinished? The inquest hasn’t even been scheduled yet, and the post-mortem keeps being delayed. I’ve been in London for nearly three weeks before Heather from the coroner’s office finally calls to tell me that it’s booked for the next afternoon.

  In the hospital the next morning I stare at Dougie extra hard, trying to commit him to memory. The bruising on his face has darkened since the first time I saw his body. This is what I’m going to remember: not my living boy, but this, the tenderness of bruises, and the perfect stillness of a face without breath.

  I squeeze his hand, unyielding and cold, and linger beyond my allotted half hour, until the chaplain comes into the doorway and gives a polite cough.

  I want to say something to Dougie, but I don’t know what words would fit. Gill’s always been the one who’s good with words. She’s the writer; she’d be able to say all the things that I can only feel. I need her to tell me how I’m feeling. To explain it to me, so I can say the right things to Dougie. But Gill and her words aren’t here. It’s just me and Dougie, and he can’t tell me anything.

  Back in the flat, I keep looking at the clock. Ten o’clock. Eleven o’clock. Noon. I’m not allowed to be there, but I’ve researched every detail of the post-mortem. I know better than to tell Gill this, but in the last few weeks I’ve read webpage after webpage about how post-mortems are conducted. I learned about the central incision down the front of the body. The cut’s shaped like a Y, so that they can get to all the main organs. Heart, lungs, stomach. I read about the examination of the stomach contents. The second incision at the back of the head, so that they can take off the top of the skull and remove the brain.

  When Dougie was a baby, he used to fall asleep on my shoulder when I burped him after a feed. Now, if I close my eyes, I can still feel that weight. More than nineteen years ago, but my body remembers. Standing in the kitchen, I find myself leaning my head to the side, against his little body that isn’t there.

  They call me at four to say that it’s done, and the body released into the care of the funeral home. We chose a firm close to my flat in London, and I walk there the next morning. I’m met by a painfully courteous young man in a dark suit, who shows me to the room where Dougie is waiting.

  The coroner’s assistant was telling us the truth – Dougie doesn’t look different after the post-mortem. I expected to see some change – a formlessness in his features; some clue that his scalp has been peeled off and put back on. But they’ve done a good job. He looks no worse than when I last saw him, in the hospital. He’s still recognisably Dougie, though still recognisably and unmistakably dead.

  The cremation is later today. When I spoke to the funeral director yesterday he said I could be there, and I was surprised to hear myself say no – I’d argued, after all, for the right to attend the post-mortem. But if I were at the cremation, I wouldn’t trust myself to let go.

  The young man clears his throat. ‘I’ll leave you alone,’ he says, ‘to say goodbye.’

  I step closer to Dougie. Goodbye is a word you use all the time – something you say before you go to work, or pop out to lunch. An ordinary word. It has no place here, in this funeral parlour on the outskirts of Holloway. There should be new words for this. New languages, made of holes and silence.

  ‘Goodbye,’ I say, because even though the word isn’t enough, it’s all that I have.

  Yesterday I consigned him to the post-mortem; today I’m sending him into the incinerator. Can a blade be an act of love? Can a furnace?

  Gill

  It’s midnight here when they cremate him. Gabe calls me.

  ‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘I know it must be late.’

  ‘It’s not as though I’d be sleeping otherwise.’ There’s a pause. ‘Do you think it’s happening right now?’ I ask him. ‘Do you think it’s over?’

  I’d imagined that I’d know – that I’d feel something, like Jane Eyre hearing Rochester’s cry for help. But I didn’t sense anything when the cave flooded, and I sense nothing now.

  ‘They’ll call me when it’s done,’ he says. ‘They promised. But it won’t be for a while.’

  ‘Okay.’ So we wait together, our silence stretching between us, a net to catch the dark. After a while he says, ‘Do you remember when he was a baby and his wrists were so fat it looked like he had screw-on hands?’

  I nod, even though Gabe can’t see me. I’m remembering the cookie-dough texture of Dougie’s baby flesh.

  ‘Are you there?’ Gabe asks.

  ‘That thing he used to do with his eyebrows, when he was angry?’ I say, keeping my voice low so I don’t wake Teddy. ‘You know?’

  ‘That scooter he made us drag everywhere?’

  ‘He and Papabee and the brandy, that Christmas?’

  He doesn’t need to say any more than that, because his stories are my stories too. So we’re just listing things, now, faster and faster, each one a question: Do you remember? Do you remember it too?

  ‘I suppose I should get off the phone,’ Gabe says. ‘For when they call.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Are we going to get through this?’ he asks.

  I don’t say yes, because I understand that on a night like this, every word is a promise.

  ‘We’ll try,’ I say.

  I’d say sorry for not writing for so long, but for once I have a rock-solid excuse. (I’m going to be playing the broken leg card for a long time, so get used to it.) I guess by now Mum and Dad will have filled you in on everything that happened. It was about as grim as you’d expect. Quite lucky not to remember much of it, to be honest (hooray for shock and hypothermia!) – and probably lucky to get out of there with just the leg thing. Definitely won’t be signing up for another caving trip anytime soon…

  It used to be him imitating me. Dougie was a good mimic – the natural performer. He did a great Papabee, and a pretty good Gabe. But he impersonated me more than anyone. He’d yank his voice up an octave and mimic the martyred cry that I used to do when the kids were slow to help. ‘I’ll do it,’ he’d screech, huffing around the kitchen slamming drawers. So many phrases that I never realised I overused, until I heard Dougie echoing them back at me: Use your brain! God give me strength! Ask your father!

  My turn, now, to be the mimic.

  I couldn’t sleep after saying goodbye to Gabe, so I tiptoed to the study in the dark and set to work again on the letter. I’m surprised by how much I enjoy it. All the exclamation marks and digressions that Sue ruthlessly cuts from the drafts of my recipes and columns, I allow myself now. And I hear his voice – his loud voice, equal parts enthusiasm and sarcasm.

  I could work, in theory, but it’d be bloody hard on crutches, so I’m still on paid leave. Dad reckons the school’s SHITTING themselves in case we sue. Plus, apparently there’s going to be some kind of insurance pay-out, because it happened at work. If I could’ve persuaded them to cut the leg right off I would’ve got a cool 100K…

  As always, there’s truth inside the lie – apparently there is going to be some money. Not from the school itself, but their insurer. Last week Gabe emailed me some documents, including a neat list of amounts payable for various injuries incurred in the course of work. Loss of a toe: £9,000. Loss of finger (non-dominant hand): £18,000. I’d opened it, and glanced quickly down the list. There, at the bottom: Death. I slammed the laptop shut.

  It’s taken me days to write this letter. I need to get the details right. I need to prove to myself that I can capture his voice. His unfeigned enth
usiasm, and all those endless parentheses.

  So my summer travels have started earlier than planned – as soon as we got the all-clear from the doctors, we flew to Florence to start the world’s least rock’n’roll gap year travels: me, my crutches, and Dad (not exactly the way that I expected my holiday to go!). But Dad’s been a champ, and God knows how I would’ve managed without him…it’d be one thing to join up with mates from school for a bit of travelling, like I’d originally planned – but another to ask them for help every day when I need to shower with a full leg-cast! (Let us never speak of this again! SERIOUSLY.)

  Dad might cramp my style a bit, but there’s another thing that softens the blow: we’re staying in way nicer places than I would’ve stayed in otherwise – Dad says he’s too old for hostels – AND he’s paying for almost everything – so maybe travelling with the old man isn’t so bad after all. There are moments (like at the buffet breakfast at the hotel today – FIVE trips back to fill my plate!) when breaking my leg begins to feel like the best decision ever.

  Did the Uffizi Gallery yesterday – queues were ridiculous and I would have been tempted to bail, but Dad was keen. Apparently queues are ten times worse in the summer holidays, so that’s another win for the broken leg, which meant we could start travelling early – result!

  Today: the Duomo (big main church – looks like St Paul’s in London, but on steroids), and we decided (probably stupidly!) to try to go up the tower – 463 steps! We left my crutches at the bottom and I did it by leaning on Dad. Took ages (and A LOT of grumpy tourists queueing behind us), but worth it – the view from the top was amazing.

  I check all the details. I read articles and travel blogs about Florence, to check the number of steps. I remember being there myself, twenty-five years ago: me and Gabe, young and invincible with love and the heat of that summer. The sweat on the back of my knees when we climbed the Duomo. Emerging from the cool of the narrow stone steps to the shameless heat at the viewing platform at the top.

  Bloody hot here. Dad got sunburnt on the top of his head – said last time he was in Florence (back when the dinosaurs roamed the earth) he had hair (hard to imagine, I know).

  Every night when Papabee, Teddy and I watch the SBS world news, I check the global weather report for the temperatures in Italy. It’s so hot there – summer coming early. I picture Dougie in the crowded street, squinting into the Florentine sun as he looks up at the obscene bulge of the Duomo. He’s more real to me, that Dougie, than whatever remains after the cremation. I can see him clearly, sitting on the steps around the edge of the Piazza della Signoria. There’s a stain on the front of his t-shirt from where he and Gabe had gelato on the Ponte Vecchio. I can feel the glare of the sunlight coming off the polished stone steps.

  The envelope is the most complicated part, because it has to be handwritten, not typed. I cut out the address from one of his previous letters to Sylvie, slip it inside a blank envelope, lay it on the brightly-lit iPad screen and then trace over his writing. It takes me two goes to get it right, so that the handwriting doesn’t look hesitant. I’ve ordered Italian stamps online, and an ink-pad and mail franking stamp too. I know Sylvie probably won’t even look at any of this, but I want to get it right. For two nights I sleep with the envelope under my mattress, like a teenage boy hiding porn. When I take it out on the third day, it’s convincingly flattened and creased.

  I remember helping Dougie make a pirate map for a homework project when he was in primary school: burning the edges and soaking it in weak tea to stain it brown.

  The things we do for our children. The things we do to our children.

  I make sure to bundle the letter in with some other things – a handout that her history teacher emailed me, about the Russian revolution; a newspaper clipping about the band Augie March, because she and Dougie used to listen to them all the time; a Philip Pullman book I bought for her at a second-hand bookshop.

  In the ward, I hesitate for an instant before I pass them to her. It’s one thing to keep the truth from her – we’ve been doing that ever since Dougie died, more than three weeks ago. But this is different, and tangible. In this artfully aged envelope, the lie has been committed to paper.

  ‘These are for you,’ I say, and hand the bundle over, and put the daily container of food on her bedside table.

  She tosses the book down on the bed. ‘I’ve read that one,’ she says. ‘Sue lent it to me last year.’

  I pick it up again. ‘Oh well. Maybe Teddy will enjoy it in a few years.’

  She shrugs and puts the rest of the papers on the bedside table without looking at them. When she turns, her shoulder blades protrude. It hasn’t occurred to me before that there’s a reason they’re called shoulder blades. That blade smuggled in, disguised as a metaphor, so familiar that I never noticed it at all, until confronted with the sharpness of my daughter’s back.

  I don’t say anything about the letter. When I leave, the bundle of papers is still sitting untouched beside the bed.

  The next day I try to keep my voice casual. ‘What’s the news from Dougie, in the letter?’

  ‘You’ve probably heard it all already from Dad,’ Sylvie says.

  ‘I bet they have a different perspective. I hope Dad’s not dragging Dougie into every church in Italy, like he did with me.’

  She’s turning away. She says nothing at all.

  I never thought that I’d be grateful for the awesome self-absorption of the anorexic. But she makes the lie easy for us. She’s too busy obsessing over herself to have time for anyone else. She isn’t going to scrutinise me, or Dougie’s letters. She’s given us our alibi herself. She’s given us our alibi: herself.

  She’s wearing a jumper that Dougie used to wear – a big grey V-neck, the wool all pilled now, unravelling at the wrists. From spending so much time in bed, she has a slightly balding spot at the back of her head, like a baby. Her skin is grey, and her lips are blue-rimmed and flaking.

  Since Sylvie got sick, I see girls like her everywhere. It’s like a kind of Wi-Fi that’s been turned on in me, alert to those desperate girls and women. Some of them aren’t even thin, but I can still tell. I notice the ones in cafés who shift their food around on their plate, and take forty minutes to eat a bowl of soup, leaving the bread untouched on the side. The ones who eat but then excuse themselves after each course, and go straight to the toilet. They’re all around, these women, walking stiffly through their own lives, vigilant as ghosts. I put today’s container of food on her bedside table – spanakopita, the layers of pastry like geological strata. I’m close enough to her now to smell her awful reek, like boiling whale blubber. It’s the smell of protein wastage, fat burning. Ever since Sylvie got sick, I can’t render fat from steak without gagging, because the smell is too close to Sylvie’s breath. It reminds me of that old joke – the kind that Dougie would have called a Dad Joke:

  ‘My dog’s got no nose.’

  ‘How does he smell?’

  ‘Terrible.’

  Now, as I sit back, I think: My daughter’s got no fat. How does she smell? Terrible. I wish Gabe were here. We’d drive home from the hospital and close our bedroom door and I’d tell him my stupid joke and he’d understand.

  ‘Has Dad called you lately?’ I ask Sylvie.

  I’ve warned Gabe about the letter, and told him what to say. Him and Dougie negotiating Florence’s cobbled streets together, Dougie impatient on his crutches. Gabe sounded tired, but he didn’t disagree with me. Didn’t even blame me, when I told him I’d read Dougie’s old letters, though I could hear the hesitation in his voice.

  ‘Honey,’ he said. ‘Jesus. I know how much you’re missing him’ – and the but that was about to follow never came because I didn’t let it, launching instead into the details of their travel.

  ‘He rang yesterday,’ Sylvie says. ‘Said they’re going OK.’

  I feel a surge of gratitude to Gabe.

  There’s a pale stain on the right shoulder of Sylvie’s jumper – probab
ly some of the liquid food leaked when the nurses were flushing her feeding tube clean.

  ‘Here,’ I say. ‘That jumper’s grubby. Give it to me and I’ll wash it.’

  ‘I’m cold.’

  ‘You’re always cold.’ That’s why her skin’s covered with a hazy layer of fur, standing out from her goose-pimpled skin. It’s the body’s response to having no fat to insulate it. ‘Put your dressing gown on, then.’

  ‘Fine,’ she says. ‘But bring it back when it’s dry? It’s my favourite.’

  ‘I’ll bring it back tomorrow.’

  She makes sure the disconnected tube is tucked out of the way behind her ear, before she pulls the jumper up over her head. Her pyjama top rises with it, exposing her stomach and her bra – a tiny crop top, baggy over her absent breasts.

  There’s a drought on the mainland, the news each night full of pictures of bones in the red dust, and starving cattle, like hammocks of skin slung between bones. That’s what I think of, when I see the jarring angles of Sylvie’s hipbones and ribs.

  She yanks her top down, but she caught me staring. And my face must show what I feel, because she looks angry, not just embarrassed.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ I say. I know it’s not fair to feel proprietary about her body. It belongs to her, for all that it grew in me. But I can’t help this swell of disgust, and anger, and terror, all at once, when I see what she’s done to herself, this ruined body, when Dougie’s body has only just been dissected and burned.

  ‘Nice, Mum,’ she says. ‘Really nice.’

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ I don’t recognise my own voice – the shrillness in it. ‘Do you want me to pretend that this is OK? Are you proud of what you’ve done to yourself?’