‘How did you know?’ I ask again.
Gill
Of course I knew, I think, after Gabe has said goodbye. His news about the broken leg hardly even surprised me. I wanted to say: I told you already. Dougie’s my son. I made those bones – they grew inside me.
The best lies are close to the truth. My own lie to Sylvie just got closer.
And it’s working. When I go to the hospital the next morning, Sylvie asks me about Dougie again. Before, a whole visit could pass without her saying a word.
‘Dougie OK?’ she says, her book still on her lap.
‘Better every day, Dad says.’
‘How much longer will he stay over there? Dad, I mean.’
‘As long as Dougie needs him. Work said Dad can work remotely for a while.’ That’s true enough – his boss has been great. There it is again, that neat mix of truth and falsehood. ‘And Dougie couldn’t travel alone – not the way he is right now, that’s for sure.’
She nods and looks back down to her book.
I’m a good liar – she’s made me one. It’s only for a few days, we said to her, when she first went into hospital. We’ll find a way to help you. You’ll be better soon. Did I believe that, then?
She has no way of finding out, I reassure myself, as I walk back to the car. There’s no internet in Paediatrics 3, and no phones except the ward landline, supervised by the nurses. Not even fresh air can get into that ward. Louise and the rest of the medical team have agreed not to say anything until Gabe’s back. The anorexic patients are kept separate, to stop them from competing with another. And Sylvie doesn’t really have friends any more, who could visit her and give the game away. Her friends from school all drifted off, after the first year or so of her sickness. I can’t blame them. Three years is a long time, and never more so than in your teens. Even Sue’s daughter, Ella, who’s more family than a friend, now only goes to the hospital very occasionally, always with Sue. I suspect Sue drags her in, and while I appreciate the effort, I don’t blame Ella for her reluctance. The girl in the hospital bears no relation to the girl Ella grew up with.
I see Sylvie’s friends from school sometimes, around town, holding hands with boyfriends, texting on their phones. They’ve rolled their uniform skirts at the waist, to make them shorter. They always look guilty when they see me.
‘Hi, Mrs Jordan,’ they say, shooting a look over my shoulder at the waiting cluster of their friends. ‘How’s Sylvie?’
‘Oh, you know,’ I reply. ‘The same.’
Sometimes they make vague promises to visit her in hospital soon; sometimes they offer excuses: ‘Sorry it’s been ages. I’ve been so busy with school. And hockey.’ I never prolong their awkwardness – I’ve learned to smile broadly and make an excuse of my own, and dash off. It isn’t their fault. What would they talk about, now, with Sylvie? Their lives don’t intersect in any way. Sylvie’s cut herself off from all of that. From everything, and everyone.
Her closest school friend, Esra, visited Sylvie a lot in the first year. Then I came across Esra in the hospital corridor after a visit, crying, facing the wall, her face pressed against a poster about shingles vaccinations. I stopped, unsure whether she’d want to be seen, but she turned before I could make a choice. She stared at me, wiping her cheeks with a fist balled inside her sleeve.
‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘Sweetie. It’s all right.’
She shook her head. ‘It’s not though, is it.’
I exhaled. ‘No. But it will be.’
‘But what if it’s not?’
We stared at each other, under the merciless fluorescent lights of the hospital corridor. She wiped her face again, I squeezed her shoulder, and she left. I never saw her again, after that.
Sue calls on Thursday. ‘We’re going to the Neck on the weekend. D’you want to come?’
‘Sorry,’ I say automatically. ‘We can’t make it.’
‘You wouldn’t even need to drive. Ella’s at music camp for the weekend, and Nathan’s got some party at his flat. So it’s just me and Dan. We can fit you and Teddy in our car. Even Papabee, if he’s up for it.’
Teddy would be alone in the boys’ room, underneath Dougie and Nathan’s empty bunks. No footsteps creaking above us at night from the girls’ room upstairs – that will be empty too. Draped over a railing in the laundry, Dougie’s wetsuit, with the shape of his body still in it.
‘I don’t think I should be away from Sylvie for that long,’ I say.
‘Nonsense. It’s two days. We’ll be an hour’s drive from the hospital. She’ll understand you need a break. And it’s not like she talks to you anyway.’
‘I’d like to come. I’d love it. But I—’
‘It’d be good for Teddy,’ Sue says, cutting me off. ‘He can have a last swim, before real freezing weather settles in. We can take the boat out, do some fishing. He hasn’t been down there for ages. He can bring a friend if he wants. That weird kid with the eyebrows?’
‘Alasdair,’ I say. ‘But we just can’t this weekend – sorry. And I have to dash – got a meeting with the dietitian at the hospital in twenty minutes.’
It doesn’t matter that what I said about the meeting is true. Sue still knows me well enough to know that I have slammed the conversation shut like a door.
I close my eyes and picture the Neck. Even though it’s months since I’ve been there, I can still see it perfectly clearly. I could assemble the beach, grain by grain, stone by stone, each in its rightful place. Set every bleached limb of driftwood into its proper location on the sand.
Just down the road from the house is the tessellated pavement. It’s famous – in summer, tourists are decanted from huge coaches to take photos and leave again. The plateau of stone lies almost at sea level, and through some geological quirk it formed into a grid of squares, a game of hopscotch that reaches all the way to the sea. I’ve always loved the tessellated pavement, its strict geometry. When the tide goes out each square becomes its own small, sharply delineated pool. When the kids were younger we could spend hours there, the children squatting over the rock pools, or jumping from square to square.
Once, at the Neck, Gabe caught me licking my own wrist.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked, laughing.
‘I can taste salt,’ I said. I hadn’t even swum that day. It was just the Neck, the beach, the salt air. ‘Try it.’ I held out my arm to him, and he did, his tongue warm on my skin.
‘I always love your recipes,’ he said, moving his kisses up my arm.
Some days, Dan drove the trailer down to the beach with the dinghy, and we took the kids out fishing, padded and fat in their bright orange life jackets. On those nights we’d eat the flathead they caught, always too small to be satisfying, and full of long pine-needle bones. Sometimes the kids would gather mussels, wrenched off the rocks at low tide.
They were my favourite meals of all: no good for recipes, because they’re too simple. To capture meals like that, the recipe would need to begin at dawn, with the loading up of the trailer. The sand in everything, even the beds and the sandwiches. The recipe would have to include all the noises: the sound of the kids riding their bikes in circles around the barbecue while Dan and Gabe cook; the radio propping open the kitchen window so they can hear Radio National. The sound of tennis balls pinging off the water tanks when we play cricket round the side of the house, and everyone yelling Sausage! in unison when somebody hits a four and Sausage gets carried away and harries the ball all the way into the blackberry bushes that grow out of control along the edge of the property. The recipe would have to include what comes after the meal, too: the washing up, and the board games, and those moments when the kids are asleep, or at least out of earshot, when we finish the half-warm bottles of white wine, and I lean into Gabe and smell the sea and the barbecue smoke on him.
I should have tried, somehow, to write a recipe that could fit in all of that. But I didn’t know how – and now that’s all finished with anyway. I can’t imagin
e ever going there again.
When Sylvie first got sick, I wondered what we’d done to deserve so much suffering. Now, after three years of her sickness, and with Dougie gone, I look back on all those years at the Neck, and I wonder how I ever dared to think that we deserved so much happiness.
I can’t write a recipe to capture those days at the Neck. Instead, I keep writing my own secret recipes. I serve them, daily, to Teddy and Papabee, but their titles I confide only to my notebook. Roast beetroot salad for the week after your son’s post-mortem results are released. Three simple soups for the days immediately following your son’s death. My job has always involved writing recipes for particular occasions. If I went through my old books, or the box where Gabe keeps all my newspaper cuttings, the titles follow the same pattern: Casseroles to warm the winter evenings. Three seasonal salads to put a spring in your step. Quick weeknight eggplant pasta. So these new meals aren’t such a change – it’s just that the occasions are different.
I think these new recipes might have started with the sweet tea that everyone kept offering us, in those first days. For the shock, they all said. We must’ve drunk gallons of the stuff. It didn’t make any difference, as far as I could tell, but the ritual of it got me thinking about the ways people have always had recipes for specific days, particular milestones. Christmas pudding; wedding cakes; my friend Esther making challah bread each Thursday, for the Sabbath. The startling red of Tiet canh, blood soup, when Gabe and I were once in Vietnam at Lunar New Year.
So I navigate these formless days with recipes. I cook for Teddy and Papabee, and for Dougie and Sylvie and Gabe, who aren’t here to eat what I make. I cook and I write and I cook and I write. Quiche for the day after your son’s cremation. Cake for your daughter’s birthday, which she will not eat.
Teddy
Before I go into the hospital, I try to remember all the things I’m not supposed to know (Sylvie trying to kill herself; the twenty per cent) and all the things I’m not supposed to say (Dougie being dead; the secret funeral; Mum making more and more weird food at home). I go through the ward and count the rexiles: four today. Four’s bad: it’s better when there are more, because of the twenty per cent.
Sylvie doesn’t say anything except for ‘Hi,’ which is bad, and boring, but also a relief, because at least that way I don’t have to tell her any lies. She’s wearing a singlet and pyjama trousers, and when she turns around to get another book from the bedside table, her back shows all the bones and the tight strings where muscles used to be. Dad took the back off his old watch once and showed me how it worked, all the little metal cogs and bits. Sylvie’s just like that now – all the inside bits on the outside.
A nurse comes in, and Sylvie holds out her arm for the blood pressure machine without even being asked, because it happens every few hours. The nurse says, ‘How’s school, Teddy?’ to me, and ‘That’ll do nicely’ to Sylvie, when she’s checked the machine. After she’s written down her notes and gone, the silence feels even bigger than it did before.
I go into the bathroom. I don’t even need a wee – I just go there because I want a break from Sylvie, because her not-talking gets very noisy. So I go into the bathroom and sit on the loo for a bit. Then I feel bad about hiding from her in the bathroom – it’s not her fault she’s sick, Mum and Dad and the doctors are always telling me. So I decide to write her a message, something she can find later, as a surprise, and because there are things I can say in writing that I can’t say when I’m in the room with her and all her bones. I take her toothpaste, smear some on my finger, and squish it against the mirror. I wait for a while, wondering what to write. I love you, maybe, but she knows that already, and I’m embarrassed to imagine nurses or cleaners reading it if they go into the bathroom. I want to tell Sylvie something she doesn’t already know. And not one of the things that people kept writing in cards, the first time she went into hospital. Get Well Soon. Thinking of You. Sorry to hear you’ve been unwell. There weren’t any cards, the second time, or the time after that, or the time after that. People ran out of things to say – all the easy words were used up.
I stand in front of the mirror and try to think what words Sylvie actually needs. I want to write something that’s true. In the end, I write: Don’t die. I really mean it. And it’s short, which is good because making the letters on the mirror is harder than I thought, and I’ve used up half a tube of toothpaste by the time I get to the e. I feel bad for the cleaners, knowing they’ll have to scrub the mirror clean, but I hope they’ll understand. This isn’t graffiti like at school: JT WAS HERE or all the cocks and balls scribbled on the lockers. This is important. You only have to look at Sylvie, wearing her bones on the outside, to see she needs this message.
When we visit the next day she doesn’t even say whether she saw it – she doesn’t say anything. Mum and Papabee are with me so I’m embarrassed to ask and, anyway, Sylvie’s still busy not-talking.
Gabe
When I did my PhD in fluid mechanics, I wrote a whole chapter on egg whites. Then I met Gill, and she used to joke that my egg whites chapter was proof that we were suited: We’re both food writers, basically, she said. I liked the idea, but I knew it wasn’t true. I was never interested in the eggs themselves. I was interested in the forces: the shear rate; the viscoelastic properties; the way that egg white can simultaneously behave like a fluid or a solid. I liked the clarity of the scientific model: hypothesis; experiment; results.
Later, I got a job as a research physicist. It’s never made me much money, but it’s always been interesting work, with good people. Hypothesis; experiment; results. When the kids came along, with their endless questions about how things work – Why does rain fall down and not up? What makes the wind blow? – I enjoyed being able to give them real answers.
But I don’t know how to disassemble the events of Dougie’s death and make them into an answer. I go back to the British Library, and spend hours researching water catchment areas; runoff; the different absorptive capacities of limestone and clay. I go to the Wellcome Centre Library with the print-out of Dougie’s post-mortem results, and spend hours translating them into a language that I can understand. The Centre has an exhibit about the human body, and one of the glass cases holds a pair of cross-sectioned lungs. I stand there for an hour, maybe more, trying to picture the bronchi and bronchioles filling with water. I think of what Teddy asked me about the box of ashes: How much does it weigh? I wish I could reach through the glass and pick up those lungs and feel their lightness. Compare them with a waterlogged pair. Heft the difference in my hands. Hypothesis; experiment; result.
I’m supposed to be working – my boss has been sympathetic, but there’s a limit, and I can’t afford to take any more unpaid leave. I do just enough work to stay on top of things, but my real job now is Dougie. I don’t sleep much. I take my laptop to bed and spend the night descending into the endless caverns of the internet – meteorological archives; articles from scientific journals about diatoms, the algae sometimes found in the bone marrow of drowning victims; potholing club message boards where cavers argue about the relative merits of different brands of gear. I buy a cheap inkjet printer, a pile of papers mounting next to the toaster.
People talk about ‘heavy rain’, but I’d never really understood how heavy it can be. In article after article, I learn the heft of water, the solid weight of rainfall. A cave system has what’s called a ‘gathering ground’ – a catchment area from which water will run into the caves. A single inch of rainfall adds up to 27,154 gallons for each acre. Above the limestone karst of the Smith–Jackson caves, the soil is clay, which means it doesn’t soak up much rain. Instead, it shrugs off water like an oilcloth. The gathering ground for the Smith–Jackson System is at least 1,700 acres. The nearest Meteorological Office station records that between midnight and 2am on the morning that Dougie died, 1.4 inches of rain fell. That’s 64,626,520 gallons. Add to that whatever water spilled over the lip of the Lipscombe Reservoir – thousands o
f gallons, conservatively. And all that water – all that weight – had to go somewhere. It found its way down, easing through gaps and cracks, coaxing open fissures in the earth, until it poured into the Smith–Jackson System.
So I learn that Dougie’s death didn’t happen in the caves at all. It happened upstream, hours earlier. It happened between four and four forty-five that morning, when the wall of the reservoir was breached, and the spilled water began to soak through the layers of rock towards the caves. By five that morning, while Dougie was still sleeping, probably in bed with Rosa, his death had been decided. At eight am, while they were on the coach heading towards the caves, his death was already a done deal.
Or maybe it happened earlier: when the rain first began to fall on the reservoir at midnight; when the wind turned northerly the day before, driving the thick band of clouds down from the Pennines. Or earlier: when the school decided on the excursion; when Dougie decided to take a year overseas; when an engineer decreed the height of the reservoir wall. It becomes a reductio ad absurdum that takes me all the way back to the moment Dougie was born, his birth containing his own death.
And the question I’m grappling with has become one of those simple maths problems from primary school: If a coach arrives at a cave with twelve passengers, and leaves with eleven, what is X? If a family has five members, and one is in hospital and another is dead, how many people are in the family?
Much as I hated the idea of a post-mortem, it still isn’t enough. I want them to get the excavators in, take the whole cave system apart. I want every adult and child on the trip interviewed, twice, by the police. The coach that took them there dismantled, piece by piece. Each rope untwisted to its separate filaments. The water strained, each pebble counted.
At first I email articles and links to Gill, sometimes several times a day. This one’s interesting re the speed of flash floods, I write. See the link for the cached BBC weather report. But Gill never mentions them, and when I ask her, she’s vague.
The Cookbook of Common Prayer Page 16