She shrugs. ‘Fine. They like him. A friend of mine even worked for his company one season, a few years back. Apparently Murphy’s a nice guy. My friend had no complaints.’
‘So why did he go in? It was nearly an hour after you’d turned back. The water almost definitely would’ve been higher. But he took ten kids in there.’
‘I’ve got no idea why,’ she says. ‘Or what it was like when he arrived. Look – I really have to get back to work soon.’
‘Please – just a few more minutes? You said, in the logbook, Water underfoot at Cavern 1. How deep was it?’
‘I’ve thought about that constantly. Honestly, I don’t know. It was splashing, but not like we were wading. It wasn’t hard work – it wasn’t deep-deep.’
‘But too deep for you to want to go in.’
‘I didn’t say it was dangerous. I just didn’t fancy it. I’m not some kind of hardcore, intrepid, outdoors warrior. I just wanted a few hours, a nice morning’s potholing with my kids.’
‘They were the other two people in your group? Your kids?’
‘I say kids,’ she laughs. ‘They’re bigger than me – seventeen and nineteen, now. But you know what it’s like—’ She stops herself, appalled.
‘I get it,’ I say. ‘They’ll always feel like your babies, right?’
She moves on quickly. ‘That’s it. And I don’t get to see much of them, these days. They live with their dad, and Gordon – the oldest one – he’s at uni now. But they came down for my birthday and we wanted to do some potholing together, like we used to.’
‘Could I talk to them? Just in case they remember anything else?’
She shakes her head again. ‘I think it’d be best if you didn’t. I don’t want them dragged into this. And David’s doing his A-Levels – he’s got enough stress on his plate.’
I’m getting used to this – the fear that tragedy is contagious. I don’t even blame her. If there’s one thing I can understand, it’s that fierce desire to protect your children.
‘But I’ve asked them, I promise,’ she says, rushing to fill the silence. ‘I’ve asked them to think about it really carefully. And they don’t remember anything more than what I’ve told you. And the police asked all three of us the same thing, about the water level.’
I’m relieved to hear that the police have at least followed up the lead.
‘Had you ever seen it that high before?’
‘I don’t know. A couple of other times there was water underfoot. But that was with friends who were more experienced than me – not with my kids. It wasn’t my call to make, those times. But that day, I was in charge. I didn’t want to wade in with the water that height, and rising.’
‘Rising? You didn’t say that in the logbook.’
‘It’s not my job,’ she snaps. ‘I’m not the weatherwoman. You said nobody’s on trial. I didn’t even have to write as much as I did. Time in, time out – that’s all that I needed to put in the book.’
‘Sorry,’ I try again. ‘Of course, that’s quite right. I know it’s not your responsibility at all. But it’s important – you thought it was rising?’
She’s flustered now. ‘I don’t know. Did I say that? I don’t know for sure. I guess it was just a feeling? I wasn’t in there for long enough to notice a change. But I hadn’t seen it that deep before, so I guess I figured—’ She stops, closing her eyes for a second.
‘Look. I don’t know why I said rising,’ she says. ‘If I’d known you were going to cross-examine me, I’d have thought more carefully about my words.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I say again. I’m getting this wrong. ‘I really didn’t mean to make you feel that way. I’m not here to interrogate you. I’m just trying to figure out what happened. It’s my son.’
‘I know.’ She’s gathering up her things, pulling her coat off the back of her chair. ‘But I can’t help you any more than I already have. I told you: I went in, there was water underfoot, so I left. I’m not part of this.’
She puts on her coat. ‘I’m so sorry about your son.’
I nod. ‘Dougie. He was nineteen years old.’
‘I remember that,’ Meredith says, pausing with her coat half-zipped. ‘I read it in the papers.’
She hoists her bag onto her shoulder. ‘I have to go. I’m sorry.’
When she’s gone, I’m left with my untouched coffee and that bare sum: Murphy led a group of twelve into the caves, and eleven came out. An equation I can’t solve, except for one variable: Murphy.
It isn’t hard to find his address. It takes less than five minutes online. His guiding business is a limited company, and he’s the sole director, and it’s registered to a residential address. Part of me wishes it weren’t so easy. If it had been harder, then I wouldn’t have to choose what to do next.
For a long time, I stare at the address on the screen. It’s in Potters Bar, just beyond London’s northern edge. 24 Hetherington Close. It sounds very suburban, very English. Very distant from all the things that I know about Murphy: the caves; the flood; the look on his face in that one newspaper photo. I’ve stared at it hundreds of times: it shows Murphy sitting in the open door of the back of an ambulance, a tinfoil blanket around his shoulders. He has scratches on his hands, and wet hair, one hand to his head, and his mouth is hanging open, a perfect oval, like the perpetual scream of a cartoon ghost.
Cauliflower florets with saffron rice, for when your husband has been gone for five weeks
Slice the cauliflower into inch-thick steaks, like a cross-section of a brain. Drizzle with oil, scatter with sea salt, and roast at 200° for 30 minutes.
Count out six saffron threads. You don’t actually need to be this precise, but I find the process calming. I like picking them up, one by one, with the tips of my fingernails.
Drop the saffron into the pot of basmati rice when the liquid has almost cooked away. If you have a glass lid for your pot, you can watch the orange unfurl through the rice as it boils, until the rice is an almost indecent shade of orange.
While the rice is cooking, use a fork to toss together a thick paste of the crushed garlic and almond slivers, a tablespoon of olive oil, and a handful of coriander, finely chopped. Add a diced red chilli too, scraping out the seeds first – you want the chilli for colour rather than for intensity. Fry the paste on a low heat, throwing in a couple of anchovy fillets. They’ll melt away entirely, but their taste will stay. I’ve been thinking, lately, about how things can linger. About what remains.
When the garlic is softened, turn up the heat a little and briefly sear the roasted cauliflower florets in the paste, until each side has a crispy coating. Serve with the rice (you can stir in a knob of butter, or some sesame oil, for extra decadence), and garnish with orange nasturtium petals, surprisingly peppery.
(Don’t use those tiny tins of anchovies – the miserliness of them goes against the whole spirit of this dish. Don’t even use those skinny jars with only a dozen fillets. Get a big, fat jar from a Mediterranean deli and ignore any nonsense about ‘discard three days after opening’. One jar will last you for months. The trick is to keep the anchovies submerged in oil – top up the oil if necessary. Whatever you do, don’t let the air in.)
Gill
At five weeks, when it’s become clear that Gabe’s not going to be coming back any time soon, Sue says, ‘At least you can cook all the things he doesn’t like. Mussels every night.’
Sometimes, at the Neck, the kids would pluck mussels from the black rocks in the shallows, and I’d cook them in white wine broth. Gabe always screwed up his whole face. ‘It’s the texture,’ he’d say. ‘Like chewing somebody’s gums.’
Now he’s gone, I’m surprised to find that instead of cooking mussels, I catch myself wanting to cook the things that he enjoyed most. He’s always liked saffron, which I used to find cloying; since Gabe left, I start adding saffron to things. Those velveted orange threads cost more, per ounce, than gold – but once I start, I can’t stop. I add saffron to smoked
haddock and potato soup, and watch it gradually turn jaundiced. I make a lemon tart with saffron and pistachio cream.
I’m plotting the next stage of Dougie and Gabe’s trip: Sicily, where saffron’s a common ingredient. I want to taste that decadent golden flavour while I plan the letter.
I serve Teddy and Papabee saffron rice with cauliflower, the rice the colour of a workman’s high-vis vest.
‘Good Lord,’ says Papabee.
‘Why’s everything orange?’ asks Teddy.
The answer is: Because I miss your dad, but that isn’t a straightforward answer, and it would begin a conversation that I don’t know how to end.
‘I like it,’ Teddy says, not waiting for my response. ‘It looks cool. Can we have a blue dinner one day? Or purple?’
Dougie and Gabe are in Sicily now. The air is so hot that the whole island smells of rosemary and lavender, and the hot-wood smell of a sauna. In the hilltop town of Erice, Dougie sits on some shady steps to rest his leg, the grey stone surprisingly cool beneath him.
Food here is the best. We’re living mainly on arancini, these rice balls that they sell everywhere (Dad doesn’t find my ‘balls’ jokes as hilarious as I do…). Have learned not to translate what things are made of – was loving these sandwich things at the station in Palermo, then I used Google Translate and apparently they’re made with ‘Pork spleen’ (not even exactly sure what that is, to be honest, but not brave enough to Google further…). Have learned my lesson: just eat, and don’t ask questions.
We came up to Erice on a cable-car from Trapani, swaying like mad in the wind (worse than Papabee’s driving!). Amazing views from here but they’re kind of pointless because half the time the whole town is covered with cloud. The locals call it ‘Kisses of Venus’ (sounds better in Italian – everything sounds better in Italian) which is a v v romantic way of saying it’s grey and you can’t see a thing.
Teddy yells from the living room. ‘Mum! Dad’s on the phone!’
‘Tell him I’ll call him in a bit,’ I shout back. ‘Just in the middle of some work.’
Last week we went to a few beaches – even though all I can do is kind of hop around in the shallows. Beaches are different here anyway – lots of crowds, and people selling stuff, and deck-chairs that they charge you money to sit on. Makes me nostalgic for the Neck, even though I don’t miss the freezing water.
When I’m finished I slip it under my mattress for a few days, to get the envelope less pristine before I give it to her. And I like to know the letter’s close to me as I lie there. I sleep above it like a bird roosting on an egg.
Gabe
Gill doesn’t ring back. I lie on my bed in the dark, one hand reaching out to rest on top of the box of ashes, and I try speaking to Dougie, like the chaplain at the hospital suggested. I try to imagine that we’re in the backyard again, the cricket ball in my hand.
‘Five best strikers in the Premier League?’
‘Five things that made you fall in love with Rosa?’
‘Five thoughts that went through your mind when the flood came?’
All I get is the blinking of the clock radio’s luminous dial, and five different kinds of silence.
I’m beginning to suspect that this grief of mine is selfish. I ought to be grieving for him – for everything he won’t ever have a chance to do, or to be. But I can’t help grieving for myself, too – for the days and years with him that I’ve lost. I make so many wishes: I wish that he’d never come to England; that he’d never gone on the caving trip; that it hadn’t rained; that we’d never let him drop French in grade 10, and then he might have gone to France for his gap year instead.
Since Sylvie got sick, and Dougie died, I’m learning that every wish is the same: more time.
When Gill rings back the next day, she launches straight into telling me about the latest letter.
‘Sicily now, remember,’ she says. ‘I’ll give it to her in a few days. I’ve emailed you a copy.’
I don’t know how to tell her that I can hardly bear to skim the letters she emails me. They’re too uncanny. It’s like hearing Dougie’s voice through a wall, muffled and just out of reach.
I feel closer to Dougie when I listen to Rosa’s stories about him.
‘Did he tell you about the shampoo?’ she asks, when she’s here later that morning. She’s sitting on my windowsill, her shoes off. There’s red polish on her toes but it’s flaked and picked away. It makes me nervous when she sits next to the open window like that, three floors up, but I know I’m being paranoid. And I’m not her father.
A lot of her stories start the same way: Did he tell you…
‘No,’ I say. ‘Tell me.’
‘You know he had to share a bathroom with the senior boarders? One of the students, or maybe a few of them, kept using his shampoo. It wasn’t a big deal, but it was annoying. Like: they’re all loaded, and he was scrimping and saving so he could travel in summer. He tried writing his name on the bottle, but the shampoo kept going down. And you know what he was like about his hair.’
I nod, remembering watching the hospital chaplain apply the hair-gel.
Rosa hops down from the windowsill and crosses the room to sit on the arm of the sofa. She always does this – sits everywhere but on a seat. She sits on the floor, leaning against the sofa; she perches on its arm. She moves about my flat like it’s her own. I should give her a key – she’s here every day anyway. The school’s shut now for the long summer holidays, and she’s still in limbo about what she’ll do afterwards.
‘I hope he wouldn’t mind my telling you this.’ She hesitates. ‘It’s pretty gross.’
‘Jesus,’ I say. ‘How bad is it?’
‘Oh well, not much Dougie can do about it now.’ She laughs bleakly. Then she leans forward, grinning, hands clasped together. ‘He pissed in the shampoo. Waited until it was half-empty and topped it up with pee.’
I wrinkle my nose, but I’m grinning too.
‘Did anyone use it?’
‘Yup. And the kid complained to the housemaster, and Dougie got hauled into Overton’s office. Big trouble – the whole works: deeply inappropriate; we expect better of you, blah blah blah. Dougie tried to say, Well, it was my shampoo after all, I should be able to do what I like with it, but Overton wasn’t buying it, and Dougie made it worse because he couldn’t stop laughing.’
Overton hadn’t mentioned this. I can’t blame him – it hardly fits with his narrative. An immeasurable contribution to the school community, he’d said to me. But I can recognise Dougie in Rosa’s story: the impulsive plan. And that teenage-boy mindset, with the penis as the solution to everything. What did you think would happen? I want to ask him. And I want to laugh with him over the idea of some spoilt rich kid lathering his floppy hair with Dougie’s piss. I want to say to Dougie, I promise not to tell your mother.
But he never told me, either, and he’s gone now. It’s just me and Rosa, and the traffic sounds coming in the open window.
I hire a car again, and drive to Potters Bar. I’m not even intending to go to Murphy’s house – I tell myself I’ll just have a look around, get a feel for the area. I cruise his suburb, then circle his block a few times, slowing when I reach his street. I scan for house numbers, driving so sluggishly that I stall the unfamiliar car. I imagine what Dougie would say: Smooth, Dad. Really stealthy. The car coughs back to life, and then I ease to a halt when I spot number 24. It’s a bungalow on the corner of the block. The garden’s neat enough but not fancy – the lawn mown, but nothing in the flowerbeds except some overgrown agapanthus, the first of the purple flowers daring to show.
For an hour I sit in the car. I’m not waiting for anything – I just don’t know what to do next. Then the door of the bungalow opens, and Murphy comes out.
I’ve only seen him in a handful of online photos, half of them taken on the night of the flood, his face distorted by dirt and flashlights and shock. But I know him straight away, even though his hair looks longer now. He’s ta
ll, with wide shoulders. He’s wearing running shorts and a singlet, and as soon as he reaches the pavement he breaks into a jog.
I lower my head as if I’m examining my phone, and keep my face down until he’s passed my car. I force myself to calm my breathing. It was stupid of me to assume the house would be empty in the daytime. Where else would he be? His guiding company has shut down, probably for good. For the first few weeks, the website had a holding message on the home page: We regret that we are on hiatus as of May. Then the site was taken down altogether – each time I check, I get the same dead-end message: Server not found.
He speeds up. I wait until he’s nearly at the corner before I pull out and drive slowly behind him. I stall once again, and hear Dougie’s snort: Basically James Bond, you are. I follow Murphy for two blocks, but there are no other cars around, and I feel conspicuous. He turns right and jogs across the road, not twenty metres ahead of me. My foot’s already on the accelerator. It would only take seconds to hit him.
I let him go, watching his calf muscles bunch and contract as he strides up the hill.
What’s the point of all those muscles, I think, if you couldn’t even save my son?
At home, I pick up my phone to call Gill and tell her what I’ve done, then I drop it back onto the counter. I’m afraid she’ll be angry with me. I’m angry with myself. The policeman and the coroner’s office have both said I need to keep away from Murphy.
And Gill’s got enough to worry about. When we talk, she’s always distracted. I recognise the exhaustion and fear in her voice because I hear it in my own. I don’t know if it helps, those snatched conversations that we have; her running through the travels I’m supposed to be going on, and me running through my research. I don’t know what we’re offering each other but our own fears.
Sometimes, in my cramped bedroom in the London flat, I turn on the electric blanket for the side of the bed that would be Gill’s. It’s already too hot at night here, but I like the vague warmth of it, the heat coming from the other side of the bed as if she were sleeping there. I lie there in the dark, Dougie in a box on one side, imaginary Gill on the other.
The Cookbook of Common Prayer Page 21