There’s still at least a month until the inquest. I’m afraid that all my research is getting me nowhere, when I should be at home with my family. Am I failing them, by being here, or would I be failing Dougie by leaving while there are questions still unanswered? I’m scared that I’ve achieved nothing, and now, after seeing Murphy, I’m scared of what I might do.
I call Gill.
‘Maybe I should come back,’ I say. ‘I’m not getting anywhere here, really. I’m not doing anyone any good. And it’s not fair on you. Maybe it’s time to end all this. I’ll bring Dougie home. We’ll tell Sylvie the truth.’
There’s a long pause.
‘No,’ she says, finally. ‘We’re managing OK here – don’t worry. You have things you need to do. One of us needs to be there for the inquest. For Dougie.’
Gill
I hang up and hold the phone for a while in both hands. Of course I want Gabe to come home. I miss the sound of his voice talking to Teddy, and his patience with Papabee. The clattering of his laptop when he’s working. He never learned to touch-type properly, so he jabs at each letter using only his index fingers, each keystroke a loud clatter. It used to drive me crazy, and now that it’s gone I miss it.
But I just need a bit more time.
I give Sylvie the next letter, in a bundle along with a sheet of essay questions that her geography teacher emailed me.
‘Everyone else can just Google the answers,’ she says, glancing at the homework. ‘D’you know how much harder it is without the internet?’
‘If you feel like getting better and joining everyone else out there’ – I gesture beyond the hospital window – ‘you go for it.’
She hasn’t mentioned the letter. It’s the fourth one, and tracing Dougie’s handwriting for the address gets easier every time. But I think of what Louise said to me: Don’t underestimate her. I worried that the first letters were too pristine, so for this one I poured myself a glass of beer, letting the head froth over a little, and sat the glass on the letter, leaving a pale stain, nearly invisible. Then I poured it down the sink – I’ve never liked beer.
She doesn’t open the letter while I’m there, but I notice that she holds on to it, turns it over, then turns it over again.
I ask her about the book she’s reading (Emma Donoghue’s Room); I tell her about how Papabee picked Teddy up from school the other day wearing one black shoe and one brown. She remains stalwart in her silence and my voice sounds strained, so I stop, and try to keep my hands still. I watch her, holding the envelope, and catch her glancing at me.
‘Is Dad OK?’ Her voice startles me.
‘What do you mean?’ I say quickly. ‘Of course he’s fine. You’ve spoken to him, haven’t you?’
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘He called again yesterday. But he was kind of quiet.’
‘He’s busy with Dougie, love. I know they’re having a lot of fun, but it’s not easy for Gabe, helping Dougie get around. He’s working, too, remember – trying to keep on top of work stuff from over there. And anyway, he knows Dougie’s been keeping you up to date with everything they’re up to.’ I point at the letter, still unopened in her hand.
‘You’d tell me, wouldn’t you?’ she asks. ‘If there was anything wrong with Dad? Or if there was something wrong with you and Dad? If you were getting a divorce?’
I laugh, and it’s genuine. I feel drunk, giddy with relief that she’s so far from the truth. ‘Darling, I promise you. Dad and I are fine. He’s only there to take care of Dougie.’
‘He’s been gone for a long time,’ she says. ‘Six weeks. So I just wondered.’
Six weeks. I’m so delighted that she’s counting something other than calories or kilograms.
‘We’re fine,’ I say, ‘He’s a bit knackered, but I think he’s still having the time of his life, to be honest.’ I picture it again, the two of them on Cefalu beach in Sicily, Dougie brown and Gabe pale. Dougie’s leg-cast propped on a rolled-up towel.
Sylvie’s belief only makes it more real. I can see the blue and white stripes on the towel; the skin on Gabe’s bald head peeling slightly; the way Dougie sweats on the bridge of his nose, where his sunglasses sit.
Teddy
Thirteen and a half. That’s what Sylvie said when I showed her that photo of herself. That means she would’ve been in grade 7 or 8. So on Sunday morning, when Mum’s in the hospital and Papabee’s reading in the living room, I go through the photos in the study again, one last time. There’s the beach at the Neck, with Dougie and Ella sitting on the same towel. Me with a certificate from the school spelling contest, two missing teeth making a big gap in my smile so my face looks like it’s not finished. Sylvie in a pair of black leggings and a black and white striped shirt, ten times too big for her, after the school play.
It was King Lear, and Sylvie was the Fool. Mum and Dad went both nights the play was on; Papa J even flew down from Sydney just to see it.
‘He didn’t come down for my nativity play,’ I said, when he arrived.
‘Sweetie,’ said Mum. ‘You were Camel Number Four. It’s not the same.’
I was only seven or eight, but Mum and Dad still made me go and watch Sylvie’s play. Most of it was boring – I couldn’t understand the words, even though Mum spent ages beforehand explaining the story. When they squished out that man’s eyes, they had fake eyeballs that looked really real, and one of them rolled across the stage to the front, near where we were sitting, and for the whole rest of the play it sat there, staring at me, and I stared back. Afterwards, when Mum and Dad asked me if I’d liked the play, all I could think of was that eye. Now I wish that I’d watched more carefully. I should’ve been watching Sylvie.
The school play’s always at the end of the year – it must’ve been around December. By the end of the summer after that, Papa J was dead, and Sylvie was in hospital. So much changed, so quickly. Had her sickness started yet, while she was in King Lear? I didn’t pay much attention to her then – why would I? She was just my sister.
I do remember how Sylvie looked, with her make-up on for the play: half of her face painted white, and half black. I remember Papa J giving her a hug after the show and she turned her body sideways, like she was already trying to disappear.
I stand in Sylvie’s bedroom doorway for a second before I go in. It smells like rooms always smell when they’re shut up for a long time: dust, I suppose, and old air. On her bookshelf the books are squished in, not just standing up but also lying down sideways across the top, filling every gap.
I find King Lear on the top shelf, between a French textbook and a book called Wolf Hall. I pull out the play – the pages are all crackly and wavy along the bottom, like Sylvie dropped it in the bath, and lots of the pages have the corners bent down (Mum tells me off when I do that).
I lie on my tummy on my bedroom floor and flick through the whole thing. Sylvie’s gone over all the Fool’s lines in bright yellow highlighter. I find every yellow bit and read every single one of the Fool’s lines. I’m hoping for some big, obvious clue, like a note in red pen, written in the margin, to explain everything. But there’s nothing like that, and sometimes Shakespeare makes English seem like a language I don’t speak:
She’ll taste as like this as a crab does to a crab. Thou can’st tell why one’s nose stands i’th’ middle on’s face?
Why to keep one’s eyes of either side’s nose, that what a man cannot smell out, he may spy into.
It’s all like that: nearly everything that the Fool says is riddles and nonsense, hiding in old-fashioned words. I read until the stripes of the carpet have pressed perfect stripes into the skin of my elbows, and I still haven’t found any secrets.
There are some parts where I feel like I can spot a bit of Sylve in the Fool, or a bit of the Fool in her:
Have more than thou showest,
Speak less than thou knowest.
But that doesn’t help me work out what it is that she knowest. It only tells me that maybe when she was learning a
ll those lines, and saying them on stage every night, they got inside her, like the flu or chickenpox.
That’s when I notice that the Fool’s lines aren’t the only ones Sylvie’s marked. With a pencil, she’s underlined other things too. I go through it again, every single page, checking what she’s underlined, and I see that she has left me a clue after all. The underlinings aren’t random. There’s a pattern.
Sylvie
When I first read King Lear, in Mrs Robson’s class in grade 8, I remember thinking, Why would you show this to a classroom of teenage girls? Don’t you realise what you’ve given us? Mrs Robson leaned against her desk at the front of the class to read the first scene out loud, and when Cordelia uttered her first Nothing, I looked around the classroom and couldn’t understand why everyone else wasn’t feeling what I felt. Everyone looked completely normal. Janet Paterson was painting her nails with White-Out; Faizah and Kelly were passing notes. I looked at all of them, and then back at the book. ‘Nothing,’ Mrs Robson read. And I thought: This isn’t a book, or a play. This is a grenade.
That’s where I learned about nothing. I learned to be Cordelia, stoppering her mouth.
I read Lear again and again. I read it until the corners of the pages were dog-eared, and the paper along the bottom was crinkled from reading it in the bath. I got a part as the Fool in the school play, and I learned everyone else’s lines as well as my own. I read it on the bus, and I made Mum take me to a bad am-dram performance in Cygnet. I read it when I should have been studying French, and when I was meant to be sleeping. Nothing, I said out loud to myself, under the covers. Nothing will come of nothing.
I always knew that Gloucester’s eyes being gouged out isn’t the most violent part of the story. It’s Cordelia, and the way she does violence to language. She’s the one who stills her own tongue, refusing to come to her own defence. She speaks loudest with her silence – louder than her sisters, or her father; louder than the storm. It’s her silence that sends Lear mad. Nothing. The audacity of it. I’d always been a good girl: a straight-As, polite, wanting-to-please girl. It hadn’t occurred to me, until Cordelia, that I was allowed to say no.
After Lear, I worked my way through all Shakespeare’s plays. Reading Othello, late at night, I misread a line. I was in bed, half asleep, and when Othello says, ‘Silence that dreadful bell,’ I read it as: ‘Silence, that dreadful bell.’
In my tired state I had to re-read it twice to make sense of it. I never liked the real version as much as my accidental one. I recognised something in ‘Silence, that dreadful bell.’ I understood how noisy silence could be, just as I understood how nothing could be a verb.
But these days, I think less about Cordelia, and more about Lavinia, in Titus Andronicus. I keep coming back to her. Unlike Cordelia, Lavinia doesn’t choose her silence. She is silenced with a blade – her tongue chopped out at the root, her hands hacked off.
Is this what I’ve been doing, all this time?
I have hacked out my own tongue.
I have been here, alone, ringing the dreadful bell of silence.
Gill
I slice mushrooms, to bake with tomatoes and polenta. I speed up until the knife on the wooden board is a metronome, set too quick. So fast that I’m daring something to go wrong.
I can’t stop writing my new recipes. They’re not really about Dougie and Sylvie; they’re about what’s left after they’ve gone. About our house, crowded with all its absences.
That night, on the phone, I tell Gabe I’m writing more than ever.
‘That’s great,’ he says. ‘I’m so glad. And it’ll do you good.’
He’s always been like that: excited for me. Cutting out all my newspaper columns; recording me any time I was on the radio. Somewhere in the shed we still have a shoebox of cassette tapes, even though I don’t think we even own a tape player any more. Gabe’s handwriting on each label: Gill – ABC. Do Not Tape Over!
The next day, after I’ve been to the hospital, I finally email some of the recipes to Sue. She texts me within forty minutes. Are you in? I’m coming over.
She has a stack of papers in one hand as she comes up the front path.
‘I can’t sell this to a publisher,’ she says, putting my recipes down carefully on the kitchen counter while I pour the gin. ‘You know that, right?’ She gestures at the pages. ‘You can write stuff like this and you know I’ll always be happy to read it. And if it helps you, great. But I can’t sell this. People will think you’ve gone mad.’
I nod. ‘It’s not really for selling.’
She grabs a page at random. ‘Soufflé for the day your daughter’s weight reaches a new low.’ Another page. ‘Quiche for the day after your son’s cremation. This isn’t a book. It’s a therapy session. Which is fine, as long as you don’t want to, you know, keep making a living from selling your writing.’ She fishes through the pages and yanks out the saffron and cauliflower recipe. ‘You have to pay for all this bloody saffron, for one thing.’
We both laugh, but she’s still got an eyebrow raised.
‘Have you called that man yet?’ A few weeks ago, she gave me the number of a therapist that her sister recommended. ‘Natasha says he’s really good,’ she continues. ‘Sensible. No Enya music, I promise. No dolphin wall-hangings.’
The phone number’s been sitting on a Post-it note by the phone for weeks. At some point I propped a shopping list over the top of it. Loo paper. Teddy’s muesli bars. Saffron. Washing powder.
‘Maybe this is therapy enough,’ Sue says, sweeping the recipes into a rough pile. ‘But it couldn’t hurt to see a professional.’
‘Probably. I’m sure you’re right. But when? When would I find the time?’
I’m glad Sue’s been honest with me – and I didn’t ever expect that these recipes would make a viable book. But I also know it will make no difference – I’ll keep writing the recipes. I don’t have any choice.
When she’s gone, I get back to work on the latest letter.
After Sicily, Rome’s a bit of a shock to the system – it’s crammed with traffic and noise and people and heat. And all v unmistakably Italian – in a tiny alley yesterday we saw a café where people literally drive up to the counter on their Vespas, slam down a shot of coffee from the counter, and drive out. Like drivethru McDonald’s but a million times classier.
We did a tour of the Colosseum yesterday – usually guided tours are my idea of hell, but I’ll admit that this one was worthwhile. Surprise twist: apparently heaps of the ancient statues, buildings etc. actually used to be painted really bright colours – we all just picture them the colour of faded sandstone because that’s how they look now. (If you already know this, please pretend you don’t – I want to be the smart one for a change.) Am looking forward to being a massive bore who smugly points out errors in historical films from now on…
Heaps of stray cats around Rome (Teddy would love it) – they’re extremely cute but Dad said I shouldn’t pat them in case they have fleas, which led to a classic language barrier moment at lunch yesterday. Me to the waiter at the outdoor pizza restaurant: ‘Can you touch the cats?’ Him (v enthusiastic) ‘Oh yes! Yes!’ (Runs inside, comes back a moment later with a broom and starts trying to hit the cats and chase them away down the street.) Anyway, Dad’s probably right about not touching the cats – fleas in my cast would be a new low.
I can picture him: skin brown all over, even the toes where they emerge from his cast – and then the stark white flesh underneath the plaster, smelling like an old Band-Aid.
At times Dad and I’ve come fairly close to wanting to kill each other (in the year of our lord 2016, does he really need to have the key-strokes sound turned on in his phone? REALLY?), but we’ve also had some really great chats. You know he worries about you all the time, right? (Even with my broken leg, you’re still stealing my thunder.) Mum too, obvs. But you know that already. Go easy on them, yeah?
Anyway, enough of the soppy stuff. Day after tomorrow we’re off to P
aris…
When the hospital rings, I’m squatting on the grass in the backyard, with a black plastic bag on my hand, like a glove, to scoop up a shit that SausageDog’s just deposited. I have my phone in my pocket – this is what you do, when your daughter lives in the hospital. You take your phone with you to the garden, and to the loo. When you have a shower, you balance your phone on the towel-rail where you can still hear if anyone calls.
I drop the poo bag and fumble to answer the call. There’s a limit, I think; I can deal with dog shit and calls from the hospital, but not at the same time.
‘Should I come in?’ I say, as soon as I recognise Louise’s voice.
‘No need,’ she says, quickly. ‘It’s not bad news.’
My stomach wants to unclench, but I don’t trust Louise’s words. It’s never not bad news.
‘Is it her blood pressure again? The cardiac guy said—’
‘Honestly. It’s nothing to worry about. Good news, in fact. I thought you’d like to know.’
I wait.
‘Nothing momentous,’ Louise says. ‘We both know that’s not how this works. But she’s drunk a Sustagen, two days in a row. Voluntarily.’
Sustagen, that viscous beige fluid that the hospital uses as a food replacement. 249 calories in each carton (Sylvie’s made us all into experts). We buy it in bulk when she comes home – a shelf in the fridge is still full of Sustagen from the last visit, when she only lasted a few days before being readmitted.
‘She didn’t say anything when I was in yesterday, or this morning,’ I say.
The Cookbook of Common Prayer Page 22