‘I’m not surprised – on some level, she’s ashamed. But today she asked the dietitian how long she’d have to keep it up to get the tube out.’
‘How long would that be?’
‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,’ Louise tells me. ‘She’d have to manage more than one Sustagen a day. I’d like to see her coping with some solids, too, and maintaining at least her current weight. So we’re still talking a good while, and I wouldn’t want us to count our chickens. But it’s the asking that seems positive to me. It was off her own back. Taking some ownership of the process – I see that as a really positive sign.’
I can forgive Louise her brief lapse into psycho-jargon. Taking some ownership of the process. Today, I can forgive anyone anything. After I thank Louise I pick up the dog poo, and even the warmth of the bag in my hand feels like a benediction.
I ring Gabe as soon as it’s dawn in London.
‘That’s brilliant,’ he says. ‘Jesus. Really brilliant.’
‘It’s only been two days.’
‘I know. But still – it’s better than nothing.’ Sylvie has trained us to be grateful for such small things. Two days, two cartons of Sustagen.
His voice is hesitant. ‘Does this mean we should think about telling her?’
‘Are you out of your mind? You want to derail this, just when she’s showing some signs of progress?’
‘Of course not. That’s the last thing I want to do. But lying to her—’
‘We’re keeping her alive,’ I say. ‘That’s not the same thing.’
What if it is, though? What if it’s exactly the same thing? What if the only way to keep my child alive is by lying to her?
Gabe
‘Anyway,’ Gill says, ‘remember you’re heading for Paris shortly. Rome’s been a bit much, but he loved the Colosseum. And cats – there’re cats all over Rome.’
‘Listen,’ I say. ‘Maybe we don’t need to do this any more. If she’s doing well, maybe we need to try trusting her.’
‘Trust her? How?’
I know what she means. We have to have Sylvie fed through a tube because we can’t trust her to keep herself alive. Since the first suicide attempt, we’ve had to keep the knives and the medicines in a locked box whenever she’s allowed home. How can we entrust her with Dougie’s death, and our grief? In her hands it will become a weapon, to be turned against herself.
Gill’s shouting down the phone now, through sobs. ‘I’ve been working so hard to keep her going. To make sure this whole thing doesn’t fall apart. And just when it’s working, you want to risk telling her?’
‘I know how hard you’ve been trying.’ I do. I know she’s done what I can’t bring myself to do, which is to step back into our lives, and to keep going. She hasn’t had the luxury of indulging her grief, the way I have. But this lying to Sylvie can’t be right. I’m afraid of what Gill’s doing. I’m afraid for her.
‘Don’t you trust me?’ she asks.
‘I love you.’ I don’t know if that’s the same thing.
Two years after Sylvie was first admitted to hospital, I said to Gill, ‘It’d be easier if she had cancer. Then, at least, we’d all be on the same side.’
It’s not something that we could say in public. Nobody would dare wish that on anyone, let alone your own daughter. And we saw them in the hospital all the time – those poor kids, bald and eyebrow-less, faces puffed with steroids.
Nonetheless, it’s true: this illness sets us against her. Sylvie hates us for refusing to let her die. She resents us the same way that she resents the nasogastric tube that keeps her alive. ‘How dare you?’ she screamed at us, once, when we were driving her back to the hospital because she hadn’t maintained her weight and her lips had started to turn blue again. ‘How dare you?’ she yelled again and again from the back seat, while Gill gripped the steering wheel. In Sylvie’s last year at school we’d gone to watch her in a production of King Lear; now her clenched, furious face in the rear-view mirror made me think of what faithful Kent says about Lear’s death being a relief: He hates him / That would upon the rack of this tough world / Stretch him out longer.
We stayed at the hospital while they re-inserted her tube. The first time, she yanked it out again straight away. The second time, they sedated her. That was the night, on the drive home, that I said to Gill, ‘It’d be easier if she had cancer.’
‘Don’t ever say that,’ Gill said. ‘How can you say that?’
It’s my job, you see, to tell the truth, and it’s her job to hate me for it.
It’s barely dawn; Rosa won’t be here for hours. Outside, the buses are grinding down High Street. It’s warm already; exhaust fumes suspended in the humid air.
I get a glass of water. On the kitchen bench, by the sink, is a knife block. The medium knife is a good size: small enough to fit in a pocket, but not too small to sink deep. It feels right in my hand. And I’m not going to be slicing anything. Just one sharp jab, upwards, under the ribs. I’ve Googled it. I’ve even practised it, standing in the kitchen feeling like an idiot.
When Rosa comes, around eleven, she makes herself tea. I’ve left the knife on the counter and she picks it up automatically, turns it over to see if it’s clean, then slips it back in the block. I act as though nothing has happened. Nothing has happened, yet.
‘What are you working on today, Sherlock?’ she asks, throwing herself down sideways on the couch, her legs dangling over the arm.
‘I’m trying to put together a clearer timeline. The ambulances weren’t there until 1208 – that’s thirty-eight minutes after they were called. I drove the route myself, from that same hospital, and it only took me eighteen minutes.’ I did it this week, in a hire car. Twice, to be sure. ‘And I don’t have a siren.’
‘Would it have made any difference? They didn’t find him for hours.’
‘There’s an NHS guideline – it’s supposed to—’
‘Would it have made a difference?’ she interrupts in a flat voice.
‘Don’t you want to know?’ I wave at the papers in front of me. ‘Don’t you want to work out what happened?’
‘I don’t need to work it out. I was there, remember?’
While she doesn’t like to talk about that day, she’s happy to talk about Dougie. Did he ever tell you… she says, and I stop whatever I’m working on and listen. Sometimes, when she’s gone, I write her stories down. Not for the coroner – this is just for me. And for Gill, and Teddy, and even for Sylvie, one day, when we tell her the truth. I scribble my summaries of Rosa’s stories:
Prague (Easter) – they forgot the code to get back into the hostel and D climbed up to the second floor and tried to get in through the balcony; got the loop of his jeans stuck on the railing and an Israeli guy inside had to rescue him.
At the school – he was meant to be helping the matron in the laundry and he washed a whole load of uniform jumpers at 60° and they all shrank; said it was a great result because they never got him to do laundry again.
He and Rosa downloaded all the old Miss Marple movies (the ones with Geraldine McEwan) and binge-watched the whole series over a few weeks. R says D was ‘really into them’.
‘I liked that he enjoyed weird stuff like that,’ Rosa said with a shrug. ‘Not a jock, even though he did so much sport. It was refreshing – a lot of the male teachers are really macho. Sometimes the staffroom felt like a big sausage-fest.’
When she uses terms like that, I’m reminded of how young she is. How old I am. The only thing that we have in common is sitting in a small grey box in the next room. Why does she keep coming here? Why am I so glad that she does?
I want to call Gill and tell her all Rosa’s stories about Dougie. But Gill doesn’t want to talk about him, except for the details of the letters she’s writing. I understand why – it’s too raw, and she’s working too hard to maintain the secret for Sylvie. But because I can’t talk about him properly except with Rosa, it’s as if his life has become the secret, rather than
his death.
In the late afternoon, when Rosa’s gone, I practise again with the knife. I rehearse the movement, slipping my hand from my pocket and bringing the blade up hard, like a punch but with the knife gripped tight in my fist.
What I don’t practise is what happens after that. I don’t practise trying to put the knife back in my pocket, or running away. I can never think beyond that moment: the grab with the other arm, and then the strike. I can’t picture the man bleeding, or dying. I’m not even sure that I want to. It doesn’t make any difference. I can picture Dougie, drowning in the dark. That’s enough. There has to be a price paid for that. Twelve went into the cave, and only eleven came out. That equation has to be balanced.
I turn the knife over again. Don’t you trust me? Gill asked me on the phone. Do I trust myself?
Teddy
Going into the ward this time, I don’t get nervous when I walk past all the other rexiles’ rooms. I don’t count how many there are. I don’t even look at them. This time I know what I’m doing.
I pull the curtains shut around Sylvie’s bed, and hold up the King Lear book so that she can see the cover.
‘You were the Fool,’ I say. ‘How come you’ve underlined all Cordelia’s lines too?’
She takes a deep breath in and lets it out slowly. The tube shakes when she breathes. I try not to look at it.
‘Have you even read it?’ she asks.
I nod. ‘And I watched you do the play, remember?’
Somebody walks past her door, footsteps going squeak squeak on the shiny floor.
Sylvie keeps her voice quiet. ‘Yeah. But did you understand it?’
I shake my head. ‘Not most of it. But in the Cordelia bits, there was a lot of stuff about nothing.’
If nothing is Sylvie’s answer, what’s the question? And can you catch silence from a book?
‘What are you playing at, Teddy? Why do you keep bringing me this stuff?’
I don’t want to lie to her – all my lying is used up with the Dougie lie.
‘I’m trying to find the answer,’ I tell her.
‘To what?’
What I want to say: To you. Instead, I say, ‘To all of this.’ I wave my arm around at her little room, and the big ward outside it.
‘I’m not a problem to be solved,’ she says. But she doesn’t sound cross. She sounds tired, the same as always, and a bit afraid.
‘Teddy,’ she says again. ‘What are you doing?’
I’m not sure how to explain to Sylvie how it all fits together: these prices I’m looking for, the Lorax, and her. Sometimes things make sense in my head and then when I say them out loud they feel all wrong. In case my own words aren’t working properly, I try using that bit from the start of The Lorax, about the price you need to pay to hear the story: the coins, and the nail, and the ancient snail shell. I know it off by heart. I say it like it’s a nursery rhyme, or a prayer. She still looks at me like she doesn’t get it.
‘I’m trying to find the right thing,’ I explain. ‘Special things, so you’ll tell me your story. To help you get better.’
‘Like your bribe? That money you tried to give me?’
‘No. I got it wrong, that time. I was wrong about the photo, too. What I’m looking for, it’s not a bribe. It’s like a – a price, or a key, or a present. Like I’m treasure-hunting.’
‘Does this look like a treasure to you?’ She picks up the creased old book.
I shrug. ‘I know that if I had special treasures, at least one of them would definitely be a book.’ Probably The Lorax. Or 101 Dalmatians.
‘What would your other treasures be?’
I’m little, but I’m not stupid. I know she’s changing the subject so she doesn’t have to talk about herself, or King Lear, or how she took Cordelia’s nothing and built a cage out of bones. Still, it feels good that she asks me something. Since she went into the Boneyard, Sylvie’s usually not interested in anything at all. So when she asks me about my treasures, and looks at me seriously like that, it makes me feel like a giant, big as the world.
‘SausageDog,’ I say. ‘Definitely. And my key to Papabee’s flat.’ Neither of the big kids got one – just me, because I’m the one that goes to Papabee’s all the time. Normally I get their hand-me-down things, but that key is just mine.
‘The book that Mum wrote for me, when I was a kid, and Dad did the pictures.’
‘I remember that,’ she says. ‘Teddy to the Rescue.’
‘Yup. And my sunglasses that you bought me two Christmases ago.’ Because Mum and Dad don’t believe in brand-name things, but Sylvie knew I really wanted some Oakley glasses like the cool kids at school, and she bought them for me herself, with some of her babysitting money from before she got sick.
‘What else?’
I want to say Dougie’s old cricket bat, which still has the marks of his fingers on the rubber grip. But I don’t dare to say it out loud to Sylvie because even just thinking about Dougie makes my tongue feel bigger and heavier in my mouth, and I can’t risk getting ox tongue again – not now.
‘They’re good treasures,’ she says, smiling at me, and just for a moment, if I ignore the tube, her smile even looks a bit like the smile in the photo that I brought her. Like a real smile, on a real person.
‘Any more?’ she asks.
‘I can’t think of any for now,’ I say. ‘What about you? Are you going to tell me about King Lear?’
‘There’s nothing to say.’
Sylvie
‘You were the Fool,’ says Teddy. ‘How come you’ve underlined all Cordelia’s lines too?’
I can’t explain to Teddy about Cordelia and the Fool. How being the Fool is being Cordelia too, and vice versa. Teddy’s eleven – he doesn’t want to hear me rehash the essay I wrote for Mrs Robson in grade 9 English. He won’t get it.
The year I discovered King Lear, I read every book in the Shakespeare section of the library. I pored over his plays like I was lost and they were maps. When I’d finished them all, and the poetry too, I read all the criticism I could get my hands on.
And this is what I learned: Cordelia and the Fool never appear at the same time. Some people think it’s because they would have been played by the same actor (a young boy, maybe). Some people even say they’re meant to be the same person. I don’t know about that – but I know there’s a link between them. Cordelia’s exile made the Fool fade away: Since my young lady’s going into France, sir, the fool hath much pined away. I know that when Lear holds Cordelia’s dead body in his arms, it’s the Fool’s name in his mouth: And my poor fool is hanged.
Perhaps Lear’s just using a pet name for Cordelia. Or maybe he’s confusing the two – the same way Papabee calls Dougie Teddy, and Teddy Dougie. It doesn’t matter. Either way, the two are blurred.
So while I was being the Fool, I was thinking about Cordelia. I was thinking about how she refuses words, and he refuses food, and they both end up dead.
I was thinking about Cordelia’s nothing, and how it’s her salvation and her destruction.
And Teddy, little Teddy, with his treasure hunt, and his head full of books. Holding out my battered copy of King Lear as if I’m going to throw up my hands and tell him everything.
He thinks my secrets will come pouring out like coins from a poker machine: Jackpot.
He doesn’t realise that my secrets will swarm out of me like bees.
PART FIVE
Blue cheese and smoked salmon risotto for when your daughter may be recovering, but you’re afraid to believe it
When you add the white wine (or, even better, vermouth, if you have it), bend your head low over the hot pan and take a slow, deep breath. Let that flush of boozy steam coat your face. It might even burn a little. You won’t mind.
Everyone knows that the rice in a decent risotto should be al dente, but for this one, I stop at the instant just before. The rice must be firmer than the toasted pine nuts that you’ll sprinkle on top at the end. When nothing feels real, you
need to hear the crunch between your teeth. If you leave it on the heat for a minute too long, it slips into blandness, the rice going limp. You need to get this right, even if it takes two attempts. You need the rice between your teeth to crunch like sardine bones.
Gill
I stir the rice, and I try not to think about Dougie, or his empty room at the end of the corridor. I stir, and I try not to think about Sylvie and her cartons of Sustagen, or the four crackers that she ate yesterday, according to Louise. I can’t allow myself to believe that Sylvie’s really beginning to eat again. Hope is a place that I dare not go; if I enter, there will be no coming back.
So I cook risotto instead. I savour the repetitiveness of the stirring, and the patience that it imposes. The stock is absorbed at its own pace, one ladleful at a time. I watch the trails my wooden spoon leaves in the rice, and the way the rice always closes over them again. I envy the rice its reliable forgetting.
When I look over my hurried notes for the recipe, speckled with oil, I see how the handwriting slips between my own and Dougie’s.
Sylvie
It doesn’t happen just like that. It happens in small steps. First, the Sustagen. Then the foods that I can trust: crackers; Special K breakfast cereal, precisely weighed, with skim milk. Black tea (no milk; no sugar). Sometimes it takes me an hour or two, and the nurses hover nearby, watching to make sure I’m not squirrelling anything away. I’m not allowed to go to the toilet for at least an hour after eating, either, to make sure I keep it down. I do (vomiting’s less tempting with a tube in, anyway – that’s a mistake you don’t make twice).
When Mum comes in, she fishes around in her bag for the latest offering. ‘Risotto,’ she says, holding up the small plastic tub. ‘Blue cheese and smoked salmon, with baby spinach and pine nuts.’
She puts it on my bedside table, and picks up yesterday’s container, to take home. Then she notices that it’s lighter than it should be. It’s only a small container – barely a few spoons full – but it’s half-empty. And in our family, we’re alert to tiny changes in weight.
The Cookbook of Common Prayer Page 23