The Cookbook of Common Prayer

by Francesca Haig

  I even email a working title to Sue. What do you think about this, for a title: THE BOOK OF COMMON FARE.

  She emails back, straight away. I like it, but this is better: THE COOKBOOK OF COMMON PRAYER. Come over?

  I grab a lemon and drive to her place, and we sit at the outside table with gin and a bowl of olives.

  ‘You’re still doing it, then? These batshit recipes?’

  I nod, passing her a small pile of paper. ‘Turns out I don’t seem able to do much else.’

  She flicks through a few pages.

  ‘I know they’re weird,’ I say.

  ‘Yup.’ She reaches for another olive. ‘I like this one, though – the sperm mushrooms one. I’d cook that.’ She gathers the papers into a pile. ‘Let me take these, have another look through them. Far be it for me to admit to being wrong, but there could be a salvageable idea in here, among all these weirdly specific recipes.’

  ‘That’s the problem, though, isn’t it? Most of them are so specific to what’s going on for me – they’re not going to be relevant, or even interesting, to anyone else.’

  She shrugs. ‘Pretty sure not many people have had the experience of faking madness while finding a way to kill their uncle and avenge their murdered father – but young Will Shakespeare seems to have done alright out of it.’

  ‘But you’re right that it couldn’t work as a book,’ I say. ‘Sperm mushrooms. It’s hardly aspirational.’

  She leans back and spits the olive stone into a rosemary bush.

  ‘I dunno,’ she says. ‘Maybe people don’t want a cookbook about a life they aspire to. Maybe they want a cookbook they can recognise themselves in.’

  My phone rings. When I see Hospital (Louise) on my screen I get a lurch of fear.

  ‘Tell me now,’ I say to Louise. I knock over the olive bowl as I stand up. ‘Please don’t make me wait.’

  ‘It’s sort of nothing,’ she says. ‘Something and nothing.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I’m already grabbing my car keys, gesturing to Sue that I need to go.

  ‘She ran away,’ Louise says. ‘For about half an hour. But then she came back.’

  It’s not the first time Sylvie’s run away. She managed it last year, despite all the precautions on the ward. Afterwards, when they reviewed the CCTV, it turned out that she’d slipped through the double security doors behind a couple who’d been visiting their daughter. That’s all it takes: a distracted nurse, a busy corridor. She was gone for a few hours – a few hours of me and Gabe driving in increasingly frantic circles around town until the police rang us to say they’d found her.

  I used to keep thinking, This must be the worst part. Each hospital anniversary. The suicide attempts. Then, driving round and round scanning the streets, I thought: Actually, this is the worst.

  I’ve stopped all of that now. There isn’t any worst. Just days, and then more days.

  This is how she escaped this time, Louise tells me: if the patients on Paediatrics 3 are doing well, they’re given occasional access to an outside area, for some fresh air. It’s a small, walled terrace on the first floor, with a few benches and a depressed collection of cactuses. People stand around in hospital gowns or pyjamas, some of them wheeling drip-stands, some of them smoking furtively. This time of year, it’s usually empty, nobody wanting to be out there in the cold and the drizzle.

  Sylvie’s been allowed out there, these last few days, thanks to her incremental progress with eating. And today she got lucky: there was nobody else there, and when the nurse got called away, Sylvie climbed her way out.

  ‘Nobody’s ever done it before,’ Louise tells me. ‘It didn’t occur to us that it could be done. Let alone by a patient.’ She sounds almost admiring. She says Sylvie must have disconnected her feeding tube, climbed onto one of the benches and heaved herself on top of the wall, then climbed from there across a flat section of roof and jumped down into the car park.

  Twenty minutes later, they found her drip-stand in the courtyard, by an empty bench in the rain. They were about to call the police when she walked back in.

  Sylvie

  Mum charges into the ward, ricocheting between relief and anger. She squeezes my hand, and I try not to stiffen against her touch.

  ‘I thought you were making progress,’ she says. ‘Jesus Christ. You could’ve been killed, falling off that roof. And you know you have to be careful with your heart. Scrambling around like that – anything could have happened.’

  ‘But it didn’t.’

  Everyone’s so busy asking me why I ran away. Nobody thinks to ask why I came back.

  Mum’s right that my body’s weak. It took me four goes to climb up onto the wall. I don’t have any strength in my arms, and by the time I’d pulled myself onto the top I was out of breath, my pulse drumming its fingernails against my chest. I tried not to think of what the doctors have said about my heart-rate.

  I balanced on top of the wall, panting, and checking my right elbow where I’d scraped it on the bricks. Even though it was bleeding, and even though my breath was still coming fast, it was the first time in years that I’d thought of my body as something for doing things with, rather than just something for scrutinising.

  When I’d edged to the end of the wall I had to pull myself up again, onto the flat roof. An empty chip packet was blowing across the rooftop.

  In Paeds 3 the windows are all double-glazed, and they don’t open. I don’t know if it’s a suicide thing, or an infection thing, but it means that the air’s always stuffy and dry. All day, from my bed, I can see the lines of cars moving down Campbell Street, but the windows change the outside world into a silent movie. The only noises are hospital noises: shoes squeaking on the lino; the beeping of monitors; the hiss and whirr of the feeding pumps; the voices of nurses.

  Outside, it took a while for my ears to get used to the noise. It was like that moment in an aeroplane when your ears pop, and suddenly you realise that you weren’t hearing anything before. I could hear the crackle of the chip packet as it scraped across the bitumen roof, and the deep, distant rumble of the cars below. I closed my eyes and let the sounds come.

  Then I crossed to the far side, where I could jump down onto the top of the car park, and follow the stairs to street level. The dark staircase stank of piss, and as I headed out the door I wrapped my long cardigan tight over my pyjamas. It was raining, the pavement dark and shining. I passed the back door of the hospital, skirting a wide puddle with a tideline of cigarettes. It was early afternoon, not too many people around to stare at me as I walked down the street. My pyjama trousers are plain grey; my Ugg boots could pass for actual boots. I let my hair hang over the right-hand side of my face to cover the tube.

  Maybe I wasn’t trying to get away. Maybe I just wanted to see for myself whether the world was still there, and whether there was still room in it for me.

  Mum touches my hair, still wet from the rain outside. ‘I just worry about you, sweetheart,’ she says. ‘You know that. We just need to know you’re safe.’

  I don’t say anything.

  ‘And when you’re ready to leave this place properly, I’ll be the first to celebrate. You’ve been doing so well lately. But you can’t just run away. You need to get well first. Then you can do whatever you want.’ She waves her arm wide, the movement too big for the cramped space of my room. ‘Go travelling, like Dougie. Fall in love.’ She leans forward, as if we’re sharing secrets at a sleepover. ‘You know Nathan has a boyfriend now, apparently? Sue told me.’

  She’s done this before – dangled bits of gossip in front of me like shiny lures to coax me back to the world.

  There was a boy my age in Paeds 3 for a while, last year. He was called Will, and even though they try to keep the anorexics separate from each other, he wasn’t anorexic, and we got talking in an occupational therapy session. He was in here because he cut his arms so much he almost bled to death. I don’t much like talking, these days, but talking to Will wasn’t so bad.

&nbs
p; ‘You seem to be getting along well with Will,’ Mum said, after she came in one day and saw me and Will talking by the nurses’ station.

  I shrugged, glad that Will had gone back to his room and couldn’t hear this.

  ‘Yeah. He’s nice.’

  ‘Nice-nice, or nice-nice?’ she asked.

  Mum and I didn’t have any practice at this. Maybe if I’d stayed at home, stayed in school, she and I might’ve had a chance to get better at this kind of thing. There would have been school dances; maybe dates; bringing boyfriends home, like Dougie used to with his girlfriends. But I’ve spent those years in Paeds 3 instead, which means that Mum and I didn’t have the vocabulary for this situation.

  ‘Just nice, Mum,’ I told her.

  She asked me a few times, after that, ‘And how’s your friend Will?’ Dad asked too, ‘Seen much of Will?’ I know the story that they wanted: the story where I would fall in love with Will, and he’d entice me back to normal life. That would have been a nice story: Girl gets sick. Girl meets boy in hospital. Girl falls in love. Boy helps girl get better. Maybe they heal each other.

  But that isn’t my story, and it wasn’t Will’s either. He had his own story, for one thing, and having seen those scars on his wrists, I’m pretty sure he had bigger things to think about than dating. He got discharged a few weeks after we met, and I haven’t seen him since. It’s been nearly a year. It’s not like he can text me, or email me. And I doubt he’d be keen to come back to Paeds 3 for visits.

  Mum’s still staring at me. ‘Are you planning on doing this kind of escape stunt again?’ she says.

  I pull my cardigan tighter around my body. The wool still smells like outside – like rain and cigarettes. I want to explain to Mum that it’s not going to work the way she used to think it would. It’s not going to be a boy that coaxes me back into the world. It won’t even be her, or Dad, or anyone else. I want to tell her that what I remember from running away, this time, is the light in the oily puddle. The syncopated percussion of the empty Coke can blowing along the pavement in the street; the reflections pasted onto the dark windows of the office building opposite. That’s what I’m learning to find. All of it – all that fierce and ordinary beauty.

  Teddy

  ‘Are you sure you’ll be OK with Papabee for the whole day?’ Mum asks. ‘You can come with me to the hospital, if you’d rather.’

  ‘We’ll be fine,’ I tell her.

  She pulls two twenty-dollar notes out of her wallet and gives them to me. ‘Here. Get lunch for you both. And tell Papabee he can take you out for ice cream, if he wants. And we’ll all do something fun together tonight, OK? We’ll watch a DVD – your choice. Anything except Lord of the Rings.’

  That’s because Papabee always gets confused between the different hobbits and keeps asking who’s who.

  ‘We’ll be fine,’ I say again.

  It’s a Saturday – Mum’s going to the hospital, because Sylvie ran away yesterday (which is bad) but came back (which is good) and now they’re having a meeting with her doctor and her dietitian and her psychiatrist, all at once. I don’t have a soccer game this week, so Mum said I can spend the whole day with Papabee, as long as we’re back for dinner. I don’t mind – I’m glad. For my plan, I need a long time.

  I have to tell Papabee which way to drive. It takes him three goes to turn off the highway and towards the bridge. The first two tries, when I tell him to take the ramp up to the right, he says, ‘Absolutely,’ but then whizzes straight past it, and we have to do a big loop to get back to where we were. The third time, with me yelling in his ear, he zooms up the ramp without even slowing down and then says, ‘There’s no need to shout, my dear boy.’

  After that I use my phone to navigate, making sure I give him heaps of warning before every turn-off. I’ve done this drive a million times, but usually in the back seat, arguing with Dougie and Sylve about who’s taking up too much room. I’ve never been in charge of finding the way before.

  It takes a bit more than an hour to get to the house at the Neck. I know Sue and Dan aren’t here this weekend, because Sue rang to invite us to go with them to one of Ella’s violin concerts in town. Mum said no. She says no to everything these days, but I don’t mind this time, because Ella’s concerts are boring, and I need to come here instead.

  As soon as we see the sea I know I’ve come to the right place. We get to the bit where the land disappears on both sides and it’s just the road, sea all around us, and I can hear the gulls doing their yelling, and I know for sure that there are secrets the water knows. When I’m here, I believe extra hard in the particular magic of nails. Here, it feels like if I could just see far enough along the beach, Sylvie would be waiting for me, about to say something, mouth open, her eyes squinched up against the sun.

  The driveway gate’s open – it’s always open – and the house is sitting waiting for us, just the same as it always has. I can hear the sea even from here. The sea is speaking sea language, and the wind is speaking wind language. I haven’t been here since Dougie died and I feel a big wave of missing this place, which is also a big wave of missing him.

  Sue and the others must have been here recently – there’s a beach towel forgotten on the line, and the grass has been cut. I know it’s not fair to be angry at Sue and Dan and Ella and Nathan – I’ve heard Sue invite us here at least twice, even though Mum always says no. But I still hate to think of them coming here without us. I walk under the clothesline and when the wind slaps the towel at my face I yank it out of the way. The broken peg goes ping off into the grass and the towel falls on the ground and I leave it there. Papabee doesn’t notice.

  The fly-screen rattles; Papabee’s trying the front door. I know where the key is – on top of the side window frame – but what I’m looking for isn’t inside.

  ‘The others will be coming shortly, I expect,’ he says. ‘Are they bringing Dougie and Sylvie in the other car?’

  ‘That’s right,’ I say, because it’s unfair to tell him he’s wrong all the time. Maybe that’s why I’m getting good at lying to Sylvie – because I’ve been doing these little lies to Papabee for so long.

  It’s sunny – the first sunny day in ages, even though it’s still cold. Papabee settles himself down in the hammock, his flat cap pulled down to shield his face from the sun. Sometimes, when we’re staying here, I climb in the hammock with him – facing the other way, my head leaning against his legs – and we can lie like that for ages, talking and not talking. But not today. Today I have a job to do.

  ‘I’m just going to check something,’ I tell him. ‘I won’t be long, OK?’

  ‘Indeed,’ he says, and his hat goes up and down as he nods.

  I go round to the back of the house. Past the water tanks, where there’s a bunch of trees, and one tree bigger than all the rest. It’s called the Secret Tree, except I’m not meant to know that. Even its name is supposed to be a secret – but the big kids never noticed me, so they don’t know how much I see, or how much I know.

  I’ve seen Sylvie and Ella climb up the Secret Tree so quickly it looks easy. But it’s different for me: the first branch is way over my head, and when I try to climb up the trunk I scrape the inside of my legs and scratch my arm. Even when I reach the branch it’s really thin, and the next one up isn’t much better, and under my weight it makes a noise like something complaining. My knee hurts, and my hands are sweaty – if they get any sweatier I’ll slip for sure. I think about Sylvie, climbing over the wall at the hospital when she ran away. Was she afraid, like this? Did she hear her blood going swoosh swoosh swoosh in her head?

  I wish I was Possum-Teddy. Possums don’t know about gravity so they just ignore it. I’d go up the tree faster than the big kids, and I’d see in the dark and I’d never want to be anything other than what I am, because a possum is always enough. I could swing from my tail, and stomp on the roof with a noise so loud that you know possums don’t have any secrets.

  But I’m not a possum, and I’m hea
vy with secrets, dragging the branch lower and lower and there’s a cracking sound too. I wrap my arms around the branch but it’s too small and if I fall I’ll land smack on my back.

  Will Papabee hear me if I shout for him? He’s all the way around the front of the house, in the hammock, and he might even be napping by now. Even if he did hear me, would he know what to do? And if I knock myself out, or hurt myself really badly, what will happen to him? How would he find his way home?

  I think about Sylvie, and Dougie, and Mum and Dad, and Papabee waiting in the hammock at the front of the house. I unscrunch my eyes and wiggle a bit closer to the trunk, then in a quick scrambly movement I pull myself onto a thicker branch. Two deep breaths, big shaky ones, and then I keep climbing.

  Nearly at the top, the hole in the trunk is perfectly round, and just big enough to get a hand inside. This is where Sylvie and Ella used to leave secret notes for each other. Their secret letterbox, except it wasn’t secret, because I was watching.

  I snap off a twig and poke it in the hole first, swirling it round to try to clear any spider webs. I’m not scared of spiders, but I’m not stupid.

  There’s nothing there. I don’t know what I was expecting. Maybe a diary explaining it all. Or a letter, spelling everything out.

  Dear Teddy, Thank you for caring about me enough to solve this mystery. This is how you can make everything better…

  But there’s nothing in the hole but sticky resin and flakes of bark.

  Papabee’s still in the hammock, giving little snores. It doesn’t seem fair to wake him up, so I climb in with him and we lie like that for a while, together. In my pocket I have a handful of pine needles from the Secret Tree. Both my hands are black with sticky, pine-smelling goo from the tree trunk.

  I stare at the sky and try to work out if the swooshing sound I can hear is the sea, or the blood in my ears, still pumping hard after the climb. I decide it can be both.