The Cookbook of Common Prayer

by Francesca Haig

I think she’s afraid, but I don’t know what she’s afraid of. It might be me.

  It’s a new feeling, this: curiosity. A turning back to the world. For a long time, I’ve looked only inwards. I have been my own object, my own subject. Now, I see everything. Mum’s bottom lip, flaky where she bites it. Teddy, stopping himself from talking. What have I done to them?

  At the Neck, the stingrays will be waiting in the shallow water, lying right on the sand so they touch their own shadows. The tide goes out, holds its breath, and comes back. The house will sit empty, an abandoned shell. The penguins that nest under the jetty will have laid their eggs.

  I want to go back there, squat quietly at the edge of the jetty and see the hatchlings. Not breaking out of their eggs, but breaking into the world. There are so many things I want to find out, things I want to try. For such a long time I was impatient for my life to end. Now I’m impatient for it to start.

  Gabe

  ‘I haven’t told you everything about what happened in the cave.’

  For an instant I’m afraid I might shake her. I imagine grabbing Rosa and shaking her until all the truth about Dougie’s final moments comes rattling out.

  ‘You said you’d told me everything. You said you didn’t remember anything else.’

  ‘I lied.’

  I try to calm my breathing. Two minutes ago we were kissing. Now I’m imagining the cave. The blackness.

  ‘Why did you come here every day, and watch me trying to work out what happened, when you hadn’t told me the truth?’

  ‘Maybe that’s why I came. I don’t know. I wanted to be close to you, because you knew Dougie.’

  ‘You should’ve told me.’

  ‘I’m telling you now.’ She takes a deep breath. The red wine has stained black the creases in her top lip. ‘I told you we were holding hands, when the flood came. You know how it is.’

  I don’t know. I can never know how it was, to be there in that cavern, with the water coming up in the blackness. I can imagine, though, how skin would seek skin.

  ‘So when Murphy came for you?’

  The question sits between us. I wait.

  ‘I let go of Dougie’s hand.’ She sniffs, her breath jerky. There’s a tear on her cheekbone, magnifying one of her freckles. ‘Murphy was pulling me towards the entrance. Dougie didn’t let go. So I kind of—’ She wiggles her empty hand in the air. ‘I pulled away from him. I let him go.’

  ‘You should have told me,’ I say eventually. My voice is quiet. ‘That’s all. I wish you’d told me.’

  ‘It doesn’t change anything. It won’t matter to the inquest. It doesn’t make any difference.’

  ‘It does to me.’

  ‘Why?’ she shouts. ‘It happened to me, not you. It’s mine, not yours. It belongs to me.’

  ‘He was my son.’

  ‘He was my boyfriend.’ She’s standing up, glaring at me.

  It’s true that what she’s told me tonight doesn’t change anything. I still don’t know whether he died then and there, in Cavern 3, or whether he struggled for minutes or hours. I don’t know whether he was already dead when the floodwater dragged him through to Cavern 4, or whether he swam there himself, looking for a way out. I don’t know what was in his mind.

  ‘I won’t come here again,’ Rosa says.

  I nod. ‘I think that’s best.’

  She shuts the door behind her.

  Gill warned me, when she said she couldn’t bear to see Dougie’s body: once something’s in your head, it’s there forever. I can’t stop picturing Dougie’s outstretched hand, as Rosa’s slips from his grasp.

  I go to the kitchen and I get the knife.

  All the way there, on the train, I’m aware of the unyielding pressure of the metal against my thigh. The cold of the handle, when I slip my hand into my pocket to grasp it.

  It’s nearly midnight when I get to the house. The lights are all off, rain dripping noisily from a broken gutter on the roof.

  I ring the bell. No time to hesitate. There’s no answer, and I ring again. A light comes on inside, and I hear voices.

  Murphy opens the door. He’s wearing a navy dressing gown. He looks worried, or angry. His partner, in striped boxer shorts, is a few steps behind him, holding a phone.

  ‘I’m Gabe Jordan,’ I say.

  And at exactly the same time he says, ‘You’re Douglas Jordan’s dad.’

  It hasn’t occurred to me that, all those nights when I was Googling him, he was Googling us. What has he found? It would only take two minutes online to find all kinds of stuff: pictures; newspaper articles; my profile and photo on my work website.

  The man in the background says, ‘Phil? Should I call the police?’

  Murphy doesn’t say anything. He’s waiting for me to speak. I’m waiting for the same thing. My tongue has become an inert thing in my mouth, too big, too heavy. My hand’s still in my pocket, gripping the knife.

  In the end, I slip back into the juvenile mathematics that has troubled me all this time:

  ‘If you go into a cave with two adults and ten children—’

  ‘Eight children,’ Murphy says quickly. ‘Eight children, and four adults.’

  ‘You know what I mean. Dougie and Rosa were barely adults. They were in your care too.’ The knife isn’t cold any more – it’s warmed to my hand. It feels like a part of me.

  ‘And so were eight twelve-year-olds,’ he says. ‘I got them all out. I got the Campbell woman out too.’

  ‘If you go in with ten, and you come out with nine,’ I repeat. I feel dizzy.

  His face looks formless – so stricken that it changes shape, the bones all gone, everything hanging.

  ‘I don’t think you should be here.’ His voice is shaking.

  ‘If you don’t leave now, I’ll call the police,’ his partner says. He lifts his phone to his ear.

  ‘Did Dougie say anything to you?’ I ask Murphy. ‘At the end?’

  ‘I’m not supposed to be speaking to you,’ he says.

  Then he starts talking, and he doesn’t stop. The words fall out of him, sand from a slit sandbag. ‘I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m so sorry I’m so sorry, he seemed like a good kid, such a good kid, I’m so sorry, so sorry—’

  I can’t even make out most of his words. My hand on the knife. My hand on his arm.

  And I’m squeezing him, and I don’t know if I’m trying to crush him or to comfort him, and he’s squeezing me back, his strong arms, and we’re both crying, and all my maps have led me not to the cave and its secrets but here, this moment, standing in the dark with a stranger’s arms around me.

  ‘I have to go,’ I say, and I leave them standing there, backlit in the hallway.

  Bouillabaisse for when you’re afraid that your daughter won’t come home from hospital, and afraid that she will

  When softening the fennel and onion, use both olive oil and butter – this is not a time for holding things back. Later you can watch the oil marbling and pooling on top of the stock.

  The fennel flavour takes on a new dimension if you throw in a tablespoon of fennel seeds at the same time as the chopped fennel and onion. Wait until the seeds snap and explode. Savour those small, contained detonations.

  Toss in some star anise with the prawns. If you’re squeamish, you can take off the prawn heads before you condemn them to the pan – but if you were squeamish, you wouldn’t have got this far, through these three years. And the flavour’s better if you leave the heads on. The prawns surface like commas in the broth. Like pauses in a sentence you haven’t yet said out loud.

  Gill

  I fell in love first with the word: bouillabaisse. Those three languorous syllables: bwee-ya-bess. I learned in culinary college that the Baisse comes from Abaisser (‘to lower the heat and simmer’). But in my imperfect French, the Baisse is close enough to Baise, that emphatic, glorious Fuck. Every bouillabaisse I ever cooked was just an attempt to live up to the name. Mostly I failed.

  This one, though, comes close.
I dropped in some long, curled strips of lemon rind to lean against the sweetness of the saffron. Prawns, heads and all, and chunks of Tasmanian salmon, slipped in right at the end for barely enough time to cook, the flesh still glassy in the middle, glossy as the inside of a shell.

  I serve it with homemade bread. I never used to have the patience to bake bread – but since Sylvie went into hospital, patience is no longer a choice. And I like the kneading. I like holding the dough up against the light and stretching it until it’s nearly translucent, thin as the webbed skin between base of thumb and forefinger. I like leaving the ball of dough to rise and coming back to find it fat with air. I like the optimism of that process – leaving the dough to rise in a bowl on the windowsill and hoping, each time, that the yeast will perform its small miracle.

  I call out to Teddy and Papabee that dinner’s ready, and take one final taste of the soup, a slurp straight from the wooden spoon, scalding my tongue.

  I think: Dougie will like this one.

  Sylvie

  On my bedside table is Mum’s latest Tupperware. I made myself eat three spoons of the seafood soup. That’s the rule (I’m good with rules): I force myself to have three spoons every day of whatever she brings. Full spoons – so full that if my hand shakes at all, the food spills on the sheets and I have to start again. These spoonfuls are the hardest part of my day – much harder than drinking Sustagen or eating my safe foods, because I don’t know exactly what’s in Mum’s meals. In this soup, the oil’s congealed in little specks on top, and I close my eyes when I eat it so I don’t feel sick. It’s important, though. I’m learning that I have to pay attention. I need to understand why Mum’s so brittle; why Dad sounds so vague and tired when he phones; why Teddy’s so tense; why Dougie’s writing to me so often, but why he’s never there when Dad rings me. If I want to understand these things, then I have to start with these little plastic containers Mum brings in every day. I can’t understand Mum without tasting her food.

  I think I’m starting to understand now. I think I know what I have to do. And when Teddy comes in, all by himself, I say: ‘I need you to do something for me.’

  Teddy

  When she asks for my help, I’m afraid. I’ve always been a bit afraid of Sylvie, even before she put her bones on the outside. She’s always been way, way cleverer than me. If she asks me for the truth, I don’t know what I’ll say. But I promised Mum not to tell Sylvie. So whatever I do I’ll be letting somebody down.

  And what about Dougie? How do I do the right thing for him, when he’s in a box at Dad’s flat in London, and can’t tell me what he wants?

  But Sylvie doesn’t ask me anything – she just tells me exactly what she wants me to do. Then she gives me her bank card.

  ‘You’ll need this,’ she says. ‘It’s going to be expensive. Use my Papa J money.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  She writes down her pin and her online security code. I don’t realise straight away what it is. 1103Sau5ag3, she’s written – just a lot of numbers and letters. Then I get it: Eleventh of March – my birthday. And Sau5ag3, for SausageDog. And even though Mr Brindle in Computer Tech at school always says you should never use pets’ names or birthdays in passwords, when Sylvie tells me hers it makes me think that maybe all this time we’ve been missing her, she’s been missing us too.

  That night, after dinner, I tell Mum I need to use her laptop for homework. She’s busy in the kitchen anyway, and she hardly seems to hear me.

  In my room I double-check and triple-check the details. I can remember Dad’s birthday (ninth of February) but not which year, so I have to go back out to the kitchen.

  ‘Mum,’ I say. ‘I’m doing a family tree project for history. What year was Dad born?’

  I’m worried that she’ll ask more about the project, but she doesn’t even look up.

  ‘67,’ she says.

  ‘1967?’

  Mum laughs. ‘Come on, Teddy. It’s hardly gonna be 1867. Does Dad look 149 years old to you?’

  Sometimes, I think. Since Dougie died, sometimes he does.

  Back in the study, I triple-check Dad’s details, and press Purchase. Then I send an email and a text.

  The email is to Dad. I attach the plane ticket, and the booking number, and type the message that Sylvie wrote down for me on the edge of one of my geography worksheets. There, next to Mrs Conway’s diagram of the water cycle, is Sylvie’s handwriting:

  Dad.

  Come home. We need you here. Don’t tell Mum.

  Sylvie.

  At the hospital today, when Sylve told me what to write, I said: ‘But doesn’t Dougie need him?’ I made it into a question, so it was less of a lie.

  She looked at me for a few seconds, and I’m nearly sure she was going to ask me something, but in the end she just said, ‘We need Dad too.’

  The text I send is to Sue. Sylvie said I could just tell Sue the message, if I could get her on her own, but Sue hasn’t come round for a while, so I text her instead.

  Dad’s arriving back on Sunday. His plane lands at 11am. Mum doesn’t know. It’s important. Please can you pick him up?

  Mum can’t pick him up, because she doesn’t know he’s coming back. And it’s a school day so I can’t guide Papabee to the airport. ‘Dad can just catch a taxi,’ I’d said to Sylvie, but she told me to ask Sue. I get it. If Dad was in a taxi, he could change his mind, or go back. But nobody gets away from Sue.

  Sue rings my phone straight away.

  ‘Are you going to tell Mum?’ I ask.

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I think, if you did, she might tell him not to come home.’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘It’s not that she’s mad at him,’ I say. ‘But if he comes back, things will have to change. And she wants things to stay the same.’

  ‘How about you, Teddy? What do you want?’

  In the whole time since Dougie died, I don’t think anybody’s asked me that. I close my eyes and squeeze my hand tight around the phone.

  ‘I want my dad back. And I want my mum back too.’

  Sue takes a deep breath.

  ‘Email me the flight number so I can check if it’s on time. I don’t want to be hanging around at the airport for hours if it’s delayed.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I say, and even though she just says, ‘You got it, Tedster,’ and hangs up, I think she knows my thank you is as big as my fear.

  Gabe

  When I get back from Murphy’s I’m still shaking, and the knife that was in my pocket is gone. Did I drop it at his house, or somewhere on the way back? I hardly remember catching the train home. I’m drunk, exhausted. I run a bath.

  For the last two months, I’ve wanted to know everything. I wanted to know the angle of Dougie’s body when they found him, and the contents of his stomach, and what happened to the carabiner that was on his harness when they started but wasn’t on his body when they found it. I wanted to know why the force of the water punctured his left eardrum but not his right, and whether he felt it, or heard new sounds. I wanted to know if his eyes were open or closed, and the expression on his face, and whether his final thought was of Rosa or of us.

  I bend my knees and let myself slide down until the bathwater creeps over my face. I hold my breath and force myself to open my eyes. The lights in the ceiling are blurs of white. Was this how Dougie felt, as the last air escaped him? Did he hope, or did he forgo hope? Which of these do I need to learn from him?

  I lie on my back in bed and listen to the sirens in the distance, and the night buses carrying their emptiness from stop to stop. I call Gill. She doesn’t answer – she often doesn’t, these days. I don’t blame her.

  I’ve spent two months here, amassing all those facts now stacked on the dining table – those reams and reams of paper. But the only true answer to all my questions has been silence. And the person who can teach me the most about silence is sitting in a bed in Paediatrics 3, on the other side of
the world.

  And Teddy – little Teddy. I abandoned him to all the things I cannot face. Gill too. I’ve failed all of them.

  When I sleep, I dream that I’m hanging on to Dougie’s hand.

  Let go, he says. Dad, you dork. Let go.

  It’s four in the morning when the email from Teddy comes in.

  I pack my bags. Clothes, wash bag, wallet, laptop. The things that Rosa brought me from Dougie’s room: his old t-shirt, which still smells of him. The photo of Sylvie that was stuck above his desk. Not the Sylvie that I remember from when she was a child, or the Sylvie that I’ve wanted her to be. This is the actual Sylvie, the one who’s waiting for me now, at home, all bones and glare.

  This has all gone on too long – my obsession, and Gill’s, neither of us daring to call out the other in case they respond in kind.

  There were only two things I needed to learn here in London:

  Dougie is dead.

  My other children are not.

  In conversations since Dougie died, I’ve sometimes balked at saying, I have two children. Now, I’m learning to remember it: I have two children. I cannot save Dougie. But I might be able to save them.

  I leave the rope on the coffee table, on top of the book about cats.

  The last thing I pack, rolled carefully in a jumper and tucked into my hand-luggage, is Dougie’s ashes. Gill’s been writing to Sylvie for months about my travelling with Dougie. Now it’s time to do it for real.

  I should call Rosa before I leave, I think. I want to say goodbye. I want to tell her that she should go on and do all the things she’s talked about. Visit her sister in Mexico. Go to Iceland. Fall in love with someone. I want to say that she was right, to let go of Dougie’s hand, and to survive.

  I want to say to her that it’s not her that I’m angry with. It’s Dougie, for going where I can’t follow.

  I want to give her my blessing, but I don’t. She doesn’t need my blessing, or my absolution. She doesn’t need anything from me.