There are other currencies, other voices, other languages to learn.
We can learn them together.
I bend to whisper in his ear.
Papabee
I watch an egret, and admire the question mark of its elegant neck. At least I think it’s an egret – the line between egret and heron and cormorant has become rather blurred lately. I used to know a lot of names of birds – my wife was very keen on all of that. Now, egrets and herons and cormorants tend to coalesce into a vague mass of long-necked water birds.
Nonetheless, I very much enjoy watching them. I’ve always thought they look discerning, the way they peer down their beaks at the world. This one sits on a rock among the waves, and the curve of its neck is like the arch of a raised eyebrow – imperious.
It seems to me to be far too cold for swimming, and too dark, and the waves look distinctly hostile. But Sylvie has gone in. It looks as though she’s swimming with her clothes on, which strikes me as eccentric. Still, I ought to at least try. I like to join in when I can.
I walk a little way into the water. Much too cold, unpleasantly so, and so I go no further. Gillian is in too now, but I stay here, in the shallows, and try not to wonder why they’re all behaving in this manner. I try to concentrate on pleasant things: the egret (if indeed it is an egret). The last bit of light touching the clouds at the horizon. I wait. I do a lot of waiting. Often I don’t remember precisely what I’m waiting for.
They’re coming out now: Gillian with an arm hooked under Teddy’s armpit and wrapped around his chest. Dear Teddy – I wondered where he’d got to. And Sylvie on the other side of him. I still think she has been allowed to get far too thin – I’ll talk about it with Gillian, after they’ve all dried off.
Teddy’s lying on the ground now, in all his wet clothes. What a lot of sand we shall have in the car on the way home.
Perhaps they told me they were going to swim. Perhaps they told me why. I do forget a great deal. I suspect I’m a burden to them, though they’re far too kind to say it. But I’m not the only one who forgets. I see them doing it too: forgetting who I was, before I became this old man who can’t tell an egret from a cormorant; who can’t always remember my family’s names. I’m mainly Papabee now, not Edward or Dad. Dear old Papabee, and there are worse things to be, but it is difficult, sometimes, all this forgetting.
Gillian’s bending over with her hands on her knees, all her clothes soaking. Sylvie’s close to Teddy. She bends over too now, saying something in his ear.
Teddy
Sylvie whispers to me. She tells me lots of things. Some of them make sense, and some of them don’t. She doesn’t tell me how to save her. She tells me that I don’t need to save her. That it’s not my job.
Some of what she tells me, I realise I’ve known all along. I can see now: all the clues that I didn’t realise were clues. I remember how she’d pushed his money away, when I’d tried to give it to her. How she’d held the envelope by the corner, the same way Mum holds the little black bag after she’s picked up one of SausageDog’s poos, carrying it carefully between the tips of her finger and thumb. ‘I don’t want his money,’ Sylve said. I remember her after King Lear, how her body turned sideways when he hugged her. The tissue that she ripped up at his funeral – those angry little white shreds.
She doesn’t tell me because of nails, or magic, or any price that I could find, or because I nearly drowned. She tells me because she’s ready, and I listen.
But she doesn’t tell me everything. I know that what she tells me are only some of many answers, and I know that it isn’t over. There’ll be more hospital visits; more doctors; more of those awful afternoons in the family therapist’s office.
‘And I know about Dougie,’ she says. Water’s dripping off her hair and her nose. ‘I know he’s dead.’
I swallow. My mouth still tastes like the sea. ‘I didn’t like keeping it secret from you.’
‘Someone once told me I had to keep something secret, too,’ she says. ‘You don’t have to do that any more.’
Mum steps closer to us, now she’s finished coughing. She puts her arm around Sylvie’s shoulders. Then Mum looks at me, and says, ‘Oh, Teddy. Teddy. There you are.’ She sounds surprised, as if it’s the first time she’s seen me in ages.
Gill
Over the crest of the sand, from the direction of the car park, a policeman is walking.
Papabee reaches us first. He looks down at his legs, his suit wet up to the knees.
‘I appear to be wet,’ he says. ‘Has it been raining?’
Behind him, a cormorant stands on a rock among the waves. It spreads its wings wide and holds them like that, crucified against the sky.
PART SEVEN
Gill
The next day I’m on the front verandah with Sylvie, and Sue’s car pulls up. Gabe gets out, squinting against the sharpness of the light.
Sue holds the gate for him while he drags his suitcase through, but she doesn’t follow him up the path. She stands at the gate and sees me watching from the verandah.
I raise my hand, a kind of salute, and she raises hers back.
I let the children have Gabe first. Teddy runs to him and jumps up like a monkey, Gabe staggering under his weight. Even Sylvie gives him a hug, and I try not to wince when her spine protrudes as she raises her arms to him.
Then it’s just the two of us.
I tell him what happened yesterday. He keeps saying, ‘Christ. Christ. I should’ve been here.’
I nod. ‘Yeah. Or I should have been there with you. I don’t know. We both got it wrong, didn’t we?’
After the kids and I had come out of the water, the policeman insisted on getting us checked out at the local medical clinic. They kept us for a few hours, monitoring Sylvie’s heart carefully. They gave us hospital gowns to wear, to replace our soaking clothes. Papabee only needed to change his trousers, so he wore a gown over his shirt and tie, and kept wandering around the clinic with the back of his undies showing, making Teddy giggle.
We left Papabee’s car there and I drove us all home, Teddy and Sylvie falling asleep in the back seat.
‘I should have been there,’ Gabe says again.
‘You’re here now.’
I’ve been denying my grief; he’s been running from his. We face each other now, in the shadow of the mountain, in the space that Teddy and Sylvie have created for us.
‘I should’ve tried harder,’ says Gabe.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘But you were trying. I know how hard you were working over there, for the inquest.’
He shakes his head. ‘I was working hard at the wrong thing.’
‘Me too.’
It’s not a happy ending. It’s not an ending at all, but a kind of beginning. I have work to do – the job of grieving for Dougie, which I’ve dodged for more than two months. There are days I long to slip back into the comfortable old lie. But when a lie breaks, it breaks the way an egg breaks: incontrovertibly.
Gabe and I talk. At night, the kids in bed, we talk so much that sometimes our words pile up, a mound of words, things we haven’t said to each other during these last months. He tells me some of what he found out in England, and I tell him about Sylvie, and Teddy, and all that they’ve done.
‘It was them who brought me back, you know,’ he tells me. ‘I don’t mean metaphorically. I mean, they actually booked the flight. They sent me the ticket.’ In his voice I hear the mixture of shame at himself, and pride in them.
There are things he’s learned about Dougie’s death that I’m not yet ready to know, and moments of Sylvie and Teddy’s lives that Gabe has missed and can never make up for. That’s OK, or, if it isn’t OK, at least we’ve accepted that it can’t be changed.
I go to see the therapist that Sue recommended, and he listens to me and passes me a box of tissues when I cry. I have tissues in my bag, nice ones, not the thin, single-ply ones that he proffers, but it seems rude to refuse him, so I cry into his scratchy tissues.
>
‘It’s more exfoliation than therapy, really,’ I say to Sue, and she laughs.
I called her the day after Gabe came back. Before I could even begin to apologise for everything, she just said, ‘See you in five? Don’t forget the lemon.’
At her house, I told her what had happened at the Neck.
‘Teddy went straight under. Went down like an anchor.’
‘Shit,’ she said. ‘Why? He’s a decent swimmer.’
‘It was freezing cold. And he had stones in his pockets. Full of them.’
‘Oh Jesus.’ She was hysterical. ‘Your bloody family. How on earth does an eleven-year-old go full-Virginia Woolf?’
‘No, no,’ I said, laughing too. ‘He was collecting the stones, apparently. I’m still not sure exactly why. Something to do with him and Sylvie. He said he couldn’t explain, but that’s why he went there in the first place—’
‘OK, so not suicidal, but still batty.’
‘Probably, yes,’ I said, but I felt proud of Teddy – of his determination. His total commitment to his schemes, even when I don’t understand them.
I think a lot about what happened on the beach that evening. I know that it wasn’t a miracle, and it wasn’t a baptism. It wasn’t any kind of metaphor. It was real, and it was nearly deadly. But something changed. I don’t know who saved who, but we all went into the water, and we all came out.
After dinner one night I walk with Papabee up to his flat, Sausage leading the way.
‘I should’ve been there,’ I say. ‘That day at the Neck. I should never have left Teddy with you for all this time. It wasn’t fair. Gabe and I were neglecting him – and you.’
It takes Papabee a few goes to get his key into the lock. ‘Teddy? We’ve always been fine, Teddy and me. We make an excellent team.’
‘And you’ve done a great job, taking care of him when I couldn’t.’
‘He takes care of me,’ he says, as the door finally swings open.
‘I know. But you’ve still been wonderful. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to repay you.’
‘Far the best thing to do,’ he says, already busying himself with his hat and scarf, ‘is to write me a cheque for a hundred dollars.’
A packing crate arrives from the school in England, with a note from the headmaster, in old-fashioned handwriting. There’s a photo, too: a rowing boat with Douglas Jordan painted down the side, the headmaster and his wife standing in front of it, looking suitably solemn. Another photo, this one of the boat in action, being rowed by eight glowingly white boys. Gabe and I laugh over it, and I remember Dougie’s letters – the real ones – where he’d laughed about those posh kids. Gabe tells us about Dougie pissing in the shampoo bottle, and Teddy can’t stop laughing, and Sylvie says, ‘That’s gross. Completely gross.’
Inside the crate are all Dougie’s possessions from England – the ones that Gabe hadn’t brought back already. Together, we pack them up. We keep his photos, and some of his t-shirts, which will fit Teddy one day, if he wants them. The rest goes to the charity shop.
‘Do you still have those letters?’ I ask Sylvie.
She nods. ‘Why? D’you want them back?’
I’m not sure. I don’t know how I’d feel about getting rid of them. They’re lies, but they’re part of our story, and so I leave them with Sylvie for now. Who do they belong to, anyway? Her? Me? Dougie?
A postcard comes, one day, for Gabe. It’s from Mexico – a picture of palm trees, aqua water. On the back, it says: I still miss him. Rosa.
Gabe
I’ll tell Gill, one day, about what happened between me and Rosa, and about what I nearly did to Murphy. I won’t tell her right now – she has enough demands on her, and I don’t want to place my mistakes at her feet, demand forgiveness of her when she’s already given so much. Sometimes the kiss with Rosa seems a small thing – at other times it takes on a huge weight. And sometimes I’m using a knife in the kitchen and I can’t believe it ever went that far – that I really carried a knife with me to Murphy’s house that night. The knife and the kiss are the same: nothing happened, but it was still too much.
It’s not for me to decide how much forgiveness any of this warrants. And Gill might not be interested in forgiveness. But we’ve done enough keeping of secrets, and soon it will be time to tell her. She may ask me to leave – I’ll understand if she does, and it will be no more than I deserve. But Dougie’s death has taught me that few people get what they deserve, so I find myself hoping that Gill and I will find a way through.
I’ll tell her, too, that I understand what she did. That there was a kind of courage in her refusal to let either Dougie or Sylvie go. I’ll tell her that it might not have been the right thing for us to do, but that it was right in the way that love is always right: because it has no choice.
What remains of love, after decades? Maybe it’s no more than a kind of selfishness: I want to be around her. When Gill drags a chair into the patch of sun on the front verandah and sits there reading the papers, I want to drag my chair next to hers. That doesn’t feel like a small thing.
We talk about the children. For hours, we pass our memories backwards and forwards to each other. Gill and I are handing each other back our children, dead and alive.
I don’t begrudge either of us the consolations that we sought. But it’s time to stop seeking.
The inquest comes and goes. I am not there. The coroner records a narrative verdict – some recommendations about due diligence for caving instructors in adverse weather. The findings seem restrained, sensible. I don’t read the whole report.
Sylvie is still at home. She doesn’t join us at the table yet, for meals. Instead, she eats secretly, in her room. It takes her two hours, sometimes more, to get through a bowl of cereal. There are days when it feels like all she does is eat – so many hours, for such tiny amounts of food.
But she does it. The bowls that she brings out of her bedroom are empty. I check, and check again, more carefully, but there’s no more sneaking food to SausageDog; no more of those hidden parcels of food, scrunched in balls of paper or silver foil and shoved in her wastepaper basket.
‘The wanting doesn’t go away,’ she says to me, when I ask her one night. ‘I just get better at managing it. The voice that says: You’re fat, don’t eat that, is still there.’ She shrugs. ‘But I know it’s a bullshit voice.’
The plan is for her to go back to school next year, and she’s studying already. She’s started using Dougie’s room to work in. Her books on his shelves; her Ugg boots under his desk. Some evenings Teddy joins her in there, lying on Dougie’s bed to read while Sylvie works at the desk. They still call it Dougie’s room, but it’s not dusty any more. I like to hear them talking together in there, their voices stopping and starting, while Gill and I sit together on the front verandah and watch the mountain propping up the clouds.
Teddy
After dinner Mum puts on the SBS news and Papabee says what he always says about Lee Lin Chin being handsome for a Chinawoman, and I shout, ‘You can’t say that, Papabee!’ and Sylvie says, ‘Actually, she’s not even from China – she was born in Indonesia,’ because Sylvie knows everything. And I remember the game Dougie used to play: one point for every time Papabee says something embarrassing, ‘and two points for casual racism’.
Mum’s started taking me to my soccer games, now Papabee doesn’t drive. Mum and Dad talked to Papabee and his doctor, and agreed that it was time to take away Papabee’s licence, and sell the car. He doesn’t really seem to realise. I still go to his place after school most days, but I catch the bus. Every now and again Papabee calls the police and tells them his car’s been stolen.
On Friday afternoons, when Sylvie goes to her therapist, Mum takes me to the bookshop café and we have cake and sometimes she buys me a book. ‘Because that’s what we need in our house,’ she says, rolling her eyes. ‘More books.’ She lets me eat the froth off the top of her cappuccino, and she listens to me tell her about school, and abo
ut how I’m teaching SausageDog to shake hands, and about how Alasdair-Down-The-Road stole a cigarette from his gran, smoked it, and coughed so much that he vomited.
I give Mum all my stories. I don’t think there are going to be any more prices paid for stories in our family. I think we’ve all paid enough.
Some of the names in our house have changed again. Mum’s calling Dad ‘Gabe’ now, and not ‘your father’, unless I’m asking her too many questions about the International Space Station and then she says, ‘Go ask your father.’ And Dougie seems to be Dougie again, and not Douglas, now that the lying’s done with.
We don’t talk about Papa J now – he’s come out of his name altogether. Maybe Sylvie talks about him to her therapist, or to Mum and Dad. I don’t know for sure – that’s her business. The dark water taught me that in the end you mainly save yourself, and that’s enough.
Mum and Dad are going to family therapy with Sylvie again. After the second session, I heard the three of them staying up late talking, and the next day the photo of Papa J and Dad was gone from the kitchen, and all that was left was the nail it used to hang on. I thought about the weird magic of nails, and I thought about how somebody can be like the Onceler in The Lorax: you only ever see a bit of them at a time, or see them in glimpses, and never really get the full picture. When I get angry at Papa J now, I don’t have anywhere to put all my anger, because he’s underneath that whole diggerload of dirt. But at least I know my anger doesn’t belong with Sylvie any more.
With all these names changing, I decide my name should change too. I’ve tried imagining being Bird-Teddy, Silverfish-Teddy, Crab-Teddy. It’s time to imagine what it’s like to just be Edward.
The Cookbook of Common Prayer Page 31