The Cookbook of Common Prayer E-Book

Francesca Haig

• Herausgeber: Allen & Unwin
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

When Gill and Gabe's elder son drowns overseas, they decide they must hide the truth from their desperately unwell teenaged daughter. But as Gill begins to send letters from her dead son to his sister, the increasingly elaborate lie threatens to prove more dangerous than the truth. A novel about family, food, grief, and hope, this gripping, lyrical story moves between Tasmania and London, exploring the many ways that a family can break down - and the unexpected ways that it can be put back together.

Leseprobe

Francesca Haig grew up in Tasmania and is an author and academic, whose poetry and YA/crossover fantasy have been widely published. She lives in London with her husband and son.

Published in hardback in Great Britain in 2021 by Allen & Unwin, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © De Tores Ltd, 2021

The moral right of Francesca Haig to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 91163 090 6Trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 91163 091 3E-book ISBN: 978 1 76087 480 3

Printed in Great Britain

Allen & UnwinAn imprint of Atlantic Books LtdOrmond House26–27 Boswell StreetLondonWC1N 3JZ

www.allenandunwin.com/uk

For James Upcher, 1979–2017.

Always brilliant,

always beloved.

Prologue

Dark water rising.

It comes up faster than you’d believe, but it doesn’t wait for your belief, or need it – the water is its own permission. It’s black, and cold enough to make your lungs clench. If you scream, or shout, you don’t hear it over the indifferent water. It swallows your words, swallows the world.

The water tells only one story, and it’s the story of water.

Teddy

It’s Papabee who taught me to understand stories. My grandpa read me so many stories that I learned how they can come outside of their pages, until a story is something you can move around in, like a house, or a forest, all dark up above and sideways and down below too.

When I was small (even smaller than I am now), Papabee used to read me The Lorax, and the bit at the start went into my head and never came out.

If you want to hear the story of the Lorax, the book says, you have to go and ask the Onceler. The Onceler’s a sort of monster-person that you never even see properly – just a glimpse of green hands, or a peek of eyes through a window. From way up high in his creepy tower, he sends down a bucket on a rope, and the only way to hear the story is to put in exactly the right things: fifteen cents, one nail, and a snail shell. Not just any snail shell, either – it has to be from an ancient snail, a grandfather four times over.

Papabee used to read me The Lorax over and over – it was one of our very best books. So since all the bad things started happening, and our house started to fill up with stories that nobody will tell, I’ve known exactly what to do. The stories are building up, like the dust in Dougie and Sylvie’s bedrooms. Mum and Dad are stuck, and Sylvie’s stuck, and Dougie’s stuck too, in his own way. Our whole family’s stuck tight, and nothing can be fixed until they find a way to make their stories word-shaped.

And everyone’s so busy being stuck that nobody notices me at all any more. I’m only small, after all – eleven years old and mainly knees and elbows, and always in the way, like SausageDog.

I know it’s not easy to make people tell the truth. I’m still learning about how there are different kinds of truths: the right ones and the wrong ones. When our cat died, my teacher said, ‘I’m sure she’s gone to a better place.’ I said, ‘I think he’s in the freezer at the vet’s.’ That’s the wrong kind of truth, apparently, because Mrs Conway made me pick up rubbish in the playground at recess, for being rude.

But I know how to fix my family, and how to shake the stories loose. Because of The Lorax, and Papabee, I understand something about stories that the others don’t: if you want someone to tell you their story, you have to find the price, and pay it.

Gabe

When we named him Douglas, we didn’t know that it meant dark water. Those were the days before endless online forums about baby names, and we chose Douglas without much deliberation, because it had been my grandfather’s name, and he’d died only a year before Gill got pregnant. I’d been close to my grandfather in a way I never was to my father. And Gill and I both liked how the name sounded: Douglas. The solidness of it; those reliable, hard sounds. When he was born, our first child, bunched up and wrinkled as a tissue that’s been through the wash, the name seemed to suit him.

It was only nineteen years later, after Dougie had died, that I found out what his name meant. I was staying up late every night, scouring the web for more details than the official accounts had given me. There’d been a flurry of coverage in the first few days – long articles in the local press, and short ones in the big national papers. After the first week, the reporting died down, and my nightly search threw up the same articles, which I could recite like scripture.

That night, nearly two weeks after he’d died, I typed in my usual search (Douglas Jordan Dead Cave Floodwater) and one of the hits, several pages deep into the search results, was a listing on a baby names website. Douglas (boy). Means: Dark water.

Ever since then I’ve blamed myself and Gill, accidental prophets. I blame us for choosing a name that turned out to be a promise.

PART ONE

Omelette for the day the police come toyour house to tell you that your son is dead

Take six eggs (large; ideally free range).Crack them, one by one, carefully separatingthe yolks and whites into two large bowls.

Throw them away.

Gill

This is how it happens:

There’s a knock on the front door. It’s Sunday, mid-morning. Teddy’s gone to soccer practice with Papabee and I’m back in bed with the papers, SausageDog asleep across my legs. Gabe, still in his dressing gown, is in the bathroom.

I get up, the dog protesting. I see them as soon as I reach the corridor. One man, one woman, their blue and white uniforms unmistakable even through the dappled glass panels of the door. I’m surprised it’s the police – in the past, whenever Sylvie’s gone downhill, the hospital has always called us. That’s how I know it must be really bad.

For a second I want to hide. If I never let them in – if I freeze, or drop very slowly to the ground so they can’t see my silhouette, and crawl back into the bedroom and never answer the door – then they’ll never be able to tell me the news.

They knock again, and call out, ‘Mr and Mrs Jordan?’

I can’t move. I’m frozen in a crouch, staring at the pattern on the hallway rug and trying to ignore the hammering on the door. From the bathroom I hear Gabe, voice thick with toothpaste. ‘Gill? Can’t you get that?’

I’m still stuck there, half-crouched on the rug, when he comes out from the bathroom, holding his toothbrush. He sees me, sees the police at the door.

‘Shit,’ he says, and goes straight to the door, and opens it.

Will I ever be able to forgive him for opening that door? If he’d just left them outside, and stayed here with me, the police would never be able to come inside and say the words, Your daughter has died.

But it isn’t our daughter. It’s our son.

When Dougie first went away for his gap year, I didn’t really grasp that he’d moved out until the pasta fell on me. The corner shop used to do a special pasta deal: five packets for five dollars. When Dougie was in high school, I’d pick up a pasta deal at least once a week. From the instant he hit puberty, he was always eating. He ate WeetBix in a pasta bowl because it was bigger than a cereal bowl; ten WeetBix at breakfast, and sometimes the same after school. Our fridge was crammed with cartons of milk, and still we couldn’t keep up. His friends were always coming over after school, and they’d cook pasta before heading off to hockey or basketball practice. Jars of cheap tomato pasta sauce; mounds of grated cheese. I was forever buying cheese – huge bricks of cheddar. Gabe and I used to laugh about it. ‘Jesus,’ he said, when we were out of cheese and milk again. ‘It’d literally be cheaper to buy a cow.’

Then Dougie left for his year away. After he’d been in England for five weeks, I still hadn’t consciously changed my regular shopping routine. One afternoon I opened the pantry and twenty-five packets of pasta came tumbling down on me from the top shelf. I sat on the cold tiles of the kitchen floor and cried. I wasn’t hurt – not even bruised. But it was the first time I really understood that Dougie had left home.

Now there are two strangers in my house telling me that he’s dead, and I think: I need a moment like the falling pasta to make it real. He’s already been away for more than four months. We’ve become used to not having him here, and it will take something as tangible as twelve and a half kilos of pasta falling on my head to prove to me that this is different. Then I could hold the fact of his death, as solid as all those crinkling packets of spaghetti and penne that I had to pick up from the floor. Instead, all I have are these police officers in their neatly ironed uniforms, and their words that I can’t make sense of: accident; caving; flash flood; coroner.

They use phrases that I’ve heard on TV shows – Perhaps you should sit down; We’re terribly sorry to have to tell you; Every effort was made – but the officers seem sincere. The man even has tears in his eyes while he explains what happened. He’s very young, probably only early twenties, with a few spots still lingering on his forehead. He sits opposite us, leaning forward as he talks, his shirt coming untucked at the back. I remember Dougie’s school uniform shirt, always untucked. I find myself comforting the policeman, saying, ‘It’s OK, don’t cry. Don’t cry.’

The dog, excited to have visitors, is trying to lick the policewoman’s ankle. His tail’s wagging, not just from side to side but round and round like the crank on my coffee grinder.

‘Do you have someone who can be with you?’ the policewoman asks, trying to push SausageDog away without being rude.

‘Sue,’ I say, at the same time as Gabe says, ‘We’ll be fine.’ I want Sue here – my best friend. I want somebody to translate the police officers’ words into something that I can understand. There’s a ringing in my ears. Several times I ask Gabe, ‘Can you hear that?’ and he keeps shaking his head.

I give the policeman my phone and he calls Sue. I hear his voice from the corridor. ‘If you can come straight away, I think that would help.’

‘We have to be there,’ Gabe says. ‘In London. I’ll book flights.’ He wipes the back of his hand across his eyes. ‘We’ll ask Sue if she’ll keep an eye on Teddy and Papabee. And Sylvie, too.’

‘Oh God,’ I say. ‘Sylvie. This’ll kill her.’

Gabe

The policeman gives us the number of the Buckinghamshire police. I get put through to a woman and I put the phone on speaker so Gill can hear too. The lady is nice – terribly, convincingly nice, as if what happened to Dougie is an unprecedented shock, even though it’s presumably her job to deal with death on a regular basis.

‘I’m afraid I can confirm that they found Douglas’s body last night.’

‘It can’t be him,’ Gill says immediately. Her eyes are jammed tight shut, her fists too. ‘It can’t be,’ she repeats. ‘It must be somebody else.’

‘There’s been a preliminary identification, and—’

Gill interrupts her. ‘Who?’

‘We’re confident that it’s Douglas, Mrs Jordan.’

‘That’s not what I meant,’ says Gill. ‘Who identified him?’

There’s a shuffling of paper. ‘A Rosa Campbell,’ the woman says.

‘Dougie’s mentioned her,’ I say. ‘She’s his girlfriend. She teaches there, at the school where he works.’ Should I say worked? Through which hole in language has my son slipped from the present to the past tense?

‘She could be wrong,’ Gill says. ‘How can she be sure it’s him?’

‘They know him.’ I look down at my hands. ‘Rosa’s his girlfriend, for God’s sake. If they’re sure, they’re sure.’ And it’s not as though the caves under the Home Counties are crammed with the bodies of young men, I want to add, but it seems too flippant, too harsh.

‘You can view Douglas’s body at the hospital,’ the woman says.

‘The hospital?’ I echoed, stupidly. I was expecting it to be a morgue, or a funeral home or something. Why is he at the hospital? He’s dead. He’s already been dead for – I counted hurriedly in my head – at least twenty hours. There’s nothing they can do for him at a hospital.

‘The deceased are kept at the hospital,’ she explained. ‘Until they can be released to the care of a funeral home.’

She gives me the number for the hospital, and the address of her own office. Gill’s crying more noisily now, so I end the call quickly, with apologies that the woman politely brushes away.

I’m angry at Gill for forcing me to be the sensible one. For taking all the hysteria for herself, and for leaving me to handle things: talking to the police; booking the flights. Meanwhile, Gill sobs, and rocks herself forwards and backwards, and the policeman says something about making us sweet tea, for the shock.

I walk to Gill and lean close to her, my forehead against hers.

‘How are we going to tell Sylvie?’ I ask.

Gill

‘How are we going to tell Sylvie?’ he asks.

I have no answer for him, so it’s a relief when Sue arrives, a shriek of brakes outside. She lets herself in the back door, all noise and tears. ‘Fuck,’ she says. ‘I can’t believe it. I can’t fucking believe it’s real. Is it real? You poor loves. My loves. How can it be real? Fucking fuck.’

She grips my hand and I grip back and I’m glad that she’s punctured the orderly calm of this scene, and the rehearsed condolences of the police officers. She clutches me to her, then Gabe, and then me again. My lungs are an accordion being squeezed. An atonal gasp bursts from me.

‘I’ll pick up Teddy and Papabee,’ she says.

I nod. I haven’t even been able to think properly about them yet. Teddy, and my dad.

Once, years and years ago, we left Teddy behind at the hockey club’s end-of-season barbecue at the reservoir. My sister, her partner, and their kids were staying, so there were four adults and six children. It was chaotic – Dougie had eaten too many chocolate bars and thrown up, and we were rushing to get home, herding the kids into two cars, everyone assuming Teddy was in the other car. We got halfway down Waterworks Road before I realised. When we rushed back we found Teddy, unaware we’d even left, playing with his friends among the trees by the water’s edge. For weeks afterwards I’d wake at night picturing him in the reservoir, the water closing over his little face.

Standing at the counter, I crack the eggs, one after another. I separate the yolks and whites, cradling each yolk in my palm while the white slips through my fingers to the bowl below.

‘I don’t think I can eat,’ Gabe says. ‘Can you?’

‘No,’ I say, and I keep cracking the eggs. When they’re all done, the yolks make a slurping noise as I tip them into the bin. The police officers must have gone; I didn’t even notice Gabe showing them out.

Footsteps outside the back door – Sue’s brought Teddy and Papabee back. She hasn’t told them anything yet, and my dad’s as oblivious as ever, but Teddy already knows something’s up.

‘Sue wouldn’t say what’s happened,’ he says, looking from Gabe to me and back again. His transparent plastic soccer mouthguard is still in his hand, like the teeth of a ghost.

We tell Teddy and Papabee together, because they do everything together and it doesn’t seem fair to separate them for this. Papabee doesn’t say anything at first, while Teddy cries, and collapses into Gabe’s embrace. Then Papabee says, ‘Why don’t you telephone Dougie? I’m sure if we just ring him, he’ll be able to sort all of this out.’ He picks up the remote control from the coffee table and holds it out to me. ‘Gillian – just telephone him.’

‘We can’t, Papabee,’ Gabe says, and eases the remote from my dad’s hands. ‘He’s dead.’

Then Teddy cries so much that he wets himself, which he hasn’t done for more than five years, and I’m grateful to have something to do, rushing to put on a load of washing and run him a bath. I sit on the edge of the tub, stroke his hair and tell him that we love him, which is true, and that it will be all right, which is not.

‘Teddy. Teddy-bear. Teddy,’ I say, kissing the top of his head.

He was never meant to be called Teddy. We named him Edward, Papabee’s name. Except we never called him that – people called him Teddy from the very start. At first, we always corrected them, said ‘No, it’s Edward.’ Then, when we started calling him Teddy too, we promised ourselves it would be just for a few years. Teddy’s OK while he’s little, we agreed; It’s cute for a baby – but not for a big boy, let alone a man.

But we didn’t ever get around to making the change. On his first day of school his teacher called him Edward, and Teddy didn’t answer because he didn’t even know that was his name.

I sit on the edge of Teddy’s bath. He’s lying on his back, staring at the ceiling. ‘Mum? Was it dark?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘In the cave,’ he says. He fiddles with his flannel, draping it over his bony knees. ‘Would it have been dark?’

‘I don’t know.’ I try to make my voice gentle. Teddy looks very small there, in the water.

‘I think it must have been dark,’ he says, ‘if it was a cave underground.’

I bend my head to his and stay there for a long time.

When I go back out to the kitchen, Sue’s making us sweet tea. Gabe’s taken Papabee into the living room, patiently explaining again and again what’s happened. Papabee says, ‘How extraordinarily sad,’ and ‘Quite, quite dreadful,’ over and over, but then he stoops to pat SausageDog, straightens again, and asks Gabe, ‘Will Sylvie and Dougie be joining us for dinner this evening?’

‘I know you won’t feel like it,’ Sue says to me, ‘but you should eat something.’ She opens the fridge. ‘Any eggs?’

I shake my head. ‘We’re all out,’ I say. I can’t explain why they’re all in the bin.

‘When are you going to tell Sylvie?’ Sue asks.

Teddy

I can hear Mum and Sue in the kitchen now, talking about Sylvie.

‘I don’t know how to tell her,’ Mum says. ‘Jesus Christ. This’ll be the end of her.’

‘Don’t say that,’ Sue says. ‘Sit down. Drink some tea. We’ll get through this.’

‘How?’ Mum says. ‘How, though?’

I lean my head back and let the water fill my ears, so I don’t have to hear Mum talking like that. I used to think Mum and Dad had all the answers. You think that, when you’re little. I’m still little – I can still stretch out in the bath and get my whole body underwater and my knees don’t even make an island – but lately I’m not so sure about Mum and Dad and answers.

When Mum and Dad were trying to tell me and Papabee about what had happened to Dougie, I couldn’t stop looking at the big pile of eggshells on the counter. I was trying to understand what Mum and Dad were saying, but I was also thinking about the eggshells, and why there were so many of them. And when an egg cracks, is it broken or is it coming true?

Papabee kept saying, ‘Quite, quite dreadful,’ but he said it like ‘Quate’ because he used to live in England, so his voice is posh even though he’s not posh at all. And I remembered how Dougie used to do a really good Papabee voice, when Papabee wasn’t around: Quate, quate extraordinary, Dougie would say, and do his big Dougie laugh. So I was hearing Papabee’s voice and Dougie’s at the same time and Mum and Dad’s too – until I couldn’t hear anything properly at all.

After a while, my ears got less muddled and noises started to creep back in. I could hear two seagulls outside doing their croaky seagull yells. The seagulls must know about Dougie, I thought. They get it. What the gulls were saying made more sense than all of Mum and Dad’s words. The seagulls were telling the whole truth about Dougie being dead. They were yelling, carrrrrr carrrrrr carrrr, and it sounded exactly right.

Then I did so much crying that I let go of everything, even my wee, all hot down my legs, way hotter than you’d think, and Mum was trying to clean me up and a bee had come in the window and Mum was saying to Dad, ‘For God’s sake can you deal with that?’ and it didn’t seem right that this moment should have become about wee and getting the washing on and chasing the bee out the window instead of Dougie being dead, which was The Big Thing.

While Mum was helping me out of my wet trousers and wrapping me in a towel, I listened to the gulls, and I thought, How do they know? How can they know this exact feeling? If I were a gull I’d fly away. Miles away. I’d fly straight up up up until our house is just a square of roof like on Google Maps and all the people are tiny LEGO-people, then tiny ant-people, then nothing at all. Right up as high as I could go and all I’d take with me would be my own gull-voice that sounds like gone gone gone.

I’d rather be Bird-Teddy, even if it meant eating worms. Warm mouth, worm mouth. I’d rather be any Teddy than this one. If I was Bird-Teddy, all my thoughts would be bird-thoughts and all my questions would have bird-answers, and none of my questions would be about caves.

I swish the bathwater with my fingers, then hold out my hand and watch the drips falling off the end of my fingers. How does the water always know how to point down? How does it find the way? How did it find Dougie, and what did he do? Dougie always seemed so big to me, but he’s never seemed bigger than now. My big brother drank the river, all the clouds and their rain. The whole wet sky and everything underneath. He drank all of it.

I lean my head back and close my eyes. I’m trying to figure out how Dougie being dead is going to work, and what language I can miss him in because I don’t know the words for this in English. Through the door I can hear that Mum and Dad and Sue are back to talking about Sylvie and how they’re going to tell her. Part of me wants to yell at them: Dougie’s dead! Why are you talking about Sylvie? I want Dougie’s death to belong all to him. But I know that it can’t – no chance – because everything that we do ends up being about Sylvie. It’s been like that for three whole years. Like a computer game that’s stuck on a loop, and everything always ends up back at the same bit: Sylvie. Sylvie.

The water’s dripping off my hands, little plink plink sounds, and I make up a little rhyme in my head, in time with the drips. A rhyme like in The Lorax or one of my other old picture books. Mum and Dad have two sons and a daughter. My sister in the Boneyard, my brother in the water.

There’s a word for Sylvie’s sickness, but I know a secret: it’s not really a disease at all. It’s a place.

It’s a place because we all live in it now, and there’s no outside of it. I call it the Boneyard. It smells of hospital (which smells like a toilet that’s just been cleaned), and it tastes of nothing, and if it had a colour it would be grey-blue, the exact colour of her skin and the hospital floor. That’s the Boneyard. We live there, since she got sick. I suppose Dougie lives there forever, now. He’s stuck in the Boneyard for good.

I have a sister. I have a brother. A sister in the Boneyard, a brother in the water. In the black water in the blackest cave. I have a sister made of books and bones. I have a brother made of dead.

I’d like to give Dougie back his own death, like a present. It’d be the worst present ever – even worse than socks, which is what Papabee always gives me for birthdays and Christmas. But if I can’t stop Dougie being dead, then at least I can try to give his death back to him.

That broken game again, stuck on a loop, round and round – because to give Dougie his death back, I have to fix Sylvie. Three years ago, something happened to my sister. Something broke in her. Just like that: snap. I never knew until then that a person can break, like a zip or a rubber band. I never knew a whole family could get broken too. I never knew a disease could be a place, and a whole family could live in it.

If I want to know what happened to Dougie, in the deep down blackness of that cave, I need to know what happened to Sylvie. I need to find out her story.

Sylvie

PART TWO

Gill

It doesn’t start out as such a big lie.

‘We can’t tell Sylvie yet,’ I say.

‘What are you talking about?’ Gabe asks. He’s finally got off the phone from the airline, and the phone’s still in his hand. Sue’s gone, and Teddy’s in his pyjamas, playing cards with Papabee at the dining table.

‘What are you talking about?’ Gabe says again. ‘We don’t have a choice.’

‘It’ll kill her.’

He’s silent, so I go on.

‘I’m not being melodramatic. The shock could literally kill her. You heard what they said about her heart.’ The nurse told us just last week, when she checked Sylvie’s obs, that if somebody came to A&E with a heart-rate like that, they’d be sent straight to intensive care.

When people say that the heart is a muscle, it’s not just some inspirational meme about love, circulated on Facebook by your annoying aunt. It’s a fact: the heart, that vigilant muscle, wastes away along with the rest of the body. If your body is starved for long enough, the heart loses mass. The walls get thinner, and weaker. The heart can’t pump enough blood, or stay steady. There’s only so long that the body can sustain that sort of strain. Ever since the day Sylvie stopped eating, her heart is a timer, counting down. The nasogastric tube keeps her alive by carrying food directly down her nose into her stomach, but whenever I look at it hanging from her nostril, I can’t help but see a fuse.

‘We can’t lie to her,’ Gabe says. I envy his faith in what’s right. He’s a good man. I knew it thirty years ago, when we were walking home from our second date and he bent to pick up a snail from the wet pavement and move it to the grass so it wouldn’t be crushed.

But I’m not a good person like he is. I’m a mother.

‘I want to do the right thing too,’ I say. ‘Of course I do. But not at any cost. It’ll kill her. You saw what happened, after Katie P died.’

Katie P was in the same ward as Sylvie. After Katie killed herself, Sylvie’s silence grew more and more implacable. The row of perfectly straight cuts on the inside of her left arm moved higher and higher. For her brief stays at home, we’d learned to hide all the knives and medicines in a locked box under our bed. But she used whatever she could lay her hands on. A chisel from the shed; a loose screw from the desk in Dougie’s room. Each time the doctors said she had to be readmitted, I felt guilty at my own relief. At least in hospital they could keep her safe.

Gabe shakes his head. ‘It’s not the same as when Katie died. Sylvie needs to know. He’s her brother, not just some girl she used to see around the ward.’

‘Exactly,’ I hiss. ‘If she was that bad after Katie died, imagine how badly she’ll cope with hearing about Dougie. She got sick right after your dad died, for God’s sake. She doesn’t exactly have a great track-record of dealing with loss.’

‘We can’t lie to her about this.’

‘We won’t be lying. We just won’t tell her yet.’

So my first lie is to Gabe, not to Sylvie. Because I already know that it will be more than just omission.

‘She’ll hear about it. Christ, Gill, this is Hobart. There aren’t any secrets here.’

‘How could she hear? There aren’t any laptops or phones allowed on the ward. No internet. She’s in isolation. Nobody can visit her without our permission – and we’ll tell our friends why they can’t say anything just yet.’

Paediatrics 3 is a completely controlled environment. Locked doors, and windows that don’t open. No mobiles, no internet access.

‘It’s not just the dodgy stuff online – all those pro-ana websites,’ the nurse had explained to me, when Sylvie was first admitted, and they made me take away her phone. ‘There are privacy implications for other patients, too, now that every phone has a camera. And stuff gets nicked all the time, so we discourage people from having valuables on the ward – that includes phones. And then there’s the cords.’

‘The cords?’ I asked.

‘Charging cords,’ she said. ‘You know, for phones and laptops.’

I still didn’t get it.

She raised her eyebrows and lowered her voice. ‘They’re a hanging risk.’

‘Of course,’ I said. But even as I said it, I was thinking, How did this become an ‘Of course’ moment? How have we arrived in a place where it’s considered obvious that our daughter will try to kill herself with anything she can form into a noose?

I grab Gabe’s hand. ‘It’ll only be a few days. We’ll tell her later. Just a few days. Maybe a week, while we get over to England and sort this out.’

Gabe doesn’t need to say it out loud. He just looks at me, and lets my words marinade in their own stupidity: Sort this out. As if it’s a muddled hotel booking, or a broken toe, and not my son in a morgue somewhere on the other side of the world.

‘Just a week,’ I repeat. ‘Just until she’s a bit more stable.’ Sylvie’s obs have been bad since last weekend. Heart-rate jumpy, blood pressure low. Before weigh-in on Tuesday a nurse caught her loading up with water, straight from the bathroom tap, and now she isn’t even allowed to go to the toilet unaccompanied.

‘Don’t make it more complicated than it already is,’ says Gabe.

‘Is there a simple way to do this?’ I snap. ‘I’m not an expert in dealing with my son’s death.’

‘Our son’s death,’ he says quietly.

Gabe’s right, of course. My grief leaves no room for his. There is only room for me and Dougie, just as there was when he was born, his face outraged, wrinkled and purple as the cross-section of a red cabbage. For weeks, a baby’s eyes can’t even focus enough to make out anything beyond the orbit of their mother’s face. It was just me and Dougie, so hungry that he almost took my left nipple off with the urgency of his suckling.

I’d never imagined that the fierce intimacy of those newborn days could be recreated, but now I learn that I was wrong. This is the same: the same reeling sleeplessness; the same raw-skinned, ripped-open love. It allows for nobody and nothing else – not even Gabe. I don’t claim that it’s right, or fair. But it’s a fact. Nobody warns you, before you give birth, about the savagery of that love – a love that starts when you’re still bleeding and does not stop.

I know that I have not lost a son. I’ve lost a thousand sons: the baby, milk-drunk and heavy-headed. The toddler, with his absolute determination to swallow stones. The six-year-old, with his growing fluency in his own body. The fourteen-year-old, mortified when I hugged him in public. The seventeen-year-old, who let Teddy beat him in arm-wrestles. The nineteen-year-old whom we put on the plane in January, hiding his nervousness behind bravado. The man he would have become, and the father he might have been, and all the hundreds of futures I’d imagined for him. I’ll never be able to count the many Dougies that were lost in that cave. It’s too much – too much for me, and certainly too much for Sylvie.

‘We can’t tell her,’ I say again.

‘Gill,’ Gabe says. ‘Love. You’re not thinking straight. You know we have to.’

‘I will not bury two of my children.’ My words are a freshly sharpened blade.

This time he doesn’t correct me, doesn’t say Our children.

Teddy’s quiet at bedtime. I figure it’s best if we keep to our normal routine as much as possible, so I brush his hair, and Gabe reads him two chapters of The Horse and His Boy and kisses him goodnight.

I know how to do this, I think, as we go through the evening’s rituals with Teddy. I know how to ease the knots from his curly hair. I know to put a clean glass of water on the bookshelf next to his bed, and to leave the door open just enough for SausageDog to get in and out in the night. I know how to be his mother.

But I don’t know how to be a mother to a dead child. What can I do for Dougie now? What does he need from me?

And how can I be a mother to Sylvie, who wants nothing from me except to be allowed to die?

‘Is it real?’ Teddy asks us, before I turn out the light. ‘Is he really dead?’

‘Yes, sweetheart,’ Gabe says. ‘I’m afraid so.’

For hours, Teddy’s question and Gabe’s answer rattle around in my head, the words coming loose. Is it real? Really? I’m afraid so. I’m so afraid.

Gabe

All through that night we barely sleep, and when I do slip into the oblivion of dreams, waking is a new torture.

‘Where has he gone?’ I say into the dark, not expecting an answer. ‘Where has he gone?’

I feel the shaking of Gill crying, her back pressed tight against mine.

In the morning, we drive to the hospital, leaving Teddy with Papabee.

Gill turns to me, before we get out of the car. ‘How do I look?’

‘You look beautiful.’

‘You know what I mean. Do I look like I’ve been crying?’

‘A bit,’ I say. ‘We both do. But it won’t be the first time she’s seen us like this.’ We’ve done plenty of crying in the parked car outside the hospital over the last three years.

It’s only going to be for a little while, I say to myself, as we walk up the hospital stairs. A white lie; a stopgap, until Sylvie’s stronger. Until Gill and I can say Dougie’s name without our breath faltering. We’ve spoken to Louise, Sylvie’s doctor – she’s agreed that we can’t break the news to Sylvie until we’re back from London to support her. Louise has given the order to the nurses – nobody to say a word.

Sylvie has lied to us every day, for years. Yes, I drank my Sustagen. No, the doctors said I could exercise as long as it’s only an hour a day. Yes, I put butter on my toast like the dietitian said. I don’t hold it against her – it’s part of her illness, we know that. But it still makes it easier to justify this lie.

Anorexics are wonderful liars. They’re accomplished magicians. Watch for the meals slipped to the dog, or into a hand, or a sleeve, and palmed off into the bin. The little parcels of food concealed everywhere.

And the greatest lie of all, the climactic disappearing trick: the body itself, vanishing.

How did Dougie learn this trick, to disappear so completely?

Gill

We try to hug Sylvie, but she’s adept at leaning away from our embraces, and turning her face from our kisses. Today, I barely notice. I’m concentrating on not sobbing. I start the words that I practised in my head, all through last night.

‘Sweetie, we have some bad news.’ It isn’t all lies you see – it’s a version of the truth. ‘There’s been an accident, on a caving trip that Dougie was doing. A flash flood, and he was hurt. Nothing serious, thank God, but he broke his leg. It’s been a nasty scare. He’ll be in hospital for another few days, and he’ll be stuck on crutches for at least six weeks. Probably more.’

She looks very young, her mouth opening and staying open.

‘Jesus,’ she says. ‘Is he OK?’

‘He’s fine,’ I say, a little too quickly. ‘The leg’s painful, and it was a frightening experience, but he’s going to be fine. But we really ought to go – just to help him get back on his feet. He won’t be able to work for at least a month. And when we told him we were coming, and we’d be there for my birthday, he went online and got us tickets to the Chelsea Flower Show.’

Gabe shoots me a look at this unexpected piece of improvisation. I think, Sylvie’s not the only accomplished liar in this family. Just watch me.

‘I’ve always wanted to go,’ I say.

‘I can’t think of anything worse than being dragged around the Chelsea Flower Show,’ Gabe says, and rolls his eyes. ‘The things I do for your mother.’

I know he isn’t talking about the flower show, and I squeeze his hand.

‘But Dougie’s OK?’ Sylve asks. It’s the first time in a long time that she’s asked for anything from us. She and Dougie have always been so close. How can I refuse her?

‘Of course.’ I lean closer and say conspiratorially, ‘But I think he’s missing us, though he’d never admit it. He tries to act so grown up, but this whole thing’s given him a shock. And it’s a bad break, the leg. There might be more operations needed, depending on how it heals. So we’re flying out tonight.’

‘OK,’ she says, nodding. Even through her pyjama top I can see her ribs poking out, a birdcage made of bones. I try not to think about her bones, or Dougie’s.

Gabe sees me pause and picks up where I left off. ‘Papabee will help out with Teddy,’ he says. ‘And Sue and Dan are going to keep an eye on both of them, and you too.’

But already Sylvie’s withdrawing from us again, and she just shrugs. The nasogastric tube comes out of her right nostril, is taped in place across her cheek, and tucked behind her ear. It’s connected to the feeding pump that hangs from the drip-stand by the bed. The pump makes its rhythmic, gassy hum. Shhhhh. Shhhhh.

On the drive back home, I rest my hand on Gabe’s leg. He’s wearing old corduroy trousers, the ridges soft under my fingers. He puts his hand on top of mine and squeezes tight. The lie we’ve told feels more irrevocable than a promise. More than a marriage vow.

Sylvie

Mum and Dad leave me with my silence, and it rises around me like water.

(Doing this to myself isn’t the hard bit. The hard bit is doing this to them.)

Did it hurt, when Dougie broke his leg, and how much? Was he afraid? I know about fear (don’t ever make the mistake of thinking I am not afraid). I know all the shapes of it. If Dougie were here, and if I could find my way back to talking, I’d like to ask him about the shape of his fear, when the water flooded the cave.

I can’t imagine Dougie laid up with a broken leg. He’s always doing something. Always the basketball bouncing on the driveway; the cricket ball thrown against the side of the house. Visiting me in the hospital, he could never sit still. He’d rock backwards and forwards on his chair; sometimes he’d borrow a wheelchair and balance on the back wheels at the same time as talking to me. I hardly ever spoke back, but since he went away, I miss those visits. I used to watch him from my hospital bed, and think: How does he do that? How does he occupy his body without thinking about it?

He’s always been like that. I used to be like that too.

Nothing changes. Everything changes. All those summers at the old house at the Neck, always the same and always different. The tin dinghy tied under the jetty was there one year and gone the next. Still the same bit of loose carpet tripped us on the stairs; the same shelf in the fridge was broken. One year the sea was full of jellyfish, suspended in the water like kites, trailing their tentacles, and only Dougie dared to swim. For an entire summer it didn’t rain, the huge tin water tanks nearly empty, so that if a cricket ball hit them they rang like a gong. Papabee got sunburnt on his bald spot, and when we tried to rinse the sand from our feet, the outside tap was too hot to touch. The creek near the blowhole disappeared, then returned with the autumn rains. Teddy got too big for me to carry. Still the cockatoos gave the same cry from the pine tree behind the house. Papabee offered to make the lunch and on the beach we unwrapped nine very neat marmalade and lettuce rolls. Sue and Dan’s daughter Ella was away that year, on a school exchange to Spain. Dad’s dad, Papa J, came down from Sydney for the whole summer. Ella came back again. With a rolled-up newspaper I squashed a mosquito high up on the bathroom wall. The mark stayed there all summer – a black smear, with a tiny splat of my own blood.

Gill

It’s dark when Sue arrives to watch the sleeping Teddy, and we take a cab to the airport. Gabe loads the suitcase into the boot. I can’t remember anything that I packed, though we must have done it. We must have stood in our room and chosen things, and put them in the case. How is it possible that we did this? Gabe will have taken care of it, I think, though I know it’s unfair to expect him to be any more lucid than I am.

I close my eyes and let myself imagine that, instead of the airport, we’re going to Eaglehawk Neck – to Sue’s family’s beach house, where we’ve been going since before our kids were born. Instead of this taxi, I imagine we’re in our rusty white station wagon, Papabee and the kids in the back. Dougie and Sylvie are elbowing each other for more space, and SausageDog’s drooling on Teddy’s lap. There at the Neck, that thin stretch of land linking the Tasman Peninsula to the rest of Tasmania, the old house will be waiting for us, the broken fly-wire on the windows curling at the corners. Sue and Dan, with Nathan and Ella, will be there already, and we’ll park in the shade of the macrocarpa trees, and everything will be just as it always was. Spiders will scoot between cracks in the walls; the stack of boogie-boards will be leaning against the shed. Dougie and Nathan will cheat at cards, and Sylvie and Ella will sunbathe on the water tanks, and Teddy will fall asleep on the couch, trying to stay up as late as the big kids. My children will go barefoot on the beach, and the air will smell of sun cream and distant bushfires. Nothing will have changed.

I force my eyes open. We’re going to the airport, not the Neck. The taxi sweeps past Cornelian Bay and along the riverfront, the city ahead of us, spread out along the river’s western shore, and the mountain looming above it. Then we turn onto the bridge, and I lean my forehead against the glass window, watching the other lanes of traffic and the river beyond.

The Tasman Bridge fell once, in the mid-seventies. A ship crashed into the pylons and brought half the bridge down, killing twelve people. I wasn’t even living here then, but if anyone in Hobart ever tells you they haven’t thought about that crash as they drive across the bridge, they’re lying. We’ve all done it – imagined that forty-five metres of falling. Asked ourselves: What if the kids were in the car? What would I do? Would my last words be Brace, or Get out, or I love you? How would I spend my last breaths, my last moments? We’ve all done it – prodded ourselves in the tender places of our hearts, trying on somebody else’s heartbreak. Edging as close as you dare to somebody else’s disaster. Until you wake one day in your own disaster, a perfect fit.

The letter ambushes me while we’re waiting at the boarding gate, and I’m rifling through my handbag for an aspirin. There are various bits of paper in there – my boarding pass, half-finished recipe notes, old receipts. Then I see Dougie’s handwriting. The letter is addressed to Sylvie Jordan. I remember taking it from the letterbox a few days ago and putting it in my handbag to take to Sylvie in hospital – but after the news I completely forgot.

Sitting in the plastic chair beside Gabe, I hold the envelope like it’s a bomb, or a gift. Dougie’s writing across the front; his saliva on the seal on the back.

Since he went to England, he’d written to Sylvie every couple of weeks. Real letters, because she isn’t allowed any internet. For all my moans of ‘Would it kill you two to include Teddy?’, I’ve always been quietly proud of how close Dougie and Sylvie were. Before she got sick, I used to love seeing them walking on the beach at the Neck, those two sets of footprints close together, and Teddy trailing behind. I liked hearing the big kids talking in Dougie’s room, after dinner. I even liked the way their voices stopped when Gabe or I walked past the door.

If they hadn’t been so close, her descent into silence wouldn’t have hit him so hard. If they hadn’t been so close, I’d be able to contemplate telling Sylvie the truth.

He always sent the letters to the house, because she’d changed wards a few times, and we’d learned that the hospital mail room was unreliable at best. So the letters came to the house, and we’d take them into hospital for her.

‘Gabe,’ I say, nudging him. ‘Gabe.’

He knows it straight away for what it is. When he takes the letter from me he holds it as though he should be wearing gloves, like a curator at a museum with some priceless artefact. He swallows, then clamps his eyes shut.

‘Jesus,’ he says. ‘Jesus.’ He presses the envelope to his forehead, leaning forward and rocking slightly.

‘This must be the last one, right?’ I ask. ‘If it came just the other day?’ Gabe straightens, and we check the postmark. It was posted a little over a week ago. Dougie wrote to Sylvie regularly, but not weekly. There will be no more.

Gabe’s still holding the envelope, but he makes no move to open it. ‘Keep it safe,’ he says. ‘We’ll have to give it to her when we’re back.’

Teddy

In the morning, Mum and Dad have gone, but I don’t even have any room to be sad about it because all my sadness is full up with Dougie.

Even though it’s Monday, Sue says I don’t have to go to school today. I tell her that Papabee can drop me at the hospital instead.

‘Are you sure you want to go?’ Sue asks.

I nod. Definitely. It’s definitely better than sitting at home watching Sue try not to cry, or watching her try to tell Papabee again and again what’s happened. Going to see Sylvie is the opposite of that, because there isn’t allowed to be any telling about Dougie.

‘It’s not that we want to lie to her,’ Dad said before they left last night. ‘But she’s just not well enough to deal with it. We need to think carefully about how to tell her, and when.’

I get it. I know what he and Mum are thinking about, because when Sylvie first got sick I Googled anorexia and it says twenty per cent mortality, which is one in five. And it seems like Sylvie might be the one in five, because her words stopped, ages ago, and her skin’s all grey and kind of scaly, like the feet of the pigeons that hang around the rubbish bins in Franklin Square. On her left wrist there are scars I’m not meant to notice, all purple and shiny. If she dies, as well as Dougie, then the Boneyard will never finish for us. We’ll all be there forever.