‘She’s taking F.H.B. a bit literally, isn’t she?’ he said. But I was too tired to laugh. I’d just come back from the hospital, where Sylvie had ignored me to lie with her face to the wall.
Teddy overheard Dougie’s question. ‘Does she think there isn’t enough food?’ Teddy asked. He was barely nine then, when Sylvie was first hospitalised. ‘Is that it? You should show her the top of the cupboard, where all the tins are, and the big packets of pasta.’
‘That’s not it,’ I said. ‘Dougie was just making a joke. It’s got nothing to do with not having enough food.’
‘Plenty of food at my place too, Gillian,’ said Papabee, looking up from the newspaper. ‘Only have to ask.’
‘No, Papabee, that’s fine,’ I said, trying to keep my voice calm. ‘Thanks, but it’s all fine.’
I’d been so glad when Sylvie suddenly showed an interest in cooking. After she turned fourteen, she was suddenly in the kitchen all the time, watching at first and then joining in. And I was secretly smug about it. While some other girls her age were trying out their fake IDs at Knopwood’s pub, Sylvie was in the kitchen with me, learning how to pierce a drizzle cake with a skewer so the sugar syrup penetrates all the way down to the bottom.
‘Maybe she’ll be a chef too,’ I said to Sue. We were watching Sylvie making an apple cake; layering thin slices of apple in the base, pressing them flat with her fingertips.
‘She’ll be better than you soon,’ Sue said. ‘I’m gonna ditch you as a client and take on Sylvie instead.’
During the hospital years, I ran through those moments again and again: Sylvie in the kitchen, by the window, lifting the beaters from the cake mix; holding them high to check the consistency of those viscous ribbons of batter; using a wooden spoon to shift the last scraps from the beaters to the bowl.
I should have known then. Anyone else would have licked the spoon.
Papabee was the first to realise what Sylvie was up to. ‘Do you think Sylvie ought to be quite so thin?’ he said to me, one day after dinner, when the kids had left the table.
‘She’s just growing,’ Gabe said, stacking the plates.
‘And you know what she’s like,’ I added, reaching over Papabee’s shoulder for his glass. ‘We can’t keep her out of the kitchen. She eats all the time.’
Papabee didn’t argue with us, because he never argues with us. But what I should have understood was that cooking all the time isn’t the same as eating all the time.
Sylvie made cakes for birthday parties, special occasions, and for no reason at all. Dougie loved it – he was sixteen, and always hungry. He’d grab a slice of something every time he passed through the kitchen. Or he’d sit on the counter while she cooked, Sylvie slapping his hand away when he tried to swipe the choc chips or scraps of shortcrust pastry.
Then we could no longer ignore the way her collarbones had grown sharp as a wire coat hanger under her skin. She kept getting thinner, and I got fatter. In those months before her admission, she was baking so much, and was so insistent. Every afternoon, something new from the kitchen: rugelach biscuits, rolled tight like little fists; Baklava, layer after layer of pastry, heavy with sugar syrup and encrusted with pistachios. ‘Go on,’ Sylvie would say, ‘I made it for you.’ My clothes grew tight across my hips, and when I took off my trousers the waistband left a mark, a ring bisecting my waist. I had wandered into one of those fairy tales or myths, where the witch-mother consumes the child.
Sylvie never ate the things she made. ‘Go on,’ she’d say, when Gabe patted his full stomach, or when I waved away the offer of another slice of carrot cake. ‘I made it for you.’ She and Dougie had always been close, but there was something new in the way she watched him eat now. His hunger, and her hunger. When she offered us the cakes she’d made, she wasn’t offering – she was goading. ‘Go on,’ she’d say, again and again. ‘Mum will have seconds, won’t you, Mum.’
She loved cooking for us. And she did love us – that wasn’t counterfeit. She loved us, and she despised us. She loved us, because she despised us. Such a precise combination of love and disdain, generosity and disgust – she balanced it carefully, like the cinnamon and powdered ginger in the gingerbread men that she pressed out on the flour-dusted countertop. Each time she baked, and we ate, it was proof of our weakness, and her strength. She was reshaping our bodies, and her own. Pressing down with the cookie cutters, sharp and exact.
In the end, we had to refuse. My clothes didn’t fit any more, and she was sharpening, all angles and edges. I didn’t want to exile her from the kitchen, but we couldn’t let it continue. When she bent to open the oven door, I couldn’t take my eyes off her spine, that dorsal ridge of bone.
‘We have to be strict about it,’ Gabe said to me and Dougie. ‘It’s getting ridiculous.’
‘No more cakes?’ Dougie asked, with a theatrical moan. ‘Are you serious?’
‘No more cakes,’ I said. ‘Not unless she eats them too.’
So we sat her down, still in her apron. The apron strings that used to tie at the back now passed all the way around, tied at the front in a triumphant bow.
‘We mean it,’ I told her. ‘We won’t eat what you cook unless you eat it too.’
And that was the end of it. She didn’t cook another thing.
The policeman’s still answering Gabe’s questions. Something about how Dougie’s body was removed from the caves – the difficulty of manoeuvring it through the narrow tunnels. I think of Dougie’s mouth full of water. Sylvie’s mouth, always empty. Sylvie’s hands, clenched around her silence. Dougie in the kitchen, when Sylvie cooked, his hands, snatching at scraps of pastry. His hands, reaching for air.
I want to slip back to the bedroom, to where Dougie’s opened letter still sits inside my book. I want to take the book to the toilet, lock the door, and read the letter again and again. I’m actually missing home more than I expected. I miss the Neck – miss being in the sea. I want Dougie’s voice in my head, not the policeman’s.
‘The caves aren’t re-opened to the public yet,’ the policeman says. ‘And before they are, our own investigators will be searching them thoroughly.’
Don’t, I want to say. Block up every entrance. Set explosives and bring the whole thing down.
Teddy
The newspapers at Papabee’s flat give me the idea. He forgets to chuck things out, so the newspapers always pile up next to the loo, and Mum and Dad have been in London for four days, so they haven’t been able to come up to his flat to clear out the rubbish. I’m sitting on the loo at Papabee’s, looking at the newspapers, and reading some of the headlines:
Deadly Superbug Thriving in Australia
Leaked Brexit Email Claims David Cameron has ‘Starved’ NHS
So many stories squished in those folded-up pages. If Sylvie isn’t going to tell me her story herself, then maybe I can find it in there.
‘Can you please help me with a history project, for school?’ I ask Papabee, when I come out. ‘I have to look at some old newspapers.’
He drives me to the library. When he parks in Bathurst St, it takes him twelve goes of back-and-forward to get into the right spot. Counting Papabee’s tries at parking is a game Dougie used to play. The record is nineteen. That time, Dougie and Sylvie and I were all in the back seat, counting in whispers, and we laughed so much that Dad turned around and said if we were rude to Papabee he’d make us walk home.
Could some of Dougie’s laughing still be here, stuck in the back of Papabee’s car, wedged down the side of the seats and in the footrests, along with bits of biscuit, and pieces of SausageDog’s hair? I like the idea that Dougie might have left something behind.
Even after twelve goes, the back of the car still pokes out a bit into the road.
‘A somewhat rakish angle,’ Papabee says, looking over his shoulder. ‘But it will have to do.’
In the library, I ask the man at the counter if we can see the old newspapers.
‘How old?’ he says.
/> ‘From 2012,’ I say. It was 2013 when Sylvie first went into hospital, but I figure I’d better look a bit further back than that, just in case.
‘Looks like you and I have very different definitions of old,’ the man says, then smiles at Papabee as if they’re sharing a joke.
Papabee smiles back politely. ‘Indeed,’ he says.
‘Indeed’ is like a disguise for Papabee – he says it all the time. It’s good manners, and it makes it sound like he agrees, without showing that he doesn’t understand. I’ve even tried it myself, a few times. Once Dad was helping me with my French homework, and he said, ‘You haven’t made the verb agree with the subject.’
‘Indeed,’ I said – but it didn’t work, because Dad just looked at me funny, and Dougie laughed and said, ‘Why are you talking like someone from the olden days?’
The man behind the counter points us down to the basement, where another librarian asks us, ‘Local or interstate papers?’
‘Both, please,’ I say. I’m not quite sure of the difference, but it’s safer to look at both. I want to do this job properly.
She shows us how to log in to see the old newspapers online – the Mercury and The Age and The Australian and The Guardian Weekly. All the ones that I can remember seeing around our house, because they’re the ones Sylvie would’ve seen. I scroll and scroll, stopping whenever I see a headline that looks interesting.
Some of them are about things I sort of remember, even though I was only eight or nine back then:
Man kills family at health spa
Health plea for asylum centre
Terrorists break hearts of Tassie victim’s family
Others I can’t understand at all, even now:
Medicare gap widens: Doctors raise fees but rebate frozen in Budget
Victory for besieged MP Commission clears Thomson of electoral breaches
We spend almost two hours there. Papabee doesn’t get bored. It’s one of the things I like most about him. He never hurries me along, like other people always seem to. A few times he asks me to remind him what we’re there for, and I tell him again that it’s a history project, and he has a few goes of scrolling up and down the screen, and says, ‘What an ingenious contraption.’ We stay there until it’s nearly six, and the librarian is stacking things on her desk, extra noisy, and staring at us, and finally she starts turning off the lights in the far side of the basement, so we have to leave. I realise that, for the whole time, I haven’t thought about Dougie being dead.
‘Did we find what we were looking for?’ Papabee asks, when we’re walking up the stairs.
‘I’m not sure,’ I say.
I’ve written down a few of the headlines that seemed most important – the ones that are so scary or sad they might’ve got stuck in Sylvie’s brain, playing over and over like a song you can’t get out of your head. The ones that might have scared her enough to make her stop eating.
Children will be exposed to the worst effects of climate change, says UNICEF
Doctors involved in terror torture
After the bloodshed, Cairo begins grim search for relatives
I can see how those kinds of stories could’ve made Sylvie afraid, or upset. But the rest of us were around back then too, and saw the same headlines, and we didn’t stop eating.
While Papabee’s driving backwards and forwards and backwards again, trying to squeeze out of his parking spot, I re-read the headlines in my notebook. I know I have to choose really carefully. I got it wrong when I tried to give Sylvie my Papa J money. If I’m going to find the price that will make Sylvie’s secrets come rushing out, it has to be exactly the right thing.
Even before we get back home, I already know that the newspapers aren’t what I need. The history in all those headlines is too big. It isn’t going to answer my questions about Sylvie. It’s the wrong kind of history – politicians and countries and tornadoes; big news stories. The kind of history I need is smaller, and closer to home.
When we come in, Sue yells out from the dining room. ‘TeddyandPapabee? That you?’
Before Papabee moved here from England, I was just Teddy. Or, a lot of the time, HurryUpTeddy or NotRightNowTeddy or (from Sylve or Dougie) ShutUpTeddy. When Papabee came, the big kids were almost teenagers, big and busy with homework and sports practice and sleepovers, and without much room in their lives for an old man, or a little boy. But I was five when Papabee came, and it turned out he had exactly the right amount of room in his life for me, and I had exactly enough room in my life for Papabee. He arrived, and we turned into TeddyandPapabee.
Sue’s dishing up dinner – it’s one of the casseroles that people keep dropping off since Dougie died, and since the Mercury had Hobart Boy Killed in Cave Tragedy on the front page. Sue’s started calling them ‘Death Casseroles’. There’ve been a lot of them. If you could measure how bad something is in casseroles, Dougie’s death is Nine Casseroles worth of bad.
‘Jesus, Teddy,’ Sue said the day before, bringing in another two casseroles from the front verandah. ‘You’re going to need a bigger freezer. We’re all set for the apocalypse now.’
I thought: Maybe this is the apocalypse. Maybe it’s not like in the movies, with aliens or bombs or asteroids, and all the capital cities blowing up, one after another. The White House – Boom. The Sydney Opera House – Boom. Maybe this is how it really happens, instead: a little apocalypse, one person at a time. Sylvie – Boom. Dougie – Boom.
So we eat the lasagne that Sharon-Over-The-Road made for us, and nobody talks about Dougie, or Sylvie, or where Mum and Dad are. After dinner I don’t have any homework, so we watch Pride and Prejudice, the old one that Sylvie loved, before she got sick. When the episode’s over and we turn the lights back on, Papabee says, ‘Ah. It appears that the dog has eaten my trousers.’ He stands up and we can see he’s right – the whole time that the dog was nuzzling and snuffling at his feet, Sausage was actually eating right around the bottom bit of both Papabee’s trouser legs, very neatly. Sue and I start laughing, and Papabee’s laughing as well, and saying, ‘Goodness me,’ and now that his trousers are cut off short I can see that his socks don’t match, one grey and one black, and that makes it even funnier, and we’re all laughing, and I think about Dougie, who used to make us all laugh, and Sylvie, who lost her laugh like Papabee losing his car keys. And I wonder how these three things can be true at the same time: that Dougie’s dead, and Sylvie’s in hospital, and the dog ate Papabee’s trousers. What kind of day is it, that can hold three things like that at once?
Mum and Dad ring when I’m in my pyjamas.
‘We miss you,’ Mum says. ‘Are you being good for Sue?’
I tell them about Papabee’s trousers, and Mum says, ‘Oh God, it probably says something about how grubby his suit is. We’ll get him a new one when we’re back.’ And I can tell the real funniness of it isn’t making it all the way to London, where it isn’t night-time, and they can’t see Papabee’s trousers or his odd socks.
‘What time is it there?’ I ask.
‘Morning,’ Dad says. ‘Ten o’clock.’
‘Which day?’
‘Tuesday, same as there,’ he says.
It’s Tuesday night here, which means Dougie has been dead for longer here than there. And even though I know that’s not actually how time zones work, I wish Mum and Dad had been able to keep flying, round and round the world chasing the time difference backwards all the way to the moment Dougie died, back far enough to stop him. And then back even further, right back to before Sylvie got sick, to stop her too.
I first noticed Sylvie getting skinny at the Neck.
I mean, I’d noticed already that she was getting skinny. But I didn’t know whether or not it was normal. I didn’t know what happened to girls’ bodies when they were teenagers. Just before that same summer, Sue’s Ella had come back from her exchange in Spain suddenly taller, and thinner, and with boobs that she never had before. So I thought maybe getting skinny was part of turning into a
woman, like boobs and periods.
But at the Neck, when I saw Sylvie in her bathers, I realised she wasn’t normal-skinny. She was a kind of skinny that made me want to stare and look away at the same time. She’d changed colour, too. The rest of us got browner and browner that summer, but even though Sylvie lay on the beach like the rest of us, she stayed a kind of grey-blue. When she helped me to zip up my wetsuit, her hands on the back of my neck were freezing cold.
I hoped the Neck might fix her, because of the magic that’s there. Every year, I start to feel the magic as soon as we get close. The drive takes an hour, but we usually stop at Forcett to buy a box of cherries from the truck at the side of the road. We eat the cherries, redder than any red thing, while we drive, and Dougie and I spit the pips out the window. One day there’ll be cherry trees growing all the way along the highway, both sides.
Across the skinny bit of land at Dunalley, the bush gets thicker, and I know that we’re coming into the magic. When we open the car doors and I hear the waves going shhhh shhhh, I know for sure that the sea never stops telling itself secrets. I can feel the magic even when nothing’s happening, which is the most happening thing of all, because at the Neck I can notice that the sky’s happening, right up there, and the big trees behind the house are happening too, and the seagulls, and my body, all of it, busy with happening.
The magic at the Neck isn’t magic like the man with the fake moustache pulling a rabbit out of a hat at Alasdair-Down-The-Road’s birthday party. It’s not good magic or bad magic – the magic at the Neck is crabshell gumtree bushfire magic, and it belongs to itself and you can’t even argue with it. It’s magic like the big eagle that flies above the beach, going round and round, writing O O O on the sky.
When we were younger, we used to go searching for Tasmanian Tigers in the bush above the beach, getting ourselves so excited that we could almost believe we could see their striped fur through the trees. Back at home I don’t believe in Tasmanian Tigers – I know they’ve been extinct since the olden days. But at the Neck, I can believe in anything. I can almost smell the Tigers hiding there in the bush – a doggy smell, like SausageDog but more wild. Sharp smell, like the smell of being afraid or being excited, or both.
The Cookbook of Common Prayer Page 7
