We say it and say it and say it and we might even believe it.
More than anything else, of course I blamed myself. All teenage girls turn on their mothers. I did it myself, when I was that age – for at least four years, I rolled my eyes at every single thing my mother said, and smoked cigarettes out of my bedroom window, just to annoy her. So when Sylvie stopped eating, it felt like a very particular attack on me. When she refused food, it couldn’t help but feel pointed.
When she was first admitted to hospital, I asked her, ‘What did I do wrong? What did your dad and I do wrong?’
‘For fuck’s sake, Mum,’ she said. ‘It’s not always about you and Dad. This isn’t about you.’
‘Language,’ I said, automatically. But I didn’t care about her swearing – I cared about her dying. Her words – This isn’t about you – were a relief and a blow, at once. Whatever had claimed her, we didn’t even figure in it. It wasn’t about me – it was about her, and about food.
But I’m a chef, a food-writer – how can I separate myself from food? How does a mother separate herself from her daughter?
For the first week or two after I got back from London, people kept bringing meals around, and we ran out of vases for the flowers. An expensive bouquet of lilies was stuffed into the laundry jug; a dozen roses crammed into an empty peanut butter jar; the whole house reeking of flowers on the point of going bad. But by the time the last casseroles have been eaten, and the last of the flowers have dropped their petals and been dumped in the compost bin, I’ve realised that when somebody dies, nothing else stops. I still have to file my articles; Teddy’s school uniforms still pile up in the laundry basket; and Papabee crashes his car. I’m in the passenger seat, on the way back from helping him with his weekly shop, when he rounds a corner at about five miles an hour and steers with stately magnificence straight into the back of a parked car.
‘Ah,’ he says.
While I write a note with my contact details, to tuck under the other car’s windscreen wiper, Papabee keeps saying, ‘Far the simplest thing is for me to write them a cheque for a hundred dollars.’ It’s the same thing he says every time he gets a bill, whether it’s forty dollars for the newspaper subscription, or twelve-hundred dollars to the plumber for a new boiler.
‘You sure he’s still safe to drive?’ Sue asks, when she rings me that evening.
‘Of course he’s safe.’ I’m surprised at the impatience in my voice. ‘He barely dented the car. His driving’s fine – it’s only navigating that’s a problem. Or losing the car.’
This happens a couple of times a month. He’ll forget where he’s parked the car, or he’ll drive down to the shops, then leave the car there, and walk home. Back at his flat, he sees the car missing from the parking space and calls the police to report it stolen. These days the local police switchboard has a note on file, telling officers to call me before they file a report on his stolen car.
‘Him and Teddy together most afternoons,’ says Sue. ‘Talk about the blind leading the blind.’
‘They’re fine,’ I say. ‘And what am I supposed to do? I can’t manage the school run, work and hospital every day without Papabee’s help.’
I don’t say, out loud, the other reason I’m so grateful to have him around as much as possible now – because at night, when he’s gone home, and Teddy and I are alone, Teddy’s questions start. He lies on his side in bed with the dog tucked behind his knees, and asks me in his small voice:
‘Do dead people get cold?’
‘Does it hurt to drown?’
‘Does a dead person know that they’re dead?’
I don’t have the answers to those questions, because they’re the questions I would ask too, if I dared. Instead I say, ‘You’ll have to talk to your father about that, sweetheart.’
I must’ve said that a lot, because today I say it again and Teddy asks, ‘How come Dad’s the expert in Dead Stuff?’
I don’t have an answer for that either. If I did, it would be something to do with Gabe being braver than me. Something to do with me being here, with Teddy and Sylvie, where there’s no room, and no time, to face those questions.
That’s why I cling to those times when Papabee’s here. For those few hours of dinner and coffee and watching the news, Papabee says exactly the same things that he’s said for the last six years. Lee Lin Chin comes on, to read the SBS news, and Papabee says, ‘She’s a very fine-looking lady, for a Chinawoman,’ and Teddy and I shout, in unison, ‘Papabee! You can’t say things like that!’ and I can almost pretend that things are normal. I can almost pretend that death is just another time zone that Dougie has travelled to.
I’ve started ignoring my phone, unless it’s family, the hospital, or Sue. The messages and cards continue to come, and I can’t avoid everyone entirely – not in Hobart. I bump into people at the Hill Street Grocer, or at the gates of Teddy’s school. At first, it was condolences, and questions about the funeral, which I brushed aside, grateful for once for the inquest and the post-mortem, which at least give me a genuine reason to avoid committing to any plans. But as the weeks pass, I’ve noticed that people are too embarrassed to mention Dougie at all. Or, worse, they talk about him, but when they do, I can’t recognise him.
A long letter arrives from Gabe’s brother, in Sydney. He writes about Dougie’s charity work. It’s true enough – last year Dougie raised more than six hundred dollars for Amnesty in his school’s annual fundraiser. He and some of his mates ran a sponsored 10k race. But when the Amnesty people gave a talk at his school, he said to us, ‘For people worried about attacks on freedom of speech, they sure do go on a lot.’ We’d laughed, outraged, and Gabe cuffed him on the back of the head with a rolled-up magazine. Dougie didn’t even need to train for the race – he ran it easily, for fun, with the latent fitness of an eighteen-year-old boy. And he hadn’t actually done much of the fundraising part – that had mainly been me and Gabe, cornering our friends and asking our neighbours; grabbing the sponsorship sheet off the fridge every time anyone came over.
Mrs Manheim, the head of Dougie’s school, writes too – a really kind letter, mentioning Dougie’s talent for sports, his leadership skills, his popularity with the other students. But all that I can think while I’m reading it is that Dougie and his friends used to refer to her as Mrs ManHands.
I don’t remember the person these letters describe: this rule-abiding, wholesome, polite young man. Where’s the Dougie who would sleep until two pm on weekends, if Gabe and I didn’t drag him out of bed? The boy who played computer games all night, and lied about scraping my car along the garage wall?
Missing too, are his patience with Papabee, and the summer he taught Teddy to swim, and all those letters he posted to Sylvie.
What if Dougie was an ordinary boy – cruel, and funny, and lazy, and curious, and kind, and always leaving skid-marks in the toilet? Am I still allowed to mourn him then? Nobody but Sue wants to talk about the Dougie that I remember – the boy who seemed, from the ages of twelve to fourteen, to be masturbating more or less full time.
Sue rings on Sunday afternoon and says, ‘The kids are out. I need a drink – how fast can you get here?’ Teddy’s at Papabee’s so I grab a lemon from the tree by the clothesline, like I always do, and by the time I drive over the bridge and park in Sue’s driveway she’s already got the gin poured. We’ve been doing this for so many years that I only have to think of her to catch myself patting my side pocket, expecting to feel the bulge of a lemon.
Sitting on her porch now, with a gin and tonic cool in my hand, I ask her if she remembers Dougie’s masturbation phase – all those bunched-up tissues I used to find under his bed when I was vacuuming.
‘Oh Christ,’ she says. ‘How could I forget? And I was going through the same thing at home with Nathan. I had to take to his sheets with a chisel.’
I’ve been avoiding Nathan and Ella. I’m terrified that I’ll find myself resenting them – their warm bodies; their working lungs; their fut
ures – and I love them too fiercely to risk showing them that. But when Sue and Dan bring them to the house I can’t refuse them – they grew up with Dougie, after all. Ella squeezes Teddy to her, and Nathan stands, all big hands and feet, looking awkwardly around the hallway as if searching for a place to put down his sadness.
I’m glad to have them here – I am. I want to hear all about Nathan’s share-house, his uni course, and Ella’s exams. But after nearly an hour, Nathan starts to cry again. He says, ‘Is Gabe going to bring Dougie home with him, when he comes?’
‘We can’t sort out any of that until they’ve done the operation first,’ I say.
‘You mean the post-mortem?’ he asks.
I nod. The operation: that’s how I prefer to think of it, whenever Gabe brings it up.
‘And the funeral? When will that be?’ asks Ella.
‘It’s all up in the air at the moment.’ It’s the same line I’ve repeated to everyone who asks.
‘We could help you,’ Nathan says. ‘If you want. To organise it, I mean. Heaps of our friends have stories, and photos and stuff, that we could use.’
‘Thanks love,’ I say, grabbing the dirty mugs from the table and heading back into the kitchen. ‘But there’re a lot of things we need to sort out first.’
A lot of Dougie’s other friends have written or emailed – awkward, stilted letters that their parents probably told them they had to write. I heard the sad news. His old friend Tom appears at the door one morning, and cries. I cry too, and give him a hug, but I don’t invite him in.
‘I have to head out in a minute,’ I say. ‘An appointment at the hospital. Sylvie – you know.’
I hug him again before he goes. Then I close the front door and lean against it, breathing too fast.
Seventeen days since I got back, and since I gave Sylvie that final letter from Dougie. She hasn’t said anything, but I know she will have noticed. This vigilant girl, who used to peel apart her sandwiches to check the thickness of the butter. Who once worked out, by taste alone, that I’d been slipping full-fat milk into her porridge instead of skim. She doesn’t miss a thing.
I’ve fabricated the details of Dougie’s operation, and his recovery. I’ve told her that Gabe’s staying with Dougie, and that as soon as Dougie gets the go-ahead from doctors, the two of them will do some travelling together, because Dougie will still need help. They’re thinking about going to Florence, I’ve said.
But if a letter doesn’t come soon, she’s going to wonder why she hasn’t heard from him. She’s going to start asking questions.
After I drop Teddy at school, I come back to the silent house. In the study, I open my laptop and hear the wheezy hum of the machine starting up.
Everyone says I should get back to doing more writing. Sue, Gabe, and my sister all keep telling me the same thing: It’ll be good for you. I haven’t shown them the new recipes – the ones that barely make sense, even to me. I don’t know whether I’ll be able to show them this new project, either.
Closing my eyes, I think of all the letters I’ve read, and reread, these last weeks. Like a radio scanning the frequencies, I search my mind for Dougie’s voice. I take a deep breath, then another, and start to type.
Gabe
The nights are worse than the days. Sometimes, at night in the little flat, I don’t know if I’m crying for Dougie, or Gill, or Sylvie, or Teddy. Or for myself, missing all of them. But I can’t leave – there’s work to be done. I stay up late, hunched over the laptop, and I read everything I can find about the accident, and about caving, floods, and rescue procedures. I let each tangent carry me further down.
One of the police reports identified the particular brand and type of rope that they used – it’s listed in an inventory of items retrieved from the cave, along with ‘One (1) purple headtorch (not working)’ and ‘One (1) Scarpa boot (left foot), unlaced.’
Was his headtorch working before it went into the water? Did Dougie enter the caves with his bootlaces undone, or did it happen later, the water’s fingers unlacing them for him?
I order the same rope online. It’s £120, and I don’t even dare to convert the price into Australian dollars. I don’t know how I’ll explain to Gill that I need to feel in my hands the same rope that Dougie held.
I take a bus to Covent Garden to collect it.
‘There you go,’ the man in the shop says, throwing it down on the counter. It’s neatly coiled – calligraphic loops. ‘Got any good trips coming up?’
‘Not really,’ I say.
All the way home I’m aware of the weight of it in my backpack. 4kg, the label says – the weight of a baby a few weeks old. I remember how I used to carry Dougie in a sling, his face in my chest, the top of his head tucked under my chin so that I could smell his hair.
Back in the flat, I uncoil the rope. It’s stiffer than I’d expected – more unyielding. I run it through my fingers. I fill the sink and submerge the rope, then check how hard it is to grasp when it’s wet. I try to coil it again, but I don’t have the knack, and it makes an ungainly bundle.
The police pathologist’s report, from when they first recovered Dougie’s body from the cave, said his hands were clenched. I’ve learned that this doesn’t mean his hands were clenched when he died. Sometimes it happens afterwards – the hand muscles seize of their own accord. I spend a whole night reading scientific journal articles about the clenching of fists. Cadaveric spasm. I can’t explain why this has become so important to me: were his hands reaching out, or were they clenched?
I go to meet an old friend of Dan’s, called Jeremy Gamlin. Dan emailed me Jeremy’s contact details and told me that he’s a climber and caver who might be able to talk me through some of the details.
We meet in the coffee shop in the British Library. I suggested it because it’s one of the few landmarks in London that I know, but I regret it now I’m here, surrounded by students, all around Dougie’s age, with their laptops and coffees.
Jeremy and I queue up for drinks, and there’s a minute or two of fussing and rearranging of trays and teapots and saucers before we can really talk, and it seems too big a leap to go from No, I insist, let me get this, and Did you want milk? to talking about how Dougie drowned.
‘This is the kind of rope they were using.’ I pull it from my backpack. The rope smells of damp, and looks incongruous here in the café. ‘10.6 millimetres thick. Sixty metres long. I bought the exact same one.’
‘Is that important?’ Jeremy asks. ‘I read the report you forwarded me, and a few of the newspaper articles – I didn’t see anything about the rope failing? They were using that for the ascent back from Cavern 3 to 2, right?’
‘The rescuers found the rope intact. But I just want to understand how it all works.’ I hesitate. ‘I’m trying to get the full picture.’
He nods. When we first shook hands he’d told me, ‘I can’t imagine what you’re going through.’ The thing is, I can’t imagine it either. I’m in the middle of it, and I still can’t imagine it, can’t grasp the shape of it.
‘I did a bit of Googling,’ he says, ‘after Dan got in touch. The group your son was with, they were legit operators, not some cowboy set-up. They have a good safety record, until this. All the paperwork that you’d expect.’
‘If they were so well qualified, why did they let it all go wrong?’
He grimaces slightly, folds his hands together and then unfolds them again. He hasn’t touched his coffee. ‘Every time you go into a cave, or up a mountain, it’s a risky environment. A good instructor can mitigate the risks – control certain factors. But there are always going to be elements outside their control. Weather; rockfalls; stuff like that. It’s not necessarily a case of human error.’
Rocks don’t make errors, I think. Weather doesn’t make errors. People do.
‘The guy in charge – Phillip Murphy – why didn’t he check more carefully?’ I ask. ‘How could he not have realised there’d been too much rain that night?’
�
��It was a bad combination. Heavy, localised rain upstream. Then the spill over that reservoir wall. So much can change so quickly – there’s a reason it’s called a flash flood. The guide made a judgment call.’
‘And he got it wrong.’
‘Clearly.’ He holds his hands wide, like he’s offering me their emptiness. ‘And if he’d done his prep, he should’ve known about the rains overnight. My bet is that he did. And he would’ve assessed the water levels on entry. But he couldn’t have known about the reservoir. And the Smith– Jackson System – it’s not known to flood. The reservoir was the game-changer.’
‘He should have known,’ I say. ‘His website said he’d guided groups there for at least eight years.’
‘There hasn’t been a flood like that. Not in eight years. Not ever, from what I can tell.’
‘I can see that,’ I say, impatiently. ‘And I’m not looking to sue – I’m not after money, nothing like that. I’m not even trying to place blame. We just want to know what happened. My wife and I—’ I stop for a second. Is it fair, dragging Gill into this, when I know it’s only me? ‘We just want to understand what happened to Dougie.’
‘I can understand that,’ he says. ‘I’m just not sure what I can clarify for you. What exactly are you looking for?’
I go to the hospital every morning, to see Dougie. The various chaplains all know me now, so there isn’t much preamble. They have Dougie ready in the little room, and I go in and look at him for half an hour.
‘You can talk to him, if you want,’ the chaplain suggests one day. ‘Some people find it helpful.’
I try it, but I know she’s in the adjoining room and I feel embarrassed. All I manage is his name, in a whisper: Dougie. Dougie. I say it so many times that the name starts to sound strange to me, and it becomes just a noise, rather than a word. Dougie’s death keeps slamming me up against the hard limits of language.
The Cookbook of Common Prayer Page 13
