Sylvie
‘Are you proud of what you’ve done to yourself?’ Mum asks.
Proud. Proud?
See this bit here, where my hipbones poke out? I run my hands across the bones maybe fifty, sixty times a day, to check that they’re still there. To measure them with my fingers, and see if they stick out more or less than yesterday. I wrap both arms around myself and strum my ribs like the strings of a guitar.
Proud?
I’m hiding. I’m hiding in these clothes – that old jumper of Dougie’s, so big that the sleeves hang right down over my hands, and the neck falls off one shoulder. I’m hiding in this body, this pyre of bones.
I’m hiding. Don’t look at me. Look for me. Don’t look for me. Look at me.
I hold Dougie’s letter. Since he went away, I always picture him at the Neck, because at the Neck we’re all most ourselves, and Dougie most of all, always the first into the cold water, the first to catch a flathead from the dingy.
The Neck isn’t a safe place – perhaps that’s why we love it. In summer, the air is tight with bushfire smoke, and tiger-snakes unravel themselves to stretch across the hot gravel of the driveway. Something moves at the edge of your sight, and maybe it’s just a bird setting the long grass shaking, or an echidna following its snout along the dirt, but you speed up anyway, sprinting towards the open places, the cleared roads. The sea is always watching, with its rips and its spiteful waves. The tide comes in quick, and can turn the headland into an island if you’re not careful.
The Neck doesn’t forget. It remembers the white invasion, and the decades of murder and violence. The attempt to corral Tasmania’s entire indigenous population onto the natural prison of the Tasman Peninsula, beyond the Neck. The penal colony at Port Arthur, and then the shooting in 1996. The savage beauty of the whole peninsula.
If a child went missing at the Neck, you wouldn’t find them half a day later, asleep in a grass meadow, like the children in fairy-tales. It isn’t that kind of a place.
What would have happened, that summer at the Neck, if I’d tried to talk to Dougie? It was so hot that year. The wind smelled of fire – something was always burning, that summer. The water in the tanks was running low and the grass was scorched brown, except for one green patch where we hosed down our wetsuits. When I climbed the tree behind the house, black cockatoos took to the sky with their terrible human screams.
Teddy
When Dad’s dad, Papa J, died a few years ago, people kept saying, I’m sorry for your loss, which made it sound like we’d left him on the bus or something. But he wasn’t lost – we knew exactly where Papa J was: in a hole at the cemetery near his house in Sydney.
They had to use a digger to fill in the grave. We weren’t meant to see that bit; after the speeches part of the funeral was finished and they’d put Papa J’s coffin down into the hole, the priest walked us all to the car, so we could drive to the wake. But I looked back, while Mum and Dad were hugging people and talking, and I saw the gigantic pile of dug-up earth, with a tarpaulin stretched over it and held down with bricks on the corners. I saw the digger parked around the side of the toilet block, and a man in a bright orange vest standing next to it, smoking and looking bored while he waited for us to go. That’s how I learned how much earth it takes to bury somebody: a whole digger-load.
We’re not burying Dougie. Mum said she and Dad decided to have him cremated, because it’s what he would have wanted. I don’t think Dougie would want any of this – but I know why Mum and Dad aren’t ready for the digger-load of dirt. A digger-load of dirt is too heavy to be anything except real. You can’t ever take it back.
Dad Skypes us, the day after the cremation, and I ask him to show me what Dougie is now.
‘It’s not much to see, love,’ Dad says, at the same time as Mum says, ‘I’ve got to watch the risotto,’ and goes back to the kitchen.
Dad goes off screen for a minute, and I hear him shuffling things around, then he comes back with a grey box, only as big as a PlayStation.
‘What’s it made of?’ I ask.
‘Polystyrene, I think.’ He holds the box closer to the camera. It looks the same kind of stuff that an eski’s made of, or the boxes of ice at the fish shop. Like if I pressed my fingernail into it, I’d leave a mark.
‘Can you show me the inside?’
‘It’s all sealed up, Tedster.’ He turns it sideways to show me the sticky-tape round the edge of the lid. ‘I reckon it’s best to keep it that way for the trip home, don’t you think?’
I picture the box coming open on the plane, the ashes tipping everywhere when somebody opens the overhead locker. Bits of Dougie falling all over strangers.
‘OK,’ I say. ‘How much does it weigh?’
Dad picks up the box again in both hands. I like that he takes my questions seriously. ‘Not much,’ he says. ‘About the same as a great big dictionary.’
‘Paperback or hardback?’
‘Hardback.’
‘OK,’ I say again.
I think for a long time about that little grey box. I don’t feel like Dougie’s really inside that box, the same way time isn’t really inside a clock. But if Dougie isn’t in there, where’s he gone?
When Dougie went into that little box, I thought the main bit of his dying was finished. I was wrong.
Nobody tells you that being dead just keeps on going. Of course I knew that already – I knew that once you’re dead you’re dead for good. But I didn’t really get what it means – that now Dougie’s dead, he’s dead every day, always, and that means every single day is another day I walk past his closed bedroom door and think, Still dead, and get the milk out and see the photo on the fridge of Dougie at his grade 12 formal and think, Still dead. I never knew that even his old basketball, going flat in the corner of the driveway, would make me think, Still dead. Nobody ever tells you how much Still dead keeps happening.
I start to think maybe the problem is that we haven’t had a funeral. I remember Papa J’s funeral – Dougie looking sweaty in a tie, and Sylvie sitting next to me and crying, her hand scrunched tight around a tissue, which she ripped into a hundred little pieces.
I didn’t cry that day. Papa J didn’t feel much like a grandpa. He didn’t feel much like anything because he hardly ever visited, and when he did, Sylvie was always his favourite. Grown-ups aren’t really supposed to have favourites, or if they do, they’re supposed to pretend they don’t.
The only other funeral I’ve ever been to, apart from Papa J’s, was for our goldfish, Spotty. He was our first goldfish to die, and we did a big funeral for him. We dug a hole in the garden, Dougie glued two icy-pole sticks together to make a cross for the grave, and Sylvie gave a little speech. I played ‘Jingle Bells’ on my clarinet – Dad said it should have been ‘The Last Post’, but I don’t know that one, so I did ‘Jingle Bells’ instead.
But goldfish die all the time, it turns out, and they’re actually kind of boring, so it was hard to be upset. By the time the last one died, a year go, Dougie just scooped it out of the tank and chucked it out the window into the lavender bush, and we hoped SausageDog wouldn’t find it.
If I were Goldfish-Teddy, the whole world would end at the edges of my glass tank. And the tank would be enough, and the plastic castle would be enough. The stones on the bottom too. And because goldfish don’t remember anything, it would always be now, and every day the same: water, tank, rocks. Water, tank, rocks. There’d be no remembering, and no surprises. And nobody could keep secrets from Goldfish-Teddy, because I could see through everything, a world made of glass and water. The light would come straight through.
I keep waiting to get used to Dougie being dead, the same way we all got used to the goldfish dying. I wait and wait, and when Mum isn’t watching, I even test myself, by taking Dougie’s photo off the fridge and staring at it, to see if it still makes me feel the same. It does – even after three weeks. It feels like a dream of falling, without the bit where you wake up knowing it was just
a dream.
So I decide to do my own funeral for Dougie, so that his dying will have a finish to it. It’ll have to be a secret funeral, because Mum doesn’t ever seem to want to talk about Dougie any more. I don’t want to tell my friends, not even Alasdair, because I’m worried they won’t get it, because none of them have got dead brothers or nearly-dead sisters, so how could they understand about the Boneyard? And I can’t tell Dad, either, because whenever he calls he asks me how I am, and I say, Fine, which is partly true and partly not true, and if I tell him about the funeral he might realise the not-true bit. And obviously I can’t tell Sylvie, because not telling Sylvie anything about Dougie is my main job now.
So the only person I invite to the funeral is Papabee. He’s the very best for secrets. When you’re the youngest, like me, you don’t get to have many secrets. The big kids are always quicker, smarter – they work everything out. I wear their hand-me-down clothes and I hear their hand-me-down stories, and if I ever have a secret, they’re already there ahead of me. Like when I was six and I whispered to Dougie my big exciting secret, that I’d worked out that Santa isn’t real, and he just said, ‘No shit, Teddy,’ and didn’t even look away from his computer game. But Papabee’s the very best at secret-keeping, because he forgets everything, so when you put a secret in him it stays there.
I make a cross out of icy-pole sticks, to mark the grave. I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in crosses because I’ve seen them in lots of places. If I was going to believe in God, it’d have to be a God that I could see and feel, solid like a wooden cross. It’d have to be a God real enough to give you splinters.
Jesus is supposed to have died on a cross, and then he was dead in a cave like Dougie but came out again, alive. So I believe in caves, and not Jesus. And I don’t believe in miracles like turning wine into water, or Jesus coming back to life. I only know about little miracles, like how you can float on the top of water. Dougie taught me that. In the sea at the Neck he put his hand under the back of my neck and his other hand under my knees and said Go on, Teddy, just lie back. So I did. Every time you float it’s like the water’s saying: Trust me, and then you do, and it does catch you, it actually does, every time like an actual miracle or some kind of trick or maybe it’s the same thing.
I don’t have anything to bury at the funeral, because Dougie’s still in the box with Dad in London. But I think about the digger-load of dirt at Papa J’s funeral, and I decide that maybe it’s the digging and the dirt that counts, not what you bury. So on Saturday morning, when Mum’s visiting Sylvie, Papabee and I choose a spot under the bushes at the very back of the garden, where Mum won’t notice, and I use her trowel to make a hole, as far down as I can dig, until the ground gets too hard. Then I pat all the dirt back down, and poke the little cross into the top.
‘Do you want to say something about Dougie?’ I ask Papabee.
‘Absolutely,’ he says. ‘Charming boy. An excellent chap, and solid spin bowler.’ He looks around. ‘Will he be joining us shortly?’
‘Sort of.’ I think of the box that Dad’s going to bring home.
Then I play ‘Jingle Bells’ on my clarinet, like at the goldfish funeral.
‘Very festive,’ says Papabee. ‘A merry Christmas to you, dear boy.’
I squeeze his hand, and don’t tell him that it’s June. We stand like that for a long time. There are thin pink clouds resting on the mountain. I hold my clarinet in one hand, and Papabee’s hand in my other one, and I try to fit it all into myself: this big sadness, bigger than the mountain, bigger than the sky.
Gabe
Heather from the coroner’s office rings. ‘I was hoping to talk you through the post-mortem results,’ she says.
There ought to be a different ringtone for this. It doesn’t seem right that a call to discuss my son’s dissection can be announced by the same jaunty, generic ringtone as if it were Gill calling, or a market-researcher.
‘Is now a good time?’ Heather asks.
What would be a good time, I wonder, to hear my son’s post-mortem results? I don’t say it, of course. I make the usual polite noises. ‘Yes, go on – please.’
‘I have to stress that these are only the preliminary findings. Toxicology results will take a few weeks, as you know—’
‘I know.’
‘So what I’ve got today are the main items. I’ll be emailing the results through to you shortly, but I wanted to talk them through with you first. Nobody needs something like this just landing in their inbox.’
When all this is over, I’ll write her a card, to thank her for all these small acts of thoughtfulness. Then I realise: this is never going to be over.
‘Not surprisingly, there was evidence of a pulmonary oedema,’ she says, ‘which is fluid in the lungs. That’s consistent with death by drowning.’
‘Like we expected, then.’
She pauses for a moment. ‘It’s not quite that simple, I’m afraid. It’s not common, but there are other things that can cause pulmonary oedema. Head injuries, for example. A serious head injury can bring about pulmonary oedema over the next few hours.’
‘He didn’t have a few hours.’
‘We don’t know that for certain, Mr Jordan. His body wasn’t recovered for thirteen hours after the flood. The police pathologist took his temperature then, but, in water, the body loses heat about twice as fast as it otherwise would. And the cold water also simulates rigor mortis, which is another indicator that’s used to assess time of death. In those conditions, there’s no way to accurately confirm the time he died.’
‘But you heard what the guide and the others told the police: the water came up fast. You can’t tell me that he was alive for long enough for fluid to build up in his lungs.’
‘Drowning seems the most likely explanation, I agree. But we can’t exclude the alternative – that he might have been alive for some time longer. His body was recovered from a different cavern, deeper in the cave system. If he was alive when he was carried or swam downstream, then there could have been some higher ground, or an air pocket, somewhere. And the coroner has to explore the possibilities, because there could be implications, in reviewing the response, and the approach of the rescue teams.’
‘Are you trying to tell me that he didn’t die quickly?’
‘As I’ve said, the particular circumstances of Douglas’s death make timing extremely difficult to confirm.’
‘What exactly are you saying?’
‘It’s up to you, Mr Jordan, how much you want to go into this.’
‘I want to know.’
‘I’m afraid that a number of the injuries appear to be antemortem.’
‘Before he died, you mean?’
‘Exactly. The small abrasions on his hands were certainly ante-mortem. But the forensic pathologist also flagged the wounds at the back of the head – the report says: Two jagged contusions, measuring 80 and 120 mm, each with surrounding subdural haematoma. That’s bruising – bleeding under the skin. That’s consistent with an injury that’s happened before death. It’s distinct from lividity – the discolouration that you might have seen on his face.’
‘The chaplain at the hospital said something about that.’
‘That’s right,’ Heather says. ‘Lividity is from blood settling, after death. As with most bodies retrieved from water, Douglas was found face-down.’
There’s a rustling of paper.
‘There was only one actual fracture,’ she says. ‘The femur – though it wasn’t possible to ascertain whether this happened before death.’
‘Femur – that’s leg, right?’
‘Sorry, yes – the upper leg.’
‘The broken leg – which one is it?’
Another pause, another rustle of paper.
‘Right leg,’ she says. ‘Why?’
‘Nothing.’ I have to consciously loosen my jaw so that I can speak again. ‘Go on, please. There must be other clues? Other things the doctor could tell?’
‘No
thing conclusive. Some of the things that they’d normally look for, to indicate drowning, were made irrelevant by the fact that the body was submerged for so long.’ She goes on – something about water in pleural cavities, and diatoms in the bone marrow. But all I can think of is Dougie’s broken leg, and our lie.
‘We’ll get the diatom test back next week,’ she says. ‘But as I said, it won’t be conclusive.’
‘So you’re telling me you still don’t know how he died.’
‘I’m saying we can’t know for certain.’
‘But his death wasn’t instant. Is that what you’re saying? There was time – enough time for those head wounds. Perhaps the broken leg too.’
‘It seems that way,’ says Heather.
Gill. How can I tell her this? How can I even raise the prospect of him huddled there, perhaps for hours, injured, with the black water rising? If there was some kind of hidden cave or air pocket, some ledge, I have to keep it from Gill. Dougie didn’t survive that place, and nor will she.
I ring her as soon as my breath is steady enough. I talk her through the results – head injuries; signs consistent with drowning – but not the details. I’ve been worried that she’ll ask questions, see through my vagueness, but she asks nothing. This is how it goes, us handing each other lies like a children’s game of pass-the-parcel: me concealing things from her, and her from Sylvie.
‘There’s one other thing,’ I say.
‘I don’t know if I can hear any more,’ she says. ‘Please.’
‘Listen,’ I tell her. ‘You were right about his leg.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He did break his leg. The same one: the right leg. The thigh bone, too. Just like you told Sylvie.’
A long silence.
‘Are you still there?’
‘Yes,’ she says.
‘What does it mean? How did you know?’ There are 206 bones in the adult human body, Teddy proudly told me last year, when he learned it at school. 206. Of all those hundreds, how did Gill pick the right bone? Did our lie invoke this?
The Cookbook of Common Prayer Page 15
