The Cookbook of Common Prayer

by Francesca Haig

  How close to Dougie do you have to be, I wonder, to count as a Properly Interested Person? Does Rosa count? How far would somebody’s interest have to go to be considered Improper? If I spend too many hours researching cadaveric spasm, or staring at maps of the cave system, will I cross that line? Have I already? And if I cease to be a P.I.P., what new, uncharted territories of love and grief do I enter then, beyond the remit of the inquest and its acronyms?

  Gill rings in the middle of the night.

  ‘Is it Sylvie?’ I say, before I’ve even fumbled the lamp on.

  ‘No, she’s fine. I mean, not fine, but – you know. The same.’

  ‘Is it Teddy? What’s going on?’ My mouth is tacky with sleep. ‘It’s three in the morning here.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t even check the time. I just – I had an idea.’

  I wait.

  ‘It’s Rosa,’ Gill says. ‘What if she’s pregnant?’

  ‘I don’t think she is.’

  ‘How could you know?’

  ‘Because she’s twenty-one or twenty-two years old. Because he was nineteen, and they were both sensible.’ What I don’t say: Because two days ago, she drank five glasses of wine at lunch with me.

  ‘But what if she is?’

  For the last couple of years, that had been the nightmare scenario: Dougie getting somebody pregnant. Every parent of a teenage boy worries about it. We’d given him the talk about safe sex – us even more embarrassed than him, though it was a close thing.

  But now Gill’s voice sounds hopeful. ‘I’m just saying,’ she continues. ‘It’s not impossible.’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘We could help her with the baby. Maybe even raise it if she didn’t want it. Maybe that would be better, after all – she’s so young. She wouldn’t want it – what would she do? So we’d raise it. Dougie’s baby – can you imagine?’

  ‘Not really,’ I say, and it’s a lie, because I can imagine it, but I don’t dare let myself.

  ‘Rosa would need a lot of support,’ Gill goes on. I slump back down on the pillow, and she keeps speaking, her voice faster than usual. ‘And even if we raised the baby, she’d want close contact, of course. And we’d want that too – for the baby’s sake, and ours.’

  She keeps on talking, but after a while it becomes clear that she’s also been listening to all my silence.

  ‘Do you think it’s a mad idea?’ she asks.

  I exhale slowly. I don’t think she’s mad. I think of my candle in the church. If Gill’s idea is madness, then it’s the madness of prayer.

  ‘Love,’ I say. ‘We’re pushing fifty. Sylvie’s in hospital, Teddy’s approaching his teens, and Papabee’s getting more hopeless by the minute. The last thing we could handle is raising a baby. And there is no baby.’

  Gill doesn’t try to argue with me. Instead, she speaks very quietly. ‘Just let me have this. Just for tonight, OK?’

  So I listen, while she tells me how it would be.

  ‘Rosa might even want to move to Australia,’ she says. ‘A fresh start might appeal, after what she’s been through. Or she could visit a few times a year. We could help her with the airfare.’

  I think of how Teddy used to love having Papabee read him stories before bed. I listen to Gill until she’s run out of words, and then we’re silent together.

  She breaks the silence first. ‘Will you ask her?’

  ‘I promise,’ I say into the dark.

  When I open the door to Rosa the next day, she raises her left arm triumphantly. The cast has gone.

  ‘They took it off yesterday.’ She rotates her bare wrist and wriggles her fingers. ‘The doctor says it’s fine.’ The skin of that arm is pale, and slightly puffy. I think of Dougie’s body, his waterlogged skin.

  ‘That’s great.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to ask me in?’ she asks.

  ‘Let’s go out,’ I say. ‘Get a coffee. My treat.’

  She shrugs, already turning and heading back to the street.

  I follow her to a chain café on the corner. I hate this place, and its overpriced, massive, milky coffees, but today I don’t mind. If I’m going to ask her this question, I don’t want to do it in the flat where Dougie’s ashes are on the bedside table.

  Rosa sits opposite me. She’s beautiful in the way that all young people are beautiful – the newness of their skin; the novelty of their bodies. She’s beautiful in her own way too – her startling paleness; the candour of her freckles. It’s ugly to admit to myself that I’m noticing these things.

  ‘Gill asked —’ I hesitate. It had sounded outlandish enough last night, in the dark, between just me and Gill. Now, in the echoing noisiness and bright lights of the café, it seems even more absurd. But I made Gill a promise. And I have my own curiosity too, I have to confess. ‘Gill asked if there was any chance – I told her it was extremely unlikely – but she wanted to know—’ I clear my throat. ‘We wanted to know whether there was any chance that you might be pregnant. That you might be carrying Dougie’s baby.’

  She snorts. ‘Are you serious? Jesus, Gabe, no.’ The pity on her face is worse than her outrage. ‘I’m sorry. But no way. That was never an option. Of course not.’

  ‘So you’re sure?’

  ‘You want the proof? You want to dig around in my bathroom bin for the used tampons?’

  I wince. The woman at the nearest table looks across, then looks quickly away.

  ‘You’re embarrassed because I’m shouting about tampons? You should be embarrassed that you want to turn me into some sort of incubator for your dead son.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. We just —’

  ‘Look, it’s OK,’ she says. ‘I thought about it, too. For about two seconds, before I realised it was completely insane.’ She shakes her head. ‘I don’t want to have a baby. I’m twenty-two. I’m probably about to lose my job. I only knew Dougie for a few months. It would’ve been a terrible idea, even if he were still alive. Even if I’d been pregnant, I couldn’t have kept it.’

  ‘Gill and I could have helped. We would’ve helped.’

  ‘I don’t want a baby,’ she yells. ‘I don’t know if I’m ever going to want a baby. Let alone to my dead boyfriend.’ Then, more calmly, she asks, ‘Do you really want to argue about a hypothetical baby?’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘Not at all. It was stupid of me.’

  ‘I don’t blame you for clutching at straws,’ she says. ‘But it’s my whole life you’re talking about.’

  ‘There isn’t a baby,’ I tell Gill when I ring that night.

  ‘I know,’ she says. ‘Of course there isn’t. And it was probably a mad idea anyway.’

  She sounds surprisingly chirpy. It doesn’t reassure me.

  ‘How’s the book going?’ I ask her. ‘Doing much writing? Anything new?’

  ‘It’s going,’ she says, and offers nothing further.

  ‘Have you shown any of it to Sue yet?’

  ‘Not yet. One day soon.’

  I’m on the wrong side of the world. She needs me, and Sylvie and Teddy too. How can I be here, when Teddy’s there, with his bony knees and his obsessions and his small hands? But when I think of Teddy’s hands, I can only picture Dougie’s at the same age – his always-grubby nails, and the lump on his right thumb-knuckle from where he sucked it until he was nine. Who will take Dougie’s cold hand now and guide him through the inquest, if not me?

  I miss Sylvie and Gill and Teddy – I miss them so much it feels like I’m wearing my skin inside out, all the nerves exposed. But when I wake, gasping, from dreams of water, it’s Dougie’s name that rises from my throat like my final breath.

  Teddy

  When we’re tidying up after dinner, Mum trips over Sausage and shouts, ‘That bloody dog!’

  Since Dougie died, and Dad went away, Mum’s started calling SausageDog ‘That bloody dog’ even more often. She did it yesterday afternoon, too, when she found another hole that Sausage dug under the fence to chase next d
oor’s cats. Even from my room, I heard her yelling, ‘That bloody dog.’ Sausage was sitting next to me on my bed while I did my geography homework, so I squished his long ears down, holding my hands over them so he wouldn’t hear her.

  SausageDog’s not the only one whose name has changed lately. Lots of names have changed, since Dougie died – Dougie’s name, most of all. Before, he was always Dougie, except for school reports or if he was in big trouble, when Mum would shout Douglas Benjamin Jordan, or Young Man. After he died, he somehow turned into Douglas. There’s a whole pile of papers that Mum’s shoved into a corner of the study – stuff from the insurance company, and the coroner, and the airline – and none of them are about Dougie. They’re all about Douglas Jordan, or (even worse), The deceased. Even Mum and I hardly say his name any more, and when we do, it comes out strange.

  When I was six or seven I remember looking at the first baby tooth I ever lost, and trying to work out whether it still counted as a part of me now that it was in my hand. Since he died, Dougie’s name is like that tooth: it isn’t attached to him any more, so I don’t know where it belongs, or what to do with it.

  I didn’t realise how slippery names could be, until he went into the cave as Dougie and came out as Douglas. Mum’s started calling Dad ‘your father’ a lot more, instead of Gabe. And Sylvie often doesn’t answer, no matter what name you call her. She just turns her head the other way, and says nothing. Mum’s still Mum, but I don’t always recognise her, this lady who shouts at the dog and goes quiet halfway through conversations, and cooks late at night so that when I have nightmares about a cave flooded by a digger-load of dirt, I wake up to the smell of her cooking in the dark, and my fear smells like onions and garlic.

  Sylvie

  Mum brings me a container of roast lamb. Whole garlic cloves, soft and white, roll around in the tub like little blind eyes. She puts it on my bedside table, balanced on top of my books.

  Mum’s always making things. I do the opposite. See: I unmade my whole body.

  I used to look like Mum. Everyone said it: You’re the spitting image of your mother. They don’t say that any more.

  I haven’t told Teddy that I found his note, written on the mirror in toothpaste: Don’t die. I’m too much of a coward to say, I saw your message. I’m too much of a coward to obey it.

  Once, when I still lived at home, I watched a nature documentary with Teddy and Papabee. It showed how some animals signal that they’re poisonous. The garish acid-yellow on the back of the poison dart frog is a warning: deadly. The striking bands of the coral snake, announcing to predators, Poison; don’t touch. I saw it myself at the Neck, once, when Ella and I startled a tiger snake on the path down the beach. It reared up and flashed us its acid-yellow belly. We ran.

  I look down at my body. The bones of my elbows, sharpened and conspicuous: Stay away.

  Gill

  ‘How long can you keep this up?’ Sue asks me. ‘It’s been more than a month. You know you need to tell her.’

  It’s colder now – with the end of June, winter has slouched its way over the mountain and settled on the city, and Sue and I are inside, SausageDog on her knee for warmth.

  ‘I know.’ I take another sip of my wine. ‘But I can’t.’

  It’s that simple.

  Things I can do, just about: take this breath, and the next. Drive Teddy to school, and cook dinner for him and Papabee every night. Email my articles to my editors twenty minutes before each deadline. Make it to the hospital every morning and most afternoons.

  Things I can’t do: tell Sylvie that her brother is dead. Watch her die too.

  ‘What about Teddy?’ says Sue. ‘It’s asking a lot of him, to keep it from her.’

  ‘I know.’ Poor old Teddy. Good old Teddy. He learned, right from the start, to get by on the amount of attention that was available to him, which was never much – the big kids so noisy and mobile and demanding, compared with this unexpected baby. We had no time, and no money. I’d published my first two books, but they hadn’t sold well, so when Teddy was a few months old I was already back to taking shifts in restaurant kitchens to make ends meet, breast-milk leaking through my chef-whites and leaving yellow stains.

  When Teddy first taught himself to crawl, he could only crawl backwards. One day we realised none of us had seen him for fifteen minutes, and eventually we found he’d reversed himself under the dining room cabinet and got stuck. Dougie or Sylvie, at that age, would have screamed blue murder, but when we found Teddy he was just waiting quietly, playing with dust balls.

  ‘Don’t worry about Teddy,’ I tell Sue. ‘He understands why we have to do it. And he’ll be OK. He always is.’

  The sea in Cephalonia is just ridiculously stunning – so clear it’s basically showing off. But having the cast means no swimming, which is shit – getting tired of sitting on the beach watching our stuff while Dad gets to swim! Getting v fed up with the leg thing by now. Any benefits of the cast (sympathy from old Greek ladies; getting a seat on crowded trains) are well and truly outweighed by the stink of sweat-soaked plaster – a real olfactory delight (Dad calls it ‘the old factory situation’ – vintage Dad Joke). And with no swimming, the heat is hard work. At any given moment I’m itching in at least three different ways (sunburn peeling; mozzie bites; sweaty skin under the cast, which is a special kind of torture because there’s no way to get at it).

  So overall this bit of the trip has been kind of great, and kind of frustrating. Sort of feels like I’m having two trips: this slightly weird one, with Dad and the cast and my crutches, and at the same time, in my head, imagining the trip that I would’ve had if I’d never gone into the bloody cave. I keep picturing being here with Rosa instead, like we’d planned (Dad’s got many strengths, but looking great in a bikini isn’t one of them). Anyway, sorry to complain – I know I’m lucky to have Dad helping me out, and I know that even this version of the trip is still a lot more exciting than Paeds 3. We’ll come here together one day, when we can both make the most of it.

  Yesterday we went out on a little boat to Ithaca – the smaller island nearby. It’s meant to be the place from the Odyssey, which I bet you’ve read. Don’t tell Mum that we just went to beaches and a taverna, instead of doing any of the cultural stuff (in our defence, we only had a few hours there). Had lunch at a taverna that’s literally on a jetty – having a beer there while dangling my good leg in the water did make me feel like a bit of a dickhead for moaning about the annoying stuff.

  I lick the flap of the envelope and seal it tight. For the next half hour the gluey, chemical taste lingers on my tongue. Dougie’s voice lingers too – my mouth full of it. Don’t tell Mum. A bit of a dickhead. If I hadn’t gone into that bloody cave. Phrases from this letter echo among fragments from his earlier letters. I miss the Neck – miss being in the sea. They’re OBSESSED with potatoes. Try not to freeze out the parentals. Dad says he’s too old for hostels. I can’t tell, any more, which are his words and which are mine.

  Gabe

  Gill rings.

  ‘You’ve been in Cephalonia,’ she says. ‘The two of you went on a boat trip around Ithaca. But it’s hot, and he’s frustrated that he can’t swim, with the cast.’

  Always the water. I can’t get away from it.

  ‘And then we’re headed to Sicily, right?’

  ‘It’s all in the letter,’ she says. ‘I’ll email you a copy. Make sure you read it before you call Sylvie.’

  I might tell myself that it’s Gill writing the letters, but I’m lying to Sylvie every time we speak. I’m not just implicated – I’m neck-deep.

  When Sylvie went into the hospital, Dougie started coming out of his room with red eyes, looking like he’d been chopping onions.

  ‘Is he smoking weed in there?’ Gill whispered. But there wasn’t even a whiff of cigarettes, let alone weed. It took us a few days to realise that Dougie had just been crying.

  He and Sylvie had always been a team. Whenever I walked past Dougie’s room, afte
r dinner, they were talking, laughing, arguing, him on his bed and her lying on the floor with her feet up on his bookshelf. Before Dougie’s voice broke, there were times that I couldn’t tell which one of them was speaking, because they shared the same inflections, the same secret language of shared jokes and references and irritations.

  Then she was in hospital and he was left behind, one half of the big kids. We tried to talk about it with him, and he was about as responsive as you’d expect a sixteen-year-old boy to be.

  ‘I’m fine,’ he insisted.

  ‘If you don’t want to talk about it with me or Mum, what about a counsellor?’ I asked. ‘Or one of the teachers at school?’

  ‘I literally can’t think of anything worse,’ he said, and went back outside to play basketball.

  He and I still played cricket in the backyard on weekends. We had an ongoing list-game that we’d been playing ever since he was big enough to hold the cricket bat. We took turns to come up with prompts, in between each ball.

  ‘Top five one-day bowlers.’

  ‘Top five concept albums.’

  ‘Top five stories that Papabee’s repeated most often.’ (My turn. ‘Don’t tell Mum,’ Dougie said.)

  ‘Top five Jason Statham films.’ (His turn. ‘Is he the bald one?’ I asked.)

  ‘Top five reasons Sylvie won’t eat,’ I said one day last year, when it was my turn to bowl. As though I could ambush him with the question, like a reverse swing ball.

  He stopped. ‘It’s not a game, Dad. Jesus.’

  ‘I know,’ I said immediately. ‘I just thought – I don’t know. I thought we could talk about it.’

  ‘This isn’t some clickbait article.’ He let the ball drop. ‘Top Five Reasons Your Sister’s Dying. Number Three will blow your mind!’