The Cookbook of Common Prayer

by Francesca Haig

  Teddy

  ‘Did you do it?’ Sylvie asks me as soon as I get there. I’ve skipped soccer practice and caught the bus straight to the hospital. On Tuesdays Mum usually meets me here at five, so I’ve got almost an hour before she’s due.

  ‘Yup,’ I say. ‘Sue’s picking him up tomorrow, if he comes.’

  But that’s not why I’ve come in to the hospital early today, without Mum or Papabee.

  ‘I’ve got something for you.’ I take the plastic bag from my backpack.

  ‘Here we go again.’

  She doesn’t take the bag, so I open it myself. I take out the bundle of pine needles and let them fall onto the bed. One of the needles sticks to my palm; I peel it off and put it on the covers with the others.

  Here in the ward, where everything’s clean and white, the little pile of needles looks like something from another world. Sticky pine-sap smell, and bits of dirt.

  ‘Where are these from?’

  I don’t answer, because she already knows.

  ‘When did you go?’ she asks. ‘Mum didn’t say anything about going to the Neck.’

  ‘She didn’t go. I went.’

  ‘How the hell did you get there?’

  ‘Papabee. Don’t tell Mum.’

  ‘It’s not safe for him to drive all that way any more.’

  I hope that if I don’t say anything, she’ll have to stop changing the subject.

  She scrapes the needles into a pile and starts putting them back in the bag. ‘I’d forgotten about the Secret Tree,’ she says, with a laugh that doesn’t quite work.

  ‘Then how did you know where these were from?’

  ‘You aren’t even meant to know about it,’ she says. ‘It was just for me and Ella. It was meant to be our secret.’

  The big kids never understood how much I know. Mum and Dad don’t either. You can hear and see a lot when people forget to notice you.

  ‘We were the ones who found the hole in the tree,’ Sylvie says. ‘Me and Ella, years ago, when we were ten or eleven. It was our own private game.’

  The big girls. Their laughing voices when I knocked on the door of the girls’ bedroom in the attic. Go away, Teddy. Girls only. Sylvie’s a year younger than Ella, but their birthdays are both in August, so most years they had a joint party, until Sylvie went into the Boneyard.

  ‘That hole in the Secret Tree was our letterbox,’ Sylvie says. ‘We’d leave little notes for each other. Just silly stuff. You know: I hate Nathan – he’s such a pain in the arse! Meet me by the beach after dinner for a swim – DON’T TELL THE BOYS! Let’s paint our nails tomorrow! Stuff like that.’

  Her voice is a bit croaky. It might be from all those years of having the tube down her throat. Or it might be that she’s not used to talking this much.

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Then nothing. I don’t know. We got older. It just stopped. You know what it was like: she came back from Spain and she was different.’

  That was the summer before Sylvie got sick. Ella had gone on exchange to Spain. That summer she wasn’t at the Neck, and Papa J was there instead, taking Ella’s place as Sylvie’s partner for Pictionary.

  ‘She was still nice to me, when she came back the next year,’ Sylvie says. ‘She was never mean – but you could tell that she just wasn’t interested any more. Not like before. It was like all our old games, our old secrets, they’d become boring to her. Or like she’d just forgotten about them, which was kind of worse. And even though we were still sharing a room, she didn’t talk to me like she used to. She was always hanging around with the boys, laughing at Dougie’s stupid jokes. It made me feel like I was suddenly so much younger than she was.’

  I know that feeling. I know the exact shape and taste of it, like my tongue knows my teeth.

  ‘Then I saw her going to the Secret Tree,’ Sylvie says. ‘One morning, near the end of that summer. And I couldn’t believe it – because we hadn’t used it for the whole summer, and she hadn’t even mentioned it. But I saw her going there, sneaking off after breakfast. It was the first time all summer that I felt happy. So I went, straight after, and I found the note: Meet me at the island, midnight tonight.’

  We all call it the island, but it’s actually not an island most of the time. It’s the headland at the far end of the beach, a big mound of rocks that pokes out into the water. It only turns into an island at high tide, when it gets cut off.

  Sylvie’s still talking. ‘It was like she was giving me back all my memories: making it all OK again. That I didn’t have to feel embarrassed about all our old games, or for missing her. That we were still a team. So I wrote on the back: OK! And I put it in there for her. All through the rest of the day I was so happy. I didn’t say anything to her about it, because it was more special that way, using the Secret Tree like we used to.

  ‘Then, that night, I went down to the beach. Ella’d already left, earlier – I thought she was just going to the loo, but she didn’t come back. And I lay there, too excited to sleep, waiting for midnight.

  ‘Then I sneaked out too – out the window, because I was scared of waking up the boys if I went down the stairs.’ Again, her laugh doesn’t come out right.

  ‘I sneaked right down to the beach. I didn’t have a torch or anything, but it was pretty light – a really big moon. And there was Ella. The tide was out, and she was lying on the sand, right by the island. I could see her all the way from the tessellated pavement.’

  Another one of those laughs. It frightens me a bit.

  ‘Then?’ I ask.

  ‘You don’t want to know all this, Teddy.’

  That’s stupid. I still have the scrapes on my arms from where I climbed the Secret Tree. I wouldn’t have done that – I wouldn’t have done all that sweating and scrambling – if I didn’t want to know.

  ‘Stop treating me like a baby.’ My voice sounds angry. It sounds exactly as angry as I feel.

  She looks at me for a long time before she speaks.

  ‘It wasn’t just Ella. It was her and Dougie, lying there together. She must’ve told him about the Secret Tree. The note was for him. He probably didn’t even notice my OK! on the back.

  ‘At first I thought they were just lying there, the way Ella and I used to when we were younger, looking at the sandworm trails, and waiting for the crabs to come out.’

  I wait, too. Her words come out slowly, slowly, like a hermit crab coming out of its shell.

  ‘They weren’t just lying there,’ she says.

  ‘What were they doing?’

  I know the answer already. I’d forgotten that I knew: I’d seen it, that summer, after Ella came back from Spain. I didn’t know what it meant – only that it was something I hadn’t seen before. All the clues that I didn’t realise were clues. Once, when I was lying under the table playing with cards, I saw Dougie’s leg reach out to Ella’s. Pat pat pat, his foot on her leg. I thought he was kicking her – I remember wondering why she didn’t kick him back or tell him to get stuffed. Another time, when we were walking down to the beach, Dougie and Ella were way behind the rest of us and when I looked back they were holding hands. They didn’t normally do that.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I’d asked.

  They let go right away and Ella laughed at me. ‘What do you mean?’ she said. ‘Just holding hands, you goose. Like I do with you.’ And she grabbed my hand, and swung it, forwards and backwards, a bit too high, and held it all the way down the gravel road to the beach. And we were both pretending: pretending that was normal. Pretending that what I’d seen with her and Dougie wasn’t something new.

  ‘Were they doing kissing and stuff?’

  She nods, and I’m relieved she doesn’t want to tell me any details. I know about sex – enough to know that it definitely isn’t something that I want to talk about with my sister.

  I try to picture Dougie and Ella, there on the sand, under a big moon all full of its own roundness. I picture them as much as I can, and then when it gets too clear I try t
o picture Sylvie instead, standing on the beach, watching. Her bare footsteps in the wet sand, and how they stopped.

  ‘It shouldn’t have mattered,’ she says. ‘I walked away, quietly as I could, and it shouldn’t have mattered as much as it did. It wasn’t even that they were sleeping together.’ She’s picked up one of the pine needles and she’s breaking it, very neatly, into pieces. ‘I just felt so stupid. I thought the note was for me. It was always our special thing, the Secret Tree, and our special place. She’d told him about it – that was the worst bit. And all of a sudden I was the idiot, and they’d gone off somewhere without me. I was being left behind. And I didn’t want any part of it.’

  The sex? Or the growing up?

  It’s like she’s heard the question in my head.

  ‘Any of it.’ She tosses the little pieces of pine-needle back onto the bed. ‘Everything was changing. I didn’t want it all to change. I wasn’t ready.’

  ‘You knew they were growing up. You were too.’

  ‘I didn’t want to.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Even I know that everyone has to grow up. A lot of it doesn’t seem like much fun – more homework; exams; being sensible. Even the stuff that’s supposed to be fun – like sex, or the taste of wine – seems a bit gross. But even I know that you can’t stop growing up – it happens whether you want it to or not.

  It takes her a while to answer. ‘I just felt like they’d outgrown me.’ She gives a big shrug. ‘Like I was being left behind.’

  ‘Is that the story? Is that why you stopped eating?’

  She shakes her head. ‘No. But it’s part of the story.’

  Sylvie

  When Ella came back from Spain at fifteen, she suddenly had boobs. Not pathetic little beginner boobs like I was just starting to grow, but proper boobs. She didn’t have them when she went away, and when she came back, there they were. She was tanned, and she said choritho instead of chorizo, and she had amazing clothes from vintage shops in Barcelona, while everything I owned had been bought for me by Mum at Sportsgirl or Target. Ella showed me photos of a boyfriend she’d had in Spain. In one of them, he was sitting up in bed, laughing, with no shirt on and the sheets rumpled all around him. I tried not to look embarrassed.

  I could feel it again – that sense that everyone else was in a hurry. Dougie and Nathan were always jockeying for a seat at the grown-ups’ table; sneaking to the far side of the headland to smoke cigarettes. I hated the smell of smoke on them; hated the feeling that everything was going too fast.

  That summer at the Neck, everything was changing. I saw how Dougie looked at Ella. We all looked at her – her long red hair turning blonde in the sun. Before, I used to feel like her beauty was a secret that only I knew. Now the secret was out. Her legs hanging over the edge of her beach towel, her toes digging into the sand. Upstairs in our little room at night, I wanted to talk to her about everything that happened the summer that she wasn’t here. But I didn’t know how to tell her about the footsteps on the stairs. I wanted to pretend that nothing had happened after all.

  All summer I waited to find the words. The days kept passing, as if they weren’t full of secrets. Dan caught a bucketload of flathead and Mum cooked them, full of tiny bones. Teddy smashed the kitchen window with a cricket ball. I saw Ella and Dougie on the beach, and stood there feeling like I might throw up right there on the sand.

  I wasn’t angry – not at Ella, or even at Dougie. I just knew that something was starting, for them, but for me it was something coming to an end. I didn’t want anything to change – not ever. I wanted summers at the Neck to always be the same: me, Dougie, Nathan and Ella sunbaking on top of the water tanks. Running barefoot to the beach, Teddy trailing behind with SausageDog. Squatting at the edge of the headland, poking at our reflections in the rockpools.

  Everything was changing. Everything. The tide was coming in, and I couldn’t stop it.

  PART SIX

  Sylvie

  I’ve been watching them. I’ve been tasting Mum’s food, listening to her silences, the spaces between the things she says. I’ve seen how Mum avoids the subject of Dougie, or talks too much about him, her words coming out too fast, too full of details.

  And Teddy’s drawing nearer to my secrets too. He’s creeping closer, sideways, crabwise, following the stories he’s been able to collect. What will it cost him to find me? And what will it cost me to keep him away?

  I want to grab his narrow shoulders and say, What you’re doing is dangerous. Don’t get any closer. Don’t get any closer to me.

  Soon enough, we’re both going to work it out. The tide’s coming in. We’re both going to arrive at our answers.

  Look: here is a picture of a family on a beach. A happy family. The gum trees are white and straight, and the rocks are the red-brown of an old blood stain. Look: the children are playing in the water, the parents are talking. Two grandfathers sit on beach towels. A dog is digging in the heavy sand.

  Look closer.

  Teddy

  Something’s about to happen. Dad’s coming home, if he uses the ticket we bought him. Sylvie’s supposed to be coming out of hospital this afternoon, if she stays stable. And Mum – Mum’s spending all her time writing those letters, and cooking her weird recipes.

  This is my last chance – the very last go. But I know what to do now, and where I have to be.

  Mum wants to get the house ready before she goes to pick up Sylvie, so she’s happy for me to be with Papabee all day.

  ‘Just be back by five,’ she says, ‘when Sylvie and I get home from the hospital, OK?’

  Papabee misses the ramp towards the bridge again, but he gets it right the second time, and then we’re on the bridge and pointing away from town. In my head, that rhyme comes back: Sister in the Boneyard, brother in the water. I’m going to the water, and the Boneyard – both at once. I’m going right deep back to where it all started.

  Just past Copping, where the road gets really winding and twisty, Papabee overtakes a tractor and stays on the wrong side of the road. I remind him to get back into the left lane, trying to keep my voice polite, and he says ‘Indeed,’ and wanders back over. But it isn’t Papabee’s driving that’s making me feel like I might throw up. It’s not even the twisty road. I’m afraid. Proper afraid, with hand-sweat and everything – like when I nearly fell out of the Secret Tree. I wind down the window (Papabee’s car is so old it has actual winding handles) and take small breaths so I don’t vomit.

  We stop at the service station at Dunalley, just like we used to with the whole family on the way to the Neck. I buy a custard tart with my pocket money, and a lamington for Papabee.

  ‘How very kind,’ he says. ‘What would you call this delicious confection?’ Bits of coconut are stuck in his moustache.

  Back in the car we drive through the first thin stretch of land, water on both sides like a gate made of sea. I know it has to be the Neck, for Sylvie’s price, and I know it’s going to be the beginning or the end of something. I just don’t know what.

  Instead of going to the house, I get Papabee to park above the tessellated pavement. Down on the beach it’s pretty cold, but we take off our shoes anyway. I like the way the wet sand squishes up between my toes.

  ‘That’s where I’m going.’ I point at the rocky headland, way at the far end of the beach. ‘Want to come?’

  Papabee looks at the steep rocks. ‘I think that would require me to be rather more intrepid than I am,’ he says. ‘But I shall have a walk along this charming stretch of beach, and meet you back here.’

  ‘OK,’ I say, relieved that he isn’t coming with me. I can’t explain to him that I’m looking for the final clue, to unlock Sylvie’s secrets. That I’m like a detective, but this isn’t a game or a story any more. I’m trying to find the magic that’s as strong as the magic of nails and crosses – a magic that belongs just to us. Something that I can take to Sylvie and say: There. That’s the price. Now tell me the whole story.

 
Gill

  I carry Sylvie’s bag from the car to the house. It’s not too heavy, despite all the books, but she still looks too frail to bear any weight at all.

  I call out when I unlock the front door, but Teddy and Papabee aren’t back yet. Sausage comes to the door, smells Sylvie’s hand and licks her ankle, then waddles back to his basket to resume his sleep.

  ‘They’ll be back soon,’ I tell Sylvie. It’s quiet here – quieter than the hospital, with its food pumps and monitors and the low chatter of nurses. I wish Teddy and Papabee would arrive. I don’t know how to be in silence with Sylvie yet.

  I put her bag down by her bedroom door. She’s behind me, moving in the way that anorexics do – her posture stiff, as if she might break in half.

  In the kitchen doorway, she reaches out her hand. It hovers just above my arm, not quite touching me. I notice that her hand looks different – the knuckles less spur-like, the veins less prominent.

  ‘Mum,’ she says. ‘There’s something I have to tell you.’

  Sylvie

  Before I speak, I take three breaths.

  If I say it out loud, it will become real. From living so close to silence for so many years, I’ve learned that every word is an incantation.

  Teddy

  It was always going to be the Neck. It seems obvious now – like Papabee searching for his glasses when they’re on top of his head the whole time. Of course it’s the Neck. I could have saved a lot of time – all these weeks and weeks of looking in the wrong places.

  There’s no one else on the winter beach – just us and all that heavy sky. I walk right down the far end, until Papabee’s just a wiggly line wearing a hat, and then I scramble onto the rocks of the headland. Squatting over one of the rockpools, I poke my finger into a sea anemone, making it squeeze shut, then I feel bad, because Sylvie always used to say it was mean to trick them into thinking they’ve caught food.