The Cookbook of Common Prayer by Francesca Haig

Author:Francesca Haig
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books

At first I email articles and links to Gill, sometimes several times a day. This one’s interesting re the speed of flash floods, I write. See the link for the cached BBC weather report. But Gill never mentions them, and when I ask her, she’s vague.

‘I haven’t had a chance to get to them yet,’ she says. ‘Had a meeting with Sylvie’s cardiac specialist today. And I haven’t managed to do a sweep of Papabee’s flat for at least a week – God knows what’s growing in his fridge by now.’

I ought to be there to help her. She’s doing it all herself: scrambling to stay on top of hospital and school runs; feeding Teddy and Papabee and not feeding Sylvie; and also somehow staying on top of her own work, and the increasingly elaborate lie.

It’s been three and a half weeks, and we still haven’t told Sylvie the truth. Worse than that: Gill’s told her Dougie and I are travelling together. She’s given Sylvie a letter that’s supposed to be from Dougie. The lie is growing bigger and I can hardly keep up.

‘You’ve left Florence by now, OK?’ Gill says to me. ‘Remember that, when you call her. I’ll put it all in the next letter. You’ve taken the ferry across to Cephalonia. It’s been hot there – high-twenties every day.’

I look around my cramped flat, the white-grey London sky outside.

‘Is this mad?’ I ask her. ‘Is this whole thing mad?’

The whole situation seems so far-fetched already – Dougie dead; Sylvie in hospital; me on the other side of the world with my son’s ashes in a box – that I can’t tell any more what’s normal, what’s acceptable.

‘Are we making it more complicated than it needs to be?’ I ask.

‘I don’t know how to make it simple, if simple means Sylvie dead.’

I can’t argue with that. Sylvie dead stops all debate. It’s the place that my mind won’t allow itself to approach.

‘You should ring her tonight,’ Gill continues. ‘She misses you, you know.’

Does she? Is Sylvie even capable of thinking beyond herself, that ever-shrinking orbit of her attention? It’s the nature of anorexics to be self-absorbed. If anyone could have got through to her, it would have been Dougie, but his letters went unanswered.

‘I’ll ring her tomorrow,’ I promise Gill.

Every few days I call Sylvie on the ward phone, but the conversations are always stilted. She didn’t want to talk to me when I was at home, and my being here hasn’t changed that. She asks about Dougie, and I keep my replies brief, not wanting to sink deeper into the quicksand of the lie. ‘He’s on the mend,’ I say. ‘Leg still really painful, but he’s not whinging too much.’ I have excuses prepared in case she asks to speak to Dougie: I left him in town when I came back to the hotel – even with a broken leg, he’s got more energy than me! Or: He’s not up yet – he was drinking with some Canadian lads we met last night.

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