As The Sea Is Now Deep - 2. Chapter 2

The last suicides had been the previous winter, in the middle of an unseasonable fog. Their bodies had washed up on the lakeshore. If it hadn’t been for the note they left in the girl’s home we’d all have sworn the Butcher had escaped and was back at large. The municipality had even put up a sign at the top of the highest cliff that said “IT’S NOT WORTH IT” with a number for a 24-hour helpline.

It never bothered me. On weekends I’d hike up to the cliffs and sit with my legs dangling over the ravine, looking out over the gorge to the thicket on the other side that seemed to go on forever. I didn’t have a Hundred Acre Wood; I had a Thousand Acre Forest.

Grandma was sitting on the back porch petting Pish-Tush, their ever-yowling Siamese, when we appeared at the fringe of the back garden.

We were soon engulfed in her fat arms, pushed against her bosoms and overwhelmed by her reek of eau de cologne and talcum powder.

“Graeme, sweetie,” she said, pecking him on the cheek. “I’m so glad you came. There’s lots of food. Jacob hardly eats these days...”

“Grandma...”

She brought a hand to her forehead. “Oh dear, the lasagne has bacon in it. I can make you something else my boy...”

“It’s fine, Mrs Brody,” my friend interjected. “We don’t keep kosher.”

I loved chiding Graeme for being flippant about his heritage. Then he’d point out I wasn’t exactly the most observant Christian either. I always found it funny that I was the one who had an Old Testament name and he a Celtic one.

The tableau was the same as always, Grandpa holding court at the head of the long teak table, Grandma shovelling hills of food onto our plates whether we liked it or not.

“How was school, boys?” said Grandpa.

“Same old,” I said. “We’ve got a lot of work to get through before the exams.”

“You’re bright kids,” he replied. “Which reminds me.”

He got up and shuffled into the kitchen. Moments later he had returned with a bottle of wine.

“It’s not cold, but it will do,” he said. He proceeded to pour wine into Grandma’s glass, and then into ours. The children were always given wine glasses, even though we’d have fruit juice or cola.

“William, what on earth are you doing?”

“What does it look like I’m doing?” he retorted, slightly offended. “We should have a toast to these young men being in their prime.”

“What would Graeme’s parents say if they found out you were feeding their under-age son wine?”

“Stop being a poisonous old woman.”

Grandma clenched her teeth, suppressing a retort.

Grandpa got up. “What do your people always say?” He raised his glass to my friend. “La Chaim! To life!”

His voice was thunderous; it seemed a sin to disobey him. The wine was sickly sweet, the type that gave you migraines. Communion wine seemed tame by comparison. Graeme and I looked at each other as we swallowed.

We didn’t drink any more, but became light-headed anyway from the food bloat that followed. The lasagne was followed by a mountainous apfelstrüdel, surrounded by flotilla of homemade ice cream that had so much egg and sugar in Julia Child might have blushed.

My stomach gurgled loudly as we sank back on the chairs on the veranda.

“Your grandparents are so cool,” Graeme said, rubbing his belly. “I think I might explode if I ever look at food again.”

“Welcome to my world,” I said. “What do you want to do now?”

“Do we really have to study? My brain’s leaking out of my ears in this heat.”

“We could go swimming first,” I said. Pish-Tush had jumped on my lap and was kneading his old paws onto my stomach.

“Swimming? Where?”

“At the lake.”

“Are you mad? It’s deep and there are currents.”

“We’re both on the water polo team, you moron.”

“People have drowned in that lake.”

“People who got drunk and couldn’t swim,” I insisted. “And they went alone. You never go swimming alone.”

“I don’t like the idea of swimming where people have drowned,” Graeme insisted.

“You’re such a pussy.”

“Yeah, but a pussy who prefers to stay alive.”

In the end we passed out and only woke up when the first rumblings of the storm announced themselves.

Pish-Tush was yowling. He didn’t like the sound.

“That cat sounds like he’s dying,” Graeme said as we walked inside.

“That’s what Siamese are supposed to sound like, dufus.”

Now that our bellies had somewhat recovered, we managed to do some work at the dining room table. Grandma fussed around us, bringing tea and turning on the lights, muttering that we’d go blind squinting in the dark. The wind and the hammering rain blended into a white noise that soothed the horrors of organic chemistry unfurling themselves in the textbook.

“I just don’t get this shit,” I groaned, chewing on a pencil. “Like I really give a fuck where these bonds are supposed to go.”

“It’s important,” said my grandfather, who had materialised behind us. “Else benzene wouldn’t burn.”

“Sorry, Grandpa.”

“It’s fine, my boy. I was nine when I said ‘fuck’ for the first time, though my father clouted me.”

I stared at my grandfather.

“May I?” he said, sitting down next to us and yanking my spit-soaked pencil out of my mouth.

"Um, Grandpa..."

“Your germs, my germs," he said, wiping it on his cardigan. I wrinkled my nose in reflex.

He sketched a hexagon on a piece of paper and drew a circle inside it. “Benzene is a beautiful thing. This kept us up in the air in Korea. Whenever I'm at the airport and I smell jet fuel I...”

His breathing deepened. He clutched his chest.

“Grandpa? What’s wrong?”

“It’s fine... Iris! Where are my pills?”

“Oh for heaven’s sake, William! You’re supposed to keep them on you!”

I could hear Grandma muttering as she clomped towards her husband, producing the little amber bottle with a bored expression.

“That’s better,” he said after sticking one of the little pills under his tongue. “To think this stuff is also used to make dynamite. Bet you boys didn't know that.”

“Go lie down,” Grandma said.

“I’m fine.”

“If you drop dead I’m just going to leave you there, I swear. Have you made an appointment?”

“Our son’s a doctor. I don’t need to go to some snot-nosed specialist who’s going to charge me thousands for probing and prodding me.”

Grandma stood her ground. “David’s been begging you to go to Dr Wintour for weeks. Now go take a rest.”

He didn’t say anything, but got up and lumbered towards the stairs.

“Sorry about that,” said Grandma. “He’s so stubborn. You know, I waited for him for two years while he went off to the war and I never complained.”

Grandma wiped her eyes. I reached out and took her hand in mine. Her hand was doughy and cool.

“It’s all right, Jakey,” she said and ruffled my hair.

“Is everything okay, bud?” Graeme said when she walked out.

I shrugged. “Don't mind them. They’re always nagging at each other like this. They’ve been together for like fifty years.”

“My parents never talk.”

Now that I thought of it, neither did mine.

o0o0o

The weekend arrived while the world baked in its slow oven. Graeme came on Friday to stay over at my house. We made a pact to study in the evenings when it was cooler.

His snoring woke me early Saturday morning. I poked him in the ribs.

“Fuck off, Liam,” he groaned and pulled the covers over himself.

I frowned. “Liam?!” I poked him again. “Earth to Solomon, wake up!”

“Stop that,” he mumbled, turning over and hugging the counterpane. We’d slept in each other’s beds since we were five, and there had never been anything strange about it.

“You sound like a warthog,” I said, yawning. I didn’t say anything about him mentioning Liam’s name in his sleep. I couldn’t anyway, I'd recently had a dream about Michelle Pfeiffer in her leather Catwoman outfit and Graeme took great delight in pointing out that I had called out her name and was hugging the pillow awkwardly.

Graeme groaned, rubbed his eyes, and eased himself out of the bed.

“You gonna shower first?” he said slowly.

“I’ll stay for a while. You go ahead.”

“Why?”

“I’m lazy.”

“You’ve got morning wood, that’s why.”

“Piss off,” I said, and launched a pillow at him.

“Admit it. You do.”

“So what if I do? It’s not like I’m going to jerk myself off while you’re here, doucheface.”

“Where did your motor-mouth come from?” he said, grinning. “You’re usually so prissy when it comes to these things.”

“I’m not prissy.”

“Suit yourself, Jake. But I know there aren’t just comic books under your bed.”

“Fuck you,” I said, and rolled over clutching the other pillow.

I was still dozy and half-paralysed from the ebbing sleep. I felt icky, as if some giant with halitosis had breathed on me. I needed to pee, but I lay back as a memory washed over me.

I was six, and remembered a group of boys teasing Graeme in the locker room after dinky cricket practice because they were calling him a Jew-boy and looked different. I don;t actually remember punching Fred Atkins in the face but I do remember I made him cry. My father wasn’t angry with me. He merely grinned on the ride home from the Mother Superior's office and bought me a footlong hotdog from the drive-through diner my mother hated.

“What’s circumcision anyway?” I asked at supper that night. “And why do the Jews do it? Father McDonald said that Jesus says Gentiles only need to have it done to their hearts.”

“That was St Paul, my boy, but yes.”

My sister giggled.

“It’s nothing to laugh at,” said my mother with a stern look.

My father fetched one of his medical textbooks. What followed was a mildly horrifying lecture that made me wince with sympathy pain. He was about to explain the menstrual cycle to me when my mother interrupted us and said I’d had quite enough trauma for one day.

Graeme and I were brothers after that: surviving broken action toys together, scraped knees, exploding chemistry sets and headaches from binge-watching the Star Wars trilogy on rotation. I even went to Shul with his family a couple of times and he joined me for Easter Vigil, complaining loudly that it was even more boring and drawn-out than the Day of Atonement.

I was deep in thought when I eventually got to brushing my teeth. The memory had washed up a tide of random reminiscings, like the time I puked on the kid in front of me on my first roller-coaster ride. Then the time caught my sister snogging Harry Paulsen in her bedroom and her bribing me with twice my allowance to keep quiet. Would I remember all these things as I grew older? And when would I end up kissing a girl in her bedroom one day? My sister had been seventeen.

Until recently the thought of people sucking face had been gross to me. Now it made things uncomfortable in a different way, more so than looking at Mrs de Villiers’s legs in science class with those extremely short skirts she insisted on wearing. When she sat down on the front laboratory bench her boobs were at the same level as the Periodic Table that hung on the wall. I think every schoolboy who ever attended her chemistry tutorials knows the sequence of the halogens off by heart.

I was shoving down bacon and eggs when the phone rang.

“It’s for you,” my mom said.

For a moment I fantasised that it was Kerry. I’d had an unrequited crush on her the moment I first saw her, but I think she was as aware of me as a whale would be of a shrimp larva. She was also Liam’s girlfriend, the other half of the coolest couple in school.

“Hello?”

“Hi Jake. It’s Liam.”

“Liam?”

Graeme swung his head towards me and mouthed ‘what?’

“Hi Liam,” I continued.

“Hope you don’t mind, I figured your dad is the only Dr Brody in the phone book... I have a favour to ask.”

“Yeah?”

“I know you and Graeme are studying together. I was wondering if I could join you guys for a bit?”

“Um…”

“I'm not doing so well in English and maths and Coach says if my marks aren’t good enough I can’t stay on the team next year. So I figured if I hung out with you bright sparks maybe I could...I dunno..."

"You want to hang... with us?"

"Well, yeah, I just thought—"

Until last week's conversation in the shower, I had no idea Liam even knew my name.

"Dude, are you there?"

I flushed. My surprise had driven the conversation straight towards the city limits of Awkwardville.

"Sorry."

"So what do you say, Brody?"

"Well...we’re studying this evening, so I guess you could come over then if you want, we’re gonna do Gatsby and then maybe some calculus.”

“Dude, that would be really, really cool. What you doing now?”

“Um, I’m hanging out with Graeme.”

“Maybe I could take you out for burgers or something at Milford’s first to say thanks.”

I smirked. “Free burgers from Liam Thomas? I'm not saying no.”

“Done. Meet me there at one then.”

He rang off.

“What was that about?” asked Graeme.

“Yes, what was that?” my mom added, taking our plates. “Isn’t Liam Thomas the rugby captain?”

I nodded. "He wants to study with us. Said he’d take us for lunch as payback.”

“That’s nice of him,” said my mom. “You and Graeme would make good teachers.”

"I dunno, Ma."

Graeme was looking at me as if I were a surrealist painting.

“What's wrong, dude?”

“Earlier this week your grandfather gave me a whole lecture about atoms. Now Liam Thomas is acting like he’s one of our besties.”

“Who cares," I said. "We’re getting free burgers out of the deal. The guy’s family is loaded. And his dad bought him a Porsche, even though he can’t drive yet.”

“That’s not nice, Jake.”

“Sorry, Mom.”

“Do you think you boys could go over to Grandma and Grandpa this evening? I’ve asked them if it’s okay. I’m sure they wouldn’t mind if Liam joined you. Your father and I are going out... probably late.”

My mother looked old and pale. I’d hardly seen my parents together lately. Just this morning, my father had left early to assist at a surgery.

She brought a hand to her head and squeezed her eyes shut.

“What’s wrong, Ma?”

“I shouldn’t have had the... excuse me.”

"Mom? Are you having a migraine again?"

She ran out of the kitchen.

"Dude," said Graeme, shaking his head. "Is your family cursed or something?"

I managed a cautious snigger, trying not to notice the muffled retching I could hear coming from the bathroom.