I welcome you here today to pay tribute to Toby Brennan, to mourn the shortness of his life, and to comfort his family for their loss. His mother Bridget, his father Finn and his brother Jarrah have lived among us less than a year. The turnout today is a sign to the Brennan family that though you are new here, you are part of our community, which is full of compassion. Our hearts are with you at this tragic time.
The closest I came to seeing Toby again was when we walked into the chapel at the crematorium at ten o’clock on Friday morning, four days and one hour after he died. There he was, just a couple of metres away from me, in a white coffin that looked too small to hold him.
Earlier in the week the woman from that foundation thing, whose name I kept forgetting, asked if we wanted a viewing. Toby’s body would be back from the autopsy on Wednesday and there was time, she said.
Dad just shut his eyes and shook his head.
‘You may want to give people the option. You might change your own minds. It can be an important part of your healing.’
Did I want to see Toby? The idea was terrifying. But maybe if I saw him I’d believe he was dead.
‘It is a chance to say goodbye,’ the woman continued. ‘Toby will look very peaceful.’
‘After he’s been autopsied?’ Mum snapped. I think she’d forgotten I was there.
I had a flash of Toby, eyes closed, skin pale. I glanced at Mum and Dad but they were both looking at the floor. If I said I wanted to see Toby, did it mean I was blaming them? Did I need their permission? Was I even brave enough? I was scared that dead Toby would get into my brain and be the only thing I remembered.
The idea of seeing Toby never got mentioned again. Not when people started arriving, not when the house was full of Brennan aunts and uncles and cousins, making food and drinks all through the day and night, crying and blowing noses, hugging me, cooking and eating, cooking and drinking, always food on the table, more and more dropped off every day until we were throwing it out. No one asked about seeing Toby, or not in front of me, though maybe that was what the whispered conversations in the kitchen were about, the ones that stopped suddenly when I walked into the room.
I didn’t want to hear what they were saying anyhow. The thing I needed to hear and the thing I couldn’t stand to hear was what happened. Who let Toby out of their sight? Which one of them?
No one talked about that.
Then suddenly it was Friday and somehow we were running late for the funeral; suddenly it was all a rush and no one could get organised. We were maybe the last people to get there and we came down the aisle with everyone looking at us, and filed into the front row and sat down. And there was the coffin. When the service was finished, Toby would be cremated. That was the polite word for it. No chance to change my mind.
I’d never seen a dead body. Not of a person. I saw our cat after she was crushed by a car back in Hobart. Gave me nightmares and we never got another cat. I’d had a nightmare about Toby too, the night after that woman asked about the viewing. I knew the body was Toby’s, but I couldn’t recognise him. Woke up choking. Maybe it was lucky the last time I saw Toby he was alive. Maybe it was lucky I could only imagine what had happened, and what he might look like.
There I was, in full view of every person in the place. Toby out the front in the white box. Mum on the end of our row, me in the middle, Dad next. The two front rows were full of Dad’s relatives. Uncle Conor sat next to him, really close. Then Dad’s sister Mary and her girlfriend Edie, and his other sister Carmel and Uncle Graeme. Cousins – mostly older than me, who I didn’t know well – were in the next row.
Conor was staying with us, sleeping on one of the couches. His wife Helen hadn’t come. Edmund was sleeping on the other couch. Everyone else was at hotels, but they spent all their time at our house. Poppa Brenn didn’t come.
‘He’s too old,’ Dad said when I asked. ‘He can’t cope.’
Whatsername asked me all through the week if I had support, if I had friends, did I want counselling. She was trying to be nice. But every time she asked made it worse. No, I didn’t have friends. The closest thing to a friend, Billy, was just as outcast as me. He’d texted something during the week that sounded like his mother made him send it, but that was all.
My aunts and uncles and cousins were sorry for me, but it was like they didn’t know me. ‘You’re so much taller,’ everyone said. I wasn’t. I just looked older suddenly. I could see it in the mirror. Most of them hadn’t seen us since we’d left Tassie at the start of the year. Toby wasn’t even two then. They didn’t know how he’d started talking and suddenly there’d been a person inside that little body. They didn’t know how he’d say something and you’d look at him and think: So that’s been going on in there.
And it was like I didn’t know anyone either. Especially Dad and Mum. Dad sat me down the day after and tried to tell me what happened. He could hardly talk. The gate somehow got left unlatched – something to do with that gizmo thing – and Toby somehow got into the pool and somehow no one saw it in time. It was an accident, he said. A terrible accident.
The white coffin. The voice of the celebrant. The sound of people behind me crying.
This doesn’t happen to us. This happens to other people.
It was a stupid thing to think. But it wouldn’t get out of my head. I’d read about bad stuff in the papers, I’d felt sorry for those people whose lives had been wrecked, and then I’d forgotten them. And now we were them.
When the celebrant paused, I snuck a look over my shoulder. There were about five rows of kids from my class at school. Laura Fieldman was in the middle of the third row, looking right at me.