Girl A(30)

When Father came from the hospital to collect us, it was bedtime. Ethan and I had fought over who would read the bedtime story, and Peggy had deemed that we would take it in turns, in age order: first Michael, then Benjamin, then Ethan, and then me. Delilah, three and bored, ran from one room to the next, delighted to be awake. The book concerned pirates, and was significantly more dramatic than any of Father’s bedtime tales, even if Michael read in a stilted monotone, and Ethan rolled his eyes (‘Alexandra can read better than this’) until it was his go.

I was nervous and excited about the opportunity to read in front of an audience, and as Ethan neared the end of his pages, my heart pattered faster. I really could read better than Benjamin – and maybe even better than Michael – and here was the chance to prove it. I cleared my throat, and had wrested the book from Ethan when Father knocked at the door.

‘Another girl,’ Father said to Peggy, then shouted for us.

‘It’s late,’ Peggy said. ‘Eight o’clock, Charles. They’re in their pyjamas. They can just stay here.’

Ethan and Delilah had joined Father at the door, but I stayed on the sofa, holding the book. ‘It’s my turn,’ I said. ‘It’s my turn to read.’

‘Come here, Alexandra.’

‘It’s outside visiting hours anyway,’ Peggy said. ‘They can meet their sister tomorrow.’

‘I’ll decide when they can meet their sister. Let’s go, Alexandra.’

‘There are only a few pages left.’

Ethan looked up at Father. ‘Come on, Alexandra,’ he said.

‘But it’s my turn.’

Father held out his arm and brushed Peggy aside. He came into the living room without taking his shoes off and picked me up. I was still holding the book; he took it from my hand, easily, and threw it against the wall. Over his shoulder, I saw the faint footprints of dirt in the cream carpet, and Peggy and her children, standing in their light, bright hallway, becoming smaller in the night.

Mother had been opened up, Father said, once we were in the car. The baby couldn’t get itself in the right position. They had cut her out. I looked to Ethan for an explanation, but he, too, was confused. Delilah started to cry.

At the hospital, I didn’t want to leave the car. I thought of Mother on a cool, silver table, her torso splayed across the room. You could see each of her organs operating, as on the face of an expensive watch. The new baby crawled from the viscera, slippery with blood. In the car park, I reached for Ethan’s hand, expecting him to ridicule me; he was eight, now, and above such gestures. But he held my hand and squeezed it.

Of course, it wasn’t like that at all. We travelled along the vast, bright corridors, trying to pronounce the names of the wards. In maternity, a nurse spoke to us gingerly, the way that you might speak to a wounded and vicious animal, and took us to Mother. She lay on the bed, asleep, with her skin and flesh intact. At her side, in a small plastic cradle, was the baby.

Father didn’t look at the child. He touched Mother’s hair and face, waking her; when she saw him, she smiled. Ethan, Delilah and I crowded around the cot.

‘I don’t want her,’ Delilah said.

‘You’re too small to even see her,’ I said. The baby was still asleep. I took one of her immaculate little hands with my finger.

‘She looks just like Alexandra did,’ Mother said, and an odd, unwarranted pride spread across my chest. It had been worth missing my turn to read. Here was a new sister, who was just like me, and one day I would read to her.

‘We’ll call this one Eve,’ Father said.

Delilah didn’t change her mind about Evie. For nearly four years, she had been the youngest child, and she saw the baby as her usurper: a malicious courtier in her kingdom, smuggled in the guise of a child. The plan had been for Evie to sleep in Delilah’s room, but that was no good; Delilah took the baby’s blanket for herself, or left little ambushes for the child. Into the cot she snuck a fork, my pencils from school, the tweezers from Mother’s dressing table. ‘A present,’ she insisted, ‘for the baby.’

The house was reordered. I slept in the baby room with Evie, and Delilah moved in with Ethan.

Delilah didn’t get away with things because she was cunning, like Ethan; she got away with things because she was beautiful, as Mother had been. It was an indisputable fact, like those required by Mr Greggs, and one to which I was becoming resigned. Each year at school, we would be summoned for photographs, including family shots. When Delilah first joined us, the photographer pretended to drop his camera. ‘What a beautiful little girl,’ he said. ‘Here, here’ – he handed her a fat teddy bear, which he had been using to cajole reluctant pupils – ‘a few on your own, first.’

When the photographer had taken a set of pictures of Delilah from different angles, up close and further away, he beckoned for me and Ethan to join her in his frame. Delilah had discarded the bear; I picked it up from the dusty assembly hall floor, but the photographer shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘That’s just for the prettiest little girls. And you’re too old for that, anyway.’

My parents ordered the group photograph. Ethan was nonchalant, and Delilah was crowing, and I was looking up at the ceiling, with a red face, trying very hard not to cry.

Mother placed it in a cheap supermarket frame and hung it in the living room, where it was impossible not to look at it. Delilah, inspired, asked to see pictures of Mother as a child. ‘We’re the same!’ she exclaimed, and, looking at me over the top of the photograph album: ‘And so different from Alexandra.’