The Good Sister(5)
‘Did you enjoy The Giving Tree, girls? If so, I think you would love Where the Wild Things Are. Sit down and we’ll read it together.’
Afterward she’d ask us questions. Do you think Max really went away? What do you think actually happened? Mrs Delahunty said that answering questions helped our brains understand what we’d read. As the year went on, Mrs Delahunty chose more and more difficult books for us, and by the year’s end, according to Mrs Delahunty, we had the vocabulary of twelve-year-olds! Because of this, the following year we skipped Prep and went straight into Grade One. Mum was very proud of this. Lots of people said things to us like, What a wonderful mum you must have! and Your mum must have spent a lot of time reading to you.
The first time someone said that, I started to point out that, no, it wasn’t Mum who spent time reading to us, but then Rose tapped her bracelet against mine. Mum had given us our bracelets when we were born – mine was engraved with a fern, and Rose’s with a rose. Somewhere along the way, they became our way of talking to each other without talking. Rose always taps her bracelet against mine as a warning. Stop. It’s a good system that almost always works. There’s only been one time that Rose couldn’t stop me from doing the wrong thing and that was a mistake that will haunt me for the rest of my life.
JOURNAL OF ROSE INGRID CASTLE
Today, my therapist and I dived deep on my yearning for a baby. I talked about how it felt physical, like hunger, like pain. Like loss. My therapist thinks this stems from my childhood – a desire to do right what my mother couldn’t. An attempt to heal myself. Maybe he’s right.
As conversation steered in this direction, he asked me to talk about my earliest traumatic memory. It took me a while to find it – it must have been buried a long way down in the dusty depths of my subconscious – but now that I’ve retrieved it, I can’t stop thinking about it. It is from when I was five years old; the year after Dad left, not that I have any memory of that. My first scraps of memory that I still hold are from the following year, the year Mum took us to the library. Fern had loved that year! She refers to it with such fondness – how the library became her home, how she discovered the hidden worlds within the pages of books, how that year is the reason she became a librarian. It makes me want to scream. Sometimes I wonder if, like those choose-your-own-adventure books that we used to devour, the two of us were living parallel, alternate lives.
Do you know what I remember from the library year? Sleeping on couches that smelled of dog; being dragged from our old flat in the middle of the night and not being allowed to bring any toys, not even Mr Bear, even when I begged Mum to let me take him; hauling striped plastic bags out of strangers’ houses every morning and putting them in the boot of Mum’s little car to take wherever we were headed next; waking up every morning with a pain in my stomach; a combination, I realise now, of hunger and fear.
You know something funny? I don’t think Fern even knows we were homeless that year. She probably told herself it was an adventure, or a holiday or an experience. Or maybe she didn’t tell herself anything at all. She had a gift for accepting life the way it was, rather than questioning it. Some days – heck, every day – I envy her that.
It was Dad’s fault we were homeless, apparently. After he left, Mum couldn’t afford to pay the rent on her own. She said the landlord was charging so much that no honest person could afford it. That was why we had to sneak out of there during the night with only the things we could carry. For the next twelve months, we stayed in the car or on the couch or floor of whomever Mum was friends with at the time. Luckily, Mum had a knack for making friends. ‘Girls, this is Nancy – we met at the hairdresser!’ she’d say delightedly. A few days later, we’d be living in Nancy’s house and calling her ‘Aunty Nance’. A week or two after that, we would never see Nancy again – but we’d continue to see the clothes and jewellery she’d lent Mum. We always had a roof over our heads though, and Mum was very proud of that. She’d remind us of this each night before bed.
‘I’m doing all this for you two, you know that, right? So you have somewhere to live. If it wasn’t for you two, I could easily find a place to live. That’s how much I love you.’
‘Thank you, Mummy.’
‘And who do you love?’
‘You, Mummy.’
The months wore on. The library during the day, someone’s couch at night. It wasn’t all bad. There were things about the library I liked. I liked having somewhere to go every morning, so we didn’t have to make small talk over breakfast with whomever was hosting us. Even back then, I understood the shame of taking up space in someone else’s life. I liked losing myself in the nooks and crannies of the library, imagining it was my home. I liked that the library was a public space, a space where we were safe, at least for a few hours. I liked Mrs Delahunty too, though not with the same ferocity Fern did. From time to time, while she was reading to us, I would fantasise that Mrs Delahunty was our mother. I remember the day she read us Clifford the Big Red Dog. After she finished reading, instead of asking us about the story like she usually did, she asked us if we’d had breakfast that morning.
‘Nope,’ Fern said. ‘Two meals a day are enough for anyone, any more and you’re greedy.’
She was reciting Mum’s words, of course, verbatim. I remember stealing a glance at Mum, over by the magazines and my stomach got a wobbly feeling.