Page 3 of The Good Sister

There are a lot of people in the little vestibule now and the acoustics are particularly irritating. I place my hands over my ears. ‘It’s a compliment,’ I yell over the din. ‘Wally is universally beloved, even if he is an odd sort of fellow. Though maybe he isn’t odd, maybe he just looks that way? Like you!’

Wally pushes his glasses back up his nose and I lip-read him saying, ‘Excuseme?’

‘You don’t need to ask to be excused,’ I shout, moving toward the door. ‘The library is a public space; you can come and go as you please.’

The door opens yet again; this time an elderly man, pushing a walking frame, comes through it. I grab the door and manoeuvre around the double stroller. I’m almost out the door when a thought occurs to me and I swivel around.

‘And if you belched or farted, I didn’t hear it, so no need to excuse yourself for that either!’

And with that, I give a little wave and take my exit.

When we were five, my mother took my sister, Rose, and me to the library every day for a year.A better education than school will ever give you, Mum used to say, and I quite agree. If it were up to me, every child would have a year in the library before they went to school. Not just to read, but to roam. To befriend a librarian. To bash their fingers against the computers and to turn the pages of a book while making up a story from their superior little imaginations. How lucky the world would be if every child could do that.

I was that lucky. These days, researchers seem to be saying that we don’t form explicit memories until the age of seven, but I have a number of memories from the year I was five. Memories of Mum, Rose and me waking up with the birds, scrambling into our clothes and racing out to the bus stop. Because of our eagerness, we nearly always arrived before the library opened, then passed the time by sitting on the bench out the front, or, if it was raining, huddled under the awning finishing our books while we waited for the doors to open. When we got inside, Rose and I took turns sliding our books into the return slot and then racing to select our beanbags for the day (I preferred the cotton ones – the vinyl could get so sticky after a while). Mum never sat on a beanbag, she preferred the armchairs or seats on the other side of the library. Often, we didn’t see Mum for the whole day. That was part of the fun. We went to the toilet by ourselves, we went to the water fountain by ourselves. At the library, we were in charge of what we did and when.

We’d been doing this for a few weeks when one of the librarians, Mrs Delahunty, began taking an interest in us. First, she gave us book recommendations. Then, she gave Rose and me worksheets on which to write the names of all the books we’d read. If we got to a hundred, she said, we’d be gifted a book from the library to keep! It was through filling out that worksheet that Rose and I learned to write. Some days, when we deliberated on what to read next, Mrs Delahunty, would come over and make suggestions.

‘Did you enjoyThe Giving Tree, girls? If so, I think you would loveWhere 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!andYour mum must have spent a lot of time reading to you.

The first time someone said that, I started to point out that, no, itwasn’tMum 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 usClifford 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.

Next, Mrs Delahunty asked where we’d been sleeping.

‘On the couch,’ Fern said. There was no hint of concern on her face. I remember thinking how nice it must have been, to be so clueless. And how dangerous.

Mrs Delahunty’s expression remained the same, but the pitch of her voice rose slightly. ‘Oh? Whose couch?’

Fern shrugged. ‘Depends whose house we are at.’

Mrs Delahunty looked at me. I looked at my shoes.