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.
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.
After a while, Mrs Delahunty got up and walked over to Mum. I buried my head in my book, too afraid to look. After a few minutes, Mum came over and told us it was time to leave.
‘Who told the librarian that we were homeless?’ Mum asked, after we had exited. We were on either side of her, holding onto her hands. I remember that detail because it was unusual. Usually Mum liked Fern and me to hold hands with each other – it made passers-by smile at us, and that seemed to make Mum happy.
‘Who told the librarian that we were homeless?’ she repeated. There was an edge to her voice, and I remember Fern starting to fidget, repeating the word ‘homeless’ in that strange way she repeated things. We turned the corner into a quiet street and Mum asked again. Her fingernails were digging into my palm.
‘Mrs Delahunty . . . she asked us–’ I started.
‘So it was you?’ Mum turned on me immediately.
I peeked at Fern. She was frightened and confused. She hadn’t told anyone we were homeless; she hadn’t used that word. She didn’t know she was the one to blame.
I nodded.
Mum let go of our hands and bent down low. ‘You stupid, stupid girl. That lady might seem nice, but she wants to take you away from me. Is that what you want?’
I shook my head.
‘Do you want to go a foster home, with a horrible woman who doesn’t love you? Never see me again?’
Her face was a contorted, terrifying mask of rage. Bits of spittle flew into my face.
‘No!’ I cried. All I wanted was to be with her. To be separated from Mum was my greatest fear. She was right. I was stupid. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Mummy.’
‘Let’s go home, Fern,’ she said, snatching up Fern’s hand. I ran after them, grasping for Mum’s other hand, but she put it into her pocket. I scuttled after them all the whole way home, crying. Mum didn’t even flinch when I threw myself at her feet, grazing my knee badly in the process.
When we got back to the house – I can’t remember whose we were staying at or why they weren’t there that night – Mum made dinner for two. When I asked if I could have some, she acted as if I wasn’t even there. Afterward, she bathed Fern and read her a story. It was rare that Mum bathed us, and she never read us stories. I clambered onto the couch to listen to the story, but Mum pushed me off so roughly I fell onto the floorboards, banging my bad knee. I cried so hard my stomach hurt, but she just kept reading. When the story was finished, she tucked Fern in and left the room.