I understood somehow that I shouldn’t get into the bed, so eventually I fell asleep on the floor. When I woke, Fern was beside me, her skinny arms wrapped around me, her face buried in my hair. She’d brought the blanket and pillow down from the couch and assembled a little bed around us. She held me like that all night.
Most people think of me as Fern’s protector. But the truth is, in her own funny way, she’s always been mine.
FERN
At 6.15 pm sharp, I open Rose and Owen’s white picket gate and walk down the red brick pathway. I have dinner with Rose on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, unless Rose is travelling or working late, in which case we forfeit. Attempts to reschedule to another night have not gone well, historically. These cornerstones to my routine are what keep me calm and grounded.
Rose and Owen have a lovely house, the kind that looks like it should feature in the pages of a House & Garden magazine, even though the lawns aren’t as neat as they were before Owen went away. Owen used to mow and edge the grass every other week during the winter months and weekly during the summer, but he has taken a job in London now. Still, the lawn is the only blight on the place. The verandah is swept and oiled, and there’s a wicker basket next to the door for umbrellas. There’s also a shoe rack bearing an upturned never-been-worn pair of shiny red gumboots. Rose takes great pride in keeping house, something she says is a direct response to our childhood home, which was chaotic to say the least. I too have adopted a high standard of order and cleanliness in my home, but I stop short of keeping my house to the standard of a magazine spread.
I take Rose’s three front steps in one leap. As I open the front door, I’m greeted by Alfie, whom I kneel to pat. Even the dog is picture perfect, with his glossy coat and a ridiculous red kerchief collar around his neck.
‘Hello, Alfie,’ I say, as he leaps into my lap. When I stand again, he runs along at my ankles delightedly. When Rose and Owen got Alfie, Rose had insisted that he was going to be an outside dog. (‘How many cavoodles do you know who are outside dogs?’ Owen had whispered to me. ‘None,’ I’d replied. ‘But I don’t know any cavoodles other than Alfie, so your survey is flawed.’)
In the kitchen, Rose squats in front of the oven with two oversize oven mitts on her hands, watching a chicken under the grill.
‘I’m here!’ I announce.
Rose startles, almost falling forward into the oven. ‘Fern! You scared the life out of me!’
She stands, frowning at me. Rose is an excellent frowner. Even when she laughs, two little vertical lines remain between her eyebrows, as if her face is afraid to have too much fun. Owen used to say it was because she’s always worrying about everyone. I know she is worried about him. I can tell because whenever she talks about his job in London, she smiles extra brightly and then quickly changes the subject. Rose also worries about me a lot. I once heard her say to someone on the phone that I’d turned her hair grey (even though her hair isn’t grey and, besides, stress doesn’t actually turn hair grey, though stress can trigger a condition called telogen effluvium which causes hair to shed up to three times faster, so while I could cause her to go bald, I couldn’t turn her hair grey).
‘Did you get the milk?’ Rose asks me. She’s wearing a white shirt, black leather pants and bare feet. Rose is always in some variation of black and white, with the occasional flash of tan or beige. (If you ask me, her outfits could use a few diamantes here and there.) Rose is an interior designer, but ‘the type who designs office spaces, not the type who chooses scatter cushions’. I gather from the regularity and conviction with which Rose says this that this distinction is important to her. For this reason, I have never mentioned that scatter cushions are among some of my favourite things in the world.
‘The milk?’ she repeats when I look blank. ‘I called you half an hour ago. You said you’d stop at 7-Eleven on your way?’
Interesting. I have no recollection of this. For someone as fastidious as I am, I can be staggeringly absent-minded. It’s strange. I have a photographic memory for names and faces, I can find any book in the library with only a character name or cover description, but I will regularly walk out of the house in the morning and leave the front door wide open (Mrs Hazelbury from next door has taken to just closing the door again, after calling me at the library the first few times, in fear that I had been burgled). Rose says my absent-mindedness is part of my charm, but I find it highly irritating. I hate the feeling of not knowing my own mind, not trusting myself, even if the fact is that I’m not to be trusted.
‘Never mind,’ Rose says, with a smile. ‘I’ll get some after dinner.’
Rose retrieves a pre-prepared quinoa salad from the fridge and places it on the table. ‘So,’ she says. ‘Tell me something about your day!’
I appreciate Rose’s choice of words. Most people ask ‘how was your day?’, which is so frustratingly intangible. Telling someone something about your day, on the other hand, is specific. I contemplate telling Rose about my interaction with the possible vagrant at the library, but as there is a high possibility that this would lead to a flurry of questions, I select a different item to report instead. ‘I found out who’d been crossing out the swear words in the books,’ I say.
Rose tosses the salad. ‘Oh, yeah? Who?’
‘Mrs Millard,’ I say. ‘From the retirement community. She’s the one with the mole on her cheek with the hairs growing out of it. She returned a book through the slot after their book club meeting and I happened to be standing there. I saw the crosses and confronted her. She didn’t deny it. I told her she had to pay to replace that copy and if I saw any more copies that had been scribbled on, she’d have her library card suspended!’
‘Good job, Officer Castle.’
Technically, she should have said ‘Constable’, but I understand what she means. ‘No-one defaces library property on my watch,’ I say.
Rose smiles. Rose is very pretty. Petite with a round face, huge eyes and nut-brown hair. We don’t look like twins (lots of people tell us that). I am tall with a narrow face and blonde hair. In fact, the only physical thing the two of us have in common is the colour of our eyes. A very pale blue, like seawater in the shallows of a white sandy beach (an old boyfriend of Rose’s said that once, and I thought it the best description I’d heard for the colour).
‘It’s nearly ready,’ Rose says, getting out her lancet device and blood glucose strip.
Rose has type 1 diabetes, which means her pancreas produces little or no insulin, which the body needs to function. To compensate for her lack of insulin, Rose has to give herself twice-daily insulin injections, test her blood sugar up to ten times a day, and strictly control the type of food she eats as well as the time of day she eats it. It’s a lot of work but she never complains. Now, as she prepares to prick her finger to test her blood sugar, she looks up to warn me and, as always, I set off on a lap of the house (blood makes me queasy).
The house feels empty without Owen, even after all these months. I am fond of him, despite his many disagreeable qualities, such as his penchant for throwing an arm around my shoulder at unexpected times, and his refusal to call me by my given name, preferring instead to use uninspired versions of it: ‘Fernie’, ‘Fernster’, ‘The Ferminator’. It’s always strikes me as one of the great mysteries of life, who you are fond of. As I wander back toward the kitchen, I nearly stumble on the open suitcase on the floor, partially filled with shoes and a folded garment bag. At the sight of it, my stomach clenches slightly.