‘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.
Rose is going to London on Friday for four weeks to visit Owen. One full lunar cycle. I know Rose is excited about it so I’m trying to be excited too, but Rose and I haven’t been apart for four weeks before – not even when Rose and Owen got married, because they had a destination wedding in Thailand followed by a ‘group honeymoon’ that all the guests (including me) attended. I try not to think about what could go wrong while she’s away, and that, of course, makes me think about what happened that night and then, suddenly, I can’t think of anything else. I don’t want her to go.
‘Dinner’s ready!’
I tuck the edge of the garment bag back inside the case. That’s when I notice the bottle. A white pill bottle with a pink label, showing the midsection of a woman, with full breasts and a curved abdomen. I pick up the bottle and read the label: ELEVIT. TO SUPPORT YOU THROUGH THE DIFFERENT STAGES OF PREGNANCY.
‘Fern? Dinner!’
I stand. ‘Are you pregnant, Rose?’
It wouldn’t be ridiculous, I suppose. Rose is twenty-eight, which is an appropriate age, more or less. I have watched television programs about the way fertility dwindles after the age of thirty. Apparently, doctors were recommending that partnered women who wanted children should start as early as possible. Once the surprise of it fades, I feel something akin to excitement hit my system. A child. I’ve always been partial to children. Their lack of complexity, their proclivity for speaking directly without subtext or agenda. Of course, I’d long accepted that I couldn’t have a child of my own, but Rose having a child would be the next best thing.
I return to the kitchen and give Rose the once-over. She doesn’t appear to have gained any weight. Then again, if common wisdom is to be believed, morning sickness could ward off weight gain in the early months. Perhaps she’d been feeling off-colour these past few weeks, having aversions to food she’d previously enjoyed, but keeping it secret, waiting for a special moment to announce it? But Owen had been gone for months. What would it mean as far as he was concerned?
‘I guess you found the Elevit,’ Rose says after a beat. ‘My doctor advised that if I was going to try to get pregnant, I should start taking them. Unfortunately,’ she says, ‘it hasn’t happened yet.’
‘So . . . you’re trying to have a baby?’ I ask.
Rose picks up the plates and carries them to the table. ‘I didn’t want to tell you until, well . . . I hoped I’d be able to tell you when we had something to announce. Turns out, getting pregnant isn’t as easy as I’d hoped.’
‘Oh.’ I sit at the table. ‘Because of your diabetes?’
‘Actually, no. It turns out I have a condition called POA. Premature Ovarian Ageing.’
She offers me some dressing. I shake my head.
‘Premature Ovarian Ageing,’ I repeat. In my mind’s eye, I see a row of eggs with grey hair and wrinkles and tiny walking sticks. ‘What is Premature Ovarian Ageing?’
‘Basically it means I have the eggs of a fifty-year-old woman,’ Rose says. ‘The quality isn’t great and there aren’t many of them. We could try IVF, but that relies on me having a good egg to harvest. At the moment, they’re not sure that the eggs will survive the process.’
Now I picture the eggs in a row of hospital beds, their deathbeds. A row of my potential little nieces and nephews. ‘That’s sad.’
Rose puts her fork down. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Yes, it is, isn’t it?’
‘So . . . if you have this . . . condition, does that mean I have it too? Because we’re twins?’
‘No,’ Rose says. ‘I mean, it’s possible, but not likely. You could get tested if you were worried.’
But of course I’m not worried. I am in excellent health, something I take very seriously. My personal maintenance routine encompasses an annual check-up with my GP, twice yearly check-ups with the dentist, biennial cervical screening tests and breast checks. My exercise routine entails walking to work and back each day, a five-kilometre round trip. I also do karate twice-weekly. In addition to karate, I do Vinyasa yoga for thirty minutes each morning – for its many benefits, which include muscle stretching and a calm mind. So Premature Ovarian Ageing wasn’t something I needed to feel concerned about at all. Besides, I have no plans to get pregnant; I�
��ve never been pregnant. I’ve only ever had sex three and a half times (the half was the first time, and half is more than generous). All three and a half times were with the same guy – a medical student named Albert whom I’d dated for four months a decade ago, and only if ‘dated’ meant spending our weekends studying together, playing the odd game of sudoku and, of course, sex. I will admit I’d been curious about sex before I’d met Albert, but I was disappointed to find it strange and not particularly pleasant. Albert seemed to enjoy it slightly more than I did, but neither of us had reached anything like the euphoria I’d read about in romance novels. Still, I’d enjoyed our games of sudoku and he appeared to enjoy them too, so I’d been confused when four months in, Albert abruptly stopped returning my calls, and started keeping his head down when I saw him in the library. When I talked to Rose about it, Rose counselled me that men could be fickle, and if American teen television programs were anything to go by, that seemed to be the truth, so I let it go. I stopped bothering with men after that and I certainly never worried about babies.
I’m not capable of raising a baby and that’s that. I’ve made peace with it. But suddenly my interest in babies is piqued. If my eggs do turn out to be youthful . . . maybe there could be a use for them after all? This could be my chance to pay Rose back for everything she’s always done for me.
I don’t sleep well, in general. It bothers me excessively. Especially as I’ve read all the literature about good sleep and applied all the wisdom. I go to bed at the same time each evening, I exercise regularly and avoid screens and caffeine of an afternoon. And yet my problem remains. Like some kind of cruel karma.
I tend to fall asleep all right, it’s the waking that’s the problem. Once, twice, sometimes three times a night. I wake abruptly, my body rigid and my breathing ragged. Generally, I’m twisted sideways with my hands tangled in the sheets, a death grip, as if I’m trying to strangle them. Usually it takes at least an hour of deep breathing before I can calm myself enough to drift off again.
I never wake screaming like they do in the movies. In a way, the silence is the worst part. It reminds me of that silent night by the river when I was twelve, when I did that terrible thing.
Most days at work, I break for lunch for half an hour, during which time I eat a honey sandwich and a muesli bar at my desk in an attempt to eschew lunchtime conversation with my colleagues (it rarely works). But Fridays are different. On Friday lunchtimes, most of my colleagues at the library go down to the Brighton Hotel for lunch. Today, the group going are Gayle, Linda, Bernadette and Trevor. The ‘social ones’. One of us is required to stay back to ‘hold the fort’ and, week after week, I happily oblige. I enjoy the peace and quiet. Still, I’ve come to enjoy the ritual of being asked followed by the quick, unoffended ‘no worries’ that precedes my colleagues vacating the building. All seems to be going to plan today. I offer my usual, ‘No, thank you,’ but instead of replying, ‘No worries,’ Carmel says, ‘You might enjoy it if you came along, Fern.’
Carmel is my boss. With a thin stern face, she resembles a humourless boarding school mistress from an old English novel. She has coffee breath, and whiskers on her chin, and spends most of her shifts pushing her cart around, huffing at people who ask for a recommendation. Carmel says our job is to stack books and help people with the photocopiers. (‘Libraries aren’t just about books,’ Carmel had said to me once, and I had laughed out loud. At least, unlike boarding school mistresses, she has a sense of humour.)
My old boss, Janet, had a round, smiling face, an enormous bosom and resembled a kindly matron looking after soldiers in a postwar infirmary. Janet had read every book in the library and told staff that our job was to be a frontline soldier in the war against illiteracy and lack of imagination. I told Carmel this once and she frowned at me as if she was trying to work out a complicated maths puzzle.
‘Fern?’ Carmel prompts. ‘Would you look at me, please?’
I keep my eyes on my computer and start typing quickly, as if I’m doing something so urgent I can’t possibly be interrupted, not even to respond to Carmel. This technique is successful about fifty per cent of the time. Not great odds, but I do find it cathartic, bashing at the keyboard, filling up the silence and expectation hovering over me. The silence stretches on until Gayle comes to my rescue: ‘Right! We don’t want to miss our booking, do we? Linda, grab Carmel’s bag.’
I keep typing. In my peripheral vision I see that Carmel keeps watching me for several seconds, but then, mercifully, Gayle sweeps her up in the flurry of people exiting and she is gone.
It is quiet in the library for the next hour, leaving me with some free time to do some research on the computer. I am an avid book enthusiast, but even I can admit that when it comes to research, you’d be hard-pressed to find a tool more useful than the internet. It’s been three days since Rose confided in me about her fertility issues, and twelve hours since she boarded a plane for London. I’ve used that time to conduct a thorough investigation into what is involved in having baby for your sister. As it turns out, there are numerous options available. You can be a surrogate, which means you use your own egg . . . or you can be a gestational carrier, which means you are implanted with an embryo conceived using a donor egg. If you are using your own egg, you can become pregnant using artificial insemination, where the sperm of the intended father is inserted into your body . . . or you can use in-vitro fertilisation, where the pre-fertilised egg is implanted. In some cases, the surrogate has sexual intercourse with the intended sperm donor, but this is exceedingly rare which is an enormous relief. As fond as I am of Owen, and as much as he’d likely prefer his own sperm to be used, the idea of having intercourse with him is startlingly unappealing.
After thinking long and hard and making a spreadsheet of the pros and cons of each option, I conclude that the simplest way to have Rose’s baby would be to become pregnant naturally by a man who isn’t Owen. This method would have no prohibitive costs, no medical treatment, no need for Rose or Owen to be involved at all. In fact, if I were to become pregnant quickly enough, I could even surprise Rose with news of my pregnancy upon her return from her trip to London! What a happy homecoming that would be! I would, of course, require a man to have intercourse with, but that shouldn’t be too difficult. By all reports, men are desperate for intercourse. Apparently, they can be found at nearly every bar and club, prowling for women to have no-strings-attached intercourse with. Unfortunately, I don’t go to bars or clubs. But surely men congregate in other places too.
I am still researching when the rest of the staff return from lunch, smelling of beer and garlic and talking several decibels louder than before they left. I continue my research a little longer as, judging by the way everyone makes themselves scarce, they aren’t bothered by what I’m doing. Even Carmel and her ever-present cart are nowhere to be seen for most of the afternoon. Thus, I am knee-deep in research about an online dating app called Tinder when a patron appears at the desk.
‘I’m having some trouble with the printer.’
I hold back an eye roll. Ninety-nine per cent of front desk queries are about the printers and the photocopiers. The photocopier enquiries are the worst, as each patron is required to load up a beastly little card with coins and connect this card to their account, a process that precisely no-one, including myself, knows how to do successfully. As such, I prefer not to engage with those kinds of queries. Not only do I not understand them, they bore me in the most indescribable way. Lately, whenever a patron has a query about the printers or the photocopiers, I pretend I hear someone calling me and excuse myself. I am about to do exactly that when I recognise the person’s accent and perfect enunciation.
‘Wally!’ I cry.
He smiles, albeit a reserved sort of smile, and I find myself taken by his teeth. Straight, white and even teeth. There are no bits of food stuck around the gum line . . . he appears to care for his teeth the way he does his fingernails. If I had noticed these teeth the other day, I would never
have mistaken him for homeless (though he is still wearing the hat and the ill-fitting jeans).
‘Still wearing the hat, I see.’
Wally pauses, touches the hat, as if checking it’s still there. ‘Er . . . yeah.’
His tone indicates mild offence. It’s astonishing what can be offensive to people. For example, apparently it is the height of rudeness to ask someone his or her age or weight, which makes absolutely no sense. Why be mysterious about something that is quite literally on display for all to see? And yet, these rules exist, and everyone seems to understand what they can and can’t ask. Everyone except me.
‘You’re American,’ I say, hoping that this is a) not offensive, and b) a distraction from the hat comment.
Wally merely nods. His gaze, like last time, lands just over my left shoulder. I actually don’t mind this. Some people can be so hungry for eye contact, it’s a relief to be able to look away.
‘What brings you to the land of Oz?’ I ask. I’m quite pleased with this comment, the casual whimsy of it, but Wally does not look charmed.
‘My mother was Australian,’ he says. ‘My father is American. I’m a dual citizen.’ He pushes his glasses up his nose. He’s quite handsome, in an odd sort of way. It’s not a surprise that I’ve only just noticed – it often takes me a while to realise someone is handsome. Rose laughed herself stupid recently when I commented that Bradley Cooper wasn’t bad looking in A Star Is Born. (‘You’ve only just noticed this?’ she said, wiping her eyes. Frankly, I thought it was far more laughable the way most people made snap judgments without taking time to consider why they felt that way.)
The Good Sister Page 3