by Polly Crosby
‘You’ve had so much else to deal with—’ he looked at me imploringly, ‘—I didn’t want to add to the load.’
I grabbed the sketch from his lap, and sat down opposite him, looking at the drawing. The babies’ faces were identical, nestled close to my mother, but even in this quick sketch I could see one was fractionally smaller; less plump, less healthy.
‘It meant “small fawn”,’ Dad said quietly. He was leaning back in his chair as if winded. ‘Feena,’ he whispered.
At the sound of her name I felt a cooling in my chest, a drip, drip of water quelling the fire. I stayed studying the picture, not sure I could look at him without it re-igniting.
‘Feena,’ I repeated, the first time I had spoken her name out loud. It sounded strange, not like a name at all. A little creature came into my mind. A long-limbed, spindly deer, nervous ears swivelling. A woodland creature, dipping its head to drink.
‘Your name means “strength”,’ Dad said. ‘She was always smaller than you. Always delicate. You romped from the moment you could move, but she… she was born blue and thin as porcelain. You could almost see inside her, like she was made of glass. I tried to capture her organs pulsing and beating in a painting once, but your mother got angry. Ripped it to shreds.’
‘How old was she? When…’
‘Four. You were both four.’
I tried to picture this tiny version of myself, delicate and fragile. It was impossible.
‘What happened to her?’ A sudden feeling of dread began spreading over me. ‘Was it me?’ I asked, trembling. ‘Was it something I did?’
Dad shook his head. ‘She caught a chill, that’s all. She was always catching chills. This one was just nastier than the rest. She couldn’t fight it.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me about her?’ I said. ‘How could you let me forget?’
‘Do you remember the story I told you once, about your parrot and the little girl?’
‘This isn’t the time for stories, Dad.’
He lifted his hands. ‘Just hear me out. It was how you were after Feena died: shattered, like you had dissolved into a million shards.’ He was looking at me, his eyes so sunken that they looked black. ‘How could I keep talking about something that was tearing you apart?’
I slumped down onto the sofa, trying to digest all that he was saying.
‘With your mum gone and me already starting to forget things I just… decided we would forget. You stopped asking about her, and we carried on. And then I got the idea for the books, and it seemed like the right way to leave clues for you: so you could understand when you were old enough.’ He paused. ‘The books help me to remember her, too, you know,’ he said. He was fumbling for his whisky glass, searching the room for the decanter.
I got up, pacing the small space, not sure what to do with this new feeling of revulsion I had towards him, not understanding where it had come from, or the power it had over me. I stared at my sister in my hands, refusing to look at my father. And then something came to me, something from the story Dad had told me all those years ago.
‘In the story, the father poured the remains of the girl into the moat.’
Dad looked down at his hands. ‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Feena,’ I whispered, rushing to the window and looking down into the moat’s dark waters, imagining my sister down there, just below the surface.
‘You don’t understand, Romilly,’ Dad said behind me, ‘this thing in my brain, it’s eating away at me. And it’s always hungry and it’s always getting fatter, and every day it’s eaten something else, some memory, or word, or feeling. I can feel it pushing at my skull even now. Do you have any idea how frightening that is?’
The worry in his voice made me turn. He had abandoned the search for the whisky, and he had his hand at the back of his head and was grabbing at his skull as if he wanted to pull the illness out of him. A wisp of hair came away in his fingers instead.
‘You can’t mourn with this disease because it steals away the very thoughts that allow you to grieve. Sometimes I look at you and my mind says, Feena. And sometimes I see you and my mind says nothing at all. And sometimes I wake in the middle of the night and I see you at the end of my bed, but you’re not actually there at all. And I don’t know if it is the ghost of my dead daughter, or the ghosts of my memories coming back to haunt me.’
He leant forward and took the picture of the two little sleeping newborns from me, lifting the sketch shakily to his lips, and kissing the cheek of each baby in turn.
I seized it back, relishing the way he flinched at my touch. ‘Don’t, Dad. You can’t just give me this information and then snatch it away again.’
‘I am so sorry, daughter-mi—’
‘Stop,’ I said, the fire beginning to snarl inside me again.
‘If I can do anything, anything to make it better.’ He sounded so pathetic.
‘You can,’ I said. ‘You can go to the shed and find every picture of Feena and of me. Every sketch, every painting that you made when she was alive or when she was dead—’ he flinched at my words, ‘—collect them all together and take them up to my bedroom. They’re mine now. They’re all I’ve got left.’
He nodded.
‘Do it now,’ I said quietly, my heart beginning to turn to ash.
Dad got slowly up from the armchair, and I tried not to notice how browbeaten he looked, how frail.
At the door, he stopped. ‘If I could go back,’ he said, ‘I would have done things differently. And if I could get rid of this illness then I would. But you must believe me that everything I have done has been for you.’
He was staring, wild-eyed around the room, and I wondered which of us he was talking to: the living, breathing daughter in front of him, or the small, dead one captured forever in the drawing.
And then he was gone.
I noticed the whisky decanter on the mantelpiece. I went to it and pulled out the stopper, pouring the contents into the empty fireplace.
I sank back on the sofa and picked up the sketch, tracing the curve of our little skulls in the picture, like fragile eggs in our mother’s hands.
Our mother. For a desperate moment I wanted to talk to Mum, to let her words soothe me, but I pushed the thought aside furiously, the fire inside me igniting again. She had known all along, and she had never told me the truth. She had lied to me too.
I looked at the drawing, glimpses of my former life beginning to hit me like little shocks of electricity: another house, another life. Two of everything: two beds, two dolls’ houses, two little girls clutching two little toy hares.
And her voice. I could hear her voice again now. It was a hushed, breathless version of my own. I had heard it throughout the years, in my sleep, and when I woke, but I had never before been able to understand.
‘This way,’ she was saying, ‘this way, Romilly.’
Feena, my twin sister, speaking words that only we two understood: our very own code, secret and special, impossible for anyone else to crack.
It was a magical language that I had no use for anymore, for I was the only soul on earth who spoke it.
Twenty-Nine
I sat cross-legged in the middle of my bedroom. Every surface, every bit of floor, was covered with pictures. Frames and pieces of board leant against the walls. Scrolls of paper were spread across my bed.
I rested my hand on the collection of Dad’s books stacked next to me, reassuringly familiar in the midst of all these new paintings, and suddenly I needed to open them, to lose myself in their familiarity, to forget for a moment everything I had learnt.
I picked up Romilly’s Christmas, and ran my hands over the sleek dust jacket. It was the only one of Dad’s books to have a removable cover, and I slid it off, admiring the cloth-bound hardback beneath.
I opened it to the first page, where the publication details were listed, and my breath caught. Here, at the very top of the page, was the usual little silhouette of me, chasing an animal across the top of the w
hite paper. I had seen it a hundred times. But now there was something else.
In the left-hand corner, where the dust jacket had covered it up, there were two hares, embossed in silver. At first I thought they were boxing, but as I peered closer, I saw they had their arms around each other in a hug. The one on the left, slightly smaller, slightly more fragile, looked as if it had just stopped running: its willowy legs were still outstretched, and its ears were trailing behind it as if they had not had time to settle. There was something human about these hares, something child-like too, and suddenly it struck me: they were meant to be Feena and me.
I thought about the silhouette of the little girl that appeared at the top of the page in every book. In the first four books she was running away from the animals as if scared, but in the fifth and final book, she had begun to chase them away, and at last I understood. The silhouettes in the first four books were meant to be Feena, the ones in the last book were me. Dad couldn’t have drawn us together; it would have been too much of a clue. Instead, at the beginning of the final book, he had transformed us into animals that he knew I would recognise; the stuffed toy hares that had watched over us in our bedroom in London, and in this drawing, he had given me the chance for one final, tender moment with my sister.
I looked at the two silver hares, my eyes blurring, and their shining fur swam in my vision. Dad hadn’t doubted me: he hadn’t turned me into a comic strip to be laughed at; he had been trying to define us, to illustrate our differences amongst our similarities. I was the strong twin, the brave twin, looking out for my timid, gentle sister. I gazed at the picture, seeing how desperately we were holding onto one another, and it occurred to me that it might not be a welcoming hug, but a hug goodbye, one final touch before I went on with my life, leaving my sister behind, trapped in the pages of a book.
‘Romilly.’
I looked up, blinking away tears. In the silence of the room, her voice seemed loud.
‘Feena?’
There was a giggle. ‘This way,’ she whispered, ‘this way, Romilly.’
Those words again. I closed my eyes, and there she was, my sister, standing waiting for me, one hand outstretched. Her other hand was clutching the ears of her toy hare, small and silvery, soft from years of love. I looked down, and found an identical one in my own hand.
‘This way,’ she said again, taking my hand and turning, her long, red plait spinning out behind her.
‘Where are we, Feena?’ I asked, looking around. ‘Where are we going?’ But she put her finger to her lips.
This place was familiar. It was a green place, filled with nature: tall, bristling monkey puzzle trees sprouted from the ground, yews in the shape of peacocks loomed in the distance. As we walked, I could hear the laughter of a hundred ghost children following behind us like the wind, and I knew all of a sudden where we were. I had read about it in Beatrice’s book.
‘This is where she lived,’ I said, ‘where Bea lived. This is the garden in her book.’ And with that realisation an unknown terror gripped me. I planted my feet into the ground, not understanding why, but knowing that to go on was to see something I had tried for years to forget.
But Feena only glanced at me, her eyes solemn now, and pulled me onwards. ‘This way,’ she said again.
We had been here before, I remembered now, really been here. Mum had taken us, a trip to visit grandma Bea’s old house, the house she had written about in her ghost stories; the house that Mum had grown up in. It was open to the public now, and we wandered the chilly grounds, buttoned into winter coats, our breath misting before us.
But Feena wanted to see the fountain from the book, the one with the woodland animals drinking out of a huge leaf. There was a fawn in it, she said, just like her. When Mum wasn’t looking, she pulled me off the path, disappearing into the bushes.
‘Feena, I remember,’ I said, feeling her little hand tug me along, ‘you don’t have to do this. Please.’
But she kept on pulling me onward. We clambered over the huge mossy roots of a rhododendron, a green leafed roof above our heads. Feena put a hand in her pocket, pulling out a packet of Parma Violets, and offered me one. The sickly smell of them hit me in the back of my nose, and I shook my head, knowing now why I hated them so much. Feena placed one on her tongue and twisted the packet closed.
We began, again, to walk.
We pushed through the rhododendrons, stumbling over the soft ground, until the branches opened onto a little clearing, and in the middle was a fountain.
‘Look,’ Feena whispered, pointing.
The fountain was huge, ancient and green, towering over our heads. It was in the shape of a curling leaf, and around the edges were statues of woodland animals, their heads kissed by frost. It felt as if they had stopped, frozen in time, just as we entered the glade. The giant leaf was filled with water, its surface mirror-still, and I realised as I looked at it that the water was iced over, freezing cold and forbidding.
The feeling of terror intensified as I took it all in. I knew this fountain. I had looked at the drawing of it often when I was little, and again when Bea had given me my own copy of the book, three years ago.
‘Feena!’ my sister said, pointing, and I looked up, confused. On the fountain, next to a hare with cold, staring eyes, was a fawn, standing stiffly near the edge.
‘Feena,’ I repeated, remembering. Of course, her name meant small fawn.
Then my sister was off. She ran to the fountain, clambering up the snaking vines that sparkled in the winter sun, reaching for the statue of the deer that was her namesake. As she scaled the top, her hand reached out to touch the curve of the fawn’s ear, and she leant too far. I stood, re-living the memory, frozen to the ground as her small knee slipped against the frosty edge of the fountain, and she fell forward onto the ice.
For a moment, I thought it would support her weight, but it was thin, barely a skin over the freezing water, and with the sound of splintering glass, she fell through.
The water wasn’t deep, and I heard a splash and a peal of laughter. Relief and strange terror mixed in my chest, and I started forward. I climbed the fountain easily, pulling her out of the freezing water, her little face a mirror of my own shock, and then she laughed again.
Crossly, I tried to pat her dry, aware that she was shivering. I was always the serious twin, the protective twin. It was a cold day, and she was frail, not strong and solid like me. She let out a wheezy little laugh again. It rattled in her lungs.
‘Don’t tell Mummy,’ she whispered, her coat dark with water, mischief gleaming in her eyes.
She lifted her hand to wipe her hair from her face, and I saw how blue her skin was, as if she was turning to metal, becoming part of the fountain. The dark little mole stood out on her pale cheek, and her teeth began to chatter. We slipped down from the statue and climbed back through the rhododendrons, and out of the memory.
I opened my eyes.
The book was still lying open in front of me, the two hares hugging goodbye.
‘Feena,’ I said.
By the time we had found Mum again, Feena had begun wheezing, the crackle in her chest turning to a bubbling that kept exploding out of her mouth in little wet coughs.
By the time we got home, her temperature had peaked, and she was shaking.
She stayed in bed for days. I tucked my hare into her bed to watch over her. I wasn’t allowed to stay with her, but I sat, sentry-like outside our bedroom door, listening, waiting.
Eventually she began to improve. Her skin lost its blue tinge. She began to chatter and babble and I was allowed to sit on her bed for short bursts and talk to her. She had lost a lot of weight, and her face looked, for the first time, different to mine. The last thing I remember was being allowed to nap next to her, falling asleep with her sweet, shallow breath trickling over me.
I had thought she was going to be all right.
I closed the book in front of me. I couldn’t look at the two of us together any longer. Next to me o
n the floor was a huge painting on a stretched canvas, and I looked at it instead, trying to lose myself in the thick swirls of oil paint.
‘Don’t think of her,’ I thought to myself, ‘don’t think of Feena.’ But it was no good: now that I had remembered, she was everywhere.
I went to the window instead and opened it, desperate for some air. The moat sat gleaming below me, and I leant out, looking down.
Even here, I was reminded of her, for this was her final resting place. I looked at the water, trying to imagine my sister, drifting, becoming a part of it. Instead, the ugly face of the gargoyle shimmered up at me through the pondweed. I remembered the day Dad had destroyed the gargoyle fountain. Had it reminded him of that other fountain? Is that why it now lay at the bottom of the moat?
I latched the window closed, nearly knocking over my old stuffed parrot, Jasmine, who sat on the window sill. She looked so forlorn these days, her stuffing swollen inside her like an exploded bulrush, her once green feathers a flea-bitten, cobwebby grey.
The telephone was sat next to her. Weeks ago, I had taken it from the hallway and brought it to my room. Hours of fiddling with it had finally rewarded me with the sound I craved: a dial tone. It had been like music, connecting me with the outside world.
My hand went to the phone, my thoughts turning to my mum. I had so many questions. Mum would answer them honestly, now that the truth was out. She wouldn’t care about protecting me, like Dad had. My hand hovered over the receiver.
But what if she blamed me? What if all her pent-up grief and anger came bubbling up out of her, and she directed it straight at me?
I turned back to the room, and the large painting on the floor caught my eye again. I crouched down next to it. This picture had been the centrepiece in Romilly’s Christmas, a double-page spread depicting the snug on Christmas Eve. It was very similar to the painting Dad had made the night he told me about his dementia. That one had been auctioned off, raising thousands of pounds for a charity that helped bereaved children. At the time I hadn’t understood why he had chosen that particular cause. Now, the irony of it hit me full on: that I was a bereaved child, myself, and yet no charity had stepped forward to help me.