Rebecca

Valerie clenched her fist and willed her eyes to stay fixed on the strange man with the bowler hat and the box on legs. She could feel the heat radiating from her father’s’ hand as it sat in his lap near her own.  The strange man squinted into the sun before bending down and burying his head under a giant brown cloth attached to the box.

A finger in the air and then “eyes forward – 1,2,3!”.

Valerie knew this photograph was important to her father, so she wouldn’t move an inch. She could sense Rosemary squirming in Mother’s’ lap and tensed her body further, imagining that her own stillness might soak up Rosemary’s’ fretting and keep her still too, but of course it didn’t work.

Rosemary had done nothing but kick and scream and throw everything into chaos since she had arrived last summer. Valerie had watched from behind the sofa, with Verity in her arms, as Mother had paced up and down for months, Rosemary mewling on her shoulder. She made Valerie think of a slug or a maggot.

Valerie had asked her mother to have a tea party with her and Verity, like she always did, but now all she got was “not now darling, be a good girl and go and play quietly in the other room.” Valerie didn’t want to play quietly, she wanted to stamp and roar like a fierce lion. She wanted to sweep all of the furniture in her dolls’ house sideways, sending it all smashing into tiny little pieces on the floor. She wanted to push her fingertips down on the pointy fragments of split wood, to feel stinging pain, to see red gems of blood. Then she could run to her mother and show her the cut and claim warm sweet embrace as her reward. She could push her ear into her mother’s shoulder and smell the tinny scent of her lavender perfume in the crevice of her neck where her locket sat. She could swallow the sweet smell down like custard. She would feel the soft, rhythmic rub of her mother’s fingertips up and down her back, their sole aim and purpose being to soothe her crying, and not Rosemary’s’.

But Valerie would never do that. She would never up-end, disorganise or break things. She listened carefully to rules and instructions and made sure she followed them. Her dance teacher had recently reported that she wasn’t the child with the most flair in her tap lessons, but she never, ever put a foot out of place. And this is why she resented Rosemary so much.

Rosemary came into the world abruptly, before her scheduled time, stealing precious days as an only child away from Valerie. Rosemary moved impulsively, she flung herself at things, knocking over the tea-set and the dog’s’ bowls. She snatched at things and bit them, like Valerie’s seashell hairbrush, that now had serrated scars across its back. She dropped crumbs all over the floor, the sofa and their Mother and nobody scolded her.

Rosemary screamed and screamed and that was the worst thing of all. The only time the screaming stopped was when she was with Mother. This meant that Valerie was never content, because even when Mother’s arms were free for Valerie to have a cuddle, they were tense and shaky, cuddling her much too hard as if flattened under the heavy weight of the noisy bawling that surrounded them.

If Father tried to take Rosemary for even a moment, she wriggle like a cat over a bathtub, thumping him over and over with her fat little fists until he gave in and returned her to her mother’s’ lap. The times he held her became less and less and were shorter in duration as the months rolled past.

Eventually, Rosemary became a permanent fixture of mother’s frame, like a growth, or a lump. She sprawled outwards from her mother’s hip clutching at curtains and rolling cups off table tops. Mother changed the way she walked, leaning sideways like a crooked tree, avoiding objects and people, and even Valerie because of the number of times Rosemary had leaned over and grabbed a generous chunk of her hair.