Darling Girls, page 28
‘Alicia?’ Aaron said, once he’d rinsed his mouth out with water and returned to his spot on the stool. ‘Remember when I said I was lucky that Trish was keeping me until I finished school, and you said I wasn’t lucky because it was the least I deserved?’
‘Yeah, mate.’
‘I’m lucky now,’ he said decisively. A momentary pause. ‘Right?’
It was in that pause she saw the lasting wounds of his upbringing. Despite the bravado, the sarcasm, the cheekiness, he still needed that reassurance. Alicia’s role was to give it to him. It was a role she relished more than she could describe. The best role of her life.
‘Sorry,’ she said, rumpling his hair. ‘But that’d be us. We are the lucky ones.’
60
HOLLY FAIRCHILD
Dr Warren was a tough nut to crack. Overworked, underappreciated, and provided by the state to assess the mental capacity of criminals, he’d well and truly checked out by the time he met me. It made sense. After all, how many forensic evaluations can one complete before one starts to phone it in? It made me nervous at first, though. He was my only hope. If it weren’t for his strange fetish, I might have been done for. But it worked out in the end. I was happy to entertain his perversion. If mother–daughter issues turned him on, I could provide. Now my defence is in the bag: mental impairment, thus, not criminally responsible.
Yes, I had to tweak the details of what happened. But I wasn’t going to be held responsible for something that was my mother’s fault. Besides, the first part of my story was true. My mum was entirely useless after my father died. John was part of a church that stepped in to help. As for the rest . . . I just gave Dr Warren what he wanted.
John wasn’t the disciplinarian I described, and he never locked me in the basement or sexually assaulted me – heaven forbid! – but what he did was worse. He stole my mother. Then they fell hopelessly, disgustingly in love. They married less than a year after my father died. And then, while my head was still spinning from all of this, they had a fucking baby.
From the moment Amy was conceived, she was more important than me. Mum rested constantly ‘for the baby’. She barely left the house. She started knitting for the baby . . . knitting! She made a bunch of soft animals and even knitted a life-sized doll, adding Amy’s name to it after she was born. She started eating organic food – which was not a thing back then – while continuing to feed me fish fingers and whatever other rubbish she had in the freezer. And apart from me and John, she didn’t tell anyone that she was pregnant, suddenly superstitious that something would happen to her perfect, magical second-chance child.
When the time came, she had a drug-free home birth rather than the epidural-assisted hospital birth she had with me. Worst of all, she gave birth to a daughter, making me entirely redundant.
‘Aren’t you a darling girl?’ Mum would say as she stood over the bassinet, gazing at her. ‘How I love you, darling girl.’
It made me sick.
One night, Mum and John left me to babysit for a few hours, which frankly wasn’t the greatest parenting choice, given that I was barely a teen. They made a big deal of it – saying, ‘Your big sister is babysitting,’ to Amy a million times in a silly baby voice. We were all referred to in reference to our relationship with Amy by then. Amy’s mummy. Amy’s daddy. Amy’s big sister. As if we’d ceased to be anything else. As if we hadn’t existed before she came along.
Mum thought babysitting would be a good way for me to bond with Amy. I thought it would be a good chance for me to ignore her and watch TV. It might have been okay had she not kept crying. She cried until her little face was red and her legs were scrunched up against her belly. Not so cute now, are you, darling girl? I thought, as I peered down at her.
Did I mean to hurt her? Well . . . I won’t say it didn’t feel good to throw her against the wall. I won’t say it didn’t feel good to put an end to the crying. I won’t say it didn’t feel good to see Mum’s and John’s faces when they saw what I’d done.
Mum was the one who buried her. In secret – to ‘protect’ me. She told John she couldn’t bear to lose two children. For God’s sake. I assumed she’d taken her to the woods or something, not buried her under the damn house! Then again, if she hadn’t buried her under the house, I never would have dreamed up this teen pregnancy story. Thank you, Mummy. Thank you for everything.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
When this book was in its infancy, I had the privilege of speaking with a dozen women who were raised in foster care in Australia. I will forever be changed by these conversations. Without them, I couldn’t have begun to appreciate the feelings of bewilderment, displacement and powerlessness that result from being taken away from your home and placed with strangers when you are a young, traumatised child. What perhaps moved me most was each women’s unprompted assertion that she was lucky. Lucky because she was able to remain in contact with her biological brother. Lucky because she wasn’t sexually assaulted more than once. Lucky because her foster parents were kind to her. It inspired me and broke my heart in equal measure. They were receiving so much less than any child deserves. But in their minds, they were lucky.
I am so grateful to the foster parents and social workers who took the time to speak with me. For every villain in the foster care world there are a hundred heroes working tirelessly to help these kids and fight this broken system. We need more heroes. These children belong to all of us, and as long as the system is failing, so are we.
At its heart, this is a book about sisters born from different wombs. I was able to write about this with some authority because I have one. Thank you for that, Sasha Milinkovic, today and always.
The book is infinitely richer for the team of people who worked on it – with Jen Enderlin, to whom this book is dedicated, at the helm. Thank you, team.
At St. Martin’s: Brant Janeway, Erica Martirano, Katie Bassel, Kejana Ayala, Christina Lopez, Kim Ludlum, Brad Wood, Lisa Senz, Tracey Guest.
At Pan Macmillan Australia: Alex Lloyd, Ingrid Ohlsson, Katie Crawford, Praveen Naidoo, Charlotte Ree, Tracey Cheetham, Ali Lavau, Brianne Collins, Clare Keighery, Candice Wyman and Christa Moffitt.
And as always, special thanks and gratitude to my literary agent, Rob Weisbach.
You can’t write about foster care without reflecting on your own family of origin. I will always be grateful to my parents, Geraldine and Trevor Carrodus, for giving me a childhood home where I felt safe and loved – so safe and loved that they had to sell the family home and move into a one-bedroom apartment to get us to move out. I didn’t understand the privilege of that at the time. I do now.
Oscar, Eloise and Clementine – you three are my life, my joy, my raison d’être. You are always safe and loved with me. But I’d also like you to move out one day and I have my eye on Gran and Grandpa’s one-bedroom apartment so don’t get too comfortable. ILY.
The following books were extremely helpful to me in writing this novel:
The Prettiest Horse in the Glue Factory by Corey White
Thrown Away Child by Louise Allen
The Convent by Maria Hargreaves
Fifty-One Moves by Ben Ashcroft
The Brightness of Stars by Lisa Cherry
About Sally Hepworth
Sally Hepworth is the New York Times bestselling author of nine novels, including The Good Sister and The Soulmate. Drawing on the good, the bad and the downright odd of human behaviour, Sally writes incisively about family, relationships and identity. Her domestic thriller novels are laced with quirky humour, sass and a darkly charming tone. They are available worldwide in English and have been translated into twenty languages.
Sally lives in Melbourne, Australia, with her family and one adorable dog.
Also by Sally Hepworth
The Secrets of Midwives
The Things We Keep
The Mother’s Promise
The Family Next Door
The Mother-in-Law
The Good Sister
The Younger Wife
The Soulmate
Pan Macmillan acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of Country throughout Australia and their connections to lands, waters and communities. We pay our respect to Elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today. We honour more than sixty thousand years of storytelling, art and culture.
This is a work of fiction. Characters, institutions and organisations mentioned in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously without any intent to describe actual conduct.
First published 2023 in Macmillan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd
1 Market Street, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 2000
Copyright © Sally Hepworth 2023
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Sally Hepworth, Darling Girls
