Dad was still in his armchair when I came in, an empty whiskey glass on the table next to him.
As soon as I saw him, a bittersweet burning sensation ignited deep in my chest, a flickering, peppery heat, dangerous and deliciously addictive.
I was still holding the sketch, and I dropped it into his lap. When he didn’t wake, I kicked him hard in the ankle. He awoke with a snort and, seeing me, smiled. Then he noticed the piece of paper.
“What’s this? Have you been drawing?” He smiled again, his mouth crinkling so that his face was all beard. Slowly, his expression changed.
“You’ve been in my shed,” he said, his words tinder to my combusting chest.
“Yes.” My voice felt strange, as if I had swallowed the word and it had caught alight somewhere near my lungs.
He took a deep breath, letting it out slowly through his nostrils as he looked at the drawing.
“You made a mistake in your planning,” I said, and with each word I spoke, my chest got hotter and hotter until I could feel the heat rushing up through my throat and coming out as sparks in my voice. “You left a list of all the objects, and I worked out the clues.”
Dad put his hand over his face and rubbed hard. “You weren’t supposed to find out yet,” he said eventually.
At his words, my heart caught alight, a pyre of burning meat inside me. “It’s not a game, Dad,” I said. “It’s not a treasure hunt with a deadline and a prize. It’s my dead sister.”
He flinched at my words.
“She is dead, isn’t she? I haven’t got that bit wrong? She’s not locked up in a tower somewhere? Or lying comatose, waiting for her prince?” I was pacing the small room now.
“You’re too young,” he said, his words hardly audible.
“Too young for what?” My whole body was on fire now. I could feel flames leaking round my eyeballs, fire-hair licking about my head. “Too young to take care of myself? Too young to feed us, to look after us? I run this house, Dad. I take care of you. But I’m too young to know about my own dead sister?”
“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 returning.
“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 swiveling. 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 whiskey 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 toward 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 whiskey, 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 leaned 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 whiskey 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.
Glimpses of my former life began to hit me like little shocks of electricity: another house, another life. Two of everything: two beds, two dollhouses, 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.