The Good Sister

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