Page 52 of Darling Girls

None of them replied.

At first, Miss Fairchild spent every waking moment with Bianca. Unlike Rhiannon, Bianca was a placid baby. She ate and slept and was content to sit and play. At night, if she woke, she could be settled with a pat on the back. The problem with Bianca was that she didn’t like to be touched. If you tried to show her affection, she flinched or cried.

In response, Miss Fairchild showered her in kisses and hugs that were clearly unwanted. After a week of being rebuffed, Miss Fairchild started to get annoyed.

‘What’s wrong with her?’ Miss Fairchild asked. ‘Why doesn’t she like cuddles?’

There were just so many ways a person could fail her, Jessica realised. Rhiannon cried too much. Bianca didn’t want cuddles. How could a foster child, who already carried his or her own trauma, ever have room in their little hearts to love Miss Fairchild the way she needed to be loved?

Five days into her stay, Miss Fairchild relinquished responsibility for Bianca like she’d done with Rhiannon. This time, Jessica, Norah and Alicia hit their stride quickly, establishing a routine for Bianca and divvying up the duties.

Bianca was collected a few days later. They all stood on the porch and waved her off. This time they didn’t need to be told that there’d be no rest until they’d restored the house to order.

More babies came. They were always girls and they all arrived in the dead of night. Some stayed for a day or two, some for a week or more, but the pattern was the same. Miss Fairchild started out caring for the child enthusiastically before becoming disenchanted. One had crossed eyes. One was overweight. One had fetal alcohol syndrome. Each time a baby came and went, Miss Fairchild became more irritated, and the girls became more tired.

‘I have been trying to figure out why I haven’t been sleeping at night,’ Alicia said as she paced the floor with a baby in arms. ‘And then it dawned on me.’

‘That’s funny,’ Norah said, stony-faced.

If it were just the fatigue they had to deal with, they might have been able to cope. Unfortunately, to add to their fun, Miss Fairchild was becoming impossible to live with. During the day she was mean, always finding reasons to criticise or obstruct them. At night, she drank. Often when they were up feeding a baby they could hear her rattling around downstairs, muttering as she threw an empty bottle into the rubbish bin.

When a baby stayed longer than a week, a social worker came to visit, usually Scott. The girls always knew when he was due, because Miss Fairchild would instruct them to clean the house from top to bottom and then stage some sort of ridiculous activity – a puzzle or a board game that they’d be playing ‘spontaneously’ when Scott arrived. Jessica didn’t know why she bothered; Scott didn’t pay any attention to them anyway. He seemed far more interested in Miss Fairchild’s wellbeing, making sure she was ‘coping’. Which would have been fine and well, except he didn’t seem to notice that she wasn’t.

23

NORAH

After briefly introducing themselves to the ‘babies’, all the women adjourned to the Port Agatha pub, which was deserted apart from the bartender and a guy watching the footy in his Richmond scarf. Despite its impressive external appearance, this was not one of those fancy, renovated pubs with fancy food to match. It was a sticky, smoky drunk-old-man pub, the kind with a dartboard, brawls and alcoholics, serving breaded meat of obscure origins.

‘Why don’t we introduce ourselves?’ Jessica said. She sat at the head of the long table of women as if she were conducting a board meeting. ‘I’m Jessica. I lived at Wild Meadows from when I was four until I was fourteen. This is Norah; she lived there from ten to thirteen. And Alicia lived there from twelve to thirteen.’

‘I thought we were introducingourselves,’ Alicia said.

Jessica ignored her.

‘I’m Rhiannon,’ said the woman with dreadlocks and fingerless gloves. ‘I was at Wild Meadows for two weeks when I was an infant.’

Norah blinked. ‘I remember you. You cried all the time. I’ve never heard anything like it.’

‘Norah!’ Jessica admonished her.

Rhiannon just laughed. ‘That’d be right. In fact, the story goes that the whole reason I went into foster care at all was because I cried so much my mum went to the neighbours’ place to have a beer and left me alone to cry it out. She came back an hour later and the police were there. A delivery person had showed up and heard me crying, and when no one came to the door he called the cops.’ She sipped her beer. ‘The police took me to Wild Meadows and Mum had to do a parenting course. She still maintains thatIshould have been forced to take a sleeping course.’

‘I’m with your mum,’ Norah muttered, reaching for the bowl of nuts on the table.

‘So after two weeks you went home?’ Alicia said.

Rhiannon nodded. ‘They were the only two weeks I ever spent in foster care. I grew up in the next town, so we often drove past Wild Meadows when I was a kid, and Mum would threaten me and my sisters, saying that’s where we’d go if we didn’t behave.’ She laughed fondly. ‘A detective rang me yesterday. It was a courtesy call to let me know what was happening before it hit the news, because obviously I can’t remember anything about my time there. But I thought I’d come anyway, see what I could find out.’

‘I’m Zara,’ the next girl said. She was petite with pale skin, blue eyes and mousy brown hair braided and wrapped around her head like a headband. ‘At least, that’s the name my mum and dad gave me; they don’t know what I was called in foster care. My parents were told nothing about my previous life other than that I’d been living at a foster home in Port Agatha. Then last night I saw the newspaper article and I came straight-away. I don’t suppose you guys recogniseme?’ She looked at them hopefully. ‘I mean, you probably don’t, but I’d love to know anything about my life before.’

‘There’s something familiar about you,’ Alicia said.

Norah agreed. But she couldn’t place her. And when the bartender approached, Norah stopped trying and decided to look at him instead. He had brown skin, a mop of black curls and – Norah felt faint at this – amoustache.

‘Are these your dogs?’ he said to Norah as he put their drinks down on the wooden table. A gin and tonic for Alicia, a lemonade for Norah, a soda water for Jessica. The other three women were all drinking beer.

Automatically, Norah rose up to her full indignant, defensive self. She was preparing to trot out her service-dog spiel when he squatted down and began patting them all vigorously.