Before I learned to tie my shoelaces, I learned that my best friend Cece wanted a sibling. ‘A brother or a sister,’ she would cough stuffing her mouth with cheese and crackers, winded from the short walk across the street. The Murphy’s lived across from us on Bennington Avenue, and I had never known, nor wished for anything otherwise.  

At lunchtimes, she would hang off the school swings backwards, her golden hair sweeping the ground, catching leaves and dirt in her split ends. I was afraid when the bell rang, the boys might stampede over and snap her neck in the roll to class. She always swung up, just in time. 

When playing house, she would cocoon herself in the red-and-white gingham apron that hung above the kitchen and busy herself making dinner. Chastising ‘Frank’ (who was really Riley) for letting his dinner go cold and pushing I, ‘Cece’ down into the plastic seat by my shoulders. Though she always did feed the ‘baby’ first. 

The ‘baby’ was a soiled sack, once silky white and intended for dresses, or at least a robe. It had orange limbs that hung limp by loose stitching, contorted in fists that over time seemed to cover its face. She called it Eve, after me. When I approached to raise the blanket over its sunken chest, a shadow overcast its features, deepening to a grimace. I was still. She reached overhead and unravelled the thing from my hands, once again instructing me on how to hold the ‘baby’: face down with its feet elevated.  

Just like the last time I forgot, my toy privileges were revoked and I could only sit under the water tray until Cece was inevitably sent away and joined me. 

Though the others splashed (filling and refilling yogurt pots to rinse the hair of plastic figurines), beneath the water tray the world was quiet; Cece said it made things safe. Fluorescent lights illuminated the blue sea overhead, then alive with rainbows, and we were two crabs on the ocean floor. Above, the hurricane thrashed on, as we admired how the blue-ness agreed with her skin.  

“Smurf?” She asked, pointing at herself. 

“Smurf.” 

*

At home time, temperate oceans became agitated when Cece was dragged from under the table. A brief yelp and she was held by manicured nails, close against her mummy’s black trousers. Under Mrs Murphy’s fine red heel, the soiled skin of the ‘baby’ snagged; flesh held by a bloody tooth. 

Cece said her big name was Cecelia and when she had a sister, she would call her Sisi, short for sister. For a middle name she decided it would be ‘Princess’ or ‘Silver’. Though her mummy liked the name ‘Erin,’ and her daddy ‘Isabella’. 

This girl (Isabella Silver Murphy, or Erin Princess Murphy) would be allowed to borrow the toy ambulance; perhaps even the occasional turn about the yard in her pink bike with streamers that pushed horizontal when she went fast. 

But under no circumstances was the potential sister allowed a glimpse of Cece’s trinkets from Tenerife her Nanna Anna bought her. Or the locket from her mummy, that she couldn’t wear because it was too fancy for a little girl of eight-years-old. And if the baby was a boy he would be called Gop. And he would have his own boy things. 

She took Cece home early that day; I supposed at that time Cece was the luckiest girl in the world. To me, ten minutes took her to Disneyland, and every plastic necklace was a ruby I drew into family portraits and Christmas cards. I was the thing that existed to watch her walk away. 

She might have gone somewhere special that day. For she began swaddling the infants with unusual care, stroking their burnt cheeks with two fingers like a baby bird.  

*
We could no longer seek the ocean’s safety when Cece was called away from school the next time. It lived in the baby room, and we were now big girls, and only babies would try to sleep under the ocean.  

It felt like years had passed since her mummy announced the good news, though it was only a few months. When her daddy took her away one Spring morning, she clutched my hand; crying when they tried to separate us, so I was also taken to see the new baby. It was a Gop, but her mummy warned us he was a very small Gop, because he wasn’t inside her tummy for long enough. He had even smaller hands than Cece, and couldn’t breathe without a lot of plastic straws around his mouth. 

Her mummy was lying down, and she moved with weights on her body and dampness in her hair, as she lifted Gop out of his fish tank (when I didn’t understand grown-up things I thought of water instead). 

“Mummy that’s not a baby.” 

I stood tippy-toe and saw the wrinkled thing had yet to grow skin; for every vein was visible, and he glowed like he’d been put through a grater. He had no blankets upon him, and I forgot to ask whether he did not come with blankets, or if the people that dropped Gop off, left them in the car. 

Cece studied the thing, “What is it? Put it back.” 

Her daddy readjusted its head like it was unattached, saying: “It’s the baby, Cece. It can be a Gop, but only for today. Then he will be Tyler.” 

*
When the new baby was a few weeks old, I was invited on a trip to the seaside with my best friend. Like the third child, I tucked myself away between Gop and Cece in the back seat smiling placidly from left to right. 

When we were ankle deep in the water, Cece said to me: “I’d like to sail away to our own island.” Stepping deeper into the waves she continued, “It’d be bright and have loads of those coconut trees, and we would build a house of sticks all squashed together and drink rainwater.”  

“And wear grass skirts!” I added.  

She faced the sea, “we’ll wear our communion dresses.” Cece nodded to herself, mesmerised by the horizon. “They’re too pretty to leave behind.” 

At that moment, an elated Mr and Mrs Murphy carried Gop to the receding tide and dipped his feet into the water. With a shriek he receded back into his mother’s arms and the couple cooed to the bundle, wrapping him in Cece’s blankets as she watched, shivering. 

With a sigh Cece gestured: “Gop doesn’t like the sea, he’s not like us.” 

With a flutter of pride, I smiled, “he’s different.” 

Shaken, Cece turned to me, nodding her head vigorously. 

*

The next day it was Monday and I waited outside for Cece to come to school, yet post-Gop she was often late, hair uncombed and without a lunch. She stumbled from class-to-class, head bowing before sharply bouncing back to attention. When reprimanded, she raised her head from the cradle of her arms: ‘the thing never sleeps.’ 

By Easter, I saw a change. I saw it best in our Easter-Hunt hauls. My egg was found between the feet of a statue in the park; it was covered in rainbow sprinkles and when cracked, exploded confetti in a great puff.  

Cece’s egg was grey and stolen from a bush far away from Bennington Park, where the hunt was taking place. She insisted that I return her kindness, and as she did to me, I cracked it gently on her head. The rosy membranes of a baby chick slid into her hair, folding deeper the more I rubbed with a tea cloth. 

*
In the summer, I was invited to Cece’s birthday sleepover. My teddy, Tofu, came with a suitcase, which was unearthed and filled with sweets and jellies. As I left, mummy clutched me close, and daddy tapped her on the shoulder to release me. My case was lighter, ‘that must be her way of saying sorry for taking away my treats,’ I thought, eyeing the door as it slowly shut. 

Then daddy walked me across to Cece’s house, directly opposite. There are houses like Cece’s everywhere, the clean ones built with secrets inside. We often played games with the blinds: when they were open it meant ‘come on over’, but when they were closed it was ‘go away.’ They were open on her birthday. 

When my daddy dropped me off, the house swallowed me whole. Inside, the Murphy’s living room had none of our warmth, but was brimming with chill. Full of sharp sculptures like sea urchins on coffee tables, so shiny, daddy had to swat my hand away. 
Cece took her daily bath after dinner that day; I was left alone in her room with the mint humbug striped bed sheets and the walls that grew further apart each time I looked. 

She was in the bath a long time, and when she came out, I asked why she took so long. 

“The bath is a sea, and I like to sink in it.” 

Unsatisfied, I asked again.  

“Jus’ takes me a long time to get clean,” she palmed a towel through her dripping hair as strands tangled around her fingers. 

“Not me, I’m in an’ out. Mummy says water costs money.” I asserted.  

Cece winked, “water knows me, we’re good friends.” Sipping at a glass of water by her bed, she put the glass next to her ear, whispering, “I know the language of water,” then, “hmmm yes, really- Eve? No!” 

I craned my ear over the glass until she capsized it, tossing the contents over my face and hair. We dissolved in laughter, as I petted the water in my hair; one and the same. 

After cake, her parents reiterated their warnings of touching nothing, and I lay, unblinking, considering whether the floor was something, and how I could levitate, or fly back home. 

Cece kicked me sharply in my knee and pointed to a plush frog in blue pinstripe pyjamas.  

“Gop’s Frog.” She yawned. I rose with her. 

At midnight, Cece led the procession, Frog in one hand, and her precious plush Berribella in the other. Even with Frog beside him, on-and-on Gop cried. I’d never heard a baby cry until then, and it was terrible, like a possessed siren. 

At last, Cece tucked Berribella beside him, and he reached out; locking the purple duckling over his chest, he calmed and soon slept. Breathless, Cece stood for a long time fixing his blankets and told me to step away and be careful with her baby. 

On the landing she hugged me tightly (I can’t remember her doing that before) and sighed “sorry” into my hair (she had certainly never said that before). 

She ran to the door of the room her parents went to earlier, I supposed to tell them of her newfound tolerance of Gop. The door was ajar. 

Her mummy’s voice echoed: “Can’t we send her to your sister’s until the baby’s not so-” 

“Vulnerable?” 

 “Y’know Frank, she punches Eve all the time, kicks her, everything.” Her mummy continued, “you should see the state of that wee girl, jus’ like a pin cushion, I tell you I can't sleep straight with the both of them together.” 

“Stop- oh- stop! At’s a sin-” 

Laughter escaped the room and invaded the house. 

As soon as her daddy fell on top of her mummy, Cece bolted. 

I looked around her haunted house, each corner full of ghosts. Finally, I found her below the TV, flailing and kicking face first on the carpet. 

 “They think I’m a dragon.” Cece sat up, and the glow of the screen enveloped her in moving flames. I gazed at my body: the punches and punctures, and nod in agreement. If she hurt Gop he would cry and dissolve, like soap, in his own tears. 

“It’s an ugly thing,” she looked to me for confirmation. 

I considered the giggling baby with golden curls, that reached for her hands and cried when she left the room.  

I ventured at last, “I’d love my own Gop, I’d love him more than you do…” 

“I know,” she whispers, pinching the fatty part of my arm hard. Her moods came in waves. High up, then down, down. 

“…because my mummy says every little thing needs to be loved,” I added. 

She twisted her still-nipping fingers, studying the bricks above my head. 

*
The next day, the thunder came. Cece said she could smell rain even when the sky was clear. 

We met in the middle of the road as pots and pans clanged overhead, and the sky turned bright for seconds at a time. She and I were both dressed in our red raincoats; red because I wanted to look like Peppa. Cece took mine because she also wanted to look like our favourite character, so I told daddy I lost it and he bought me a new one.  

I felt a little bit bad for lying, very deep down, but it didn’t really matter back then, not when we could stand together, arms spread and feel the rain on our eyelids.  

We realised a huge hole in the roof of my porch made a shower if you stood facing the door, and Cece ran through the steady drippings crying, “I’m clean as can can be.” I longed to show Cece how the rainwater filled up my wellies and my feet drowned; I decided not to bother her. 

*
My daddy works very hard, every morning he gets up early.  

I say, “how early daddy?” 

And he says, “so early, that the sun wishes me a good morning as it rises. I have to give the sea a good shove to make the day’s waves, or it's too lazy to move. It just lies there like you on a Sunday morning, Smurf.” 

“Wow. That is early.” 

When I told Cece, she said, “don’t be a baby, daddies don’t answer questions.” 

Cece’s mummy and daddy hadn’t noticed the silence on the baby monitor, like my best friend, they held darkness under their lower eyelashes like upside-down crescent moons (if moons were black and lived where I could see them in other people). 
Mr Murphy dreamt he was driving the entire family on a long trip to a distant shore across endless copper fields. It was maple leaves, then corn, then sunflowers, and still the car prattled on. Cartoon over the skyline. When he looked into the mirror, both children slept sound, with the baby leaning on his older child. The whole car smelled like cinnamon and wheaten bread with butter, right as it comes out of the oven, still breathing with heat. At least I like to think that’s what Cece’s daddy dreamt of. 
I don’t think her mummy dreamt that night. 

I woke with my mummy and daddy clutching at me, both lifting me at the same time so I felt I would break in half like an oyster. Light refracted overhead. The doorway bent and shifted, for it was made of sea foam; and the room was dangerous. I was drenched in electricity. I was terribly cold. 

*
I still see her room opposite my own when I come back home. The whiteness of her house has yellowed, and the spouting is full of debris, so the rainwater ferments black before it’s cried in long streaks down the house’s face. Her blinds are drawn. Even though I am now twenty-two, my first action when I come back, is to close the windows and pull the blinds until the room is quiet and dark as a womb. 

Pattering downstairs, my slippers are dense with fur, but the sticky label on the sole is the velcro fastenings of a rain boot, closing and opening with every step. 

Like Cecelia’s, my house is also a memory. With half of the boxes in the new house and others at my boyfriend’s, the things I’ve still to clear from Bennington still crawl, alive in their boxes. Swallowing one another if shoelaces were snakes and the destroyed ‘baby’ doll was a deformed four-legged spider, still shuffling and spinning loose cotton threads as webs. Encasing itself in the box taped shut one hundred times over. 

My dad worked outside, and over a decade earlier Summer gave way to a great storm of ice and wind that closed over our town like an evil spell. 

So, as he told the police, he had only gotten up for a hot water bottle and some tablets for his bad back. For a moment he listened to the wind whistling under the front door and recalled a poem by Robert Frost. He sat for a few minutes, piecing words together until they all sounded the same, and yet unfamiliar all at once:  

“Midnight dreary,’ ats made all the difference…’ats not right, ’ats not right at all.”  

Then he gave up and went back to bed, forgetting to turn the outside lights off.  

I hear:  

‘Take care of my Gop, he’s only a little thing.’  

‘God takes the best things from us.’  

‘Some things are for the best.’  

‘Wee thing was taken too soon.’ 

It’s the thing that keeps me awake.