✅ My Cousin's Keeper [NaNoWriMo 2021]

14. My Discovery

I was feeling pretty hungry before lunch time, and suggested to Ffrances that we might have a proper meal. We sometimes had our main meal in the middle of the day at weekends, when there was more time to prepare, but I still liked to make sure we were on the same page first. She was already starting to get tired, so she was happy to sit back and watch me cook. And today, she seemed even more delighted by the scents drifting through from the kitchen.

"What's this stuff?" she asked twenty minutes later, poking at her fish with a knife. After eating a piece, she added to the question: "It's nice, and it seems kind of familiar, but I can't place it. Got something new for me?"

"Fish," I answered, and returned to my own lunch.

"You know what I mean. The sauce stuff."

"It's a black miso glaze, according to the recipe. Nice stuff, we had it yesterday and I knew you'd like it." This time she was too busy eating, so only nodded to acknowledge the answer. I could think of no greater compliment. We ate in the contented silence of two people really enjoying their lunch.

"But what actually is it?" she asked again, when the contents of her plate had been decimated. "Miso, I mean. You see it a lot in Japanese places. Is it a herb?"

"Soy paste, I think. Not sure, we'll have to look it up later. Probably says on the back of the jar." And then we went back to our meals. It was possibly even better than the night before; or perhaps that was because of the company. Once we finished, I went to wash the dishes but Ffrances insisted that it was her turn. I couldn't argue with that, not when she was already running water into the sink. So while she did that I took a few moments to look up what we'd actually been eating. I told her it was apparently fermented soy, and she gave a shrug. One more piece of information to be filed away in case we ever needed it in future.

"I wish every question could be addressed so easily," she said.

"You and me both. Not the big questions, I think it helps to keep some mystery in life. But there's some things where knowing the full story would make a huge difference."

"Like your cousin?"

"Yeah. I've been worrying about her. Just a little. Is it that obvious?"

"You've seemed a little distracted all week. Don't worry, nobody else would have noticed. In my line of work, you learn to be good at spotting how people are feeling. You want to talk?"

"Think I need therapy? Need to get over my desire to make everything go perfectly for her?"

"More likely I think she needs a little help. But that's not a professional opinion. I can put my uniform on if you really want." We chuckled, and that was all it needed. No conversation got too serious between the two of us. We knew each other too well to worry over small things.

"Seriously, though," she said, on the point of walking back into the lounge. "I'd like to know what the problem is with your cousin. She seemed shocked when I got here, like she was really embarrassed. And I know you're worried about her, you've barely thought about anything else. How about you... could you tell me a bit more, like what you're thinking? I don't want to be invading her privacy, but if it's worrying you I hope there's something I can say to help you relax."

"Well, I have had one idea. You wouldn't believe what I found when I was tidying out that room. I'm wondering if it might give her an excuse... a motivation to talk about some of this stuff." I beckoned, and she followed me up the stairs to the spare room. There, I looked at a stack of battered cardboard boxes that were piled against one wall, completely blocking access to the wardrobe. It took me a few seconds of opening boxes to find the one I wanted, and while I did I explained what was going on.

I told her that I'd had to tidy up the nursery, because I'd been storing some stuff in there that I didn't want to be faced with every day. Boxes of my stuff from college, which I'd had to take from Dad's attic a couple of years ago. She knew why, I didn't need to elaborate, but I hadn't told her before that there was almost a van load of stuff that I'd never gotten around to sorting through. The sheer scale of unpacking all those boxes, and of deciding which of my old memories I wanted to keep, was intimidating.

"How about we do it together?" she offered. "Looking through old memories will be fun, see if there's anything that reminds me of you, or vice versa. I won't pry if there's mementoes of past conquests, and it might be easier to..."

"Thanks, but that's not why I was telling you. I managed to sort some of these out already, I've been doing it if I can't sleep. Harder to ignore them, now there's not a second spare room to keep all my junk out of sight. And when I was going through them, I found... ah, here it is!"

I offered her a photograph. It was faded a little unevenly, so the colours seemed distorted close to one side. Perhaps that made it look older than it was. Maybe it had been damp in storage, or exposed to bright light, or perhaps it was just developed on cheap paper or something. I didn't know, but I knew that this was older than anything I'd expected to find in these particular boxes.

Ffrances took the picture, and tilted it in an attempt to find an angle where the afternoon light didn't reflect off it so much. She would be seeing a picture of two kids in a garden, kicking through piles of orange-brown leaves. The older girl was wearing a band shirt that was too blurred to make out the details, and had a vivid streak of colour in her hair. The other girl was half her height, hands waving overhead as she shrieked in joy. They were chasing each other, and both seemed to be having the time of their lives.

"Cute," she said with a smirk. "This is you, then? I thought this was college stuff."

"Yeah, that's me. And I remember it like it was yesterday. Weird, right? I mean, I never realised how different I looked, though. Back then I was cool, now I'm just so serious. That was... well, I took it to uni with me. There was a frame with space for like seven pictures in it, leaf-shaped cutouts and a title at the top that said 'family tree'. That was one of them. It was so I would remember most of my family when I was away. It got broke before the end of my first year, and everything got mixed up. I don't know where the other photos got to, I think there might have been one of my baby photos in there with my Gran. and me standing with mum and dad. I know what happened to that one, my first roommate burned it. With incense, I think, some kind of wiccan ritual thing. Supposed to remove the negative influences in my life. I cut off the burned bits, and carried it around for a while. Come to think of it, that might have been when the frame got broken."

"Lost in memory lane already?"

"Yeah. Weird how it all comes back. I wasn't even thinking about that until you asked. What I was thinking of... it's that photo. Me and Tess, the last time I saw her. Or close to the last. Might have been someone's birthday, her mum's perhaps. They offered me a pizza if I kept her from bugging them for an hour while they talked about grown-up stuff. My choice, any toppings I wanted, and that's a big deal when you're fourteen. Don't remember what I got, but I know it was a small fortune by pocket money standards."

"And you liked the kid too. I can tell." I nodded and smiled then. Of course I'd liked her. Maybe even if I'd been too little to know the words, I'd had some sense back then about what the future might hold. I'd known that some day, I would be putting Tess back in diapers to make her my baby girl.