Delia

There was something inside of Delia that had always seemed to be broken. Unfixed. Not quite right.

From the moment she emerged into the world on a blustery day in August, fifteen and a half years ago, she seemed to everyone who met her entirely all-wrong.

Her mother had wailed in pain for a delirious number of hours, split terribly down her centre, blood streaming from her hidden spaces, torn to bits and stitched back together, until at long last she was patted on the head with warm congratulations by her husband and the nurses.

But when her long-awaited, bundled-up, squalling flesh and blood was finally handed to her, its awful, gummy mouth frozen in a ceaseless screech, she immediately recognised what a waste it had all been.

Delia instantly established herself as a troublesome baby. “Forever clinging,” her mother said despairingly to anyone who would listen. She would cry and blubber and retch for days without stopping, refusing to be held or comforted, tirelessly demanding something unintelligible with her suspicious, reddish-brown eyes.

The doctors told Delia’s mother to just be patient, that all would soon return to rights, and that many newborns were exhausting in similar, if not identical, ways. But Delia’s mother knew that this child was different.

She nonetheless waited and hoped, watching the come-and-go of nappy rashes, teething battles, potty training, toddler tantrums, and even the arrival of her other children — sweet-smelling babies that inspired a love so deep that they only further proved that what she felt for Delia, if anything, was merely a germ by comparison.

As a little girl, Delia became spiteful and mean. She had a talent for pinching at her baby brother’s arms and making him cry — not in the shameless, insulting manner of his older sister, but rather in the style of a pitiless lamb in need of some warmth, some protection. Delia stole stickers from her younger siblings, tripped them in the playground, unnerved teachers with her affinity for big words and her inability to make friends. She was a tediously fussy eater, every meal turned into a hunger strike: food thrown on the floor, smeared up the walls, hidden under her chair at the dining room table, or else slipped onto the plates of her brothers and sisters the moment her mother’s eyes were averted.

She was subsequently a malnourished, tiresome, sleepless slip of a child, with greenish bruises decorating her skinny calves and brown, pin-straight hair hanging limp about her frowning face like tattered old drapes. Her clothes always hung away from her body in strange ways, her hair constantly looked shiny with grease, and as she approached the dreaded onset of puberty, a horrifying smattering of acne began to take form across her pasty chin and forehead — angry red bumps with putrid yellow centres that would leak fluid and stain the collars of her school shirt whenever she picked at them, which, to her mother’s disgust, she did compulsively.

Delia’s sisters, by contrast, were perfect dolls, with bright greeny-blue eyes, freckled noses, and the same golden hair as their mother.

Delia was, in the opinion of her family, the ugliest girl who ever lived.

Every attempt Delia made to beautify herself was met with their ridicule and laughter. Putting her hair up provoked a torrent of humiliating remarks about her pointed ears or lumpy jawline; the trialling of a pink lip gloss was said to draw unwanted attention to her crooked, yellowing teeth; and a new pair of trousers made her body look out of proportion, they commented, accentuating her desperate lack of curves.

And so, whilst her younger sisters had their first boyfriends and proudly announced their periods, Delia stagnated. She escaped into stories, going entire days without muttering a single word, never lifting her eyes from the pages of an aged library book.

Delia’s mother had, by this time, still not outgrown the feeling that her child had been the outcome of some ill-timed mistake. She speculated that perhaps she had returned home from the hospital with the wrong baby; that this gangly young person she felt no affinity for was not her own after all, but rather someone else’s. She guiltily hoped that maybe this realisation might end with her true daughter being reinstated at last — that she would be able to take this pretty, lost girl into her arms and feel as though the doctor had said all those years ago. That the world had returned itself to rights.

Delia once caught her mother in the midst of one of these episodes, finding her unblinking at the family computer one night, doing research into cases where expectant mothers had been given the wrong child — calculating the probability in her mind, fingers crossed, that this was the answer she had sought.

If not for this, Delia’s mother confided in her daughter that she must have been some punishment for something she had done in a past life. That Delia had been sent, from hell or another far-off place, to teach her mother a lesson, to provide her the opportunity to repent.

Delia similarly had imaginings of this sort. She hoped that maybe her real family were out there somewhere in the world, missing her, hoping that she was okay. She imagined a mother and father who wished for her every morning when they woke up. For an older, wiser being to cry to. A grown-up who loved her unconditionally.

Delia and her mother dreamed these dreams in their separate souls, knowing intimately what the other was dreaming, but saying nothing.