The Ice Twins (11 page)

She says nothing. I am bewildered. Angus and I long ago decided to keep most photos – all photos, if possible – hidden from our daughter, to ward off the memories. Perhaps she found it in one of the unsorted packing cases?

I gaze at the picture again, trying to ignore my own storms of sadness. But it is so hard. The twins look desolatingly happy. Sistered in the sun, and each other’s closest relative. In a way, I suddenly, realize, my surviving daughter is now orphaned.

Kirstie leans away from me, in her soft pink pyjamas, and she plucks the photo from my hand and then she turns it, and she shows it to me in the quarter-light and says:

‘Which one is me, Mummy?’

‘Darling?’

‘Which one is
me
? Mummy? Which one?’

Oh, help. Oh, God. This is unbearable: because I have no answer. The truth is, I do not know. I literally cannot distinguish between them; in this photo, there are no visual clues. Should I lie? What if I get it wrong?

Kirstie waits. I say nothing: I mumble nonsense words, comforting noises, trying to work out what lie to tell. But the lack of a proper answer is making things worse.

For a tight little second she stares at me, and then Kirstie starts howling: she falls back onto the bed, flailing her arms, tantruming like a two-year-old. Her scream is terrible and rending, her wails are desperate; but I can distinctly hear the words:

‘Mummy? Mummy? Mummy? Who am I?’

7

It takes an hour to calm my daughter all over again, to pacify her enough so that she finally goes to sleep – clutching Leopardy so tight, it’s as if she is actively trying to strangle him. But then
I
am unable to sleep. For six dusty hours, next to snoring Angus, I lie there, eyes bright and fierce and upset, and I turn over her words in my mind.

Who am I?

What must that be like, to not know who you are, to not know which one of ‘me’ is dead?

At seven a.m. I rise, urgent and desperate, from the tousled bed and I call Josh on the crackly phone and he yawningly agrees to give me a dawnlit boat-ride to our car, parked by the Selkie, as the tides are against us. Of course, Angus is all questions as he ambles sleepily into the dining room; as I put the phone down. Why are you phoning Josh? Where are you going so early? What is going on? Yawn.

Words stop in my mouth even as I try to reply. I don’t want to tell him the truth, not yet; not unless I have to, it’s too bizarre and frightening – I’d much rather lie. Maybe I should have done more lying, in the past. Maybe I should have lied about that affair, all those years ago; perhaps the damage was done, by me, to our marriage, and we never quite recovered. But I do not have time for guilt: and so I explain that I have to leave early, to drive to Glasgow, to research an article, because I have a commission from Imogen, and I need the work because we need the money. I tell him Kirstie had another nightmare, so she needs a lot of comfort while I’m gone.

A nightmare. Just a nightmare.

The lie is feeble; yet he seems to accept it.

Then Josh arrives in the boat, scratching the sleep from his eyes, and we steer around Salmadair to Ornsay and I run up the steps of the pier and I jump in the car and I drive madly down to Glasgow – from Kyle to Fort William to the centre of the city, calling in a favour from Imogen as I go. She knows one of Scotland’s best child psychiatrists. Malcolm Kellaway. And I know this because I read some of Imogen’s articles months back, where she’d praised him in a piece about modern motherhood. Now I demand her help.

‘Can you get me an appointment? Right now?’

‘What?’

‘Immy. Please.’ I am gazing at the haunted bleakness of Rannoch Moor, simultaneously steering, and phoning. I don’t think there are any police around, to arrest me for careless driving. Little lochs shine dirty silver, in the occasional breaks of sun.

‘Please, Immy. I need this.’

‘Well. Yes … yes, I could try. He could call you back. But, um, Sarah – are you sure you’re OK?’

‘Yes?’

‘Sarah – it’s just – you know—’

‘Imogen!’

Like a friend – like the friend who has been with me all the way – she gets the message, and she stops asking questions, and she rings off, to do my bidding. And sure enough: his office calls me as I drive: he has agreed to see me with four hours’ notice.

Thank you, Imogen.

And now here I am in Kellaway’s office in George Street. The psychiatrist, Dr Malcolm Kellaway, is sitting on a leather swivel chair behind his slim metal desk. His hands are pressed exactly flat together, as if in the most pious prayer; his twinned fingertips are poised to his chin.

He asks, for the second time. ‘Do you honestly believe that you might have made a mistake? That evening, in Devon?’

‘I don’t know. No. Yes. I don’t
know.
’

Silence resumes.

The Glasgow sky is already blackening outside, and it is barely two-thirty p.m.

‘OK, let’s go over the facts again.’

And so he goes over the facts, again. The facts of the matter; the case in hand; the death of my daughter; the possible breakdown of my surviving child.

I listen to his recitation, but really I am staring at those dark swirling clouds outside, beyond the square windows with the sooty granite sills.
Glasgow
. This is such a Satanic city in the winter – Victorian and dour, exultantly forbidding. Why did I come here?

Kellaway has more questions of his own.

‘How much of this have you discussed with your husband, Mrs Moorcroft?

‘Not so much.’

‘Why not?’

‘Just that – I don’t want to make it any worse than it is, I mean, before I know, for
sure
.’

Again the doubts assail me: what am I doing here? What is the point? Malcolm Kellaway is easily middle-aged, yet wears jeans which make him seem unconvincing. He has annoyingly effete gestures, a silly roll-neck jumper, and rimless spectacles with two perfectly round lenses that say
oo
. What does this man know about my daughter that I don’t? What can he tell me that I can’t tell myself?

Now he gazes at me, from behind those glasses, and he says,

‘Mrs Moorcroft. Perhaps it’s time to move on from what we know, to what we don’t know, or can’t know.’

‘All right.’

‘First things first.’ He sits forward. ‘Following your phone call this morning, I have done some research of my own, and I have consulted with colleagues at the Royal Infirmary. And I’m afraid there is, as I suspected, no reliable way of differentiating between monozygotic twins, especially in your pretty unique circumstances.’

I gaze back at him. ‘DNA?’

‘No. Afraid not. Even if we had’ – he winces as he speaks the next words – ‘a large enough sample from your deceased daughter, standard DNA tests could almost certainly not discern any difference. Identical twins are just that: identical – genetically identical as well as facially and physically identical. This is actually a problem for police forces; there have been cases where two twins have escaped conviction for crimes because the police are unable to identify which particular twin did the deed, even when they have DNA samples from the crime scene.’

‘What about fingerprints, aren’t they different?’

‘Yes, there is sometimes a slight difference there, in fingerprints and footprints, even in identicals, but of course your daughter, ah … there was a cremation, wasn’t there?’

‘Yes.’

‘And neither girl was fingerprinted before.’

‘No.’

‘You see the difficulty.’

He sighs, with unexpected vigour. Then he stands, and walks to the window and gazes at the streetlights outside, which are switching on. At three p.m.

‘It is rather an intractable problem, Mrs Moorcroft. If both daughters were alive, there are other ways we
could
differentiate them, from now on – maybe using patterns of branching blood vessels in the face, facial thermography, but when one is dead, and you want to do it retrospectively … Then naturally it is pretty much impossible. Anatomical science is not going to help us.’

He turns, and regards me in my disconcertingly deep leather chair. I feel like an infant, my feet barely touching the ground.

‘But maybe this is all unnecessary.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Let’s be positive, Mrs Moorcroft. Let’s look at it a different way, and see what psychology can tell us. We know that loss of a co-twin is especially distressing for the surviving sibling.’

Kirstie. My poor Kirstie.

‘Identical twins who lose their co-twin have significantly higher scores on four of the eight GEI bereavement scales – they suffer more from despair, guilt, rumination and depersonalization.’ He sighs, briefly, but goes on: ‘In the light of this intense grief, especially the depersonalization, the major possibility is that your daughter Kirstie is simply hallucinating, or delusional. Doctors at Edinburgh University did a study on this subject, on co-twins who lose the other twin. They found that outright psychiatric disorder is elevated in twins whose co-twins have died, compared with twins both living.’

‘Kirstie is going mad?’

He is framed by the dark window behind.

‘Not mad, more disturbed; perhaps quite severely disturbed. Consider what Kirstie is going through alone: she herself is a living reminder of the deceased sister. Every time she looks in a mirror, she sees her dead sibling. She is also experiencing, vicariously, your confusion. And your husband’s confusion. Consider, likewise, how she must dread the approach of solitary birthdays, of facing a life of comparative isolation, after being a twin since birth – she is surely experiencing a loneliness none of us can really comprehend.’

I am trying not to cry. Kellaway continues,

‘The bewilderment must be profound. Also, a surviving twin may well feel guilt and contrition after the co-twin’s death: guilt that she was chosen to live. The guilt is further compounded by seeing the grief of her parents, especially if the parents are warring. So many divorces follow this kind of thing, they are sadly universal.’ He looks directly at me. Clearly expecting a response.

‘We don’t argue.’ Is all I can say. Quite weakly. ‘I mean – maybe we did, at one point: our marriage went through, you know, a rough patch, but that’s behind us. We don’t argue in front of my girl. I don’t think we do. No.’

Kellaway walks to the second window, and stares out at the streetlights while talking: ‘The guilt and the grieving, and the sudden engulfing loneliness, can combine to unbalance the mind of the surviving twin in rather extraordinary ways. If you look at the literature of bereaved twins, as I have done, there are many examples of this. When one twin dies, the other will take over their characteristics, becoming more
like
the twin that died. An American study found one twin whose brother died at the age of twelve; the surviving twin became so like his dead brother his parents were convinced the living twin had, as they put it, the ‘spirit of his dead brother within him’. In another example, a twin in her teens who lost her sister, took on that sister’s name, voluntarily, so she could’ – Kellaway half-turns, and looks at me – ‘stop being herself. That is the phrase she used, she wanted to
stop being herself
. She wanted to
be
her dead twin.’

A pause.

I have to reply, ‘So your conclusion is that Kirstie
is
Kirstie, but that,’ I am trying to speak as calmly as I can, ‘but she is pretending to be Lydia, or thinks she is Lydia, to get over the guilt, and her grief?’

‘It’s a very strong probability, in my mind. And it’s as far as I can go without a proper consultation.’

‘But what about the dog? What about Beany?’

Kellaway walks back to his swivel chair, and sits himself down.

‘The dog is perplexing. Yes. To a certain extent. And you are of course right: dogs can differentiate by scent between identical twins, even if the best DNA tests cannot. Yet it is also known that bereft and surviving twins often make very close bonds with pets. The pet
replaces the dead sibling. My guess, consequently, is that Kirstie and Beany the dog have formed this closer bond, and Beany is behaving in a different way in response to this fonder attachment.’

The Glasgow rain is now falling on the window, quite heavily. And I am at a loss. I had come so close to believing that my darling Lydia was back, and yet it seems Kirstie lives. I imagined it all. The whole thing. And so did Kirstie? My heartbreak has intensified: pointlessly.

‘What do I do now, Doctor Kellaway? How do I deal with my daughter’s confusion? Her grief?’

‘Act as normal as possible. Continue as you are now.’

‘Should I tell my husband any of this?’

‘Up to you. It might be better to let it lie – but this, of course, is for you to decide.’

‘And then? What’s going to happen then?’

‘It’s difficult to say for sure. But my best guess is that this state of disturbance will pass, once Kirstie sees that you still regard her as Kirstie, still love her as Kirstie, don’t blame her for being Kirstie; she will become Kirstie, once more.’

He makes this speech like a peroration. With an air of finality. My consultation is clearly over. Kellaway escorts me to the door, and hands me my raincoat, like a doorman at a classy hotel; then he says, much more conversationally:

‘Kirstie is enrolled at a new school?’

‘Yes. She starts next week. We wanted time to adjust. You know …’

‘That’s good. That’s good. School is an important part of normalization: after a few weeks there, she will, I hope, and believe, begin to make new friends, and this present confusion will pass.’ He offers me a wan but apparently sincere smile. ‘I know it must be cruel for you. Almost intolerable.’ He pauses for a moment, and his eyes meet mine. ‘How are you doing? You haven’t talked about yourself? You have been through an incredibly traumatic year.’

‘Me?’

‘Yes. You.’

The question stumps me. I gaze at Kellaway’s face, his mild and professional smile.

‘I’m doing all right, I think. The move is a distraction, but I like it. I reckon it can work. I just want all this to be over.’