The Ice Twins (20 page)
The wind is steely and chilling, trying to push the car door closed; I zip my North Face jacket to my chin and stuff my fists in my pockets, and walk the beaches, gazing. And thinking.
The light here fascinates me even more than the light around Torran. It’s not quite as beautiful as Torran, but it shifts with even more tantalizing swiftness, veils of rain and cloud conceal the mountain peaks, shyly, then you see bright spears of sunlight, lancing, and slanted, and golden.
They look so judgemental, the Black Cuillins. Like a row of inquisitors in black hoods. Their shark-toothed peaks rip at the heavy passing clouds, gutting them of rain. Yet still the clouds build and fall, in their endless and anguished turmoil, apparently without pattern.
But there is a pattern here. And if I stare long enough at the Black Cuillins across the waters of Eisort, I will understand it.
Angus loved Kirstie. But something that he did frightened her. He loved her. But she was frightened of him?
The pattern.
The pattern.
I can find the pattern if I think hard enough; then I will understand everything.
We still haven’t found a church for Kirstie’s funeral.
The days mingle into each other: like the clouds over Sgurr Alasdair. Angus goes to work two or three days a week; I try and find freelance business. I get emails from London therapists, following up my grief from Kirstie’s death. It seems trivial, and outdated, and irrelevant. All of it. Compared to what is happening to our daughter, right now.
She has to go back to school or we will never succeed on Torran; but she is clearly reluctant. Her bandaged hands are an excuse for her to stay home, but when the bandages are ceremonially removed, one evening, I decide, with Angus’s concurrence: she has to try again at Kylerdale.
Next morning we take the boat, as a family, across the water to the Selkie. Lydia looks miserable and apprehensive, lost in her oversized school uniform with the stupid shoes. Her shy face peering out from the pink hood of her anorak.
Angus kisses me on the cheek and gets in Josh’s car – he’s getting a lift to Portree. I envy him this: he has a job and he seems to be enjoying it. At least he gets off the island, out of Sleat, and meets people.
Pensive and brooding, I drive Lydia to Kylerdale Primary. The morning is mild, with a spit of rain, all the kids are leaping up the path, scampering out of cars, heading for their classes, throwing off their coats and joshing each other. All except my daughter, who approaches the school gates with tiny steps. Will I be forced to carry her?
‘Come on, Lydia.’
‘Don’t want to.’
‘It will be much better today. The first weeks are always the worst.’
‘What if no one plays with me again?’
I ignore my sympathetic pain.
‘They
will
, darling, just give them a chance. There are lots of new kids here, just like you.’
‘Want Kirstie.’
‘Well, Kirstie isn’t here any more. You can play with the other girls and boys. Come on.’
‘Daddy likes Kirstie, he wants her back too.’
What is this? I hurry on. ‘Here we go. Let’s take off your coat, you don’t need it now.’
Escorting her inside the glazed door, I share a silent glance with Sally Ferguson. She gazes down at my daughter.
‘Hello, Lydia. Are you feeling better now?’
No response. I put a hand on Lydia’s shoulder. ‘Lydia, say hello.’
Still no response.
‘Lydia?’
My daughter manages a bashful, reluctant, ‘Hello.’
I look at Sally and she looks at me and she says, rather too breezily:
‘I am sure everything will be fine today. Miss Rowlandson is telling stories about pirates.’
‘Pirates! Lydia, listen, you love pirates—’
I gently push my daughter in the back, propelling her towards the corridor, and slowly – very slowly – she walks, looking at the floor, a portrait of introversion. Then she disappears into the school corridor. Engulfed.
When she is gone Sally Ferguson reassures me.
‘We’ve told all the kids that Lydia lost a sister, and can be a little confused; they won’t be allowed to tease her.’
I am meant to be soothed; but I’m not convinced that this is better. Now my daughter is indelibly marked out as odd: as the girl who lost a twin. The haunted sister. Perhaps the other kids have heard about the incident at the Freedlands’. Oh yeah, that’s the crazy girl who smashed the window because she saw a ghost.
Look at the scars on her hands.
‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘I’ll be back at three-fifteen to pick her up.’
And I am. By ten minutes past three I am waiting anxiously at the school gates with other mums, and a couple of dads, who I do not know: I painfully wish I did know these people because then I could casually chat, and then Lydia would see me interacting and, by example, it might help her to interact with her peers. But I am too shy to strike up conversations with these strangers: these confident parents with their big 4x4s and their banter; it strikes me once more how much of this is my fault – I have handed on my crippling shyness to Lydia.
Kirstie would probably have been fine here. Certainly better at interacting. She would have bounced around, singing her songs, making other kids laugh. Not Lydia.
The children rush out of the door at the allotted time, little boys run into their mothers’ arms, girls walk out hand in hand, slowly everyone appears, and is embraced, and slowly the parents and kids disperse; until I am the last parent left in the playground, in the cloaking winter darkness, and then my daughter emerges, unhappy in the doorway, and a young blonde teacher, I presume Miss Rowlandson, shepherds her towards me.
‘Lydia!’ I say. ‘Did you have a good time? Was it nice today? How were the pirates?’
I want to ask her: Did anyone play with you? Did you pretend Kirstie was alive?
Lydia takes my arm and I look at the young teacher and she weakly smiles, and blatantly blushes – and returns to her classroom.
In the car, and in the boat, Lydia will not talk. She is mute. She says a quiet thank you to food, but she says nothing else and goes to her room and reads. Then she walks down to the beach in the moonlight and stares at the shining rock pools, which capture the reflection of the silvery moon. I watch her from the kitchen. My daughter. Lydia Moorcroft. A solitary little girl, on an island, in the dark. Quintessentially alone.
And so the days go on, similarly cloudy, mild and damp. We plan the funeral: Angus agrees to do most of the phoning and paperwork, as he gets off the island more than me. I can sense his reluctance. I take Lydia to school every day, and she is silent; I pick her up from school every day, and she is silent. She is always the last to leave the classroom.
On the fourth morning I get to school early: I am going to try something different. With a choke of guilt, I push Lydia into a crowd of girls, from her year and her class, gathered at the school gate – and then I pretend to take a call on my mobile.
Lydia has no choice: she has to interact, or she will be standing there, quite
painfully
isolated.
I watch, pretending to converse on the phone. Lydia looks as if she is trying to talk – to join this group of her peers. But they are ignoring her. She looks desperately back, at me, for support, or consolation, but I act distracted, as if I am engrossed in my phone call. Then I stand nearer, eavesdropping.
My hopes rise. It seems as if Lydia is going to do it: my daughter is going to talk to a schoolmate, to communicate; she is shyly approaching a brunette girl: a slender, apparently confident child, chattering with her friends.
I listen as Lydia says in a nervous voice: ‘Grace, can I tell you about my leopard?’
The girl – Grace – turns to Lydia. She gives my daughter a tiny appraising glance, then she shrugs, and doesn’t even reply. Instead she looks away and talks to her other friends; and then the entire group of girls goes happily wandering off, leaving Lydia there, staring at her shoes. Rebuffed. And shunned.
Unbearable
. I am wiping away barely hidden tears as I take her into the school building, as I walk to my car and start the engine. I hope the tears will go away, but they don’t, they last all the way to Broadford, where I do my wifi work and answer my emails. And by noon the urge is irresistible.
I have to see for myself.
Climbing in the car I drive too fast, down the Sleat road, to Kylerdale School, on its green promontory, by the wind-tousled waves. The cold metallic sun has emerged: making Knoydart shine gold and bronze. Above a steely sea.
It’s the end of lunchtime. All the kids will be in the playground, having eaten. I want to watch Lydia again: to see if things have improved. I want to discover if she is interacting, or if she is being teased and mocked.
But I don’t want to be seen, myself: so I creep up the side of the playground, on a little-used path, which wanders down to the shingly beach just beyond. I am sheltered, by winter’s thorny shrubbery, from the screaming happy kids beyond the chainwire.
Girls are hopscotching. Boys are ragtagging. I scan all the little pink faces, the white socks and blue trousers, looking for the blonde hair of my daughter. I cannot see her. All the kids are, apparently, out here playing. But Lydia?
Might she be inside? Reading on her own? I hope not. She must be out here. Please let her be out here, playing with someone else.
There she is.
I close my eyes and calm myself. Then gaze, properly.
Lydia is standing in the far corner of the playground. Entirely alone. The nearest child, a small boy, is ten yards away: with his back to her. But even though she is conspicuously alone, Lydia is doing something. What?
I go closer, still concealed by trees and bushes.
I am just a few feet distant, now. I see that Lydia is facing away from the school, from her classmates, isolated from the world.
She is quite alone – yet she is talking. Animatedly. I can see her lips move, and her arms wave. She is talking to the air, to the trees and the chainwire, she is actually smiling and laughing.
Now I can hear her.
‘Nnneeooo nononon yes free up thrre up fff … Wakey wakey no yes paka. Sufffy sufffffy nnnn. Mmmmm. Nana nana nana.’
As she says this Lydia waves her arms, then she stops, and listens, as if someone is talking right back at her. But no one is talking back at her. Then she nods and laughs and babbles some more.
It’s the nonsensical twin language she shared with Kirstie. The twins kept it going right to the end. We never worked out what it meant.
Lydia is talking to her dead sister.
‘An t-Eilean Sgithenac – the winged isle – Skye.’ Josh spun the wheel as they rocked south. ‘That’s about the only Gaelic I learned.’
Angus said nothing. The morning was bright and fiercely cold. Perhaps the first morning of proper winter.
‘Molly’s learned quite a bit more, she’s into all that Celtic stuff. But it’s all so bloody gloomy. I mean – you know that little cove near Ardvasar, Port na Faganaich, it’s really cute, right?’ Josh chortled, and went on: ‘Then you find out what that means, Port na Faganaich? It means the Port of the Forsaken Ones, really.
Port of the Forsaken Ones
. Charming.’
Josh accelerated up a hill, momentarily leaving the sea behind, though you never left the sea behind for long, not on Skye. His friend buzzed open a window, and inhaled the icy fresh air.
‘Winter, at last, love it. Proper cold, so where was I – yeah – and there’s some lake here, Lagan, something. Lagan—’
‘Lagan inis na Cnaimh.’
‘That’s the one. I keep forgetting you’re a local. Yes. Lagan inis. And that means – Molly told me last night –
the hollow of the meadow of bones
. For fuck’s sake. Why? What’s that doing for real estate values? Do you want to buy a nice bungalow in the hollow of the meadow of bones? No? OK, then we’re building a condo, yeah, by the Ridge of the Night-hags.’
Josh chuckled at his own jokes. Angus stayed quiet. He already knew the quaint and macabre local folklore. He could remember it word for word: all the stories his grandmother used to tell him. They were sacred in his memory. Happy holidays and scary fables. Bonfires on Torran with his brother. His dad not there. Everyone happy. Listening to the old tales.
The bonny road which winds around the fernie brae – ach, that’s the road to death and heaven, the auld place of the fairies …
Angus gazed from the window of Josh’s car, Torran was hidden now, behind headlands. He thought of Lydia –
Lydia
– and Sarah, alone, together, in the cottage. Sarah and … Lydia. He had to accept she was Lydia. It was for the best. It was his doing. His daughter with her damaged soul, and her scarred hands and wrists. She was harmed: by life, by death, by Angus.
And by her mother.
Now the car rattled over a cattle grid; they were crossing the top of the Sleat peninsula, east to west. Taking the road to Tokavaig. This narrow road cut through an expanse of brown and rolling moorland, studded with little silvery lochans, shivered by kittiwakes. It was not beautiful. But soon they would see Loch Eisort.
