The Ice Twins (9 page)

And this was the very first night, of the very last holiday.

I’d driven down with the kids in the morning. Angus was delayed in London, but due later. Mum and Dad were out for a drink. I was sitting in the kitchen.

The large airy kitchen was where everything happened in my mum and dad’s house, because it had one of the best views – and a lovely big table. All was quiet. I was reading a book and sipping tea; the evening was long, and beautiful: rosy-blue skies arched over the headlands and the bay. The twins, already sunburned from an afternoon on the beach, were, I thought, playing in the garden. Everything was SAFE.

And then I heard the scream of one of my daughters.

That scream which will never go away. Never leave me.

Ever.

Here on Rannoch Moor I grip the wheel – accelerating. As if I can overtake the horror of the past and leave it dwindling in the mirror.

What happened next? Is there some clue, overlooked, that would unlock this awful puzzle?

For half a moment, sitting in that kitchen, I couldn’t work it out. The girls were meant to be on the lawn, enjoying that languid summer warmth; but this awful scream came from
upstairs
. So I rushed up the steps in blinding panic, and raced along the landing, and looked for them – not there, not there,
not there
– and I knew, somehow I knew, and I ran into the spare bedroom – yet another bedroom with a balcony. Twenty feet up.

The fucking balconies. If there was one thing I hated about Instow, it was the balconies; every window had them. Angus hated them too.

We always told the twins not to go near them; the iron railings were too low, whether you were adult or child. Yet they were so tempting. Because they all had those blissful views of the river. Mum liked to sit on her balcony, reading Swedish thrillers, drinking supermarket Chardonnay.

So, as I ran up the stairs, it was the balconies that ripped me open with terrible anticipation, and when I stepped into the bedroom I saw the silhouetted figure of one of my daughters, dressed in white, standing on the balcony, shouting.

The irony is that she looked so pretty that moment. Her hair was caught by the setting sun: she was coro-naed, gloried, flamingly haloed – she looked like a child of Jesus in a Victorian picture book, even as she was shouting, in icy and curdling terror.

‘Mummy Mummy Mummy Lydie-lo, it’s Lydie-lo, she’s falling off, Mummy, help her, MUMMY!’

For a second I was paralysed. Staring at her.

Then, choking on my panic, I looked over the railing.

And, yes, there was my daughter – broken, down there on the decking, blood spooling from her mouth, like a filled-in speech bubble, red and glossy. She looked like an icon of a fallen human, like a swastika shape with her arms and legs splayed. A symbol.

I knew Lydia was doomed as soon as I saw her body shaped that way, but I rushed downstairs, and cradled her still-warm shoulders, and felt for her slivery pulse. And at that precise moment my mum and dad came back from the pub, walking up the path: walking straight into this appalling tableau. They stopped, and gazed, quite stricken – and then my mum screamed and my dad frantically called for an ambulance, and we argued about moving Lydia or not moving Lydia, and my mum screamed again.

And then we all went tearfully to the hospital and spoke to absurdly young doctors, to young men and women in white coats with that flicker of tired shame in their eyes. Murmuring their prayers.

Acute subdural hematoma, severe and stellate lacerations, evidence of retinal haemorrhage …

At one point, awfully, Lydia came to consciousness. Angus had arrived to be engulfed by the same horror, so we were all in the room – me and Angus, my father, all the doctors and nurses – and my daughter faintly stirred and her eyes slurred open, and she had tubes in her mouth, and she looked at us, regretfully, melancho-lically, as if she was saying goodbye, then she went under again. And she never came back.

I hate these memories. I remember how one doctor blatantly stifled a yawn as she was talking to us, after Lydia was pronounced dead. Presumably she’d done a long shift. Another doctor said we were ‘unlucky’.

And monstrous as it was, he was, technically, right, as I discovered many weeks later – when I regained the mental capability to type words into a search engine. Most young children survive a fall of less than thirty feet, even forty feet. Lydia was unlucky. We were unlucky. Her fall was awkward. And this discovery made it all worse; it made my guilt even more unbearable. Lydia died because we were unlucky, and because I wasn’t looking after her properly.

I want to close my eyes, now, to block the world. But I can’t, because I’m driving. And so I drive on. Questioning the world. Questioning my memory. Questioning reality.

Who was the girl that fell? Is it possible I got it wrong?

The original and significant reason I thought that it was Lydia down there, dead, was because the twin who survived,
told me that
.

Mummy Mummy come quickly, Lydie-lo has fallen.

And naturally, when she said that, I took her at her word. Because there was no other immediate way of telling them apart. Because the girls were dressed so sweetly yet identically that day. In white dresses. With no blue or yellow.

This wasn’t my doing. It was the twins themselves. For a few months prior to that holiday they’d asked – they had demanded – that we dress them the same, cut their hair the same, make them look the same.
Mummy, sit here between me and read to us.
It was as if they wanted to be re-absorbed into each other. As if they’d had enough of being individuals for a while. Indeed, sometimes the twins would wake up, in those final months, and tell us they’d had exactly the same dream. I didn’t know whether to believe them. I still don’t know now. Is that possible? For twins to have the same dream?

Is it?

Touching the pedal, I race around a corner; urging myself on, as if the answer can be found on the coast. But the answer, if anywhere, is in my mind.

Angus and I had acceded to the twins’ impulsive wish – to be dressed exactly alike – because we thought it was just a phase, like tantrums or teething; and, besides, it was easy enough, by that time, to tell them apart by personality. By the different ways they bickered with each other.

But when I ran up the stairs and I saw one of my daughters, in her white dress, barefoot and totally distraught, there was no personality. Not at that moment. There was just one of the twins, shouting. And she was shouting
Lydie-lo has fallen
. And that’s what gave me her identity.
Kirstie.

Could we have got it wrong?

I do not know. I am lost in the hall of mirrored souls. And again that terrible sentence pierces me.

Mummy Mummy come quickly, Lydie-lo has fallen.

That’s when my life cracked open. That’s when I lost my daughter. That’s when everything went black.

As it does now. I am shuddering with grief. The memory is so powerful it is disabling. Tears are not far away; my hands are trembling on the steering wheel.

Enough. I need to stop, I need to get out, I need to breathe air. Where am I? Where are we? Outskirts of Fort William?

Oh God. Oh God.
Just STOP.

With a yank of the wheel I veer the car, fast and hard and straight into the forecourt of a BP garage, squirting grit with the wheels, almost smashing into a fuel pump.

The car gently steams. The silence is shocked.

‘Mummy?’

I look up at the rear-view mirror. Kirstie is staring at me in the mirror as I smudge the tears from my eyes with the heel of my hand. I stare at her reflection, as she must have stared so many times into mirrors, seeing her own reflection. Yet seeing her dead sister as well.

And now Kirstie
smiles
at me.

Why? Why is she smiling? She is mute and barely blinking: and yet smiling? As if she is trying to freak me out.

A sudden fear ripples through me. Absurd and ridiculous, yet undeniable.

I have to get out of the car. Now.

‘Mummy’s just going to get a coffee, OK? I just – just need a coffee. Do you want anything?’

Kirstie says nothing. Clutching Leopardy with her two fisted hands. Her smile is cold, and blank, and yet somehow, knowing. It is the kind of smile Lydia would sometimes do, Lydia the quiet one, the soulful one, the more eccentric of the twins. My favourite.

Fleeing my own child, and my own doubts, I rush into the little BP shop.

‘No petrol, thanks. Just the coffee.’

It’s too hot to drink. I stumble out into the raw, sea-scented air, trying to stay in control. Calm down, Sarah, calm down.

A hot cup of Americano in hand, I climb back in the car. I take deep, therapeutic breaths. Slowing my heartbeat. And then I gaze in the mirror. Kirstie remains quiet. She has also stopped smiling, and turned away. As she scratches Beany behind the ear, she is staring out of the window at the suburban houses that straggle the road, to and from the garage. They look foolish, and English, and incongruous, with their polite windows and twee little porches, set against the grandeur and immensity of the Highlands.

On, on, on.

I turn the key, and pull away. We take the long road towards Fort Augustus; to Loch Lochy, Loch Garry, Loch Cluanie. It is so long, we have come so far. I think about life before the accident, the happiness, so easily shattered. Our life was made of brittle ice.

‘Are we nearly there
now
?’

My daughter shakes me from my thoughts. I look in the mirror, again.

Kirstie is gazing at the summits of the mountains, which are veiled in grey mist, and returning rain. I smile in a reassuring way and say Yes and I drive my daughter, and Beany, and our hopes, along the dwarfed and single-track road that negotiates the endless wilderness.

But we are, indeed, nearly there. And now the distance I am putting between me and my old self, my old life, my dead daughter, her ashes scattered on Instow beach, feels right and good and necessary. If anything, I want to go further. This two-day journey from Camden to Scotland, overnighting in the Scottish Borders, has been so epic, it righteously underscores the life-change we are undertaking. This distance is so long there is no going back.

It feels like a nineteenth-century migration; as if we are pioneers heading for Oregon. So I grip the wheel and drive us out of the past; trying not to think who it is in the back of my car, which dancing and heraldic unicorn, which ghost of herself. It is Kirstie. It must be Kirstie. It is Kirstie.

‘This is it, Kirstie, look.’

We are approaching Skye. The family’s rusted Ford Focus is rattling through the touristic but rain-lashed port that is Kyle of Lochalsh – then we are steered along, by the high street, towards a great looping bridge. Abruptly the rain stops.

The grey, chopped-white waters of Loch Alsh flow beneath the soaring bridge – a gut-churning plunge. Then we swoop down onto a roundabout.

We have reached Skye. And the next little crowd of suburban houses soon yields to the emptiness.

It is a traumatized yet beautiful landscape. Islands and mountains are reflected in dark indigo waters to my left. Bow-backed moorland stoops down to the echoing shoreline. A boat drifts, alone. A plantation of firs is divided by a road that seems to go nowhere – disappearing into those dark, sombre regiments, then blackness.

It is harsh and daunting – and very handsome. Bright lozenges of late autumn sun blaze on the further hills, like organized fires, moving silently and very fast. And when we slow right down, on cattle-grids, I can see details: the way the dew in the grass is struck, by the sun, making tiny, shivering jewels.

We are just a few miles from Ornsay. The road is widening, and I begin to recognize the green hills and steely lochs from the pictures I have seen – from all those images on Google.

‘I can see Dada!’

Kirstie points, eagerly. Beany growls.

I slow the car to a crawl, and follow my little girl’s gesture, and yes, she is right. There are two men standing on a stone pier, in front of a big, white, gabled Victorian building, which is, in turn, staring out to the broad sea-channel. The men are recognizably Angus – and Josh Freedland. Josh’s red hair is particularly distinctive.

This is it. Must be. That’s the Selkie; and that’s the pub car park on the seafront. And Ornsay village is, surely, the scattered outcrop of orderly gardens, converted crofts, and glassy-walled new-builds that surrounds the tiny harbour.

And that in turn means, most importantly of all – I lift my eyes like a worshipper in a church – that the little island with the little lighthouse, out there, in the Sound – that islet humbled by the beautiful vastness of oceans and mountains: that is our destination.

This is my new home; and its name is like a tolling bell.

Torran.

Five minutes of narrow lanes brings me to the car park and the Selkie, and the tinkling sound of nervous boats, moored and anchored in the wind: lanyards, spinnakers, bowsprits; I don’t know what any of these words mean, but I will learn. I will have to acquire a new, maritime, seaworthy language, befitting someone who lives on an island. For all my anxieties, I quite like that idea. I want everything to be new.

‘Hello, darling,’ Angus is greeting Kirstie as she climbs, timidly, tentatively, blinking in the wind, from the back of the car; Leopardy is clutched, as ever, to her chest. The dog stirs, and barks, and follows my daughter, loping out onto the tarmac. ‘Hello, Beano!’ says Angus, and his smile widens. His beloved hound.

Amidst the sadness, I am pleased. Despite it all, I have successfully delivered the dog and the daughter.

‘Say hello to Uncle Josh, sweetheart,’ says Angus, as my seven-year-old gazes around, mouth half-open. Angus thanks me with another smile as our daughter says a polite and bashful ‘hi’ to Josh.

‘Not too bad a journey?’ Josh asks, eyeing me.

‘Only two days,’ I say. ‘I could have done with a bit more driving.’

‘Hah.’

‘Perhaps next time, Angus, we can move to Vladivostok?’