The Ice Twins (15 page)

And I explain. I explain as I did to Sally Ferguson. As maybe I am going to have to explain with everyone else.

I do it quickly so I don’t choke up. I tell her there is a possibility that we got it wrong: the identity of the twin that died. We don’t know. We are trying to find out. It is all so absurd yet so cruelly real. As real as the mountains of Knoydart. My mother, who can anyway be easily as silent as me, stays respectfully silent throughout.

‘My word,’ she says at the end. ‘My word. My. Well. Goodness. Poor Kirstie. I mean—’

‘Mum, please don’t cry.’

‘I’m not.’

She is crying. I wait. She keeps crying.

‘It’s just that it brings back so many memories. That awful night. The ambulance.’

I wait for her tears to subside, fighting my own emotions into submission. I have to be the strong one here. Why?

‘So, Mum, we need to get to the bottom of this, if we can, because – because we need to decide if she is Kirstie or if she is Lydia. Then settle on it, I guess. I don’t know. Oh, Jesus.’

‘Yes,’ my mum says. ‘Yes.’

A few more stifled maternal sobs pass me by. I watch the traffic outside the café, heading for Kyle or Portree. The long winding mountain road that snakes past Scalpay and Raasay. Angus took that road this morning.

Our conversation drifts into practicalities, and trivialities. But I have a serious question for my mother.

‘Mum, I want to ask you something.’

She sniffles. ‘Yes, darling?’

‘I need to know, to search out any inconsistencies, find out any clues.’

‘What …’

‘Is there anything about that night, that weekend, before the accident. Did you notice anything different about the girls, or different between them? Something you haven’t told me, because it didn’t seem relevant?’

‘Different?’

‘Yes.’

‘What does that mean, Sarah?’

‘I don’t know. It’s just – maybe I can differentiate them? Even now. Were they behaving differently, was there anything weird, any reason why there was this confusion in my daughter’s head?’

My mother is entirely silent. A soft snow is now falling outside, the first of the winter. It is just a few brief flurries. It floats like the lightest confetti in the sharp sad air. Across the street, a small child, walking with her mother, stops and points at the spangled nothingness, her face ignited with joy.

‘Mum.’

More silence. This is an unusually prolonged pause, even for my mother.

‘Mum?’

‘Well.’ My mum puts her thoughtful, lying voice on. ‘No. We don’t need to dig it all up do we?’

‘Yes, we do.’

‘Well, I can’t think of anything.’

She is lying. My own mother is lying. I know her too well.

‘Mum, there is something. What is it? What? You have to tell me, no more evasions. Tell me.’

The snow is thinning to nothing: just a trace of silvering in the air. The ghost of snow.

‘I can’t remember.’

‘Yes, you can.’

‘But, darling, I really can’t.’

Why is she lying about this?

‘Mum. Please
.
’

The next silence is different. I can hear her breathing. I can almost hear her thinking. I can see her down there in Devon, in the hallway, with the photos from my dad’s career on the wall, framed and faded, and dusty. Photos of him receiving awards for long-fogotten ads.

‘Well, darling, there was something maybe, but it’s nothing. Nothing.’

‘No. It’s not nothing. It might not be.’

This is so obviously where I get it from: the propensity to silence, the refusal to reveal.

I can see why Angus occasionally wants to strangle me.

‘It’s nothing, Sarah.’

‘Tell me, Mum. Tell me!’

I actually sound like Angus.

My mother takes a deep breath, ‘All right, I … I just remember the day you arrived Kirstie was quite upset.’

‘Kirstie?’

‘Yes, but you didn’t notice, you were so distracted, what with … everything. And Angus was late of course, late arriving, very late that night, and, I asked Kirstie what it was, what was upsetting her so, and, she said it was something, to do with Daddy. That he had upset her somehow, I think. Something like that, that’s all I remember, it’s surely nothing.’

‘No, it might not be. Thanks, Mum. Thanks.’

The dialogue dwindles. We express our motherly and daughterly love. My mum asks if I am all right,

‘I mean,’ she adds, ‘all right in yourself?’

‘Yes. I am all right.’

‘You’re sure? You sound, darling, a little, you know, like you did. Sarah, you really do not want to go back there. Not like you were.’

‘Mum, I am managing, I really am, apart from this Lydia thing. I actually like the house, despite the rats under the bed. And I love the island. You must see it.’

‘Of course, of course we will.’

To get her off the subject, I ask about my brother Jamie: and it works. My mum laughs softly, and affectionately, and says he is sheep-farming in Australia. Or felling trees in Canada. She’s not entirely sure. It is a family joke that Jamie is so wandering, and prodigal: a family joke we use, to get us through the bad times, and the awkward conversations. Like now.

Then Mum and me say goodbye. And I sit there in the café, and order another coffee. Wondering about this conversation I’ve just had. Why was Angus late that night arriving at Instow? Before the accident the story was: he might be working late. Yet when we tried to call him at work, he wasn’t there. It later emerged – he later explained, further – that he’d stopped by Imogen’s house, from work, to pick up some of the twins’ things: as they’d recently had a sleepover there.

Childless Imogen always liked having children around.

At the time I didn’t question this story. Not remotely. I had too much grieving to do; it all made sense anyway. But now?

Imogen?

No. This is stupid. Why am I doubting my husband? Apart from the drinking, he’s been there for us all along. Loving, devoted, resourceful, miserable, Angus. My husband. And I need
to trust him, as I have no one else.

And anyway there’s nothing more I can do about Kirstie’s troubles this minute; I’ve got to do some of my own work.

I have to earn, by writing. Angus’s new, part-time job in Portree will bring in a few quid, but a few quid is not enough. We need more income. Consequently whatever I can add will be crucial in keeping us on Torran.

And I want to stay on Torran, so very very much.

So I open my laptop, and spend two hours sending emails: the accumulated ideas, notions and necessary communications of forty-eight hours. I send a bunch of emails to editors in town: maybe I can write something about Torran and Sleat, about local folklore, the Gaelic revival, anything.

Sipping my cappuccino, looking at the cars driving in and out of Broadford Co-op, I consider, once more, my growing infatuation with our island. It’s like a teenage crush on an uncaring, hard-to-please boy. The more difficult Torran is, the more I want to own it, to make it mine.

A few hard hours later and my work is done; I must go back to school to pick up Kirstie. I am going to be late, so I press the pedal, but then I skid over the snow-slicked cattle grid, and almost shunt into a stunted oak, mournfully guarding a farm track to my left.

Slow down, Sarah, slow down. I need to remember the road is dangerous pretty much all the way, from Broadford to Ardvasar. But then everything is slightly dangerous here.

A lonely snowflake hits my windscreen, and is exterminated by the wipers. I look at the low balding hills. Shaved by winds and deforestation. I think of the people wrenched from this landscape by poverty and the Highland Clearances. Skye used to be populated by twenty-five thousand people. A century later it is half that. I often consider the scenes of that emigration: the crying farmwives, the sheep-dogs quietly killed, the babies screaming as they quit their beautiful, hostile homeland, and sailed west. And now I think of my daughter.

Screaming.

I have decided what to do about my daughter. I don’t want to do this. But I have to. The awfulness this morning clinched it.

I arrive at the school. With an effort, I flash an unconvincing smile at some of the other mothers, and then I turn and look to the cheery paper sign on the glass door saying
Failte
and I wonder where is she, where is my daughter?

All of the other children are pouring out: a cataract of giddy energy and Gaelic chatter and Lego Movie lunchboxes, a mob of small people running into parental arms and then, finally, the last, slow, reluctant child emerges from the door. A little girl with no friends. Talking to no one.

My daughter. Now an only child. With her sad little rucksack. In her sad uniform. She walks up to me and buries her face in my stomach.

‘Hello you,’ I say.

I put an arm around her, and guide her to the car.

‘Hey. How was the first day at school?’

My cheeriness is absurd. But what else can I do? Be doomy and suicidal? Tell her everything is indeed awful?

Kirstie straps herself in the child seat, and gazes out the window at the grey tidal waters of the Sound, and the pink and orange lights of Mallaig: with its port and its railway station, and its symbols of escape and civilization and the mainland, now dimming in the distance. The winter darkness is already shrouding, at three-fifteen.

‘Sweetie. How did it go at school?’

She is looking out of the window, still. I persist.

‘Moomin?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Sorry?’

‘No one.’

‘Oh, OK.’ What does this mean?
Nothing
and
no one
? I turn the radio on and sing along to a happy tune as I have a brief exultant urge to drive the car straight into Loch na Dal.

But I have a plan and we are going to stick to it. We just need to get to the boat, then get to the island.

Then I will do what I am so afraid of doing.

This wretched and terrible thing.

10

The boat is there, waiting, lashed to the pier that juts from the car park outside the Selkie. The lighthouse and lighthouse-keeper’s cottage look innocent in the distance, white and lovely, yet humbled by the dark, framing mountains of Knoydart. I stop the Ford and park.

It takes me four or five tugs of the outboard to get the engine ticking over. It used to take me ten. I am getting used to this, and I am steering the boat better. I can even tie knots.

Kirstie sits, slightly red-eyed, yet calm, at the other end of the dinghy, looking first at me, then at the rocky beaches of Salmadair, as we putter across in the chilly breeze. Her blonde hair sweetly curls and kicks in the wind. She looks so pretty – her retroussé profile is framed by the waters. I love her so much, my little girl. I love her because she is Kirstie and I love her because she reminds me of Lydia.

And, of course, part of me wants my little Lydia back. Part of me sings at this idea. I have missed Lydia intensely: the way we would sit and read together for entire afternoons, the way we would sometimes just sit, quiet but happy; Kirstie was always bouncing around, much less patient. The idea that Lydia could have returned, from the dead, is a kind of miracle. Terrifying but a miracle. Maybe all miracles are frightening? But if I get Lydia back, if this really is Lydia here, now – then Kirstie dies.

What am I thinking? This is Kirstie, as I am about to prove. In the cruellest of ways. If I can find the ruthlessness to see it through.

Kirstie asks, in the biting sea wind, ‘Why’s it called Salmadair, Mummy?’

This is good. A normal conversation.

‘I think it means island of psalms, darling, there used to be a nunnery here.’

‘When, Mummy? What’s nunnery?’

‘A nunnery, with people who prayed, they used to pray here, many years ago, a thousand years ago?’

‘Before we were a baby?’

I ignore the troubled syntax, and nod. ‘Yep. Long time before then.’

‘Now there’s no nuns there?’

‘No. Are you cold?’

The wind is really kicking at her hair; her pink raincoat is unbuttoned.

‘No it’s all right. The wind is making my hair blow all over my face but I like hair in my face.’

‘OK. We’re nearly
there.’

A seal rises to the right – bottling – looking at us with those orphaned eyes, sad, and wise; then with an oily, whiskered plop it disappears and Kirstie smiles her gap-toothed smile.

The Sleat waves are kind, and ferry us onto the beach beneath the lighthouse. I drag the dinghy – which is just light enough – above the tideline, where crabs scuttle, and a dead salmon rots, pecked by herring gulls.

‘Pooh,’ says Kirstie, pointing at the smelly fish carcass. Then she runs up to the cottage and pushes the never-locked door and disappears inside. I can hear Beany barking softly in greeting. He used to bark loudly and happily. I knot the boat, and follow. The kitchen is cold. The rats are quiet. The harlequins dance on the stained white wall of the dining room. The stone is kept on the loo seat, so as to keep out the mink.

Angus is absent, doing his overnight thing in Portree. We are alone on the island and that’s just fine.

Kirstie pats and strokes Beany then she goes to her room to read, and I prepare supper in the shadows of the kitchen, where the wire baskets swing overhead in the half-light, preserving our food from the rats. I can hear the respiration of the sea, it sounds like someone doing exercises. There is a calmness. Before the storm?

I gird myself for what I am about to do.

I should, perhaps, have done this three weeks ago: I am going to do a test on Kirstie, one she cannot fake or fail. The idea half-occurred to me this morning, as I contemplated Lydia, screaming at the school; it only really formed this afternoon.

My experiment will rely on my daughter’s phobia: her hatred of darkness.

Whenever this phobia was triggered, both twins screamed: but they screamed in a unique way, they screamed differently. Kirstie would yell, and pant, and shout: making a tremulous version of horrified words. Lydia would go into a simple shriek: very high-pitched. Ice-shattering.

I’ve only heard this scream a few times. It is different to any other vocalization. Which is probably why I only clearly thought of this today. And one of those occasions was when we had a power cut, in Camden. Two years ago, plunging the twins into total darkness: the blackness they always feared.