The Ice Twins (19 page)

13

I can see the terror on Angus’s face, on Molly’s face, their fears are nothing compared to mine. I feel I’ve been here before. In Devon.

Lydia screams again, she has pulled back from the shattered window; her scarlet, bloodied hands poised vertically in the air, like a surgeon waiting to be gloved.

Angus and I approach our daughter, tentatively, trembling, as if we are approaching a feral animal – because she backs away as we get close. But as she retreats, Lydia stares at me. Alarmed. As if she is scared of
herself
.

I can hear Josh behind me, calling an ambulance, Yes, Maxwell Lodge, Ornsay Village, half a mile past the Selkie, by the chapel, yes, please right away, PLEASE.

‘Lydia—’

‘Lydie …’

She says nothing. Rigid and red-handed, imploring, she continues to retreat. Her quietness is almost as terrifying as the bleeding.

‘Christ—’

‘Lydia—’

‘Josh, call the fucking ambulance!’

‘I have, I am, I—’

‘Lydia, babe, Lydie …’

‘Get water, Molly, bandages – Molly!’

‘Lydia, it’s OK, it’s OK, stay still – let me—’

‘Mmmmmummmmy. What happened to me?’

Even as she speaks, Lydia is still backing away, her hands raised in the air. The blood runs down her bare elbow, dripping now onto the polished wooden floor.

‘Please, Lydia?’

Behind me, Molly runs in with a bowl of water and tissues, and flannels, and once again Angus and I attempt to approach Lydia, on our knees, arms beckoning: but she evades us, sloping away, bleeding. Has she severed an artery, or is it just deep scratches?

I am kneeling on something hard and sharp. Glass.

I stand – but Angus runs past me and he grabs Lydia, in the corner, and holds her close to his chest; she is too shocked to elude him. He yells at me: ‘Wash her hands, get the blood off, we have to see how bad this is.’

‘Josh—’

‘The ambulance is coming: ten minutes.’

‘Baby, baby, baby.’

Now Angus is rocking Lydia backwards and forwards in his arms: saying
shhh
,
shhh, shhh
, comforting her, as I lean close. I begin to sponge and daub the blood from her fingers, with the cold flannels, and Molly’s bowl of water. The sponged blood coils in the bowled water like red smoke. With a swoon of relief I can see she is not so badly cut; my daughter has lacerated her palms and knuckles, and ripped the skin in multiple places, but it does not look arterial, the wounds are not that deep.

But there is lots of this blood; lots of blooded tissues are piling up; Molly whisks them away like an attending nurse.

‘Jesus,’ Angus is whispering as he holds her tight. ‘Jesus.’

Molly replaces the tissues with baby wipes, ointment, bandages.

‘Hey,’ I say, ‘Lydia.
Sweetness.
’

She looks so vulnerably young here, in her father’s embrace, in her party dress, with those cheery butterflies outlined in pink spangles on the front. She looks so young, and so damaged. Her white socks and pale pink sandals are speckled with blood, she has a tiny smear of blood on one of her bare oval knees.

What can I do? I know she is unhappy, and I know she is too young to be this unhappy; and I haven’t forgotten the note on my bed.
Kirstie is still here
. Why did she write that? What is preying on her mind? What anguish and doubt? So my grief battles my fears, which tussles with my guilt, as I wash her little fingers. As I squeeze the water and wash the worst of the bleeding.

Then I say, again: ‘Darling. Lydia. What happened just now?’

Of course, I know what happened. Or I can guess very well what happened. She looked in the window and she saw herself, but she saw the image of her dead sister. The identity confusion is sending her into ever darker places.

Sitting on her father’s lap, Lydia shakes her head and hugs her dad closer, he is stroking her hair, gently, caressingly; she looks away from me, but speaks:

‘Nothing.’

I daub at the bloodstains, they are almost gone now; it’s my own fingers which are trembling. I really thought she had opened her wrists, in some horrible, infant suicide bid. Or maybe in fear of the ghost inside herself, the ghost she has become.

‘Lydia, why did you break the window?’

Angus glares at me. ‘We don’t need to ask that, not here, not yet, for God’s sake.’

I ignore him. What does he know? He wasn’t there, in Devon, that evening. He’s never been through this before, he’s not been to that place of particular terror, hearing a shout, discovering that your daughter is dead.

‘Sweetheart, what was wrong, with the window? Was it like a mirror?’

Lydia takes a deep breath, and she hugs her daddy one more time, then she sits up and lets me wipe the last of the blood from her knuckles.

She might need stitches, she will definitely need plenty of plasters and bandages. Most of all, Lydia needs love, calm and peace, and an end to all this scariness – and I don’t know how we are going to find that.

Molly is on her hands and knees, brushing the chunks and angles of window glass into a dustpan; I wince, guiltily.

‘I’m so sorry, Molly.’

‘Please …’ She shakes her head, and gives me a smile of very serious pity, which makes me feel worse. ‘Sarah.’

I turn back to my daughter. I want to know.

‘Lydia?’

Abruptly she opens her eyes very wide and stares at the broken window, its black jagged void, surrounded with fangs of glazing; then she turns to me and speaks, her voice quivering:

‘It was Kirstie, she was here, she was in the window, Mummy, I saw her, but it wasn’t like last time, not like then, that time she was saying things, saying bad things, it was scary Mummy, but I – I – I—’

‘OK,’ says Angus. ‘Weeble, slow down.’

I stare at him.

Weeble?

That’s what he used to call Kirstie.
Weeble
. It’s a word from some TV ad when his mum was a kid: she taught it to him.
Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down
. That’s why he gave the word to Kirstie. Because Kirstie was the brave one, his favourite, the tomboy climbing trees, the roisterer doing fun things with Daddy, she would climb trees so high and yet she never fell down. Weeble.

He’s calling her
Weeble. He’s hugging Lydia, and calling her Weeble, the same way he would tightly hug Kirstie. Hugging and kissing her. Does that mean he still thinks she is Kirstie? He knows something I don’t? Or is this just the terror of the moment?

‘Weeble,’ he says, ‘You don’t have to tell us.’

‘No.’ Lydia shakes her head and gazes at me. ‘I want to tell. Mummy?’ Now she reaches out her arms and she climbs into my arms and together we sit, mother and daughter, on the fashionable Turkish rugs with her on my lap and she breathes in and out for a few seconds, and then she says, ‘Kirstie was in the window upstairs too and I couldn’t stop her, every time I looked she was there, every time, and she’s dead and she’s in the mirror at home, and now she was in here and she starts saying things, Mummy, bad things, horrid things. This was different, Mummy, and it makes me frightened. I’m so frightened of her, make her go away now, please, make her go away, she is on the island and she is in the school and now she’s everywhere.’

‘OK, OK …’ I soothe my daughter, stroking her head. ‘OK.’

Josh appears in the door again: abashed, and pallid: ‘The ambulance is here.’

We probably don’t need the ambulance any more; we assuredly don’t need some siren-wailing, life-saving dash to Portree; nevertheless we carry Lydia to the drive and we all clamber into the ambulance, and Josh and Molly and the Americans and Charles and Gemma Conway make their mumbled and heartfelt goodbyes; and then we are the afflicted little family driving through the darkened roads of Skye, past the star-crowned mountains, sitting in the back of the ambulance with a silent paramedic, and Angus and me not speaking.

Lydia lies on the stretcher, her hands lightly bandaged. She is inert and sad now. Passive. Expressionless. The ambulance speeds. I don’t know what to say. There is nothing to say. Portree greets us with roundabouts, traffic, two supermarkets and a police station and I get an urgent yearning to be back in London. For the first time.

In the Emergency Room at the small, new Portree hospital they patch up Lydia’s fingers with several delicate stitches, and ointments, and soothing creams, and proper bandages, and lots of nursing compassion offered in fluting Hebridean accents, and throughout it all me and Angus stare at each other, and say nothing.

Then the ambulance drivers take us back to Ornsay as a favour, so we don’t have to pay for a taxi. Because Angus and I are, of course, over the drink-drive limit. We only had to drive half a mile from the Selkie to the supper party so we didn’t bother staying sober. Now it seems awful. The shame of it mixes with the shame of everything else. We are a shameful couple. Dreadful people. The worst parents of all. We lost one daughter to a fall and somehow we are losing the other.

We deserve all this.

Angus starts the boat and we divide the dark waters back to Torran and I put Lydia to bed; then both of us go to the Admiral’s Bed and Angus tries to cuddle me and I push him away. I want to be left alone with my thoughts. He called her Weeble. I’m not sure what it means.

That night I have a dream: I am in the kitchen getting my hair cut and when I look in the mirror, I can see that all my hair has been cut off, and then I look down and see I am naked and people can see me through the dark windows; and I don’t know who these people are, and they stare, and then I feel a cold kiss on my lips and when I wake up I want to masturbate, my fingers between my thighs; it is four a.m.

But as I put my face to the pillow again I get an overpowering sense of remorse, and guilt, like there is dark silt in my mind, churned up by the dream. What did it mean? Is this the guilt from my affair? All those years ago? Or the guilt from not being there, not being a good mother: when my daughter fell?

Angus is snoring and dead to everything. The moon looms through the window, over the Sound of Sleat, over the dark green Scots pines of Camuscross, over the gathered white yachts with their rigging stripped for the winter.

That morning we don’t do anything; Lydia is obviously not going to school, her hands are still bandaged and her eyes are still clouded with unhappiness, and Angus seems content to stay at home, attending our daughter. The three of us drink tea and juice and then Lydia comes with me to the window and we look at a lonely seal on a rock out there on Salmadair, barking, sad, it looks crippled: like a creature with no limbs.

Then I hang some washing on the line – the day is cold but bright and windy. I gaze at the waters: Loch Alsh and Loch Hourn and Loch na Dal, all those rivers and estuaries, lit by slender dazzles of winter sun, as the clouds part and reform. The lochs seem so cold yet unruffled today.

Out on the water is a big blue boat, the
Atlantis
. I know this boat, I’ve seen it before. It’s one of the glass-bottomed tourist boats out of Kyle, showing the trippers what lies beneath the chilly waters: the swaying forests of kelp, dancing slowly, like enchanted courtiers; the deep dark weeds and sharks. Then the violet, pulsing jellyfish, trailing their melancholy tentacles.

They say some of these jellyfish are venomous with their stings. I’ve always thought that this doesn’t seem right. Somehow unjust. Cold northern waters with tropical dangers.

Pegging out the last shirts, and Lydia’s now bloodless frock and white socks, I glance once more at the boat, then go back in to the cottage.

Angus has Lydia on his lap and they are reading Charlie and Lola books, the way he used to read Charlie and Lola to the twins years ago. I look at them. She is surely too old for these books, she looks – suddenly – a bit too old to be on Daddy’s lap: I forget that she is growing up, despite all the horrors. Angus always liked to put Kirstie on his lap.

But perhaps all this regression is comforting. I glance down. The Charlie and Lola book on the floor is
I Will Not Ever Never Eat a Tomato
; the one they are reading is
Slightly Invisible
.

I remember
Slightly Invisible
. I think it is about Lola’s invisible and imaginary friend, Soren Lorensen. He appears in the books like a ghost, only half-drawn: icy and grey.

Kirstie always liked reading about Soren Lorensen, the imaginary friend of Lola.

And now I think again, obsessively, about the note on the bed. I have not forgotten it, this last week, despite the intervening scares. My little girl wrote that note. It had to be her. No one else could have written it, not unless Angus is trying to torment me. And even if he were trying to do that – and there seems no possible motivation for him – he surely couldn’t have faked that handwriting, not so precisely.

But Lydia’s and Kirstie’s handwriting was, of course, identical. Lydia could easily have done it. That’s just how she writes. Which means she really did it: she wrote it.

And what do I do about this? Grab Lydia and shake her until she confesses? Why should she suffer, when it is mostly our fault? We called Lydia Kirstie for a year, by mistake, because we made a tragic and stupid error, so inside herself Lydia must still be deeply confused as to where Kirstie has gone.

The remorse accumulates; I need to get out – from under its weight.

‘I’m going to take the dinghy,’ I say to Angus.

He shrugs. ‘OK.’

‘I just need a walk. Just need to get out of here for a bit.’

His smile is tepid. ‘Sure.’

The tension between us remains, it is weakened only by the horror of the last day; we are too exhausted to mistrust each other. But the growing mistrust will return.

‘I’ll pick up some shopping at Broadford.’

‘OK.’

He isn’t even looking at me now, just helping Lydia to turn the page with her bandaged hands.

The sight of this pains me, so I step outside, march to the boat, and motor myself to the Selkie pier. Then I walk to the Freedlands’ house, quickly step in the car, and drive the three or four miles across the Sleat peninsula to Tokavaig. I want to see the famous view of the Cuillins across Eisort.