The Ice Twins (28 page)

My dad has wandered out of the pub. Sad, and genial, and drunk, with a glass in hand.

I grab him. ‘Play with Lydia,’ I say fiercely. ‘Please. Look after her.’

He nods, vaguely, and half-smiles in a boozy way, but he obeys and bends to chuck his granddaughter under the chin. And I take my phone, and I walk down to the other end of the pier, where no one can hear.

First, I try Kellaway’s office number. No answer. Then I try his home number; no answer.

What next? For several moments I stand here, looking across the mudflats and the incoming tide: towards Torran. The light has shifted again: now the island is darkened and it is Knoydart that dazzles, in green and dark purple. Birch forests and emptiness.

Kellaway. I remember something he said. And where he stopped. And seemed hesitant. It was Samuels. The child psychiatrist Robert Samuels.

I need the internet for this. But where?

I’ll have to drive. Crossing the pub car park, I climb inside the family car. The keys are in the ignition; Angus often does this, just leaves the keys in place. No one locks doors or cars around here. They take positive pride in their crimelessness.

Extracting the keys, I weigh them in my hand. As if they are valuable foreign coins.
Samuels, Samuels, Samuels
. Then I put the keys back in the ignition, and turn – and I floor the pedal – and now I am driving away from my daughter’s funeral. I’m just going a mile, up the hill. To that place you can get a proper 3G signal. And internet access.

At the crest of the hill, I park. Like a local. And take out my smartphone again.

Now I enter the words in Google.

Robert Samuels. Child Psychologist.

Immediately his Wiki page flashes up. He works at Johns Hopkins. He is quite famous.

I scan his biography. The wind whispers in the firs and pines, like a faint chorus of disapproval.

Samuels is a busy man. He has loads of citations. I read the list:
The Psychology of Childhood Bereavement
,
Gesture Creation in Deaf Children
,
Risk Taking in Pre-pubertal Boys
,
Evidence of Paternal Abuse in Twins
.

My eyes rest on the words.

Paternal Abuse in Twins
.

I click on the link but it just gives me a one-line summary.
Elevated levels of paternal sexual abuse in identical twins: a meta-analysis and proposed explanations.

This is it. I am close. Nearly there. But I need to read the entire paper.

Breathing deeply, and calmly, I click two or three times until I find a copy of the paper. The site demands cash. I take out my card from my purse and type in my card-numbers, paying my money for the PDF.

And then I read it in twenty minutes: sitting here in my car, as the sun sets over the bald hills above Tokavaig.

It’s a dense, but short article. Samuels has, it seems, collated dozens of cases of sexual abuse by fathers of twins, especially twin daughters, ‘commonly the favoured twin’.

I read on, the phone trembling in my hand.

Signs of abuse include intensified rivalry between twins, ‘self-harming by the abused and/or her co-twin’, inexplicable expressions of guilt and shame, ‘an appearance of happiness which cannot be trusted’, ‘the non-abused twin can exhibit as much psychological harm and mental disturbance as the abused twin if they are exceptionally close and privy to each other’s secrets, as many twins are’; and then a final stab: ‘self-harm or even suicide is not unknown in the abused twin’.

It all feels so normal. Reading this. Sitting here. In a car. Parked on a bleak twilit hillside. Learning that my husband, it seems, sexually abused Kirstie. Or at least got
way
too close.

Why didn’t I see it? The special hugs: between Daddy and Kirstie, between Daddy and his little ‘Weeble’ – that stupid name, his icky term of endearment. And what about those times he would go into his daughter’s bedroom, at night – when Lydia was awake and reading with me – leaving him alone with Kirstie?

This is surely it. This is the pattern I have been searching for, the pattern hidden everywhere I looked. Angus was abusing Kirstie. That’s why she was frightened of him. She was always his special, special favourite. He liked her to sit on his knee whenever he could. I saw it. Hidden in plain sight. Lydia has confirmed it, Samuels predicted it.

He was abusing her. It confused her and scared her and in the end she jumped. It was suicide. And so much of Lydia’s subsequent bewilderment and distress must come from this.

Because Lydia knew. Maybe she witnessed some of the actual abuse? Maybe Kirstie told her, long before she jumped. That would have upset Lydia so much she might even have pretended to be Kirstie, to deal with the trauma. To somehow pretend her sister had not died because of what her father did: Lydia went into denial about everything. Maybe that’s why they were swapping identities that summer, trying to avoid Daddy?

The possibilities are endless and bewildering, but they all attain the same conclusion: my husband bears the guilt for the death of his daughter, and now he is tearing the other into pieces.

What do I do?

I could go up to the road to McLeods, the shop that sells stuff for deer stalkers: buy myself a big shotgun. Go to the Selkie. Kill my husband. Bang. The anger inside me is virulent.

Because, oh God, I need revenge. I do. I do. But my needs, right now, are irrelevant. I am not a murderer; I am a mother. And what matters is my daughter Lydia. For now, despite my fury, I just need a practical way out of here: a way for me and Lydia to escape this horror. So I have to stay calm, and be clever.

I stare out of the car window: a father is walking down the road with his toddler daughter. Maybe it’s a grandfather, he looks old. Rather stooped in a Barbour jacket and knotted red scarf. He is pointing at a huge herring gull swooping down, pecking, dangerous, a white flash in the air.

Evidence of paternal sexual abuse.

The anger rises inside me: like fire.

21

Slipping the rope, Angus jumped in the boat, with the weekend’s shopping from the Co-op.

The outboard motor kicked into life and Angus throttled up to speed: ploughing the waters. It was getting very dark already, and the weather was brewing something nasty to the north. There was a lick of cold rain in the air; the firs on Salmadair were bending in the sharpening wind. There were rumours of a real storm next week, perhaps this was the first hint.

The last thing they needed was a proper winter storm on Thunder Island. Yes, the funeral yesterday had gone OK, considering. Everyone had come and gone, the rituals had been completed.

But the dark, underlying cracks in the family were unresolved, the terrible confusion in Lydia, his contempt for Sarah, her mistrust of him because of Imogen.

He steered the boat, and frowned at the louring sky.

His guilt was intense. He may not have had sex with Imogen that night, but their flirtation
had
begun the night of the accident. The first unexpected touch, the different way they looked at each other: a lingering gaze. He’d known what she wanted, from that night on, and yes he’d encouraged it by staying, that night, much longer than planned.
Oh I can drive to Instow later
.

But it only got slightly serious after the accident. After Sarah fell apart. And in the end they’d only had sex a couple of times.
He had, at the last moment, drawn back from Imogen – out of loyalty, however misguided, to Sarah: to his family. So his guilt and responsibility, however painful, was nothing compared to hers: compared to Sarah’s.

The anger was urgent inside him. He tried to calm it. Sniffing the air. Cold and rainy. What would happen now?

Next week Lydia was meant to go back to school. How would that work? The Kylerdale teachers, perhaps regretting their hasty exclusion, had taken to calling the Moorcrofts, and imploring them:
Give us another chance
. Despite their pleas, Angus wanted to try a different school, or maybe home schooling; but Sarah was determined to have one last go, lest Lydia feel defeated.

But if she went back to Kylerdale – if she went to any school right now – Angus could envisage all kinds of terrors; they were obscene in their madness.

Perhaps, then, a proper winter storm would be fitting: a suitable backdrop to the intensifying strangeness. Because their lives had become melodrama. Or maybe some form of masked theatre. And all three of them were in disguise.

The waves lashed at the little dinghy. He was glad to make it to the shingly beach, under Torran lighthouse. He’d just finished dragging the boat out of the clutches of the highest tide, and dropping the shopping bags on the shingle, when Sarah’s voice rang across the darkness.

He could see her, running towards him, in the beam of his head torch. Even in the semi-dark it was clear she was alarmed.

‘Gus!’

‘What is it?’

‘Beany!’

He noticed Sarah was in a shirt, and soaking wet. The rain was getting heavier.

‘What the hell?’

‘He’s gone, Beany’s gone.’

‘How? Where?’

‘I was in the dining room, painting one of the walls, and Lydia came in and said she couldn’t find him, so we searched, everywhere, he’s gone, he’s really gone – but—’

‘I don’t understand – it’s an island?’

‘We can hear him, Angus.’

‘What?’

The lighthouse beam flicked on, for a second, making a moment of dazzling moonlight; Angus saw the pain on Sarah’s face. He realized what she meant.

‘He ran onto the flats? Christ.’

‘He’s stuck somewhere out there – we heard him howling about ten minutes ago.’ She gestured, wildly, at the greyness and the blackness that divided Torran from Ornsay. The great expanse of sand and rock, and those sucking, pungent, dangerous tidal mudflats.

‘Gus, we have to do something, but – but what? Lydia is going crazy. We can’t just let him drown in the mud, in the next tide.’

‘OK. OK.’ Angus put a calming hand on Sarah’s shoulder. And as he did, she flinched.
She definitely
flinched.
What did she think he was going to do? There was certainly a new expression in her eyes: she was trying to hide it. And the expression said
I hate you.
She was that angry about Imogen?

He thrust the thoughts away. Had no choice. He’d deal with this later.

‘I’ll get my waterproofs.’

It took Angus five minutes to force himself inside his waterproof trousers and oily rain-jacket. He tucked the plastic of his trouser legs inside big green wellingtons. Sarah and Lydia stared at him as he strode into the kitchen, a rope tied around his waist. He slipped his head torch on and adjusted the tightness. It was going to be fearsomely unpleasant out there. A thick Skye fog was rolling in, as well. Probably the worst possible conditions to go onto the mud.

‘Gus, please, be careful?’

‘’Course.’

He nodded at his wife. For some reassurance. Yet her anxious smile was, again, quite unconvincing.

Lydia ran and hugged him, making a crinkling noise as she embraced the plastic of his waterproofs. Angus gazed down at his only daughter. Felt a surge of love and protectiveness. Sarah said:

‘You know you don’t have to.’

But she tailed off. All three of them turned as one, and looked through the rain-speckled kitchen window at the darkness of the mudflats as a faint but unmistakable howl drifted on the wind. A dog. Howling. Loud enough they could hear it through the window pane.

His
dog.

‘Yes, I do,’ said Angus. ‘I have to try.’

‘Please save Beany, please, please! Daddy, please: he’ll be drowned if we don’t. Please!’

Lydia was hugging him again, tight around his waist. Her voice trembled with tearfulness.

‘Don’t worry, Lydia,’ Angus said. ‘I’ll get Beany back.’

He gave Sarah one final, bewildered glance. What was she playing at? How did this happen? Again, he didn’t have time to work it through. However it had happened, Beany was out there in the dark, and needed rescuing.

Angus stepped outside the kitchen into the rough slap of the rain. The wind was quite spiteful now. And yet the fog was also flooding down the Sound of Sleat, from Kylerhea.

Slipping on his plastic hood, Angus trudged against the flailing wetness, towards the causeway, following the beam of his head torch. This was proper, hard, Ornsay winter rain: the kind of rain that soaked you twice: once as it fell, then again as it bounced back, spitting, from the rocks and silt.

The mud. The damn mud.

‘Beano!’ he shouted, into the rain-bittered wind. ‘Beano! Beany! Beany!’

Nothing. The wind rappling his hood was so brutal it obscured any other noise. Angus tore off the hood of his waterproofs, he would just have to get wet; at least this way he could hear better. But where was the dog? Beany’s pitiful howling had seemed to come from the southern edge of Ornsay’s curving bay: the opposite side of the sullen mudflats.

But was it really a dog howling? Who was out here? What was out here? It was all so lightless. A dark brown spaniel would be very hard to see at night, in the mud, in good clear weather. This weather was the opposite. The fog was thickening along the shore, hiding everything. Obscuring the lights of Ornsay village. The Selkie was completely invisible, cocooned in freezing mist.