Positioning a chair, I prepare to tackle the second mural. The harlequin. But then I stop, paint-roller in hand. And I look up. The harlequin looks down. With its white sad face.
From nowhere, the realization pierces me.
The white room, the sad faces, staring down. The constant repetitive nightmare. And now her grandfather?
I’ve worked it out. I’ve worked out Kirstie’s dream. And everything has changed again; and I am frightened.
8
He gazed at his wife. At least they weren’t drinking wine out of jam jars any more. At least they had gone beyond that, into a world of actual wine glasses.
This was something, but not enough. He was sweating around Skye, trying to find work, all kinds of work, any work, building pig sties and loft extensions, building garden sheds if he had to, all his wife had to do was unpack the rest of the crockery, which seemed to have taken her about a month. Or at least six days. Yes, they’d been working hard on the house. Together. And working quite well – getting along better, despite it all. And yes, she’d had her commission in Glasgow, but what was that all about, truly? He didn’t quite believe it. Imogen seemed vague and evasive when he’d rung her, yesterday, from the Selkie, and asked her: what was his wife doing in Glasgow?
Straining not to drink his wine in one gulp, he listened to her talk about telepathy.
Telepathy?
Sarah gazed his way. Then she went on.
‘Gus, think about it: I mean – the dream. Kirstie is dreaming about Lydia. And she is dreaming about Lydia in hospital. Must be, right? So maybe she is imagining herself as Lydia, at that horrible moment: when she woke up for a second and saw us all – her family, the nurses, the doctors. Her grandfather was there, he was in that room. The white room in hospital.’
‘But, Sarah, I—’
‘But Kirstie has no idea that her sister Lydia woke up, that she was conscious for one final moment. No one has ever told her. So—’ His wife’s expression was now quite panicked ‘Gus. How else would she have known about the hospital? How?’
‘C’mon, Sarah. Calm down.’
‘No, seriously, think about it. Please?’
Angus shrugged and said nothing, trying to express, with the disdain in his expression, how much contempt he had for this idea.
‘Angus?’
Again he said nothing. Deliberately returning her silences, as a punishment. He felt a surge of anger, that she should try and ruin it all. Again. Just as they were beginning to settle in.
Setting down his glass, he gazed at the mad scribbles of rain on the dining-room window. How was he going to make this house waterproof? And windproof? As Josh had warned him: when the Skye winds and rains kicked in, Torran cottage was actually colder inside than out, thanks to some kind of refrigeration effect, from the intense dampness of so many years without proper heating.
‘Angus, talk to me.’
‘Why? When you’re blathering nonsense?’
He was trying to restrain himself: Sarah hated being shouted at, she’d fracture into tears if he really raised his voice. The legacy of her domineering father. But then she’d gone and married a brusque man, himself, not entirely unlike her father.
Her fault then? Or maybe it was no one’s fault: just the repeating patterns of families. Angus was no different, he was not immune to the tedious reiterations of genes and environment: right this minute, he wanted a proper drink. He wanted a big glass of proper whisky like his failed and sweary old man, who beat the wits out of Angus’s mother at least once a month. And then fell in the river and drowned. Good. There’s all the drink you’ll need, you old bastard.
‘What is this crap? Sarah?’
‘How else did our daughter learn about Lydia, in hospital?’
‘You don’t know that she is dreaming about this.’
‘A white room, with sad faces, staring down, and her grandfather is there? It has to be, Gus, what else could it be? The imagery is so so stark, it’s horrible. God.’
Was she on the verge of tears again? Something in Angus wanted her to cry: the way he had nearly cried, when Kirstie said what she said.
His wife had it easy.
Angus resisted the urge to terrify her with the truth. Instead he laid a big hand on his wife’s small white hand, her tiny, pretty, ineffectual hands that couldn’t tie a reef knot to fix the boat; yet these were the small white hands that he’d loved. Once. Could he ever love her properly again? Love her doubtlessly and purely, untroubled by resentment, or a desire for revenge?
‘Sarah, maybe your dad told her? You know what he’s like after a couple. Or your mum. My brother. Anyone could have said something about hospitals, and she overheard it, then imagined the rest. Think how horrible it must be. The concept. To a child. Hospital. Rooms. Death. It’d lodge in the memory. That’s why she’s dreaming of it.’
‘But I don’t believe anyone did tell her, or said anything she might have overheard. Only my family knew that Lydia woke up. And I asked them.’
‘You what?’
Silence.
‘You asked your mum and dad??’
Another pause.
‘Jesus Christ. Sarah? You’ve been ringing people up, telling them all this, all our private stuff? How is that going to help?’
His wife sipped from her wine, and shook her head, her lips thinned and whitened by suppressed tension.
Angus stared intently at the wine in his glass. Feeling a draining sense of futility: as if he were sitting in a bath and the water was glugging away down the plughole, making him colder, and heavier: transported to a nastier planet. They were shivering in this cottage; they were drowning in tasks and challenges, and maybe it was helpless.
No. He had to keep halfway positive. For Kirstie.
Tomorrow he’d try again. Maybe that architectural office in Portree, he’d take his portfolio in once more. They were close to offering him a part-time gig. They just needed one more nudge. Look, see, I used to design parts of skyscrapers, I think I can manage a sheepfold. Maybe he would beg. Help, I need a job, I need ten grand, because my daughter is living in a house that’s literally like a refrigerator.
‘Gus, there are lots of stories of twins having telepathy, some link – you know we used to talk about it and and … You know, they had the same dreams. Remember when they would start laughing, instantly, the same moment, and we had no idea what it was?’
Angus sat back and rubbed his eyes with a dusty hand. He listened to the house. Kirstie was in her room playing with the old iPad. He could just about hear the distant clicks and whistles of the computer game, dueting with the crinkle of rain on the dining-room window. His daughter was lost in a computer world, and he couldn’t blame her: it beat reality.
And the reality was: Angus did remember the times when Kirstie and Lydia would laugh simultaneously, for no reason. Of course he remembered: he would stare at them in astonishment when, from nowhere, the twins would both start giggling, in different chairs, at the same time, without apparently communicating. Sometimes this happened when they were in different rooms. He’d walk from one room to another and find them both in identical fits of giggles, with no identifiable cause.
He remembered so much. He remembered one time Lydia was reading Roald Dahl’s Big Friendly Giant in her bedroom, and he found that Kirstie was on the same page, downstairs. He remembered watching them once as they walked home from school, Kirstie walking in front, at a funeral pace, doing a kind of slow goose-step, and then he saw Lydia walking behind her, thirty yards behind, walking exactly the same way, as if they were both in a kind of trance. Why did they do that? To freak people out? Or was it because there really was some kind of mental link? Yet he didn’t and couldn’t believe that. He’d read the science: there was no such thing as twin telepathy. Just the ordinary miracle of identical genes.
He gazed at the smears of the rain. The harshness of outdoors beckoned, and appealed.
Something in him wanted to be out there in the wind and th
e cold, scrambling the cruel ridges of the Black Cuillins, getting battered by the winds up by the Old Man of Storr. But he was in here, waiting for his wife to talk. She was finishing her wine, the last of the bottle. Would they open another? He always relied on her to police his drinking. And yes he wanted another bottle, already, at five p.m.
‘Angus, please. Just think about it. Couldn’t there have been some kind of telepathy? What about those twins in Finland, who died at the same time, in a road crash. What was it—’
‘Ten miles apart. On the same night. Yep. And?’
‘Isn’t that amazing, doesn’t that prove something?’
‘No.’
‘But—’
‘Sarah, even if there was some mental link between them once, which I don’t believe, but even if there was – Lydia has been dead over a YEAR. And the dreams only started a few months back.’
The rain seemed to pause. His wife gazed at him.
He went on, ‘Even if you think twins can send each other dreams, from a distance, I really don’t think twins can contact each other through the ether – when one of them is DEAD. Do you?’
A silence ensued. He barked with laughter.
‘Unless you’re saying that Lydia is coming back, as a wee ghostie? A little phantom, floating about, talkin’ to her twin. Where is she now? In the wardrobe, holding her own head?’
It was a joke. He was making an attempt at humour.
But with a cringing dizziness, he realized that he’d touched on a truth. Sarah wasn’t laughing; or frowning; she was just staring at him, as the Hebridean rain returned, as the rain ate deeper and deeper into the cement and mortar of this stupid house.
‘Oh, fuck this! You believe in ghosts now, Sarah? Get-a-fucking-grip. Lydia is dead, Kirstie is a confused and unhappy little girl. That’s all. She just needs her parents to be sane.’
‘No. It’s not ghosts, it’s something else.’
‘What?’
‘I …’
‘What?’
‘It’s …’ She tailed off into silence.
He felt like screaming. What. The. Hell. Is. It? His anger was overtaking him. Barely keeping control, he said, as evenly as possible, ‘What is it, Sarah? What’s the big mystery?’
‘I – I don’t know. The dreams, though, what about the dreams?’
‘They’re just fucking DREAMS!’ He sank his head into his hands. Overdramatically. Yet sincerely.
For ten seconds neither of them spoke, then Sarah stood up, and took the empty wine bottle into the kitchen. Angus watched her as she went; the jeans were hanging off her hips. There was a time when they would have solved this tension by fucking. And he still wanted her; he still fancied her even when he resented her.
What would happen, if they went to bed? Their sex was always rough: Sarah liked it that way. It was one of the reasons he had fallen for her: her surprising, animalistic sexuality. Bite me, slap me, fuck me. Harder. But if he got rough with her now, and if his latent anger surfaced: where would it end?
Sarah came back from the kitchen. Not holding another wine bottle. His mood sank even further, if that was possible. Could he open one later without her looking at him? He had to stop drinking so much. Kirstie needed her dad relatively sober and sensible. Someone had to be on the watch.
But it was so hard: maintaining the lies. And this place wasn’t helping as he’d hoped. The cold, grey grisliness of November was ghastly enough, and this was just late autumn. What would real winter be like? Maybe the severity and brutality would help: they would have to pull together.
Or maybe it would end them.
She was hovering in the room, not sitting down.
‘Sarah, is there something you’re not telling me? You’ve been like this for a while – since Glasgow maybe. If not before. What’s happened?’
His wife regarded him and said, as ever,
‘It’s nothing.’
‘Sarah!’
‘I’m sorry I mentioned it. I have to get Kirstie’s clothes ready, I haven’t even unpacked them, they only arrived this morning and’ – he reached for her hand and held it, she went on – ‘she starts at the new school in a few days.’
He kissed her hand, not knowing what else to do. But Sarah pulled away with a silent, apologetic smile, and she turned and exited the dining room, through the unpainted door, scuffing in her three layers of socks on the cold stone floor. Angus watched her go. Sighing urgently.
Ghosts?
It was ridiculous. If only the problem was just ghosts.
Ghosts would be easy. Because ghosts didn’t exist.
Angus stood, and decided to busy himself with hard manual labour, to purge the sadness, and the anger. The endorphins might help his mood. They needed more wood chopped, and the light was fading.
Pacing through the kitchen he opened the battered door at the back, by the sinks and mops, that led to the lumber- room. Where the rats cavorted in ecstasy every night.
All kinds of crap was stored here, in this barnlike space: stacks of decrepit furniture, waiting to be sawed into kindling, the odd sack of coal, dating from maybe the Second World War. Pans and bottles were heaped in piles – like whole villages of refugees had stayed, then fled; there were heaps of plastic sacks and reels of blue nylon twine and pyramids of ancient porcelain flagons, most of them cracked. His grandmother had been a hoarder, a proper islander – a survivalist before her time, when it was necessary not fashionable, grabbing anything that drifted on to the beach. Hey, look, laddie, this could be useful. Keep that.
Selecting a few logs for chopping, Angus slipped on his plastic goggles, flexed his fingers into moist old gloves, and kick-started the electric saw.
For two hours he buzzed and sawed, in the dim thirty-watt light of the lumber-room bulb. The full moon rose over the rowans of Camuscross, as the clouds cleared. Beany nosed the door open and loped into the middle of the scattered, fragrant sawdust, and sat there, tail wagging slowly, and gazing at the puffs of yellow wood-dust spitting from the logs.
‘All right, boy. All right?’
The dog looked sad. He’d looked sad ever since they’d got here. Angus had expected him to like Torran, indeed relish it – an entire and beautiful island, with rabbits and seals and birds to chase, and messy muddy rock pools? – better than the littered, brick-and-concrete labyrinth of Camden. No?
Yet the dog was often morose, as now: his muzzle posed between his paws.
Angus set down the saw; he had three plastic tubs full of chopped logs. He stripped off the sweaty plastic goggles and tickled Sawney Bean behind the ear, with his thickly gloved fingers.
‘What is it, old pal? It’s just an island?’
The dog whimpered.
‘Kill some rats, Beano? There are lots of rats.’
Angus made a chomping motion with his mouth, then faked two paws with his fists. Trying to mimic a dog catching vermin.
‘Nom nom nom. Rats, Beano? Rats? You’re a bloody dog. Descended from centuries of ratters. No?’
Beany yawned, anxiously. And he laid his muzzle between his sphinxlike paws once again. Angus felt a flux of sympathy. He loved this dog. He’d spent endless happy hours walking woodlands around London, with Beany.
But this mood-switch was perplexing.
On reflection, Angus realized the dog had been acting very strangely ever since they’d arrived. Sometimes hiding in corners of the house, as if he was scared; at other times refusing to come in. And he acted differently around Sarah. He’d been acting differently around Kirstie and Sarah for a long time.
Could the dog have witnessed what really happened that night in Devon? Was Beany there, upstairs, when it happened? Could a dog remember or comprehend a human event like that?
Angus’s breath was misting in the damp raw air. The lumber-room was bitterly cold, now that he’d stopped fighting the logs with the saw. So cold that the windows were actually icing up.
Just like that day the twins were born: the coldest day of the year.
He stared at the thin crackles of rime.
And now the grief hit Angus, like a blow to the back of his knees: as it often did. Like a hard rugby tackle. Making him crumple, and lean to the dusty stacks of planks for support.
Lydia, his little Lydia. Lying there in hospital with the tubes in her mouth, opening her regretful eyes, once, to say goodbye. As if to say sorry.
Lydia, his Lydia. Little Lydia. His darling daughter.
He’d loved her too, loved her just as much as Sarah. Yet somehow his grief was deemed as lesser? Somehow the mother’s grief was seen as more important: she was the one allowed to crack up, she was the one given permission to cry, she was the one allowed to agonize for months about her favourite. OK, he’d lost his job, but he’d kept looking for more work through the agony and almost none of it was his fault. This was the enraging thing. She was far more to blame, infinitely more. He wanted to hurt his wife for what happened. Punish her. Hurt her badly.
Why not? His daughter was dead.
Angus plucked a hammer from a shelf. It was a claw hammer. Vicious and slightly rusted. Its fangs stained brown, as if there was already old blood on the steel. It was heavy, but it had a satisfying weight, just the right weight. It asked to be swung, hard, downwards, cracking something open. Finally. An explosion of redness. Like whacking a melon, soft pulp flying everywhere. Would the steel claws stick?
The rain had stopped and the sea was grey beyond the windows. Angus stared at the stained bare floorboards, despairing.
A low whimper brought him to proper consciousness. Beany was staring at him, head-tilted, and sad, and yet inquisitive. As if he could sense Angus’s absurd and terrible thoughts.
Angus looked to the dog. Calmed himself. And spoke:
‘Hey, Beany. Shall we go outside? Find a seal to chase?’
The dog barked softly and whisked his tail; Angus carefully replaced the steel claw hammer on the shelf.
The Ice Twins Page 10