The Ice Twins

by S. K. Tremayne

  ‘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 t
o 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.

  The wind is steely and chilling, trying to push the car door closed; I zip my North Face jacket to my chin and stuff my fists in my pockets, and walk the beaches, gazing. And thinking.

  The light here fascinates me even more than the light around Torran. It’s not quite as beautiful as Torran, but it shifts with even more tantalizing swiftness, veils of rain and cloud conceal the mountain peaks, shyly, then you see bright spears of sunlight, lancing, and slanted, and golden.

  They look so judgemental, the Black Cuillins. Like a row of inquisitors in black hoods. Their shark-toothed peaks rip at the heavy passing clouds, gutting them of rain. Yet still the clouds build and fall, in their endless and anguished turmoil, apparently without pattern.

  But there is a pattern here. And if I stare long enough at the Black Cuillins across the waters of Eisort, I will understand it.

  Angus loved Kirstie. But something that he did frightened her. He loved her. But she was frightened of him?

  The pattern. The pattern. I can find the pattern if I think hard enough; then I will understand everything.

  We still haven’t found a church for Kirstie’s funeral.

  14

  The days mingle into each other: like the clouds over Sgurr Alasdair. Angus goes to work two or three days a week; I try and find freelance business. I get emails from London therapists, following up my grief from Kirstie’s death. It seems trivial, and outdated, and irrelevant. All of it. Compared to what is happening to our daughter, right now.

  She has to go back to school or we will never succeed on Torran; but she is clearly reluctant. Her bandaged hands are an excuse for her to stay home, but when the bandages are ceremonially removed, one evening, I decide, with Angus’s concurrence: she has to try again at Kylerdale.

  Next morning we take the boat, as a family, across the water to the Selkie. Lydia looks miserable and apprehensive, lost in her oversized school uniform with the stupid shoes. Her shy face peering out from the pink hood of her anorak.

  Angus kisses me on the cheek and gets in Josh’s car – he’s getting a lift to Portree. I envy him this: he has a job and he seems to be enjoying it. At least he gets off the island, out of Sleat, and meets people.

  Pensive and brooding, I drive Lydia to Kylerdale Primary. The morning is mild, with a spit of rain, all the kids are leaping up the path, scampering out of cars, heading for their classes, throwing off their coats and joshing each other. All except my daughter, who approaches the school gates with tiny steps. Will I be forced to carry her?

  ‘Come on, Lydia.’

  ‘Don’t want to.’

  ‘It will be much better today. The first weeks are always the worst.’

  ‘What if no one plays with me again?’

  I ignore my sympathetic pain.

  ‘They will, darling, just give them a chance. There are lots of new kids here, just like you.’

  ‘Want Kirstie.’

  ‘Well, Kirstie isn’t here any more. You can play with the other girls and boys. Come on.’

  ‘Daddy likes Kirstie, he wants her back too.’

  What is this? I hurry on. ‘Here we go. Let’s take off your coat, you don’t need it now.’

  Escorting her inside the glazed door, I share a silent glance with Sally Ferguson. She gazes down at my daughter.

  ‘Hello, Lydia. Are you feeling better now?’

  No response. I put a hand on Lydia’s shoulder. ‘Lydia, say hello.’

  Still no response.

  ‘Lydia?’

  My daughter manages a bashful, reluctant, ‘Hello.’

  I look at Sally and she looks at me and she says, rather too breezily:

  ‘I am sure everything will be fine today. Miss Rowlandson is telling stories about pirates.’

  ‘Pirates! Lydia, listen, you love pirates—’

  I gently push my daughter in the back, propelling her towards the corridor, and slowly – very slowly – she walks, looking at the floor, a portrait of introversion. Then she disappears into the school corridor. Engulfed.

  When she is gone Sally Ferguson reassures me.

  ‘We’ve told all the kids that Lydia lost a sister, and can be a little confused; they won’t be allowed to tease her.’

  I am meant to be soothed; but I’m not convinced that this is better. Now my daughter is indelibly marked out as odd: as the girl who lost a twin. The haunted sister. Perhaps the other kids have heard about the incident at the Freedlands’. Oh yeah, that’s the crazy girl who smashed the window because she saw a ghost. Look at the scars on her hands.

  ‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘I’ll be back at three-fifteen to pick her up.’

  And I am. By ten minutes past three I am waiting anxiously at the school gates with other mums, and a couple of dads, who I do not know: I painfully wish I did know these people because then I could casually chat, and then Lydia would see me interacting and, by example, it might help her to interact with her peers. But I am too shy to strike up conversations with these strangers: these confident parents with their big 4x4s and their banter; it strikes me once more how much of this is my fault – I have handed on my crippling shyness to Lydia.

  Kirstie would probably have been fine here. Certainly better at interacting. She would have bounced around, singing her songs, making other kids laugh. Not Lydia.

  The children rush out of the door at the allotted time, little boys run into their mothers’ arms, girls walk out hand in hand, slowly everyone appears, and is embraced, and slowly the parents and kids disperse; until I am the last parent left in the playground, in the cloaking winter darkness, and then my daughter emerges, unhappy in the doorway, and a young blonde teacher, I presume Miss Rowlandson, shepherds her towards me.

  ‘Lydia!’ I say. ‘Did you have a good time? Was it nice today? How were the pirates?’

  I want to ask her: Did anyone play with you? Did you pretend Kirstie was alive?

  Lydia takes my arm and I look at the young teacher and she weakly smiles, and blatantly blushes – and returns to her classroom.

  In the car, and in the boat, Lydia will not talk. She is mute. She says a quiet thank you to food, but she says nothing else and goes to her room and reads. Then she walks down to the beach in the moonlight and stares at the shining rock pools, which capture the reflection of the silvery moon. I watch her from the kitchen. My daughter. Lydia Moorcroft. A solitary little girl, on an island, in the dark. Quintessentially alone.

  And so the days go on, similarly cloudy, mild and
damp. We plan the funeral: Angus agrees to do most of the phoning and paperwork, as he gets off the island more than me. I can sense his reluctance. I take Lydia to school every day, and she is silent; I pick her up from school every day, and she is silent. She is always the last to leave the classroom.

  On the fourth morning I get to school early: I am going to try something different. With a choke of guilt, I push Lydia into a crowd of girls, from her year and her class, gathered at the school gate – and then I pretend to take a call on my mobile.

  Lydia has no choice: she has to interact, or she will be standing there, quite painfully isolated.

  I watch, pretending to converse on the phone. Lydia looks as if she is trying to talk – to join this group of her peers. But they are ignoring her. She looks desperately back, at me, for support, or consolation, but I act distracted, as if I am engrossed in my phone call. Then I stand nearer, eavesdropping.

  My hopes rise. It seems as if Lydia is going to do it: my daughter is going to talk to a schoolmate, to communicate; she is shyly approaching a brunette girl: a slender, apparently confident child, chattering with her friends.

  I listen as Lydia says in a nervous voice: ‘Grace, can I tell you about my leopard?’

  The girl – Grace – turns to Lydia. She gives my daughter a tiny appraising glance, then she shrugs, and doesn’t even reply. Instead she looks away and talks to her other friends; and then the entire group of girls goes happily wandering off, leaving Lydia there, staring at her shoes. Rebuffed. And shunned.

  Unbearable. I am wiping away barely hidden tears as I take her into the school building, as I walk to my car and start the engine. I hope the tears will go away, but they don’t, they last all the way to Broadford, where I do my wifi work and answer my emails. And by noon the urge is irresistible.