The Ice Twins

by S. K. Tremayne

  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.

  ‘Beany? Where are you! Sawney Bean! Sawney!’

  Again, he heard nothing. The rain was near-horizontal: giving the wind a rasping edge, cutting coldly into his face. Angus strode forward – but he slipped on a kelp-slimed rock that came out of nowhere; the slip was serious – he fell to his knees, cracking a shin very painfully against the boulder.

  ‘Fuck.’ He put a hand in the gloop and lifted himself. ‘Beany! Beany! Where the fuck are you? Beannnnyyy!’

  Standing up, slowly, Angus bent himself into the driving cold rain. Lean into the wind. He took a deep breath of rain and air. He knew very well that in these conditions he was possibly risking his own life. What did Josh say? In Skye, in winter, no one can hear you scream. He could break a leg in this horrible, treacherous mud, get himself sucked in, and get himself stuck.

  Of course Sarah would telephone someone, but it might take them an hour to rustle up a posse, and the tides rose very fast around Torran. He wouldn’t drown in an hour, but he could freeze to death in the frigid, imprisoning water.

  ‘Beany!’

  Angus scanned the nothingness. Frantically wiping rain off his face.

  There?

  ‘Beany?’

  There!

  He heard it.

  A small, pitiful, unmistakable howl. Weakening, but definitely there. Judging by the noise, the dog was three hundred, four hundred yards away. Angus took out his hand torch and switched it on, his hands slippy and damp, and numbed with iciness, fiddling to press the plastic switch.

  That’s it. Angus lifted the hand torch. Combining its light with that of the head torch gave him a powerful beam of illumination. Directing it towards that spot, Angus stared, and stared, into the ghostly drifts of fog.

  Yes. It was Beany. He was just a dim shape, but he was alive. And the dog was in mud up to his neck.

  The dog was going to drown, very soon. Angus had at most a few minutes to reach the animal, before the waters engulfed him.

  ‘Jesus. Beany. Beany!’

  A pitiful whimper. A dying animal. What would this do to Lydia, if her Beany drowned? It would crack Angus open, too.

  Angus began to run, but it was impossible. Every step was either sucked into mud, or dangerously skiddy. He almost toppled forward on one wet, seaweed-skinned boulder, made extra slick by the relentless rain. One bad fall and he could split his skull on a rock. Knock himself out. That would probably be fatal.

  Perhaps he had made a mistake. Risking his own life this much. He thought of Sarah’s deceptive smile. She’d planned this? No. Ridiculous.

  He had to slow down, but if he slowed, Beany died.

  He could crawl faster?

  Dropping to his knees, Angus crawled. Through the mud. The rain was achingly cold, dribbling down his neck and shoulders, soaking through into his bones. He was shivering, feeling maybe the first hints of hypothermia, but he was nearly there. Fifty yards. Forty. Thirty.

  The dog was dying. Only Beany’s head was visible. Beany’s eyes shone with terror in the beam of the torch. But Angus was getting close. And there was a wooden platform here, perhaps some scuppered boat, half-buried in the slime for decades. It was hard to see in the dark, but the wood provided a bridge to the patch of cold mud where Beany was stranded.

  ‘OK, boy, OK, OK, I’m here, I’m coming. Hold on.’

  Angus crawled across the wood. He was five yards from the dog, he was working out a rescue plan: he’d have to reach into the mud and yank the hound, bodily, from the gunge.

  But then Beany moved. The incoming waters must have loosened the mud. The dog was half-swimming, half-struggling: rescuing himself. And he was wriggling away from Angus, up onto the shingle.

  Angus called, in desperation, ‘Beany!’

  He heard a crack of splitting wood. As Angus lifted a knee, to stand, the wood beneath him snapped, and opened up.

  At once Angus was plunged into a sump of cold seawater. Deep and silty, and very cold. There was no mud under here. He was flailing in freezing seas, in heavy boots and waterproofs. Desperate, he lunged for another spar of timber but it sank into gritty water. He was already up to his neck. Kicking at the void.

  Across the mudflats, Torran lighthouse flashed through dark. A pale glow of silver. Then black.

  22

  Where is Angus? Why is he taking so long? Is he drowning? I hope so. And yet I don’t. I do not know any more.

  I am standing at the kitchen window, gazing over the dreary flats towards Ornsay, but it is pointless. In this fog and darkness, I could be staring into space: a deep grey saddening void. Without stars.

  ‘Mummy, where is Daddy?’

  Lydia tugs at the sleeve of my cardigan. Innocent, gap-toothed, blue eyes unblinking; her tiny shoulders are trembling with worry. Much as I loathe Angus, she cannot lose her dad; not like this. Perhaps I should have restrained Angus? But he would always have tried to save his dog, no matter what the danger.

  The wind lashes the kitchen window with a whip of rain.

  This is taking too long. Once again I read the various shades of grey that constitute the fog, the densely veiled moon, the misty shoreline of Ornsay. Nothing. Every nine seconds the lighthouse bestows a paparazzi flash of silver, but it reveals just glistening emptiness.

  ‘Mummy! Where is Dada?’

  I hold Lydia’s hand. It is shaking.

  ‘Daddy will be fine. He’s just getting Beany; it’s dark, so it’s difficult.’

  I wish I believed this. I wish I understood all this. I wish I knew whether I wanted my husband to live or die.

  I’m not even sure how the dog got onto the mudflats: one minute he was in the dining room romping, as much as he does these days, with Lydia; I was in Lydia’s bedroom ironing – and then Lydia screamed and I ran into the dining room and the dog was gone and the back door in the kitchen creaked open in the Hebridean wind.

  ‘I want Daddy.’

  Perhaps Beany saw one of the kitchen rats, and gave chase? Or maybe Lydia chased the dog away? Frightened him into fleeing? Beany always seemed so scared of Torran, or of someone, or something, in the cottage on Torran.

  ‘Mummy, it’s Beany! I heard him!’

  Is she right? Was that a howling? Releasing her hand, I step to the kitchen door and pull it open. At once the ugly weather tries to push me back in, the angry rain, the bullying wind. Helpless, urgent, I shout, towards the mudflats, towards the dim shapes of anchored boats and sandbanks, and the ranked spires of dull fir trees. To where everything is smothered in mist.

  ‘Angus! Beany! Angus! Beany!’

  I may as well be shouting down a coal mine. Or in a locked and dripping cellar. The words are robbed from my mouth and whirled away on the gale.
Taken south to Ardnamurchan and the Summer Isles.

  Oh, the Summer Isles. The despair surges. Tragedy has chased us from London.

  ‘Dada is coming back, Mummy?’ says Lydia from the kitchen door. ‘He’s coming back. Like Lydia.’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course he is.’

  She is dressed in thin purple leggings and a little denim skirt, her Hello Kitty top is too thin. The cold will get at her. ‘Go back inside, Lyddie, please. Daddy will be fine, he’s just gone to get Beany. He will be back very soon, please, just go and read something, it won’t be long.’

  Lydia turns and runs into the dining room, I pursue her as far as the decrepit, paint-flecked Bakelite telephone on the dining-room window sill. The old receiver is ludicrously heavy and the dial ponderously slow. I grind out Josh and Molly’s number. But it doesn’t answer; their phone just rings and rings, perversely innocuous.

  I try Josh’s mobile. Again, nothing. ‘Hi, this is Josh Freedland. If you’re calling about work, try Strontian Stone—’

  I slam the phone down. Angry now, angry at everything. Who can help us?

  Gordon the boatman! Yes. Gordon. His number is in my mobile. Running into the bedroom, I snatch my barely used mobile from the cluttered drawer in the side table and wait – painfully – for it to switch on, and as I do Lydia wanders into the bedroom. From somewhere. She looks different. Her hair is wilder. She gazes at me, in that placid, trancelike way, as I shake my phone in frustration: Come on, come on, come the fuck on. She has Leopardy tucked under one arm. She eyes me dubiously, and says:

  ‘Mummy, maybe it doesn’t matter about Beany. Kirstie didn’t come back, maybe it doesn’t matter if Beany doesn’t come back.’

  ‘What, Lyddie, darling? I’m trying to get a number—’

  ‘Daddy comes back, doesn’t he? Please, Mummy. Lydia doesn’t mind. Kirstie is gone now, so it doesn’t matter what he did. Can we get him off of the mud?’