The Ice Twins

by S. K. Tremayne

  Perhaps that is why he looked so angry when I told him Kirstie was Lydia: he knew I was getting closer.

  He turns to go to the dining room and I say: ‘Angus, I think …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well, I’ve been thinking, while you were shopping.’

  Can I mention my suspicions? No. I can’t just come out and say it, here, on a Sunday afternoon, in this cold kitchen, where we hoped to be happy, where there are Dairylea cheese triangles in the fridge for Lydia’s packed lunch, where the shelves are stacked with Crunchy Nut Cornflakes. I will have to say these terrible words sometime, I will have to say You Touched Her – but not yet, not now, not with Lydia still traumatized by everything; I want her to go to school tomorrow, Monday, she has to dive back in, or we will never rescue ourselves.

  ‘Yes?’ Angus is waiting, impatient. ‘What is it?’

  His jeans are dirty with motor oil. He looks properly unkempt, even dishevelled. Quite unlike himself. Maybe he is turning into his real self.

  ‘Angus, you know that things aren’t so good between us. I think maybe – just, you know, for Lydia’s sake, for all of us, maybe you could spend a couple of days on the mainland.’ I am still holding the knife behind my back, with one hand. He is staring at me as if he knows what I am doing and he does not give a fuck.

  ‘Fine,’ he says. ‘Fine with me. Just fine.’ And his dark eyes flash with darker contempt. ‘I’ll grab some work stuff and get a room at the Selkie. Costs nothing this time of year.’

  So that wasn’t hard. I hear the creak of the dining-room door as Angus shoves paperwork in a bag, then I hear noises from our bedroom. The wardrobe, his kist, footsteps. Is he really just going to come and go, so easily? It seems that way.

  Slipping the kitchen knife back into the cutlery drawer, I take deep breaths of relief.

  I am listening to the gulls, and the wind at the door; the fluttering of dried sea-wrack down on the beach. Ten minutes later – no more – Angus appears in the kitchen and says, ‘Please hug Lydia for me.’ His anger is gone now. He looks softer, he looks sadder, and a stupid pang of sympathy reflexes in me, sympathy for the man I once loved, sympathy for the father losing his daughters, until I remember what he has done.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I’ll do that.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he says, very quietly. ‘I’ll take the boat, but you can walk over at low tide and pick it up later? You guys will need the boat for school.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘OK then, Sarah.’

  ‘Bye, Angus,’ I say.

  He looks at me. Is that contempt, or guilt, or despair? Maybe it is just a shrug. ‘Bye.’

  And now he shakes his head again, very slowly, very soberly, as if this is the last time we will ever meet, and I watch him hoist his bag and kick open the kitchen door, and stride down to the dinghy, where he tugs the motor into life and oars the boat onto the waters. I watch him to make sure he really is going; but as he dwindles around the Salmadair headland, Lydia rushes into the kitchen, barefoot in her primrose yellow leggings, and tear-streaked, and saying:

  ‘Is that Daddy? Where is Daddy? Is he coming to say hello?’

  What can I say? Nothing. In the midst of my anger, I forget that Lydia still loves her father. Despite everything. So I take her in my embrace, hold her firm between my arms, and I lay one protective hand on her blonde hair and now we turn and we are both facing out, towards the door and the sea, mother and daughter, and I say:

  ‘Daddy had to do some work again.’

  Lydia revolves, and she looks right up at me, imploring, supplicant, her blue eyes large, and puzzled, and sad:

  ‘But he didn’t say hello?? He didn’t even come in and see me?’

  ‘Darling—’

  ‘He didn’t say goodbye?’

  ‘Sweetheart—’

  She is distraught now. ‘Didn’t say goodbye to me!’ Abruptly she twists and wrenches free and then she goes running through the open kitchen door, down the path, straight through the wet bracken and heather, right down to the lighthouse beach, and she is screaming: ‘Daddy? Daddy! Come back, come back!’

  But his boat is too far away, and he has his back to us, and the waves and the wind are drowning her words, her small childish voice, and he obviously cannot hear her as she screams, and sobs.

  ‘Daddy! Daddy, come back, come back, come back to me, Daddy!’

  And the ravens caw, and the seagulls soar, and I have sadness choking me so I try to stay calm: I watch a hooded crow watching Lydia from the stunted rowans by the lighthouse; the crows that swoop and bite the tongues from newborn lambs, so that they cannot suckle, so that they die in just a day.

  My little girl is still shrieking.

  And, oh, this is too much. I am scared she will run into the water and I run after her, sprinting down the path to the beach, and I take her by the hand, and I crouch beside her: ‘Darling, Daddy is busy, he will be back very soon.’

  ‘He came and went, he didn’t say hello or bye-bye, he doesn’t like me any more!’

  I cannot process another second of anguish. I am content to lie. ‘Of course he loves you. He is just so busy and he will be back very soon. Now come on, we’ve got to get you set for school tomorrow, come on, we can bake some cakes. Gingerbread men!’

  Bake things. That’s my solution. Baking cakes and biscuits. Gingerbread men. Bicarbonate of soda and those little silver sugar balls, and sugar and butter and ginger.

  So that’s what we do: we bake.

  But the gingerbread men come out all wrong. Like deformed things, like gingerbread animals, and I try to make some desperate fun from the misshapen men, but Lydia stares at them in dismay, on the hot wire tray, and she shakes her head and runs to her room.

  Nothing works. Nothing will ever work any more.

  I wonder about Lydia’s deep love for her father. If she witnessed the abuse, would she still love him that much? Truly? Maybe she didn’t see anything, and Kirstie just told her. Or maybe the abuse didn’t happen like that, or maybe it didn’t happen at all, and maybe I am presuming too much, too quickly? For a moment, the doubts open up – dizzying, like vertigo. Perhaps I am wrong? Perhaps I am reaching for a cliché: sex abuse, paedophilia, modern-day witchcraft – because I am blinded by anger, or grief?

  No. No. I have Lydia’s own words, and the evidence of my own memory, and the science from Samuels. More likely is this: I just don’t want to accept that I lived with and loved, for ten years, a man who was capable of touching his own daughter. Because what does this say about me?

  Stepping outside, I throw the gingerbread men on the compost heap and look across the reeking mud to Ornsay.

  Nothing.

  Later that day Lydia and I walk across the mudflats at low tide, scrunching dead crabs under our wellingtons, and we get the boat from the pier at the Selkie, and then we steer the boat home and read books. In the evening, with a bottle of wine beside me, I iron her school uniform as she sleeps; and I’ve got half the windows open despite the cold.

  Because I want piercing cold air to keep me sharp and logical. Am I doing the right thing in taking her back to Kylerdale?

  When we were still just about communicating, Angus almost persuaded me she shouldn’t go back. But the school secretary is adamant that things will be better; and, until we get a new placement, home schooling, I am sure, will only make her lonelier. She’d never leave the island.

  So Kylerdale must be given one last chance. But as I iron, I listen to the waves of Torran wash up and down the shingles, breathing in, breathing out, and I worry. The waves sound like the fevered breathing of a child in a sickroom.

  Finally I slide into bed and sleep. And I do not dream.

  The morning sky is grey as a goose. I chide Lydia into her school uniform, though all she wants to do is stay at home, and ask me where Daddy is.

  ‘He’ll be here soon.’

  ‘Really, Mummy?’

  I pull her school jumper over her head and lie. ‘Yes, darl
ing.’

  ‘Mummy, I don’t want to go to school.’

  ‘Come on.’

  ‘Because Emily will be there, and she hates me. They all hate me. She thinks there is something wrong with me, doesn’t she?’

  ‘No, she doesn’t. She just got a bit silly. Come on. Let’s put your shoes on. You can do that yourself today. You’ve had a week off, now it’s time to get back to school. It’ll be OK.’

  How many lies can you tell your daughter?

  ‘They all hate me, Mummy. They think that Kirstie is with me and she is dead, so I’m a ghost.’

  ‘Enough, darling, enough. Let’s not think about any of this, let’s get you to school, everyone will have forgotten.’

  But when we boat across, and climb in the car, and drive the few windy miles down the coast to Kylerdale, it is apparent everyone has not forgotten; the intensely embarrassed stare I get from the school secretary, climbing out of her Mazda, tells me this. And when we go to the cheery school door with its pictures of kids on their summer outing, and its bilingual list of Our Playground Rules – Riaghailtean Raon-Cluiche – the worst possible news is immediately confirmed. We are creating an atmosphere. And it is worse than ever.

  ‘I don’t want to go in, Mummy,’ says Lydia, in a tiny voice, turning her face towards my stomach.

  ‘Nonsense. You’ll be fine.’

  Other children are shoving past us.

  ‘Look, everyone is going to assembly, hurry up.’

  ‘They don’t want me here, Mummy.’

  She is so obviously correct: how can I lie? The sense of hostility is palpable. Whereas before the kids here mainly ignored her, now the other children look fearful. One boy is pointing at her and whispering, two blonde girls from Lydia’s class are backing away from Lydia, as I push her towards the corridor, and into a day where she must survive, without me.

  Closing my eyes, I steady my emotions, and walk through the cold to the car, trying not to think of Lydia, in that school, alone. If she suffers one more day of torment I will take her out, and we will give up. But I want to try one more time.

  I need to go to Broadford to work, to plan things: so I drive fast and hard, taking the icy curves like a local, not some pootling tourist. In that way, if in no other, I have acclimatized, and slotted right in.

  ‘Cappuccino, please.’

  It’s my normal rigmarole: double-shot capp and very good wifi, in the café diagonally opposite the Co-op, in the table that looks out the window at Scizzorz the hairdresser and Hillyard the fisherman’s shop that sells oilskins and spear-guns and buckets of bait, and lobster pots to local drug dealers, or so it is said. I’ve seen those boats on the Sound, collecting the lobster pots: allegedly cached with heroin and cocaine. I didn’t believe the rumours at first; but then I saw the fishermen driving BMWs in Uig and Fort William, and I wondered.

  Everything here is more malevolent, and sinister, than it first appears. Sometimes things aren’t remotely as you imagined, sometimes what you thought was reality does not exist at all.

  Mummy, am I invisible now?

  Opening my laptop, sipping my coffee, I send a brace of urgent won’t-wait emails, then I do some research on child protection and parental abuse. It is a depressing trudge: there are so many words I don’t want to see. Like police. An hour later, I make first contact with my solicitor – preparing for separation and divorce, for dislocation from Daddy.

  And then I feel a throbbing in my jeans pocket and take out my phone. I am swallowing the taste of anxiety.

  Six missed calls?

  And they are all from Kylerdale School. In the last twenty minutes. I had the phone set to mute; I hadn’t noticed the vibrations as I was so absorbed.

  Something sharp breaks inside me, and I get a keen sense of dread: I know that a terrible thing is happening to Lydia at Kylerdale. I have to save her. Slapping change on the table, I run out of the café and jump in the car and skid back down the Sleat peninsula.

  I’m driving so fast sheep scatter in damp grey fields as I accelerate past, slurring grit, skidding right, pulling up at Kylerdale School. It is playtime. I can hear the chanting.

  ‘Bogan, bogan, bogan, bogan.’ There are dozens of kids in the yard and they are pointing and chanting. But they are shouting at a wall, with a window. What is happening?

  I open the gate to the playground – which is forbidden at normal hours but this is so far from normal, so fucking far – and now I am pushing through all these kids – as they keep shrieking and chanting, and yelling at the window in the white-painted bricks: ‘Bogan! Bogan! Bogan!’

  There is a teacher out here, trying to calm the children, but the kids are panicked, hysterical, out of control, not listening to the teachers. But why are they screaming? What are they screaming at? I run over to the window and peer through the glazing, and there, in some kind of study, or an office, is Lydia, cowering in the corner.

  She is on her own in this room and she has her hands over her ears, trying to block out the noise of the mobbing children outside. And there are tears running down her face, she is doing that silent eerie sobbing, and I am slapping on the window, trying to signal to Lydia, I’m here I’m here, Mummy is here, but Lydia is not looking and still the kids are screaming ‘Bogan! Bogan!’ And then I sense a hand on my shoulder and I turn and it is Sally the school sec, who says, ‘We’ve been trying to call you, for an hour, we’ve been trying, we—’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘We don’t know, something in the classroom, it terrified the other children. I’m so sorry, we had to isolate Lydia. We put her in the stationery office, to protect her, till you got here.’

  ‘Isolate her? Protect her?!’ I am outraged. ‘Protect her from what? Is that what you call protecting her?? Locking her in a room on her own?’

  ‘Mrs Moorcroft—’

  ‘Shutting her in by herself? How fucking frightened do you think she is?’

  ‘But, but but – you don’t understand – the teacher was with her. She must have stepped out. Everyone is unnerved. We tried to reach your husband as well, but—’

  I am so angry, I am close to slapping this bitch. But I ignore her and I run into the school, shouting at some young man, Where is my daughter? Where is the stationery room? and he says nothing. His mouth opens and closes, and then he points and I follow his gesture. Pushing my way into an empty classroom, I trip over tiny plastic chairs and buckets of papier mâché, and then I’m out in another corridor and I see a door that says Stationery and Paipearachd Oifig and now I realize, with a flux of nausea, how much I loathe this Gaelic crap.

  The door is not locked, it opens when I turn the handle and there inside is Lydia: crouched in a corner, her hands still over her ears, her blonde hair sticking to her face from the dampness of her tears, and then Lydia looks up, and sees me and she drops her hands and yells, with sobbing relief, and terror, with a voice that rips through me like a knife, slicing me with guilt:

  ‘Mummmmmyyyy!’

  ‘What happened, baby, what happened?’

  ‘Mummy, they are all shouting, they chased me, they chased me in here, they put me in here, I was so scared so—’

  ‘It’s all right.’ I am hugging her smallness to my chest, tight as I can; trying to squeeze the terror out of her, hug the memories away. Smoothing the hair away from her pink face I kiss, once and twice, and kiss her again, and I say, ‘I’m taking you out of here, now, right this minute.’

  She looks at me: hopeful, yet disbelieving, and entirely desolate.

  ‘Come on.’ I tug her gently by the hand.

  And we open the door, and then we retrace my steps to the school gate. No one stops us, or even talks to us: everyone is silent, teachers are standing in doorways, watching, blushing, saying nothing. I open the last glass door to the fresh sea air, and now we have to run the gauntlet of the kids, locked behind the wire in the playground, by the path that leads to the car park.

  But the children aren’t screaming any more. Th
ey are silent. All of them. Observing our departure. Several rows of silent, wondering faces.

  Opening the car door, I strap Lydia into the child seat and we drive, in silence, the curving road to Ornsay. Lydia only speaks when we reach the boat and we are motoring back to Torran.

  ‘Will I have to go back to school tomorrow?’

  ‘No!’ I say. Shouting above the sound of the outboard motor, and the slap of the agitated waves. ‘You’re never going back. That’s it. We will find you another school.’

  Lydia nods, her face hooded by her anorak, then she turns and looks at the water and the approaching lighthouse. What is she thinking? What has she been through? Why were the kids shouting? We beach the boat and I drag it to safety and we go into the kitchen where I cook up tinned tomato soup and buttery bread cut into soldiers. Comforting food.

  Lydia and I sit in silence at the dining-room table in the bare grey dining room with the Scottish dancer painted on the wall. Something about this image chills me more than ever. Because it is coming back. I painted over half these figures: the dancer, the mermaid, yet they are re-emerging through my paint-layers. I didn’t use enough paint.

  The dancer looks at me, pale and inscrutable.

  Lydia barely eats any soup. She dunks her bread in: eats half a soldier. She leaves the other half on the table, leaking red soup like blood. And now she just stares at the soup and says, ‘Can I go to my room?’

  And I want to say yes. Let her sleep. Let her dream this day away. But I have to ask first: ‘The kids, in the school, what were they shouting? Bogan? What does it mean?’

  Lydia looks my way as if I am stupid. She has learned some Gaelic at school; I have learned nothing.

  ‘It means ghost,’ she says, quietly. ‘Can I go my room?’