Twin Truths

by Shelan Rodger

  I look down, unable to meet my own eyes any longer in the mirror, hating what I see, unable to process the ramifications of this new reality. Be gentle with yourself, Ignacio said. He wants me to take some time out here in Buenos Aires and go to see a psychotherapist he recommends (a woman). He has spoken to Ana and she has offered me the room with the soft white cushions. I can stay there for as long as I want. He has already worked it all out. He is handing me a male solution on a plate.

  Ana lost her sister and there was never a body. Jenny has no body either. I open the window to the stars and climb, weary, back into bed and switch off the light. I can see the glow of moonlight through the open window.

  Yes she does, a voice in my head corrects. She does have a body. It is your body. You and Jenny are one. I close my eyes and feel the imaginary waters of Greece against my skin and I drift backwards in time, through the Greek seas and back into the childhood holiday seas of Mexico.

  I love swimming. It empties me. There was a time we would swim further and further out, daring each other on, until the shore looked like the sky and white foam meant the end of the reef was only yards away. We knew not to go beyond the white line. We knew that the water beyond the reef would no longer protect us and sharks watched, but sheltered by the reef we were fearless.

  One of us. I sink finally into sleep again, but I wake up at first light with a vicious sense of purpose. My brain has been working in my sleep. The photo Jenny gave me. I have it with me. Evidence. I delve into the bottom of my bag and take out the precious velvet pouch I carry everywhere. It is a long time since I have looked at the photo. I’m not sure why. I have a vague sense of it causing pain and of a lack of clarity over when it was taken. I take out the thin leather case inside the velvet pouch with slow, solemn triumph. In my mind I am already showing the image to Ignacio, already proving that he is wrong.

  But what I see makes no sense. The photo is there and I am in it, and I look fresh and barely eighteen. My hair is windswept and half covers my face. My eyes look straight past the camera as if I am not aware of the picture being taken, but the photo is torn in half. I try and try but I cannot remember tearing it. Who tore it in half? Where is the other half? Jenny, where are you?

  Time stretches and slows, stretches and slows, and in the elasticity of another endless moment, my body makes a decision.

  I follow it, silently. It stops at Ignacio’s door and knocks gently. When there is no response, it tries the handle and the door opens. The blinds are down, but not closed, and light filters through the criss-cross gaps. The effect adds to the surreal dreaminess of my movements. I walk over to the bed and sit on the edge and look at Ignacio, still asleep. I can see the little boy underneath the lines on his face. I want to lie down next to him and put my face against his and feel his cheek against mine and disappear in a grave of white cushions forever.

  He shifts then and his eyes open and he sees me slowly. There is a moment of contortion on his face and I see that his own twin identities are battling: the professional who has diagnosed the woman he should not have gone near and the man who wants her, the man who is still recovering from his own failed marriage. I look deep into the dilated green of his eyes and I think that we live in a world that is nonsensical. We kill each other in the name of our gods. We destroy the environment that sustains us. We torture people for belonging to the wrong club. Relationships fall off the end of a cliff for no reason. Children are sexually abused and mothers deny it. Fathers are like fathers without being fathers. A man with bad eyes triggers a darkness inside the eight-year-old flesh of a little girl and the darkness becomes a woman who kills her unborn baby.

  I remove my nightshirt slowly, still holding Ignacio’s eyes, and as I climb into his embrace a rat scuttles out of view beneath the bed.

  Epilogue

  My dear Pippa,

  Thank you for coming to see me. It meant a great deal to me. I hope you forgive me for not telling you about the cancer. I didn’t want you to come out of guilt or duty. I wanted you to come because you wanted to, and that was why it meant so very much that you came of your own accord. I hope you understand.

  I am not unhappy. My life has not been easy, but I have found a kind of peace, for which I am grateful. My days are numbered, though, and there is no point pretending otherwise, but there is something I need to say to you, my daughter, which I did not have the strength to tell you when we met. I do feel I owe this to you, though, and I have lied to myself so much over the years that I cannot bear to keep anything from you now.

  There was something in that postcard you sent me, when you got in contact again. Something uncanny that has quietly haunted me. You said that you had found ‘our father’. I couldn’t bring myself to ask about that pronoun. I thought I was getting carried away and I was too happy to have you back in my life, but, well, here it is, my sweet – you were born with a twin sister. She had a hole in her heart and she died when you were four months old. I never had any pictures of her. Could it be that your subconscious retains some kind of memory of her, something that slipped out in the pronoun on your postcard without you realising it?

  I’m sorry I never told you before, Pippa, and thank you again for making the trip all the way from Argentina to see me. It means the world to me, and I wish you real happiness. I must stop writing now, I am exhausted.

  With love forever,

  Mother

  SPOILER ALTERT

  The Inspiration Behind Twin Truths

  I love twists. Although we tend to associate these with fiction, real lives are full of them, surprisingly so if we stop to take stock. But in a novel they can create a sense of poetry that’s often absent in the day to day of real life’s continuum. As a reader and a writer I love the potential impact of the twist; the power to shock, to reveal, to make sense of chaos – or turn order upside down.

  The inspiration for Twin Truths grew out of two things: the conviction that there is never only one reality, and a life-long fascination with the meaning of personal identity.

  I was born in Africa and grew up in an aboriginal community in Australia, before moving to the UK and then Argentina, where I lived for nine years. I think this made me very aware of how different perspectives can shape people’s subjective sense of reality, at both a cultural and individual level.

  If you and I experience the same event, it will be completely different for both of us. There are many factors at play here: circumstantial, hormonal, genetic, cultural, or whatever else intervenes to define our personal perspective. But of course, it doesn’t stop there. The reality of that experience grows and changes with time for each of us, a subtle metamorphosis we’re rarely aware of, as the memory becomes a story and that particular story interacts with other stories . . .

  And the biggest story of all may actually be the notion of identity. There is a lot of philosophical debate about what personal identity really is. We live in an era which embraces the idea that our individual identity resides somewhere within us, as if it is something almost static, waiting to be discovered. We are encouraged to be ‘authentic’, ‘true to ourselves’, and, once we have discovered ‘who we really are’, to use this as a barometer for the biggest decisions in our lives.

  And yet, this ‘I’ we believe in is a tricky beast. It can mutate and have many different facets or phases in its lifetime. It can change according to whose company it’s in, it can be transformed by drink or drugs or medicine, or be thrown totally off course by an unexpected twist in life’s journey. Scientific research indicates that, given the ‘right’ circumstances, we are all capable of torture.

  So this tricky little beast is perhaps easier to live with if we tame it and name it. This ‘I’ may well be the ultimate habit, comforting in the extreme, the story we unknowingly create to make it possible for us to negotiate the world and our relationships.

  But what happens if something bad is thrown suddenly into the cage we have built for this tricky little beast? Trauma can break a habit or create
a new one. And this is what led to the drama at the heart of Twin Truths. Sexual abuse in childhood is horribly more common than we’d like to think, and it can wreak havoc with a person’s psyche. As I researched the impact of sexual abuse, I learnt that it could lead to a psychological syndrome called Dissociative Identity Disorder (previously known as Multiple Personality Disorder). I never intended the book to be anything more than a very loose and subtle exploration of the kind of things that could happen as a result: the way different identities can take over, as if one ‘I’ flees and takes refuge in another, the way bouts of amnesia can interact with reality, the ability to unknowingly create a different reality to massage one that is too painful to live with.

  In a way, I see Dissociative Identity Disorder as an extension of something we are all susceptible to in one form or another, depending on what life throws at us. We take refuge, we block things out, we project an image to the world or ourselves, we create small worlds in our mind and then believe in them and make them bigger. Mild identity shifts are a facet of everyday existence, just as mild madness can be, without ever needing diagnosis.

  During the nine years I lived in Buenos Aires, not long after the atrocities of Argentina’s ‘dirty war’, I witnessed a kind of collective amnesia about the 30,000 ‘disappeared’, a gentle collusion almost everywhere to forget and move on, an implicit denial of what had been seen and known during the dark years of dictatorship. Almost an expression – en masse – of Dissociative Identity Disorder, in the face of a reality too horrific to counter. The tragic story of Ana, whose sister was one of the disappeared, creates a poignant parallel for Jenny in Twin Truths.

  Then there is the intrigue of twins. Both my brother and sister have twins, and my grandmother lost a twin brother she took years to tell the family about. Twins are perfect for an exploration of identity: the way nature versus nurture plays itself out in the case of two individuals who have shared the same womb, the strength of the bond and understanding between them, the way they grow up with labels that separate or unite them by turns. By creating Jenny/Pippa as twins I was able to explore not just their differences and similarities, but the power of the relationship between them and the impact of loss when one of them disappears.

  Life’s road is full of unexpected turns. Some are exciting, some are appalling. These can change us completely or ground us even more firmly in the essence of the ‘I’ that we believe in, but they always cause some kind of evolution in our being, always create consequences in our own personal story. In Twin Truths, what I wanted to achieve was an ending that was as much a twist for the protagonist as for the reader. A twist that exposes the elasticity of reality, creating a whole new version of someone’s personal history and sense of self. Twin Truths – two truths; the truth the protagonist has lived and the retrospective truth that is discovered. In the end, which one is more ‘real’?

  Acknowledgements

  To everyone who has been part of the journey of Twin Truths, my heart says thank you. My agent, Broo Doherty, for all she has done, for never giving up, and for becoming a friend. Lisa Hughes for her inspiring editorial input. Paul Swallow for the crucial part he played in the birth of Twin Truths at Cutting Edge Press; and Martin, Saffeya, Sean and the rest of the team there. David, Broo, Rebecca and Emily at The Dome Press for giving the book a second life and publishing this new edition. Jem for the lovely new cover; Aidan, Amanda, Elizabeth, Anne, Jackie, Nellie, Leah, Liz, Jo, Book Geek, BC, Mahima, A. Rhodes and indeed anyone else who has quoted or reviewed and given space to the book on their blogs. The friends and family who were brave enough to read and talk to me about the early drafts: Mum, Tammy, Deeks, Es, Sarah, Meena, Nic, Nicola, Andy, Nella, James, Celia and her daughter Sarah, Don, Tom, Delphine, Maria del Mar, Fiona, Aviva, the three Amandas in my life, Laura, Belinda, Sophie, Tania, Nichola, and Simon. Aidan Hartley, for his amazing encouragement and feedback, which inspired me to rewrite Part Three. Nella, also, for being my writing buddy and sharing some of the happiest writing memories I think I’ll ever have. Andy and Nicola, also, for harbouring a tormented spirit at a time of need for both the person and the book. My brother for loving me enough not to feel he had to read a book that wasn’t science fiction, and my sister for being, if not actually a twin, as close as one. The real twins in my life, Scott, Alex, Rosie and Reuben, who were born after my paper twins were first conceived, and their siblings Jamie, Ella and Indi. My mum for reading every version and supporting me as only a mother can. My dad for giving me the drive to suspend judgment and get it out – and for his blood, which lives on in me and without which I couldn’t have done it. Bull for always being there and always believing.

  Published by The Dome Press, 2018

  Copyright © 2015 Shelan Rodger

  The moral right of Shelan Rodger to be recognised as the author

  of this work has been asserted in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organisations and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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