The Missing Twin

by Alex Day

  ‘I’ve let you down, though,’ she sobbed, when she could finally get the words out. ‘I did all that, I did what you said. But I couldn’t find Laura, I don’t know what has happened to her. It’s all my fault.’

  There was a long silence, punctuated only by her mother’s continued reassurances.

  Finally, when she was calmer, Sophia relinquished her head from where she had clasped it against her bosom and took hold of Edie’s hands in hers.

  ‘Listen to me carefully now.’ She paused to check that Edie was doing as instructed. ‘You’ve been so courageous and so clever … we all love you so much …’

  ‘Not courageous and clever enough to help Laura, though!’ she burst out.

  Sophia’s grip tightened around her fingers. Edie knew what was coming but could hardly believe it. She felt herself shrivel up inside, her spirit broken.

  ‘You haven’t found Laura, have you? Tell me the truth, please.’

  Out of the corner of her eye, Edie saw her father shift awkwardly from foot to foot. James coughed. He’d probably caught a cold on the plane; air travel was notorious for it. There was a long pause in which nobody spoke. And then her mother’s voice again, calm and low.

  ‘No, Edie, we haven’t found her.’

  Very, very slowly Sophia shut her eyes and then opened them again, taking a deep breath as she did so. She made sure that she had Edie’s full attention before continuing.

  ‘And we never will find her. She’s gone.’

  Fatima

  Ali came to take Fatima from the hospital when the doctors pronounced her better, the infection beaten. He paid for it all as well; it was obvious that she couldn’t. So many debts incurred now, so much to repay.

  ‘You can apply for asylum here,’ Ali told her.

  ‘But it’s not the European Union,’ Fatima replied, without thinking of what she was saying, and then was immediately overcome with remorse. How could she be so ungrateful? What did the EU matter? No one was dropping barrel bombs here, no political dissenters were being beheaded in the streets. Polio was well and truly eradicated with no sign of the return that it was making in her country and in the camps where so many had sought refuge, crammed together in conditions that made the world’s most feared diseases rub their hands with glee. She took a deep breath and tried to get a grip on herself.

  ‘It’s not the EU, no,’ agreed Ali, thoughtfully. ‘But it’s a nice place and anyway, it will be part of the club – eventually. We hope. It’s only a matter of time.’

  Time. She had lots of that, now. No house to keep, no husband to care for, no garden to tend, no work to do. No baby, with all a newborn’s needs and demands.

  ‘You can get in before the rush.’ Ali’s attempt at a joke was endearingly well meant.

  Fatima smiled. ‘Yes.’ And then she thought about the resort on which he had been working, the money he had given to his bosses for their passage and documents – all his savings from over ten years’ hard graft gone now, and more besides that he still owed them, and no European citizenship and no documents at the end of it all. She didn’t want them now anyway, didn’t want to be illegal, illegitimate. It would be much better to follow the due process of the law, to be somewhere properly.

  ‘But what will we live on? Where will we live?’ She presumed Ali’s job would be over now, now that the resort’s sordid underbelly had been revealed.

  ‘There’s nothing to worry about, Fatima.’ Ali’s smile was so wide and so proud that Fatima had to choke back tears. ‘Vuk and Vlad – the smugglers – don’t own the place. The actual owner is a foreign investor, he had no idea what was going on. He’s clean as clean so the resort can carry on. And so it will – with me as general manager! I get one of the big cabins, there’s plenty of room for you and the girls – you can have the bedroom and I’ll sleep on the sofa. Plus I’ll have a much bigger salary. Ivana – you don’t know her but you’ll meet her soon – she’ll be the finance and business manager … And you can work with me, earn your own money.’

  Fatima could hardly believe it. Surely after so much pain the solution could not be this easy. There had to be a problem somewhere.

  ‘What about Ehsan and Youssef?’ That was the problem.

  Ali shrugged. ‘They have the right to apply to stay, too. But I think they won’t. They want to make it to Germany.’

  Weariness overcame Fatima. She didn’t want to lose Youssef but she understood Ehsan’s desire to press on – which would also mean that she never had to lay eyes on him again if she didn’t want to. She considered whether she’d ever tell anyone about the rape, about the humiliation and horror he had meted out to her. Probably not. She would rather bury it with all the other nightmares. As for heading north – Ehsan had always been one to follow the herd. That herd had its nose turned towards northern Europe and Ehsan and Youssef would become part of their number. At least the danger had passed now; the worst of the journey was over. They would make it alive, for sure. For Ehsan, Fatima didn’t care. But for dear, sweet Youssef, she did. She said a silent prayer for him.

  She turned to Ali. ‘Let’s go.’ The girls were playing on Ali’s phone, absorbed in a game he’d found for them. ‘Marwa, Maryam, come on. We’re going home.’

  Edie

  Edie thought that, on hearing such news she would scream and shout and cry and wail, keen like you saw women from ancient tribes on educative TV programmes do. But she didn’t. Not at first anyway. But then it dawned on her, exactly what her mother was saying and the world collapsed around her.

  ‘So – so she’s … she’s …’ Edie faltered, unable to finish the sentence. And then anger filled her and she was screeching, ‘And you’ve all been making small talk and not telling me! Hiding it from me, lying to me.’ She threw herself onto the bed and buried her face in the pillow. The tears that streamed down her cheeks fell onto the sheets and were absorbed, leaving dark patches on their crisp whiteness. ‘She came here and we went out and then she got lost and now she’s gone and nobody ever seemed to take it seriously except me – but now look! And it’s all my fault.’

  Sophia fiddled distractedly with the corner of the sheet she was clutching. She had taken hold of it when Edie had snatched her hands away, seeming to need to grasp onto something.

  ‘Edie, listen. Laura didn’t come, she was never here.’

  Blah, blah blah. Edie stuck her fingers in her ears to avoid hearing but it didn’t work because she still could.

  Sophia paused, her eyes imploring, her grip on the sheet tightening.

  ‘There is no Laura, Edie,’ she said, slowly and firmly, her voice never wavering.

  Blah. Blah. Blah.

  ‘Laura doesn’t exist. You know that. You’ve always known it.’

  A deep silence descended on the hospital ward. Her mother’s voice broke through it once more.

  ‘There is no Laura.’

  EPILOGUE

  ‘How did the session go?’

  Edie shrugged and looked out of the window. It was October and Brighton gleamed in the golden glow of the muted autumn sunshine. A few trees had turned colour and even begun to shed their leaves but most still wore the mantle of summer. The U2 song in which Bono sings of the October trees being bare came to Edie’s mind. It wasn’t true, she realised for the first time now. Unless the seasons worked differently in Ireland. Perhaps they did. Or maybe it was the effects of climate change since the song was written. Who knew?

  ‘Edie?’ Her mother’s voice intruded on her thoughts once more. ‘I asked how the session went. Did you – was it useful? Do you think?’

  Sophia’s questions were so tentative, so beseeching.

  Come on, Edie, she muttered to herself under her breath. Remember, it’s the new Edie now. The mature, grown-up, responsible one.

  She flicked through her phone and alighted on the photos Fatima had sent her of her and the twins splashing in the sea, the sunlight sending bright flares shooting from the blue.

  She put the phone do
wn and took a deep breath.

  ‘I think it went well.’ She paused and looked around her, as if seeking inspiration from the mundane surroundings of the family kitchen, complete with the detritus of daily life; the heaps of mail piled on a corner of the table, the half-emptied bag of shopping on the counter. ‘It felt – I felt – that I’ve made some progress. That I’ve begun to understand why I feel the way I do and why I can believe something so strongly that I know isn’t true.’

  The last words came out in a rush, tumbling on top of each other like her piled up memories that were constantly threatening to cascade downwards and drown her. Except that she was finally beginning to understand that they weren’t memories at all, just the febrile imaginings of her damaged mind. This was what she was seeing the shrink to sort out.

  ‘That’s good, Edie. Really good.’

  Sophia’s relief, her desperation for it to be true was so evident in her voice, despite her obvious attempts to hide it, that Edie felt guilt subsume her as it so often had before. She knew how much it mattered to her mother that she should conquer her ‘illness’.

  Lost Twin Syndrome.

  Edie knew, had known all her life, that her twin sister had been stillborn, dying shortly before or during birth; the doctors had never been quite sure exactly when she had passed away. Edie had been introduced to the name of the condition known as Lost Twin Syndrome as a young teenager, when the symptoms had reached new heights – or should that be depths?

  The precise way in which she was affected varied over time, but the central point was always the absolute certainty that Laura was there beside her, only for her to disappear, for the illusion to implode so that Edie was left utterly bereft and alone again. She was locked into an endless cycle of constantly searching for a soulmate, for the person who should be Laura, then finding they weren’t Laura and having to begin all over again. The last time she had been really bad had been when she was at university. In the end she’d dropped out, unable to cope with the blackness, the desperate sense of loss that pervaded her soul, the constant feeling of something missing, of a part of herself that was incomplete, all of which symptoms manifested themselves in paranoia, psychosis and obsessions.

  She’d had some therapy and it had improved a bit but then, on a whim, she’d chucked it all in, packed her bags and headed for the sun. All her mother and father’s anguished pleading had not brought her back and in the end, urged on by James who told them they couldn’t put their lives on hold indefinitely because of Edie, they’d gone to the Andes for their trip of a lifetime. Edie, defiantly sticking it out, too proud to give in, had spiralled downwards. Her fixation on Vuk, so dangerous, so nearly deadly, had been part of it all.

  Edie sensed her mother passing behind her chair. Sophia knelt down beside her, as you do with little children so that you are on their level, and met her gaze.

  ‘I know how hard this is for you. I’ve spent all your life trying to make the fact that your twin died at birth OK, for you and for me.’

  Edie’s hands were clenched into fists on the table and Sophia placed her hands on top of them.

  ‘At the time, we were advised to tell you that you had been a twin, not to keep secrets. I’ve always wondered if that was the right thing to do.’

  Sophia’s beautiful eyes, creased at the corners with the beginnings of the signs of age, were damp with tears. Edie looked away. She wanted to shout out ‘NO’, to refuse to listen, to ignore anything that was said to her about Laura’s death. This is what she had done so many times in the past.

  But things were different now. The realisation came as a revelation. The experiences of the summer, that had culminated in the rescue of Fatima and her daughters, seemed to have brought Edie to her senses, forcing her to take responsibility for herself and her future in a way she never had before. And perhaps seeing little Marwa and Maryam, a real pair of identical twins, had enabled her to understand that that had never been her and Laura. Her childhood with Laura had only ever existed in her imagination – albeit more strongly, more convincingly, more compellingly than anything else she had experienced whilst growing up.

  Her mother had always blamed herself, for Laura’s stillbirth, which couldn’t possibly be her fault, and for not handling the issue properly, for not saying the right things to Edie when she was little and therefore leaving her susceptible to LTS and all its attendant problems – which may or may not be her fault. Perhaps the biggest thing that Edie had learnt that summer, or started to see clearly, was that it didn’t matter who was to blame; whose responsibility it was. The person who had to make the effort to sort it was herself.

  ‘It’s not your fault, Mum,’ replied Edie, her voice calm. ‘It’s not anyone’s fault, as far as I can see. It’s just something that has happened and needs dealing with.’

  She wiped her hand across her face. She hadn’t realised she had started to cry until she felt her nose running.

  Sophia passed her daughter a tissue.

  ‘Sometimes,’ she said, Edie’s hands once more held firmly between hers, ‘when you were tiny, I used to think I could hear another baby crying. I was so sure of it, I’d go and check the nursery. But of course there was no baby but you.’

  Sophia gave a long sniff. Her voice cracked as she continued.

  ‘I believed that I needed to find the other baby and feed it before I dealt with you. I don’t mean that baby was more important, just that I knew where you were and that you were fine and well-fed, but the other baby was hidden somewhere, needing me, but I wasn’t there for her.’

  ‘I think it’s you who needs the tissues,’ said Edie in as lighthearted a manner as possible, trying to lighten the atmosphere that had suddenly grown as heavy as lead. Sophia had never told her this before. Edie had always thought she was the only one who had suffered from Laura’s loss. How could she have been so self-absorbed, so selfish, as to not realise what her mother must have gone through, losing a baby?

  Edie thought of Fatima, who had so tragically had the same experience.

  The memories made her even more determined that she would beat this thing, whatever it was, this time. Some twins make it; little Marwa and Maryam, for example, so scrumptious, their cuteness quite unreasonably beguiling to Edie, who couldn’t stand children normally. Some twins don’t make it. The human mother is not really designed for multiple births. There are those who believe that the dead twin attaches its soul to the surviving twin. She would take Laura’s soul and join it with her own, and together, they would learn the cure, for good and all.

  It would take time. Lots of time. She had tried and failed to overcome so many times before. But now she knew that she had reserves she had never imagined. She had uncovered a people-smuggling ring, albeit unwittingly, and been instrumental in its downfall. She had swum the Adriatic Sea, she had climbed a mountain (it had felt like that, anyway), she had fallen into a flipping quarry – and she had survived. Surely she could deal with this? If she were ever to move on, she would have to.

  ‘The woman you saved …’ Sophia had a faraway look in her eye as she began to speak again. ‘Fatima …’

  Perhaps they were telepathic, because her mother was thinking of Fatima, too. Edie noticed how she called her a woman, whereas Edie always thought of herself as a girl. She needed to develop that maturity, she told herself. Bloody hell, twenty-three was old enough to have some gravitas about one, after all.

  ‘Poor Fatima. I lost Laura and she has lost her baby boy. I hope her grief is not too great for her to cope with.’

  Edie recalled Fatima’s seemingly indomitable strength. Yet Fatima had told her once, when they were in the hospital together, how she hadn’t used to be like that, how previously, in her former life, she had been utterly dependent on her husband. She had had to learn to be strong overnight, after their house was bombed and her life destroyed.

  Finally letting go of Laura felt to Edie like a task of similar magnitude but of course it wasn’t. Any fool could see that. And whether it
was or it wasn’t, Fatima’s fortitude and courage, her resilience, would be her inspiration.

  ‘I’m so sad her baby died.’

  It was all Edie could think of to say.

  Thinking of the little boy seemed to have set Sophia off on another course of memory.

  ‘When James came along, you used to tell him that he was your twin, and you used to want me to dress him in girls’ clothes so that he could be like you.’

  Edie contemplated this for a moment. ‘Poor bastard,’ she sighed, remembering the way she had tormented and smothered him. ‘No wonder he goes to all these far-flung places whenever he gets a chance. Desperate to be rid of me.’

  ‘Certainly not!’ Sophia sat up straight and, with one last, surreptitious sniff, regained her usual composure. ‘He loved you, he was besotted with you. I think he just always felt that he wasn’t good enough. That you’d never love him as much as he did you because he wasn’t Laura.’

  Edie prodded at the wooden table-top, trying to dislodge a crumb that had got caught in one of its ridges. ‘Oh dear,’ she replied, inadequately. It was hard to know what to say to undo all the injuries of the past. ‘I probably damaged him for life.’

  ‘No, Edie!’ Sophia’s mouth was a round O of horror. ‘I don’t think he suffered through it, he accepted it. He had so many friends of his own, and girlfriends – how many girlfriends! – he never wanted for adoration. I said that because I wanted you to know that he understands. We all do,’ she concluded, firmly. She cupped her hands around Edie’s cheeks and kissed her nose the way she used to when Edie was small. ‘We just want you to get better.’

  Edie nodded.

  ‘And when you are, remember that we promised Fatima we’d go and visit her, have a holiday on the resort. Or nearby, if that has too many bad memories,’ Sophia added hastily. ‘No working this time – just relaxing. You could practise your free-diving some more. Perfect your skills.’

  Sophia attempted a laugh and then faltered as if not sure whether Edie would find it a laughing matter.