I descended the stairs carefully. It smells spicy with a hint of incense downstairs. It’s not unpleasant and it goes with the decor which is all rich, earthy colours. There are hangings and paintings on the walls: Indian embroideries and dramatic stormy landscapes.
Every surface is covered with stuff. Stones are piled on shelves like pebbles on a beach after a storm. Of course every stone holds a special significance: a day out at the coast or an afternoon spent paddling in the river. There’s a jam jar stuffed with feathers. Lily went through a phase of thinking that each time she found a feather on the ground it meant that an angel had been watching over her. There’s a beautiful Victorian teacup with a penis-shaped cactus planted in it. Mum found them both at a car boot sale one Sunday morning. She said she’d love to have seen the faces of the Victorian ladies if they’d seen the phallic cactus sticking up out of their fine china.
It’s like stepping back into the past because the whole house used to be like this, full of colour and throbbing with life. Not that it’s exactly throbbing with life down here any more.
It was very quiet. I knew immediately that Lily wasn’t here; it must be a twin thing. I don’t know where she goes when she’s not here and I’m not going to ask her.
I wondered if Mum was asleep. I was about to sneak into my room so I could carry on with my journal when I heard Mum call out.
‘Lily?’
She was in the sitting room so I made my way in cautiously. She was curled up in the armchair wrapped in a blanket.
‘It’s me, Mum. Milly.’
Her eyes were unfocused. ‘Oh, Milly. Yes, of course . . . sorry, I’ve just woken up.’ She made an effort to smile. I noticed the bottle of pills on the side table, and surreptitiously checked to see that it wasn’t emptier than it should be.
‘You’re only supposed to take these at night, Mum,’ I said, picking up the bottle to get a closer look. It was okay, there was still over half left. ‘I’ll make you a cup of tea.’
‘Milly?’
‘Yes?’ I stopped in the doorway, not wanting to face the mess in the kitchen but not wanting to talk to Mum either. She stared at me blankly. Whatever it was she had been going to say had fallen off the edge of her brain. I could see her trying to catch it on its way down – but it was gone.
‘Thanks,’ she said instead.
‘That’s okay, Mum. I won’t be long.’ I thought about asking her if she wanted something to eat but I didn’t want to prolong the conversation. Besides, she’d only say no. I decided to make her a sandwich anyhow and hoped she would eat it.
While I was waiting for the kettle to boil I made a start on the washing up. Every time someone walked along the street I looked up, expecting the squeak from the gate followed by Lily’s legs coming down the basement steps.
When I’d finished clearing up, I made Mum’s tea and threw together a hummus and lettuce sandwich. I wasn’t very hungry but I made a peanut butter and lettuce sandwich for myself. Mum’s always been vegetarian so at home Lily and I are too, by default. If we eat out anywhere, Lily makes a point of ordering meat and if we do the shopping she always sneaks some bacon into the trolley and then stinks the flat out by cooking it until it’s crispy. It’s pretty gross really.
I was about to leave the kitchen, clutching Mum’s sandwich in one hand and her tea in the other, when I heard the gate squeak and the sound of footsteps coming down the stone steps.
Lily.
I put Mum’s supper down and opened the door. It was Carmel.
‘Hi, can I come in? I’ve got some good news.’
Reluctantly I let her in. I hoped I could keep Mum out of this. I didn’t want Carmel to see her in a state. Carmel spotted the supper.
‘Sorry if it’s a bad time.’
I pulled out one of the chairs at the table, hoping Carmel would take the hint and we wouldn’t have to go into the sitting room. But Mum must have heard the door.
‘Lily?’
Oh God. Carmel looked at me enquiringly.
‘Mum’s just woken up; she’s not too good today,’ I explained. ‘I’ll just take her this sandwich, then I’ll make you a cup of tea.’
‘Okay, but she’ll need to sign a few things,’ said Carmel, putting her briefcase on one of the spare chairs.
When I got back from explaining to Mum that the social worker was here but she needn’t worry about it, Carmel was making her own cup of tea. She indicated my peanut butter sandwich, ‘Don’t mind me, carry on,’ she said, so I sat down and started on my sandwich.
‘Right, the good news is, I’ve pulled some strings and managed to find you a new school.’ She rooted around in her briefcase and came out with a folder. She didn’t go on about how difficult it had been, with it still being the summer holiday and everything, but I sort of got the idea. To be honest I wasn’t listening too closely. School isn’t exactly my biggest priority at the moment. I just wanted her to tell me where it was and when term started. And I’d probably have to sort some uniform out. Beyond that I didn’t really care. I know that sounds awful considering how much time I’m going to be spending there. But I made all the right noises, because I didn’t want Carmel to think I was ungrateful. Eventually she got up to go, telling me she’d be back to talk to Mum about it later in the week and leaving me some forms for her to sign.
Finally, I got to my bedroom. I shut the door and turned on my bedside light. It doesn’t do to turn the main light on. At least in the half dark I can pretend that Lily’s side of the room isn’t quite such a mess. One of these days I’m going to do something about it whether she likes it or not.
There’s a sort of imaginary line down the middle. My side is tidy and her side is a tip. Her mess always finds its way onto my side of the room, mainly with clothes crossing the line, and I’m always pushing them back with my foot. Somehow my tidiness never encroaches on her side.
It’s one o’clock in the morning and I’m beginning to wonder what I did before I got this journal. I asked Ted if he was expecting me to show it to him and he said, ‘No, it’s not like homework or anything. It’s for you – you know – your private thoughts.’
I’m glad about that; it will make it easier to write and I love writing in it. Now I know why Mum loves her job so much – or did – she hasn’t done much work lately.
At least she can sleep. Actually, that’s unfair. She’s only asleep at the moment because it’s drug-induced. The doctor gave her something to help her sleep but he wouldn’t give me anything. He said I was too young.
At first I liked sleeping because The Incident stopped playing itself in my head. Sleep was blissful unconsciousness. Is that even a word? I’ll look it up tomorrow. So sleep was good, because you can’t think when you’re asleep. It’s the waking up that’s so hard. There’s a few seconds when everything’s okay, then the brain wakes up and reminds you about what happened and you realise you’re in a waking nightmare. Then I started getting actual nightmares, so there was no escape, and now I dread going to sleep.
Reading is good because if you get a good book and really concentrate on the story, it’s possible to get lost in it. But sometimes I realise I’ve read two pages without understanding a word because my traitorous brain has started thinking again, about what happened. I’m getting better at it though. Better at concentrating on the story. You wouldn’t believe how many books I’ve read over the summer. I go to the library every Saturday and stock up. At first I stuck to the teen section but it’s not very big so I had to move on to the adult section. I avoided the crime novels and had a go at the romance, but then I discovered action thrillers and they’re the best because they move forward at such a pace that you just want to keep reading. They don’t give you time to think.
And now I’ve got the journal.
The only problem is I can’t write about my life because I don’t have one at the moment, and I don’t want to write about The Incident, so I’ve decided to write about Lily and me. I’ll start when we were born, because it�
�s a story we used to get Mum to tell us over and over. Lily always wanted to hear about how she’d been born first. I think she likes the thought that she occupied the world for a full five minutes without me.
It’s funny to think we used to be the same person, or at least the same egg, before we split into two. We did it in biology and when the teacher was explaining it everyone kept staring at us like we were freaks or something, until Lily asked them what they were staring at and they stopped.
I wonder what it was like sharing a womb with Lily. Did we know the other one was there? Did we look at each other? Did Lily kick me? Was her side of the womb all messy? Ha ha.
It’s almost impossible to imagine. I think I’ll turn out the light now and try to imagine it; it might help me get to sleep.
Chapter Three
‘Aren’t you too old to be playing with doll’s houses?’ said Lily from the bed where she was sitting, cross-legged, watching me.
‘I’m not playing.’
‘Don’t tell me, you’re doing that weird thing again, aren’t you?’
‘It’s not weird.’
She was referring to the way in which I use the doll’s house as a sort of reference map. It’s a replica of the house we live in, on King Street, and was made for us by Jason, an old boyfriend of Mum’s, for our fifth birthday. It has a basement with three floors above and a red front door. I should probably paint the door black now, like David did with the real one.
There were eight dolls in the doll’s house and each one represented an actual person.
Mum, Lily and I were in the basement, Jeanie and David on the floor above and Archie and his mum and dad on the floor above them. The only thing is, Archie’s family moved out last week so I wanted to remove them from the doll’s house.
I found the shoebox containing all the old dolls under Lily’s bed and opened it. Inside were all the other people who’d moved out.
I picked up Jason. Jason was a Power Ranger out of a McDonald’s Happy Meal. I don’t know how we got hold of him because Mum would rather have done ten years in prison than taken us to McDonald’s. Over the years the Power Ranger had stood in for whichever man Mum was seeing but I always thought of it as Jason because he was the first one I remember.
When we were little there were always lots of people living here. There was Jeanie and David, Finn and Holly – who were Archie’s mum and dad, although Archie hadn’t been born at the time – and Matt, Helen and Gina. Then Jason for a while and, although others came and went, these were our family – even if the neighbours referred to us as ‘a commune’.
When we were five and Jason gave us the doll’s house, there were two dolls inside. They were identical wooden dolls with round faces and long, curly, brown hair: Lily and me. We immediately demanded nine more dolls to make up the family. Of course we didn’t get them, not all at once. We had to build up the collection slowly. The one we chose to represent Mum was a plastic Disney Tinker Bell. We thought it suited Mum; she was just like a fairy with attitude. Eventually we had enough to represent everyone and although I’d stopped playing with them years ago, I liked to keep the right dolls in the doll’s house. I knew it was weird but I couldn’t help it.
‘Get a move on then,’ demanded Lily.
She watched me as I took Archie, Finn and Holly out of the doll’s house and put them in the shoebox with Matt, Helen, Gina and Jason.
‘Goodbye Finn, goodbye Holly – and good riddance Archie,’ sang Lily as I dropped them into the box.
‘Shut up!’
Lily folded her arms and looked sulky. She’d never liked Archie. She thought he was a snivelling mummy’s boy. But I’d liked him. He was seven and a boy so he was bound to be a bit annoying at times, but I was going to miss him.
‘It’s your fault they moved out, so just shut up!’ I said, glaring at Lily.
It was weird fighting with Lily. We never used to quarrel – well, not much, but ever since The Incident things have been different. It’s like some huge black hole has opened up between us and instead of being two sides of the same coin – something people used to say about us all the time – now it’s like we’re two different coins, and not even in the same currency.
What makes me pick fights with her is the fact that I’m really mad at her and have been ever since The Incident. And I hate being cross which makes me even more cross. It’s a vicious circle and I don’t know how to break it.
I picked up one of the twin dolls. Years ago, when we were about ten, we’d tied the hair back on one of the dolls and left the other one’s hair loose. I was the doll with the ponytail. I picked up the one with the loose hair and stuffed it in the shoebox.
‘What are you doing? You can’t do that! It’s cheating.’ Lily was leaning over the side of the bed, trying to grab hold of the shoebox.
‘Ha, so you do care, then.’
‘No, it’s just that you can’t put me in the box – I’m here, aren’t I?’
‘Maybe if I put you in the box you’ll disappear – like everyone else.’
‘Now you’re just being silly. Put me back.’
I looked at the doll’s house. There was me and Mum downstairs and Jeanie and David upstairs. It looked horribly empty and wrong. I got Lily out of the shoebox and put her back.
I don’t remember being born, obviously – that would be weird. But I’ve heard the story so many times it feels like a memory. I wonder if Lily feels the same way, although her take on it would be very different from mine. Lily knows how to make an entrance and even though, because we’re twins, it was the same birth, it always seems to me that Lily was cast in the role of leading lady and I was the understudy. While she took centre stage I was waiting in the wings.
The story can’t begin before that because there is no before that. Mum never talks about anything that happened before she came here and if she has any parents she’s never mentioned them.
Mum’s name is Summer and when she was in her final year at university she got careless at a music festival and found, on her return, that she was pregnant.
Mum was going through her New Age phase so, after she’d got over the initial shock, she gave thanks to the Great Earth Mother and didn’t bother about going to see a doctor. Why would she? There was nothing more natural than childbirth and she was surrounded by her friends. Matt was a faith healer when he wasn’t being the High Druid of the Somerset Pagan Worshippers, Helen was into crystals and had a crystal for every eventuality, and Finn’s girlfriend, Holly, knew someone who knew someone who delivered all the babies born to the New Age travellers she used to travel with.
Mum took her pregnancy very seriously. She never let anything that wasn’t one hundred per cent organic pass her lips, she stopped drinking coffee and she stopped smoking her ‘herbal’ tobacco. There were no scans or antenatal appointments. As she gradually expanded she knew that when the time came the Great Earth Mother would watch over her.
But as it happened, when she went into labour the Great Earth Mother must have been busy elsewhere, as was Holly’s ‘midwife’ friend. Mum had hoped for a water birth in the big bath in the King Street bathroom. She lay in the bath, clutching one of Helen’s crystals and topping the cooling water up until all the hot water in the tank ran out.
By the time Holly, Jeanie and Helen were concerned enough to admit defeat and call for an ambulance, Mum was past caring. She just wanted the thing out of her.
The paramedics were brilliant. It didn’t bother them that she didn’t have any medical records. It was only after she’d been handed over to the hospital staff that the trouble began.
But Lily wasn’t going to wait until they’d sorted out the lack of records or hitched Mum up to a monitor so they could check that everything was all right. Lily wanted out, so she waved me a cheery goodbye, or at least I like to think she did, and off she went. No doubt, from the depths of the womb I could hear the cooing and general celebrations that accompanied Lily’s birth.
‘Oh, what a beautiful bab
y girl, Ms Pond. Do you have a name for her?’
My mother’s sweaty but serene face smiled up at them. ‘I shall call her Lily.’
Summer Pond and Lily Pond – what could be more romantic?
‘She’s a bit on the small side but seems fine.’
‘Hang on, there’s another one in here!’
Lily’s moment in the limelight was quickly cut short as she was whisked away to be cleaned and weighed and everyone turned their attention to the unexpected second baby. Eventually I was coaxed out and quickly shown to the now exhausted and shocked Summer before being whisked away to the intensive care unit and put into an incubator. I was just under five pounds in weight and a little on the yellow side.
What Mum wanted more than anything was to leave the hospital and get away from ‘the authorities’ who kept on telling her how stupid she had been and how lucky she was that her babies were okay. But she was tied by me, the unexpected baby, who was lying in the incubator. Not that the staff stayed cross with her for long. Mum looked so fragile and beautiful and hopelessly confused by suddenly hav ing two babies to look after. And if she was sometimes too tired to make it up to the intensive care ward, Jeanie and David never failed to visit me twice a day.
So, while I concentrated on getting bigger and turning pink, Mum and Lily were left on the ward where they had plenty of time to get better acquainted.
Eventually Mum was allowed to take us home. There was one more obstacle to overcome, one more brush with ‘the authorities’ before normal life in the commune could continue: we had to be registered. David went with Mum to help out. She only had one baby sling so David carried me. Apparently I had no name up until the very last minute. Summer was determined to carry on the Pond-related theme but all she could think of was Mill Pond. Obviously, nobody is called Mill, but Milly was a perfectly respectable name. There was no time to consider the fact that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to have twins with rhyming names, or indeed that a mill pond didn’t carry quite such romantic connotations as a lily pond. And so that’s how I came to be named after a muddy puddle.
Me Myself Milly Page 2