Chapter Four
Mum came with me today when I went to buy my new uniform. I was glad because as the beginning of term draws nearer, I’m getting really nervous about going to the new school. I had to buy a new blazer, jumper and tie. The new uniform is black and looks a lot smarter than my old maroon one. My new school is an all-girl’s school, which means I’ll have one less thing to worry about. And I was worrying. What if I can’t make any new friends?
All through the shopping trip I was worrying about Mum being unhappy. I know I’m not as exciting or entertaining as Lily. I reckon she wished it was Lily getting the new uniform, Lily going on the shopping trip and going for coffee when we’d bought the things, but instead she was stuck with boring old me.
I really tried to keep cheerful, but it’s hard to sound natural when there’s such a huge, unspoken thing hanging over your head. Mum was doing the same, so we were like two big fakes pretending to have a good time. Anyone would have thought we were just a normal mother and daughter out on a shopping trip, which is what we were trying to be. And failing.
I told Mum I wanted to go to the library before we went home.
When we got there Mum went off to talk to the librarians. She knows them all because she often does talks in there about her books. I couldn’t get many books out, because I’d taken a load out on Saturday and hadn’t returned them yet.
Actually, I only wanted one. It was called How to Make Friends and I didn’t want to draw attention to it so I grabbed a couple of other books and hid it between them. I’m embarrassed that I need a book on something that most people do without even thinking, but the truth is that being a twin has made me socially inept and now that I’ve got to go to a new school on my own I don’t know what to do.
When we got home I went to hang my new uniform in the cupboard next to Lily’s maroon one. I try not to look at her clothes when I use the wardrobe. Her clothes are completely different from mine. She likes to look distinctive and original, whereas I like to blend in. They’re a constant reminder of how things have changed between us. When we were little we used to insist that we wore identical clothes. Mum didn’t approve, she kept telling us we were individuals but we didn’t believe her. We looked identical so we wanted to dress identically.
I was about to close the wardrobe door when my new tie fell onto the floor. I bent down to pick it up and caught sight of something stuffed into the back of the wardrobe that made my blood freeze. It was a blue hoodie. I didn’t want it in my wardrobe but I couldn’t bring myself to touch it. I slammed the door shut and put the tie away in my sock drawer. My heart was beating painfully fast.
I hid the library book about making friends in the doll’s house with my journal. Just in time. I turned around as Lily came in. I’d never hear the end of it if she saw my book was How to Make Friends.
As it was, she was spoiling for a fight. She lay on her bed and smirked at me.
‘I can’t believe you’re seeing a shrink.’
‘I’m not.’
‘Uh-oh, you’re in denial,’ said Lily, laughing.
‘Ha ha, very funny,’ I said, trying to give her a withering look.
I wasn’t going to tell her that actually I’m enjoying my trips across town to see Ted. I like sitting on the bus, on my own. Nobody looks at me, or even notices I’m there. Not like when I’m with Lily. People always notice twins when they look so alike. They look in passing and then they look again. They usually smile. Lily loves it. She always looks right back with a smug expression as if to say, Yes, I was so amazing they made another one, just the same.
But on the bus no one knows who I am or what happened to me. The first time I got on the bus on my own I thought people would stare and somehow know – it was such a big thing inside of me it seemed impossible that the whole world couldn’t tell. But nobody looked or whispered behind their hand, ‘Hey, it’s that girl, you know, it was in all the papers.’ So now I like going out, I like the anonymity, though I worry about leaving Mum sometimes.
Mum’s been a lot better today and I didn’t want Lily to spoil it. She was in her workroom right now. Okay, so she wasn’t working, she was just moving things around, but it was a big improvement.
‘If you’re not seeing a shrink, what are you doing then? Dating him?’ Lily wasn’t going to let up; she thinks it’s hilarious. I wanted to point out it’s all her fault but if I did she’d go away, and Lily in an annoying mood is better than no Lily at all.
‘He’s not really a shrink, we just sit in his kitchen and talk while he drinks tea.’
That was true. I wasn’t sure that they were proper counselling sessions. I mean, Ted wasn’t really a proper counsellor. Mum told Carmel she’d got me a counsellor but really he’s just friend of Mum’s from her university days who did a degree in psychology or something. Anyhow, he’s very laid-back and we just sort of chat.
I think he used to worry that we weren’t talking about what happened to me but now he’s given me the journal he thinks I’m writing about it, so we talk about other stuff and never mention Lily or what happened. He’s a lot more relaxed now, though that might be due to all the dope he smokes. He even offered me a drag once, though I think he was just being polite; he looked quite relieved when I said no. Ha ha, I’d love to see Carmel’s face if she knew. I don’t think that was the kind of therapy she had in mind.
But I don’t tell Lily any of this, she’d just tell me I should have had some, like it’s no big deal. We grew up around the stuff after all. I got quite nostalgic when Ted lit up. It reminded me of the old days in the house; the parties and the music. Lily and I would join in the dancing until we were so tired we’d fall asleep under the table.
Today Ted and I talked about books. I said I’d noticed that in a lot of children’s books I’d read, like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Harry Potter, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and the Lemony Snicket books, the children’s parents were either dead or conveniently not there. Ted said it was because at some point children want to believe they’re autonomous. They want to grow up and move away from their parents and become their own person. Or their sister, I thought, though I didn’t say it. I said I thought that in books it was probably more a case of getting the parents out of the way so the children could get on with the adventure without being called in for tea or told to wash behind their ears.
To be honest, I like talking to Ted. He doesn’t treat me like an idiot and even if he does use words I don’t always understand, I can look them up in the dictionary when I get home. Today I looked up ‘autonomous’. The dictionary said:
Autonomy
i) the possession or right of self-government.
ii) freedom of action. From the Greek ‘autonomous’ meaning ‘having its own laws’.
I like that. I am autonomous.
I didn’t learn to talk until I was about four years old – at least not properly. Lily and I talked to each other but it was a weird, private language made up of sounds and gestures. I think, when we were younger, we each knew what the other was thinking and we didn’t need to say it. If we had to communicate with adults, Lily did all the talking. She would say, ‘We want a drink’, or ‘Milly needs the loo’, so there was no need for me to talk. Eventually Mum realised what was happening and told everyone in the house they were to talk to me directly, not through Lily, and I wasn’t to get anything unless I asked for it myself. These changes didn’t bother me as much as they bothered Lily.
I discovered that I could talk, if a little quietly and hesitantly. This annoyed Lily, who quickly lost patience and tried to speak for me because she was so much better at it.
All I really remember about those early years is how Lily was always there. We played together, bathed together, even slept in the same bed. I think I thought I was Lily in a strange way. There was Lily and there was me, but in my head we were the same person. Mum had a big mirror on the wardrobe in her bedroom and we used to stand in front of it looking at ourselves. If I moved, Lily c
opied me, like a mirror in a mirror. I’d hold my left arm out, she’d hold her right arm out. The game was that she’d try and anticipate what I was going to do so that we did it at the same time.
Mum told us how, when she came to Bath as a student to study art, she soon got fed up with living in the student halls of residence so she and a few friends found the empty house on King Street and moved in. Mum said it was a beautiful house which deserved to be lived in and if the owner didn’t care about it then they would. Lots of students came and went in the house, but Mum and her friends Jeanie, Matt and Finn were always there. Mum said, after they’d been living there for a couple of years, the property market really took off and the other residents in King Street began to complain about the squat on their doorstep. The council got involved and tracked down the owner. She was an elderly lady who lived in New Zealand but she was very ill and died, leaving the house to her great-nephew, David, who she’d never met. He was finishing his degree at Newcastle University and after he’d done his finals he came down to view his property and he never left. He fell in love with Jeanie and the house and the city; so Mum and her friends didn’t have to move out.
When we were little there were about seven adults and three other children living in King Street. Mum had a theory that, although she’d given birth to us, we were humans, and one human couldn’t own another human and, besides, the whole world was one big family, so we were to call her Summer and not Mummy. This didn’t quite work out because when I was little I had trouble with my ‘s’ sounds so I called her Mummer, which sounds like Mama anyhow.
If we fell over and cried someone would pick us up and comfort us. If we wanted a bedtime story there was always someone willing to tell us one. And as the cooking was shared, a different person gave us our tea every night. If it wasn’t always Mummer we didn’t care or even notice.
Chapter Five
I was alone in my room, flicking through How to Make Friends and pretending that I wasn’t panicking about starting at the new school next week. The book suggested that you should always act naturally. Well, that wasn’t going to work. What if your natural self was painfully shy? I skipped over that bit and started on the chapter that talked about being optimistic and staying positive. How could I stay positive when I wasn’t feeling positive in the first place?
It was hopeless. All the girls at the new school would already have friends that they’d made years ago and they wouldn’t want some newbie barging in. Perhaps the whole idea had been a mistake. But then what were the alternatives? I really didn’t want to go back to my old school and have people treat me differently, which they would. I wondered if I should persuade Mum to let me be home educated. But the thought of being stuck in the basement all day and never getting out was even worse. I’d just have to do it. There was no other choice. But, whatever, the library book wasn’t much help so I stuffed it back in the doll’s house. There was a knock on the door.
‘Milly?’ It was Mum. She didn’t open the door and come in, which annoyed me.
‘We’ve been invited upstairs for a meal with Jeanie and David. I think there’s something they want to tell us. Five minutes, okay?’
‘Okay.’
As I was brushing my hair I began to worry about what it was they could want to tell us. Were they planning on selling the house? They couldn’t sell the basement flat, obviously, because that was ours, but there was no reason why they couldn’t sell the rest of the house. It would certainly explain all the work they’d done on it recently. Oh God, I hoped it wasn’t that. Or perhaps they were going to have a baby. That would be a good thing.
It turned out to be neither of those things.
Jeanie had cooked a lovely vegetarian curry and there was naan bread, poppadoms and chutney and yoghurt which kept us all busy, but I noticed that the atmosphere was a bit strained.
You know when something isn’t being talked about and it’s referred to as ‘the elephant in the room’? Well, there was a whole herd of them in that room. You couldn’t move for elephants.
David was obviously waiting until we’d eaten before telling us the news. Jeanie tried to start a conversation with Mum about her latest book, but Mum gave her a dark look and Jeanie backed off.
And then there was the biggest elephant of all, the daddy elephant: The Incident and all it entailed. So, all in all, it was an uncomfortable meal and a far cry from the meals that we used to have in this same kitchen in the good old days.
When we’d finished eating, David finally dropped the bombshell.
He explained that the university, where he lectures in English, had organised an exchange with an American lecturer, so he and Jeanie were going to move to Los Angeles for a year. It wasn’t just a job swap, it would be a house swap as well; so that meant his American counterpart would be moving in upstairs and teaching here for a year. He said they’d be leaving in a couple of weeks. I felt sick.
Jeanie explained that the door between our basement flat and the rest of the house would have to be locked. Then she said I’d have to give my front door key back. I hate them. How could they do this to me?
David said it had been arranged for ages and they couldn’t cancel and he was really sorry. He said he would have told us before but with ‘everything that’s happened’ it never seemed like the right time.
I wanted to ask if they’d take me with them but I knew I’d just sound pathetic and Mum would never agree to it anyway.
I was desperately trying not to show them how upset I was, but it must have been obvious because David put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘It’ll be fun for you, Milly. They’ve got a son and he’s not much older than you.’
Like that helped!
I made some excuse and ran downstairs so no one would see me crying. I cried into my pillow because I didn’t want Mum to hear me. My pillow got all soggy and covered in snot so I turned it over and put it on Lily’s bed. She’ll never notice.
Eventually I stopped crying and lay on the bed following the cracks in the ceiling with my eyes. I felt strangely resolute. Like there was a piece of iron running through my body. Jeanie and David were going away. I’d just have to deal with it, like I’d dealt with everything else. It wasn’t their fault – I knew that. So why did I feel that I’d been betrayed?
Why do people have to grow up and get sensible jobs and do their houses up and generally behave like adults?
I wasn’t overreacting or anything. It was as if my dad had just said he was going away for a year. David is the closest thing Lily and I have ever had to a dad. Lily doesn’t seem at all bothered and says she doesn’t know why I’m making such a fuss.
I was so upset I opened the doll’s house and took Jeanie and David out, even though they haven’t left yet. I packed them in the shoebox and stuffed it under the bed.
When Lily and I were five we went to school. Mum had been planning to home educate us, but she’d started writing these books all about some twins which really took off and so we were sent to school after all.
We were the only twins in the school and, being practically identical, we caused a bit of a stir. At least Lily made sure we did. I say practically identical because, although we looked the same, we couldn’t have been more different as far as personality went, so if we sat as still as statues and didn’t say anything it was hard to tell us apart, but the minute we started to talk or move it was obvious who was who.
Lily liked to hold my hand all the time. She learned from an early age that people thought this was sweet. I remember the first day when the teacher put us on different tables. The girl next to me smiled and said she was called Becky. She showed me her new pencil case and then Lily was there, pushing her off the chair.
‘That’s my Milly,’ she said and sat down. The girl started to cry and the teacher got cross and tried to get Lily to go back to her seat, but all she would say was ‘My Milly’, over and over again until the teacher gave up and let us sit together. It sort of set the scene for the next six years.
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br /> That was the time when Mum was seeing Jason. David was having an extension built on the back of the house so we could live in the basement and he hired Jason as the carpenter on the job. At that time we still mostly lived upstairs because that’s where all the action was, but we had our bedroom in the basement and then Mum got her workroom down there so it sort of became ours.
Jason was working on the extension and of course he fell for Mum; who wouldn’t? I don’t want to give the impression that Mum’s had loads of men over the years because she hasn’t – not really. Mum is very beautiful and she looks all fragile and vulnerable so men are always falling for her. The trouble is, although she looks fragile and vulnerable, she isn’t either of those things. She’s very strong and independent, so the sort of men that are drawn to her because they think they can protect and look after her soon discover that she doesn’t need protecting or want to be looked after. Jason stayed around longer than most.
In our basement there are two bedrooms, a kitchen, a tiny bathroom, a sitting room and Mum’s workroom at the back. It never used to feel small because we had the rest of the house as well, but since Archie and his mum and dad moved out there’s been less excuse to go upstairs. And when Jeanie and David go we won’t be able to go up there at all.
Sharing a bedroom with Lily never used to be a problem until recently. Just before The Incident Lily said she needed her own space and was going to ask Jeanie and David if she could have a room of her own upstairs. I told her Mum would never agree.
Chapter Six
I woke up really late this morning – in Mum’s bed. For a minute I couldn’t work out where I was and then I remembered that last night I’d had the most scary nightmare.
Me Myself Milly Page 3