So what happened then?
It is time to sort the loft.
Climbing the stepladder, I shove hard against the trapdoor—and with a painful creak it flies open, quite suddenly, slamming against the rafters with a smash. The sound is so loud, so obtrusive, it makes me hesitate, tingling with nerves: as if there is something up here, asleep—which I might have just woken.
Pulling the torch from the back pocket of my jeans, I switch it on. And direct it upwards.
The square of blackness stares down at me. A swallowing void. Again, I hesitate. I am trying to deny that frisson of fear. But it is there. I am alone in the house—apart from Beany, who is sleeping in his basket in the kitchen. I can hear the November rain pattering on the slates of the roof above me, up there in the blackness. Like many fingernails tapping in irritation.
Tap tap tap.
Anxieties stir in my mind. I climb another rung on the stepladder, thinking about Kirstie and Lydia.
Tap Tap Tap. Kirstie And Lydia.
When we brought the twins home from hospital, we realized that, yes, we might have sorted the names satisfactorily, but we still had another dilemma: differing between them in person was much harder.
Because our twins matched. Superbly. They were among the most identical of identicals, they were the kind of brilliant “idents” that made nurses from other wards cross long corridors, just to ogle our amazing twins.
Some monozygotic twins are not that identical at all. They have different skin tones, different blemishes, very different voices. Others are mirror-image twins, they are identical but their identicality is that of a reflection in the mirror, left and right are switched: one twin will have hair that swirls clockwise, the other will have hair that swirls anti-clockwise.
But Kirstie and Lydia Moorcroft were true idents: they had identically snowy-blonde hair, exactly matching icy-blue eyes, precisely the same button-noses, the same sly and playful smiles, the same perfect pink mouths when they yawned, the same creases and giggles and freckles and moles. They were mirror images, without the reversal.
Tap, tap, tap…
Slowly and carefully, maybe a little timidly, I ascend the last rungs of the ladder and peer into the gloom of the attic, following the beam of my torch. Still thinking. Still remembering. My torch-beam picks out the brown metal frame of a Maclaren twin buggy. It cost us a fortune at the time, but we didn’t care. We wanted the twins to sit side by side, staring ahead, even as we wheeled them around. Because they were a team from birth. Babbling their twinspeak, entirely engrossed in each other: just as they had been from conception.
Through my pregnancy, as we went from one sonogram to the next, I actually watched the twins move closer, inside me—going from body contacts in week 12, to “complex embraces” in week 14. By week 16, as my pediatrician pointed out, my twins were occasionally kissing.
The noise of the rain is more persistent now, like an irritated hiss. Hurry up. We’re waiting. Hurry up.
I do not need encouragement to hurry. I want to get this job done. Briskly I scan the darkness—and my torch-beam alights on an old, deflated Thomas the Tank Engine daybed. Thomas the Tank Engine leers at me, dementedly cheerful. Red and yellow and clownish. That can definitely stay. Along with the other daybed, which must be up here. The blue one we bought for Kirstie.
Daughter one. Daughter two. Yellow and blue.
At first, we differentiated our babies by painting one of their respective fingernails, or toenails, yellow or blue. Yellow was for Lydia, because it rhymed with her nickname: Lydee-lo. Yell-ow. Blue was for Kirstie. Kirstie-koo.
This nail-varnishing was a compromise. A nurse at the hospital advised us to have one of the twins tattooed in a discreet place: on a shoulder-blade, perhaps, or at the top of an ankle—just a little indelible mark, so there could be no mistake. But we resisted this notion, as it seemed far too drastic, even barbaric: tattooing one of our perfect, innocent, flawless new children? No.
Yet we couldn’t do nothing. So we relied on nail varnish, diligently and carefully applied once a week, for a year. After that—until we were able to distinguish them by their distinctive personalities, and by their own responses to their own names—we relied on the differing clothes we gave the girls; some of the same clothes that are now bagged in this dusty loft.
As with the nail varnish, we had yellow clothes for Lydie-lo. Blue clothes for Kirstie-koo. We didn’t dress them entirely in block colors; a yellow girl and a blue girl, but we made sure that Kirstie always had a blue jumper, or blue socks, or blue bobble hat, while the other was blue-less; meanwhile Lydia had a yellow T-shirt, or maybe a dark yellow ribbon in her pale yellow hair.
Hurry now. Hurry up.
I want to hurry, but it also seems wrong. How can I be businesslike up here? In this place? The cardboard boxes marked L for Lydia are everywhere. Accusing, silent, loaded. The boxes that contain her life.
I want to shout her name: Lydia. Lydia. Come back. Lydia May Tanera Moorcroft. I want to shout her name like I did when she died, when I stared down from the balcony, and saw her little body, splayed and yet crumpled, still breathing, but dying.
And now I am gagging on the attic dust. Or maybe it is the memories.
Little Lydia running into my arms as we tried to fly kites on Hampstead Heath and she got scared by the rippling noise; little Lydia sitting on my lap, earnestly writing her name for the first time, in waxy scented crayon; little Lydia dwarfed in Daddy’s big chair, shyly hiding behind a propped atlas as large as herself. Lydia, the silent one, the bookish one, the soulful one, the slightly lost and incomplete one—Lydia, the twin like me. Lydia, who once said, when she was sitting with her sister on a bench in a park: Mummy, come and sit between me so you can read to us.
Come and sit between me? Even then, there was some confusion, a blurring of identity. Something slightly unnerving. And now beloved Lydia is gone. Isn’t she? Or maybe she is alive down there, even as her stuff is crated and boxed up here? If that is the case, how would we possibly untangle this, without destroying the family?
The complexities are intolerable. I am talking to myself.
Work, Sarah, work. Sort the loft. Do the job. Ignore the grief, get rid of the stuff you don’t need, then move to Scotland, to Skye, the open skies: where Kirstie—Kirstie, Kirstie, Kirstie—can run wild and free. Where we can all soar away, escaping the past, like the eiders flying over the Cuillins.
One of the boxes is ripped open.
I stare, bewildered, and shocked. Lydia’s biggest box of toys has been sliced open. Brutally. Who would do that? It has to be Angus. But why? And with such careless savagery? Why wouldn’t he tell me? We discussed everything to do with Lydia’s things. But now he has been retrieving Lydia’s toys, without telling me?
The rain is hissing, once again. And very close, a few feet above my head.
Leaning into the opened box, I pull back a flap to have a look, and as I do, I hear a different noise—a distinctive, metallic rattle. Someone is climbing the stepladder?
Yes.
The noise is unmistakable. Someone is in the house. How did they get in without my hearing? Who is this climbing into the loft? Why didn’t Beany start barking, in the kitchen?
I stand back. Absurdly frightened.
“Hello? Hello? Who is it? Hello??”
“All right, gorgeous?”
“Angus!”
He smiles in the half-light which shines from the landing beneath. He looks definitely odd: like a cheap horror movie villain, someone illuminated from below by a ghoulish torch.