The Twins

by Saskia Sarginson

Genres: Family Life; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

They were inseparable until an innocent mistake tore them apart.

Growing up, Viola and Issy clung to each other in the wake of their mother's eccentricity, as she dragged them from a commune to a tiny Welsh village. They thought the three of them would be together forever.

But an innocent mistake one summer set them on drastically different paths. Now in their twenties, Issy is trying to hold together a life as a magazine art director, while Viola is slowly destroying herself, consumed with guilt over the events they unknowingly set into motion as children.

When it seems that Viola might never recover, Issy returns to the town they haven't seen in a decade, to face her own demons and see what answers, if any, she can find.

A deeply moving, gripping debut, this is a novel about the secrets we carry, and the bonds between twins.

Release date: August 27, 2013

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 300

Sample

We weren’t always twins. We used to be just one person.

The story of our conception was the ordinary kind they tell you about in biology lessons. You know how it goes: an athletic sperm hits the egg target and new life forms.

So there we were, a single ho-hum baby in the making. Then comes the extraordinary part, because that one egg split, tearing in half, and we became two babies. Two halves of a whole. That’s why it’s weird but true–we were one person first, even if only for a millisecond.

Mummy always said that having twins was the last thing she’d expected, except she knew there had to be a good reason why she couldn’t fit through doors at four months, let alone do her jeans up. Mummy was beautiful. Everyone said so. She looked like an ice queen from the pages of a fairy tale. A queen who wore flip-flops and Indian skirts with tassels dangling down, and whose fingers were stained nicotine yellow. She wouldn’t tell us who our father was. Not that it really mattered. We just pretended it did, because it felt exciting to try and guess who he might be, as if we could invent the story of our own birth.

There’s a Greek myth that says if a woman sleeps with a god and a mortal on the same day she’ll have two babies: one child from each father. Even our mother wouldn’t do anything as slutty as that. But when we climbed the branches of the lilac tree to sit on the roof of the shed, sharing an apple and discussing possible paternal options, the idea of being fathered by a god was satisfying.

The obvious choice was a rock god. Our mother played The Doors obsessively. She looked at Jim Morrison’s picture on the album cover and sighed. The only thing we knew about our father was that our mother met him at a festival in California. Bingo. It had to be Morrison. We didn’t want our dad to be one of the creeps and weirdos we lived with at the commune in Wales. Lanky Luke or smelly Eric. Mummy didn’t love any of them. We wrote Mr Morrison a letter once, secretly, signing it from Viola and Isolte Love. We never got a reply.

On 3 July 1971 Jim Morrison was found dead in his bath in Paris. Cause of death: heart failure brought on by heavy drinking. He’d planned to stop being a rock god and become a poet. He’d been waiting for his contract to run out. The day the news broke we came home from school to find our mother playing ‘Hello, I Love You’ over and over and weeping into her glass of red wine. We cried too, up in our bedroom, howling into our pillows. At first it was a kind of show; but then fake turned to real. You know how sometimes when you laugh really hard you can trip some emotional switch and start crying instead? This was a bit like that. Except pretend crying tripped the real thing, and suddenly we were drowning in tears, taking shuddering gasps, snot smearing our cheeks. We had no idea what we were crying about. Later, when Mummy was sober and we were all hiccuping and squinting through swollen eyes, she told us that Jim Morrison definitely wasn’t our dad. ‘You nitwits,’ she said wistfully, ‘where on earth did you get that idea?’

We tried a few more times to discover who our father was. But Mummy got irritated. Shrugging and rolling a cigarette slowly, she’d blow smoke spirals and look disappointed by our dull questions. ‘I’ve started a new dynasty,’ she explained. ‘I want you to build your own future. You don’t need a past.’ We knew that she thought our desire for a father was petty and bourgeois. All the worst things in the world were petty and bourgeois.

It was the spring of 1972, and Mummy said that, what with the miners’ strike and the three-day weeks, the country was going to hell. Ted Heath was a Tory fool. We had to be prepared for the worst. We needed to be self-sufficient. She dug up the weedy flowers and planted vegetables and bought two nanny goats: Tess and Bathsheba. One brown and the other black; they both had switchy tails and cloven feet like the devil. We wanted to love them, but they just chewed all day, grinding their long teeth. Even when we squatted to scratch their ears, they kept on chewing, marble eyes looking through us. The goats broke free of their tethers and trampled the vegetable patch, pulling up plants by the roots. Every morning, Mummy spent grim hours trying to replant limp broccoli and carrots before she sat with her head in a goat’s flank, fingers working, swearing at their fidgeting, to emerge with thin milk as rancid as old cheese or stewed socks.

She had a book showing which wild foods were safe to eat and when and how to pick and cook them. That book was consulted constantly, pondered over, worn and stained from being taken along on walks and splattered from being propped next to the stove. Foraging became a new religion. Plucking berries and mushrooms and apples from the hedgerows–now, Mummy said, that was free-spirited and free. Two things she approved of.

We got scratched from pushing through brambles to get at the crab apples, our mother barefoot beside us. ‘Higher, Viola. That’s it.’ Tossing her hair impatiently. ‘Get the ones on the next branch up, Issy.’ She made jelly and wine from those: tangy-tasting and pink as a tongue. Once we got terrible stomach cramps from some speckled mushrooms she’d put in a stew. But we got to like brain fungus fried in butter with salt and pepper and a little curry powder; a crinkly, rubbery, pale fungus that grew at the foot of pine trees–we tore up handfuls whenever we found it. And puffballs, picked when they were fat and white, rolling in the dewy grass on autumn mornings like misplaced snowballs. We had them sliced in batter for breakfast with crispy bacon.

*

Have you ever felt real hunger pangs? Not just a growl, the casual complaining of your stomach missing a meal, the inconvenient rumble and gurgle when lunch is late. I mean the deep birthing pain of true emptiness. The hollow ache of nothing. Fat is a human fault because it’s only humans who are stupid with greed. Birds are light as a handful of leaves. I want the lightness of wings to enter me. I’ve learned to eat like a bird, not a human. In this place they try and trick me into eating, they play mind games, stick tubes down my throat.

Of course, it hurts to starve. But you can use those pangs like a knife to slice out the bad things inside you. Eventually you’ll come to crave that feeling. Because hunger is a friend. With it you can get down to your bones quicker than you’d think. I feel them under my fingers, nudging up close below my skin, closer every day: smooth and flawless and hard. That’s what everyone says about bones, don’t they? That they’re pure. Clean. I trace the lines of mine and they make a shape: the scaffold of myself.

It’s all we are in the end anyway. Sometimes not even that. Sometimes there aren’t even bones to show for a life–just molecules shifting in the air–and a few memories locked up in your head, yellowed as old photographs.

I’m tired now. I’d like to go back to sleep. I’m rambling. I know I am. Issy wouldn’t like it. She told me to shut up when we had to sit in that little room with a man and a woman asking us the same questions over and over.

What did we do? What did we see? What time and when and where?

They thought we were wicked, you see. They thought we’d done something unforgivable. I cried and shifted on the hard chair, feeling a shameful warmth seep through my knickers. Wet dripped over plastic until there was a puddle on the floor, and a policeman came with a bucket and cloth. I closed my eyes, trying not to inhale the sharp stink of urine. My bare legs stung.

Those days were filled with listless waiting, people whispering about us behind their hands. We were trapped in that bleak room, while they stared at us and tapped their pencils and made notes. I noticed them looking at the scar on my face and I pulled my hair across, trying to hide it, scared that they would recognise the mark of Satan.

But I wasn’t alone–my sister was next to me, like she always was, stronger, bolder. Her eyes were dry and there was no wet patch under her chair.

‘Don’t say anything, Viola,’ Issy said. ‘You don’t have to say anything. They can’t make you.’

And she holds my hand tight, her curled fingers squeezing hard, steely as a trap.

1987. Bill Withers is playing loud on the stereo, and rolling sound fills the depths of the photographic studio with an atmosphere, creates a mood to work to. Except work has stopped for a moment because Ben is fussing with the lights, directing his assistant to rearrange the roll of paper that’s serving as a backdrop. Away from the bright glare of the lights and the pale sweep of paper, the echoing room, once a warehouse, is a hollow cavern.

Through a side door there is a narrow space that passes as a hair and make-up room; there’s hardly room for three people to move about, and the air is thick with stale cigarette smoke. The table below the mirror is covered with a mess of eye shadow palettes, crumpled tissues, empty takeaway cartons, overflowing ashtrays, coffee cups, lip brushes and eyelash curlers.

Isolte stands watching Julio, the make-up artist, as he bends over the model. Isolte frowns into the mirror, watching the reflection of the model’s face. The three of them, crammed together, are framed by a square of naked bulbs. Julio finishes drawing a gold line with a flourish and looks up at Isolte enquiringly, one eyebrow arched.

‘Well?’ he says. ‘Do you want more of a theatrical effect, Isolte, darling? Or is this enough?’

Isolte squints at the girl’s face, considering. The model, impassive, blinks heavy orange lashes. She’s got a towel wrapped around her to protect the sheath of silk underneath. Standing above her, Isolte notices a fine down, like baby hair, growing all over her back: a pale fur glistening along the ridge of her spine. Wasn’t it Marilyn Monroe who was supposed to have been covered in hair? It accounted for her luminous appearance in photographs. But this girl has the extra hair of the malnourished. Isolte knows it well.

She shrugs. ‘It looks great. But let’s get a Polaroid done. Then we can see.’ On set, the model positions herself in front of the lights, legs apart, hips thrust forward. She glares into the camera, a questioning sneer on her lips. Ben’s assistant has switched on the wind machine and fine strands of coloured silk blow up around her like torn butterfly wings.

Ben is already bending over the tripod, one hand poised on the camera. He is absorbed, all his energy channelled into this moment. His jeans are creased around his hips, his dark hair flopping forward. It’s the last shot of the day. Everyone is tired.

‘That’s beautiful.’ He clicks, and clicks again. ‘Lick your lips. Look at me, sweetheart. Right. Gorgeous.’

Ben is a chameleon. His working talk is fluid, changes from girl to girl, shoot to shoot. Isolte has seen him play the roguish male, but he’ll camp it up or turn gentle and sweet to get the best out of a model.

‘How do you make a duck into a soul singer?’ he’s asking and the model shrugs.

‘Put it in the oven until it’s Bill Withers.’

The girl throws back her head and laughs. Ben snaps. Isolte has heard the joke before. She stands with arms folded, imagining the picture on the page, the caption already running through her head. It’s a good shot. The model is almost transparent; the angles of her face work the shadows, pull the light on to the right planes so that she looks like an exquisite alien. Maybe it will make the cover.

It is spring outside. A rainy London day. But here she is in a windowless room creating pictures to be looked at in July. Isolte likes the way that working three months ahead pulls her through the year as if clock time has shifted into sixth gear. ‘I think we’ve got it.’ Ben straightens up, claps the room briefly, holding his hands high. ‘Well done, people. It’s a wrap.’ It is a corny thing to do. He gets away with it because, from his scruffy dark hair to his Converse All Stars in faded red, he inhabits the kind of shrugged-on style that marks him out as cool; the sort of person who slips across invisible social barriers, who knows how to be in the world. It helps that he has a sensuous face with sculptured bones; swooping eyebrows that give him, depending on his mood, the look of Groucho Marx or Byron; lips that take the natural line of a pout. Isolte notices that Ruby, the hair stylist, blushes as she turns away to collect her sprays and brushes.

The wind machine and the burning lights have been turned off. The model, rubbing her eyes, reaches for the towel. The studio is nearly empty, dim and forlorn without music. Julio has gone already, lugging his make-up box, and Ruby is packing up in the back room. The model shrugs bony shoulders into an old tweed overcoat and lights a cigarette; she’s checking her Filofax as she waves goodbye. Ben shouts over at his assistant: ‘Take the cameras down to my car, will you? And stand guard till I get there.’

‘Fancy a drink?’ He turns to Isolte, smiling. ‘Orange juice, of course.’

She scrunches up her face at him. ‘Can’t.’

‘Shame.’ He’s suddenly close, and she feels his hand on her thigh, fingers rubbing across her tights. His mouth is next to her ear, hot breath and muffled words. Deep inside she feels the flip of desire, her breath coming faster. She swallows, leans into him for a moment and then, ‘No chance, pervert,’ she whispers, slipping from his grasp.

‘You can’t blame me for trying.’ He grins at her. ‘I’ve been dying to get my hands on you all day.’

‘I’d never have guessed it… Anyway, I’ve got to go.’ Isolte shoves him away, smiling despite herself. ‘I told you already. I’m seeing Viola.’

Changing her mind, she steps closer and kisses him. She’s wanted to do that all day too–although she doesn’t want him to know, she’s always found it safer to be the one who holds back in a relationship, the one who doesn’t love as much. His lips are soft, slightly dry; there is the clash of teeth against teeth. She inhales deeply, breathing in the day’s sweat, the hint of steel and plastic on his fingers. Moving across the room, she straightens her clothes, glancing in the mirror as if to check for evidence of the kiss.

‘Women.’ Ben shakes his head, licking his lips thoughtfully. ‘Are you all this mad?’ He shrugs on his leather jacket.

‘Well, you’re the expert,’ Isolte says. ‘You tell me.’

He grabs her by the waist, pulls her close. ‘You think the worst of me, don’t you, my doubting Doris?’

She struggles, breaking away with a breathless laugh. ‘Don’t call me that.’

‘What?’ He raises his eyebrows. ‘Doubting?’

‘No. Doris, you idiot.’ She shakes her head. ‘Now let me get on.’ She throws her bag over her shoulder. ‘I’ve got places to go. People to see.’

Her minicab is waiting downstairs.

‘Does that mean you’re coming over tonight?’ he calls after her.

Isolte softens. ‘Yes. I’ll see you later.’ She ignores the lift, takes the stairs, her feet clattering on the concrete.

‘Give my love to Viola.’ His voice reaches her as a wavering echo inside the hollow acoustics of the stairwell.

Taxis are Isolte’s indulgence. Usually she can write them off for work. But if she must, she’ll pay black cab rip-off fares to avoid the squalor of the tube, or the pushing and shoving to get on a bus at rush hour.

Isolte leans back, watching the darkening streets. The traffic is at an impatient crawl. London is thick with people on their way back from work or out for the evening. Speeding commuters spill into the road as they push past tourists gathering on corners with upturned faces and cameras. It’s stopped raining but viscous puddles are slick with oil, all the pavements alight with wet reflections.

Her driver crouches over the wheel. Ornaments swing from the rearview mirror: a plain cross, a photo of a dark-eyed child, a plastic Mickey Mouse. Sometimes his eyes slide across the mirror, watching her. She wraps her coat tighter, gazing out of the window. The radio splutters and crackles.

Horns blare and someone shouts angrily. There is a drunk pitching and weaving among the cars, his hands out as if he is blind. A cyclist has to swerve to miss him; and the man on the bike turns, his mouth a circle of outrage. Isolte shrinks into her seat as the drunk staggers past the cab. But she can’t help glancing into his face, seeing his blank gaze swim towards her and away. He has the blunted features of the homeless. Out of the corner of her eye, she catches a sudden swing of movement, hears the thump of bony fingers against glass. His fist hitting her window. Isolte jumps, biting the inside of her lip. The driver turns and swears, changing gear, moving away.

Isolte puts up a finger cautiously; she can taste blood. The drunk’s lost expression has got stuck inside her head, the staring face a blurred caricature of itself. She doesn’t drink. She’s never had the desire to drown herself in that kind of oblivion. There are no gaps in her memory. She likes the feeling of control she has when other people are loosening up, their words running too freely. She’s been at parties where people she hardly knows have confided secrets, whispered their sexual preferences, confessed to infidelities. That kind of vulnerability scares her. Why would anyone do it to themselves?

‘She’s been sleeping a lot today,’ the nurse warns Isolte. She shakes her head, gesturing towards the corner bed where there is a small mound. A sleeping form. The shape so narrow it’s more like a ridge thrown up by a plough.

When Viola was first admitted to hospital, Isolte thought she would be cured. Nine years on, Viola has seen several therapists, and spent a month in a psychiatric ward; she has got a little better and then worse again. This is the third time she’s been hospitalised. Viola’s disappearing act has been going on for a long time.

Isolte moves forward cautiously. The elderly patient in the bed opposite Viola is lying on top of her covers, propped up against pillows and knitting laboriously, loops of purple wool trailing from the bed. She glances up at Isolte and smiles. Isolte smiles back, noticing with a small shock of embarrassment that the woman, who’s sitting with bent legs, has no underwear on. Why hasn’t one of the nurses told her? Why haven’t they simply tucked the covers around her? Isolte turns away quickly and pulls up a chair at her sister’s bedside.

Viola is on her back, neat and straight, her eyes closed, the sheet folded across her chest. She makes no sign that she’s aware of Isolte’s presence.

‘Viola, it’s me. I said I’d come after work. Remember?’ There is no reaction. Isolte sits forward and watches her sister’s face. Viola has a thin yellow tube threading from her right nostril across her cheek and behind her ear. The tube is stuck down with several tabs of clear tape that pucker the skin beneath. Liquid calories are sent creeping through the tube straight into Viola’s stomach.

Viola stirs abruptly, moving her head to the side with a ducking motion as if she can feel something brushing across her face, the slap of a branch perhaps, or an insect bumping against her. Isolte bends closer, whispering, ‘Viola, can you hear me?’ But Viola remains locked in her dreams. Her hands lie on the sheet, curled into fists. Her wrists, sticking out of her blue pyjama cuffs, are painful nubs of bone. Isolte reaches out as if to touch them, fingers hovering. Instead, she folds her hands in her lap.

It’s another world in the hospital. A different kind of time exists here, slow hours drag inside a weatherless zone. Viola’s ward is on the fourth floor in the old Victorian section. It has high ceilings and windows placed at a level that makes it impossible to see out without standing on a chair. The walls are a sickly institutional green; the colour reminds Isolte of her primary school. She can’t think of anything worse than being stuck here for weeks. No wonder Viola sleeps all the time.

There is a restless shifting from the beds: coughing and throat clearing and twisting of covers. A cleaner is mopping the floor half-heartedly, pushing the mop in slow semi-circles in front of him. Isolte can see scummy water collecting inside spidery fronds of cloth. She resigns herself to doing nothing. Instead she sits back in the chair and studies her sister’s face. She feels strangely furtive. Looking at Viola used to be like looking in a mirror that offered all angles. Observing her didn’t count as spying, because it was only as if she was criticising or admiring her own features. (Aha, she would think, so that’s what my nose looks like from the side when I laugh.)

Viola continues to face the ceiling with blind eyes. Her nose and cheekbones protrude in sharp ridges, shadows darkening the hollows. Under her slack lips the outline of her teeth is visible. Isolte can see a skull through her sister’s face; the planes and curves, the gaping eye sockets; the shape swimming into focus like a developing photograph. Isolte blinks and looks away. She can’t get used to seeing her sister like this. It’s becoming a struggle to remember Viola with her childish, rounded cheeks and broad smile, but Isolte knows exactly when the change began: it started when they lived with Aunt Hettie in London, after their life in the forest had ended.

*

The front door opens, letting in the sudden roar of traffic on the Fulham Road. It slams closed. The noises of the street are muffled. One of the dogs gives a welcoming bark; Hettie glances at her watch, frowning. ‘Where on earth has she been?’

Hettie and Isolte look up from their supper as Viola sidles into the kitchen, hands in pockets, a tatty bag trailing from her shoulder; the spaniels already sniffing blindly at her feet, panting with pleasure, tails wagging, and her reaching to touch their silky ears.

Isolte remembers the smell of burnt lamb fat, the kitchen cosy and warm, curtains drawn against an autumn evening. And Viola: gaunt and defensive, waiting silently in the doorway, as if she couldn’t bring herself to enter the room. The alarm bells should have been ringing. Isolte should have known then that she must do something to help her sister.

Viola stands before her aunt and sister with her long hair shaved close as a convict’s, a crop of dark bristles revealing the pallor of her scalp. She runs a hand over her head warily, as if surprised to find the grate of stubble under her fingertips.

Hettie makes an odd sound in her throat, coughing quickly to stifle a gasp.

Viola gives them a defiant glare and shrugs. ‘It’s my hair.’ Her nose ring glints. It’s a recent addition and the skin around the silver flames red and sore.

‘Not now it isn’t,’ Isolte can’t resist pointing out.

And under her show of humour, Isolte felt a prickle of anxiety. She saw how her sister’s collarbone stood out like a yoke; the hands poking out of her drooping cuffs, thin as birds’ claws; nails chewed to the quick. It was four years since they’d left Suffolk, and it was obvious that Viola hadn’t adjusted to living in the city, hadn’t even made friends at their new school.

But mixed in with the anxiety was irritation. Isolte couldn’t help it; sometimes she thought Viola was being deliberately difficult. She drifted about the house like a ghost, uncommunicative and distant. She left her curtains closed all day and her bed went unmade despite Hettie’s complaints, joss sticks filling her darkened room with a sickly smell. She locked her door, staying there for hours. And she almost never sat down to eat with her aunt and sister any more, finding endless excuses to avoid it.

‘Like some supper, then?’ Isolte rises purposefully to go to the oven, as if the energy in her movement could force Viola to accept.

‘We’ve saved you mashed potato and a chop, dear,’ Hettie adds. ‘Kept it from the jaws of the hounds.’

The spaniels shift hopefully in their beds by the radiator, looking at Hettie with their tongues hanging out.

Viola shakes her head. ‘I’ve eaten.’

‘There’s ice-cream…’ Isolte tries to keep her voice bright and enticing, tries to mask the distaste she feels at the sight of her sister’s shaven scalp.

But Viola is already halfway out of the door.

Isolte recalls looking at Hettie as they listened to Viola’s footsteps on the stairs. They were united in their frustration. But not really understanding the extent of the problem–not yet. Viola was concealing the extremity of her weight loss from them under baggy clothes. Isolte never saw her sister naked.

There is the click of the bedroom door closing; Hettie wincing. ‘Here it comes…’

A few minutes later, music hammered through the ceiling. Viola was up there alone, her thin fingers pulling singles out of covers: the Sex Pistols, The Clash, the Ramones.

Isolte couldn’t work out why her sister liked that noise.

‘I don’t think she does, really,’ Hettie said. ‘I think she’s just making a point. Isn’t that what young people like to do nowadays?’

But Isolte no longer understood what Viola was trying to say.

*

In her hospital bed, Viola hasn’t stirred again and there is no sign that she will. Isolte stands up, slipping her coat on. The woman opposite is alert to Isolte’s departure; she stops knitting, beckoning urgently. Isolte walks over with a polite smile.

The woman’s face contorts and twitches in excitement or pain. She pushes away a tangle of purple and clutches at Isolte’s sleeve with her gnarled fingers. ‘Would you be so kind,’ she gasps, as Isolte bends to her level, ‘only I’m expecting my son, you see, and his children. If you see them, could you be sure to tell them where I am?’

The woman’s voice is surprising; her accent makes Isolte think of shooting parties and the tearoom at Fortnum & Mason. Isolte hears breath rattling inside a chest.

Isolte nods, swallowing. She pulls her sleeve from the woman’s grip. ‘Yes. Of course I will.’

She walks quickly between the beds, head down, shoving her hands into her pockets, guilty and glad for her freedom.

She is overcome by a need for Ben, for the healthy bounce of his step and his male nonchalance. Ben fills a room with his needs and his opinions and his jokes. Sometimes that irritates her, but at other times it is the most comforting thing she can think of. They’ve been together for over a year now, and she keeps spare underwear, make-up and a wash bag at his flat. There’s no need to go home, she’ll go straight to his place. She presses the button next to the lift eagerly. She feels as though she’s running away.

Isolte plans to distract Ben from his phone and the TV, dissuade him from dragging her out to bars to meet friends keen to down vodka martinis in his company. They can stay in, just the two of them, shut out the rest of the world, phone for a takeaway from the local Indian. That’s another reassuring trait of Ben’s–his thoughtless, uncomplicated relationship with food. Later, in his king-size bed, she’ll feel safe inside his embrace. She loves it when Ben hugs her so tightly her breath is squeezed out of her lungs. She can already taste the chilli flaming between their lips.

Mummy was sleeping on . . .