‘Then you sit down and get comfy and I’ll make you one.’
‘Why don’t we switch that around, Mum, and I’ll makeyoua cuppa,’ I suggested, my hand already on the door handle to the kitchen.
‘Because you don’t know where anything is kept,’ she said firmly, and then, with a hint of her old spark, added, ‘And that’s a storage cupboard you’re about to walk into.’
I smiled, and it felt like a huge relief that I could still remember how to do so.
‘Okay. But just tea, Mum. No food.’
A few moments later I heard the rush of water filling the kettle, and cocked my head in anticipation as I waited for the sound of plates and cutlery. They followed right on cue. It looked as though I would be eating something after all.
As I waited for her to come back, I looked around her new lounge. It was strange seeing so many things I remembered in an unfamiliar location. It was as though pieces of my past had been slotted into a new jigsaw. They didn’t quite fit, but you had to be part of the family to fully understand why not. Almost as though I’d been drawn there magnetically, I found myself walking towards the fireplace. It wasn’t a brick inglenook like we’d had before, but a neatly tiled aperture with a gas flame-effect fire. But it wasn’t the heating source that had caught my eye from across the room. It was the collection of newly framed family photographs that stood proudly above it. My eyes smarted as I picked up the last photograph of the four of us, taken just weeks before the day when Dad, an experienced angler who’d fished in the same cove for decades, had somehow got cut off by the tide and drowned. In the photo, Mum was beaming at the camera, her arm around Dad’s waist as she cuddled up close to her husband, her head a couple of inches below his shoulder. On his other side was Amelia, at sixteen already a whole head taller than Mum. I completed the line-up, skinny-limbed and freckle-faced, with a gap in my grin where an incisor tooth should have been. I reached out, tracing each face with my finger. I lingered longest on Amelia’s and then my father’s. ‘Look after her, Dad,’ I whispered.
*
I managed three buttered crumpets, which tasted about as appetising as the packaging they’d come in. But at least they seemed to satisfy Mum that I wasn’t about to keel over from starvation.
‘They always were your favourite,’ she said, gathering up the butter-smeared plates.
They weren’t, actually. They were Amelia’s preferred teatime treat, and it was unusual for Mum to make that kind of mistake. But given the day we’d lived through, it was hardly surprising. It must be hard separating childhood histories when your younger child looks exactly like your elder, who’d been born eight years earlier. There were times when evenIstruggled to know which one of us I was looking at in old snaps in the family album.
It had been easier in my teens, when I went through a period of rebellion that featured outrageous hairstyles in a shade of red never found in nature. I ran my fingers now through my shoulder-length hair, long since restored to its natural colour. I couldn’t even remember why I’d tried so hard to push every boundary or break every curfew back then. Amelia once said she thought I’d been trying to create a big enough chasm between us to assert my individuality. With the benefit of hindsight, and having now read quite a bit on the subject, she was probably right. Apparently, it’s a fairly common phenomenon with twins – even ones as startlingly unique as us.
Eventually, the need to look different,bedifferent, was nowhere near as strong as the ties that bound us as sisters. I still felt the tug of those strands, perhaps more strongly than Amelia ever had. Despite our outward similarity, our personalities remained totally different. Amelia had a way with numbers, more of a gift really – think Rain Man on an off day and you wouldn’t be far off. But for me, maths remained a conundrum I had no interest in solving. I used to wonder if, during the IVF, when the cells divided in the Petri dish, she’d somehow ended up with all the mathematical genes, leaving me to scoop up the ones for language.
It felt like a forgone conclusion that Amelia would study mathematics at university, get a first and end up working in finance. Almost as inevitable as that the girl who’d always had a book in her hand would wind up working in publishing, with opportunities she’d never dared to dream of finally being within her grasp.
The tea had cooled in the pot and our conversation was going round in circles, all of them careful to avoid the uncertainty of Amelia’s medical prognosis.
‘What I don’t understand,’ I said, looking at a recent photograph of my sister as though asking her to help me out, ‘is what the hell made her leave her cottage in the middle of the night?’ I blamed my job and lack of sleep for my very dramatic shortlist of possibilities. ‘Could she have been trying to escape from someone? A home invasion, maybe? Or perhaps her cottage was on fire? Or she could have heard someone calling for help and gone outside to investigate?’
Mum loved me too much to call my suggestions ridiculous. ‘I was thinking more along the lines that she’d been putting something in the outside bin and had accidentally locked herself out and had wandered off to get help.’
‘Hmm, yeah, okay. Thatdoesmake more sense,’ I conceded.
‘Except that it doesn’t,’ Mum said, with a worried sigh. ‘You see, after they’d confirmed her identity, the police went to Amelia’s cottage to check it out.’
I sat up straighter in my seat, back in darkest thriller territory once more.
‘What did they find?’
‘Nothing,’ said Mum. ‘Absolutely nothing. They said everything appeared to be in order, except for the fact that her front door was wide open. She wasn’t locked out at all, Lexi; she could have gone back inside whenever she wanted.’
We fell into a troubled silence, punctuated only by the persistent ticking of the carriage clock on the mantelpiece. I was so busy running impossible scenarios through my head, I failed to notice Mum’s responses were getting slower and slower until eventually they stopped altogether. It was only when a soft delicate snore came from her direction that I realised she’d fallen asleep right there in her armchair, her tea still held in cupped hands.
I got to my feet and gently eased the mug from her grasp. It was an old favourite from the past and I was surprised to see it had survived the years and a house move. The ceramic paint was no longer brilliant red, and the wordsI love you, Mumhad all but faded away from a thousand cycles in the dishwasher, but tonight, of all nights, she must have pulled it out from the back of the cupboard. I thought I knew why.
‘Come on, Mum,’ I said, gently rousing her. ‘Let’s get you to bed.’
She climbed the stairs weirdly, one step at a time, like a toddler who’d recently mastered the art. Was that something new, I wondered? It was the second time that day that her age had given me cause for concern. My knee-jerk reaction was to remind myself to ask Amelia about it, and the idea that she might not be able to tell me, not tomorrow, nor the next day, or maybe even ever, was a dreadful thought to hold in my head for the rest of the night.
My heart felt heavy with nostalgia as I made my way back downstairs with a bundle of bed linen in my arms that I’d found in the hall cupboard. I made up a bed on the couch, knowing if Mum had been in charge there would have been perfectly neat hospital corners on the folds. It made me think of Amelia, lying alone and scared in a hospital bed. I was projecting, of course. I had no idea if that was how my sister was feeling. The drugs they had her on were probably strong enough to knock out a shire horse, so she was probably feeling nothing at all.
But I couldn’t claim that luxury when I switched off the low-wattage table lamp and lay down on the makeshift bed. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw only the beach where Amelia had mysteriously got lost. I knew the mudflats where she’d been found. They were less than a fifteen-minute walk from Amelia’s cottage door. How had she not been able to find her way back there? It felt as though I was stepping into her thoughts as I visualised a moonlit sky, the sting of salt and spray on my face and the harsh gritty feel of sand and stones beneath my bare feet. I opened my eyes. Was I actually seeing what Amelia had seen? Was she reaching out through the abyss of time and space between us and telling me how it had been, or was it simply the result of the overactive imagination of someone who’s read too many suspenseful stories?
It used to make people uncomfortable when we spoke about those snatched shared emotions and sensations. So, over the years we’d learnt it was best to keep such stories to ourselves. But there was no logical explanation for how Amelia had felt mysteriously queasy for twenty-four hours before learning I’d been suffering from food poisoning in New York. Or how I’d been doubled over in pain, far worse than hers, whenshe’dbeen the sister with appendicitis.
More shaken than I wanted to admit, I wriggled upright and reached for my phone to check the time. As weary as I felt, my body clock was still firmly set on New York time, where it was – I did a quick calculation – still only nine o’clock at night. The realisation caused a frisson of irritation as I noted that Jeff still hadn’t messaged me back.
