The Twins
J.S. LARK

One More Chapter

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020

Copyright © J.S. Lark 2020

Cover design by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

Cover images © Shutterstock.com

J.S. Lark asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This is a work of fiction. Every reasonable attempt to verify the facts against available documentation has been made.

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Source ISBN: 9780008366179

Ebook Edition © November 2020 ISBN: 9780008366162

Version: 2020-08-18

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1: 2019

Chapter 2: 2018

Chapter 3

Chapter 4: 1982

Chapter 5

Chapter 6: 2018

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9: 1982

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13: 2018

Chapter 14: 1983

Chapter 15: 2018

Chapter 16: 1985

Chapter 17: 2018

Chapter 18: 1985

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22: 2019

Chapter 23: 2018

Chapter 24: 1985

Chapter 25: 2019

Chapter 26: 2018

Chapter 27: 1985

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30: 2019

Chapter 31: 1985

Chapter 32: 2019

Chapter 33: 1985

Chapter 34: 2019

Chapter 35: 1985

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38: 2019

Chapter 39: 2018

Chapter 40: 1985

Chapter 41: 2018

Chapter 42: 2019

Chapter 43: 1985

Chapter 44: 2018

Chapter 45: 1985

Chapter 46: 2018

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52: 2019

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55: 2018

Chapter 56: 2019

Chapter 57: 1989

Chapter 58: 2019

Chapter 59: 1989

Chapter 60

Chapter 61: 2019

Chapter 62

Acknowledgements

Also by J.S. Lark

About the Author

About the Publisher

This book is dedicated to my daughter. You keep me smiling, you believe in me and constantly encourage me, even when my confidence completely fails. Thank you for the cheerleading.

Chapter 1
2019

Lucy’s arms fold into a tight knot across her chest, holding herself as tightly as the seatbelt. Holding in the anger.

I’m glad she’s angry with them. I want her on my side. I need her with me.

I let off the accelerator, press the clutch pedal and drop a gear, then push the accelerator pedal to the floor, hitting the revs hard to get the car over the top of the pass between the peaks of the hills. As if getting over the hill will mean we can escape the past. But I can’t change the past, only the future.

Dark shining speckles appear on the windscreen. The drops of rain seem to come from nowhere. I turn the wipers on. The rubber blades screech across the windscreen, back and forth, forming an eerie soundtrack to the uncomfortable atmosphere in the car. The rain is not very heavy, but it’s seriously cold outside, and the raindrops are likely to freeze as soon as they hit the ground, layering ice on top of ice.

‘You’re lucky you don’t have a sister.’ I say to Lucy, my voice trying to instil some calm. I want to cool this battle off before she speaks to Jonny. But my nerves hum as if a swarm of bees are flying through my blood. I am not calm. I won’t let her win. It’s not fair. She can’t have everything.

Memories run through my head, clips from a film of us, when we were young. From the days when we used to finish each other’s sentences and know every thought in each other’s heads. I see us doing everything for the first time together. But those days have been destroyed by all the lies and disloyalties since. We had been like two bodies with one mind until she had torn us apart. It’s her fault. She says it’s mine, but it isn’t. It is hers. She is evil.

‘It’s Dad I don’t understand. I can’t believe he did that,’ Lucy says.

‘I know. But it wasn’t his fault.’

My foot touches the brake as the car begins the descent on the other side of the hill. When it’s clear, I can see for miles from this part of the road in the moonlight, across the scenic undulation of the Lake District, the glistening bodies of water sometimes as calm and still as mirrors, the woods and the barren tops of more hills and mountains with white Herdwick sheep dotted across them. But it’s pitch-black beyond the beam of the headlights tonight. All I can see are the spots of rain, the windscreen wipers sweeping them away, and beyond that, about fifteen feet along the road to its boundaries, there’s a drystone wall and a drop on the other side of the road, where the steep hillside is shrouded in woodland.

I press the brake pedal again before a corner and navigate the turn in the centre of the road. I am probably driving too fast, but I want to get Lucy home quickly, to speak to her father, and I can’t see any headlights coming towards us.

I take another turn too fast. Lucy’s arms unfold, and one hand reaches forward, to press on the dashboard and steady herself.

The car swerves on the next bend and the back of the car slips out a little. Ice. I’d seen a gritter truck earlier but in this weather, this high up in the hills, the rain will freeze on the ground regardless.

I press the brake pedal to slow down, but this time there’s no bite. It doesn’t grip anything. Just goes down and up in an indifferent pumping action.

Tree trunks dart past in the beam of the headlights.

Another bend approaches, my foot pumps the brake pedal three times, trying to make it catch. The braking system doesn’t respond.

There are lights in the distance. Another car on the road.

‘The brakes won’t work, Lucy.’ I’m worried now. It’s not normal.

Through the corner of my left eye I see her look at me.

I steer around another bend, my foot pushing on the brake pedal trying to make it respond with brute force. In my mind’s-eye, I travel on down the road trying to remember a farmgate or walking track, where I can steer off the road and slow the car down. All I can remember is the continuous unforgiving drystone wall on the left, and the steep drop down through the wood to the lake.

‘I can’t stop the car, Lucy.’ She’s watching my fingers clinging onto the steering wheel. I am not in control of the car. I’m just holding on.

At least I know the road; at least I remember the turns.

My foot is still pushing on the impotent brake pedal.

Useless thing!

Glaringly bright white headlights face us. Dead on. Blinding me. One hand lifts off the wheel to shade my eyes as the light floods the car. ‘Lucy!’ Panic pierces through my voice. Every single muscle in my body locks stiff with fear. I am not in control.

Lucy leans over, reaching out and grabbing for the steering wheel, and turning us towards the trees, fighting the inevitable as if there’s a chance she’ll save us.

As we fly off the edge of the road into the woods, the first impact is instant and hard. It smashes the windscreen and judders through my body like the force of an explosion as the airbag bursts from its casing and presses me back against the seat.

Lucy’s scream rips through the car.

We are on the most frightening rollercoaster, racing downwards. Tumbling over and over through the bracken. Cracking branches. Bouncing from tree trunk to tree trunk. The car is no more than a pinball dropping down towards the lake. My head and body are thrown one way then the other, jolted, pulled, and caught by the seatbelt. Every strike against the metal of the car’s carcass is agony. The dents gather, crushing us in, narrowing the space we have.

Lucy screams every time we hit something. The roof above her side is crushed right down.

We are going to die.

That’s all I can think.

We are going to die.

Chapter 2
2018
Eight months earlier

I walk to the door to answer the insistent knocking and throw a smile over my shoulder for Lucy to catch.

She’s sitting at the breakfast bar. She smiles back as her glass of wine lifts to her lips.

We’re having a mother-daughter night in – wine, nibbles, and a good natter. Jonny is working late in the café, undertaking a deep clean with Marie. I had not volunteered to help, a night with my daughter is much more fun.

I should have closed the blinds, though, so whoever is knocking couldn’t see us inside. They’d have moved on to sell elsewhere. The repeated knocks tell us that the person isn’t going away. No matter how much charm they put on when I open the door, I’m not going to buy anything. I’d never buy from someone who doesn’t know that someone not answering their door is likely to mean they don’t want to be interrupted.

I twist the lock, push the handle down, and open the door. ‘Hell— Oh.’ Time slides into graphic slow motion, moving a millisecond at a time … Her. She’s here. But she can’t be here … I blink to clear her from my eyes. But she’s still standing on my doorstep.

My own blue eyes look back at me.

She can’t be here. ‘Susan?’

‘Hello. Long time no see,’ she says.

‘Why are you here? How are you here?’ Go away. A coldness, ice or stone, spreads through my body running through my arteries into the narrowest blood vessels. Medusa is at my door. I can’t move.

‘Are you going to let me in? I know it’s a surprise but I thought, when I found you, it was better to just show up.’

I hold the door firmly with only a foot-wide gap, not letting her in.

The ice cracks and my heart leaps into a running race.

My thoughts scramble around in a cluttered attic, looking for memories I’ve lost. How? But I lost those memories for a good reason. There are others … Some break out, forcing their way through prison bars, smashing open the padlocks that have restrained them for years. I had pushed them all out of the way. But her. I’ve never remembered what happened to her. All I know is that it’s tied up with horrible things that my mind doesn’t want to remember and that I never thought I would see her again.

‘Who is it?’ The tone in Lucy’s voice implies she’s sensed the imbalance in the atmosphere. ‘Mum?’ Lucy’s voice draws closer. ‘Are you …?’ Her voice drains away like water whirling down through a plughole.

I look over my shoulder at her, to explain, but she is looking beyond me, her eyes breaching the pathetic wall I’ve tried to build with my body, and she can see.

I want to run and find chairs, mattresses, and everything I have to set up a blockade in front of the open door and the hell on earth beyond.

‘Mum?’ Lucy’s gaze moves from Susan to me.

What do I say?

‘You look just like my mum,’ Lucy says across my shoulder. Then she looks at me. ‘I didn’t know you had any family.’

My mind is spinning through all the years we were together and all the years I have had to myself.

‘Mum?’ Lucy pushes for an explanation, standing so close her breath touches my ear and brushes the loose strands of hair that have escaped my ponytail.

‘This is my twin sister, Susan.’ I don’t move, keeping my body as a barrier between them.

‘You have a twin sister?’ Lucy’s voice lifts, her eyes widening, and her mouth stays open.

You’ll catch flies I used to say to her when she was young.

‘Let her in, Mum.’ Lucy’s beautiful, long, slender fingers settle on my shoulder, implying I should move out of the way.

Lucy doesn’t understand, and I can’t explain. I have not spoken about this since the day I left hospital with every bad memory firmly locked away. Jonny remembers things about when I last saw Susan. But he knows I can’t and won’t face them. A monster screams in the dark where those memories are. I want to push her away, I want to slam and lock the door. The only thing I know about Susan now is she can let that monster out.

Why is she here?

Lucy’s fingers squeeze my shoulder gently, urging me to step back. I do. Letting Lucy pull down the blockade.

‘Sarah.’ She steps in, her eyes and her voice saying something more than my name.

Shivers run up and down my spine. Wary, defensive heckles rising. It is strange hearing her say Sarah in my voice.

Her eyes are on Lucy, looking at Lucy’s eyes.

‘This is Lucy,’ I say, ‘my daughter. Mine and Jonny’s daughter.’

‘You’re married, I know.’

How does she know that I married Jonny?

‘You two are so alike,’ Lucy says.

‘We are identical,’ Susan replies.

We are not identical. We appear the same. Clones of one another. But we are not the same; Susan is evil. I can’t even say how I know that now, but I know. It’s a feeling in me. I just know she is the reason I ran. She is the reason I can’t remember. She is my living and breathing past that was so bad I have erased it from my memory.

‘Come and sit down,’ Lucy encourages, her hand lifting in the direction of the breakfast bar where our wineglasses are left, half full, waiting for us to return to them.

The image of me, an identical me from height to weight, walks across the large open-plan space that is my home and immediately makes it not a home. How can it be a home when it’s no longer safe?

‘Sit down,’ Lucy urges again, pulling out the barstool beside the one she has been using. ‘Would you like some wine?’

With anyone else I would be proud of Lucy’s warm welcome. I am proud of the way she is kind and thoughtful towards others because she is my daughter and she has grown into a wonderful woman. But this is Susan she’s welcoming, and I can’t tell Lucy why we should be pushing her back out the door.

Her hair is long, and it’s cut to almost exactly the same length as mine. It lies across her shoulders, the waves and curls in exactly the same places as mine. I’d forgotten how alike we are. It had been normal then. It’s strange now. We haven’t seen each other for more than three decades, so how can we still be so alike?

I climb up onto the barstool on the opposite side of the breakfast bar from her as Lucy takes another wine glass out of a cupboard on the other side of the kitchen.

Susan has the same deep-set wrinkle as me between her eyebrows at the top of her nose, marking a frequent frown line. We have aged alike.

No. We are not alike. Susan is evil, and I have been living a normal life for years. I am not like her. But I don’t know how to be me with her here. She has made me we again. Us. Twins. One entity not two individuals. When we were young it meant everything she or I did was done by us. Nothing was her fault nor mine. It was always ours.

I don’t want to be involved in anything she is now; she can’t be here to do anything good.

‘Mum, you’re staring,’ Lucy says in the voice I would have used if I’d said the same thing to her when she was a child. She picks up the wine bottle, fills the glass in her other hand, draining the bottle, and hands the glass to Susan.

‘Thanks. It’s lovely to meet you,’ Susan says to her.

‘And you,’ Lucy answers. ‘How do I not know about you?’

‘I think you should leave, Susan,’ I say. She hasn’t taken a sip from the glass. But I have found my voice. I get up off the barstool and lift a hand, directing her towards the door.

‘Be fair, give me a chance,’ Susan says, watching me and not moving.

When we were younger, I’d known everything she thought, everything she was about to say. Everything she liked and everything she hated. I don’t know anything about her now and I don’t want to.

‘Mum. I want to talk to Susan.’ Lucy is always argumentative when she’s had a drink. She loves debate. She loves to challenge a point of view when she’s had a glass or two.

‘No, you don’t,’ I answer.

Susan sips some wine from the glass in her hand.

I want to push her off the barstool and out of my house.

Chapter 3

The acidic white wine tingles on my tongue, not really wetting my dry mouth. I fight the bitter look that wants to set on my face as I swallow and spread my smile, aiming it at Lucy. Then I look at her. At Sarah. I hadn’t known what I would find in this secret little idyll in the Lake District. But now I know for certain that she has stolen what was supposed to be mine. All of it. ‘I know it’s a shock. I’ll go if you want me to. Give you some time to get used to the idea.’ I don’t move at all, though. I want to stay. I want to watch and listen.

Her eyes – my eyes – watch me. Suspicion hovering. She must have known I would find her eventually. We’re identical twins; it is impossible for us to lose each other forever. Twins are connected by invisible threads.

She doesn’t answer me. My eyes turn back to Lucy as the glass slips slightly in my sweaty palm.

‘Let her stay,’ Lucy pleads. Without waiting for Sarah’s answer, she looks at me. ‘Tell me about yourself. Why are you here?’

I see echoes of us in her expression and she is slim like us. She moves like us too, that is the strangest thing. I have seen her before. I’ve watched them all from a hiding place among the trees in the wood by the café. It is not the same as being close. Now I can see that Lucy’s large eyes are exactly the same as ours, from their shape and the long dark eyelashes to the irises, a mix of pale powder-blues, like water-colour paintings with flecks of grey, and deeper.

She is a beautiful. Like us. She’s the child I dream of. I want to touch her, to stroke her hair, and press a hand to her cheek to feel her warmth and confirm her reality.

Sarah has been lucky. She has taken the luck that was mine first.

‘I don’t know what to tell you. There is too much to say. I have no idea where to begin.’

Sarah walks away from us, to the fridge. Dismissing my presence.

She shouldn’t turn her back on me. I’m Susan. I’m the evil one now, and luck can change.

‘Begin at the beginning,’ Lucy says, as across the room Sarah removes another bottle of wine from the fridge.

Lucy tucks her hair behind one ear. The movement draws my attention to something that catches in the light. There is an auburn tint in her brown her. Mum’s hair had an auburn tint like that. We inherited our dark brown hair and blue eyes from the father we never met. But Mum’s brown hair had a natural red tint that you could only see when her hair caught the light in a certain way. That gene skipped our generation but here it is in Lucy.

The base of the glass bottle bumps down on the cold slate top of the breakfast bar.

I take another sip of wine and swallow it. ‘Maybe your mother should tell the story.’

Sarah looks at me but doesn’t answer as she pours herself more wine. She’s defensive. Protective. Distrustful.

She should be.

‘If I had wanted to tell you the story of my past, you’d already know it,’ she says to Lucy offering her the new bottle of wine.

This is not the reunion I pictured in my head. But that’s why I hesitated and watched them from the woods for two weeks, because I’ve been working out how to respond to them no matter how they react. I put my glass down.

If she wants me to crawl on my knees, begging to be welcomed into her family, I won’t do it. She has Jonny and she has a daughter. This was supposed to be mine. She has everything, while I have nothing. She should want to share this with me. She should want to make amends. Instead, she’s run away and hidden here.

So, let’s get the truth out into the open. ‘When we were kids we were inseparable …’ I begin.

Chapter 4
1982

We drift back from school, in no hurry, meandering through the streets, alleyways, and parks of the Old Town in Swindon. Latchkey twins. There is nothing to rush home for. Our house is usually empty. It is just a house not a home, with a door and windows, a sofa and beds, and a cooker that Mum doesn’t know how to use.

We walk along the muddy routes through the woods in Lawns Park, then sit on the kerb of the street a block away from ours and throw little stones down the drain playing a target game. Drain darts. The slot in the centre is worth one hundred points and the slots going outwards descend in points from that. When we are bored of that we sneak into Mrs Edwards’ garden and pull the flower heads off her roses, then scatter the petals like confetti across her perfectly trimmed green lawn.

‘Here comes the bride, all fat and wide.’ I throw pale pink petals into the air. The eddy of a warm summer breeze catches them and sends them spinning like sycamore seeds over and around Sarah.

‘Who do you want to be?’ she says. ‘Romulus or Remus?’

We had found the story of the twins Romulus and Remus in a book in the school library today. A book about myths and legends.

The twin babies had been lost and found by wolves.

When they were grown-up, they’d built cities. One of them had built Rome.

But because Rome was a better city, one twin had killed the other and taken Rome. The evil one had killed the other.

We are the only twins in our primary school. Identical twins are special people. We’re better than others. Rare humans. We are as rare as pearls. Uncle Martin used to tell us, ‘Rare as pearls you two.’

Uncle Michael used to say, ‘Which is the evil one? There’s always one evil twin.’ Uncle Michael had left but his favourite phrase hangs around our house. ‘Always one good, one bad,’ he’d used to tease. Mum says it when one of us does something wrong, but she never knows which of us did it.

‘Tell them which one of you is evil,’ Uncle Michael used to say in front of his friends.

‘Me. Me. I am. I am,’ we had argued to make him laugh.

We had liked Uncle Michael’s deep laugh. He had pretended he was Father Christmas one day. We knew he wasn’t because Mum had told us Father Christmas was ‘bollocks’. But we liked Uncle Michael’s laugh.

Uncle Michael had disappeared, like all of Mum’s boyfriends. They appear and disappear as quickly as the coins Uncle Stuart used to tuck behind his ears. That had been the only magic trick he knew.

‘I will be Romulus,’ Sarah says. She snarls and lifts her hands, curling her fingers over like claws. ‘We’re wolf cubs.’

Our laughter blends, merging into the same sound. The same laugh. Everything about us is the same.

I love having someone the same as me. Even Mum can’t tell the difference between us, because there is no difference. No one can tell us apart.

Sarah howls.

I snarl, then howl back at her.

We laugh again.

Chapter 5

Uncle Harry smokes a lot of cigarettes. Mum says he’s like a chimney, puffing away, ‘fag after fag’. The house smells horrible when Uncle Harry is here and our bedroom fills with smoke, like a winter fog.

We hate him and the smelly cigarettes he rolls up between his fingers and thumbs.

We want to get rid of him.

We hate the way he speaks to us. He calls us names, he calls us brats, and tells Mum to ignore us.

‘We aren’t brats, we’re wolf cubs.’ That’s what we tell him. Then he swipes out a hand at us and we run before he can hit us.

Susan told me to throw away the lump of black squishy stuff that he breaks up into his cigarettes. I did that. He turned the sofa cushions upside down and then the sofa upside down, shouted, and threw things at Mum. He thought she’d taken it, or smoked it. But he didn’t go away.

Susan told me to cut the toe bits off his socks. She has the best ideas. Mum’s boyfriends hate it when they get up in the morning and find their socks and have nothing to cover their toes. We have used that trick four times. Mum’s boyfriends leave because of that trick.

Uncle Harry hadn’t left.

Now, Susan’s dared me to cut his hair when he’s asleep.

It is 7am. We creep across the landing together, tiptoeing over the carpet. Susan is in front of me. Criss-crosses of threads show in the carpet in places. I don’t step on the threads. We play games with them. We play the snakes-are-in-the-carpet game.

My fingers tighten on the kitchen scissors so they don’t slip out of my hand. The oily sweat on my palm is making it difficult to hold the plastic handles and one handle is broken so there is only a bit of the other handle to hold. I need to be quick and quiet. I can’t let the scissors slip out of my fingers.

Susan pushes down the door handle that hangs loose because a screw had fallen out.

Mum and Uncle Harry aren’t awake. They never wake early. When we go to school they are always in bed.

But they come home late. We hear them banging the door shut, laughing, shouting, or fighting as they move around the house. Then Mum’s bed squeaks and creaks.

We cover our heads with our pillows so we can sleep.

Susan pushes the door so it swings wide, then moves out of the way. I tiptoe on, sneaking into Mum’s room.

Mum’s room has shadows like cobwebs all over it; they are made by the early daylight shining through the net curtains.

Uncle Harry has a long fringe that he loves. He hates it if anyone messes his hair up. His friends rub his hair to make him angry.

His fingers touch his hair all the time, pulling his fringe forward and moving it back over his eye in the way he likes.

I am going to cut his fringe off.

A nervous laugh tries to push its way out through my lips. I press them tightly closed so it can’t escape. He will hate it. He is going to be so angry.

Susan waits by the open door behind me as I sneak across the room, a stalking wolf cub.

We have looked at every book with wolves in it in the school library. We love wolves. We draw pictures of wolves at school and sometimes we stand out in the garden together, or open our bedroom window, and howl at the moon.

Uncle Harry is lying on his side with his mouth open. He makes a lot of noises when he is asleep, but it’s not quite snoring. It’s like whispered snores and sometimes his mouth opens and closes like a fish’s.

His fringe is flopping to one side in a weird way, hanging at a strange angle because of the sticky styling gel he puts in his hair.

I creep closer, the broken bits of the scissors’ plastic handles pressing into my fingers.

I reach out, my fingers shaking, take hold of the ends of the strands of hair with my left hand and raise the scissors in my right hand. The hair is light as feathers, but it is stiff and sticky with all the gloopy gel he uses on it.

The sharp blades of the scissors slice through the first strands. Snip. Snip. I don’t cut in a straight line.

Snip.

Snip.

Ten-centimetre-long strands drop onto the pillow in clumps beside his open mouth.

‘Take it,’ Susan whispers from the doorway, her voice claiming the pieces of hair as our trophy.

I pick up some of the hair from his pillow and rush out of the room, my footsteps heavy and the floor creaking.

Susan pulls the door closed behind me; that creaks too and it bumps against the frame.

Our gazes and our smiles collide and our hands press over our mouths trying to keep our giggles from travelling into Mum’s room. Susan’s eyes dance with laughter. In the shadowy area of the landing, where there’s no window to let in any sunlight, the black pupils in her large eyes are wide and there’s a wicked cartoon-glint in them. I must have the same glint in my eyes.

***

‘Fucking kids! Where the fuck are you? Fucking brats!’ Uncle Harry’s yells boom out of Mum’s bedroom. His feet hit the floor the sound thumps through the ceiling, bouncing around the walls.

I look at Sarah. It’s half an hour since she cut his hair. We’re still smiling.

I imagine his fingers lifting when he woke up, trying to comb through a fringe that’s not there. We win. He will go, and he won’t come back.

Mum’s bedroom door bangs into the wall upstairs. Her door hits the wall in her bedroom when it’s opened too fast and too wide. There’s a dent of broken plaster where the handle hits every time she or one of our uncles is angry.

‘Fucking kids! Where are you? Get here!’ His yells and his footsteps bang their way onto the stairs, his hand rattling the loose struts in the bannister.

Sarah’s smile lifts to a grin that dents into dimples in her cheeks. There’s a gleam in her eyes. She is the daredevil. She loves danger. I have ideas, but she has courage.

Uncle Harry bursts into the living room, smashing the door out of his way, whirling like the Tasmanian Devil. Large, naked, and as violently red as a chilli pepper.

He dives towards Sarah. ‘Ah!’ Sarah screams as his big hands reach out and she leaps over the arm of the sofa, out of his grasp.

‘Ah!’ I squeal, ducking and turning away from a grabbing hand. I run towards the front door ahead of Sarah, still screaming. The latch is fiddly and I have to push down the lock, turn the small knob as well as the handle. I twist and push and pull as Sarah screams behind me.

When I run out, cold raindrops hit my hair. Large drops of cold rain soak through my nightdress, pounding down like little hammers. They drench me in a rush.

I turn, looking back for Sarah. She’s still in the house running around the living room, leaping on and off the furniture. She’s on the wrong side of the room to get out; Uncle Harry is between her and the door.

Uncle Harry snarls, grunts, and shouts as he tries to catch her, spit erupting from his mouth in a revolting spray.

Sarah’s screams follow her around the chairs and the sofa.

Rain drips from my hair. ‘Come on. Come on.’ I urge her to run across the sofa to join me outside. Her eyes are focused on me, reaching out to me.

‘Ah—’

Her scream breaks and becomes the cracked cry of being caught as his fingers grab the top of her arm, pulling her back and throwing her from the sofa to the floor. Her head bounces on the carpet.

My breath pulls all the way down to the soles of my feet.

I want to move but every muscle feels as if it is twisted, wrung out like a flannel. I’m scared. Uncle Harry is a giant. He’s like Popeye. She kicks and hits. He sits on top of her, straddling her hips, trapping her. ‘Fucking kids. I’ll teach you to fuck with me.’ One hand circles her neck as his other hand curls into a fist.

My hair drips out the milliseconds.

She thumps his thick arms, but her fists bounce back.

His fist hits Sarah’s cheek so hard I hear a crack in the moment that I step back through the door, running to help. Too late. Too late to stop him.

Blood sprays from her mouth over his forearm and splatters on the carpet.

She screams again as the second punch hits her cheek.

A sharp pain bursts through my head. I feel everything she feels. I jump on his back, my arm wrapping around his neck. ‘Get off her!’

He hits and hits her as I hit him. But my fists don’t make a difference. ‘Stop! Stop it!’ Tears merge with the rain that’s still dripping from my wet hair.

His elbow thrusts back and hits my ribs, knocking the air out of me.

‘Stop! Harry! Stop!’ Mum yells from the stairs.

I press my teeth into the skin on his shoulder, biting as hard as I can, biting like a wolf. I puncture his skin and bitter tasting blood fills my mouth.

‘What is happening in here?’ Another man’s deep voice rumbles through the room. Another man’s large hand pulls on my shoulder and his arm wraps around my waist, pulling, ripping my teeth from Uncle’s Harry’s shoulder.

Sirens wail outside.

The room fills up with people. There are six men in here. I scream and kick as the man keeps hold of me, keeping me away from Uncle Harry, with an arm around my middle.

‘Let me go! Let me go!’ I need to help Sarah.

The sirens wail louder.

Three of the men drag Uncle Harry off Sarah, holding his head and arms. His chest heaves like I imagine a dragon’s lungs would if it was going to breathe fire.

‘Come on, love. Come away,’ a woman says to me as the man lets my feet touch the floor. I’ve seen her before. She lives on our street, over the road.

I don’t move. I can’t. My muscles have all locked up again. I can see Sarah. A man in a green suit is leaning over her, pointing the light from a thin torch into her eyes. Her skin is white and her body is limp, lifeless, lying on the floor like a blood-stained ragdoll.

The man’s arm lets go of me, but the woman wraps me up in both arms and one of her hands presses my cheek against the cushion of her large breasts. Her soft cotton T-shirt smells of flowery soap, and her breath carries the scent of mint. ‘It’s all right. It’s all right, dear,’ she says over and over as she rubs a hand across my wet hair.

I must be making her wet. The thin nighty I have worn since I was five is soaked. It’s clinging to my skin. The hems of these nightdresses reach to just above our knees. They had been down to our ankles when we were five. I am naked beneath it, with all these people in the room, and it is loose because the elastic in the neck and sleeves has stretched.

Sarah.

I push the woman away. Sarah hasn’t moved. The hem of her nighty is at her waist because she’s been kicking.

‘It’s all right dear. It’s all right.’ The woman tries to hold me again.

I step away from her, my arms outstretched trying to keep all the adults away. It isn’t all right. Sarah isn’t moving, her face is a mass of scarlet blood and bright red lumps, and she hasn’t pulled her nighty down.

‘Sarah. Sarah.’ I kneel beside her, trying to wake her up. The man’s hand surrounds my arm and he pulls me back up onto my feet. ‘She’s all right.’

‘She isn’t. Let me go!’ I try to pull my arm free. He just holds me tighter.

Chapter 6
2018

The front door opens.

Susan and Lucy turn and look the same moment I do.

Jonny pulls his key out of the lock as he steps in.

My heart bursts with relief in an explosion of adrenalin. ‘Jonny!’ He will tell Susan to get out. I slide off the barstool deserting the glass I’ve been nursing while Susan tells her tales of us and hurry to the door.

I need to hold him. I need reality to kick back in. I need it to be just me and him. I wrap my arms around his middle and press my cheek against the cold leather of his coat as he reaches to hang his keys up by the door. I look up to greet the warm lips that press onto mine. His short, dark beard tickles my chin. The scent he wears lingers in the stubble and the smell fills my nostrils as I breathe in when he pulls away.

His eyes look over my shoulder and then he moves, disengaging from me mentally and physically. He’s seen Susan. His eyebrows lift, increasing the thin wrinkles in his forehead, as his eyes widen.

I turn around, facing her with my arms lifting, to hold him behind me. To protect him. Keep him. I don’t want her to come near. I want him to throw verbal stones over my head, over my wall, aiming them all to be a perfect hit on her.

Susan has left the breakfast bar too. She walks towards us, looking beyond me at him, smiling, with my smile. ‘Hello, Jonny.’

He walks around my barrier. There is no hesitation on his part either. He walks as quickly towards her as she does towards him.

He will tell her to go.

‘Susan.’ His voice carries surprise not anger, and he holds out a hand, offering it, not throwing it at her.

What is he doing? Panic wants me to run between them, push his hand down and shove her away. He knows what talking to her will do to my sanity.

‘Hi.’ Her hand slides into his and her fingers embrace his hand. They do not shake hands, just hold on to one another. ‘It’s been a long time,’ she says with the deeper pitch of warm emotions pressing through her voice.

‘Susan has been telling me about when Mum was a child and she was hit by a man,’ Lucy says as she walks across the room with her wine glass cupped in her hand, the stem dangling between her fingers.

When Susan releases his hand, there is a reddish tint to his skin visible even through the tan left over from the fortnight we spent on holiday in Egypt a month ago.

He knows I hate her. He knows. He shouldn’t want to shake her hand. He should tell her to get out.

His eyes glance at me, questioning, as his hand retreats into his back pocket. ‘Well …’

Say it. Agree with me. Tell her to go. I transport the words to him through my eyes.

He looks at Susan. ‘Why are you here? Where have you been?’ Again, there’s no anger in his voice. It is not a challenge. He makes it sound as if her presence is pleasantly surprising.

I want to know how she found me. What she wants from me. From us. What has she come here to do?

She looks at Jonny. No. It’s not just looking; she’s watching him, absorbing details about him.

‘Are you stay—’

‘Susan has finished her glass of wine. She probably wants to go home now.’ I think Jonny was about to ask her to stay. How can he think I would want that? She is not staying in our home.

She glances backwards, looking at the breakfast bar.

My gaze follows hers.

There’s a mouthful of wine left in her glass.

When her gaze turns back it clashes with mine and she smiles, feigning friendliness and innocence. I know there’s nothing innocent about her presence here. There can’t be. She is Susan.

‘I’ll call a taxi,’ she says.

‘I’ll give you a lift if you want.’ Jonny offers. ‘It’s hard to get a cab this late on a Saturday night. They’ll all be out in town. It’s pub-turning-out time. Where are you staying?’

Why is he being nice to her?

‘I’m renting a room in Keswick.’

‘Why?’ My voice is sharp. A knife blade that jabs. I don’t trust her. How can I?

Her gaze comes back to me. ‘Because I want to be near you.’

‘You’ve been near me, now you can go. You don’t need to stay near here.’ Jonny’s and Lucy’s eyes stare at me, their expressions uncomfortable.

I don’t care if they disagree. I don’t want her near me.

I stare at Sarah. Go away.

‘Mum,’ Lucy complains, the hand that holds her glass lowering. She learned that tone of voice from me when she was a child. I’d used her name like that to tell her stop doing something.

***

‘I don’t need to stay near here, no, but I want to,’ I say to Sarah, then look at Jonny. ‘Thank you for offering, but I’m happy to ring a taxi. I’ll walk back to the main road. It can pick me up at the bus stop; it’s not far, and it won’t be long to wait by the time I get there. The driver will probably be there by the time I am.’ I knew this first meeting would be hard. There can’t be any trust between us and there must be fear. But there should be fear. I just need some glue to stick me to this family so she can’t push me away. I glance at Lucy. Maybe she is the glue.

‘If you’re sure?’ Jonny says.

Lucy reaches out with her free hand, lifts my coat off the hook and passes it to me. Her other hand is still holding her glass.

Sarah moves closer to Jonny and loops an arm around his. Mine, the movement says.

Everything used to be ours long ago. Everything was ours until she decided to make Jonny hers. Then instead of us she became a me.

I would have shared. I shared everything with her.

I smile at Lucy as I slide one arm then the other into the sleeves of my coat. Lucy smiles, her blue eyes watching me as Sarah and Jonny watch me too.

Lucy likes me already, and she doesn’t like her mother’s rudeness. I like Lucy too. I see myself in her. She is intrigued by me. I have been telling her stories that her mother has never told. ‘Shall I give you my phone number?’ I ask Sarah.

She doesn’t move, or even acknowledge that I spoke. She isn’t going to take it. She is not going to get rid of me just by ignoring me.

‘Give it to me.’ Lucy pulls her phone out from the back pocket of her jeans.

Jonny unravels his arm from Sarah’s then wraps it around Sarah’s shoulders.

I speak out the numbers in groups of three. Lucy types them into her phone with her thumb.

‘Ring me,’ I say. ‘So, I have your number.’

She smiles as her thumb touches the phone; a moment later my phone rings and vibrates in my coat pocket. She ends the call.

I look at the image of myself with Jonny, seeing what could have been. ‘I’ll say goodbye then.’ We are an us. She has tried to forget it. But I have never forgotten. No matter how many miles, walls, or years there are between us, I will never forget. We are connected by things that cannot be bound by time or distance.

Jonny smiles. He looks the same to me as he did when I last saw him. I don’t see the impacts of age in his face. I see the young man who stole my heart from inside my chest within the first hour that I’d met him.

What is he thinking? I wish I could tell. How much does he know? There’s no sign that he knows anything.

I want to ask him a hundred questions. I want explanations. I want to be able to understand. Why was I left behind?

‘Goodbye,’ I say, even though I am not ready to go. I want something from them. I need words. An apology. But the emotions overwhelming my heart want revenge too. Something in return for all the years I have suffered while she has had this.

Sarah’s facial expression is stiff. She is nervous of me. She will be constantly wondering what I’ll say and do next. Good. I waited years to find her. It is her turn to wait, to wonder, to suffer.

‘Goodbye,’ I say it again, expressing the words to all of them, looking from Sarah to Jonny and Lucy.

I don’t know if I will say anything yet. I want to see what this is first. Then I’ll decide. It’s more fun to wait anyway. She will live in dread and I will reap some vengeance and play with her mind.

Lucy walks around me, turns the handle and opens the door. ‘Goodnight, Auntie Susan. I’ll call you tomorrow.’

We share another smile as I walk out into the bright night and look up at the large half-moon and the stars that are scattered across the sky in their thousands out here where there are no cities to pollute the sky with electric light.

Chapter 7

‘Goodbye for now,’ Jonny closes the door on Susan.

‘For now?’ I say as soon as the door has shut. ‘You know I don’t want to see her, why were you asking if she’d stay?’ The side of my fist thumps his leather jacket.

His hands lift palm outwards, calling a truce. ‘I’ve done nothing wrong. Why did she come here? Did she say?’ The cadence of his voice lifts and falls in a relaxed response.

I want him to be angry.

‘She didn’t get as far as telling us, and now Mum’s thrown her out before she can. Why didn’t you tell me about her?’ Lucy’s blue eyes focus their accusations on me as she takes a sip from the glass she’s held on to.

‘For a good reason that I don’t want to talk about, which is why I haven’t talked about her. Isn’t it obvious there’s a good reason? Why else would I not mention my twin sister? Why were you being nice to her? She’s evil,’ My words are launched at them both but I look at Jonny. ‘How could you betray me?’

‘Mum. She’s an aunt I didn’t even know I had. Why wouldn’t I be nice to her?’ Lucy throws back as Jonny turns away and pulls the zipper down on his jacket. ‘You said you didn’t have any family left.’

‘She’s not family,’ I plead. ‘Not anymore. She’s a disaster. If she rings you, don’t trust her, Lucy.’

Her eyes look at Jonny as he hangs up his coat. She always looks to Jonny to confirm or deny my judgements. Our arguments have a pause button. They suspend like a sports match waiting for a video assistant referee’s judgement. Jonny doesn’t take part in arguments; he hates conflict. He only reacts to the extremes. But he presides over mine and Lucy’s arguments and calls who wins each point. It’s a habit for her to look at him for the final ruling. I think today he is going to agree with her when he should agree with me.

My heart is trying to burst from my chest with the energy I’m expending trying to make Lucy understand. Jonny should know without me having to say a word; he remembers what I ran from in London. I don’t, but it’s so bad my brain has closed it off and he never talks about it.

I feel like slapping common sense into them both.

Lucy takes hold of my hand as if at last she understands how upset this is making me. ‘I don’t understand,’ she says, though. ‘Why didn’t you say you have a sister? Why not just say you and your sister weren’t speaking?’

‘It’s just families, Luce.’ Jonny says, walking around us towards the kitchen. Dismissing the discussion and avoiding the conflict, true to type. ‘They are always complex. I don’t talk to my dad and your mum doesn’t speak about her sister. But …’ Before he reaches the kitchen, he stops, does a one-eighty, and looks at me. ‘People can change, Sarah. And she’s put the effort into finding you. I think you should give her a chance. She’s had a lot of time to regret her past and things have obviously changed. She had a hard time too.’

‘What happened, Dad?’ Lucy lets go of my hand and leaps on his words like a cat, then, as he turns back, she stalks Jonny across the room, ready to pounce on his impression of a fleeing rat.

You don’t have an aunt, I want to scream. She doesn’t count. Sisters don’t do the things she’s done. You have us. We love you. Why do you care about anything else? I follow them. ‘Dad and I are your family. You don’t need anyone else.’ My tone is harder, refusing to let any more emotion leak out from where it has all been buried decades ago.

‘Dad, tell me.’ Lucy chases Jonny down in the kitchen because it’s Jonny who’s saying what she wants to hear. He disappears around the corner of the L-shaped open-plan living and kitchen space. She disappears too.

I hear a cupboard open and close. I walk towards the sofa not the kitchen.

‘Is she really evil?’ Conspiratorial excitement lowers Lucy’s voice. ‘People say there’s always one evil twin.’

When I reach the middle of the living room I can see around the corner into the kitchen. Jonny has a wine glass in his fingers and he is heading for the bottle of wine I had opened.

‘Come on,’ he says to Lucy. ‘Let’s sit down and discuss this.’ His eyes reach to me as he puts the glass on the black breakfast bar. ‘I don’t think you should worry.’ He unscrews the cap on the bottle as he talks. ‘And I don’t think you should make her go away.’ The wine makes a glugging sound as he pours it.

After he’s filled his glass, Lucy holds out her glass for a top up, then he refills the glass with my red lipstick on the rim.

‘If she’s moved here,’ he continues as he puts the bottle down and picks up his and my glass, ‘I assume she really wants a reunion. It may be time to forgive and forget.’ He looks at me as he brings my glass over, holding it out like a peace offering.

The glass Susan used is left on the black slate. It hits me in the face like a punch. She’s been here, in my house. Talking to Lucy and drinking wine as if nothing happened in the past. But it did. There is a period I really don’t remember but the rest I have fought hard to forget.

‘No.’ I accept the glass but not his desire for peace. The room sways, reeling around like a Waltzer carriage at the fair.

Jonny’s hand catches my elbow. ‘Are you okay?’

‘No. I need to sit down; my legs are hollow. But I will be fine if she never comes here again.’ Yesterday she could have been anywhere. She could have been dead …

Jonny keeps hold of my elbow as I turn to the sofa. My arm slips out of his hold when I sit down, cupping the bowl of the wine glass in both hands.

Jonny stays on his feet, looking down at me. Referee, judge, or jury? ‘I know this is strange, Sarah, but it isn’t necessarily bad. I don’t think you should shut her out. Getting to know her again might help you to get over the past.’

I feel as if I’m being lectured to. But he saw the shipwreck I was then. He picked that young woman up and stood her back on her feet. He hears my nightmares, when the memories leak and creep out from the broken part of my mind.

‘What happened in the past?’ Lucy sits down on the sofa, twisting sideward, her thigh, knee and calf sliding up onto the leather, so she can watch me. She drinks a mouthful of wine.

Memories escape. I need thick metal safety-deposit boxes with complex locks that can’t be broken to hide all the memories in. I need a panic room. I don’t want to remember.

Jonny sits on the arm of the sofa next to me and his hand pulls one of my hands away from the glass. His hazel eyes look right into mine with a look that has always hypnotized me. ‘It’s okay. Breathe slowly. Whatever happens, I am here. It’s okay. But I think this could be good for you. I think letting go of the past would be good for you.’

A glass clinks down onto the glass top of the coffee table. ‘You keep talking about it but you won’t tell me what it is,’ Lucy complains, her confusion disfiguring her forehead, defacing her beauty with cruel lines that will become wrinkles when she is older. ‘What happened in the past?’ she presses again.

‘I can’t.’ I drink some of the wine, wanting the alcohol content in my blood to go all the way up to 14% to match the wine so it will calm my nerves.

‘Just accept that Mum doesn’t want to talk about the past,’ Jonny says, his fingers tightening around my hand. ‘What we need to do is think about the future.’ He taps the back of my hand on his thigh, then rubs my hand back and forth slowly, twice, stroking my hand on the denim of his jeans. ‘Are you going to give her a chance to be forgiven? Or not?’

The rim of the glass presses against my lower lip for a moment, before I move it away. ‘I don’t think I can.’ I don’t want to. My head shakes back and forth. ‘No.’

‘She’s never done anything to me,’ Lucy rules, with eyes that are as assertive as Jonny’s. ‘If I want to talk to her I don’t need your permission. And if you won’t tell me why you won’t talk to her, I don’t have any reason not to talk to her. Do I?’

‘The fact that you’re my daughter should be reason enough. You should be loyal to me whether you know why or not.’

Jonny’s hand lets mine slip free. ‘I’m not going to question your decision. This has taken me by surprise too. But I keep thinking about how many years have passed, and Lucy is right, she doesn’t need to be caught up in what’s become history. Let her do what she wants to do.’

‘And if your dad showed up here and apologised for beating the life out of you when you were a child, would you let her talk to him?’ My words charge at him, an angry bull storming through a china shop.

His glass lifts and he drinks a large mouthful; he swallows and it pulls on his Adam’s apple.

His expression curls the corners of his lips down when the glass moves away, as if he’s eaten sour lemons. ‘I don’t know what I’d do. But I don’t think I would ignore him straight away,’ his voice hisses at me like a snake. ‘I would want an apology. I would want to see regret, and then I would want him to plead for forgiveness.’ He stands up and turns, taking his phone out of his back pocket.

Chapter 8

‘Thanks.’ I lean over and place the cash, the fare rounded up to the nearest pound, into the taxi driver’s open palm that reaches between the front seats. ‘Keep the change.’ My phone vibrates in my coat pocket as I sit back and turn to get out of the car.

I push the door shut and take my phone out of my pocket as I walk along the pavement to reach the path to the flats.

‘Hello, love,’ a man’s voice calls. ‘Have you settled yourself in?’

It’s the white van man who lives in Flat 24. Alan. He had seen me carrying in my one box of belongings and offered to help as if I had half a dozen boxes to move. I declined his help, but it had taken ten minutes to persuade him to leave me alone.

He slides the side door of his white van shut with a metallic sounding slam then walks towards me, filling up the pavement and blocking my way into the flats unless I walk around him and cross the grass. But he’ll think it’s strange if I try to avoid him so determinedly and I don’t want to seem odd. As he comes closer my hackles rise, even though I know his interest is innocent. At six foot and a few inches more, with shoulders and biceps I imagine have been worked hard in a gym, he is intimidating.

‘Hello, yes, all settled in,’ I answer, walking towards him with an intent that says I want to get home, hoping he will move. I have my phone in my hand; I could pretend someone has rung me.

‘Well, if you need someone to show you around town, I’m your man.’

‘Thanks, but I have family here.’

‘Oh. Who?’ He turns, moving out of my way, and then walks beside me as I carry on towards the door into the flats.

‘My sister.’

‘Nice. She a local? Did you grow up around here? I don’t remember you from school. Will I know her?’

‘No.’ I turn onto the path that leads up to the front door of the flats. He stays with me, matching me step for step. ‘We didn’t grow up here. And if you know her, you’d know it because we’re identical twins.’

‘Then I haven’t seen her around. I’d remember her.’

‘She doesn’t live in Keswick.’

‘Oh.’

‘They live near Hawkshead.’

‘Not far then.’

‘No.’

‘Did you come up here to move closer to her?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s nice. All my family live here. I’m a born and bred Cumbrian.’

As we reach the door into the flats, his hand lifts and his forefinger presses keys on the number pad to let us in. The lock clicks as it releases, and he pushes the door wide, holding it open for me in a gesture of kindness that I am unused to.

‘Thanks,’ I say as I walk in ahead of him.

‘You’re welcome, love.’ He passes me, moving ahead of me a little to open the door into the stairwell too.

‘Thanks,’ I say it again.

‘If she lives out of town,’ he says, returning the conversation to Sarah as we climb the stairs side by side. ‘She might not know about the best places to find some nightlife in Keswick, away from the tourists. So there’s still a good reason for you to take me up on the offer of a drink.’

I glance sideways at him.

‘It can be on me, my treat,’ he adds.

‘Thank you, but no.’ I am never going to take him up on the offer of a drink.

We reach the short landing of the first floor where the stairs turn back on themselves to progress up again. ‘Goodnight,’ I say. My flat is on this floor. His flat is on the floor above.

I put my hand on the door handle to push the heavy fire-door open before he can take command of it.

‘You can’t knock a man for trying, love,’ he says as I open the door.

It depends how forcefully they try. But he hasn’t been rude or pushy. I smile in answer, then slip through the door to escape.

I look back to double check he isn’t following as the door slowly shuts, controlled by the mechanism above it that prevents it from slamming. He is not there.

I glance down at my phone as I take my keys out of my pocket and walk to my front door.

The text is from a number I don’t know.

Hi Susan, it was good to see you.

It begins. I touch my phone, using my thumbprint to unlock it and read on.

We need to talk. I have to tell you something. It’s important. Can I meet you tomorrow some time? Don’t say anything to Sarah or Lucy. It would only upset things. I can pick you up if you like. We can go for a drink or a walk. Whatever suits you. Let me know. Jonny.

A smile parts my lips as I slip the key into the door’s lock.

When I’m inside and the door is closed, I reply, the phone’s screen glowing in the dark room.

Okay. Meet me at 10.30 in the lakeside area? I’ll wait outside the theatre.

I touch the arrow to send the message to him.

I lean back against the door, staring at the phone’s screen, hoping he’ll reply immediately.

Nothing.

The phone’s screen turns black as the phone shuts itself off.

Oh well, he’s messaged. That’s something to hold on to, and tomorrow I will see him alone. I throw the phone on my bed, turn the light on, and take off my coat.

The phone vibrates. My heartbeat leaps into a quicker pace as I pick it up, looking at the screen.

Okay.

That’s all his reply says. I picture him in her company, answering quickly and shoving his phone back into a pocket or putting it down, acting as if no text was sent. It makes me smile again, because I walked back into their lives today and I already have a secret to keep with Jonny. I don’t know what he’ll say tomorrow, but sorry would be a good start.

***

The day is warmer than I expected it to be. So warm that I had to take off my coat, but actually it is handy to have it in front of me to hold in my arms like a defensive shield. I don’t have any more reason to trust Jonny than I have to trust Sarah, but I want to see him. I came all this way to see him, not her.

Tourists pass me, walking past the theatre towards the lake. A lot of them have dogs with them, and a lot of them are like me, over-dressed in raincoats, and some are in their waterproof trousers too. It was meant to rain but the black clouds have blown over and gorgeous spring sunshine reaches through the vivid green leaves of the trees that line the street, forming a picturesque avenue. The scene is so beautiful it’s inspired someone on the other side of the street to stop and sketch it. The man’s pad is leaning on the fence as he works with quick pencil strokes, glancing up and down.

I look towards the carpark. I expect Jonny to park there and walk to the theatre. I look at my phone again; he is now ten minutes late and he hasn’t messaged. At what point do I decide he is not going to make me wait any longer and walk away?

‘Hello.’ The call comes from a way away and it could be directed at anyone, but even from a distance I remember his voice.

I lift my hand and wave at the tall figure striding towards me, a figure that pulls at my heart with memories I should have forgotten a long time ago. I walk towards him slowly. My heart and head want me to run. They expect a welcoming hug when I reach him. But he is my sister’s husband now. My hands stay firmly pressed into my coat pockets.

His speedy walk suddenly halts into an awkward standstill when we meet in the paved area beside the theatre. There is an awkward period of silence too that is probably only a second but feels longer. ‘Thank you for agreeing to meet.’ After he has spoken, his hands lift and hold my shoulders as he leans in, his lips pursing. I turn my head. He was angling for my cheek, but I make sure his kiss lands firmly on my lips.

‘Shall we walk down to the lake?’ I say, stepping back. I need to be in motion, to use up the adrenalin sprinting in my blood.

‘Yes.’ His hands slide into the front pockets of his jeans as we start walking. He is just wearing black jeans and a burgundy jumper; he had come in the car and had known what the weather was like. ‘Sorry to be so cloak and dagger.’

I glance at him. In profile he is exactly the same; the wrinkles of fifty years of life don’t show. ‘What is it you want to tell me, and why can’t I tell Sarah and Lucy?’ There’s no point in letting him dress this up. I would much rather whatever he wants to say is straight out in the open.

‘I’m sorry,’ he begins as he walks with a slow pace, looking at me. ‘We didn’t just leave you, if you think that. We looked for you.’

Really? My heart jumps into a stronger pulse. But even if that’s true, they had not come back.

‘I’m glad you look well. I’ve worried about you—’

‘It’s been thirty years. You can’t have worried that much. You would have found me.’

He looks ahead and releases a long breath. ‘I admit I stopped looking a while after we moved here. I was busy with the café.’

Excuses. Excuses. ‘Is that what you brought me here to tell me? That you’re sorry you left me behind. Does Sarah not know that, or would she hate you to say it?’

‘No.’ His eyes are back on me. ‘Sarah doesn’t remember anything about that time, Susan. That’s what I need to talk to you about. She had a breakdown. She was badly beaten and when she came off the drugs she just emotionally collapsed. Her mind couldn’t cope.’

And you think mine did?

‘She wiped the years you spent in London out of her mind and she’s never mentioned them since. She doesn’t remember things, Susan, and I don’t want her to. That’s why we couldn’t find you, because she didn’t remember where you were living.’

We reach the area of the path that turns at the edge of the lake, where the wooden piers reach out into the water for the ferries to dock alongside. There are old fashioned rowing boats drawn up on the gravel beach at the bottom of a tall wall and huts cluster around the space above the lakeside, selling postcards, gifts, tickets for the ferry, grain for the ducks, and ice creams.

‘Didn’t want to remember, you mean.’

‘No. Honestly, Susan, she remembers nothing about that time, and I want it to remain erased. She’s seen a few different psychiatrists – when we first moved up, and more when we had Lucy. She’s learned to cope with what happened in your childhood, but she’s never recalled what happened in London, and she was upset yesterday because you became a part of the monsters in her head.’

He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know what happened in London. If she’s never told him then he can’t know. The anger I have been dealing with for years, the anger the psychiatrists have been working on with me for years, flares up in a red mist that hovers. But I have learned to control how I react. ‘So you dragged me out here to meet you to tell me you’re sorry you left me there, but that I should deal with my own memories because you want to protect Sarah? I’m not a monster, Jonny. I’m her sister.’ My voice is measured, the words slow and precise, not shouted, spoken.

‘How bad was it? When did you get away? How did you get away? I called the police at the time, but I had hardly any details from Susan. You were in Vauxhall, that’s all I knew.’

‘Thanks for caring.’

‘We did care, Susan. But we couldn’t do anything more than we did. Do you want a cup of coffee or tea? We can get a takeaway and sit down on one of the seats along there?’

‘Why?’ I don’t stop walking. I lead us on past the hut selling drinks and snacks.

‘Because I thought having told you that, you might want to tell your story to me. I do want to know. Perhaps I can help Sarah see things from your si—’

‘No.’ I stop walking, turn to him, and look into his hazel eyes. They are a gold colour in the sunlight reaching through the trees. When his eyes catch the light, it’s just the light-brown, straw-like colours I see. ‘No thank you, Jonny. I don’t talk about it either.’ I turn my back on him and walk away.

I know now that their life is all fake. It’s a farce that they have created here. Built on lies and pretence.

I glance back. He isn’t following. He’s turned to queue at the café hut. I don’t turn back; I carry on and break into a run. I will run for now. But in reality, he has given me stones to throw. I am not going to run for long. I will regroup, think about what it means, and then I will plan.

Chapter 9
1982

They won’t let me see Sarah.

A black female police officer called Julie has herded me out of the house and into the backseat of her police car, as if I’m a lost lamb not a wolf cub. She’s sitting with me so I can’t escape.

I’m cold. Even though the rain has stopped and it’s not that cold outside she has wrapped me up like a human parcel in a crinkling silver sheet.

‘I want to see Sarah.’ I keep telling her.

‘Let’s let the doctors and nurses do their job first, sweetheart.’

Three black-clad policemen push Uncle Harry along the path from the house. All he’s wearing are his faded jeans. He doesn’t even have shoes on. His hands are trapped in handcuffs behind his back and they push his head down as they reach the police car in front of us, then shove him into the back of the car so hard I see him fall.

One of the policemen sits in the back with him. The other two go to the front of the car, open the doors, and get in.

Sarah isn’t out of the house yet. The ambulance is parked in front of that police car.

I look back at the open door of our house. It’s just the ambulance people, Mum, and Sarah in there now. The police had chased all our neighbours out.

The police car in front flashes an indicator light, then pulls out and drives off, taking Uncle Harry away.

A man knocks on the window beside Julie. He holds up a bright-red mug as if he’s toasting the policewoman.

Julie winds down the window a little. ‘Yes?’

‘I brought her some hot chocolate. I saw her shaking. Poor kid.’ He lifts the cup in a toast again.

Any other, no, every other day, these people who have come out to stare close their curtains so they don’t have to see us sitting on the kerb until it’s dark, or so we can’t see into their houses and interrupt their lives.

Julie winds the window down further. ‘Thank you. That’s kind of you.’ She holds out a hand to take the mug by its handle then passes the mug to me.

My hands squeeze around the warm china as I take it. It smells sweet not just chocolatey.

Julie winds the window up.

The man in the green uniform comes out of the house, the ambulance man. He has a bag. He puts it down on the grass then turns back and lifts a set of wheels over the doorstep. It’s the wheels of the wheelchair that the woman had taken inside about ten minutes ago. The ambulance woman in a green uniform is holding the wheelchair’s handles.

‘Is that Sarah?’ I ask Julie. There is a wrapped mummy-like figure in the chair in a bundle of white blankets. It must be Sarah but I can’t see her face.

The man picks up his bag and walks on ahead to the ambulance.

‘Sarah!’ I shout, trying to make her hear me through the closed windows. She isn’t moving. ‘Is she dead?’ I ask Julie. I don’t wait for a reply, I discard the mug of chocolate on the floor, knocking it over and filling the car with the sweet, sickly smell of hot chocolate and reach for the door handle, pulling the latch to let myself out. It won’t open. ‘Sarah! Sarah! Mum!’

Mum is there. She is locking the front door.

‘I want to get out.’ I turn and look at Julie.

‘Jus—’

‘Sarah!’ Julie isn’t going to let me out. I tug at the door handle. It bruises my hand.

If Sarah is dead, I would know it. Wouldn’t I? ‘Sarah!’ She can’t hear me.

‘She’ll be all right.’ Julie’s hand is on mine, squeezing my fingers and trying to stop me pulling the door latch. Her voice is gentle but insistent. ‘Sarah needs to go to hospital and I’m going to find somewhere for you to stay until she’s well. It won’t be for long.’ Julie’s voice is like the one people use when they pet a puppy. There, there. Pat, pat.

I’m not a puppy. ‘I want to see Sarah.’ I keep pulling at the handle as if it will work with more effort. They steer Sarah’s wheelchair up a ramp into the ambulance a few metres in front.

Mum climbs the steps beside the ramp and sits in the ambulance.

‘I want to go too.’ I look at Julie. ‘Why can’t I go?’

‘Sarah needs some special care in hospital. She’ll be fine, but she needs to see the doctors and you need to go somewhere where you can change into some dry clothes and be warm and safe.’

‘But I want to stay with Sarah!’ I lash out, knocking Julie’s hand away. ‘I want to see Sarah!’ I don’t want to be separated. ‘She’ll want me.’

The driver’s door of the police car opens. ‘What’s going on in here?’

I stretch a leg out to climb through the gap between the seats. But the policeman’s hand comes out like the lollypop lady’s and he stops me like she stops the traffic.

‘Calm down, Susan. Your mother told me to tell you that she’ll be in touch with you as soon as she can, and she’ll let you know when your sister is on the mend. But for now the best thing you can do for your sister and your mother is behave and do as you’re told so you’re not a worry to them.’ He nods at me at the end of his sentence as the ambulance’s doors are closed.

They’ve left me. Mum has left me.

The ambulance people walk around to their cab.

The spilt chocolate is sticky and hot on my feet.

The policeman drops into the front seat. He pulls his seatbelt across and clicks it into place. Julie reaches across me to pull a seatbelt around me as the ambulance drives away. My eyes follow it.

There’s no point fighting anymore. I can’t get to Sarah. I have to wait. To wait and hope they will take me to her.

Chapter 10

The room is strange and dark but the duvet is warm and the mattress and pillow are soft. The bed smells clean, of sweet fruit and flowers. It smells a little like the tinned peaches that the school dinner ladies serve for dessert sometimes.

I like the smell.

I want to share the smell with Sarah. I try to share it through my thoughts, but I don’t know if my thoughts reach her. I can’t hear her thoughts. I hope it’s because she’s asleep.

I want to be at the hospital. I told the police I would behave and sit quietly with her. I’d escape from the house and go by myself if I knew where the hospital is. If I knew where I am too. I’m in foster care in someone else’s home but I have no idea where this house is. I have my own room; no one would see me escape but I don’t know where to go. I’m lying here instead, trying to make my thoughts reach her.

I’ve never had my own bed before. It’s horrible. The room is too quiet. I miss hearing Sarah’s breaths and feeling the warmth of her body lying next to me

The woman has older children. One of the boys has given up this room for me to sleep here. He is sharing now.

I spent hours in a police station before they’d brought me here, my legs swinging in the oversized chair as the radio played in a corner of the office. I wore Julie’s coat all day while I’d waited. It was a leather coat with a silky red lining. She rides a motorbike into work. It was her motorcycle coat.

My lip is bruised and sore because I’ve bitten it for hours and the skin is torn. But the pain makes me feel better because I want to feel what Sarah is feeling.

The police bought me a whole bucket of KFC chicken and fries for lunch, and after lunch I had a Mars bar. Then a man from social services came to collect me. He and Julie brought me here. They gave me some new clothes in a bag, including a nightie. I’m wearing the new nightie. The woman here threw my old one in a metal bin with a snappy lid.

Has Sarah been given a new nightie too?

I had a bath here, with bubbles, and she left me alone, ‘to soak,’ she said. I’ve never had a bath on my own before. I’ve never lain down in the water and let it soak me up until my skin shrivelled into little creases before. Mum doesn’t make us wash, and when we do have a bath we get in it together. But the woman here said a bath would feel nice and help me relax.

I close my eyes, trying to look through Sarah’s eyes and see the things Sarah is seeing. I should be able to feel her breaths on my cheek. They are the music that I fall asleep to every night.

Tears catch in my eyelashes, trickle onto my cheeks, and run sideways into my hair, wetting the pillow. I rub the tears off my cheeks with the top of the duvet cover. My breaths become short, sharp, noisy sounds. I don’t want to cry but I’m scared. My mind can see all the blood on Sarah’s face and in her hair.

The door opens and light spills in from the landing. ‘Susan, are you okay? Can I do anything? Would you like me to sit with you?’

‘No. I just want my sister.’

Chapter 11

‘Where’s Susan?’ My voice is weak. It’s hard to talk. Pain is throbbing in my jaw, lips and teeth and around my eyes. Uncle Harry’s big fist had set fireworks off in my head and they are still exploding; every pulse of pain sets more flashes off, lighting up my brain. My whole body aches. It feels as if every brick in the house fell on top of me, not one man.

The doctors say I have concussion and they need to monitor me.

‘Safe,’ Mum says, answering my question with the word she has spoken ten times. Impatience and annoyance give her voice a sharp sound. She hasn’t looked up from the crumpled magazine she found in the waiting room. The pages flick over. She doesn’t care. She is angry at us for ‘causing this mess’. She is angry because we made Uncle Harry angry and ‘put social services on her back.’

It’s late, and dark outside. I was asleep, but the nurses wake me every hour to shine a little torch into my eyes, take my temperature, and blow up an armband that squeezes and pinches my arm.

Someone has drawn the curtains over the windows since I last woke. They have pulled across the curtains between the beds too so I can’t see the other children. But the lamps above some of the beds are on and the light shining through the thin yellow cotton with giraffe patterns turns the other children and their mums into shadow puppets.

The voices of other mothers travel through and around the curtains. They speak in soft, concerned, caring voices. Whispering, ‘how do you feel,’ ‘do you want anything’, ‘I love you’.

Without Susan to be my other voice, there’s a devil and an angel in my head. They talk at me like they do in Tom and Jerry cartoons. I imagine them sitting on my shoulders. The little devil speaks like Susan, telling me we shouldn’t care about Mum being so useless and loveless. We don’t need her. We don’t need anyone else. We are wolves. Wolf cubs don’t need mums. Wolves howl; they don’t whisper I love you. The angel speaks my thoughts and feelings. She says, I need Mum today. It’s okay to need her. Mums should worry and fuss when their child is hurt. Every other mum in this ward is worried about their child.

Our mum let Susan go. We don’t even know where she is. Mum said, ‘I don’t need to know. She’s with social services so she’s safe.’ But I think all these other mothers would know. No, they would not have let her go.

My stomach rumbles and growls. I’m not hungry. My tummy has turned somersaults all day, while the large black and white clock on the wall ticks away each minute. I want Susan to walk into the ward every time the clock ticks onto the next minute.

Where is she sleeping? I can’t imagine it. I’ve asked the nurses, but they just say, ‘Ask your mum.’ Don’t they see that mum doesn’t care?

A policeman told me Uncle Harry won’t come to our house again. But he won. He cut us in half. All I did was cut his hair.

‘Why can’t Susan sleep here, Mum?’ If Susan and I are together, I won’t care about the pain.

‘Because she’s safer where she is. I told you. You don’t need to worry about her.’

But I am worried. Why aren’t you?

I sit up, my head thumping as if Uncle Harry’s fist is inside my skull, and slide off the bed. The hard tiled floor is cold under my bare feet. The hospital gown I’m wearing catches on the bed and pulls open at the back.

‘Get back into bed,’ Mum complains.

‘No. I’m going to find her.’

‘You’re not. You won’t be able to. She’s in a foster home tonight and I don’t even know where it is.’

‘What’s going on? Are you all right, Sarah?’ A nurse in a pale blue uniform and tabard covered in pink cats walks over to me. She’d been looking at the notes at the end of a bed on the other side of the room. ‘Can I help? Do you need the toilet? I can walk with you.’

‘No. I want my sister.’

She looks at Mum, as if Mum will give me an answer.

‘She’s in foster care because I had to come in here.’ She looks at the nurse. ‘I told her, her sister is safe.’

The nurse makes a little sighing sound. It’s not an angry sigh like Mum makes when she’s annoyed, it’s a nice sigh. Her sigh says she cares. It sounds as gentle as one of the other mums saying I love you. ‘Well then, Sarah, I would say the quickest way to bring your sister home is to climb back into bed and get some sleep so your body can heal quickly. Did you know all the healing magic in your body happens when you’re sleeping? If you’re feeling well enough tomorrow, you can go home and then you’ll see your sister. I’m sure she’s missing you too.’

‘I know she’s missing me.’

‘Then get back into bed and go to sleep so you can both get back home tomorrow.’

I nod at the nurse with the kind voice, agreeing, but the room becomes a blur of giraffe curtains and soft lights. The tears trickle from my eyes onto my cheeks. I sniff them back and swallow but they roll down my cheeks and drip from my chin.

‘Here.’ The nurse walks around me and pulls a tissue out from a box on the cabinet next to my bed. She holds the tissue out towards me. I take it and use it to wipe my cheeks.

‘If your sister is in a foster home then your mum is right, she’s safe,’ the nurse says, as she leans over me. ‘Come on, back into bed.’ She lifts the sheet and blanket.

I climb up onto the bed and slide down to lie on the sheet.

‘And straight to sleep,’ the nurse says as she draws the top sheet and blanket over me. When she straightens up she looks at the watch on her wrist. ‘I have to wake you again in thirty minutes to do your observations; you want to get as much sleep as you can in between.’

The soles of the nurse’s trainers squeak on the floor as she walks back over to the boy’s bed on the other side of the room.

I look at the clock and watch the third thin red hand tick, the one that moves the fastest. The one that counts the seconds. How many places has that got to move around the clock before I see Susan again?

A page of the magazine Mum is looking at turns over.

Chapter 12

I’m dressed in clothes that Mum brought in this morning.

All the other children’s mums stayed the night here, sleeping, some snoring, in the chairs beside the beds. But Mum said she couldn’t sleep in a chair and she went home.

I think she went to the pub. She always goes to the pub. She could have gone to fetch Susan. She came back at 11am this morning and she didn’t bring Susan.

The nurse at the desk by the ward’s door told Mum off for being late. They want to discharge me. They didn’t know I could hear but I’d been to the toilet so I was close to the desk and I heard.

A man from social services had come in with a policewoman to speak to her but they had gone away because Mum wasn’t here. They’ve come back now. The nurse rang them. Mum is not allowed to take me home unless they agree, the nurse told Mum. ‘Your daughter will be taken into care if you do not act responsibly.’ The nurse spoke in the voice our teacher uses when Susan and I do something wrong.

I can’t wait to tell Susan that Mum was told off. I start to smile every time I think about it, but I can’t smile because my face hurts.

I went back to the toilet so they wouldn’t see me and guess that I’d heard. I stood in there for a few minutes, staring at the strange bruised face in the mirror, a rainbow of purple, blue, red, black and yellow on her cheeks and chin, on our face.

‘You’ll feel better in a week or two,’ a nurse had said to me last night after Mum had gone, when she’d come to look in my eyes. She had seen the tears on my cheeks. I think she thought I was crying because it hurt. She didn’t know I was crying for Susan. I liked her, the nurse. I like all the nurses. But I want Susan here with the nice nurses. She would have had fun here if she had slept in a chair.

I asked the policewoman and the social services man if I can see Susan. The man just said, ‘We’ll see what we can do when I’ve talked to your mum.’

They’re talking to Mum now.

I’m sitting on the hospital bed, my feet crossed and my legs swinging. Waiting. Watching through the window into the small room near the nurses’ desk, where they are. I can see Mum through a long narrow window in the door.

She was crying and then shouting at them. I think, when she comes out of the room, she will be angry with me. I don’t care as long as she says the right things so they let Susan come back to us.

It feels as if they’ve stolen Susan. Child thieves. Child catchers. Like dog wardens, rounding up stray dogs, stray wolves. In my mind I see Susan in a kennel somewhere.

My legs keep swinging. I stare at Mum through the window and try to send Susan a message in my mind. I’m going to find you.

It’s ages before Mum comes out of the room.

Nurses in brown uniforms are handing out sandwiches for lunch.

The social services man holds the door open for Mum as she walks out. He talks over her head to the policewoman.

Mum looks at me. She doesn’t smile.

I slide off the bed and run to her. it’s only a few steps. My legs don’t hurt, but my head hurts when I run.

‘Sarah, no running,’ a nurse calls.

‘Mum. Are we going to get Susan?’ I hold her hand. I’m holding on because I want to control her, like a ventriloquist puppet, make her say yes and take me to Sarah.

‘Yes,’ the man behind her answers. ‘We’re all going to collect Susan now.’

I look at Mum, not him. ‘Thank you.’ Thank you for saying the right things.

***

We are sitting in the back of the police car, silent, our hands clasped tightly on the black leather in between us. Sarah and I don’t need words; we just know things about each other. We just know how much we need each other. That we can never be separated. I knew she would make them come for me as soon as she could. I waited as patiently as I could this morning, ignoring the conversation of the family I was with, just waiting for Sarah so we could be us again.

Her face is covered in vivid mingling colours, as though someone painted her face and let the colours run into one another.

We hate Uncle Harry. It’s the first time we’ve hated anyone. We don’t like most of our uncles, but we’ve never hated them so much that it hurts like a fist clasped in our stomachs.

The car pulls up outside our house. The policewoman gets out of the car and holds the door so we can climb out from the back. The man who came to collect me with Sarah and Mum leads the way to the door, and after Mum has unlocked it the man and the policewoman step into the house behind us.

‘The housing association have changed the locks,’ Mum says, as she closes the door, shutting the man and the policewoman in the house with us.

‘Good,’ the man says. He looks at us. ‘So then, girls. You will be safe here with your mother.’

We nod. Our palms are hot and sticky; we have been holding onto each other for an hour now. We won’t ever let each other go.

The policewoman’s eyes look all over the place, as if she expects to find something specific. But it’s just our house with bits and pieces everywhere. Dirty plates and mugs in the kitchen. Our sofa with the big dip in one seat where we broke the springs because we jumped on it like a trampoline. Our small TV. Our curtains hanging on a bit of string. But there’s one thing that’s different: a brick-red stain in the middle of the beige carpet. Sarah’s blood. The carpet has not been cleaned properly.

The policewoman’s eyes catch me staring at her. She stops looking around and smiles, with a smile that shines in her eyes. She wants us to like her. That’s what her smile says. I’ve seen some of our uncles smile like that.

‘You have my number, Jackie,’ the man says to Mum. ‘If you need me, call. But I’ll be back tomorrow.’ He glances at the policewoman and they share a look that we don’t understand. But Mum nods agreement.

‘And call 999 if there’s any trouble,’ the policewoman says as if she thinks there will be trouble. We don’t have a phone, though. The nearest phone box is at the end of the road.

‘Goodbye, then.’ The man looks from Mum to us. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, girls.’

We don’t answer; we just watch as he turns to the door and the policewoman follows him. Mum stands behind them as he opens the door, and then they both leave. She shuts the door then turns around and looks at Sarah.

We expect her to shout. She doesn’t. ‘Sit down on the sofa,’ she says. ‘You need to look after yourself.’

We sit down together. Close. Pressed together.

‘Do you want a drink?’

We shake our heads.

‘I was talking to Sarah, Susan.’ Sarah’s bruises mean Mum knows who is who. She turns away. ‘Social services left some food for you. Do you want a bag of crisps? Or chocolate might be easier to eat.’

‘Chocolate,’ I say for us.

‘I was speaking to Sarah.’

I want Sarah to look like me again. I don’t like her looking different. We are still one person, even though we look different. Us. Sarah and Susan, not Sarah or Susan. I don’t like Mum looking at us differently. We are the same.

Chapter 13
2018

‘The man from social services, Dave, came back every day for three weeks to sit on the sofa and drink a cup of tea, asking us what we had done at school that day, and watching Mum. She would lean against the wall of the archway into the kitchen drinking her tea and suffering his presence.

There were no uncles in those three weeks.

But two days after Dave said he would visit just once a week, Mum went out when we were in bed and came back with Uncle William.’ I laugh in a self-mocking tone. It is not a humorous laugh; it’s a dismissive laugh that belittles our past.

‘No.’ Lucy’s blue eyes pop out of her head on long stalks as she leans across the café’s dark wood table, nursing a cup of hot chocolate between her hands. She lives in Keswick, not far from the flat I rent. I’d sent her a message and asked her if she wanted to meet. She’d messaged back with a smiling face and a yes.

She had asked me to continue my story as soon as we’d sat down at the table. It was interrupted twice by the server asking us what we wanted and then bringing our drinks.

‘I didn’t know any of that happened in Mum’s childhood,’ Lucy says. ‘Why did you fall out if you were so close?’

‘I’ll get to it,’ I smile. ‘But you want to know it all, don’t you?’ I can’t wait until she tells her mum I’ve promised to tell her everything.

‘You’re as bad as Mum. You sound like her, you know? I mean your voice sounds just like hers.’

‘I know.’

She leans back in her chair. ‘Dad told her she should trust you.’

‘Did he?’ My heart leaps at the thought of Jonny saying something on my behalf.

‘Yes. You should go to the café and see her there. She won’t be able to whip herself up into a temper there. That’s what I do when I know she’ll be upset about something: tell her in public.’

She makes me smile, this beautiful woman who could be my daughter as easily as she is Sarah’s. There’s a little jitter of excitement in my chest when I breathe in. This is everything I’ve wanted it to be. I want to walk right into the middle of their lives. Their café is as at the heart of it as much as their daughter is.

‘Your mother and I were different after that incident with Uncle Harry …’ I say, continuing my story. It makes me laugh inside knowing that Sarah hasn’t told her any of these things. She’s washed her past away so she can turn herself into someone else. I don’t believe she can’t remember. I think she deliberately doesn’t remember.

Chapter 14
1983

Uncle Harry’s violence changed Sarah and me, but it didn’t make us afraid. It made us tougher. It made us stronger. We could cope with anything and survive. We learned to attack before we are hurt. We are often in trouble at school for fighting, but the children we fight with are the bullies.

Mum likes violence now too. She fights with Uncle William. She hits him and he hits her back. I’ve seen her slap him and he pinches her arm and wraps his hand around her neck and squeezes. She’s nicer to him after they’ve had a fight. He’s never nice to her.

We haven’t tried to get rid of him. He ignores us and we stay out of the house, avoiding him.

When Dave from social services visits, Uncle William goes out, and Mum says we mustn’t mention him to Dave.

We haven’t.

But today Mum has a bruise around her eye and Dave can see it’s from a punch. We didn’t see it happen, but we know Uncle William hit her. It’s blood-red not dark purple, like Sarah’s bruises from Uncle Harry.

‘Go upstairs for a minute, girls,’ Dave says. ‘I want to speak to your mum.’

As we walk upstairs, Dave shuts the living room door. Sarah is first. She looks back at me, and we agree silently that we won’t go to our room, that we will sit at the top of the stairs and listen.

‘What happened, Jackie?’ The walls are thin; we can hear his voice easily even though he’s shut the door.

‘Nothing. Do you want tea?’

‘Nothing is not an acceptable answer. You know that. If you stick with “nothing” I will have to call the police and take the girls. Yes, I’d like tea, but while we drink it you can tell me what happened.’

Mum sighs loudly in her dramatic, attention-seeking way. From the position of the sound I think she has turned away from him to make the tea.

They don’t talk while the water runs into the kettle; the kettle clicks and gradually increases in heating sounds to a steaming boil.

I imagine Dave sitting at the other end of the sofa from the big dip, where he always sits. He is patient. Dave can sit quietly for ages waiting to hear what you will say. It’s like the who-blinks-first game. Who speaks first loses. He always wins when we play that game, because we forget we aren’t supposed to speak first.

‘Thank you.’ Mum must have handed him the mug of tea.

The sofa creaks, which means Mum has sat on the arm at the dip end. When she sits there, she turns sideways and puts her feet in the dip.

‘So …’ Dave pokes at her. ‘Was it a man?’

I smile at Sarah. Her hand wraps around my hand, and she pulls my hand onto her lap, squeezing it.

‘Yes,’ Mum answers.

‘Is he here often?’ There’s another period of silence. ‘Remember, this is about the girls too.’

‘I know.’

‘How much time does he spend here? I can, and will, check what you say with your neighbours.’

‘He lives with me.’

‘Has he hit you before?’

There’s another silence.

I look at Sarah. Should we go down and tell him?

‘Yes,’ Mum says. The word is said quietly but it’s quick and angry. Just like the way she slaps us.

Sarah’s lips pull up into a smile as mine do the same. This will be goodbye Uncle William.

Dave sighs. He sighs when he’s thinking about something, when he’s working out what he thinks about what you said.

‘Then what are you going to do? I can’t leave the girls here if you let him stay.’

Sarah’s fingers lace us together.

If we go anywhere we will go together, even if we have to run away.

‘He wouldn’t go if I ask him. He won’t leave.’

‘Have you asked him?’

‘Twice. The second time he gave me this black eye.’

‘The rental agreement for the house is in your name. I can ask the police to remove him and you can get a solicitor to help you with a court order that would stop him coming back.’

‘He’d still come back. He’s been in prison, he was fed and warm, and he had a roof over his head. He doesn’t care what the police threaten him with. He’ll come back.’

‘Then do you want me to contact a refuge and see if they have space for you and the girls?’

‘A refuge?’

‘If you want to keep the girls with you, that’s your only option.’

There’s another gap in the conversation. I imagine Dave sipping his tea.

The grating sound of the wheel of a cigarette lighter spins. I picture Mum sucking through the end of a skinny, hand-rolled cigarette.

‘Jackie …’ Dave pushes.

‘Yes. Okay then.’

‘All right. I’ll need to go back to the office to make the call.’

Everything will move quickly now. Like it did when Uncle Harry hit Sarah. We will be taken away. Dave makes things happen. He makes promises and he keeps them. He promised we would never see Uncle Harry again and we haven’t.

The front door thumps shut behind him and the letterbox rattles, telling us he’s gone outside. We stand and walk downstairs.

The living room door opens. ‘I suppose you two were listening and you’re happy about it.’ Mum stands there holding the door with the cigarette hanging between her lips, sending up a thin spiralling smoke signal, asking for pity.

‘What’s a refuge?’ Sarah asks.

The cigarette lifts in Mum’s lips. It glows the colour of fire at the end as she sucks on it. Then her fingers take it out of her mouth. ‘Somewhere women go to hide,’ she says. ‘You better pack what you want to take. There’s some bags under the sink.’

We left the house an hour later with Dave and five old supermarket shopping bags full of what would become all we had. We got into a taxi, that Dave paid for, and it drove us away from the place where we were born. It drove us out of Swindon and all the way to Gloucester.

Chapter 15
2018

The old-fashioned bell that dangles above the café door chimes, welcoming another customer with its merry jingle.

I’m cleaning off a table, wiping over the pine top, having moved the used crockery onto the tray. I glance over my shoulder, the instinct to respond and present a welcoming smile kicking in.

‘Hello,’ Jonny calls in a tone that questions as much as greets before I see her too.

An adrenal surge urges fight or flight. But appeasement is the third part of a human’s instinctive defence mechanism … That’s what Jonny wants me to do. To wave a white flag and talk to her. But he doesn’t know all the details. He can’t understand what he’s asking me to do. I may not remember everything, but I remember enough to know she’s trouble.

‘Hello,’ Susan answers Jonny, looking at him. She hasn’t looked at me yet. His eyes direct hers to me.

I’m frozen into stone, caught in her Medusa stare again. Is it really only me who can see the snakes she has in her hair?

‘What are you doing here?’ I ask.

‘That’s not a very nice welcome.’ Her voice is jovial. Happy. Everything in her body language and her voice suggests she is not a threat and pleased to be here.

Is she pleased to be with me, though, or pleased to torment me? Is it all pretence?

Was she happy in the years we were apart? The question flies into my mind and lands sharply and heavily like the point of a dart. Like thinking of her dead. I’m not sure I can imagine her really miserable and be happy myself. But I don’t want her to make me miserable either.

She looks at Jonny again. ‘I saw your advert for a part-time waitress in the window. Any chance?’

He looks at me again, directing her eyes back to me, smiling in a way that makes a statement.

She’d assumed Jonny was the one to ask. He is the one wearing a striped blue and white shirt while I’m wearing a sleeveless, loose summer dress over a T-shirt and black leggings but we’re equal partners in this café. The lease and loan that set this place on its feet are in both names.

‘I’d suggest you two talk a bit more before you make any commitments. You need to be sure you can endure each other’s company. Shall I make you some coffee and you can sit down for a few minutes?’ His gaze holds mine, looking for anything I might say through silence. Susan is probably still able to read those sorts of interactions too.

Susan. It’s still weird to hear that name aloud, or in my head. I had banished it.

We only have four customers. The Easter holidays are over and it will be a month before the Summer tourists arrive. In the height of summer the café is full nearly every hour of every day. But today, the people scattered around the tables are regulars from the village. People who just want to get out of their houses for an hour. They are looking, though; it’s not every day someone’s clone turns up.

‘We’ll sit outside,’ I say, untying the bow securing the pinafore that’s wrapped around my middle. I don’t want the regulars, or even Jonny, to hear this conversation. ‘Come on,’ I say to her, leading the way and throwing my apron at Jonny.

I pass her and open the door.

The bell rings again.

I hold the door, letting her walk out first then follow her, as Jonny goes behind the counter to make the coffee himself. He smiles at Marie who is making up a sandwich order. She raises her eyebrows at him, and I see his skin redden.

The door swings shut behind us as if it is closing on the life I have today and leaving me in the past.

‘What are you doing here?’ I turn to one of the tables in the shade of the awning and pull out a chair from a small round two-seater table.

‘Finding you.’

‘Why?’ The metal seat is cold.

‘Because you’re my sister,’ she says as she pulls out the chair on the other side of the table and sits down facing me. ‘My twin sister.’

I wait for more. Expect more. Nothing more is said. ‘That doesn’t mean anything special anymore. It’s just genetics.’

The lake water laps at the pebbles on the narrow shoreline in front of the café. The gentle sound and the calls of the birds in the wood behind the café deny the intensity that crackles across the table like a forest fire.

‘It means something to me, and I came because I want you to admit that it still means something to you. Don’t worry, I won’t say anything to Jonny. I’ve accepted everything as it is.’ Her elbows rest on the table and she leans in to make the conversation more intimate, my blue eyes staring back at me, promising to tell the truth, the pupils glowing with what looks like a real desire to be forgiven. Her posture is subtly threatening though.

‘Are you waving a white flag or a skull and cross bones?’

It’s strange looking at her. She is the me I see in pictures. And the me I see in the memories of my childhood. She’s like a shadow of me. The evil half of me. Not a separate person.

‘I’m sorry.’ She says without prompting. I see a very good impression of sincerity in her eyes.

Crocodile. I don’t trust her. Why would she come here and say sorry to me now?

‘I’m not.’ I lean back in the chair, moving as far away from her as I can without getting up and walking away.

‘I want us to be close again. I want to forget everything too.’

‘And if I don’t want us to be close …?’ I sound like Lucy at her most belligerent. But I have a good reason to be confrontational. Why should I trust her Trojan horse of an apology?

She sighs in the dramatic way that mum used to and her eyes glisten with a sheen of moisture that implies sadness. ‘Then I’ll go away.’

‘Is that a promise?’ Does she feel as strange as I do, looking at her exact resemblance. We still look absolutely identical, weight, height, hairstyle, everything.

‘If you want it to be?’

‘I do.’ She was always a good liar; I suddenly remember that. What is she really thinking? Years ago, I always thought I knew what was in her head.

‘Then I promise to go if you want me to,’ she answers. ‘If you promise to try to get to know me again for six months before you decide.’ Her ransom demand is thrown across the table like the perfect poker hand, with an indifferent expression.

Six months.

Is she lying?

My fingers pick a packet of mayonnaise out of the condiment holder on the table and I squeeze it in the middle, squishing the sauce inside the plastic.

‘Six months,’ she repeats. ‘We need to spend time together to get to know each other.’

‘Why?’ I ask again, remembering Lucy as a child of five. Every question was followed with three more whys. Why? Why? Why? ‘What is the point?’

‘You have a husband and a daughter. I don’t have anyone. I want my sister back.’

I don’t answer.

The café’s doorbell rings.

‘Here you are,’ Jonny comes out carrying a mug of coffee in either hand.

He smiles at me, a smile just for me, his hazel eyes offering understanding and support.

I love you. The words slip through my thoughts. When Susan has gone I will hug him and say the words aloud. ‘Thank you,’ I say as he puts a mug of foamy cappuccino down in front of me.

‘Thank you,’ Susan says when he puts the other mug down in front of her.

It’s like a perfect echo. Our faces are the same, our bodies are the same, and our voices are the same.

‘Do you want to talk about the past?’ She asks as Jonny walks away.

I lean forward to drink the coffee. ‘No.’ I’m looking at the heart Jonny has drawn with milk foam on the top of my coffee, not at her. I lift the mug and sip the coffee, breaking the heart.

‘Then tell me about your life. Tell me what Lucy was like while she was growing up.’

I don’t want her to know about Lucy. I just want her to leave us alone. Me, Jonny, and Lucy.

‘I like going to watch films at the cinema,’ she says. ‘We were never able to go as children, were we? Did you go with Lucy when she was growing up?’

‘Sometimes. She didn’t like the noise from the surround sound until she was about ten. How did you find us?’

‘Through the café. Someone mentioned Jonny’s name on Twitter, with a link to the café information. They recommended it. They’d come here every day on their holiday. Neither of you are on social media. There isn’t even a proper webpage for the café. It was just a Google link.’

I know. It’s deliberate. My hands embrace the warm coffee mug. I look at her, telling her to take our lack of online presence as a hint. But I know now that she had never really been able to read my thoughts.

‘Do you remember leaving London?’ she asks.

I shake my head. ‘I know we lived there. I met Jonny there. But I don’t know what happened. I don’t want to.’ A shiver of distaste trembles through my shoulders as my mind shakes, warning of an earthquake and a Tsunami if I touch those memories. I look down, shaking my head again, seeking comfort in the warmth from the coffee cup. ‘I just know that it was a horrible time.’ I look back up at her. ‘And it was your fault. You always got us into trouble, Susan. Did you stay there?’

She stares at me, not responding for ages, then she says, ‘For a while.’

‘But you’ve been somewhere else since …’

‘Obviously.’

I can still spot her tells, even if I can’t read what’s in her brain. She’s omitting important things. She’s looking at me too directly. Hiding behind a solid mirror that she’s cast across her eyes. I don’t want to remember the things that will be behind that mirror anyway. But if I can spot her tells, she can see mine too. She is just choosing to ignore my leaking body language telling her to go away.

‘Where was somewhere else?’ I ask.

‘I don’t want to recall that. I haven’t had the happily-ever-after ending you have. You should think yourself lucky.’

‘I do. Is that why you’re here? To muscle in on my happiness?’

Her body jerks back slightly. It’s a tiny movement that no one else would probably have noticed. But I notice because I know her better than anyone else. I am her.

The years between us break apart, disappearing, exploding in a dynamite blast. She is in my head, another me. I know her mannerisms, her body language. I can read so many things through the way she moves and looks at me. That is what I had thought was our special sixth sense when we were children.

‘Yes,’ she admits. ‘I want to be happy. I’ve never had a chance to be really happy.’ Her gaze holds mine for a moment, then drops, and she drinks from her coffee. Which is strange because the action does not seem the right movement, it doesn’t match her words. If she thinks I can make her happy, why not look at me when she says that.

I drink too. But I don’t take my eyes off her. ‘Are you asking for pity?’

Her gaze rushes back to me. ‘No. I’ve never needed pity.’ There’s an accusation in her eyes, something that I am being accused of. Words hover on her tongue but she is hanging onto them behind her lips.

‘I said we won’t speak about it. I won’t say anything, if you don’t,’ she says.

If she is speaking about things that happened in London, I have nothing I can remember to speak about anyway. But if she is speaking about the years before London, then there are things I don’t want Lucy to know. I nod, agreeing. ‘I won’t say anything about the past. Your secrets are my secrets.’

Chapter 16
1985

‘Girls! Girls!’ The copper’s shouts punch through the air with a pitch that says, stay where you are.

Susan looks at me, smiles, and then she says, ‘Run.’

She laughs as we launch into the race. Our legs pump hard, our trainers with the holes in the seams of the canvas pounding on the pavement.

We have a head-start of a few metres on PC Merry. Uncle Charlie calls PC Merry the laughable policeman. The copper doesn’t know we know him. He doesn’t know us. But he knows Uncle Charlie.

‘Girls! Stop!’

He should know we aren’t going to stop. If we stop we’ll be in trouble for not being in school. That’s all he thinks we’ve done – skipped school. But that’s not all that we’ve done.

We run across the uneven pavements of Cirencester town centre then dodge into an alley between the shops, the muscles in our legs burning.

Susan stops. As she breathes, her breaths pull at the buttons of her blouse. ‘Put the stuff in this bin,’ she orders lifting the blue lid of an industrial recycling bin. It’s packed with cardboard. She tips goodies out from the sleeves of her cardigan and unloads the pockets of her skirt.

I pull the stolen goods out of my pockets and throw them in.

‘Come on.’ Susan lets the bin lid fall with a plastic clatter, clasps my wrist and pulls me on.

There’s a bench at the end of the alley, a bench that we can climb onto and use to get over the fence into the park beyond.

I hear PC Merry coming, his shoes slapping rhythmically on the pavement. In a couple of minutes, he will reach the end of the alley and see us.

Susan lets go of me and climbs. I climb too. She flops over the top of the fence, falling onto the grass on the other side. I tumble over a moment behind her.

We stay still, huddled together on the ground, listening and waiting. If he looks over the fence and doesn’t look down he won’t see us but if we start running he will.

His footsteps run into the alley and along it, getting closer and closer, then he runs past us, out of the far end of the alley and into another street.

I look at Susan and press a hand over my mouth to stop a laugh erupting.

‘Do you want a cigarette?’ Susan pulls a packet out from her skirt pocket.

I do laugh, quietly, because she’d dared to keep a packet. I’m usually the daredevil. I had been the one who had pulled the packets off the shelves in the shop. But she told me to. It was easy, though; Mr Jankowski is always leaving the shop unattended. He goes out the back to talk to his wife and we take advantage.

Uncle Charlie says, ‘If people give you an opportunity then it’s only polite you take it.’

He makes us laugh and he likes making us laugh. He says things just because he knows we will laugh.

Susan unravels the plastic, opens the packet, pulls out the foil, and throws it aside then takes out two cigarettes. She holds them in her lips, puts the packet back in her pocket and pulls out a pink plastic lighter that had been in the cardboard holder near the till. She lights both cigarettes, sucking on the filter ends as she holds them in the lighter’s flame. Then she holds a cigarette out for me to take.

‘Thanks.’

We sit with our backs against the fence, our legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles, and blow smoke circles up towards the blue sky. The nicotine slides from my lungs into my blood.

We can’t go home for a while. We have to hide until the end of the school day.

We never go to school. We don’t fit in there. We can read and write. One of our primary school teachers said we were exceptionally bright. We don’t need to know anything else from teachers. We taught ourselves how to steal and we are good at that.

The head teacher told Mum we’re feral.

We looked that word up. It means wild. Untamed.

We like being called feral. It reminds us of when we used to imagine that we were wolf cubs.

The day is hot, and the grass is dry, so we don’t get up. There’s nowhere else to go to anyway.

We strip off our cardigans, pull the hems of our grey school-uniform skirts to the top of our thighs and turn our faces up to the sun, like sunflowers. We close our eyes and let the sunshine warm us from the outside to the inside, letting the sun tan the skin on our faces, arms, and legs.

We open our eyes as a cold shadow sweeps across our legs, as if the sun has been covered over by a cloud.

‘Hello. What are you two up to?’ Three boys are looking down at us, their shadows stretching over us. The tallest and best looking was the one who’d spoken. He has amazing gold eyes.

‘Nothing that’s any of your business,’ I say. We are tall, for our age, but if we stand up these boys will tower over us by inches. They look like teenagers.

They make us wary, but we aren’t afraid. We aren’t afraid of anyone. My heartbeat is racing, though, like it was before when PC Merry was chasing us.

‘I saw you had cigarettes. Let us have one.’ It’s not a request; it’s an order made by a ginger-haired boy.

It would be better if we were on our feet. We would be less vulnerable, more able to fight. But if we get up they will think we feel threatened. In an unspoken agreement we stay in our casual position on the floor, neither of us moving a muscle. But I feel awkward just sitting here.

‘Go on then …’ The tallest and the best looking holds out a hand towards Susan, asking verbally and physically, not telling.

‘What are you going to give me in exchange?’ Susan asks him. She’s smiling at him. Flirting. Mocking the size and the threat of him.

‘I’ll pay you back for it later.’ He smiles. He has a charmer’s smile. Uncle Charlie smiles like that when he’s sober.

I like a smile like that. It says, like me. I can make you laugh.

Susan takes the cigarette packet out from her skirt, opens it, and takes out one cigarette. She holds it out to him. ‘Here you are.’ When he bends down reaching for it, she pulls it back smiling.

He nearly loses his balance and tumbles on top of her, but his black friend with short black hair grabs the back of his T-shirt.

I think he’ll be angry. I see his anger bursting open in my mind. He isn’t. He laughs. ‘Bitch.’ The insult is said in the lightest, least offensive way possible. He holds out a hand, his palm open and facing up. Offering to help Susan stand, not asking for the cigarette. ‘If you give me one, we can sit in the playground and share it.’

‘What about us?’ His black friend protests.

‘You’ll have to convince her to give you one yourselves.’

Susan reaches out and holds his hand. He pulls her to her feet, leaving me alone on the grass.

His mates don’t offer me a hand but then I don’t have the cigarettes. There’s a hoard of goodies in the rubbish bin on the other side of the fence, though. There are more cigarette packets and some chocolate bars.

I don’t tell them. I don’t want to share with them. I can get up on my own.

Susan walks off, still holding the boy’s hand. She doesn’t even know his name. But he’s a charmer.

Are we like Mum? Because … I fancy him too. If she hadn’t taken his hand I would have reached out. Smiles like that boy’s are like the music of a snake charmer. He is the Pied Piper for girls.

I glance down at the watch Uncle Charlie picked out from a bargain bin in the newsagent and stuffed into his coat, then gave to me. In the time it had taken the long second hand to tick over one minute we had learned to fancy boys.

Just looking at him had made my stomach tumble over in a roly-poly. I held my breath when he held out his hand, my heart leaping around on a pogo stick because I knew something momentous was going to happen. It had happened to Susan.

The ginger-haired boy’s eyes are leery. He’s watching me in a way that makes an unpleasant tingle run up my back.

‘You got any cigarettes?’ he says.

‘No.’ I don’t like him. He’s ugly and rude. He’s not even trying to be charming to persuade me to give him a cigarette. He would try to bully me into giving him a cigarette if I had any.

‘Are you coming with us, or are you just going to sit there?’ The black kid’s eyebrows lift as he asks me. Then he holds out a hand.

I scrabble up without accepting his hand. Probably flashing the crotch of my knickers because my skirt is pulled so high. I pull the hem down, wrap my cardigan around my waist and tie it at the front, then pick Susan’s cardigan up off the grass.

‘Why are you in the park?’ I ask the black boy, my eyes on Susan and the tallest boy, walking ahead, talking to each other, still holding hands. She doesn’t seem to care that I’m not behind her.

Why did he pick Susan to hold hands with? Just because she has the cigarettes. That’s the only difference between us today.

How can anyone pick between her and me? We are the same. I’ve never thought about boys before. But how will boys choose one identical twin? By a packet of cigarettes.

***

I spend my afternoon sitting on one of the eight sections of the witches-hat roundabout, with the black and the ginger boys in the sections either side of me, watching Susan kiss the tall boy sprawled across a section of the roundabout. The other boys and I just sit there smoking. They talk, while I listen.

I learn their names. Jonny is the tallest one, the black guy is called Wayne and the ginger creepy one is called Jay.

‘Shall we get something to eat?’ Susan is looking at Jonny and only talking to Jonny, who is reaching for another cigarette.

Jonny’s other hand slides down from a position where it had been on her chest over the top of her school blouse.

I look at my watch. It’s nearly five.

‘I have money for a burger.’ Susan says. Stolen money.

Jonny sits up, his long legs dangling over the side of the roundabout as he takes another cigarette from our packet and uses our lighter to light it.

His gaze catches mine.

I think he’s looking for the differences. There aren’t any. If I met him and she wasn’t there, I could pretend to be her, and he wouldn’t know.

‘I don’t have any money.’ Jonny says to Susan his gaze moving off me to her. Then he looks at his mates. ‘Do you?’

Shaking heads are his answer.

‘We have enough money for everyone.’ Susan says.

She’s going to give them our money.

‘Sarah has it.’

We took the money from Uncle Charlie’s wallet this morning when he and Mum were in bed. We took it to buy cigarettes but then Mr Jankowski hadn’t been behind the counter so we’d just taken what we wanted.

The notes are still folded and hidden in my skirt pocket.

Jonny, Wayne, and Jay look at me.

What will they do if I refuse to pay for them?

‘You’ll have to earn your burgers,’ I say, taking control, my chin tipping up as I look them in the eyes, one at a time, desperately trying to think of a good, grown-up dare.

I will ask them to steal something else for us.

Chapter 17
2018

A laugh, a sharp, high sound, pulls my attention across the room to the café’s counter where the selection of cakes, salads, and pastries are displayed in the chiller cabinet. Marie is placing the freshly baked scones that have been flooding the café with a delicious smell for the last ten minutes onto the cream-tea plates. Jonny is standing beside her. But Susan is there too, this side of the counter, looking over at Jonny. The laughter came from Susan.

Her hands are on her hips in a posture that makes her breasts more prominent. They push against the white blouse she is wearing, stretching the buttons at the front so there is a flash of bright scarlet bra. Although, her bra is clearly visible through the white cotton anyway. Sometimes she looks more like a striper than a waitress.

I can always tell the two of us apart, now, when I catch sight of us in the mirrors we have on the walls to make the café seem bigger because she wears in-your-face clothes. There’s always something prominent about what she’s wearing. It’s sexual. Slutty. And it’s Jonny’s face she shoves herself in.

Other than that, though, generally, she wears her hair in a pony-tail, while mine is down and that is the only way strangers know which waitress has arrived at their table – the owner or the summer-temp – and sometimes, despite her choice of clothes, when she wears her hair down regulars ask her questions about my life.

Even Jonny mistakes her for me when he’s not concentrating and just turns to ask something quickly. Until he remembers what I wore to work.

I have thought about cutting my hair short, just so there will always be something that easily distinguishes me, but that feels like giving in to her. I don’t want short hair, so I’m not going to let her force me into cutting it. I like it like this.

The problem is that she likes her hair the same way, and she likes many of the things that I like. Including Jonny.

She said she wanted to get to know me again, but she spends more time at the counter or in the office talking to Jonny than she does out here serving the tables with me. With her breasts trying to pop her blouse buttons open.

I want to say something but it sounds childish. I’m not going to let her force me into feeling like a vulnerable, possessive child. I don’t want to let her know she has the power to make me jealous, or to doubt Jonny. I don’t doubt him. I’ve never fretted over Jonny’s faithfulness. He’s a good man.

But her …

I don’t trust her.

She makes me feel as if I’m lying to myself when I say I trust Jonny. Because I am afraid our relationship isn’t strong enough to withstand Susan the bulldozer.

Yes, it is. Jonny loves me.

I pick up the tray I’ve filled with dirty china and cutlery and carry it over to her.

My movement draws her eyes away from Jonny.

‘Here, you can take this into the kitchen and get the dishwasher going; we’re running low on china,’ I say.

A frown creases her brow, deepening the single wrinkle in the middle of her forehead above her nose. The frown fans out from there in slender lines.

I smile. Go on. Get lost. What has she been up to for all those intervening years?

Behind her back, Jonny’s dark eyebrows lift, asking me why? He knows we’re not running low on clean china.

When she turns away, I poke my tongue out at her back. She has succeeded in making me a child again. I hate her. I have only agreed to her working here for six months on the grounds that at the end of those six months she’ll leave the Lake District and leave me alone. And then there’s the old adage, keep your friends close but your enemies closer.

Jonny’s lips twist in a lopsided smile and he shakes his head a little, his eyes laughing at me but in a way that cautions too.

See. We are close. We can have long conversations across the café without words. We are as close as twins. We are us, me and Jonny.

I send him a smile, letting my inner laughter and love flow into my eyes for him to see. I adore him ten million more times than I hate Susan.

Marie catches my gaze, but she quickly looks away.

Behind me the bell above the door rings announcing more customers.

I turn around but in the same moment Marie walks around the counter to great them and direct them to a table. She must have seen them approaching through window.

A hand rests at my waist. There’s breath on my neck. His lips press against the hollow of my neck where it turns to my shoulder and his hand taps my side.

‘You can be a bitch sometimes, sweetheart,’ Jonny whispers against my ear as he pulls away.

I turn my head and our gazes clash. ‘Sometimes, people deserve bitchiness,’ I answer, smiling again.

‘We’re practising forgiveness,’ he reminds me in a light voice that half jokes but the other half of the lilt in his tone tells off my jealous child.

He might be on the forgiveness page with Susan but I am working through a different book called temporary tolerance.

The bell rings again, announcing the arrival of another customer. I toss Jonny a less sincere smile, pull the pad and pen out of my apron, and go to take the order.

Chapter 18
1985

I shift my bottom, trying to sit in a slightly different position on the metal bicycle rack. I’ve been sitting here for hours, and in my stoned state the discomfort is an increasing noise in my head. Any moment I will keel over like a boat out of water or fall like a felled tree.

Jonny passes the joint to me. As I take the skinny stub of white roll-up, our fingers brush.

He smiles an uneven smile at me, his lips listing to the left. The smile lifts to his charmer’s eyes.

He bought the cannabis, tobacco, and papers. The dependence on our theft has reduced because Jonny has a job working in the kitchen of a café for the summer.

It’s been warm for the last fortnight. We’ve spent every long day out in the park making the best of the light evenings, mostly with Wayne and Jay because Jonny is working. But Jonny always comes here straight after work.

I spend every minute of every day waiting for the moment when Jonny walks over the grass to join us. My heartbeat jolts harder at the first glimpse of him and my insides wobble. I know Susan feels the same but I don’t think she knows that I feel it too. She doesn’t seem to know what I think anymore. Or she doesn’t care.

He is holding her now, with his back against the corrugated iron side of the bicycle store and his legs splayed. Susan is standing between his legs, leaning against him. His arms wrap around her middle.

She turns her head, looking up as he bends. Their lips touch.

Wayne and Jay ignore them. But I watch, and occasionally his eyes turn to me, saying, why are you staring, Sarah?

Because I like you too. He must know it. But if Susan doesn’t, maybe he doesn’t either. I haven’t told her. It’s the first secret I’ve kept from her. I haven’t told her because I think it will annoy her. I don’t understand where a boy fits in between us. Does she like him more than me? What would she do if I tell her I like him too? What would she say if I tell her it hurts me to watch her kissing him?

He is dividing us. Bit by bit. It has progressed from seconds to minutes, then from minutes to hours. Even when they are apart we think of him and not each other. Sometimes they go off together in the evening. They get something from the shop or something from his house. There’s always a reason why she doesn’t want me to go with her. ‘No, we don’t need anyone else to come.’ ‘Jonny is coming with me, you don’t need to, Sarah.’ It always takes them longer than it should. Susan and I aren’t us anymore. It’s her and him.

I am jealous. Envious. When she leaves me with Jay and Wayne, she turns me into the incredible hulk – green and vicious with anger. I hate her sometimes now. I don’t want to be left behind. I don’t like her doing things that I haven’t done. We used to do everything together. I want to be with Jonny too.

‘Hurry up, have a good drag, then give me the joint,’ Jay says.

I draw a deep breath through the joint, the heat from the burning tobacco and the drug burns my lips as the poison from the cannabis scatters through my brain. My body is a ragdoll’s.

I don’t know where I fit in anymore. I don’t have a place.

‘You okay?’ Jonny is watching me.

My eyes might have rolled up for a moment; the world turned black.

‘I just need to sit on the floor,’ I say. My head is spinning. I take another drag from the joint and pass it to Jay, then slide down the metal rack. My bottom hits the hard tarmac.

I close my eyes as the cannabis brushes over me. It’s like that, like a sweep of feeling. It makes me float.

I like lying on the grass in the darkest place I can find and looking at the moon and the stars when I’m stoned.

We often stay out all night now it’s warm. We run home at sunrise, sleep for a couple of hours and leave again before anyone from social services or the police are likely to come around and force us to go to school. Mum had a letter from the school’s solicitor. They are taking her to court. They said they will fine her or lock her up in prison if we don’t go to school.

We don’t go. She can’t make us.

She tries to get Uncle Charlie to make us go but he is out at work in the morning and he can’t make us go.

So we live on the streets nearly all day and night.

Something touches my head, ruffling my hair. I open my eyes and look up.

Jonny is touching me. I see him through a haze that’s like looking through water.

‘Don’t have any more, Sarah.’

I don’t answer. I can’t answer. I can’t make my lips or my tongue move.

Susan reaches out to take the last of the joint from Jay.

My head tumbles back and bumps against the metal. I let my head rest there, on the cold metal pillow, as my thoughts swim in the water that is all around me.

The others’ conversation drifts in single, isolated words, and the sounds sail off on the mild evening air. I don’t know how late it is. It’s probably only nine o’clock and I am drunk and stoned out of my head.

A smile slides my lips over my teeth.

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