The Twins
J.S. LARK
One More Chapter
a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
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.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
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.
