The Ice Twins

‘If we have kids.’ Josh shook his head. Stared down at the stains of milky coffee in his cup. ‘If.’

A slightly painful silence ensued. One man mourning his lost child, another man mourning the children he hadn’t yet had.

Angus finished the last of his lukewarm coffee. He turned in the uncomfortable wooden pew and glanced out of the window, with its thick, flawed, wind-resistant bullseye-glass.

The glass of the window warped the beauty of Torran Island, making it look ugly. Here was a leering landscape, smeared and improper. He thought of Sarah’s face, in the semi-dark of the loft, warped by the uncertain light. As she peered into the boxes.

That had to stop.

Josh spoke up: ‘The tide must be out now, so you’ve got two hours, max. You sure you don’t want me to come with, or give you a lift in the RIB?’

‘Nope. I want to squelch across.’

The two exited the pub into the cold. The wind had keened and sharpened as the tide had fallen. Angus waved goodbye to Josh – I’ll come round the house tomorrow – as Josh’s car skidded away, chucking mud.

Opening the boot, Angus hauled out his rucksack. He’d packed the rucksack, very carefully, this morning, at his cheap Inverness hotel, so he had everything he needed for one night on the island. Tomorrow he could buy stuff. Tonight he just had to get there.

Across the mudflats.

Angus felt a pang of self-consciousness: as if someone was watching him, mockingly, as he adjusted the straps of his rucksack, distributing the weight. Reflexively he glanced around – looking for faces in windows, kids pointing and laughing. The leafless trees and silent houses gazed back. He was the only human visible. And he needed to be on his way.

The path led directly from the Selkie car park, down to some mossed and very weathered stone steps. Angus followed the route. At the bottom of the steps the path curved past a row of wooden boats – their keels lifted high onto the shingle, safe from approaching winter storms. Then the path disappeared completely, into a low maze of seaweedy rocks, and grey acres of reeking mud. It was going to take him half an hour, at least.

And his phone was ringing.

Marvelling at the fact he could get a signal – hoping faintly, futilely, that there might also be a signal on Torran – Angus dropped his rucksack on to the pebbles, and plucked his mobile from his jeans pocket.

The screen said Sarah.

He took the call. The fourth, from his wife, of the day.

‘Hello?’

‘Are you there yet?’

‘I’m trying. I was about to cross. I’m at Ornsay. Just seen Josh.’

‘OK, so, what’s it like?’

‘I don’t know, babe.’ He tutted. ‘Told you: I’m not there yet. Why don’t you let me get there, first, and I’ll call you back as soon as I can.’

‘OK, yes, sorry. Hah.’ Her laughter was false. He could tell this even on a cell phone, from six hundred miles away.

‘Sarah. Are you all right?’

A hesitation. A distinct, definite pause.

‘Yes, Gus. I’m a bit nervous. You know? That’s all …’

She paused. He frowned. Where was this going? He needed to distract his wife, get her focused on the future. He spoke very carefully.

‘The island looks lovely, Sarah. Beautiful as I remember it. More beautiful. We haven’t made a mistake. We were right to move here.’

‘OK. Good. Sorry. I’m just jangling. All this packing!’

Sarah’s anxiety was still there, lurking. He could tell. Which meant he had to ask; even though he didn’t want to know any answers. But he had to ask: ‘How’s Kirstie?’

‘She’s OK, she’s …’

‘What?’

‘Oh. It’s nothing.’

‘Sorry?’

‘It’s nothing. Nothing.’

‘No, it’s not, Sarah, it’s clearly not. What is it?’ He gripped his frustration. This was another of his silent wife’s conversational stratagems: drop a tiny unsettling hint, then say ‘it’s nothing’. Forcing him to gouge the information out of her; so he felt guilty and bad – even when he didn’t want the information. Like now.

The tactic drove him crazy, these days. Made him feel actually, physically angry.

‘Sarah. What’s up? Tell me?’

‘Well, she …’ Another long, infuriating pause stopped the dialogue. Angus resisted the temptation to shout What the fuck is it?

At last Sarah coughed it up: ‘Last night. She had another nightmare.’

This was, if anything, a relief to Angus. Only a nightmare? That’s all this was about?

‘OK. Another bad dream.’

‘Yes.’

‘The same one?’

‘Yes.’ A further wifely silence. ‘The one with the room; she is stuck in that white room, with the faces staring at her, staring down. It’s nearly always the same nightmare. She gets that one, always – why is that?’

‘I don’t know, Sarah, but I know it will stop. And soon. Remember what they said at the Anna Freud Centre? That’s one reason we’re moving. New place, new dreams. New beginning. No memories.’

‘All right, yes, of course. Let’s talk tomorrow?’

‘Yes. Love you.’

‘Love you.’

Angus frowned, at his own words, and ended the call. Slipping his phone in his pocket, he hoisted his heavy rucksack – feeling like a mountaineer attempting a summit. He could hear the clink of a heavy wine bottle inside, knocking against something hard. Maybe his Swiss Army knife.

Picking his way through, he edged along rocks and sand, trying to find the safest route. The air was redolent with the heady smell of rotting seaweed. Seagulls wheeled above, calling and heckling. Haranguing him for something he hadn’t done.

The tide was way out, exposing old grey metal chains, slacked in the mud, linked to plastic buoys. Whitewashed cottages regarded him, indifferently, from the curving wooded shoreline of mainland Skye, to his right. On the left, Salmadair was a dome of rock and grass, encircled by sombre firs; he could just see the top of that big unoccupied house, on Salmadair, owned by the billionaire, the Swedish guy.

Josh had told Angus all about Karlssen: how he only came here for a few weeks in the summer, for the shooting and the sailing, and the famous views over the Sound: to the waters of Loch Hourn and Loch Nevis, and between them the vast massif of Knoydart, with its snow-iced hills.

As Angus trudged along, hunched under the weight of his rucksack, he occasionally lifted his head to look at these same brooding hills. The great summits of Knoydart, the last true wilderness in western Europe. Angus realized, as he surveyed the view, that he could still distinctly remember the names of Knoydart’s enigmatic peaks. His granny had taught him so many times: Sgurr an Fhuarain, Sgurr Mor, Fraoch Bheinn.

It was a poem. Angus was not a fan of poetry, yet this place was a poem.

Sgurr an Fhuarain, Sgurr Mor, Fraoch Bheinn.

He walked on.

The silence was piercing. A kingdom of quietness. No boats out fishing, no people walking, no engine noise.

Angus walked, and sweated, and nearly slipped. He wondered at the windless tranquillity of the afternoon, a day so still and clear he could see the last ferry, in the blue distance, crossing from Armadale to Mallaig.

Many houses, hidden in the firs and rowans, were totally shuttered for the winter. That accounted for much of the quiet: for this sense of desolation. In a way, this sheltered, stunning, southern peninsula of Skye was increasingly like one of the richest quarters of London: emptied by its own desirability, used by the wealthy for a few days a year. An investment opportunity. A place to store money. Other, less alluring parts of the Hebrides paradoxically had more life, because the houses were cheaper.

This place was cursed by its own loveliness.

But it was still lovely. And it was also getting dark.

The walk took him fifty difficult minutes, because the dark grey mud sucked at his boots, slowing him down, and because at one point he went wrong: climbing up onto Salmadair proper, heading unconsciously for the billionaire’s house with the huge, glass-walled living room, which suddenly reared in front of him, in the gathering gloom, protected by its rusty twines of barbed wire.

He’d taken the wrong path left. Instead of skirting Salmadair’s shingled beach.

Angus remembered Josh’s warnings about the mudflats at night. You could die out there. People die.

But how many really died? One a year? One a decade? It was still much safer than crossing a London road. This place was crime-free; the air was clean and good. It was much safer for kids. Safer for Kirstie.

Pressing between gorse bushes, slowly negotiating the beaten path, Angus scrambled over some very slippery rocks – gnarled with old barnacles, which scraped his fingers. His hands were bleeding a little. He was scratched and weary. The north wind was perfumed with seagull shit and bladderwrack, maybe the scent of newly chopped pine-wood, carried all the way from Scoraig and Assynt.

He was nearly there. In the dregs of the afternoon light he could see the exposed tidal causeway of rocks and grey shingle, littered with smashed crabshells. A slender green pipe snaked across the Torran causeway, burying itself in and out of the sands. He recognized the waterpipe, just as he recognized this part of the route. He remembered walking it as a boy, and as a very young man. And here he was again.

The lighthouse, the cottage, lay beyond, in the last of the cold, slanted sunlight. In just two minutes he would press the doorway, into his new home. Where his family would live: as best they could.

Reflexively, he looked at his phone. No signal. Of course. What did he expect? The island was entire and of itself: alone and isolated, and as remote as you could get in Britain.

As he ascended the final rise, to the lighthouse-keeper’s cottage, Angus turned and looked back at the mudflats.

Yes. Remote as possible. That was good. He was glad that he had coaxed his wife into making the decision to move here: he was glad he had persuaded her into believing, moreover, that it was her choice. He’d wanted them far away from everything for months, and now they had achieved it. On Torran they would be safe at last. No one would ask questions. No interfering neighbours. No friends and relatives. No police.

5

Kirstie.

Glancing up, I see Kirstie’s face, impassive, unsmiling, in the rear-view mirror.

‘Nearly there, darling!’

This is what I have been saying since driving out of Glasgow; and, in truth, when I reached Glasgow I thought we were ‘nearly there’, it looked so close on Google Maps, we were halfway through Scotland, weren’t we? Look, it can’t take much longer. Just two more inches.

But instead, like a terrible endless story, told by a chuntering bore, the road has gone on, and on. And now we’re lost amid the ghastliness of Rannoch Moor.

I have to remind myself why we’re here.

Two days ago Angus offered money we didn’t have, to fly us to Inverness, where he would pick us up, and leave all the moving to the men we’d hired.

But doing it this way seemed, somehow, a cheat – something in me wanted to drive the whole distance, with Kirstie and Beany; and someone had to bring the car, whether now or later. So I’d insisted Kirstie and I would make the entire journey, from the bottom corner to the very top of Britain, to meet Angus in the Selkie car park, in Ornsay, with the celebrated view of Torran.

Now I have regrets.

It is all so vast, and so bleak. Rannoch Moor is a bowl of green and dismal greyness, glacial in origin, presumably. Dirty, peat-brown streams divide the acid turfs; in places it looks as if the peat turf has been ripped apart then sewn back together.

I glance at Kirstie, in the mirror, then I glance at myself.

I truly don’t want to, but I have to do this: I have to go over it all, yet again. I must work out what is happening with Kirstie, and whether it stems from the accident itself. From that terrible fracture in our lives.

And so.

It was a summer evening in Instow.

My father and mother retired to the little town of Instow, on the north Devon coast, almost ten years ago. They’d ended up with just enough money, salvaged from my dad’s gently failed career, to buy a biggish house, overlooking the wide slothful river, at the point where it became an estuary.

The house was tall, with three storeys, and balconies, to make the most of the view. There was a proper garden, with a further, rabbity slope of meadow at the back. From the top floor there were glimpses of the sea between the green headlands. You could watch red-sailed boats heading for the Bristol Channel, as you sat on the loo.

From the start I liked my parents’ choice, of Instow. It was a nice house, in a nice little town. The local pubs were full of sailors, and yachtsmen, yet they were without pretensions. The climate was kindly, for England: solaced by southwestern breezes. You could go crabbing on the quayside, with bacon and string.

Inevitably and immediately, Instow became our default holiday home. A pretty, cheap, convenient bolthole for Angus and me, and then a place where we could take the girls, knowing they’d be looked after by their doting grandparents.

And my folks really doted. This was partly because the twins were so pretty and adorable – when they weren’t squabbling – and partly because my wastrel younger brother was wandering the world, never likely to settle down: so the twins were IT. The only grandkids they were likely to enjoy.

My father was, as a result, always eager for us to come down and take another holiday; and my American mother, Amy – shyer, quieter, more reserved – more like me – was almost as fervent.

So when I got the call, from Dad, and he airily asked: What are you doing this summer? I readily agreed – to another vacation in Instow. It would be our seventh or eighth. We’d had too many to count. But all that free childcare was just so tempting. All those long, delicious sleeps, of adults on holiday, while the twins went off with Granny and Granddad.

And this was the very first night, of the very last holiday.

I’d driven down with the kids in the morning. Angus was delayed in London, but due later. Mum and Dad were out for a drink. I was sitting in the kitchen.

The large airy kitchen was where everything happened in my mum and dad’s house, because it had one of the best views – and a lovely big table. All was quiet. I was reading a book and sipping tea; the evening was long, and beautiful: rosy-blue skies arched over the headlands and the bay. The twins, already sunburned from an afternoon on the beach, were, I thought, playing in the garden. Everything was SAFE.

And then I heard the scream of one of my daughters.

That scream which will never go away. Never leave me.

Ever.

Here on Rannoch Moor I grip the wheel – accelerating. As if I can overtake the horror of the past and leave it dwindling in the mirror.

What happened next? Is there some clue, overlooked, that would unlock this awful puzzle?

For half a moment, sitting in that kitchen, I couldn’t work it out. The girls were meant to be on the lawn, enjoying that languid summer warmth; but this awful scream came from upstairs. So I rushed up the steps in blinding panic, and raced along the landing, and looked for them – not there, not there, not there – and I knew, somehow I knew, and I ran into the spare bedroom – yet another bedroom with a balcony. Twenty feet up.

The fucking balconies. If there was one thing I hated about Instow, it was the balconies; every window had them. Angus hated them too.

We always told the twins not to go near them; the iron railings were too low, whether you were adult or child. Yet they were so tempting. Because they all had those blissful views of the river. Mum liked to sit on her balcony, reading Swedish thrillers, drinking supermarket Chardonnay.

So, as I ran up the stairs, it was the balconies that ripped me open with terrible anticipation, and when I stepped into the bedroom I saw the silhouetted figure of one of my daughters, dressed in white, standing on the balcony, shouting.

The irony is that she looked so pretty that moment. Her hair was caught by the setting sun: she was coro-naed, gloried, flamingly haloed – she looked like a child of Jesus in a Victorian picture book, even as she was shouting, in icy and curdling terror.

‘Mummy Mummy Mummy Lydie-lo, it’s Lydie-lo, she’s falling off, Mummy, help her, MUMMY!’

For a second I was paralysed. Staring at her.

Then, choking on my panic, I looked over the railing.

And, yes, there was my daughter – broken, down there on the decking, blood spooling from her mouth, like a filled-in speech bubble, red and glossy. She looked like an icon of a fallen human, like a swastika shape with her arms and legs splayed. A symbol.

I knew Lydia was doomed as soon as I saw her body shaped that way, but I rushed downstairs, and cradled her still-warm shoulders, and felt for her slivery pulse. And at that precise moment my mum and dad came back from the pub, walking up the path: walking straight into this appalling tableau. They stopped, and gazed, quite stricken – and then my mum screamed and my dad frantically called for an ambulance, and we argued about moving Lydia or not moving Lydia, and my mum screamed again.

And then we all went tearfully to the hospital and spoke to absurdly young doctors, to young men and women in white coats with that flicker of tired shame in their eyes. Murmuring their prayers.

Acute subdural hematoma, severe and stellate lacerations, evidence of retinal haemorrhage …

At one point, awfully, Lydia came to consciousness. Angus had arrived to be engulfed by the same horror, so we were all in the room – me and Angus, my father, all the doctors and nurses – and my daughter faintly stirred and her eyes slurred open, and she had tubes in her mouth, and she looked at us, regretfully, melancho-lically, as if she was saying goodbye, then she went under again. And she never came back.

I hate these memories. I remember how one doctor blatantly stifled a yawn as she was talking to us, after Lydia was pronounced dead. Presumably she’d done a long shift. Another doctor said we were ‘unlucky’.

And monstrous as it was, he was, technically, right, as I discovered many weeks later – when I regained the mental capability to type words into a search engine. Most young children survive a fall of less than thirty feet, even forty feet. Lydia was unlucky. We were unlucky. Her fall was awkward. And this discovery made it all worse; it made my guilt even more unbearable. Lydia died because we were unlucky, and because I wasn’t looking after her properly.

I want to close my eyes, now, to block the world. But I can’t, because I’m driving. And so I drive on. Questioning the world. Questioning my memory. Questioning reality.

Who was the girl that fell? Is it possible I got it wrong?

The original and significant reason I thought that it was Lydia down there, dead, was because the twin who survived, told me that.

Mummy Mummy come quickly, Lydie-lo has fallen.

And naturally, when she said that, I took her at her word. Because there was no other immediate way of telling them apart. Because the girls were dressed so sweetly yet identically that day. In white dresses. With no blue or yellow.

This wasn’t my doing. It was the twins themselves. For a few months prior to that holiday they’d asked – they had demanded – that we dress them the same, cut their hair the same, make them look the same. Mummy, sit here between me and read to us. It was as if they wanted to be re-absorbed into each other. As if they’d had enough of being individuals for a while. Indeed, sometimes the twins would wake up, in those final months, and tell us they’d had exactly the same dream. I didn’t know whether to believe them. I still don’t know now. Is that possible? For twins to have the same dream?

Is it?

Touching the pedal, I race around a corner; urging myself on, as if the answer can be found on the coast. But the answer, if anywhere, is in my mind.

Angus and I had acceded to the twins’ impulsive wish – to be dressed exactly alike – because we thought it was just a phase, like tantrums or teething; and, besides, it was easy enough, by that time, to tell them apart by personality. By the different ways they bickered with each other.

But when I ran up the stairs and I saw one of my daughters, in her white dress, barefoot and totally distraught, there was no personality. Not at that moment. There was just one of the twins, shouting. And she was shouting Lydie-lo has fallen. And that’s what gave me her identity. Kirstie.

Could we have got it wrong?

I do not know. I am lost in the hall of mirrored souls. And again that terrible sentence pierces me.

Mummy Mummy come quickly, Lydie-lo has fallen.

That’s when my life cracked open. That’s when I lost my daughter. That’s when everything went black.

As it does now. I am shuddering with grief. The memory is so powerful it is disabling. Tears are not far away; my hands are trembling on the steering wheel.

Enough. I need to stop, I need to get out, I need to breathe air. Where am I? Where are we? Outskirts of Fort William?

Oh God. Oh God. Just STOP.

With a yank of the wheel I veer the car, fast and hard and straight into the forecourt of a BP garage, squirting grit with the wheels, almost smashing into a fuel pump.

The car gently steams. The silence is shocked.

‘Mummy?’

I look up at the rear-view mirror. Kirstie is staring at me in the mirror as I smudge the tears from my eyes with the heel of my hand. I stare at her reflection, as she must have stared so many times into mirrors, seeing her own reflection. Yet seeing her dead sister as well.

And now Kirstie smiles at me.

Why? Why is she smiling? She is mute and barely blinking: and yet smiling? As if she is trying to freak me out.

A sudden fear ripples through me. Absurd and ridiculous, yet undeniable.

I have to get out of the car. Now.

‘Mummy’s just going to get a coffee, OK? I just – just need a coffee. Do you want anything?’

Kirstie says nothing. Clutching Leopardy with her two fisted hands. Her smile is cold, and blank, and yet somehow, knowing. It is the kind of smile Lydia would sometimes do, Lydia the quiet one, the soulful one, the more eccentric of the twins. My favourite.

Fleeing my own child, and my own doubts, I rush into the little BP shop.

‘No petrol, thanks. Just the coffee.’

It’s too hot to drink. I stumble out into the raw, sea-scented air, trying to stay in control. Calm down, Sarah, calm down.

A hot cup of Americano in hand, I climb back in the car. I take deep, therapeutic breaths. Slowing my heartbeat. And then I gaze in the mirror. Kirstie remains quiet. She has also stopped smiling, and turned away. As she scratches Beany behind the ear, she is staring out of the window at the suburban houses that straggle the road, to and from the garage. They look foolish, and English, and incongruous, with their polite windows and twee little porches, set against the grandeur and immensity of the Highlands.

On, on, on.

I turn the key, and pull away. We take the long road towards Fort Augustus; to Loch Lochy, Loch Garry, Loch Cluanie. It is so long, we have come so far. I think about life before the accident, the happiness, so easily shattered. Our life was made of brittle ice.

‘Are we nearly there now?’

My daughter shakes me from my thoughts. I look in the mirror, again.

Kirstie is gazing at the summits of the mountains, which are veiled in grey mist, and returning rain. I smile in a reassuring way and say Yes and I drive my daughter, and Beany, and our hopes, along the dwarfed and single-track road that negotiates the endless wilderness.