Free The Ice Twins by S. K. Tremayne Page B

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.