The Other Half of Augusta Hope. Joanna Glen

excited.

      ‘Two months to go,’ I said to Julia, crossing off another day on the chart we’d stuck to the back of the wardrobe door.

      ‘Will we be different when we come back?’ said Julia.

      ‘Course we will,’ I said, smiling.

      I remember us packing for Spain, suitcases open on the bed and the sun coming through the bedroom window and landing in that little pool, over in the corner, where there was, where there is, one of those triangular-shaped stands, made to fit in corners. On it are our awards – all my academic cups, made of fake silver, and my one riding rosette clipped to the top, and Julia’s dancing trophies in the shape of gold ballet shoes. I remember specks of dust falling through the sheet of light, bits of our own skin.

      I’m looking down at my hand, brown from the sun because I live here now.

      The skin of my hand.

      Mano in Spanish.

      Mano mano mano – man-o – man-oeuvre – man-overboard – man-o-tee, but I think it’s manatee actually.

      They are sometimes called sea cows – dolphin things with rounded noses. Like the pilot whales we saw from the boat out in the Straits of Gibraltar, heading off from the port at Tarifa.

      That day.

       Parfait

      ‘Will you come?’ I said to Wilfred. ‘This is the last time I’m going to ask you.’

      Wilfred shook his head.

      ‘We’ll make a new home with hammocks in the garden.’

      He shook his head again.

      ‘A hundred per cent?’ I said. ‘Because once we’ve gone, you won’t be able to change your mind. This is the day to decide.’

      Wilfred pointed to the rope around his ankle.

      ‘You want to stay with Claude?’ I said.

      Wilfred took me by the arm, leading me to the patch of earth where we’d buried Claude, and there, at the foot of a cypress tree, was a pile of stones, with a fresh red rose in a little clay pot. He’d scratched the name CLAUDE into the bark, and he’d drawn tally marks, four upright lines and one diagonal, in fives, for every day since he died – they went stretching up and around the trunk.

      When I saw those tally marks, I put my arms around him. I was taller than him, and his face fell into my chest.

      It made me cry to feel him crying.

      To feel his feelings and not be able to change them.

      Three years since Claude died – and what it must be to lose a twin.

      I couldn’t bear to remember the sight of Claude in the corner of the burnt hut.

      Three months since the girls disappeared, and no one had seen a sign of them since.