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.