CHAPTER 13
Between the ages of two and three, the Kettle triplets began to babble to each other in their own secret, unintelligible dialect, switching effortlessly to English whenever they needed to communicate with a grown-up.
Years later, Maxine discovered this was a relatively common phenomenon among multiples, known as “twin talk” or more impressively—idioglossia. (At the time, all she really cared about was that they weren’t attempting to drown, suffocate, or bludgeon one another.)
Gradually, they talked less and less in their secret language and eventually it was erased from their memories, vanished like the lost language of an ancient tribe.
Psychic connections between twins and triplets are another well-documented and exciting phenomenon. In this area, however, the Kettle girls have always lagged. The idea, after all, is to feel your sibling’s pain, not laugh uproariously at it. Elvis, before he went onstage, was able to feel the presence of his dead twin brother, Jesse. Yet nine-year-old Gemma, immersed in her new Enid Blyton book, couldn’t even sense the stealthy presence of her very much alive sisters stealing a bag of mixed lollies from right next to her hand.
When they were eleven, Cat became obsessed with the idea of telepathic communication. Many hours were spent on complex experiments. Unfortunately, they all failed, due to the appalling incompetence of her sisters, who could neither send nor receive a coherent message.
No, the Kettle girls share no psychic connections. (A lot of the time they don’t even understand each other in ordinary verbal, sitting-across-the-table conversation.)
And so:
At nineteen, Lyn’s chin slams into her steering wheel in a car accident caused by a very drunk driver on the Spit Bridge. Gemma feels nothing, not the tiniest twinge, as she dances seductively in a dark, smoky club on Oxford Street, a frangipani in her ear, a cigarette between her fingers. And Cat doesn’t even pause for breath in screaming at her computer, which keeps crashing while she tries to finish an overdue uni assignment.
At twenty-two, Marcus whispers vicious threats into Gemma’s ear, and Cat senses nothing as she breathlessly wrestles with Dan while just outside the door his flat mate laughs heartily at Hey, Hey It’s Saturday. And Lyn is far away in another time zone and another season and doesn’t look up from suspiciously reading the label on a can of deodorant in a London chemist.
And at thirty-three, Cat rocks back and forth, back and forth, as her abdomen knots and locks and she silently screams, Stop it, stop it, stop it. Lyn feels nothing but pleasure as she watches Maddie’s awestruck face illuminated by the colors of fireworks thundering across the sky. And Gemma feels nothing but Charlie’s tongue and taste as she kisses him in the hallway of some friend of a friend’s New Year’s Eve party.
No, neither of them feels a thing until the first day of the New Year when Dan calls to say, “Cat’s lost the baby.”