Jim’s mother will be her new stay-at-home caregiver, no need for safe and sensible Jim to pause his safe and sensible job. They have money. The house is in Jim’s name.
I have no claim to any of it. The only piece of paper worth anything is Violet’s birth certificate, and that is in my old home, behind changed locks. As if that’s enough to keep me out. Not once I have backup. Not once I have my twin on my side again.
ROBIN|PRESENT DAY
While Robin watched from the various windows, there were flurries of change in the Magpie apartment. After the boiling rows, it looked like Mrs. Magpie had finally left her husband and taken the little boy with her. She’d been back a few times briefly but never for long. Cautious visits after a life together. After they leave each time, Mr. Magpie remains. He’s stopped going to work as far as Robin can tell.
Robin battles not to feel sorry for this man, a man who beats women. She watches his husk in a dressing gown, sees him sitting on his son’s bed. Robin reminds herself that what she saw may have been the tip of a very dangerous iceberg. That it’s a good thing the family are apart. But the way his lights go out every time his son leaves is hard to ignore. Especially as Robin’s gift may well have played a part, and not in the way she’d intended. Robin hates infidelity, hates blurred lines, but violence trumps it all.
He didn’t ask to be her symbol of normality and goodness. But watching him clatter around his empty apartment, troubling each room in turn, never seeming to sleep, not dressing until late—if at all—also feels like an injury to her. Feels like he’s pulling her down even further with him.
Mr. Magpie, possible wife beater and God knows what else. And yet every day, still, “Good morning, Mr. Magpie.”
After the arguments in the kitchen, a heavy question mark sat over the Magpie family. While tuning out her own pressing concerns, quite literally in the case of the drumming on her door, Robin has found herself running over spools of old film in her head. Scenes witnessed in the Magpie house, newly soured from the recent activity. Robin has watched this family for over two years. Watched their son turn from a bundle in their arms to a scooting, laughing zip of color through the alleyway. Watched their special days, their milestones.
Robin has never shared any milestones as an adult, unless you include getting drunk with the band. Last Christmas, she’d surprised herself with a yearning for someone’s hand in hers, waking up smelling the sleepy scent of someone else’s skin. She’d watched the Magpies with a sharp and jealous edge.
Robin couldn’t risk it, of course. The closeness, becoming two-halves-of-one-whole, it was dangerous. Boyfriends required trust and leaps of faith. They could then take those trusting hearts and twist them into something new, something impossible to unpick.
Robin had decided many years ago never to take that risk. She’d rather rely on her own wits, sit in her own mess, than be dragged and coerced into someone else’s. She’d seen the damage that a boy—a man—could do.
But so many times she’d watched and thought what an attentive man Mr. Magpie was, what a good father. She’d marveled at how lucky Mrs. Magpie was and then at how vile she’d become. For months, Robin had seethed, wondering how Mrs. Magpie could cheat on a man like that. A man Robin doesn’t really know. A man who is standing in his kitchen right now with a large kitchen knife in his hand, testing the weight. He’s dropping it into his flat palm, holding it up to the light, staring at it like it offers some kind of solution.
TWENTY
SARAH|1993
We’ve been in Atlanta now for six months. The first three we lived in an “executive serviced apartment” paid for by the company, which meant that someone came in every day to empty the bins and there was a gym in the basement, where Mum spent a lot of time while Drew was at work. She’d met some of the other executives’ wives and was surprised to see that Americans weren’t all overweight, like we’d been raised to believe.
The whole of Atlanta feels like a building site. They’re preparing for the Olympics even though it’s still years away. And they’re building even bigger houses and even taller towers. Drew says it’s a “boom city,” which sounds dangerous. All in all, it feels a very long way from Birch End.
I liked the apartment we stayed in. I liked the huge fridge that had a special chute just for ice. I liked that we were on the sixteenth floor of the building—the highest I’d ever been—and when I opened the electric curtains with a special button, I could see out across a city that was glittering with glass, the cement mixers and diggers out of sight on the ground.
I was sad when we moved out but I was awestruck by our new house in Sandy Springs. It could have gobbled both my old houses and still had space. Three of the five bedrooms have their own bathroom. I have a wardrobe that you can walk into, and even after I’d hung all my clothes up, there were about eight feet of railing left empty.
The school that the cola company found for me is very small. It’s for students from around the world, and there are three other cola kids in my class of twelve.
I notice the other cola kids smirking at me when I get told off for misunderstanding things. At my old school, I’d known all the rules. I was like an encyclopedia. I showed prospective pupils around.
But here, here I get everything wrong.
I was due to fly to England two weeks ago. Apparently, March in Atlanta is usually chilly and very rainy. But the morning before I was due to leave—my second-ever flight and the first on my own—snow started to fall. It fell and fell and fell. We tried to set off for the airport early, Drew begrudgingly lined up to drive me, as Mum doesn’t like driving on the right. There were at least two feet of snow on our front garden—“yard,” as our neighbors call it. We tried to get to Drew’s car. I couldn’t drag my suitcase through the heaving drift of white.
We went back inside to watch the news and work out what to do. The newsman said that the airport had only four inches of snow on it but that the roads were “treacherous.” My flight was canceled. The power went out. When the electric came back on, we watched the National Guard on TV as they handed out bags of fruit to stranded motorists. By the end of the day, fifteen people had died in the snowstorm.
Mum said she’d rebook the flights for the next school holiday, which seems like a year away. I wanted to call my dad and let him know about the blizzard and that my flight was canceled, but the phone lines were down.
Robin answered when I finally got through.
“What the fuck happened?” she said. “Were you trapped in the snow?”
“Not exactly,” I said, too sad to match her agitation. “But it snowed really badly and the planes couldn’t take off.”
“I’m gutted,” she said.
“Me too,” I’d whispered. A sob lodged itself in my throat, which I tried to swallow back down as my mum came near the phone.