“No, one of the flats behind me. I—” She looks down at the mobile phone in her hand like she’s surprised to see it and says, “Hang on one sec, I’m sorry.”
She dials three numbers and lifts it to her ear. She starts to talk—she’s calling an ambulance, saying maybe fire brigade too, for the ladder—now she’s giving an address and it’s not this one and she says, “Hurry,” and all the time I’m standing there, staring at my sister and trying to understand what the hell I’m seeing.
“The ambulance is going to take too long,” Robin says, and her eyes search my face like she’s adding things up.
“Ambulance for who?”
“Can you come with me? Can you help me do this?” she asks.
“Yeah, of course,” I say, but I still don’t know what’s happening. She’s wearing only a pair of shorts and a tank top in March, and she just shoves her bare feet into some trainers in the hall. She grabs her keys, and after such a flurry of activity inside, she takes an age to step down onto the pavement. As she does, she reaches for my hand.
She looks so different from the last time I saw her that I look straight forward in case she thinks I’m staring at her. She’s bent over, hunched and scrawny but with these lumpy little muscles on her legs, sloping shoulders and the palest skin I’ve ever seen, crisscrossed with scratches. She looks like something emerging from a hole, not really a person at all. Not a savior. Someone who needs to be saved.
ROBIN|PRESENT DAY
Robin can’t take the time to consider why her twin sister, Sarah, is standing on her doorstep, because right now Henry Watkins is standing on his child’s table with a cord around his neck, and he looks very much like he’s going to step off and kill himself. Robin cannot let this happen, no matter what.
Robin’s front door is wide open, the ambulance called. There are shoes on Robin’s feet, shoes that have never stepped on this pavement. Robin reaches for her sister’s hand, the weight of the world she’s stepping into bending her in two. The sun is brighter than it has been in weeks. Unfiltered sun on her bare arms and legs. She squints into her sister’s face, thinner and pinker than she remembered, her sister’s concerned eyes, her spiky nose. Sarah. She would have to help. They move as one.
Robin’s body is not used to any of this. The changing breeze, the sun, the noises all around. People, so many people, on bikes, on foot, scrambling buggies and dragging kids. People stepping backward without looking, people so entwined with the world around them that they don’t need to look.
As the sisters make their way along George Mews, Robin starts to straighten up. She has to focus on getting to that apartment. She can’t look at the big expanse of green, mustn’t notice the battle of smells between exhaust fumes and spring grass. The rustling of glass as the pub takes a delivery, the distant beeps of traffic that blanket this city. She just has to focus on getting into the flat and not dropping and curling into a hard little ball.
As her legs become used to the pavement and her eyes stop watering and adjust, Robin finally notices the warmth of the hand on her arm, how her sister is clinging to her too and not just propping her up.
“The man who lives behind me is trying to hang himself,” Robin says.
“Oh shit,” Sarah says. Sarah, who never used to swear. “Do you know him?”
Robin falters. No, she doesn’t. And yet…“No, I just happened to see from the window. And if he steps off the table, I don’t think the ambulance will get there in time.”
They go a little quicker. A three-legged race. Robin’s legs and arms are goose-pimpled but she won’t feel that yet. The sisters turn in to Jewel Street, which runs behind George Mews.
Robin has never seen the flats from the front, but she knows which flat Henry Watkins is in. She remembers his address from sending his wife her gift and starting all this trouble. She feels sick at the memory and other memories too, which surface unbidden.
THIRTY-SIX
SARAH|1998
For the first month back in England, I lay on my new bed in my old room and tried to be glad I was home. Robin still tiptoed around me, still refusing to apologize but seemingly aware that she should.
Callum had gone, and Hilary seemed keen to forget his absence by concentrating on cooking and fussing over me. All I wanted to do was hide. And sleep.
Out of gratitude and duty, I tried to join in with the family meals Hilary had cooked, even though I felt queasy from mid-afternoon until bedtime. I lay still for many hours, just expecting that my pregnancy would end. Remembering something I heard about what a high percentage of early pregnancies end in miscarriage, often without the woman even knowing. I tried to want that to happen, tried to will it. God knows, if any pregnancy deserved to fail, it should be one borne out of such a terrible moment. Moments.
What took my breath away, what made the tears roll into my pillow, was the pain I felt at the thought of it ending. An unplanned pregnancy, with a man who should never have so much as looked at me that way, growing in a body that was not his to touch. Jobless, without a plan, without a friend, and yet…The thought of being “saved” from this catastrophe through the raw odds of loss punched holes in my heart.
This was my baby.
I got away with being quiet that first month. No one expected much from me anyway. I was tired from the flight and then I was overwhelmed by the move. I was daunted by having to choose from the limited university options that last-minute applications offered. I was looked at sympathetically, except by Robin, who didn’t look at me much, because she was out all the time.
After six years apart, our differences had hardened. I’d become an only child but she’d been one of a pair. Callum had gone, fled into an easier life with fewer questions, no expectations. But instead of seeing the twin-half now in front of her, Robin just retreated too. Staying out until all hours or hiding in her room.
Had I not spent so long lying on my side with one hand on my belly, feeling giddy and sick, I would have been more hurt. Perhaps I would have had it out with her, cleared the air.