by Tina Seskis
Frances spent the next seven days in hospital, and that gave her time to at least appear to recover from the trauma of the births, the absence of her husband, the fact she was quite unbelievably the new mother of twins. She decided her only option was to make the best of it, to embrace both girls, in fact maybe in the end it would be nice to have two. But it wasn’t easy, Emily and Caroline were different from the start. When they were born you would hardly have known they were twins – Emily was pink and plump, Caroline thin and sickly and pallid, almost two pounds lighter than her sister. And then Caroline refused to take to her mother’s breast, although Emily had no problems, and so Caroline’s weight dropped as her twin’s increased.
Frances was stoical by nature. She tried and tried and tried with Caroline, until her nipples bled and her nerves were ragged. She was determined to treat her two babies the same – she had to now they were both here. In the end it was one of the nurses who put her foot down and gave Caroline a bottle on the fourth day, she said they couldn’t starve the child. Caroline gripped the teat in her tiny mouth ferociously, contrarily, whilst Frances felt like a failure, and another bond was broken.
In the months after that Caroline’s weight caught up fast with Emily’s, she absolutely loved the bottle. Her thin limbs filled out and she took on a puffy look – all creases of skin and fat red cheeks – that Frances tried hard to find appealing. It was as if Caroline couldn’t grow up fast enough, couldn’t wait to get one over on Emily, even at this age. She was the first to crawl, the first to walk, the first to spit her solids into her mother’s face. Frances found her a handful.
The twins grew more physically alike as they got older. By the time they were three they’d lost their baby fat, their hair had grown thick and straight, and they sported matching blunt bobs that Frances did herself. She dressed them the same – that’s what people did in the seventies – and it became hard to tell them apart.
Only their temperaments gave them away. Emily seemed to have been born happy and placid, able to simply go along with the world and make the best of what came her way. Caroline was strung out. She couldn’t stand surprises, hated not getting her own way, went mad at loud noises, but most of all she couldn’t bear her mother’s easy love for her sister. Still a survivor in those days, Caroline turned to her father for support, but Andrew seemed rather vague and absent in his role as a parent, as if it all was a bit too vivid for him, and Caroline was left looking in on the family as though she wasn’t really meant to be there. Frances was careful to never show any overt favouritism – the twins always had the same food, same clothes, same kisses at bedtime, but each twin sensed the gargantuan toll this took on their mother, and it left a burden on each of them.
It was a cold wet afternoon on a housing estate in Chester, and the five-year-old twins were bored. Their mother had gone food shopping and Andrew was meant to be minding them, albeit whilst half-listening to the football on the crackly Roberts radio he’d brought in from his shed. But Andrew had disappeared into the kitchen ages ago, to make another phone call they’d assumed, that’s what he usually did when their mother was out, and they’d grown tired of their map puzzle, it was too hard without their father to help them. They lay now at each end of the brown velveteen couch, kicking each other’s legs aimlessly, and not entirely painlessly, their matching red tartan dresses riding up their thighs and their knee-length brocade socks scuffi ng down their shins.
‘OWWWW. Daddy!’ yelled Caroline. ‘Emily just kicked me. DAAADDY!’
Andrew poked his head round the kitchen door, stretching the cord of the wall-mounted phone until its kinks were pulled nearly straight.
‘I didn’t do anything, Daddy,’ said Emily, truthfully. ‘We’re just playing.’
‘Stop that, Emily,’ he said mildly, and disappeared back into the kitchen.
Caroline disentangled her legs from her sister’s and then launched herself across the length of the sofa and pinched her twin hard on the upper arm. ‘Yes, you did,’ she hissed.
‘Daddy!’ shrieked Emily. Andrew’s head appeared again, and he was cross now. ‘Just stop it the pair of you,’ he said. ‘I’m on the phone,’ and then he shut the kitchen door.
When Emily realised her father wasn’t going to help her she stopped crying and padded across the expanse of neat beige carpet to the doll’s house at the far end of the room, by the patio doors. This was Emily’s favourite toy, but it was not exclusively hers – like most of her things it had to be shared, and Caroline loved to move all the furniture into the wrong rooms, or even worse take it out altogether for the dog to eat. Caroline followed her over and said coaxingly, ‘Let’s play teddies,’ and so Emily agreed, although she didn’t entirely trust her sister’s motives, and they’d set up their teddies for a tea party and even played quite nicely for a few minutes. Just as Caroline had tired of their half-game and stalked off to the kitchen to find her father, Emily heard a car pull up in front of the garage that formed the left side of the chalet-style house.
‘Mummy!’ Emily jumped off the couch and ran down the length of the living room towards the hall as she heard her mother open the front door.
Caroline was on her way back from the kitchen, where she’d helped herself to a malted milk biscuit from the metal tin in the cupboard next to the cooker. Her father had quickly got off the phone and let her have one, which had surprised her, it was nearly tea time. She’d just bitten the cow’s head off, planning to savour each body part, but now she crammed the rest of the biscuit into her mouth, eating urgently. As Caroline came into the hall wiping crumbs off her face she saw her twin hurtling down the lounge towards her, and her first instinct was to move, get out the way.
‘Hello Mummy!’ called Emily. Frances was putting down her shopping, ready to open her arms to both her daughters. But when Caroline saw Emily’s joy and their mother’s reciprocity she wanted to shut the scene out, it made her feel cross. As Frances set the last bag down on the orange shag rug in the middle of the sunlit hall, she looked up and saw Caroline slam the lounge door shut, hard, at precisely the right moment. And then she saw Emily come tearing through the plate glass towards her, and she heard the sound of a bomb going off.
Andrew had chased Caroline around the oval-shaped dining table whilst Frances picked shards of glass out of Emily’s face and arms and legs. Miraculously, Emily’s cuts were mostly superficial, but Caroline was still sent to her room until tea time, despite Andrew trying to convince his wife that Caroline hadn’t realised what would happen – she was too young, he’d said, she couldn’t possibly have done it deliberately – and that they should let her come downstairs now. But Frances was unrelenting, she’d never been so furious in her life.
Later Andrew hypothesised that it was only Emily’s speed at impact that saved her from Jeffrey Johnson’s fate, the boy four doors down who’d been left with a livid two-inch scar on his cheek from a run-in with his own glass door. There was however one deeper cut on Emily’s knee which faded over time but failed to disappear completely, and she was never able to look at it without being reminded of her sister, and of course as she got older it reminded her of all the other things Caroline had done over the years, so the scar was much worse than it looked really. The Browns replaced the door with a wooden one after that, and although the living room was always that much darker, Frances felt happier that way.
THE BEGINNING
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First published in Great Britain by Kirk Parolles as A Serpentine Affair 2013
Published in Penguin Books as When We Were Friends 2015
Text copyright © Tina Seskis, 2013
Cover images: © Hunter/Corbis; © Gari Wyn Williams/Millennium Images
The moral right of the author has been asserted
ISBN: 978-1-405-91796-4
