“It isn’t like when you’re having one of your dopy fits?” I said.
“No, nothing like. That was before I kenned for sure she was real, and in a place I could be going to—I could walk into a room and she’d be there, waiting for me. Before, I was only watching, seeing what she was seeing, and she’d not have kenned I was there. Now I can feel her. Put a cloth over my eyes and spin me around, and I’ll point you where she is. I could walk straight to her, and maybe I’d weary on the way and fall asleep, but my body would go on walking to her.”
Then the phone rang and I went to answer it. It was Janice.
“Melly thinks this is safe,” she said. “I hope to heavens she’s right. Is Trish back yet? Can I talk to her?”
Mum came and I went back into the kitchen. In spite of what Melly had told Janice I was pretty anxious. I thought any sort of connection between where the two girls were might make something happen, but when I asked Melanie she shook her head.
“It isn’t that way,” she said. “Just now I ken with my mind she’s there, and that’s our ma talking with Trish, and that’s it. It’s the other times, when the whole of me’s aching and screaming for us to be together, body and soul, just the one body, just the one soul … Mary, mother of God, help me!”
She wasn’t swearing either, she was praying. I’d never heard anyone do that before, not for real. I took hold of her hand and held it and she started to cry, quietly, wiping the tears away with her sleeve and swearing under her breath and crying again. This is going to sound really stupid, but I was glad she was doing it. She needed to cry, and she needed to hold my hand so that she could do it, and she trusted me enough to let herself go like that. Yes, I was glad.
The next few days were a real muddle. I’m not going to write down all the different telephone calls and so on, mostly Mum and Janice, but sometimes me talking to Melly and sometimes Melanie and Janice trying to get to know each other a bit. It was specially hard on Janice, Mum said, getting used to the idea that there was this other daughter, or other half of one daughter, depending how you looked at it, who she’d never met and who’d lived this life she didn’t know anything about. And on top of that Janice still hated the idea that there wasn’t some kind of ordinary, real-world explanation for what had happened. That’s why I put in that bit about the other daughter or the half daughter. Melanie and Melly were absolutely set, certain, sure that they were two halves who’d somehow come apart, but Janice was just as certain they were two different people, and always had been and always would be, and what was happening between them was some kind of psychic freak.
“She thinks she might have had twins without knowing it,” Mum said. “She had a perfectly appalling labor, in their caravan, with the horrible sister and a couple of old hags from the circus acting as midwives. It was extremely primitive and full of superstitious nonsense, and she passed out several times, so I suppose it’s just possible. I know in some places people are very superstitious about twins, because they think one of them must have come from the devil, though I’ve never heard of that happening in France. But I can tell you one thing—the little boy I was looking after when I was an au pair was perfectly obviously left-handed, but when I suggested he might be, the family was very upset, and the grandmother wanted the parents to sack me on the spot. There’d never been the slightest taint of left-handedness in either family, she said. So what Janice thinks now—or rather what she seems to be trying to persuade herself—is that she had twins without knowing it and they took the left-handed one away …”
“You said there didn’t have to be a left-handed one,” I said.
“No, I don’t think so, and I wouldn’t have thought you could tell that small. But these are very superstitious people and perhaps they believed they could. Anyway, let me go on.… Then, when she ran away with the baby and they came after her and took it away, what they did was exchange it for the other one, which they’d farmed out somewhere, and bring that one back. I must say I don’t believe that either. You know your baby and it knows you, however like the new one might be, though according to Janice it cried and cried and wouldn’t stop for days after they brought it back.”
“But you don’t believe it,” said Melanie. “Tell me you don’t believe it, Trish. It’s …”
She was trying not to swear when Mum was around, and sometimes it was pretty funny when she bit something back at the last moment, but not now. She was really upset.
“No, I don’t,” said Mum. “I can believe in somebody having twins and not realizing it, in circumstances like that, but not in people discovering at once that one of them was left-handed …”
“They didn’t have to know then,” I said. “They could just believe one of them was going to be, and take the second one away and keep it until they found out, and then do the swap. And they were just about ready to do that when Janice cleared out, so they had to come after her. And you did say the baby cried a lot, after.”
I could have kicked myself. I’d only just registered that Melanie really couldn’t cope with Janice’s kind of explanation, about twins and so on, and I needn’t have blurted that out, even if it made a sort of sense. Anyway, Melanie totally lost it.
“That’s crap!” she yelled. “I tell you it’s effing crap! We’re one! I’m her and she’s me, and the eff with anything else!”
“I believe you,” said Mum. “You know it’s so and Melly knows it’s so, and that’s all the argument I need. What Keith said was perfectly sensible, but what’s happening isn’t sensible.”
“We can’t go on this way,” said Melanie. “I tell you, we can’t go on this way!”
Another evening I was doing homework in the kitchen—you get a lot of that in Scottish schools. Mum was at the theater and Melanie was in the lounge watching TV. I was steaming along through some math when she yelled at me to come and see. I yelled back I was busy and she came rushing out and started trying to pull me out of my chair, yelling at me it was important and I’d got to come. I could see she was on one of her highs so I said I’d come for a bit.
It was a program about Siamese twins. There’d been stuff in the news about a pair who’d been born in Liverpool and they were going to try and separate, and this was some kind of documentary about other pairs. It wasn’t my sort of thing. Given the chance I’d have zapped to another channel, but Melanie made me watch the lot. Some of the twins hadn’t got a chance. They’d got shared livers and kidneys and things, and there was no way they could be cut apart and both of them live. The ones who were more lightly joined the surgeons could do something about, but it was always chancy. We were looking at a pair who were joined at the chest when Melanie pressed the mute button.
“That’s us,” she said. “That’s me and Melly.”
I stared at the screen. They were babies still, about a year old, I guessed. Two heads, four arms, four legs, and this body thing in the middle. It was a still photograph, not film. Both faces were screwed up, both mouths seemed to be crying, all eight limbs struggled and threshed. It was horrible.
“They canna live like that,” said Melanie, “and you canna cut them free of each other.”
She always sounded much more Scottish when she was upset. After a bit she pressed the button again.
“… died at two and a half years,” said the voice-over. “Even with modern surgical techniques, it is unlikely that either of them would have survived an operation to separate them.”
She didn’t say anything else until the program was over and she’d switched off.
“Do you see now, Keith?” she said. “It isna livers and that we share, but try and make us two, the way you and my ma are trying, and one of us will be dead. Both of us, very like. We must be one, like we were when we were born. We must be made one.”
“Made one? How?”
“I dinna ken. All I ken is when I was a wee bairn I was one, and Papa took me away and made me two, and one he gave back to my ma and one he kept for himself, but we couldn’t live long lik
e that, no more than the bairns in the program. I tell you this, Keith. If you hadn’t been coming down the steps by Princes Street the morning you were, there’d have been some other thing happen to pull us together again.”
“What would happen if you just met, and got it over with?”
“The one of us would be dead, and the other would go crazy past curing.”
I’d never said anything to her about doppelgangers, and nor had anyone else as far as I knew. I didn’t bother to ask how she could be so sure. She wouldn’t have been able to tell me.
When Mum came home she called Janice, which she did most evenings. Janice said that Melly hadn’t watched the TV program, but she’d described the Siamese twins to her and said almost exactly the same things that Melanie had been saying to me.
I had three weeks back at school after Edinburgh, before the summer holidays started, so we had to work out what to do about Melanie. We couldn’t risk leaving her alone. She said so too. I’d be doing homework and she’d be listening to a tape on my Walkman and she’d jerk up and stare in front of her. Or maybe she’d be watching TV in the lounge and she’d come sort of sleepwalking into the kitchen and mutter to me in a dead kind of voice, “Hang on to me, Keith,” and I’d stop what I was doing and simply hold her tight, ten minutes, quarter of an hour sometimes, and she’d give a big sigh and say, “Ta, I’ll do now,” and I’d let go. If anyone had come in and found us they’d have got the wrong idea. OK, I was keen on her in a way I’d never been on Melly, or anyone else come to that, but what was happening to her was too serious for that kind of messing around.
Janice couldn’t leave Melly alone either, but that wasn’t as much of a problem, because Melly had school, and friends, and all her usual life to hang on to. Melanie didn’t have any of that, nothing to anchor her down. Mum arranged to go in to the opera afternoons and evenings, and she took Melanie in with her to give her a hand. Then I’d take the bus in after school and bring Melanie back to Bearsden, though sometimes we hung around in Glasgow for a couple of hours so she could buy a few clothes and get to see a bit of life. Mum and I’d only been a few months in Bearsden, so people didn’t know that much about us. Our story was that Melanie was half French, and her mum was a friend of Mum’s, but her parents had split up and she was staying with us while things got sorted out, and we were being careful in case her dad showed up and tried to take her away. That was all pretty well true, in fact I gave myself nightmares about M. Perrault somehow nosing her out, the way he’d found Janice at the hotel when she’d run away from the circus. Luckily there are pages and pages of Robinsons in the Glasgow phone book. I suppose if he’d gone to the police about Melanie going missing, and told them it might have something to do with Mum, they’d have tracked us down, but Melanie said he wouldn’t because he didn’t trust policemen. We didn’t see anything about her in the papers or on the local news.
Mum worked in the sewing room in the theater, next door to what they called the Wardrobe, which was a regular room stacked with racks of costumes and shelves of boots and hats and shoes and gloves and sword belts and so on for all the different productions. They’d have two or three operas on the go, and maybe a couple of others being got ready, and there might be fifty or sixty people in the cast, what with the chorus and everything. That’s a lot of costumes.
Usually there’d be half a dozen women in the sewing room, stitching and cutting, but with the opera on tour it was just Mum in the evenings. I got there one time and found her sitting on a pile of clothes with Melanie on her lap, rocking her to and fro like a baby. They both looked utterly exhausted.
“Thank God you’re here at last,” said Mum, though I wasn’t any later then I’d said. “I don’t know what’s up, but Melanie’s been having a very bad time. I haven’t sewn a stitch for the last hour and I’ve a pile of work to do. Do you think you can take her home, darling? She seems to be quieter now. You’d better take a taxi. My wallet’s in my jacket pocket. Will you be all right with Keith, Melanie? You can call me if it gets bad again and I’ll come straight home.”
Melanie stood up, shivering. I could see she’d been crying.
“I’ll do fine,” she muttered. “Sorry about that, Trish. I couldn’t stop myself.”
“That’s all right,” said Mum. “I could see you couldn’t. I’m going to start sewing, but don’t let Keith take you away till you’re ready.”
“I’ll do fine,” said Melanie again. “I’ll just be going to the toilet.”
As soon as she was out of the room I asked Mum what had happened.
“I’m not sure,” said Mum. “I was sewing in here and Melanie had wandered out and after a bit I went to see where she’d got to—I can’t help feeling anxious about her, you know. She’d wandered into the Wardrobe and she must have been trying on some of the costumes—she’s done that before—I told her she could … Anyway I found her sort of stuck in front of the mirror—you know, the full-length one—wearing one of the green cloaks from Trovatore—far too big for her but just right for her coloring. I asked if she was all right and she didn’t seem to hear me, so I asked a bit louder and she still didn’t. But when I actually touched her she spun round and screamed, and stared at me as if I was some kind of wild animal. Next thing she was yelling and swearing. She didn’t know me at all. And we had auditions going on so all I could do was drag her in here and shut the door and try and get her calmed down. And that’s what I’ve been doing ever since. I’m desperately behind, darling. I’m going to be late back—well after ten, I should think. Are you sure you can cope? You’ll call if you need me, won’t you? The receptionist’s name is Mercy. She’s much less of a dragon than she tries to sound. Anyway I’ll warn her you may be calling …”
Then Melanie came back and said thank you and sorry again to Mum, and Mum gave her a hug and we left. I started looking for a taxi, but Melanie said she’d rather walk a bit. In the end we walked the whole way back to Bearsden, which is all of seven miles. We didn’t talk much at first. I didn’t want to bother her. We must have been nearly halfway home when she said, “I was blowing around, Keith, blowing around this great cold empty space. Like … you’ve seen a paper bag blowing along a street on a windy day, high up between the buildings, whirling and jinking wherever the wind tells it? Like that. And you know what was in there with me? The creature, the one in the traveling cage, like I told you about in my nightmares. And there was this wee glass door I must get to, if ever I was to come out of that place. And I could see myself standing in my green cloak on the other side of the wee glass door … It wasn’t any dream, Keith. It was the worst thing that has ever come to me in all my days.”
It was after half past nine when we got home. Melanie had a bath while I fixed supper. She came down in her dressing gown and we ate off our knees in the lounge, watching the telly. Then I went into the kitchen to get on with my homework. After a bit I looked into the lounge to see if she was OK, and she was curled up asleep on the sofa, so I got a duvet and put it over her and went back to my homework. Somewhere around ten Janice rang and I told her Mum was still at the theater.
“Well, will you tell her Christine has confirmed she can have Melly this weekend?” she said. “So I’ll definitely be coming up, late on Friday.”
(She’d been going to come the weekend before. She was desperate to meet Melanie, of course. But at the last minute Christine had had something happen which meant she couldn’t look after Melly, and there was no one else Janice felt it was safe to leave her with. I don’t know what she’d told Christine—as much as she could without sounding crazy, I expect.)
“Great,” I said. “I’ll pass that on. I can’t tell Melanie now because she’s asleep … Is Melly OK?”
Janice hesitated. I guessed she’d sooner have talked to Mum about it. She’s not as good as Mum is at letting me (or Melly, come to that) in on things.
“I think she’s all right now,” she said. “Why? Did something happen your end?”
I told her, exce
pt for what Melanie had told me. I felt that was private to Melanie.
“About what time would this have been?” said Janice.
I worked it out. Mum had said two hours.
“Around half past five,” I said.
There was another pause while she made up her mind whether to tell me any more.
“I’d rather talk to Trish about it,” she said. “I’m sorry, Keith, but it’s all a bit private and personal. It’s not that I don’t trust you …”
“That’s all right,” I said, though actually I felt pretty miffed—I’d told her about Melanie, hadn’t I? “Mum should be home about … oh, any minute now. I’ll get her to call you, shall I?”
“If she’s not too tired,” she said, and we rang off.
I told Mum when she got in, and she rang and talked for getting on an hour, but I was still doing my homework when she finished so she came into the kitchen and told me what had happened while she made herself her bedtime tipple, which is chamomile tea and a slug of scotch.
“Melly went to a therapist this afternoon,” said Mum.
“Did she actually want to?” I said. “Or did Janice make her?”
“It was Janice’s idea,” said Mum. “She still thinks what’s happening is some kind of fixation the girls have got. But Melly thought it might help too, she says. Janice dropped her at the therapist—his name’s Dr. Wilson—at five and went off to do some shopping, and when she got back—she was a bit late—she found Melly looking very shaky and dazed, and it was obvious that she’d been badly upset. Dr. Wilson was seeing another patient by then, but he came out and said he thought it was all right to take Melly home, but she shouldn’t be left alone and he’d telephone as soon as he could, and explain what had happened. Melly insisted she was all right, but she didn’t want to talk …”
The Lion Tamer’s Daughter Page 18
