by Will Maclean
‘I wrote it all down,’ said Abi. ‘Straight afterwards.’
‘Why?’ I virtually spat the question at her.
‘I wasn’t going to let something like that get away from us. Wait a sec.’
Abi got up and descended the ladder. I discovered fairly quickly I did not like being alone with the little wooden family and their ruined faces, so I took the cloth napkin that Abi had placed under the vase of lavender and wrapped them all up in it. I then stuffed the bundle back inside the doll’s house and did my best to secure the broken panel back on the front. I must have been reasonably engrossed in this task, because when Abi suddenly appeared at my shoulder, I started in shock.
‘Where are the people?’ It was funny how neither of us used the word dolls.
‘Back in their mansion,’ I said. ‘And they can stay there for ever for all I care.’ Abigail, to my surprise, didn’t object or mock me, or call me melodramatic. There was something unwholesome about the little family. We had both felt it.
Abi opened her notebook, the one with the owls on the cover. This notebook was where she wrote thoughts even more private than those committed to a diary – ambitions, hopes, fears, dreams both good and bad that she wanted to preserve; sayings and quotations she felt were pertinent to her own life. It was where she’d also written her poetic invocation to our ghost, tearing the page out so she could share it with me. As ever, Abi was careful not to show me any other pages as she laid the book flat on the fresh new page on which she had recorded Janice Tupp’s weird outburst. It was strange that Janice’s ramblings were now a part of this book too, alongside the words of Keats, Blake and Milton, of equal importance and weight.
‘Why did you write all of this down?’
‘I told you.’
‘That wasn’t an answer.’
She stared at me. I understood by her expression the answer was obvious to her and she was baffled as to why it shouldn’t be so to me. ‘What poured out of Janice earlier was her innermost self, a communication directly from how she sees herself. Do you know how rare something like that is? I absolutely had to write it down, and fresh, too. I didn’t want to corrupt it with my own syntax.’
We read again what Janice had said.
I see the broken house, with all the broken people in it. I see it coming back for you. I see four halves and two quarters. I see it returning, and it will never let you go.
‘The broken house,’ I whispered. A chill shuddered through me. ‘With the broken people in it.’ Panic bubbled up in me. ‘Jesus, Abi. How could she know?’
‘I don’t know,’ Abi said tensely.
‘How could she know?’ I felt cold. ‘About the people?’
‘Tim—’
‘How could she know, Abi? They were sealed into the house!’ I was on my feet now, shouting. The world seemed suddenly terrifying, a place where all of our unthinkable and macabre fascinations had leaked out and were free to caper and play. ‘She predicted this! She made a prediction and it came true!’ I raked a hand down my face. Fear gave me an excess of energy and I ran to the window to look out at the street, the world, to reassure myself it was still there.
Abi came over to me. To my supreme annoyance and incalculable relief, she was smiling. I looked out of the window again. A million miles below, in the twilight, Dad was putting the bins out.
‘She wanted you to be scared,’ said Abi softly. ‘And you are.’
‘You’re not?’
‘No.’ She sniffed contemptuously. ‘She’s just a silly girl, play-acting.’
I carried on looking out of the window. Somewhere, a distant ice cream van was improbably plying its trade at nightfall, in February, and a demented, nerve-jangling rendition of ‘Greensleeves’ hung in the air, like a manifestation of some psychotic illness.
‘So what does that leave us with?’ said Abi. ‘A melodramatic, gullible girl is humiliated by a fake ghost photograph, and instead of admitting she’s been fooled, she concocts a plan to get us back. She does a fake psychic act and we fall for it, at least in the short term.’
‘The people, though, Abi. The broken people in the doll’s house. How could she possibly know about that? They’ve been trapped inside there for decades. She couldn’t have set that up.’
Abi smiled. ‘She didn’t. She just noticed we had a battered old doll’s house and made a guess it would have battered old dolls in it. It’s a reasonable guess that an old doll’s house would have old dolls inside it. She just got lucky, that’s all.’
I thought about this. It made sense. Abi shoved the doll’s house experimentally across the tabletop.
‘Then she just pushes the doll’s house off the table, when we’re downstairs. The only bit I don’t get is how we didn’t hear anything. It must have made a heck of a noise.’
‘We were downstairs at that point,’ I said. ‘We might well not have heard it at all.’
‘There you are, you see?’ My sister grinned. ‘Turns out she’s not clairvoyant after all. She’s just really good at pretending to be.’ She sank into an armchair. After a couple of seconds, I sank into the other armchair.
We sat facing each other for a minute or so, silent as bookends.
‘We really did pick the wrong person to show that photograph to,’ said Abi eventually.
‘What about all the other stuff she said? All that stuff about giving something a shape?’
‘She was just throwing her own fear back at us. Trying to ruin this place for us.’
I thought about this too. It also made sense.
‘Anyway, don’t worry,’ said Abi, ‘I won’t tell anyone.’
‘Tell anyone what?’
‘That you got all scared and upset like a ickle baby.’ She did a baby voice for the last four words, and stuck her lower lip out.
‘Sod off!’ I laughed.
‘You sod off!’
I returned to the table, where Abi’s owl notebook was. It was still open on the page with Janice’s rantings on it. I sank back into the armchair and re-read them, whilst Abi hovered anxiously to ensure I didn’t look at any other pages. I removed the pen from the book’s spine and wrote ‘The Compleyte Prophecies of Janys Tuppe of Thisse Parishe’ at the top of the page. I thought Abi would be annoyed at me for writing in her book, but she smirked.
‘I see you too. I see you, but you can’t see me. Grinning away, showing your teeth, saying nothing but sand. You can’t stop it now. What else is there to do? What good is being clever now? And you can’t stop this. He’s coming. He has eyes but no face. He’s near.’
‘I wonder where all this nonsense came from?’
‘Who knows? It’s good, though, I’ll give her that. You get off lightly, with the broken people. I, meanwhile, end up in whatever unique hell this is, courtesy of person or persons unknown. I suppose I should be flattered that she reserved the worst of it for me.’
‘I think she thinks it was all your idea.’
‘Probably.’
We both fell into silence for a while, meditating on the day’s events. Eventually, I was the one to break it.
‘Abi? Do people at school really hate us?’
Abi shrugged.
‘Do you care?’
8
And so neither of us spoke to Janice Tupp for the rest of the school year. Janice avoided us, and we avoided her. We had barely spoken to her before the incident of the ghost photograph, so to everyone else in class it looked as if nothing had changed. However, I was careful always to give her a wide berth, almost as if she were unlucky. Something about the power of her weird little performance unsettled me whenever I recalled it. Also, I didn’t like the way she looked at us.
The day after Janice came to see us, Abigail and I set about rebuilding our attic, much to our mother’s chagrin. The proposed redecoration never got underway. Pretty soon it was back to the way it had always been, and soon after that, even more so, as my sister and I brought back a never-ending supply of treasure from junk shops, jumble sales, second-hand booksho
ps and other places where the flotsam and jetsam of other people’s lives collected.
In the subsequent weeks, we studied the family from the ruined doll’s house very carefully. In many ways, they were the eerie artefact we had been searching for all of our lives, but because of the circumstances under which they had been discovered, we found it impossible to enjoy them in the way we would have liked. Had we discovered them ourselves, we would have been free to mythologise them, to pronounce them proof of a murder, or a haunting, or the playthings of a malformed offspring kept in a secret room. Janice Tupp and her ravings had destroyed any chance we had of regarding them in this way, and our explanations for the mutilated figures were all rooted firmly in the rational. A spoilt child became our considered guess – a pudgy Edwardian boy, with a cruel and horrible streak, who exacted revenge upon his sister for some petty transgression by destroying her treasured dolls. And in time, although we never forgot Janice Tupp’s strange performance, we learned not to think about it.
Time passed. For the last five months of middle school, Janice Tupp became just another person of our own age who wouldn’t talk to us; one of the massed ranks of those who found us too obtuse, too weird, too clever by half. We didn’t care. We had each other.
The ghost photograph debacle, far from ending our fascination with strange projects, seemed instead to bolster it, and we subsequently did numerous experiments in all things paranormal. We tried automatic writing. We tried table-turning. We made our own Zener cards and attempted to read each other’s minds, concentrating on the symbols until our eyes were hot and our heads tingled.
We also devised what could be called a long-term project. We read somewhere that Aldous Huxley had said that, in the event of his death, he would contact the living by making a book fall off a shelf, and open on a certain page. That page would have a quotation on it which would communicate what the afterlife was like. Apparently, after Huxley died, his widow received exactly such a communication, and a book did indeed fall off a shelf, but the quotation her attention was drawn to was disappointingly generic. I cannot now for the life of me recall where we heard this story, and I have failed to find it since. It may not even have been Aldous Huxley, and could just as easily have been J.W. Dunne or G.K. Chesterton – or anybody, frankly. However, the specifics of the story didn’t matter. What really mattered to us was the idea of communicating from beyond the grave.
And so, we resolved that if one of us died, they would do their utmost, wherever they found themselves, to communicate with the other. However, we judged the method of opening books to be too random, too impersonal, too open to misinterpretation, and so we devised something that we thought better.
Abi and I bought a hardback notebook from John Menzies on the high street and took it in turns to write messages we thought might be useful to our dead selves on alternating pages. As with everything Abi and I undertook, there were strict rules to writing in the Book of Fates. We weren’t allowed to write anything ambiguous. We had to really think about what would be useful information to impart to the living. We had to write legibly and clearly. Abi wrote in black ink, I in blue. She wrote on the verso pages, I on the recto:
I am in Heaven.
I am in Hell.
I am in limbo
I am with other dead people I know
I can see you
There is nothing
And so on. When we were done, Abi placed it on our bookshelf, between Witchcraft in England and The Mummy of Birchen Bower, and there it remained, another thing only we knew about.
In this way, summer passed. In the last week of July, we climbed into Dad’s ancient Morris Minor and drove down to Dorset for a week, staying in a whitewashed cottage at the end of a private road of yellow gravel. Both of us found the countryside intoxicating and freeing; I still remember the depressing feeling of getting home and seeing the suburban town where we lived as if for the first time, all clashing colours and noise. Nobody, I remember thinking, would voluntarily live in a town or city.
The summer holidays went on, seemingly for ever. When we all sat down for dinner a week or so later, I knew that something was up, because Dad didn’t bring a crossword to the dinner table. Supremely uncomfortable he looked too, having to interact with the rest of his family. Halfway through dinner, he found the courage to say what he wanted to say.
‘You two. I’ve been meaning to talk to you for a while now.’
‘Uh oh,’ said Abi, not looking up from her plate. ‘Serious voice.’
‘Like he’s going to read the news!’ I said.
‘You two,’ said Mum. ‘Listen to your father.’
‘Thank you, Alice. As I was saying. I had a talk with your former headmaster at parents’ day last year. And whilst he was very effusive about your intellectual achievements …’
‘As he should be,’ said Abi.
‘Abi, please. Whilst he was very enthusiastic about your marks, he was less than enthusiastic about your attitudes.’
‘Oh,’ said Abi, looking at Dad for the first time. ‘And what did old Rogers have to say about that, then?’
‘He felt the two of you were aloof, you only really respected each other’s intellect, and in some subjects this made you pretty much unteachable.’
I smiled. ‘Owl, you and I have brains.’
My sister smiled back. ‘… The others have fluff.’
‘This,’ said Dad. ‘This is exactly what I’m talking about. This private little world the two of you share. It allows you to develop … airs and graces.’
Abi was incredulous. ‘What airs and graces, exactly?’
‘Well, the idea you’re cleverer than everyone else.’
‘Well, we are,’ Abi shot back, without so much as a pause. ‘That’s just a fact.’ Her voice was entirely free of boastfulness or vanity.
‘I can’t believe my own children have become this arrogant!’ said Dad, with genuine anger.
‘It’s not arrogance if it’s true.’ I said this audibly, but not loudly. I sensed we were on thin ice.
‘We’re not hurting anyone, Dad!’
‘That’s as maybe, but …’ Dad regarded us with a cautious, wary expression that threatened to undermine his authority somewhat. ‘You’re both fourteen now. Long past time you stopped leaning on each other. That’s why your teachers and I have taken the decision to send you to separate schools in September.’
‘What? Why?’
‘So you learn to interact with kids your own age, that’s why.’
‘We do interact with kids our own age, Dad!’
‘Oh, that Tupp girl? Well, she never came round again, did she?’
‘Janice Tupp is a moron,’ said Abi.
‘And there it is again,’ said Dad triumphantly. ‘You both need to learn to stand on your own two feet, and not look down on people.’
‘How eloquent,’ said Abi. ‘No cliché left unturned.’
‘Abigail,’ Dad said quietly, ‘I swear to God, I have had it with your supercilious attitude. Do you understand me?’
Abi looked at her plate in truculent silence.
‘I said, do you understand me?’ Dad seldom lost his temper, but when he did, he went all in. He was close to that moment now.
‘I understand,’ said Abi coldly.
‘Well then,’ said Dad. ‘That’s settled. In September, instead of you both going to Northwood, Abi goes to Meadowlands, and Tim, you’ll go to Gorston Park.’
‘All girls?’ said Abi sourly.
‘All boys?’ I echoed, equally sourly.
‘Absolutely,’ said Dad. ‘Then you’ll have no choice but to make friends your own age. It’s all been arranged.’
I shoved my plate aside and folded my arms, but I was going through the motions. One school was, to me, pretty much the same as any other, and Abi and I barely spoke to each other during school anyway. It was hard to see what difference any of it would make.
Abi, meanwhile, was furious.
Accordingly, in Septem
ber, we went to different schools. My sister, dressed in a pencil skirt, white shirt, and red-and-blue striped tie, walked a mile to Meadowlands girls’ school, and I, dressed in a dark green blazer with a green-and-yellow tie, caught the bus to Gorston Park.
Annoyingly for our parents, attending different schools made Abi and me closer than ever, at least in the short term. To be fair, I think either one of us would have been relieved to make a friend outside of our house and family, who answered or even exceeded our exacting standards, and wouldn’t stare blankly if we mentioned Michel de Montaigne, for instance, or the surgeon’s photograph of the Loch Ness Monster, or remarked that something was a ‘three pipe problem’. But we didn’t find anyone. And so, our separate experiences at different schools became something we tolerated, to return home to the attic and share with the other. Being at different schools gave us a wider variety of idiots to compare and mock in the evenings.
Nonetheless, a shift occurred. At first, it made little or no difference to our lives, but over the following year, there was no way of ignoring what was happening, even to someone as emotionally obtuse as my teenage self. Our frames of reference began to diverge, in a million small ways. Abi began to be interested in pop music, something that had never happened before. She started to experiment with make-up; I got the impression one day that she’d been smoking, though the suspicion only came upon me afterwards and by then it was too late to ask. I suspected there were boys too. I, also, had become interested in other things – vehicles, for instance, and machines, how they fitted together. Part of me toyed with the idea of becoming an engineer, a private surrender to the forces of conventionality that my sister would have been horrified by. I kept this to myself.
We were beginning to become our own people, slowly but surely. Like two tribes that were once joined and were now drifting apart; the further away we drifted, the less we would have in common, until, one day, we wouldn’t speak the same language any more. I can see now that this was right and proper, and is the natural way of things. Siblings, twins especially, must go out and forge their own identities, no matter how close their bond. They have to become their own people in order to remain people, in any meaningful sense. I see that now.
