Being Twins

We played together every day. For as long as I have memories.

Christina and me.

I picture her whenever I think about the past, about childhood, about all the awkward moments of growing up, all the wonder, the fears turned incomprehesible by adulthood. I picture a white-haired girl, full of curls, whose eyes are ice-blue; her cheeks are dimpled, chubby, a pearly-pale, and her smile is full of crooked little teeth.

She sits on a stone, out in one of the overgrown old fields; out where I think there used to be a quarry or something. She has one leg tucked up beneath the other, buried in the folds of a floral dress; one shoe on one foot, the other barely hanging. A dandelion in her small fingers, her eyes on the clouds.

I don't think she was ever afraid of anything. When I was, she just stood beside me, just reached for my hand. The touch of her fingers on mine made the fears recede. What was anything compared to the power of us two? When she was with me I walked boldly up into any challenge; I ran without stopping, without pausing for breath, headlong through grass just as tall as me, through dandelions, daisies, thistles and sunflowers. Unconcerned about what might be inches ahead of me.

“Ella! Ella!” My mum might be calling me for dinner. She might be looking for me.

And me, hunkered down in the grass with Christina, seeing how long we could hide for, how long we could hold our breath and not burst out laughing.

#

We were never supposed to go down by the river.

We always did.

We used to make paper boats, place them delicately on the water, and follow them along. The path might be strewn with nettles, with old logs full of spiders, half-forgotten barbed wire, an old shoe, a dead hedgehog. But we followed our boats until the river went beneath the road, and we couldn't follow any further.

Sometimes we drew pictures of little people, cut them out, and put them in the boats. Gave them a chance to sail out to sea. Sometimes we put stones in the boats until they sank.

One time we caught spiders and coralled them in a little circle of stones.

Another time we made a grand daisy chain, then wound it round and round and round a big oak tree. We stood beneath the oak tree and measured ourselves, and marked the top of our heads with crayon. Both the same height.

We collected acorns.

We built a secret hideout. We developed signals and passwords, and covered it up in loose branches.

We defended our secret hideout when it came under attack by boys. We defended it viciously, with fists and sticks, with biting gap-toothed mouths, with sturdy little school shoes and sheer indignation. My parents were called over that one: me and Christina, muddy, our cheeks and hands smeared with traces of blood, our smiling faces. Mum told me what she thought of all that, casting apologies at other mothers who were doing the same thing, eyes rolled, little wry smiles of understanding. Children, huh? Remember...?

Scolding. All the way home in the car. I asked her: “Can I still play with Christina?”

“Ah, sweetheart. I don't know your Christina is such a good influence.”

It never stopped me.

#

And we grew older.

We stopped at the shop on the way home for ice-cream. We talked about school, and the future we might expect from the world. And boys. Of course. The same boys who'd once attacked our hidout. Now they lounged on a nearby wall. They heckled us and we heckled them back. They did stupid things to impress us. We encouraged them.

The branch was never meant to break. He was never meant to fall and hit the road, with the screeching of breaks, men swearing. Feet running from all directions. He was crumpled and twisted in a way I'd never seen a human body bend. Like a dropped puppet, strings and all. A cordon of adults formed around him. A fairy circle. Hushed voices. Arguments.

I stood staring, while Christina held my hand.

I felt like I had to speak for us. “Nobody meant to. We were just playing around.”

I sat on the kerb and I waited, while Christina rested her chin in my shoulder. The warmth of her cheek against mine held back the cold southerly.

#

It's funny. To still feel her absence.

With all these years under the bridge. And odd that I can remember her face, that I can remember it in such painstaking detail, down to the few, individual freckles, the the slightly curled earlobes, to a cut on the bridge of her nose.

She's the negative space in my life. Wherever I look are the gaps where I think she should be. Places in photographs where I know she stood.

The things I learnt from her are part of my shape.

I can still fold a paper boat. I can still go down to the river and touch it lightly against the water. My Tabitha sits and watches me, she takes her own boat down and places it with such solemnity, face rested up against my leg, while I stroke her shoulder, keep her close, keep her safe.

I still see Jimmy Hubbard from time to time. His broken legs healed in full, though one arm never came completely right. There's a scar on his neck, indistinct, more of a smudge. But it's mine. Mine and Christina's. Like we put our mark on him that day.

When he sees me he waves, he jogs over. His own Toby is on his shoulders. “Care to try and kill me again today?”

“I think I'll pass for now.”

“You gotta be careful with this lady, Toby. She got your daddy run over by a car when she was a kid.”

My Tabitha looking up at him, big eyed and silent and curious, taking note of him, storing it away in her big private mind, clinging a little bit tighter to my leg.

#

We wrote a book, you know. Me and Christina. Or at least we began a book. Sitting in the shade beneath a huge blossoming cherry. Scribbling with pen and lined paper. She'd write a couple of pages and then she'd hand it over to me to write a couple more. There was no plan, no carefully scripted outline complete with timing and scene changes and character descriptions. We were young and in the moment, so we just let it flow. A romance between a boy whose parents were fugitives, and a girl whose parents were werewolves.

More outlandish as the words flowed on.

Two hundred and twelve pages.

I still have them. I still read over them at times. The mad getaway. The pursuing psychic cops with their intellect-enhanced police dogs, their drones; the bikie gang who assisted them on account of some deal that was never quite explained.

We left our intrepid heroes in the middle of that car chase, losing track of our story, moving on to other and better things.

Still frozen there, mid chase, hearts pounding. Our protagonists imprisoned there for years. And I think at times about finishing that novel. About overhauling it, starting almost from scratch. Giving it a life. Giving it closure.

#

I think I know how she died.

Why she's gone. So completely.

I remember it as if it were happening to me. A lonely gravel path, with trees standing like sentries along both sides. They followed her up there, keeping just out of sight. She didn't see them until they had her more or less surrounded.

She was always a tiger, Christina. Eight years old and she'd take on six boys to defend our little makeshift home. There was nothing but bright fire and steel inside her bones. And so, when they came for her she fought them off. She cursed them and went for the balls. She knew it was serious.

I remember their faces: one whose hair was as white as hers, with a pierced lip; one with short, jet-black hair; two who might have been brothers; a short one; a freckle-faced one with dark eyes and a jaw that drooped on one side.

This is what it feels like being stabbed: the realisation coming first, the pressure, the sense of touch, with the pain taking a few seconds to catch up with the surprise. And then once it has a hold, sinking its teeth in deep.

These men – just teenagers really, seventeen, eighteen – starting to panic.

What had they done, after all?

“You started this, you bitch!”

“Stop fighting. You have to lie still.”

“.... she's bleeding too much...”

After they'd run: alone on the gravel, staring up at the sky, her eyes seeing what mine saw: the great expanse of blue, no clouds, no planes, no birds, nothing to interrupt that colour, nothing to take away from its intensity. The colours really, the layers of them, blue and purple and silver, made up out of millions and trillions of pixels that all buzzed, all shivered and moved and repainted themselves over and over and over....

#

Mum, with her voice on the phone, ragged, ringing her hands. “She doesn't stop crying. David, I don't know what to do...”

I sat and hugged my legs. Willing her to come back into my life. Willing this thing that had happened to her not to have happened.

I can erase time. I can erase time. I can and I will bring her back.

“But sweetheart, she was never real.”

I don't want to hear that, I bury my face in my knees.

“Ella, listen to me. You're too old to believe in fantasy.”

I turn my head.

“She wasn't real, love.”

“What would you know?”

“It was all right to have an imaginary friend, when you were child. But you need to grow up now, you're too old for this.”

“She's dead.” And you, so heartless, the most heartless mother ever to live.

“She can't be dead, she never lived.”

#

Can't she? Couldn't she?

Sometimes I still read through the story we wrote together. I look back over childhood with the jaded eyes of nearly middle-age. Sometimes, through those lenses, she does seem to fade, I seem to see through her, to see the shape of scene a shift in my memory so that the space she occupied is filled by something else.

I look through old photos. Noting her absence. I do my best to bathe in the real world, to saturate myself in what's real and rational.

Better late than never to grow up.

But her parts of the story are written in her handwriting, not in mine. I can see the difference. I can read the difference in her style of writing. And I can feel, if I think back, focus, draw a steadying breath: the feel of her fingers pressing into my palm, the courage that came from that. I should remember it differently by now, but I don't. For all the trying in the world, for all the rationalisation, no, I don't.

#

When I was nine my mother told me: “You weren't born alone, did you know that?”

I looked up. Confused. Curious.

“You had a sister. A twin. She only lived a few hours, but she was beautiful. She was like a little doll.”

“Why did she die then?”

“Nobody knows a thing like that. She wasn't strong, her heart was too weak. And there was nothing anybody could do.”

“Oh.”

“I feel sorry that you've never had a sister. That you didn't get to grow up with her. That you never met her.”

Didn't I though?

My parents named her Karen. They buried her in a graveyard, beneath a small, polished gravestone, and they visit her on our birthday, laying flowers, offering tears.

Me: I named her Christina. And I ran with her, and played with her. We adventured together, grew up together, told secrets, wrote novels, cast spells, fought boys. I have her in my memory: a treasure not of just what was, but of what could have – should have – been. And I see her still, sometimes, from the corner of my eye. Just as grown-up as I am. Still pretty, white-blond, dressed in velvet, in tall boots, flashing me her take-on-anything smile. And when I see that, no matter what's happening around me, I find myself suddenly unafraid.