“Don’t look at me like that,” I say.
“Like what?”
“Pityingly.”
He grins. “Well, you are a bit pathetic, sis.” He hauls himself up and heads for the door. “I’ll shove them through to the kitchen so you can escape upstairs. I’d hate Joel to catch sight of you like this—he’d never come back.”
I stick my tongue out at him as he leaves the room, and then wait until I hear their voices recede into the kitchen before I race upstairs.
Joel Harris is Edwin’s oldest friend, and was a constant visitor to Summerbourne when I was growing up. He knew me as well as my brothers knew me, and he was patient with me even when my brothers weren’t. The four of us spent hours together in the school holidays, and in the absence of friends my own age I grew to idolize Joel.
I was fourteen when Joel and Edwin left for university. Miserable at school, short-tempered with Danny at home, I began to dream of Joel returning and declaring he’d fallen in love with me. I longed to leave the sneers of my classmates behind, and marry Joel, and live happily ever after with him at Summerbourne.
How I miss the days when love seemed so obvious and simple.
My fledgling romantic hopes were crushed a couple of weeks before my fifteenth birthday. I don’t relish revisiting that memory now, but it occurs to me for the first time that something Joel said that day might be linked in some way to what happened when Danny and I were born.
Instead of taking a quick shower, I pad across to the main bathroom and rummage through the cupboard for bath oil as the tub fills. Then I ease down into the hot water to try to recall the details of that day.
It was a hot July afternoon, and Edwin had invited half a dozen university friends to Summerbourne to celebrate finishing their first-year exams. At nineteen, these young men and women seemed impossibly grown-up, drinking beer and cider by the pool, telling anecdotes I couldn’t follow, and cracking jokes I didn’t understand. I studied the girls through my lashes: the sweep of their hair, their glossy nails, the way they adjusted their bikini straps. I tried to mimic them, draping my hair over one shoulder in the hope of catching Joel’s attention, but Joel had barely glanced in my direction since he’d arrived.
Ralph Luckhurst had cycled up from the village to join in the fun, and he and Danny persuaded several of the guests into the pool to play a game of Marco Polo. Edwin remained sprawled on a sun lounger, arguing lazily with a bearded medic friend of Joel’s about politics and the new prime minister. A dentistry student named Ruby, wearing a bright red swimsuit, tried to persuade Edwin to make room for her on his sun lounger. When Edwin refused, she wandered over and sat down right next to Joel.
I close my eyes now, sinking lower in the bathwater, remembering the twist of pain I’d felt under my rib cage as I watched Ruby rest her cheek against Joel’s smooth shoulder. But Joel had been distracted that day, irritable, and I was savagely glad that he only frowned at her when she whispered something in his ear.
“So what’s it like, then, being a twin?” Ruby had asked me suddenly, and it had taken me several seconds to switch frombeing an unhappy observer to an active participant in the conversation.
“Nothing special,” I’d said.
Danny hauled himself out of the pool and flopped down beside me. “Cheers, sis.”
Ruby and the bearded medic had laughed.
There followed the usual questions—which of us was born first, did we have a telepathic connection, why didn’t we look alike. The others in the pool drifted over to hear our answers, and I let Danny do the talking, uncomfortable under the scrutiny of so many pairs of eyes.
Edwin mentioned that I was twice Danny’s size when we were born, and I remember the way Ruby leaned against Joel as she giggled.
I tip my head right back to soak my hair now, concentrating hard in an attempt to recall Joel’s exact words that day. I’d had the impression he wasn’t following the conversation, and I’d been half disappointed at his indifference, until he suddenly spoke.
“My grandad calls them the Summerbourne sprites,” Joel had said.
I sit up, wringing my hair out, frowning.
It was a name other children had called us when Danny and I first started at the village primary school years earlier. I’d always disliked it, without having any idea where it came from. Over the years, as I learned not to react so fiercely, and perhaps as Danny and I learned to keep our closeness at home separate from our lives at school, the phrase had dropped out of use. For Joel to mention it now, in front of these friends I thought so sophisticated, and to imply that Michael—an adult—stillused it to describe us... It took my breath away at the time. It still makes my throat tighten now.
I remember staring at him, trying to work out why he’d said it. Joel had always been an ally, never been anything but kind to me. Perhaps he was trying to impress Ruby, I thought. If so, he succeeded.
“Ooh, why are they sprites?” Ruby had said.
“Can they do magic, then?” the bearded medic had asked. “Or do weird things happen around them?”
“Hey, cut it out,” Ralph had said, pushing his dark curls back from his face, flashing me a concerned look. Ralph and I had only overlapped at primary school for a year or so, but he’d defended me from the taunts of older children several times back then, and I loved him for it. On this occasion, the mildly drunk students ignored him.
“You didn’t tell us you had spoo-ooky twins in the family, Edwin.”
“Do us some sprite tricks, won’t you?”
“Careful, Ruby—you wouldn’t want to make them angry!”
