traffic lights.
‘Yeah, Omie? Hi?’
‘God, what’s that racket? Listen, have you heard from Mum?’
‘No,’ Alexandra told her sister. A bendy bus swished by and then a high-sided truck that rocked her with a blast of turbulence.
Olivia’s voice rose slightly.
‘Alph? Are you there?’
‘Yeah. It’s traffic. I’m out.’
‘What d’you think they’re doing?’
The lights refused to change but the stream of vehicles briefly slowed and Alexandra took the opportunity to dash across the first three lanes. It was coming on to rain, and she had no hood or umbrella with her.
‘Who?’
‘Our parents.’
‘Omie, you know as well as I do what they’re up to. They have moved further out to the sticks, they’re doing up some wreck of a house on Miranda Meadowe’s estate, Dad’s full of wild schemes, Mum’s going along with it. What’s new?’
Olivia sighed, and her sister could hear her settling herself for a long talk. ‘Nothing, I suppose, when you put it like that. I’m worried about them, though. They don’t call, do they? And when I call them, they’re always busy. Ben says the same, you know.’
‘I don’t think it’s a cause for worry, is it? They’ve got a life. We’ve got a life. Even Ben has. We’re a success story, the Davies family.’
From the safety of the central island Alexandra weighed up her chances of survival if she darted onwards against the lights.
Olivia said, ‘Is that what you call it? Growing up felt more like a car crash, most of the time.’
‘Success against the odds. Have you talked to Sam or Toby about it? It must be the same for them.’
‘No, it isn’t. The Knights were at boarding school and always moving anyway. Hampstead, Islington, Richmond, one of those places. But I so miss our old house, you know? Don’t you? I have these dreams about it, all the time. It’s where we grew up. It’s got all our history locked in it.’
‘I know, I feel the same. But at the end of the day it’s only bricks and mortar, isn’t it? The house had to go, they needed the money, that’s that, and what matters is we’ve all got each other. Even Mum and Dad are still around for us, you know, even though they’re not right here.’
‘You’re right, Alph, ’course you are. I just feel a bit, what, lost? Abandoned. Is that totally weird at our age?’
‘You mean, Parents Leave Girl Twins, Twenty-five, All Alone in World. Social Services Intervene?’
They made the humming noise that was their shorthand for laughter. ‘OK, so I’m a freak.’
‘No, you’re not. Mum’s always been right beside us. So has Dad, even, in his own way. Now they’ve sold our house and gone to live somewhere we don’t know at all with what might seem to be a random new family made up of friends of theirs from a hundred years ago, and they’re suddenly quite busy with stuff that doesn’t seem to concern us. It’s bound to be strange, isn’t it? But isn’t this what happens to all families, in the end? We were never going to be at home in the kitchen with Mum for ever and ever with Ben in his highchair and us two making jam tarts. At least they’re not divorced, like most people’s p’s.’
Alexandra ran, and successfully completed the crossing. Fat raindrops landed on the pavement, the same size as the blobs of discarded gum already speckling it. She transferred her mobile to the other ear, wedged it in place again and fished in her bag for her purse. She calculated that there was just time to run into Pret and pick up a coffee before going back to work.
‘Yeah. It is what happens. Anyway.’ Olivia sighed. The conversation had followed a familiar pattern, with her own anxieties temporarily allayed by Alexandra’s reassurances. ‘I forget what you’re doing tonight?’
‘Meeting Cam and Laure. Might go out after. You?’
‘Film, something foreign, can’t remember what it’s called. Tom wants to see it.’
‘Speak later, then?’
‘Yeah. Thanks, Alph.’
‘Love you. I’ve got to go now. Bye, sis.’
‘Me too. Bye. Wait – I’ll give Ben a call, shall I? I don’t know what he and Nic are doing. I haven’t seen them, either.’
‘Do that. Bye.’
Alexandra crammed her phone into the pocket of her black jeans and slid through the queue at the coffee counter. She had seven minutes of her lunch hour left. She would talk to Olivia at least once more, perhaps twice, before bedtime.
The Davies girls were monozygotic, or identical, twins.
At their birth their father had exclaimed in rapture, holding the squalling crimson scraps against his heart, ‘These two are my world, from this day onwards. They are my Alpha and my Omega.’
The family story went that Selwyn had tried to insist that the babies should be christened accordingly, but Polly firmly opted for what she called nice, normal names.
Polly’s mother had agreed. ‘Lovely. Not letters, or Zebedee or Dusk or Cowslip, or whatever poor little children seem to get landed with nowadays.’
It made no difference though. To their family, their baby brother Ben, and most of their friends, the twins for ever bracketed the Greek alphabet between them. To each other and to the rest of the world apart from employers, airlines and the DVLC, they were Alph and Omie. Two halves of a whole, one another’s best and closest ally.
Not that they were all that much alike, at twenty-five, even to look at. From their Facebook profiles, it would have been difficult to deduce a relationship. Alexandra worked in retail marketing, and lived alone in a rented glass and steel studio flat near Bethnal Green. She wore monochrome clothes with a decidedly Japanese influence, and intended to set up her own company within five years. Olivia lived with her boyfriend in his chaotic flat off Shepherd’s Bush Road. She was a freelance illustrator, working from home, and was usually dressed in a picturesque scramble of rainbow knits and tie-dye.
Because they lived at opposite ends of town, the two girls didn’t see each other all that often, not more than twice or even once a week. The principal link between them, as vital as their umbilical cord had once been, was their pair of mobile phones. They always had exactly the same make and model. It was really weird, Omie said, but she had lost hers one night because it had fallen out of her pocket and dropped down the toilet when she was at a club, and she had been way too grossed out to reach down and fish it out again. But then less than twelve hours later, Alph had had her bag with her phone inside it stolen from beneath her desk by a sneak thief who had slipped into her office while she was down the corridor talking to her boss and everyone else was out at lunch.
The twins consulted each other, and then agreed on the new model.
They
