Behind the Scenes at the Museum (38 page)

Someone thrusts a companionable paw into my hand and I turn my head and see Teddy smiling sadly at me. ‘It’s the end of the world, you know,’ he says, and, overjoyed, I say, ‘Oh, Teddy – you can speak!’ and he says, ‘In the Lost Property Cupboard all animals can speak,’ and I’m so happy for him but then his face darkens and he says, ‘Watch out for the Rings of Saturn, Ruby! Don’t forget they’re—’ but then his paw slips out of mine before he can say anything else and suddenly I begin to accelerate again – horribly – so that my brain feels as if it’s being stretched and pulled from my skull on a thread of elastic and dreadful pains shoot along all the nerves in my arms. Great multicoloured sunbursts explode on either side of me and the faster I move towards the stars at the end of the world, the more they recede and I grow afraid that this is a journey that will go on for ever and I search my mind for the terrible thing I must have done to deserve such a punishment.

Then out of the darkness, like something from the Ghost-Train ride in Scarborough, looms Mr Belling’s angry face and he starts to shout at me but I can’t hear any words until suddenly, very loudly right in my ear, his voice booms, ‘Your poor mother’s given you everything but you’re just an ungrateful little bitch!’ and I put out my hands to fend this vision off but he will keep on speaking, ‘You’re a wicked, wicked girl,’ and I try to shout, ‘No!’ because I know what he’s going to say next but I can’t speak and suddenly I can’t breathe either and dreadful noises start to issue from my mouth, the noise of a drowning person, drowning on air, and Mr Belling’s apparition hurtles down the well of time with me so that I have to put my hands over my ears to shut out what I know he’s going to say – but I can’t block out his voice which is repeating over and over again, ‘You killed your own sister, Ruby! You killed your own sister!’

‘I did not kill my sister!’ I hissed back at him. ‘She was run over,’ but he just gave me this horrible kind of leer and said, ‘I don’t mean that one, you stupid little girl, I mean your twin sister!’ and with these extraordinary words he turned on his heel and left the room. Then I heard Bunty shouting from the hallway, ‘We’re off to the theatre now, Ruby, we’ll see you later!’ and the front door slammed and the Rover drove off.

My own twin? My own twin? What on earth was he talking about? It was a curious thing because although part of me was totally baffled by this statement, another part could hear alarm bells going off and my skin felt as if centipedes were crawling over it. I ran upstairs to Bunty’s bedroom and poked about on the top shelf of her fitted wardrobe amongst the shoe-boxes in which she kept her large collection of unworn shoes, until finally I found what I was looking for, the shoe-box with no shoes inside, the one that she kept crammed with the bits of paper that made our lives official and random objects that couldn’t find a home anywhere else but somehow couldn’t be thrown away. I sifted my way down through medical cards, log books, insurance certificates, a broken earring, an old ration book, the silver locket (see
Footnote (
xi
)
), mortgage papers, a mouldy-looking paw, an old theatre programme, a plastic ring from a cracker. After a while I got down to George’s will and his death certificate, to Patricia’s O Level certificates from the JMB (now Bunty will have two daughters who are academic failures), to Bunty and George’s marriage certificate, Gillian’s death certificate, and then all the birth certificates, held together with a rubber band –
Berenice Eileen, George Arthur, Patricia Vivien, Gillian Berenice, Ruby Eleanor
. And Pearl’s.

There I had it – Pearl.
Pearl Ada Lennox
. Born in Fulford Maternity Hospital on – incredibly – the same day, of the same month, of the same year as – me. The 8th of February 1952. I read Pearl’s birth certificate over and over again and then compared it with mine, looking from one to the other endlessly as if eventually they would explain themselves. But there was only one explanation – ‘Pearl Ada Lennox’ really was my twin sister. I could feel a dreadful, threatening pulse beating in my stomach, yet I had no recollection of this sister, could bring no image to mind. I had a strange surge of memory – as if caught in a photographer’s flash – of alphabet cards in a horseshoe – a pig, an elephant, an apple, a rabbit, a lemon, but nothing more. Perhaps, like Elvis’s twin, Pearl died at birth – perhaps we were Siamese twins and she had to die for me to live and that was what Mr Belling meant. But somehow I didn’t think so. I raked down through the papers in the shoeless shoe-box until finally, right down at the bottom, I found what I was looking for – another death certificate, this one made out for 2 January 1956.

Cause of death – drowning. It made me think of
The Tempest
and
those are pearls that were his eyes
or pearl fishermen diving for oysters in the Southern China Seas, but it didn’t make me remember anyone called Pearl and it certainly didn’t make me remember a twin sister.

Did I drown my own sister? Could such a thing be possible? I couldn’t even drown myself. I opened the silver locket and there again were the two pictures of me as a baby that I had found once before in Bunty’s bedside table and it took me a long time, staring hard at the twin images in the diptych, to realize that one of them wasn’t me at all, but my sister. I stared and stared until my eyes ached trying to work out which one was me and which one wasn’t. But if one of them was the false Ruby and the true Pearl, I couldn’t for the life of me say which.

I put all the papers back in the shoe-box and closed the door of the wardrobe. By the time Mr Belling brought Bunty home I was already in bed and was feigning sleep when Bunty looked in on me as she usually does these days – to check if I’m still breathing, I suppose. But then something made me change my mind and I sat bolt upright in the bed so that she gave a little scream as if I was a zombie suddenly getting up from its grave. I switched on my bedside light and waved the silver locket at her. ‘Why have we never talked about this?’ and Bunty’s silence was frightening because I didn’t know what it contained. Finally, I heard her swallow, nervously and say, ‘You forgot.’

‘I
forgot
? What do you mean, I forgot?’

‘You blacked it all out. Amnesia,’ Bunty said shortly. She still managed to sound slightly irritated, even when telling me these momentous, earth-shattering things. ‘Dr Haddow said that was probably for the best – after what happened.’ Half of her had already disappeared round the door but something stopped her from leaving. ‘We all thought it was for the best,’ she added. ‘After all, nobody wanted to be reminded about what happened.’

‘But you can’t just blot something like that out,’ I yelled at her. ‘You can’t just pretend somebody never existed, not talk about them, not look at photographs—’

Bunty had slipped even farther round the door so that she was little more than a hand and voice. ‘There
are
photographs,’ she said. ‘And, of course we talked about her; it was you that blotted her out, not us.’

‘It’s always
my
fault, isn’t it?’ I screamed, and then a silence fell between us that stretched out and expanded and took on a strange watery kind of substance, trap-ping us until I dropped the question that couldn’t be avoided any longer into the pool of silence and felt the ripples moving outward. ‘How did I kill my sister?’ The ripples reached Bunty and she sighed. ‘You pushed her in the water,’ she said flatly. ‘It was an accident, you didn’t know what would happen, you were only four years old.’

‘An accident?’ I echoed. ‘Bernard Belling talked about it as if I was a cold-blooded murderer—’ My mother had the grace to sound annoyed, ‘Well, he shouldn’t have been talking to you about it—’ She hesitated. ‘At the time, I did blame you, but of course it
was
an accident . . .’ Her voice trailed away and then finally she said wearily, ‘It was a long time ago, there’s no point in bringing it all up again,’ and she finally managed to disappear behind the bedroom door.

But a few minutes later she came back and sat on the end of my bed. Then she took the locket from me and opened it up and sat for a long time without saying anything. ‘Which one?’ I said finally. ‘Which one is Pearl?’ and she pointed to the photograph on the left and said, ‘My Pearl,’ and began to cry.

Then just blackness, a profound deaf-dumb-and-blind darkness that goes on for ever and ever and ever as I dive down like a diver fishing for pearls until –
Flash!
There’s a light ahead and I think,
The Light of the World
, and know that I must be coming to the bottom of the Cupboard. In the middle of the light there’s a little figure and the closer I get the brighter she gets, standing, like Botticelli’s Venus, in a great, gleaming shell made of mother-of-pearl, pale and opalescent, and I can almost touch the figure now, the one who is my twin, my double, my mirror, wreathed in smiles, saying something, holding out her little arms to me, waiting for me, but I can’t hear anything at all except for a clock chiming in my head
four, five, six
and the sound of something whimpering and scratching at the door; then there is more blackness, blackness like a woolly shroud, blackness that’s trying to get inside me, stuffing itself into my mouth and nose and ears like a thick, black fleece and I realize that I am being buried alive and the earth is raining down on my coffin and coming in through tiny little cracks. Cracks of light—

‘Ruby? How do you feel now, Ruby?’ and the mouth smiles and pulls back and I can see a funny-looking woman, quite old, with plaits wound round her ears like headphones and spindly gold spectacles hanging round her neck. I can’t speak, my throat feels as if it’s been washed with gravel and my head is throbbing. I squint my eyes up against the sunlight which is pouring through the hospital window and spilling onto the green linoleum in big geometric pools. ‘Hello, Ruby – I’m Dr Herzmark, and I’d like to help you, is that all right?’