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Red and yellow and clownish. That can definitely stay. Along with the other daybed, which must be up here. The blue one we bought for Kirstie.
    Daughter one. Daughter two. Yellow and blue.
    At first, we differentiated our babies by painting one of their respective fingernails, or toenails, yellow or blue. Yellow was for Lydia, because it rhymed with her nickname: Lydee-lo. Yell-ow . Blue was for Kirstie. Kirstie- koo.
    This nail-varnishing was a compromise. A nurse at the hospital advised us to have one of the twins tattooed in a discreet place: on a shoulder-blade, perhaps, or at the top of an ankle – just a little indelible mark, so there could be no mistake. But we resisted this notion, as it seemed far too drastic, even barbaric: tattooing one of our perfect, innocent, flawless new children? No.
    Yet we couldn’t do nothing. So we relied on nail varnish, diligently and carefully applied once a week, for a year. After that – until we were able to distinguish them by their distinctive personalities, and by their own responses to their own names – we relied on the differing clothes we gave the girls; some of the same clothes that are now bagged in this dusty loft.
    As with the nail varnish, we had yellow clothes for Lydie-lo. Blue clothes for Kirstie-koo. We didn’t dress them entirely in block colours; a yellow girl and a blue girl, but we made sure that Kirstie always had a blue jumper, or blue socks, or blue bobble hat, while the other was blue-less; meanwhile Lydia had a yellow T-shirt, or maybe a dark yellow ribbon in her pale yellow hair.

    Hurry now. Hurry up.
    I want to hurry, but it also seems wrong. How can I be businesslike up here? In this place? The cardboard boxes marked L for Lydiaare everywhere. Accusing, silent, loaded. The boxes that contain her life.
    I want to shout her name: Lydia. Lydia. Come back. Lydia May Tanera Moorcroft. I want to shout her name like I did when she died, when I stared down from the balcony, and saw her little body, splayed and yet crumpled, still breathing, but dying.
    And now I am gagging on the attic dust. Or maybe it is the memories.
    Little Lydia running into my arms as we tried to fly kites on Hampstead Heath and she got scared by the rippling noise; little Lydia sitting on my lap earnestly writing her name for the first time, in waxy scented crayon; little Lydia dwarfed in Daddy’s big chair, shyly hiding behind a propped atlas as large as herself. Lydia, the silent one, the bookish one, the soulful one, the slightly lost and incomplete one – Lydia the twin like me. Lydia who once said, when she was sitting with her sister on a bench in a park: Mummy, come and sit between me so you can read to us.
    Come and sit between me ? Even then, there was some confusion, a blurring of identity. Something slightly unnerving. And now beloved Lydia is gone. Isn’t she? Or maybe she is alive down there, even as her stuff is crated and boxed up here? If that is the case, how would we possibly untangle this, without destroying the family?

    The complexities are intolerable. I am talking to myself.
    Work, Sarah, work. Sort the loft. Do the job . Ignore the grief, get rid of the stuff you don’t need, then move to Scotland, to Skye, the open skies: where Kirstie – Kirstie, Kirstie, Kirstie – can run wild and free. Where we can all soar away, escaping the past, like the eiders flying over the Cuillins.
    One of the boxes is ripped open.
    I stare, bewildered, and shocked. Lydia’s biggest box of toys has been sliced open. Brutally. Who would do that? It has to be Angus. But why? And with such careless savagery? Why wouldn’t he tell me? We discussed everything to do with Lydia’s things. But now he has been retrieving Lydia’s toys, without telling me?
    The rain is hissing, once again. And very close, a few feet above my head.
    Leaning into the opened box, I pull back a flap to have a look, and as I do, I hear a different noise – a distinctive, metallic rattle. Someone is