we’re cramped like specimens, she wants to be free.
She pushes her little creased feet against me
speeds herself from our crimson-weeded pool.
I want to catch her ankle and make her stay –
all around me, anemones raise their voices
calling to her do not go forward.
My twin is determined, her mouth a drawn line.
I see the strength of her clenched fists, the spiky blackness
of her hair. She pushes her head forwards, her chin lifted,
swims out in a rush of seaweed, out into dry antiseptic air.
I can’t follow her. My feet are where my head should be –
I’m a rock jammed between boulders, unable to move.
No longer the length of my flesh against hers, no more
our hearts hinged together; never again the two of us
sliding around the sloping genius of the womb.
*
Our birthday
Eight years old, we have come to the mine workings to play;
cards on the caravan mantelpiece, new elastic for our knee-high
white socks. The September sky is wide open. Under our red sandals
earth is ochre, burnt umber, ultramarine. My father, standing,
holds my twin’s hand and my hand. My mother in black clothes
cuts up her saffron cake. We can hear the mine creaking, the flatness
of the sea; my father’s nervous beauty. We have dressed our dolls
in matching clothes, poured gin carefully into their holey mouths.
My father ties our dog to a tree on boggy ground. He says:
the grass is gold the trees are gold the smoke from the huts
is sheep’s wool caught on a fence we are sheep’s wool caught
on a fence; he has a low voice like a cow’s. When he carries us both
on his shirtless back, my twin cries: can’t you smell the cricket stumps,
the sunburn, the muscle? But I think: will she set fires under
the caravan and lock me inside? She promised we would run around
with stale bread and forget-me-nots, but that was before.
After that, everything happened.
*
Lumbar puncture
I went to see my twin in her glass cubicle.
She had a bed whose sides went up and down
like a drawbridge. I looked at her in her glass castle
with all her notes and charts – she was a mathematical sum.
My twin had a needle in her spine.
I wanted to ask that needle what it saw
when it punched through her silvery skin,
what exactly it was doing there.
I sat on her bed in my deathly plain clothes
like an injured thing at the foot of a mountain.
I wanted us to go home to the stained glass
and the paper weights, to the bramble patch
where she would dare me to walk barefoot.
I even longed for her crutches and her paintings
of dead poets and her distorted shoes.
And was there a donkey? Was there a bear?
There were endless rows of glassed-in children,
ill and dying, nurses in their own clothes
with their cheerful wedding rings,
smoothing the patched-up sheets and pillows,
stroking the suddenly angelic heads.
*
Typewriter
My twin moved to a downstairs room,
her handwriting unravelled – they bought
an electronic typewriter for her but still she
missed out letters. I watched her budgie’s head
peeping out between the keys, our mother knitting up
my twin’s dropped ball of words. We sang along
to Tainted Love, imitated the chatter
of the monkey muse.
No one knew her at that time, not even me.
She wheeled around her bed indomitably,
on her knee her muscular imagination spitting
and flexing. I stood behind her on my hated legs
pushed her forwards, ashamed of my head
which was a box of words scribbled on raffle tickets,
a glittering skull with glassy eyes like marbles
or counting beads.
We used to lie in our twin beds in our twin room
under heavy blankets, yellow nylon sheets
like a punishment. When we went to sleep
on an argument, my head filled up with twitching things.
I breathed in her stories, her intelligence –
her courage starved me.
Contents List
MY TWIN, THE FEARLESS
13 Breech
14 The Dewerstone
15 Our birthday
16 My twin, the fearless
18 Curtains
19 Dartmoor
20 Migraine
21 Glowworms
22 The gerbil and the May Queen
23 Lumbar puncture
24 The raft
25 Three Shires Head
26 Porch
27 Cliff
28 Typewriter
29 Horse therapy
30 Motorbike
31 The Upper Room
32 My twin’s child
33 Birds
34 Banished
35 Forbidden
ANGELS OF ANARCHY
38 The Oval Lady
39 The Oneiroscopist
40 Frida’s Letter
41 A Little Night Music
42 House Containing Angel
THE MARTELLO TOWER
44 The Martello tower
46 Gay-Lyfe Pets and Aquatics
48 They didn’t want to see me
50 P10
51 Wincobank
53 Taraloka
54 Behind my sister’s house
55 Searching
56 Foundations
57 Babysitting
58 Coal bunker
59 Megan McMorran
60 Bungalow
61 Well dressing
62 My father in the monastery
64 Conversation at Cricieth Castle
65 Subsongs
66 Anchoress
67 My father’s field glasses
68 Landing, Plymouth Rock
68 Susannah White, passenger
69 Thomas White, who dyed of the general sickness
70 William Bradford, Elder
71 The Longest Journey I
72 Trefeglwys
73 Truck driver, 1983
74 Gap year
75 Severe weather warning
76 Seamstress’s notebook
77 Oswald Road
78 Dreams of warthogs
79 The Boatshed Café
80 Jesus on a train from Mumbai
81 Woodcutter
82 Grandmother
83 The nameless tree
84Hatch
85 States of happiness
86 After April
Related Reviews
‘Sharp, intelligent and unsettling, Suzanne Batty’s work is distinctive. Batty writes about twins, mental illness, love and families with a wry humour. She writes to find out who she is and in doing so helps us discover who we are. She is original, brave, unflinching.’ – Jackie Kay (on The Barking Thing)
