Strange

You and your sister are five years old. You are told not to talk to strangers. Strange, you think, as strangers seem to love to talk to twins. ‘Which one’s older?’ Crouching and smiling, pantomiming comparison, swivelling their heads and darting their eyes from you to your sister and back again, scanning your bodies in a manner that anyone would otherwise find inappropriate. As if playing a game. As if, moreover, you have asked them to play.

Around this age you happen to watch a man approaching a family dog – a retriever of some common sort – while playing in the park. The dog belongs to a family that is eating on a blanket nearby. It sniffs around beneath a tree, trailing its leash through leaves. The man, smiling, approaches the dog. It pays the man no notice. The man crouches down and pets the dog. It carries on nosing the leaves. The family look over and see the man. He smiles at them politely. The family understand that all is well, smile back and carry on eating. The man pulls a stick from the leaves and stands. The dog walks a circle and sits. The man throws the stick a few metres ahead. The dog doesn’t move, panting lightly. The man retrieves the stick himself and tries again, throwing farther. The dog, as if understanding now, appears to play along. It trots through the leaves, picks up the stick, then, flatly ignoring the man, trots to its family and sits, panting heavily, pantomiming fatigue.

Smile

It is your habit in childhood to frown at strangers, smiling ones in particular. In the photos that survive adult relocation – photos of you and your sister with family, taken in a range of locations by strangers – you are always frowning. For years you believe that these photos confirm your mother’s allegations, that you were the ‘difficult’ one of the two, much harder to rear than your twin. But when you are a mother yourself you start to doubt your mother’s word choice. Finding your frown on your daughter’s face, you understand its source – not a difficult girl but a guileless one, the absence of any mask. The bulk of the photos are of you and your sister. In these you are always smiling, an arm around her shoulder and your two heads tilting in. No one ever instructed you to stand in this way, that you can recall, but from five years old until fifteen more or less the pose remains: you on the left side, she on the right, your arm outstretched to hold her, long, her right hand gripping your thumb at her neck, her left brain touching your right. Were a sculptor to craft a bust of you both this would be its form. (No photos survive, if any were taken, of either of you on your own.)

It is your sister’s habit in childhood (idem: one childhood containing two children) to smile at strangers, smiling or not, particularly when not. She is smarter than you in this regard, she understands the game; the expectation that twins like dogs will always want to engage; the preference of strangers and mothers both for girls who play along. It is both of your habit to mirror each other when finding yourselves in some new situation. Shoulder to shoulder, facing forward, neither can see the other. Nevertheless, your two faces take on precisely the same expression. Frowning brows and smiling lips, a meeting in the middle. Which one of you is older? Fetch. Together: She is / I am.

Second

According to the hospital you were born a minute and a half before your sister. According to you a minute and a half cannot possibly make you older. Surely the surgeon could have scooped you out second, or scooped her out sooner? Does it take ninety seconds? To mop up the membrane and cut through the cord? Such an arbitrary number shouldn’t matter. But you say it so often, or sing it, in chorus, your two voices one, breathing life into sound – a minute and a half, a minute and a half – that the words become matter themselves.

Singular

You and your sister are ten years old. You visit an aunt overseas. She is a friend of your mother, in no way related, your favourite kind of auntie. In the main you dislike the other sort, your blood relations they call themselves, a phrase that calls to mind soldiers covered in blood on a battlefield. And this is in fact how they speak of it, family, of the concept in general and of each other specifically, as if family were war: violent, zero-sum and a thing to be survived. The non-relations are also survivors – of men, you conclude, overhearing – but have not become soldiers, easily angered and shockingly hostile to children. This one, childless, lives in a flat full of pillows she purchased while travelling abroad: pompoms from Morocco, mud cloths from Mali, raw silks from India, China. When speaking, she tends to laugh and gesture, making her bangles jangle. She smokes, her voice is hoarse, the laughter deep, a kind of thunder. ‘What would you like to do today?’ she asks you over breakfast, pouring, stirring champagne into orange juice with the handle of her egg spoon. ‘Something you’ve never done,’ she adds, licking the handle clean. ‘What’s something you’ve never done that you would like to do today?’ You look at your auntie. Together: ‘Me?’ She thunders laughter. ‘You and you.’ Pointing the spoon at each in turn. ‘And you.’ Gesturing to both. Jangle, jangle. ‘This is the problem with English,’ she laughs. ‘There should be two different words.’ Jangle, jangle. ‘How can you tell when someone means just one of you or both?’ You consider. Your mother says you-and-your-sister when talking to you-singular about you-plural. Have you-and-your-sister cleaned your room? Did you-and-your-sister hear me? The phrasing has never struck you as strange but yes, you see now, it is. Five syllables where one would suffice. The language is clumsy, burdensome. But your beloved auntie is wrong, you think. There should be three different words: you the somebody, you the somebodies, you the unit – the bodiless whole, greater than the sum of its two-headed parts, disembodied beyond disaggregation.

Scientist

And always which one in lieu of who. Another telling word choice. A who is fully singular. A one belongs to two. Or: A one with ‘which’ belongs to two. A one with ‘the’ is on her own. The difficult one. The easy one. The artistic one. The scientific one. A second game that strangers, friends too, love to play with twins. It happens, you know, with siblings as well, brothers and sisters, perhaps more with sisters. Your girlfriends with sisters similar in age, whether older or younger, report as much. The difference, you insist, is the aim. Sisters are compared, twins are studied.

Everyone becomes a scientist when meeting twin sisters, instantly committed to research, to quantifying |d| = deviance from absolute identicality. ‘But you don’t look the same’ is where this begins, the ‘but’ confrontational almost, that most glaring deviation recorded at once: You and your sister are fraternal.

Italians, you learn, call identical twins veri gemelli. Real twins. Fraternal twins are falsi gemelli. False twins. Knock-off handbags. The scientists – on learning that you and your sister aren’t veritable veri gemelli – should quit, but with a fervour that seems to be fuelled by your falseness, they press for facts instead. Unidentical, yes, but how unidentical? Deviation – |d| – must be graphed. Where is the difference? Intelligence? Attractiveness? Interests? And where is the sameness? There has to be sameness if you are twins. If there isn’t it has to be invented. You and your sister look nothing alike. You resemble different parents. She is slim and petite with your mother’s sweet face, round eyes, archetypically feminine. You are all hard lines like your father, all limbs, much taller at ten than your sister. Those who don’t know or aren’t told that you’re twins rarely guess that you’re even related. You share facial expressions but no facial features. The scientists cannot accept this. They squint at your faces, narrowing their eyes, narrower and narrower, blurring your features, blurrier and blurrier, until aha! Same smile, they say, different teeth.

This is the first recording: Same/different. The second: Either/or. Example. Your sister plays piano effortlessly well, right from the start, a gift. Her fingers are startlingly strong for a child, especially a child so skinny. As your mother enrols you in all the same lessons (a misapplied notion of fairness) you play piano too, quite well, but lack all native grace. Your talent, and passion, is drawing. A similar gift for the arts one might say. But similarity, perfectly acceptable in siblings, is bitterly disappointing in twins. Were both of you musicians, e.g., twin violinists, a virtuosic duo playing Bach, sawing away at the double concerto – now this would excite the scientists. Identically artistic! |d| = 0! With your talent compounded by your twinship, and each of you considered a better violinist individually than the lone child-soloist. Alas. You, a pianist and a painter, are neither excitingly different nor excitingly same, and the scientists, in need of excitement, scrap same/different for either/or. Which one’s the artist? You or her? We are. Wrong answer. We isn’t one. And if you are the artist, the right-brained one, then she must be left-, the logician. This happens so often and for so many years that both of you start to believe it. Your childhood talent is draughtsmanship (for you, a mathematical practice) but you trade your Tombows for tempera. Why? The artistic one should paint. Your sister perfects Paganini/Liszt then promptly abandons piano. The logician, however musical, should focus her efforts on maths.

If one aims to compare two things, you insist, one sets them side by side. You and your sister are set, instead, one on top of the other then blurred, made to appear as a single like thing and then broken apart into opposites. Broken apart, blurred together, broken apart, blurred together. Your sameness (unreal) insisted upon. Your similarity (real) ignored. This is what siblings cannot understand. This is what they do not suffer.

Size

You are fifteen years old. You are spending the night at the home of a friend of yours (plural). This friend and your sister are in Maths Club together, the friendship is theirs more than yours (singular). But neither can see this yet, you nor your sister, you call her our friend with unquestioned conviction and on, you see later, the unspoken understanding that all of your friends must be both of your friends. Your friendships are triangles: you at the base points, the friend, equidistant, at the apex. The idea of a friend that is yours but not hers is a line, and a line you don’t cross. As your mother requires you to take the same lessons, you require each other to form the same bonds, a rule that you never acknowledge but vigorously, mutually and mutely enforce.

The parents of this school friend have known you for years. The triplets, they call you fondly. The mother is gentle, a paediatrician, the father is cheerful and loud. At dinner he applauds your sister’s appetite. Refreshing to see in a girl. ‘Cause she never gets fat,’ says the friend, also cheerful and loud. ‘The skinny twat!’ The mother, miraculously, never gets angry. ‘That’s one way to put it,’ she laughs. ‘It’s common for second-born twins,’ she adds. ‘Owing to the very low birth weights.’ You are thinking that ‘second-born’ is better by far than one and a half minutes younger or apart (how far apart are you? parted again) when your sister speaks up beside you. ‘Or owing,’ she says, ‘to the first-born twin taking all of the food in the womb.’ The mother, the friend and the father laugh. You choke on the water you’re drinking. ‘I didn’t take all of the food,’ you splutter, seized by the fear that you did.

You have always been taller than your sister, as said, but you grew in a new way in summer: You are big-boned with breasts, she is bird-boned without; she looks months and not minutes apart. More. Parted by more than mere months. By heavier. Menstruation. Weight. Blood. The laughter, once cheerful, sounds hostile, your sister’s especially an accusation: You are to blame for the difference in size, which is not just a difference (as you have believed) but a deficit rather. Just look at you two. Just look. At your flesh. And her bones. Your sister is right. You took too much. ‘Of course you didn’t!’ The mother is still laughing. ‘You had separate placentas.’ She winks at your sister. ‘Fear not! I treat skinnier singletons!’ You and your sister frown-smile. The friend giggles. ‘Singletons?! Are twins called doubletons?!’ The father, still howling, slapping the table, spills his wine on the eyelet lace. The mother speaks over his jovial cursing. ‘No, dear. Twins are called multiples.’

Morning. Your mum drives, you in the front, your sister in back behind you, both of you resting a cheek on a fist and a shoulder against a window. ‘Did you and your sister hear me?’ Silence. ‘I said was the sleepover fun?’ You haven’t looked at each other since leaving the table, since food in the womb became zero-sum, but see yourselves now in the front and back window, your two blurred reflections. Mourning.

Singleton

At university you date a mathematician. You (singular) are twenty years old. He is tickled to discover not one but two words with one meaning to him and another to you. ‘A singleton,’ he says, ‘is a set containing one element.’ You blink, confused. ‘Natural numbers that are neither prime nor composite.’ You blink, still confused. Looking for his notebook, he tries again. ‘The set of all even prime numbers?’ He is never without a notebook this mathematician, any notebook, the cheap sort, he buys them in bulk, pocket-size, spiral-bound, all of them tattered, nothing like your leather-bound sketchbook. He praises your paintings but teases your preciousness; asks if you know that the brand is a hoax? Moleskine, created in 1997, has nothing to do with Chatwin or Paris. In truth, you envy the ease of his genius, the furious scribblings in Pep Rally pencil, equations filling pages then scratched out unfinished, his comfort with starting from scratch. He pats the duvet, a notebook pops up. He opens at random and writes:

The set of all even prime numbers = { 2 }
The set of months beginning with the letter N = { November }
The set of American states ending with the letter K = { New  York }

‘Multiples,’ he continues, ‘are numbers you get when you multiply a number by an integer.’ You laugh. ‘Bloody hell. Maths is so fiddly. What’s the difference between a number and an integer now?’ When you end the relationship after a year and a half, he sends you a package in the mail. A pocket-sized notebook, empty it seems, a gesture, you toss it aside. Months later you find yourself needing to jot down some airline record locator. How you manage, spotting that notebook in haste, to open to his note you don’t know. In the middle of the page, in Pep Rally pencil: 1.5 isn’t an integer.

Space

In Rome a man you fancy comes to fetch you on his scooter. You are twenty-five years old, summer, evening, velvet breeze. Your feet slip off the foot pegs as he circles the Circus Maximus quickly, gliding towards the Palatine Hill, the ‘Wedding Cake’ beyond. You can’t find a place to rest your feet, or you can’t find a way not to have any feet; he showed you the place when he kicked out the pegs as you mounted the scooter in Monti. Now your flip-flops keep brushing his slip-ons, made of some soft salmon suede that looks edible, and you fear that your feet are encroaching. An old and irrational preoccupation. When sharing a thing (no matter what) with one other person (no matter who), you labour with the fear, an obsession almost, that you are taking too much. A dessert with a girlfriend. A bed with a boyfriend. An armrest on a plane with a neighbouring stranger. The floorboard of a Vespa with a soon-to-be husband. But where to put your feet? At a red light several Vespas stop beside you, one quite close. The driver is wearing an elegant suit and an exceptionally bulky helmet. He looks like a well-dressed warrior, you think. A centurion with a stylist. The woman behind him is holding his waist with a delicate grip and an upright back, her lipstick is red, her stilettos are pink, perched on the foot pegs, flamingos. Their Vespa goes, your Vespa goes, the thrill again and the velvet breeze, the Roman pines in silhouette like hulking heads of broccoli. You copy the woman, holding on, putting your feet in their place.

Sister

The Roman writes for la Repubblica. His hero is Hunter S. Thompson. ‘We are all alone. Born alone. Die alone’. You snort. Does he use that line on all the girls? And no. You weren’t. Born alone. ‘So there are two of you!’ Just one. Of you. And one of her. He laughs. Rs roll. ‘Then you’ll adore the story of Rome. Eet’s a story of tweens.’

You park in Piazza del Campidoglio. He brings you to the statue. A wolf from whose nipples, two of the eight, cherub-like babies suckle. ‘The twins,’ says the Roman. Romulus and Remus, left on a riverbank to die by exposure (like Moses, you propose) then found by a she-wolf and nursed until found by a shepherd. ‘The story of Romulus,’ the Roman goes on – but here you interrupt, rather startling you both, the words bursting forth before you are even aware of having thought them. ‘The story of Romulus and Remus,’ you correct him. ‘And why must Remus come second ?! Do we even know which –’ you correct yourself – ‘who?! Do we even know who was born first?!’ Blushing, you stop to catch your breath. Misinterpreting, he chuckles, thrilled by what appears to be your interest in the history. ‘No one knows which was born first,’ he concedes. ‘But Remus died first so comes second.’ You frown. ‘How did Remus die?’ He shrugs. ‘Nobody knows that either.’ You laugh. ‘But how can a myth of such obvious importance exclude so important a fact?’ Now the Roman is quiet, an uncommon occurrence. Like many romani he is partial to chatter. ‘I suppose,’ he says finally, ‘it isn’t important. Romulus, not Remus, founded Rome.’

In fact, you learn, the twins wish to found a ‘city on a hill’ together but they can’t agree which, the Aventine Hill or the Palatine minutes away. The Roman is right. The details differ but the plot remains the same: Remus humiliates Romulus in public, Romulus rages, Remus dies. Romulus, as king, bestows upon Remus full funeral honours. It is now widely agreed that Romulus murdered Remus. Still, he mourns.

This troubles you greatly. You wander the city, and later the country, pressing for facts. You travel to a monastery in Lombardy to inspect a fifteenth-century frieze. You write a doctoral thesis in History of Art on representations of fratricide. You find, notably, very few women killing their sisters (they more often kill themselves) but innumerable men – envious, scheming, wounded – offing their brothers. Set and Osiris, Cain and Abel, Michael and Fredo Corleone. As if sisters at odds can coexist in discomfort but brothers quite simply cannot. You consider, again, fraternal twins. Frater meaning brother. Fraternal sister has always seemed a contradiction in terms. But perhaps, as advertised, fraternal twin sisters are false? Falsi gemelli. Not false as twins but false as sisters. Fraternal twin sisters are brothers.

Stranger

You have a baby (a girl). You are pregnant (a girl). You have just turned thirty years old. You and your sister send texts on your birthday but you do not talk. You are strangers. Your husband (the Roman), who talks to his mum at least once every day, can’t accept this. ‘But you are tweens,’ he says. ‘What happened?!’ You shrug. You are twins. That is what happened. He still can’t accept this. He is looking for scale. A decades-old rivalry, an epic betrayal. There is nothing. Remus scaled Romulus’ wall. What did Abel do to Cain?

Split

You and your sister invent your own language as infants, a common occurrence in twins – derived, some say, from the sounds of the womb, the blurred hum of heartbeat in water. No sounds survive. Twins must be made to forget as quickly as possible. You won’t learn to speak the world’s language, say doctors, so long as you carry on speaking the womb’s. As twins tend to babble most freely at night (reminded of the dark of the uterus, you think) the recommendation is to split them apart when they sleep. This seemed logical before. Now, as you sleep-train your one-year-old daughter (or try to), it seems cruel. The Roman finds papers from peer-reviewed journals in which researchers present the same finding: leaving an infant to cry it out has no adverse effects on mother–infant attachment. He is, he assures you, happy to use whichever method you like. But you rock her on Monday, camp out on Wednesday, let her cry it out on Friday, nurse her to sleep on weekends. ‘You are,’ he says, ‘betwixt and between.’ He is right, of course, and he uses that phrase in particular to make you laugh. You don’t.

When you finished your thesis research in Rome and returned to London, you attempted long distance. Both of you hated the endless texts and phone sex, and you split. The endless texts and phone sex continued. Finally, he put his foot down. At the time, when texting in English, he used Italian phonetics unknowingly. Wow spelled as uau. These spelled as this. He emailed an ultimatum. I can be your friend, I can be your husband, I cannot be betwixt and betwin. You laughed until you cried. He uses the expression whenever he wants you to laugh.

You cry. Sat in the hall on the hardwood floor with your back to the door of her nursery, watching black-and-white baby-cam footage until the timer chimes – you cry. No adverse effects on mother–infant attachment, bully for mothers and infants, but what about twins? Infant twins? What about twin–twin attachment? If the infant believes – as the sleep blogs warn, with ominous terms like ‘undermined trust’ – that the mum who won’t come when it cries is gone forever, what of the twin? Did you and your sister believe that the being with whom you were formed and born was dead? And in whom was your trust undermined? Trust in your mother? Or trust in the other?

Shadow

In your bedroom you dress for a dinner party. In your bathroom your daughters play. They remind you, at thirty-five years old, of you and your sister those decades before. After a moment you notice with sudden alarm that all has gone silent and panic; they’re their father’s daughters after all, congenitally incapable of quiet. But the elder is here in your bathroom doorway, stretching both arms to the door frame, brimful, frowning brows and smiling lips, just about to laugh. You don’t see the younger. (Six and five.) Where has she gotten to? ‘HERE!’ She leaps to the side from behind her sister’s back where she was hiding. ‘You couldn’t see me!’ ‘You couldn’t see her!’ They repeat their trick at your mirror. The elder, holding her arms out, praises the younger hiding behind her. ‘You can’t see you at all!’ (She uses the second person.) ‘See?’ But the mirror is blocked from the younger’s view as she is blocked from its and, shifting her face to the left of her sister to see the illusion, she breaks it.

You think of the frieze. A decorative medallion of Romulus and Remus at Certosa di Pavia, in which Remus’ profile appears as a double of Romulus’ or else as a shadow. Your daughter’s face, emerging to the left of her sister’s, looks precisely the same: a double that breaks the illusion of erasure. She hides again, laughing, restoring it. Laughing, you see, because the erasure is voluntary first and reversible second. Your two daughters’ trick is to make themselves one, a trick that they play on others. But it was others who played this trick on you, making you one in their minds, an amusement, always disappointed that you were still two – as perhaps you, too, came to be in the end? Denied even the ways that you wished to be one, or were, when allowed, left alone, babbling away in your whale-song in darkness, two heads touching, a whole.

Artwork © Bénédicte Kurzen & Sanne de Wilde/Noor, Twins pose with local flowers, Gwagwalada, Nigeria, 2018