and Janice Brown?’ said Julia, with a massive frown wrinkling up her forehead.
‘Robin Fox said it’s typical of the suburbs, but I didn’t know what he was on about.’
‘Do you really mean that Mum and Dad would do this too?’ said Julia again. ‘Like, would Dad have had sex with Helen Dunnett or Janice Brown?’
I nodded very seriously, and then I said, ‘Come to think of it, nobody else would put up with Dad’s pants!’
That set Julia off, thinking of his grey Y-fronts with little slits at the front to put his thingie through. (We knew masses of words for his thingie these days, but neither of us could quite bring ourselves to use any of them – the whole idea of it appalled us. Not to mention the necessity of his thingie in our very own creation. With our very own mother!)
My father came raging up the stairs because, instead of being contrite and ashamed of the rudeness of my double-entendre, he’d heard me laughing again. When he came in, shaking and bursting a blood vessel in his neck, we put our hands over our mouths because seeing him there screaming at us and knowing he was wearing those slitty grey Y-fronts underneath his grey trousers made us squirt laughter between our fingers in big gasps and splurts. This sent him totally round the bend.
Then our mother came in, smelling of talcum powder, from her bath, and we could see her big stretchy pants because she’d got her nightie on which was a bit see-through, and we could also see the tyre of fat around her middle, like a ring doughnut.
‘If you go on laughing like this,’ said my mother, ‘you will give your father a heart attack.’
At the mention of the word heart attack, and I don’t know why this was, a big squelch of laughter burst out of my mouth through my fingers – and that set Julia off.
My mother turned bright red in the face.
She looked at Julia and said, ‘I expected more of you.’
And I realised that she didn’t expect more of me.
I couldn’t decide whether to try and be good like Julia or whether to pay her back by being extremely bad.
When my mind clogged up with stuff, I used to go down to the lake, and I’d let the water wash it clean as I swam deep, like a dolphin, remembering that I was Parfait Nduwimana, and I was in God’s hands.
‘Come on then,’ I said to the rest of them. ‘Who wants to learn to swim? It’s a beautiful day.’
‘There are crocodiles in the lake!’ said Gloria. ‘You must be mad!’
‘Not in the part where I go,’ I said.
‘We’ll all get bilharzia,’ said Douce.
‘Or leeches on our legs,’ said Pierre.
‘How about if we come and watch you?’ said Gloria. ‘Come on, Wilfred, you can come too.’
Wilfred stared back at her, with no words.
‘Pierre?’
‘Maybe,’ he said, his brow creased up as if he had a war going on inside him, as usual.
‘Zion?’
‘If Parfait’s going, I’m going.’
It was quite a walk down the hill, but the lake was shimmering, and there were butterflies about, and we almost felt like a family again, walking along together in a line in the sunshine.
Gloria and Douce linked arms, but they didn’t sing together like they used to; Wilfred ambled along with the rope still round his ankle; Zion was wearing the red-and-white nylon football top that he liked to believe had once belonged to David Beckham; and Pierre walked some distance behind.
‘This is what it would be like if we walked to Spain,’ I said to them. ‘Except when we arrived, we’d be swimming in the turquoise sea. In the actual Atlantic Ocean. And we’d be getting out onto the yellow sandy beach and having a picnic together. Possibly with a bottle of Spanish wine.’
‘I’m not sure we’d make it all that way up Africa,’ said Douce. ‘Or I’m not sure I would.’
‘We could go a little at a time,’ I said. ‘I’d make sure you all had time to rest, I promise you. And if you were tired, we’d wait a day before moving on.’
‘We don’t need to decide now,’ said Gloria.
‘We have to go,’ said Zion with that determined look on his face. ‘I can’t believe you don’t want to. We can go to Europe and build a new life, with our own house on the beach, all of us together. And we can drink Spanish wine and go to festivals together. What on earth is stopping you? I just don’t understand.’
‘We don’t know what Europe’s like,’ said Douce quietly. ‘It could be worse than here.’
‘Nothing could be worse than here,’ said Zion. ‘And I’m going with Parfait for sure. If you don’t want to, don’t bother.’
‘It’s such a long journey,’ said Gloria.
‘God gave us legs,’ said Zion. ‘What do you suppose they’re for? Except walking.’
I put my arm around Zion and squeezed him.
‘Give them time, Little Bro,’ I said.
‘I’m serious,’ he said. ‘If I could choose, we’d set out for Spain tomorrow. I want us to be happy again.’
I first heard the word España when Diego moved into Willow Crescent. If somebody had told me there was a word for a country which sounded as light and airy and beautiful as this, I might never have chosen Burundi.
I thought (obviously) that the country which joined on to France had the name of Spain, which rhymes with pain and plain and rain.
We’d ventured as far as France on our August holidays, which we documented in sticky photo albums, covered by cellophane, annotated by my mother and arranged in date order.
People loved to comment on the differences between Julia and me, never looking through the albums without saying which one of us was taller, smaller, thinner, fatter, paler, darker.
This is what happens with twins.
I quickly became the clever one – and Julia was obliged to oppose me. Julia quickly became the pretty one – and you see where I am going with this. And, in seasons, being objective, I was not an attractive child.
There I was, knobbly-kneed and squinting on the beach in Benodet, twenty kilometres from Quimper, where we were staying, and where my mother bought the lasagne dish.
There I was in Wales, skinny and tall, with slightly lank hair.
It rained a lot on that holiday, but we swam in the pool anyway. My father stood under an umbrella with our towels over his arm, and my mother stood next to him, holding my glasses and intercepting me as I climbed out, so that I didn’t bump into anything. My grandmother sat in the pool café, storing up criticisms of our fellow guests to share with us later.
‘Far too much squinting at books,’ said my mother, hooking the spectacle arms around my damp ears, then trying to pat me on my upper arm. I wriggled from her touch. I didn’t like my parents to touch me, and because I wriggled, they gave up trying and lavished their touch on Julia.
In our tiny pinewood bedroom, I read Julia poems, which she tolerated, and excerpts from a book called An Instant in the Wind which I’d found on my grandmother’s