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My parents didn’t seem the sort of people who would end up killing someone. Everyone would say that – except the boy who died, who isn’t saying anything. He carried his story with him off the edges of the earth, like the others who died along the way.
This story, my story, belongs to them too.
My story starts, like all stories do, with a mother and a father, and here they are – Stanley and Jilly Hope.
Stanley, tall, and stooping to apologise for this, liked to wear a dark wool suit, which, when he sat down, would rise to reveal two white and entirely hairless shins. Jilly was well below his eyeline, squashy as marshmallow and keen on aprons. She had pale curly hair, cut to just above the shoulder, which she patted, to little effect.
My parents put down a deposit on the house in Willow Crescent, in Hedley Green, before there was a house there at all. The riskiest thing they ever did. Empty out their bank account for a pile of mud.
From then on, no more risks to be taken. Life best lived within the crescent, which was circular, and round and round they went with their lives, contented, with no desire for exit.
I, as soon as I was out of my mother’s womb, looked to be out of anywhere I was put in, striving, with some success, to exit the cot, the playpen or the pram.
My first exit (out of my mother) was fraught. I’d turned the wrong way up and wrapped the umbilical cord around my neck, whilst Julia slid serenely into the world shortly before midnight on 31 July. I didn’t appear until some minutes later, by which time it was August, and we were twins with different birthdays.
My sister, born in July, was named Julia; I, born in August, would be Augusta.