Death Watch

Saturday, 5 September 1992

The moment Bryan Judd’s twin sister died – that very instant – he was sitting on an abandoned sofa on the waste ground behind Erebus Street. He’d gone to the mini-market and bought a can of Special Brew which he was drinking slowly in the vertical summer heat, listening to his radio. The signal came and went, like an audible mirage, but he sang in the gaps, expertly finding the key, knowing all the words of ‘Success Has Made a Failure of Our Home’, mimicking the Elvis Costello cover, not this version by Sinéad O’Connor. The beer was warm, the tin damp, and the alcohol made him feel better about the night to come – about what it might hold for him. Ally had said she’d meet him outside the Lattice House. Her skin was always cool, even in this endless summer, and he’d found that to seek it, taut under his fingertips, had become an obsession. He smiled, tipped his head back, and drank, despite the taste of metal in his mouth.

And then his twin, Norma Jean, was there with him, a presence as physically real as the tin can in his hand. He never had any warning, there was never a sense in which she approached. She was just there. Inside him. They told people it wasn’t a link between their minds, it was a link between their bodies, as if the intimacy they’d shared in

But this wasn’t like the other times. This was a violent shock, a blow. The beat of his heart became slow and hard, thudding, as if he were running, or hiding; and in the background he could hear her heartbeat, a mirror image of his own. His blood rushed in his ears and he knew the emotion she was feeling was fear; then, with a jolt which seemed to tear at the muscles that held his heart in place, the fear escalated into terror. He tried to stand, wanting to go to her, but his knees buckled and he knelt, not feeling the shard of glass that cut into the soft tissue below his knee.

And then, despite the sun, a shocking coldness covered his face, and his neck; and all the noises of the day – the creaking dockside crane, the traffic on the inner ring road – became dull, and distant, as if heard under water. The coldness enclosed his head, his shoulders, inside his mouth, and down his throat. He tried to gulp air but there was something in his throat, something slippery and cold. He gagged, spewing vomit down his T-shirt. He tried to fill his lungs but there was nothing there, just this fluid cloak of suffocation over his head and shoulders.

He was drowning, on a summer’s day, on a dusty piece of waste ground as dry as bones.

He tried to stand, but fell back on the sofa, blacking out.

The lost heartbeat made him run to find her: across the waste ground, around the back of the Sacred Heart of Mary and down the street to his house, past the launderette where his mother worked, the windows clouded with condensation. As he passed he heard his baby brother crying from the pushchair by the open door.

The front door of their house, next to the launderette, opened as he got to it and his father came out, pulling it closed behind him, pushing a hand through a shock of white hair like a wallpaper brush, thick with paste.

‘It’s Norma,’ said Bryan. ‘Something’s happened…’

His father brushed a hand over his lips and Bryan noticed the bib of sweat which stained his shirt.

‘Jesus, Bry,’ said his father, who was looking at the blood on his son’s trouser leg, below the knee, and a cut on his cheek.

Bry pushed past, just stopping the door before the lock dropped, running halfway up the stairs.

‘Norma!’ He stood, listening to the familiar sounds of the house: a clock ticking, the cat flap flapping.

His father came to the foot of the stairs, looking at him through the banisters, as if they were bars on a cell. ‘Your

The bedroom door to his sister’s room was open, the bed inside made, but dented, as if she’d thrown herself on it. In the bathroom there was a trickle of water still running to the plughole, and a single bloody fingerprint on the edge of the bath.

He felt his father at his shoulder.

‘I felt her, drowning…’ said Bryan.

He could smell his father now. Cheap talc, and the cream he put in his hair. Bryan looked at his father and saw that he’d cut himself shaving.

‘She walked out twenty minutes ago. She’s fine.’ Their eyes met. ‘We argued, that’s all – about the baby. That’s all you felt, Bry – she’s upset. Now leave it. Please.’

His father leant forward, pulled some toilet paper from the holder, and wiped the bloody print from the ceramic white edge of the bath.