About Books: The Invisible Twin

 

This book was the one that took me the longest to write. It was two years or so in the making. I don’t know why it took so long. Maybe I simply wanted to make sure everything was accurate. I had a vague idea what happens and much of the information is gleaned from diaries. That meant that I had to make diary entries as well as writing a novel. The novel is in two parts.

My motivation for writing this one was exploring the relationship between identical twins. What happens when one dies? How does the other learn to cope?

As the child of an identical twin, I had a unique glimpse into that world. There are things about twins that singles don’t generally encounter. I noticed things about my mother and my aunt as I grew up, and heard some of the silly questions they were asked.

People frequently asked me, once they found out my mother was a twin, how I could tell them apart. That was easy. I never thought they looked all that much alike. I never mistook one for the other when our families were together, although occasionally a couple of my cousins did.

My mother and her sister were frequently asked what it was like to be a twin. I found that to be a strange question. How would a twin know what it’s like not to be a twin?

Some twins experience something where one is considered the sympathetic twin. This is the phenomenon in which one twin feels pain or some other sensation when something happens to the other twin. My mother felt labor pains every time my aunt had a baby. And my aunt’s varicose veins often gave her – and my mother – trouble. My mother’s legs would ache, and it had nothing to do with anything she was doing. She’d call my aunt and tell her to sit down and put her feet up. My family always found it funny. And my mother always knew when something happened to my aunt.

In fact, I used to worry about what would happen if my aunt died first. That could have dire consequences. My mother died about six years before my aunt, so we never found out if death had an effect.

Only when my aunt was in her 70s or 80s did I discover that she sometimes experienced pain when my mother was hurt. Once, when my mother smashed her knee cap, my aunt responded to being told with, “So that’s why my knee was bothering me.” But it seemed, from what she told me, the sensation wasn’t as great as it was for my mother.

Twins also, as babies, tend to develop their own special language. They understand each other when they speak what seems to others like gibberish. Most outgrow this in their first few years, and while it may delay regular speech a little, they learn to talk like everyone else.

Twins have their own individual personalities. For however identical they may be, there are differences, even in looks. I always thought my aunt looked slightly more like her father’s side of the family, while my mother looked more like their mother’s side, yet they were, indeed, identical. Even looking at their baby pictures, I could tell which one was which.

My mother was somewhat of an introvert. My aunt was an extrovert. They had different friends, although some were the same. And even after not seeing each other for a time, they could pick up the conversation as if only minutes had passed. They had certain looks they gave each other as a kind of unspoken code.

While some identical twins are what people sometimes call “mirror image” twins, where one is left-handed and the other is right handed, my mother and her sister were not. My aunt did say once that she thought she should’ve been left-handed. Of course, they grew up in an era where that wasn’t tolerated.

Armed with this information, I knew how characters who were twins would behave.

My twins are teenage boys who live in Wales, Kit (Christopher) and Bryn. At the start of the story they’re just shy of 18, and on their way to a party, a rare one where friends of both of them will be in attendance. Just before they reach the house where the party is, they’re in an accident. Kit is hurt; Bryn doesn’t survive.

Through a series of flashbacks to when they were between 15 and 17, as well as parts of Bryn’s journal, Bryn is revealed, and we learn the relationship between the boys, their hopes, dreams, similarities and differences.

The boys have a way of identifying people who only hang around them because they’re twins: twin groupies. Most are harmless, if annoying, but a few are less than friendly, and use one or both of the boys for their own purposes.

Many people are devastated by Bryn’s death, none more so than Kit. The entire family has difficulty for a while, barely managing to cope. They put up a front for Kit’s benefit. But Kit isn’t about to wallow in self-pity. He has to learn to cope in the world without Bryn, and seeks out help on his own.

Kit acts in the school plays, and always planned to become a professional actor. Bryn wanted to be a footballer, possibly for Manchester United if he was good enough.

The story is set in the 1980s, with all of the hair, makeup and music of the time. Each chapter is titled with a song from the British top 40 charts from the week in the 1980s in which that chapter takes place.

Kit’s first challenge after losing Bryn is to finish his final year in sixth form. He takes his A Levels (Something like SATs) over the objections of his parents, who think he’s been through too much to pass. They encourage him to wait. Typical of a 17-year-old, he’s not about to listen.

While most are supportive of him, he has a few people who end up playing games with him. He discovers his own resilience, and that many of Bryn’s sports friends actually like him.

The second part of the story revolves around his life in university and beyond and the many starts and stops in his healing process. He believes it’s important for him to succeed, not just for himself, but for his brother, too.

He tries to keep the fact that he had a brother who died a secret, with some disastrous results. He doesn’t want the pity. He discovers that’s only a momentary experience compared to backlash from people who believe he’d lied to them.

While he studies to become an actor, his instructors, while trying to hone his acting skills,  inadvertently give him suggestions that, at times, wreak havoc with his real life.

Through the roles he eventually gets, he manages to move forward with his life, and, he hopes, make Bryn proud.