I just wish I could talk to Mum properly. Tell her that I’m terrified I’m turning into her and that all I have in my future is a room right here, in this place that smells like stale piss and overcooked cabbage. Or that I think there is something very wrong about my husband.

“You should call her,” Chris says as we drive home.

“Hmmm?”

“Leah. You should call her.”

We always have this conversation after visiting Mum, her confusion over which twin I am leading Chris to once again suggest a reunion. I haven’t seen Leah for a long time. Although, of course, I keep tabs on her. It isn’t stalking. Stalk—that’s a strong word, bringing to mind some dirty pervert in a mac watching through the window as the pretty girl takes off a roll-neck sweater with the light playing exactly right in the background. No, I wasn’t stalking. I was just checking in, making sure Leah was all right. She’s always made the worst choices, after all. Has always had terrible taste in men, looking for those who will treat her like shit, worse even than Dad did to Mum. She needs me to keep an eye on her. Even if my own romantic judgment hasn’t exactly turned out to be so great after all.

* * *

I don’t know which of us was born first, but Leah always maintained she was. The hospital had attached a little band to each of our scrawny, wrinkled wrists, our skin the color of uncooked chicken in the glare of the delivery room lights. Our bassinets were similarly labeled with Baby Girl One and Baby Girl Two. But the bands were taken off in favor of a different color of piping on our onesies as we were prepared to be taken home. Our dad wasn’t around, and Mum had forgotten which color represented which twin in her struggle to take two tiny babies home on her own. Dad had found Mum in hysterics, not knowing who was Megan and who was Leah. He had looked from the tear-streaked mess of his wife to the identical faces of his twin daughters and made a rather worrying decision. With a needle and a broken BIC pen he tattooed a tiny dot on to Leah’s ankle. Two dots on to mine. Yes, my father tattooed us. When we were just a few days old. It was the only way he could think to tell us apart. Of course, once Mum had calmed down a bit, she told him he could have just used a marker pen or something, but by then it was too late. We don’t know if he was right, either; perhaps I was actually the elder and had spent the first few days of my life being called Leah. We will never be certain.

When we were about five, I remember we tried to get away with a swap. We swapped all the time, of course we did. Twins always do. Especially as it’s harder for parents to discipline both of you for a crime committed by just one. But normally we were just trying to avoid the punishment for minor transgressions: a stolen biscuit, spilt milk on the floor, a little bit of felt tip bleeding through the paper on to the wooden kitchen table and leaving a small stain. This was a little more serious, involving a football and the next-door neighbor’s greenhouse. We got away with it though. My father hadn’t counted on the ingenuity of the rather precocious children we were. Children with a permanent marker to ensure we both had two little dots on our ankles.