The Butterfly Heart Read Free Page A

their windows and heard the things they said. Bad things and good things. But it all stopped the day Winston found me and beat me till I couldn’t walk.
    He was much bigger than me, a man, and he took a stick to me and beat me as I was lying on the ground, shouting so loudly that everyone came to look. He said he would beat the devil out of me, the witch’s heathen child. It was my grandmother who stopped him. He was afraid of her. She ran out of our house on her thin legs and I heard her voice: “Winston.” Nothing else. Not loud, no shouting. Just that. He stopped and looked around, I think to make sure who was speaking. When he saw her, he moved away from me. He looked scared.
    I did not get up; I lay there absolutely still. If I moved, I thought it would start again. I did not even open my eyes or my ears. Then my grandmother came over to me and knelt down in the dust. She put her head next to mine. “Come, little one. You are all right now.” She helped me home and for three days and nights she looked after me, taking away the pain. Winston never touched me again.
    But he waited a long time, and then he touched her.

Bul-Boo
    Dad went up north today, so he wasn’t home for supper, and I wonder if Mum deliberately chooses these times to give us lectures. This one started at supper because Madillo made a speech about being older than me and how that meant she should always get her food first. She did come out first – that bit is true – but identical twins are really only two people by accident. One egg splits and two embryos grow instead of one. So technically she is not older.
    Whenever Mum gets an opportunity to tell us how lucky we are, she takes it. So she leapt in. “Madillo, instead of wanting to be first in the queue, you should be grateful for your mere existence.”
    That silenced both of us. I could have expected the usual “millions of children wouldn’t mind
when
they got food as long as they got something…” But not this.
    “If you were horses…” Mum went on. “Well, if
I
was a horse that had fallen pregnant with twins, the vet would be called and one of the eggs would be pinched to death. One of
you
.”
    “Pinched to death? I’ve never heard of that.” I didn’t like the way this conversation was going.
    “Yes. Pinched. So it withers away. And the mare –
me
, in this case – is left with only one foal. One of
you
, in other words.”
    “Well, that’d only be if you were a tame horse,” Madillo said. “If you were wild, there’d be no vet to call and then both of us would be born. Then I might demand to get food first.”
    “Or you’d both die, taking me along with you. And, on the subject of existence, what if one of you had disappeared? It’s a phenomenon, you know: the Phenomenon of the Disappearing Twin.” Mum announces things like that as if they are just daily occurrences, twins disappearing all over the place, never to be seen again.
    “In humans or horses?” I said.
    “I’m talking humans here, Bul-Boo,” she said. “Twins can show up on a scan and then, by the time of the next scan, one of them has disappeared. There is evidence to suggest that it disappears into the other twin. If that had happened in your case, either one of you could have ended up with a tiny pre-human embedded somewhere in your body.”
    Mum sat back and started eating again, as if she had just had a perfectly normal conversation. I could have lived my whole life quite happily without knowing any of these facts.
    “Is there a Phenomenon of the Disappearing Triplet?” Madillo asked.
    “There is.”
    “I have always had a feeling there was someone else in my life… I wonder where she’s embedded? Maybe in my shoulder. I think I’ll call her Mary.”
    For pretty obvious reasons both Madillo and I like simple names: Mary, Anna, Emily – they all sound good to us. If we had names like that, no one would ever ask us, “Now, dear, how do you spell that?”
    “What makes you think