First Born by Will Dean
Chapter 1
I am half a person.
The darkest half. The half that isn’t quite fifty per cent.
My fire alarm doesn’t look as pristine as it should, so I stand up on my mattress and press the test button. It bleeps. I test it again because I read on Quora one time – a comment embedded deep inside a thread – that it’s possible to get a false positive.
Sometimes I feel like I am a false positive.
Not sometimes. For at least eighteen of the past twenty-two years. Since I was four years old. That’s when I realised two important things in life. First: there are no such things as identical twins. Second: the universe conspires to trip you up.
I test the alarm again and it bleeps.
I lie back down on the bed and the four baby-safe pillows compress under the weight of my head. Pillows made with air holes. Breathable pillow slips. It’s rare that a full-grown adult woman suffocates from lying face-down in her sleep, but it is not impossible. There was a reported case in South Korea last year.
On my bedside table rests a knife with a three-inch blade. It’s legal because it does not lock and the blade is short, but I made sure to order the toughest knife available. It’s a balance of risks. Being incarcerated, even short-term, even just being questioned by the police, versus the risk of being violently attacked in my own home.
My entire existence is made up of balancing risks. KT, my twin, has never felt the need.
I want to move to the kitchen to make a cup of tea, but I will not leave while my phone is charging. Reddit taught me better. A retired firefighter shared his three top tips for avoiding house fires. This wasn’t his opinion; it was his conclusion after years of experience. First: avoid electric bed blankets. Second: avoid cheap Christmas lights. Third: never leave your phone charging on a flammable surface. I don’t watch my phone the whole time it’s charging, I’m not insane, but I do lie or sit next to it, within arm’s reach of my fire extinguisher and emergency fire blanket. There’s another pair of extinguishers in the far corner of the room. Another pair in every other room of my small Camden Town apartment. I believe in forward planning.
Camden may not be known as the safest area of London but, again, there is a balance to be found. Most people look at crime statistics and property prices and then they make their decision. I need to avoid crime and I need to avoid bankruptcy, both serious risks living here. I’m also mindful of other pertinent factors. My estate agent was more than a little surprised when I asked for the exact elevation above the River Thames. Like he hadn’t heard about rising sea levels. Like he hadn’t watched the documentary by a Dutch scientist on YouTube about how the Thames Flood Barrier is already outdated and how if we suffer a once-in-a-century storm surge much of London will end up underwater.
When I calculate my budget, I always try to keep some money back for Mum in case she ever needs it again. Five years ago Dad’s business almost went under. Mum has no job, no qualifications, no income. He doesn’t want her to work. I don’t feel comfortable with that set-up, that lack of autonomy, so I try to save a few pounds each month in case she ever needs it.
Next to my phone is a photo of them both. My parents: Paul and Elizabeth Raven. Good people. Caring and straightforward and down-to-earth. Honest, mostly. Mum is, at least. Next to that is a photo of me, Molly Raven, and my monozygotic twin, Katie, or, as I call her, KT. I don’t use the term ‘identical twin’ because it’s a blatant lie. A travesty. Our base DNA is identical, sure, but that’s about all that is.
We were once one person.
We are not any more.
The photograph was taken last year before KT moved to the USA. She had already broken the news to me and I can see that loss in my expression. The trauma of it.
We are not identical; she is prettier and funnier and she doesn’t need to constantly assess threats. ‘I’ll try anything once,’ is what she always says. Why would you do that? And why would you be proud of it? Back in our three-bedroom Nottinghamshire house growing up, she’d be the one trying ice-skating for the first time while I sat in the café with Mum, watching. She’d be the one volunteering for things in class, whereas I never volunteered for anything unless it made one or both of us safer.
If I look closely at the photo I can see the scar in her eyebrow from when she fell on a Cornwall beach when we were seven. I was the awkward one even back then. The anxious one. KT was the adventurous one, always rock-pooling and fishing crabs and wanting to swim. I was left on the beach within my windbreaks, slathered in sun block. Always safe. That day, when blood was dripping down into her eye, Mum and Dad trying to wash the wound from a bottle of water, I walked away. I couldn’t deal with the drama. The stares from other beachgoers. Or the fact that we looked so completely different in that moment. Mum and Dad worked hard to make sure I could handle everyday life, to ease my anxieties. But, in that moment, they were so focused on KT that they forgot about me. I walked off to sit on some rocks and nobody noticed. Mum and Dad were comforting KT, and in that instant they looked like a perfect family.
But she is my twin. That’s precious. She is the closest person to me in the whole world. We are not like other people. We were an egg cell – a singular, beautiful egg cell – that split in utero.
KT took half of me and I took half of KT. I don’t own pets because I can’t afford pets and because my landlord will not allow pets and because – and please feel free to research this for yourself – there are an estimated four thousand incidents recorded each year in Europe alone of dogs and cats killing or seriously maiming their owners. That’s one worry I can live without.