The five of us round the table. Always in the same place. Me opposite my son, the girls opposite their father. Identical twins with their own language. I'd learnt a bit of it when they were seven. Till then it was impenetrable. It angered me. 

I'd wonder what I'd done wrong. The boy was born when they were three. He was light, happy, weighed nothing on my hip, not a worry came with him. Maybe that's why I took to sitting opposite him at meal times. For the lightness.

When I came home from the hospital with a baby they met me on the doorstep. Two moon faces. Silent, just stood there. I couldn't see what they were thinking. 

As he grew, I took to listening behind doors to them playing with him, anxious that he'd not grow properly, lacking a common language. They spoke to him softly and lovingly, carrying him about, showing him stuff, small creatures in the garden which they captured and kept in jam-jars in corners in the borders. 

Later, he was a conduit between the girls, their world and their language, and the rest of us. He didn't speak it well, but he understood them and they understood that. Sometimes I'd wonder if we were a happy family. I'd take us apart in my mind. Late at night. My husband asleep beside me. I was restless. It was like a puzzle. If I thought about it hard enough the answer might come. 

I measured us against other families I knew. How were we the same?  Or different? But how would I know? What I saw, for all I knew was a mask.

I was convinced the girls’ special language was wrong. I took them to a doctor and then a behavioural specialist. We'd meet in a small room. They'd play on the floor and I'd sit alone in a chair facing him and all he ever did was ask me questions about my childhood as if it was my fault. He said he was a Jungian analyst and it would take time. I didn’t know how much time I had.

I wondered if I should bring my husband or my son, but there were only the two chairs. I'd have thought there'd be more. Did only mothers go? All these questions rattled in my head endlessly as we drove home, my daughters behind me staring out at the dark afternoon.

It was late autumn then. Cold nights. When I couldn't sleep, I'd creep out into the hall, my feet chill on the floor, and listen at their door. I could hear them whispering sometimes. They grew older and went to high school. Maybe it was a shock. Something must have shocked them anyway, for they stopped talking to anyone and only spoke to each other and only in their language. My husband said it was a phase they'd grow out of. But I didn't believe him. 

My son made other friends. He was nine, then ten, then eleven. It seemed too quick. Moved away from our family somehow. Every other boy was his friend. He'd be out every day at someone's house after school, having his supper, phoning to say when he'd be back for bed. 

We became lonely, my husband and I. It felt as if we'd lost all our children. We were still young. I thought about having another but the idea passed by. It felt like we weren't fit to be parents. 

The school began to complain, asked us to go in. We sat in the headmistress's office, opposite her. I had no idea what to say and my husband was silent beside me.

My moon-faced girls. Why they did what they did I can't say. Though you might think that I should. Being their mother. Sometimes I think of their conception. How the planets must have been in mis-array, and we too young, wet with sweat and semen, happy and rolling in it like animals failing to take account of fate. It all seemed so easy. Their coming, the birth, the feeding. I was an earth mother. An animal, fat and sleepy with mothering.

My boy got to be fifteen. Everyone loved him. I met him once by surprise, getting off the school bus and he looked at me with his laughing face and said, 'What are you doing here, old woman?'  and then he hugged me tightly in front of his friends. I felt my breath squeezed out.

The girl was there, amongst them, standing and looking at me, her bag in her arms. They walked off together, with their gang, my boy’s arm over her shoulder. I went home.

Where it happened was their secret place. Only, then it wasn't a secret anymore. Everyone knew in the end, reading the reports. Afterwards. They must have been cuddling each other, I suppose. Wrapped together, whispering to each other. 

I wondered whether they'd seen what was coming, how much they’d suffered. I wondered if it had happened in silence, if they'd been taken by surprise. If they'd been laid out like they were, side by side, for a meaning. 

In court, they talked about a jealous rage, how the twins had wanted to possess their brother when he was little. How the girl had come between them. 

I was in a muddle then, looking up at them, my daughters, sitting up there, staring into space, not talking. I looked at them and thought, they were never that strong. They took them by surprise, my boy and his girl.