On the beach, a boy was making sandcastles.
‘God, is that you?’
I giggled at his scrawny little chest and mop of hair.
‘Yep. Summer of ’82. I was nine years old.’
‘I wasn’t born.’
He sighed.
‘No.’
Another boy wandered into shot, waving a spade, and I leant forwards, gaping. It was another Jasper, for all the world. Jasper the first leaped up and the two began sparring with their buckets and spades.
‘There are two of you!’ I exclaimed.
‘There were two,’ he corrected flatly.
‘Oh! Isn’t he … I’m sorry.’
‘Joseph was my twin,’ he said. ‘When we were twelve, he got leukaemia. He lived another eighteen months.’
There were no adequate words. All I could do was stare at him, horrified, and take his hand. Looking back at the laughing children, I teared up.
‘Oh, Jasper.’
‘’S all right,’ he said, with a little hand wave, but his lower lip jutted more than it usually did. ‘Long time ago.’ He pulled me closer, though, and I could feel his chest move up and down. He didn’t want me to see his face but I heard him swallow.
‘You’ve never mentioned it,’ I whispered.
‘No, well, not the most cheerful topic of conversation,’ he said.
‘I don’t care about that,’ I said, absolutely consumed with the need to hold him and make his world whole again. ‘I care about you.’
We held on to each other while the ghost boys flickered, splashing in the waves. The film went blank and all I could hear was the heaviness of Jasper’s breath as he fought to master it.
‘It must have changed you,’ I said, once he was able to loosen his grip on me and let me look at his face.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘God, I hated the world and everything in it. To have my life, as I knew it, taken right out of my hands like that … well … It wasn’t easy. Joe and I … our bond was special.’
‘Of course it was.’
‘I went looking for it, for versions of it, all the time. Ava Rose – I thought she … but no. And perhaps you can understand, a little, why I like control.’
‘Yes. It makes sense to me now.’
‘When I direct, the world is the way I make it. It’s the way I want it. If I don’t want the person to die, they don’t die. It’s therapy.’ He smiled crookedly.
I took his face in my hands and kissed his forehead, then his lips, where the smile still quivered.
‘Do you think you’ve let him go?’ I whispered.
‘It’s getting better,’ he said. ‘Growing up is tough at the best of times, and it wasn’t the best of times. I had kind of a wild youth. I was lost. Directing – when I got into it – really started to change that. I’m not the raging child I was any more.’
‘Are you still looking for Joseph?’
He shook his head, smiling through a glimmer of tears.