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It was the last night of my four night visit to Rome. I'd walked myself to the verge of exhaustion again and was having a final cup of tea in the bar/restaurant next to my hotel. Some new brick paving was being laid on the street and the bar was struggling to keep down the dust, even after the builders had finished for the day and the air conditioner was doing it's best to pump out some cool, moist air onto the tables and customers sitting outside with food and drinks. Emerging from the haze of cold air combined with concrete dust, was a woman, glasses hanging lopsidedly from their cord around her neck, speaking a combination of English and Italian, from which we customers understood that she had something annoying in her eye.  She lurched across to my table and asked if she could "leave this here a moment" , laying down an A4 notebook, whilst squinting and protesting about the "something" in her eye as she did so. "This stupid thing - it keep...

 Doubles Alice was older then Evelyn- by twenty minutes precisely. They'd come into the world quite calmly and quietly, the midwife had said, at 7 am on 17th June; definite identical twins. Gemini, in fact. Even from that first moment of new life, it was clear that they were going to be a little 'different', though no one was quite sure how or in what way. They'd been wrapped up immediately in stiff green linen and laid side by side in a hospital cot where their where their wide open eyes had gazed at each other as though trying to establish their togetherness, from the start, oblivious to the other bawling babies in the hospital nursery. Neither of them cried, even when hungry and they needed little in the way of comfort from nurses arms. Their solace seemed to lie in each other and as long the two babies were in the same cot, they were content. No one in later years was quite sure what had become of their mother...