Nicknamed the Silent Twins, June and Jennifer Gibbons lived with their parents in Wales until being institutionalised. As children, they had struggled with speech impediments, and communicated with each other via a secret twin language that became more and more impenetrable to outsiders. They mirrored each others movements, even when separated; they were each others only friends, closer than lovers; and they hated each other as much as they loved each other. Those two words would come to articulate and represent the strange, obsessive push-pull rivalry and bond between the twins. Each. Other. As adults, the two would write to express themselves to an outside world that they felt utterly divorced from, novels, stories and poems, all fey and lyrical work, often dealing with their individual feelings of torment and helpless rage caused by the constant presence of the other. Their ostracism from the world, that sense of being trapped, cocooned with each other, would lead to petty theft, then to serious arson as the pair acted out their frustration and fear. As June wrote, No friends. Nothing else to do. Nothing to fill the cold hour. They tried to kill one another. Jennifer attempted to murder June by strangulation with a telephone wire; in turn, June tried to drown Jennifer in a nearby river. Eventually committed to Broadmoor Hospital and diagnosed as schizophrenic, Jane and Jennifer would agree on one thing: each could never live a complete life with the other around. They would argue violently, horribly about which one should die that the other might live the full life she felt she deserved. Only days before their scheduled release from Broadmoor, Jennifer would whisper to their friend Marjorie, a frequent visitor: Im going to die. Weve decided. Within hours of their release, Jennifer was dead: she slipped into a coma with her head gently laid upon the shoulder of her twin, her nemesis. The cause of death was never determined, except to say that Jennifer had died of an inflammation of the heart, a diagnosis metaphorically sound as much as it was medically accurate. June still lives close to her parents today: finally free to live a single, separate, full life of her own.
Professional writer, punk werewolf and nesting place for starfish. Obsessed with squid, spirals and story. I publish short weird fiction online at desincarne.com, and tweet nonsense under the name Jack The Bodiless. You can follow me all you like, just don't touch my stuff.
