The Twins Would Only Answer To Each Other's Names And They Were Not Joking

They were six. Identical. Nice kids, both of them, and — this is important — completely distinguishable, because one had a scar on his chin from a coffee table and one did not.

In October they swapped names.

Not as a prank on the babysitter. This is what nobody could get their heads around. They did it with their mother, their teacher, each other, and with a straight, tired, slightly irritated patience, the way you correct somebody who keeps getting your name wrong at work.

The one with the scar answered only to his brother's name. The one without answered only to the scarred one's.

Their mother thought it was a game and, to be fair, she was working two jobs and a game costs nothing.

The teacher had a word. The parents had a word. Nothing changed. Six weeks.

The thing that frightened me — and it took me the whole six weeks to work out why I was frightened — is that they never got it wrong.

Six-year-olds cannot maintain a bit. They cannot. They break, they laugh, they slip up at bedtime when they are tired and they want their mum.

These two did not slip up once in six weeks. Not once, not when they were ill, not when they were half asleep, not when one of them fell off the trampoline and screamed for his brother — and he screamed the OTHER name, the swapped one, in real pain, with no time to think.

That is what did it for me. You cannot fake the name you scream.

On the last night I sat for them, the one with the scar — who was, by then, insisting on his brother's name — cried at bedtime and would not say why, and then said: "I want to go back."

I said, "Back where, sweetheart?"

And he looked at me like I was being deliberately slow, and he said, "Back to being me."

In the morning it was over. They were themselves. It has never happened again, and they are seventeen now, and they do not remember it, and their mother laughs about it at parties.

She calls it "the name game".

I have never once laughed.