It is a birthmark. It is not an illness and it is not a syndrome. She sees a dermatologist twice a year and that is the whole of it and she is a completely healthy child.
And I have the same one.
In the same place. Since the day I was born.
Thirty-five years.
And that is why I nearly went out, and it has nothing to do with the baby.
Because my twin brother looked at a mark that is on his own sister's back — a mark he has known about since we were four years old — and said, out loud, in a hospital room, "she can't be ours."
Lorna understood it in the same second.
She made a noise I am not going to try to describe and three people came in from the corridor.
She screamed at him: "That's JOSIE'S."
And he said — and this is the sentence, and there were four hospital staff in that room by then, and one of them has since told me she has thought about it every week —
