Tao Read Online Free Page B

whatever,” said Mimi. “I think your dad is joking because I already have a brother called Conor. You can ask Sally.”
    “He isn’t joking, Mimi,” I said. “I am your brother too.”
    Kate had come back quietly out of the kitchen and was mouthing that I should put her on the phone. My head was in a spin. I handed her the phone and she asked Mimi if she could speak to her father. But it seemed that Mimi didn’t want to get her father. So Kate had to insist. There was a long wait then, with Kate just holding the phone.
    Eventually Mimi’s father must have come, and Kate and he talked for a very long time. I went out in the garden and kicked the football back and forth against the wall of the house until Kate finally called me in.
    I sat down at the table with a long face. I didn’t really feel that cross anymore, just fed up and sulky.
    “I gave Mimi’s dad your mobile number to give to her,” said Kate, putting a glass of water on the table in front of me. “I hope you don’t mind?”
    I just shrugged. I was surprised that Kate even knew my number.
    “It’ll make it easier for you to chat in private,” she said.
    “S’pose so,” I mumbled, but right now I didn’t really care.
    “It’s true then – what Dad said – this Mimi is my sister?” I asked her, a bit grumpily. “When exactly were you going to tell me?”
    Kate sighed. “Your father and I only found out about Mimi after we had adopted you. Mimi is Chinese, like you. When Rose and Paul, that’s Mimi’s parents, adopted her from the orphanage in China, they were told that she was an only child. When we adopted you a few weeks later we were told the same thing, but it was a mix-up. Later on, somebody in the orphanage found the papers saying that you were really twins…”
    “Twins!” I spluttered. This day was getting stranger and stranger.
    “Well, yes,” said Kate, “apparently. So they wrote both families a letter, but it was too late then. We weren’t going to give you to Rose and Paul, and they weren’t going to give Mimi to us.”
    “When were you going to mention this little thing?” I said in a sarcastic voice. “I think I had a right to know about this!”
    I could feel my eyes welling up.
    “We were going to tell you both when you were seven.”
    “But you didn’t!”
    “Well, no, we didn’t,” said Kate softly, “because that’s when your father and I broke up and it was all upsetting enough without this on top of everything. So we told Rose and Paul to wait for another year or two.”
    “But that was three years ago,” I told her.
    “I know, Tao.” Kate was biting the corner of her lip. “But then something terrible happened. Mimi’s mother, Rose, was run over by a bus when she was out cycling and she died. So we wrote to Paul and said that we would wait until the time was right for Mimi before we said anything…”
    “Oh,” I said. “That’s very sad.”
    “Yes,” said Kate and I didn’t push her away this time when she put her arm around me.
    “And then Mimi found our phone number and a letter,” I finished.
    “Her father, Paul, had started to write to us. He hadn’t been happy with the letter that he had written so he had crumpled it up and thrown it in the waste-paper basket. Mimi’s sister Sally found the letter and she put Mimi up to ringing you yesterday. Mimi didn’t know about you before that.”
    There was a long silence in the kitchen when Kate finished talking and even though I had a lot of questions I didn’t want to ask anything else. Sometimes you can have an information overload. I have a twin, was all I could think. I have a twin.
    In the afternoon, I met Kalem and we went to play our football match. Angela had made another smoothie for us, as last week it had brought us such luck. It didn’t work so well this week.
    Questions about Mimi kept popping into my mind. How could you have a twin sister for ten years without knowing about her? What did she look like? Was she