Lullaby (3 page)

‘Well, if they hadn't been away that weekend—'

‘I didn't cause the lightning. Guilt would be ridiculous.'

‘That's a very adult response.'

‘Thank you.'

2

When I was fourteen, I had a teacher who looked just like Maggie. For an elective.
I did codes, Theo chose cooking. The codes teacher was like Maggie. Not in the way
I look like Theo. If you analyse it, feature by feature, nothing matches up. But
considered as a whole, they're the same person. They have the same feel about them.
I only had that teacher for three months, but she was my favourite. I had a sort
of crush on her.

‘Did the death of your parents make you and Theo closer, do you think?'

‘We were already close.'

‘That doesn't answer the question.'

‘Have you heard of the Pauli exclusion principle?'

I hoped she hadn't. I hoped it was the sort of
thing only people with mothers like
mine knew about.

‘If any two electrons are too close,' Maggie said, ‘then the combined probability
of them being anywhere cancels out. It's only through being apart that they can exist
at all.'

‘It's why you and I don't fall through the floor.'

I was disappointed—I wouldn't get to explain it to her.

‘Even though we're mostly made up of empty spaces. Because there's a limit on closeness,'
I said.

‘Do you believe in God?' Maggie asked.

‘I think we've got more important things to talk about,' I said.

‘More important than God?'

‘Yeah.'

‘I was wondering, when your parents died, if you didn't blame yourself, perhaps you
blamed Him? Maybe it made you question His existence?'

‘No,' I said. ‘I've never believed in that sort of a God.'

There was a knock at the door. An old guy, older than my father would have been if
it hadn't been
for an electrical storm, waited at the end of his trolley.

‘Tea, coffee, biscuit?'

‘I'd like a water,' Maggie said.

‘Same, please.'

The man poured two glasses of water. We both got a biscuit we hadn't asked for. The
man moved slowly, like he had a pain in his shoulder. He smiled at us, longer at
me than at her. Maybe because I was the patient, or because he knew the whole story:
identical twins, orphans, one of them in a coma, an experiment. It's the sort of
thing people talk about.

‘This biscuit is awful,' Maggie said, when the door had closed again.

‘I like it.'

‘Excellent.' She passed me hers.

I put it in my mouth and explored the bite mark with my tongue.

‘What happened to you, once your parents had gone?'

‘There was money. And the house was paid for. We own it, really. Once we're twenty,
it'll…'

I hope it never happens to you. I hope death never comes so unannounced. But if it
does, this is how it will be. Without warning, the smallest
thought, the least consequential
sentence, will take your feet from under you, and you will fall, and keep on falling.
Your head will hurt, the world will go small and dark, and your eyes will fill with
water. Sometimes, you will vomit.

Next thing, you'll be on your knees, wiping dribble and bits of somebody else's biscuit
from your chin, apologising for being disgusting, even though you both know you can't
be held responsible.

‘No, please, it's absolutely fine.'

There was a spot, about as big as a thumbnail, on her skirt, and I was trying to
wipe it away with my sleeve. She was pulling back, but politely, careful not to push
me away. The pool on the floor between us spread. I remember it was mostly clear.
I hadn't had much to eat, since I heard. Maggie stood.

‘I, I'll get somebody. I won't be a moment.'

She hurried out and I finished her water. I considered leaving, but couldn't think
of anywhere to go.

The first few passes of the cleaner's mop drew up most of the vomit: viscous, helpful
stuff. I watched
her swirl it into the bucket, then pull the mop back through the
ringer. I remember thinking it was like a mathematics problem from school. The next
splash of the cleaning water must have been part vomit. There's no escaping that
without a second bucket. And cleaners never have a second bucket. Slowly, one cycle
at a time, the floor and bucket vomit ratios were equalising.
If the bucket contains
fifteen litres, and the vomit has a volume of 1200mL, and the mop on average transfers
400mL of liquid, write a differential equation to describe…
I didn't go that far,
but I was aware that part of the cleaner's task was to spread my vomit over a wider
area.

‘But you weren't left to live alone in your house,' Maggie said, when the cleaning
was finished. ‘You were only twelve.'

‘Our auntie was in charge. Our uncle wanted to move in with us but there was a line
she wouldn't live beyond, so many thousand kilometres from the equator. I can't remember
the exact number, but we were on the wrong side of it. It was to do with mosquitoes.
She had a map, showing the progress of tropical diseases as the climate warmed. I
don't
know if it's true, I don't know that much about diseases. But we never saw
any mosquitoes near our house, and the people we knew died of normal stuff, and lightning.'

Maggie didn't smile. ‘So you think your auntie was using the mosquitoes as an excuse?'

‘No, I think she really believed it. She was that age, the generation that grew up
online and lost their perspective. I think she thought if she came to look after
us, ultimately a mosquito would kill her, and it would be her own fault for having
been so careless. So she hired a—we never knew what term to use—a nanny, an auntie
substitute, a Mrs Struthers. I guess my auntie didn't worry quite as much about the
mosquito getting Mrs Struthers.'

‘Or you.'

‘We didn't take it personally.'

‘What was Mrs Struthers like?' Maggie asked.

It was a difficult question. I'd always had so many different feelings about Mrs
Struthers, and no matter how I tried, I could never get them to line up.

‘Kind. But she had too much time for us. I think that was the main thing. Normally
parents are busy earning a living so they can look after
you, but in Mrs Struthers'
case, looking after us was how she earned her living. I don't think that's the ideal
balance. Luckily, she couldn't tell us apart, or we might have suffocated.'

Maggie nodded. A nod was different from a smile, was different from a stare, was
different from the deliberately suspended moment before she exhaled, was different
from the first joint of her index finger pushing briefly against her top lip. I had
no idea what the differences meant. Possibly they all said the same thing and the
only real variable was the length of the pause. Considering the urgency, she did
a lot of pausing.

‘How did your mother feel about you being twins?'

‘Are you going to ask about our father, too?'

‘Your parents. How did your parents feel?'

‘I don't know. I don't know how to answer that.'

No pause. Not even long enough for me to blink.

‘Did they treat the two of you differently?'

‘They tried to.' I corrected myself. ‘Mum tried to. We weren't allowed to wear the
same clothes. Not just at the same time, I mean we had entirely
separate sets of
clothes. Right down to the cloth nappies we wore: his were blue, mine were red. Or
that's the way I'm told it. If people referred to us as the twins she corrected them,
made them say Rene and Theo.'

‘Not Theo and Rene?'

‘Probably she mixed it up.'

‘Do you think she loved one more than the other?'

She doesn't like you. And she doesn't not like you, either. She's doing her job.

‘I don't know. Maybe. But if she did, she was good at hiding it.'

‘Did you wonder if it was you?'

‘No.'

I was sure she didn't believe me.

‘So you never dressed the same. What else was different?'

‘Not the shoes,' I said.

‘Sorry?'

‘We had this thing, once we were walking, where we always wanted to wear one another's
shoes. So we'd end up in one of each. One red, one silver. That's how it is in the
pictures.'

‘Do you think you were rebelling against
your mother's desire to see you as separate?'
Maggie asked.

‘I think we were two and wanted shit we couldn't have.'

‘Do you think you grow out of that?' she asked.

‘Have you?'

‘Not really.'

Stories never come loose cleanly; everything's always tangled up with something
else. You talk about shoes and there, dangling off the end, is a haircut. We used
to do that, Theo and me, lie in our beds and talk for hours, and then at the end,
try to trace our way back through the conversation, all the way to the beginning.

‘I remember, we were maybe four, not quite at school. Theo had long hair down to
his shoulders, mine was just over my ears. I have a photo of it. We both said we
wanted short hair, but Mum wouldn't allow it. I must have screamed louder than Theo
did, because I got taken to the hairdresser. That night, when we were meant to be
in bed, I found some scissors and hacked Theo's hair as short as I could. He asked
me to do it. I made a mess of it, of course, and then he
made a mess of mine. That's
the sort of thing people should take photos of. Mum was furious. She got the clippers
out and reduced us both to fur. There was no other choice. Later, Dad saw us sitting
together on Theo's bed with our foreheads touching, rubbing each other's hair. The
sight of it made him cry. I remember the tears in his eyes, although I'm not sure
I really saw them. It became a story, you see, the sort you use as Christmas decoration,
so it's impossible to know for sure.'

‘Does that worry you?' Maggie asked.

‘What?'

‘The difference between what you remember, and what really happened.'

‘No, I think it's good,' I said.

‘How's it good?'

‘Stories are good,' I said. ‘They make it more real.'

She laughed. She was beautiful, and she had laughed. It felt like a victory.

The longest pause so far. Her head tilted slightly, and her glasses became opaque.

‘How were you different? Tell me about your personalities.'

Past tense. It wasn't her job to make things easy.

‘That's a hard question.'

‘There are going to be a lot of hard questions.'

‘I mean, there's an easy answer, but it's wrong.'

‘Tell me why it's wrong.'

‘The easy answer is the way other people always describe us,' I said. ‘When you're
a twin, people make too much of the differences, because they're trying so hard to
prove they see you as individuals. Then those differences grow into stories, and
the stories start to choke you.'

‘How do people describe you?'

‘They say I'm the sensitive one, and he's the charmer.'

‘And that's not true?'

‘Our first three school reports all said it. They used teacher phrases, but it's
what they were getting at. But I know for a fact our first two teachers couldn't
even tell us apart.'

‘Why did people think you were the sensitive one?'

‘Maybe I got upset more easily. Dad said it was more that when I got upset, people
noticed, because they were already looking for it. They said
I liked detail. With
jigsaw puzzles, and drawing, and then reading, I would stay at one thing for hours,
and if it didn't go right, or they made me put the lights out halfway through a chapter,
I'd have a fit. Theo's myth has him jumping from one thing to another. He always
knew when people were watching him, that part's true. He made them laugh, he made
me laugh, all the time. I don't think he was restless, I think he was just trying
to entertain them. The word teachers used for him was resilient. I craved that word,
it took on a magical quality. If only somebody called me resilient, then everything
would be all right. I was sure of it.'

‘But they didn't?'

‘No, it was already spoken for.'

‘What word did they use for you?'

‘Gifted.'

‘That's not so bad,' Maggie said.

‘No.'

‘Do you think Theo craved your word in the same way?'

‘Of course. Because every time they called me gifted, they were really saying he
was stupid. And every time they called him resilient, they meant I was fragile. Every
way you can find of praising a
person is also a way of insulting anyone else who's
listening. Twins understand that.'

‘But would you say you were different?'

‘Compared to what?'

‘Compared to each other.'

‘No, I mean, what do you compare our difference to, to judge its significance?'

‘I see.'

She didn't. So I'd have to tell her about the magic bedroom. I would have anyway.

‘We were eight. We slept in the same room. I had a poster of a dinosaur on the wall
above my bed. Theo had a racing car. Really we both liked fire engines, but Mum made
us each choose something different. One night we sleepwalked. It might not have been
exactly like that. Maybe, one of us sleepwalked and half woke the other. Or maybe
Theo set the whole thing up, as a trick. But I don't think so. Theo was a good liar,
but not that good.'

I wondered how long she would let me do this: jump from one story bough to the next,
hoping to climb high enough that none of the ugliness could reach me. Soon she would
have to call me down. We both knew that.