Mischief (36 page)

....‘Those twins of hers. Spooky! Poor Ted, no wonder he wanted out. I expect she destroyed the suicide note.’

....‘One person in two bodies, those twins. Like seeing double. In a lot of countries they put them down at birth.’

And then ‘she’ became ‘you’, which was worse.

....‘You’re a rotten cook. You do realise that? That omelette would kill anyone.’

....‘You murdered him! He was having it off with that rich girl in his shop and you didn’t like it.’

....‘Even your daughters call you a witch. You’re always seeing things. You probably just looked daggers at him, and he upped and died.’

....‘Did you put a stone in his mouth to stop him walking, the way his great grandpa did. It runs in the family.’

I suppose it all came out of my own mind, not from theirs, but I still found it hard to forgive them. It was ‘rotten cook’ that hurt most. I’m actually quite good.

Cynara: ‘I’m not saying they bumped Ted off just to try it out, but it wouldn’t surprise me’.

It was not out of the question that I was the guilty party and just didn’t remember. It’s possible to hypnotise people into doing things and then forgetting they’ve done it. Forget that, re-wind. It’s an absurd proposition. Oh Finnigan! as Ted would say. Beginagain!

I made more coffee. I felt perfectly alert. The wake-up pills were working well. I realised that I didn’t want to go to sleep anyway in case Ted came walking out of my dreams into my real life. He seemed so much on the verge of doing so. If he did, where would my loyalties lie? Odd that I now loved Robbie as once I’d loved Ted. Cynara had suggested over lunch that love had nothing to do with romance, just with the nature of the sexual relationship. And it is true that many a girl in an arranged marriage will say ‘I did not see my husband until my wedding day, but I came to love him almost at once’ – she lived happily enough before him, but now can’t envisage life without him: she is addicted to him.

Perhaps Cynara is right. Love is the product of a hormonal exchange between two people. An addiction to Robbie has simply replaced an addiction to Ted. Odd too that Robbie had chosen tonight of all nights to be trapped in his office. If indeed he had been. Whatever his motives, whatever ‘they’ had to do with it – and it was important that I did not let my incipient jealousy of Cynara interfere with my judgement – at least I had a few hours before his return in which to gather my wits.

I went to find the death certificate. I remembered shoving it into the living-room bureau after a brief look at ‘cause of death’, and thinking I’d deal with it later. Rather to my surprise it was still there. (Robbie had done a great clear-out when we got married because it was to be a new beginning for both of us. The house these days looked the way Robbie liked a home to look, neat, tidy, rather male and without clutter. Robbie favoured disambiguation.) The reality, the finality of the document was rather shocking; it had been filled with a pen hand, not a computer, in a rather thin and tremulous but determined hand, as if by an old person sticking to older ways. It was as I remembered it: ‘Cause of Death – apoplexy; query? cerebral thrombosis. Query? arteriovenous malformation.’

The coroner’s letter had not arrived until January 21st, and was at odds with what the locum had told us. He had simply assumed SADS. I went down to the surgery with the twins to check it out. Who these days spoke of apoplexy? Ted’s family had melted away back to Ireland – most had decided not to come to the funeral; they had surely done their duty by me – and my sudden acute attach of telepathy evaporated as they did. I could once again hear only what others wanted me to hear, and thanked God for it. Dr Nevis had returned from his ‘well-earned holiday’.

‘Apoplexy: death by rage?’ I complained. ‘What kind of medical term is that? No-one talks of apoplexy these days.’

‘The Scots still do,’ he’d said. ‘Up there it’s a recognised cause of death. Down here in the South you get more detail.’

‘But we are down here in the South,’ I said.

But a post mortem had been obligatory, it seemed. The death ranked as ‘mysterious’ though non-suspicious, and it being the holiday season and very few pathologists around at the best of times – autopsies were a messy job and delay distressing for the loved ones – Dr Nevis had done what he could and found a slot in Scotland. The body had been transferred by ambulance from the Royal Free to the Edinburgh City infirmary and hence by taxi to the city morgue for the autopsy.

‘By taxi? Just ordinary taxi?’

‘One of the new ones big enough for wheelchairs.’ Ted’s corpse would have travelled with a nurse attendant. It was a short distance and taxis were quicker, simpler and cheaper than ambulances.

Cynara at lunch: ‘Oh darling, you’ve no idea, have you, just how important you are to the future: that is to say, how much money they’re prepared to spend on you.’

So many people had been involved – corners must have been cut, taxi drivers could have been bribed, even pathologists – ‘cause of death: apoplexy’ in a tremulous hand – filled in by some unpaid intern, or some batty old morgue attendant anxious to get rid of a body and home for his tea. Do coroners keep their blank forms under lock and key? Once you begin to doubt you doubt everything. The cost of anything simply did not apply if you were thinking of the behaviour of social media, or the search engine people, or the great Internet stores – the ‘they’ to whom Cynara referred. The ‘they’ who had sent Robbie in to keep an eye on me, because of my alleged closeness to the other side. Blast this bloody wicked paranoiac nonsense, breeding paranoia in me…

I wondered if I should call the twins in the morning and ask them if they thought there was anything strange about their father’s death. But then I thought no, they would not, like Hamlet, feel the need to avenge their father’s most foul and unnatural murder – if that’s what it had been. It was hardly in their interest. They no longer lived with us – they now shared a flat near Lambeth Bridge, overlooking the Thames: Robbie had put down the deposit for them a month or so after we were married. I hadn’t asked how much, but it can’t have been cheap – three rooms, bathroom, kitchen and a river view in central London? And he’d paid off their student loans, at £9,000 a year each hardly negligible. Was Robbie paid so much that he could afford this kind of thing almost without noticing?

Were ‘they’ involved in some way, even in this? Had the twins too been bought off – my lovely, light, dancing, two-peas-in-a-pod girls? Mind you, life with the twins wasn’t always sweetness and light. On bad days during their childhood, when I was tired and low, I’d resented the fact that I had one child but twice the work. Most identical twins develop differences in looks and temperament as they grow older, but not ours. Martha and Maude just seemed to become more and more alike. I’d said as much to Jill Woodward on the day that Ted died, ‘It’s all so unfair. All that work with Ted and now he’s just gone, and all that work with the twins and still there’s only one of them,’ and she’d looked at me blankly with her botoxed face. If she felt sorry for me she couldn’t show it even if she wanted to. She was unreadable.

In their early teens the twins make a real effort to become more easily recognised as separate individuals, wearing different clothes and following different celebrities but by the time they were nineteen they’d given up – they looked and moved and thought like the same person, ultra, ultra identicals. People accuse me of being telepathic, when all I am is normally empathetic, just over-sensitive to what others must be feeling, but I’m nothing compared to Martha and Maude: their bickerings often end (and they do bicker) just because one of them is using the other’s lines and they get confused.

Robbie of course has always wanted to take them off to the Portal Inc lab to ‘check out their brain wirings’ as he put it, but so far as I know they’ve never gone along with that. One of Robbie’s neurobiologist colleagues is working on twinning, researching the effects of mitochondrial insufficiency on the development of the foetus. (That’s me, apparently. Mitochondrially deficient! It figures: when in doubt just blame the mother, ha-ha-ha.) There are degrees of twin-ness in identical twins. Normally mitochondrial traces continue to work on the fertilised foetuses so that as they grow older differences in appearance and personality become more and more pronounced, but not with Martha and Maude. Robbie suggested a link between my (alleged) mitochondrial insufficiency and my oestrogen over-sufficiency, probably contributing to my menstrual mood swings – but I really didn’t want to know. Enough is enough. I’m a person, not a bundle of hormones and chemicals, and I’m not going to be defined away by my DNA. It’s reductionist. On the other hand, if there could be some link between my mood swings and a dream life which is beginning to oppress me, next time Robbie suggests it maybe I will go and ‘see someone’ at Portal Inc. It can do no harm.

Oh God, so much is all my fault – my insufficient mitochondria having failed to enable the twins to differentiate as they grew older, and one can only suppose I drove my natural parents to murder and suicide, my father getting fed up and killing my mother. I said earlier that ‘he had changed his mind’ and shot himself, but actually he did fire at me and I was hospitalised but survived: the police had to shoot him. One way and another I think it’s a miracle I’m as sane as I am.

And the twins had always seemed to me to be over-fond of Cynara, almost taking her part against mine. They admired her style, the sheer extravagance of her manners. They’d even met Robbie before I had. They’d happened to drop by to see Ted in the Gallery: he wasn’t there, but Cynara, as it happened, was – on the very day when Robbie was there, interested in buying a fake Franz Hals for his office foyer. A strange coincidence. Stranger still, come to think about it, that since we were married Robbie had showed so little interest in paintings. The ones we had on our walls had been bought and hung by Ted: and though I had suggested to Robbie that we simply give them back to the gallery and have done with them (I’d always been a little disconcerted by Ted’s interest in fakes) so that Robbie could have his own space on the walls, he’d not taken the suggestion up. Ted’s choice of paintings hung stubbornly on our walls. Married life is like that – all compromise.

What else had Cynara said? ‘When a man takes Doxies he passes on so much extra SSRI in his cum she ends up so passive, pleased and loving she’ll do anything he asks. The lab keeps them under lock and key.’ And then I thought, it all makes dreadful sense. I so love Robbie, and he seems to love me. Perhaps Cynara isn’t making it all up, isn’t deranged. Supposing the love-fix is true, the sex you have to have to keep the addiction going? Supposing it’s all true. Ted, murdered just in order to get him back from the dead, myself put in as stalking horse. Cynara:
‘
If anyone could get a genuine word from the other side it’d be you.’ That’s what they’re after. Me as the stalking horse. No wonder Cynara was doing so well with the gallery: ‘Good to have the NSA on one’s side.’ Again and again:‘I’m not saying they bumped Ted off just to try it out, but it wouldn’t surprise me.’

Then, after weeks, the letter from the coroner came and we were free to go ahead with the funeral. Ted’s brother’s Aidan’s mother-in-law from his first marriage came over to help me with the arrangements. I tried to apologise for the nylon sheets and scratchy towels she’d been given last time, but she looked surprised and said she hadn’t even noticed. Everyone had just been upset I realised. The relatives had not been particularly unkind: just thinking what people will think, but don’t say, if I really had been overhearing their thoughts.

Cynara called me white witch Philly. How dare she!

When we finally got the body back it looked okay in its coffin. You could hardly see the join, according to family members who’d gone down to see it at the undertakers before it was cremated. I had no desire to do so, though one of the brothers told me I ought, otherwise I would have trouble believing Ted was dead.

A cat once died in my arms: I was a child. It belonged to our neighbour. In one second it turned from a living, wailing, struggling creature to a scrap of rather dusty limp fur, which might as well go in the dustbin. When my adoptive mother died the police gave me her handbag to sort out, sodden with river water as it was – it had been trapped in the car – and the same thing had happened to that. The life had left it. The bag, so much part of her, was denatured: changed from a watched and guarded possession – ‘
Where’s my bag? Oh, where’s my bag
?’ – to a piece of limp washed-out leather, and even the cards and coins inside seemed worthless: my mother had taken their significance with her and the bag didn’t even have a soul. I tell you the spirit goes. The bits and pieces become as nothing.

When I’d seen Ted dead in his bed the spirit had already gone, and I accepted his death as much as I ever would. Interesting, that as soon as his body was back in the locality where it had died I’d had the dream, or as I now saw it the vision, of Ted walking away. I can see now why it is so important the world over to have corpses back and close at hand. Edinburgh was simply too far away. In my mind now Ted was not dead, but wandering and stumbling in the dark wood waiting for salvation, or at any rate hoping for it. I should have gone down to the icy morgue and prayed over his body and helped him on his way, on the principle held by mediaeval theologians that the prayers of the living hastened the sinner out of purgatory – so the priests had taught my adoptive mother and so she had taught me. But I delayed and delayed, and then I heard that Cynara had been to view Ted’s body, so any indecision was at an end. If she visited, then I wouldn’t.

By the time Ted’s corpse was back and sufficiently restored to receive visitors, I was in what my grief therapist Bambi Bennett called the second state of grieving: out of denial and into anger. The twins had gone down to the morgue without waiting for me to decide if I was going to go, and come back to report that they had seen Cynara there.