The Allegations

by Mark Lawson

  On the issue of lookalikes, their mother had been prone, early on, to take two pieces of clothing off the same peg and brush their hair with matching strokes, Phee sitting on one knee and Dee on the other. However, from the perspective of twentysix, Phee could see that the standard rules for bringing up twinned siblings contained a contradiction. Selecting two different dresses and back-combing one head and front-combing the other would, by definition, break the rule of exactly equal treatment. A childcare expert (especially, as many seemed to be, a childless one) might advise letting the girls decide but, in practice, that would have led to Dee going to primary school in a clown suit with her hair in a tricolour Mohican.

  From the age of around eleven, the sisters had differentiated themselves: Dee chopping and tinting her hair short and blondish, while Phee copied Mummy’s shoulder-length, dark (now dye-assisted) locks. Jeans or dresses, cardigans v sweaters, heels not Converse, nipple-ridge rather than custom-fitted bra – it was an increasing statistical improbability that anyone except their parents would reckon them identical. When Phee, at fourteen, turned vegetarian, they could no longer even be served the same meals. Chat from boys moved from ‘Are you completely identical?’ (with its slavering innuendo) to: ‘Did you meet your friend at school?’, which was doubly funny because they more or less hated each other by then.

  Yet, though the avoidance of a double-act had been a driving motivation in their lives, it would have seemed strange, even to them, to make separate speeches at Daddy’s landmark birthday, where ‘my father’ sounded divisive and possessive but ‘our father’ had an odd religious echo. Once they had decided to do something together, Phee came up with the idea of a mock history exam paper on Daddy’s life – the sisters alternating Qs and As – but Dee had suggested a poem in which they took successive lines, resulting in a brief discussion about why her idea was the best.

  Tom Pimm, ‘Uncle Tom’, who was always good fun, as long as you weren’t on the end of too many of his jokes, rode the applause that followed the toasts, and then said: ‘Toby, with school tomorrow, was considered a bit young for tonight, and, with someone called Edmund, you don’t want three kids telling their dad what they think of him.’ The age of those in the room who got the joke was a mini-history of the British education system. ‘Though Tobes will, of course, be at the private family lunch, to which the bastards haven’t invited us, or at least me, next Sunday. But now Phee and Dee, to whom I will certainly not refer as the twins’ – cheery jeering from those in on the joke – ‘would like to pay their own tribute.’

  They both stood, Phee in her black Monsoon cocktail dress, Dee wearing a pillar box-red ’40s evening frock with plunging bust-line and pussy-bow, bought from a Vintage site.

  Even their adjustments of the table microphone were individual, because of Dee’s heels and Phee’s flats.

  It was the elder (by seventeen minutes) sister who did the introduction: ‘Phee and me – don’t worry, Uncle Tom, that’s not a “grammatical howler”, it’s a rhyme, for reasons you’ll hear – felt that, as we come from one ovum – Daddy, please don’t do the un oeuf is enough joke again – we were being egged on to do something together. So …’

  Dee paused and looked across the table at Phee, like a conductor, her nodded head the baton.

  ‘Daddy,’ she began, ‘sisters born together are a certain type of rhyme.’

  ‘So couplets seem the way to praise you at this special time,’ Phee added, tapping out the rhythm for safety on the underedge of the table, but relieved that her voice wasn’t squeaking.

  There was a hum of soppy pleasure in the room that Phee hadn’t heard since they put on little plays as kids, but she also sensed less sentimental notes of approval at the punning structure.

  Dee was swinging like a dancer to the beat as she spoke her next line – ‘Especially, as with Phee and Dee, you gave us chiming names’ – to which Phee matched hers – ‘Although such diminutions often fly above the brains’ – until they were confidently alternating sentences.

  ‘Of people who don’t realize that from the Bard they’re spun’

  ‘Does brother Toby know yet he’s a belch-related pun?’

  A big laugh and, although a stand-up comedian was the thing that Phee was least likely to become, she had a glimpse of the hit for which they did it. Strictly, Tobes was their halfbrother, but that felt mean and the kinder form also saved them a syllable. Her sister looked directly at Daddy, who was wiping his brow, and possibly eyes, with a napkin.

  ‘A lot of folk don’t comprehend your own name is a part,’ she said, with Phee replying: ‘In that play about the king who drives his daughters from his heart.’

  ‘You, though, have always had a different effect on us.’

  ‘Which is why we’re thrilled that everyone is making such a fuss …’

  ‘Of all you’ve said and done in your own history.’

  Dee had to say it hist-or-ee, like in Abba’s ‘Waterloo’.

  ‘We sometimes wish to switch you off, like when you’re on TV.’

  That reference to Daddy’s argumentativeness went down almost as well as the play on Belch. Dee surely can’t have planned to give Phee the biggest laugh lines.

  ‘But, generally, we want to see a never-ending run …’

  ‘Repeating back-to-back those sixty years of love and fun.’

  ‘So hugs from Emma, Toby, Granny, Grandpa Jack and Dee!’

  Daddy hated them calling his stepfather Grandpa Jack but it was necessary for the scansion.

  ‘And kisses from Uncle Timon, “Uncle” Tom, Dom Ogg and Phee!’

  Daddy’s high-pitched snigger at the mention of his TV boss, spotting the gag about Ogg’s reputation for dropping his name into everything.

  ‘Daddy, thanks for stopping people ever calling us “the twins”.’

  This was the tricky bit, where they started dividing lines.

  ‘Because we’re very different,’ said Phee.

  ‘Dee smiles,’ said Dee, flashing her teeth as illustration.

  ‘Phee never grins,’ Phee completed the couplet, a line that her sister may have intended as cruel, winning the target another Comedy at the Apollo response.

  ‘But, for once, we have a subject on which we can agree.’

  ‘You’ve been a perfect Dad for me …’

  ‘And also, Dad, for me!’ added Dee, characteristically claiming the last word. They had almost never called him ‘Dad’ before, except in a period when Dee said it to be different from Phee, but that was what happened in a form in which metre came before meaning.

  When Dee bowed to emphasize the end, there was the sort of applause that would make a theatre cast look happy and abashed. Emma was openly weeping, using the bright pink napkin as an emergency hankie, and Granny, sniffing back her own emotions, was rocking her head slowly in approval. ‘Brava!’ Grandpa Jack shouted, stressing the final letter to demonstrate his sophistication. ‘Brava!’

  Daddy was on Phee’s side of the top table so it was simply logistical that he embraced her first. ‘Brilliant!’ his winey breath whispered, ‘history didn’t quite scan but …’ which was very him, so she didn’t let it upset her, but told him: ‘Dee basically wrote it.’ And he had to lean awkwardly across the table, overturning a microphone, to reach her sister, which also felt pleasing, although she knew that the thought broke their truce for tonight.

  Good Morning

  Too much alcohol – a welcome sedative when they had gone to bed at 2 a.m. – proved an equally effective diuretic by – she blindly tapped the clock’s indented top and stickily squinted at the numbers – five o’clock. Ned always said you didn’t get a hangover if the booze was good enough, a theory they both frequently contradicted, and, anyway, the bladder couldn’t distinguish between vintages.

  When Emma got back from the bathroom – while washing her hands, she swilled around her after-party mouth some tap water which, this humid night, was not as cold as hoped – Ned had rolled onto his back, arms splaye
d like a shot soldier, though advertising vitality with snores that made his jaw jerk as if punched. She jarred an elbow against his arm – one of the acquired reflexes of two people who have long shared a bed – causing him to roll onto his side, where the noise was more muffled by pillows.

  Groggy annoyance at being awake after only three hours was heightened by the bright light through the curtains as the year approached its shortest border between night and day. Desperately though she needed sleep, there might be no more this morning. The only benefit of midsummer was that she could try to read herself asleep without a row about the light being on. Emma fumbled her glasses off the top of the Donna Tartt, which was split halfway through its bulk by the Mother’s Day bookmark Toby had made at school.

  ‘Em, you awake?’

  ‘Go back to sleep.’ She patted her partner’s arm through the flimsy summer duvet. ‘You blokes of sixty need your kip.’

  ‘Fuck off!’ he said, using the expression’s friendly form, rolling to face her, shaping his body into a half-hug to be completed. ‘Are you worrying about something?’

  ‘No.’

  She moved onto her back, compromising short of an embrace.

  ‘Ah. You hesitated before answering.’

  A career explaining the events of history had made him an amateur psychologist, her smallest shifts in mood analysed as if they were the diaries of Anne Boleyn.

  ‘I was trying to remember how to speak. I’ve had three hours’ sleep, Ned.’

  ‘Why are you awake, then?’

  ‘One, probably two, flutes of fizz. A different wine with every course, including pudding. More bubbles for the toasts. I may be much younger than you, love, but I’m too old to do that on a weekday. So I’ve had a wee and now I’m trying to knock myself out with a novel.’

  He tapped the hardback that was awkwardly resting on her belly, increasingly conscious of the weight of the book’s almost-Biblical thickness. ‘How about a cock instead of a goldfinch?’

  Happiness at his interest in her reading tastes was cancelled by his sometimes depressingly adolescent attitude to sex.

  ‘Grow up, you’d think it was thirteen you’ve just been.’

  They slept naked in the summer. She knew, if she looked, that the bedclothes would be tented by his erection. She had thought she’d got away with it the night before; he had briefly pressed against her when they went to bed, but then had fallen asleep. And, if he started now, the night was over; older men are naturally slower and, after that much drink, he could be stabbing away for hours.

  Now she felt the familiar pressure against her thigh. In their long-established rituals of intimacy, she was supposed to turn and face him. But she remained on her back and felt his shuffling adjustment against her, his penis trembling against her thigh as he edged it towards the goal.

  ‘Good morning,’ he said, in the throaty loaded tone that he used as a prelude to sex.

  ‘Not now, Sweet, please? I need to go back to sleep.’

  ‘Meanie.’ The voice he used was borrowed – another feature of his foreplay – from that duck that used to sing on television. ‘I want my birthday present.’

  ‘Well, if you’re promising you’ll only have to have it once a year, okay.’

  ‘Ha ha. Remember I’ve written a book about the wives of Henry VIII. Don’t be like this, Em. We’ve always done it on my birthday. I think of it as a present even if …’

  ‘Well, sometimes it’s nice to open …’

  She abandoned the image, fearing the sort of joke it might provoke. Using his elbow for awkward support, like a picnicker trying to eat while lying on the grass, he was half leaning across her now. She felt him against the cleft of her legs and then a raindrop of glop against her thigh, which she briefly hoped might be the end but knew was the beginning.

  ‘Please, Em. Perfect end to a perfect day and all that?’

  ‘It’s next day. Five in the morning.’

  He shifted again, until almost in a press-up position above her, then tried a kiss, which she met with closed lips, less from rejection than fear of morning breath.

  ‘You’d have more fun tonight, Sweet, when I’m less shattered.’

  ‘You’re a cruel woman, Emma Jane Humpage.’ The whole maiden name was generally scolding, but in this case the surname that had caused so much trouble at school was also slick with innuendo. ‘Take it while it’s going. After sixty, they say, it’s …’ He laughed. ‘Up and down.’

  ‘Doesn’t feel as if you’ve got any problem there.’

  Emma had hoped that this tribute to his virility might appease him – she was feeling mildly mean about not letting him – but he took it as permission to circle the object of the compliment, like a vibrator, until it pushed against her.

  ‘Ned, I love you but … I haven’t got my cap in. You don’t want to be paying tuition fees at …’

  She decided it would be unwise to speak aloud his projected age when a second child would go through college.

  ‘It’s okay. We’ll do what the Pope does.’

  The first time he made that joke, she had laughed.

  ‘Ugh. That’s so messy.’

  He was edging inside her now, swirling the tip around, one of his favourite foreplay moves. Her slight regret at denying him was boosted by sensations of pleasure and, although she felt habitual irritation at the human animal’s surrender to programmed appetite, her body began to smooth his route.

  ‘You will pull out?’

  ‘You always say …’ – his wheezy sex voice – ‘it’s sad for Toby to be an only child.’

  She raised her hand and air-slapped him, but he intercepted the gesture and sucked on the end of her fingers, a clue to how he really wished to finish, although he would be bloody lucky this time; there were limits to her conciliatory nature.

  While she was annoyed by his insistence, and disappointed by having given in, the sex was not unpleasant – eventually or reluctantly consensual, she would have described it, his kissing of her nipples always irresistible – because she was with someone she loved and with whom, in most other circumstances, she was happy, even eager, to make love.

  Despite her exhaustion, she felt an orgasm starting, and exaggerated the sounds and movements in the hope of quickening him up. But he seemed lost in private pleasure and didn’t take the hint.

  ‘Ned, it’s nice but I’m nearly asleep.’

  She reached down and gently stroked his testicles, a proven trigger, and, as she groaned encouragement, he gasped, lurched backwards and his penis briefly beat time on her belly. Ungallantly moving away from the mess he had made, he rolled away, pulled up the kicked-down duvet and wiped himself drier. More washing. Great.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  ‘Is that better?’ she replied, as if to a child who had been sick.

  ‘Mooom. Happy birthday.’

  His voice was sleepy. She hit his arm. ‘Oi, now you’ve woken me up, don’t …’

  At first, in her confusion, she thought the ringing was an alarm clock or the bedside telephone, and turned, flinching at the sticky dripping from her stomach, towards them. But the noise was down the corridor: the entryphone.

  ‘Ned?’

  ‘The fuck is that?’ he yawn-talked, unwillingly alert.

  ‘Someone at the …’

  ‘Pissed kids pissing about. Or a minicab mix-up …’

  But, if so, it was persistent pranksters, or a stubbornly misinformed driver. The doorbell’s shrill single note kept repeating, like a modernist composition.

  ‘There’ll be another note under the door from that dragon in Flat D,’ worried Emma. ‘You’ll have to go down.’

  ‘I can’t. I’ve still got half a hard-on.’

  ‘And I’m all covered in gunk.’

  In the hay fever season, she always kept a box of tissues on the bedside table. Drying herself as best she could, she pulled from the floor the faded sarong from their Australasian honeymoon and gathered it around her as she went to the wi
ndow and pulled back the curtain.

  In the peeled and faded painting that her distance vision had become without glasses, she made out that the sloping road on their side of the square was double-parked with cars, their lights on and engines running, which would have signalled taxis, except that there were three in a row. Two of them were dark saloons but the other white and with a flashing light. She let the curtain drop and, from a ridiculous instinct, whispered, as she told Ned: ‘It’s the police!’

  The words had the effect of a wire instantly pulling Ned out of bed and into a standing position.

  ‘Oh Christ, no! It must be Phee or Dee!’

  Naked, he pouched his hands, from some reflex of shock or shame, across his lap. Emma noticed, with the intensity of attention that adrenaline brings, that his penis had instantly shrivelled.

  ‘Do you want me to go, Sweet?’

  ‘No, Em, I’ve got to …’

  Emma felt the smug relief of knowing that her partner was here and her child was safe in Winslow with Maddy. If anything were up with Toby, the child-minder would have called her. Unless they had both died in a fire. She consoled herself with the odds against such a conflagration, then shifted to worrying about her mother or brother, until that fear too was relieved by the thought that, however bad the news might be about them, she would be able to cope in a way that could not be the case if it involved Toby or Ned.

  Three nights a week, even if they were at the London flat, Ned laid across the bedroom armchair his running clothes for next morning. The more he had drunk, the longer he ran, a TV critic having made him sensitive about his silhouette. Emma watched – the slow-motion vision that people described at such moments must be due to heightened, frightened concentration – as her husband stumbled into boxer shorts and struggled with a University of Middle England sweatshirt, the name of his employer blurred and faded by perspiration and washing.