The Fahrenheit Twins

by Michel Faber

  ‘No, we’re not going back,’ I sigh. ‘The train has to drop us off at a station. The special lights it needs to see the safe way home aren’t working properly. We’re going on a coach instead.’

  ‘With horses?’

  ‘No, coaches are … well, they’re buses, basically.’

  I know she’s going to ask me what the difference is, and I’m racking my brains in the few seconds’ grace.

  ‘What’s the difference between a coach and a bus?’

  ‘I don’t think there is one. It’s like the difference between films and movies.’

  John wouldn’t like that, theatre director that he is. For him, films are uncompromising arty projects made by auteurs. Movies are Hollywood hamburgers made by homophobic corporations. But there is a bigger world of language outside John’s narrow queer one. It’s not my world anymore, but it exists. And most people live in it.

  ‘Has John got a job?’ my daughter asks, as fearlessly as if she were asking if he owned a bicycle.

  ‘I told you: he’s a playwright. He writes plays.’

  ‘Like Peter Pan?’

  ‘No. For grown-ups. One of his plays was being performed at a special festival just before we came up to visit.’ ‘What was it about?’

  My mind goes blank when I think of John’s play. At first I think this is because I’m stressed with grief at the memory of him telling me we can’t go on together, then I think it’s because of how difficult it is to explain a gay play to a child so as not to make her mother go ballistic.

  After a few more seconds, I realise it’s neither of those things. In the lurid electric light of the train interior, travelling backwards with my eight-year-old daughter at my side, I suddenly realise that my gorgeous talented award-winning partner’s play wasn’t about anything really, except being gay. Judged next to any children’s story, it had no plot to speak of.

  I take a deep breath.

  ‘It was about … Somebody tries to get a person to give up being a politician.’ ‘How?’

  ‘By telling a secret about him.’

  ‘What secret?’

  I snigger playfully, caught between fatherly tease and infantile embarrassment.

  ‘It’s a secret,’ I wink.

  ‘Can I see the play?’ she says, rising to the challenge.

  ‘It’s over,’ I tell her.

  ‘Over?’

  ‘It was on for a while,’ I say, recalling the passions, the intrigues, the arguments, the complicated negotiations, that were poured into those ten long days. ‘Then it closed.’

  There is a pause while Tess chews this over.

  ‘So everybody knows the secret except me,’ she says at last.

  ‘Yeah,’ I grin, feeling dirty, as ashamed of my cowardice and my compromise as Tessa’s mother would like me to feel of my sexuality itself.

  The train is stopping at Perth station: more PA messages about not leaving anything behind. Tessa peers through the window at the descending gloom.

  ‘Is it night time?’ she says, as she gathers her things together.

  ‘No, it’s only afternoon. Four thirty.’

  ‘Is it going to rain, then?’

  I’m preoccupied with checking we have everything while people jostle past us through the aisle.

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

  ‘My carry bag is open at the top,’ she reminds me. ‘I don’t want my new book to get wet.’

  I am shocked by this concern of hers. Her new book is Great People Through The Ages, given her as a present by John when she first arrived – when he was still able to keep his feelings under control. I would’ve thought she’d want to dump the book in the nearest rubbish bin as soon as I wasn’t looking. But she is frowning, trying to figure out a way of folding the top of her carry bag so the rain can’t get in.

  ‘It’s all right, Tess, if it starts raining I’ll shelter it inside my coat.’ I am almost weeping again. This is what it’s come to: tears I would once have shed over momentous events like the birth of a child or the death of a close relative I now want to shed when it looks as though there’s some hope that my daughter will accept the gift of a crappy politically correct book from my lover.

  We step out onto the platform. All the lights are on. But then they always are, aren’t they, in railway stations? I look beyond the concrete carapace of the glorified shed we’ve been stranded in. The sky is mauve now, even though it’s the middle of summer. I am unsettled to discover that I can’t tell whether the luminous orb near the horizon is the sun or the moon.

  A uniformed employee of the railway is beckoning us towards the overpass stairs. He is holding a hastily felt-tipped sign that reads Edinburgh and The South, as if Edinburgh and The South were a rhythm & blues band struggling to draw a crowd at the local pub.

  ‘This way,’ I say, still choking on my hopes for a brighter future.

  In the station car park, there are three coaches, or buses, waiting. One for Glasgow/Carlisle, one for Edinburgh/Newcastle, one for London. My daughter and I stand in the correct queue, along with about thirty other people. Immediately behind us, a young man and woman make the best of the circumstances by snogging. The sound of their lips sucking on each other is comically erotic and a bit surreal under the darkening sky. A middle-aged lady in front of us remarks on the strange weather.

  ‘Not natural, is it?’ she sniffs.

  I feel perversely tempted to defend the rights of the sky to go dark whenever it pleases, but say nothing. I am on my way back to the straight world. There are rules to be obeyed. By the time I get to my wife’s place in Keswick, I’ll be so straight-acting someone’s liable to try and sign me up to the local football team.

  ‘John’s a nice colour,’ says Tessa all of a sudden. ‘Nicer than I thought.’

  I blush from my ears down to my shoulders. I wish we were alone in a room together, my daughter and I. Then I could sit back in an armchair while she said these things, and allow myself to go faint with pleasure at hearing them, without this sick fear of having to shush her any moment.

  ‘Your mum already told you he was black, didn’t she?’ I remind her gently. The memory of Heather hissing at me, in front of Tess, that it must be a nice change for me to play with a big black dick instead of my own limp little excuse, is still raw in my mind.

  ‘He doesn’t look black to me,’ says Tessa. ‘He’s brown’.

  I smile. Black people are a rarity in my wife’s town. Invisible, almost. Like homosexuals.

  ‘We say he’s black, though,’ I inform her. ‘That’s just the way it is.’

  Tess is not to be fobbed off in this way.

  ‘But he’s not,’ she insists. ‘He’s … he’s the colour of chocolate blancmange.’

  I burst out laughing. The thought of John as a sculpture of chocolate blancmange makes him ridiculous and benign. A little less like a fearsome, formless chaos of emotions, capable of sweeping me out of his life like a natural disaster. I think of the surface of refrigerated blancmange as it returns to room temperature: the silky dusting of condensation slowly starting to twinkle. I think of John’s skin. But Tessa is still waiting for a satisfactory explanation.

  ‘We use the word black because he’s not white like us,’ I offer.

  ‘We’re not white,’ she says, as if any fool could see this. ‘Well, close enough,’ I sigh.

  ‘You’re pink,’ she tells me, pointing up at my face. ‘With red spots. And in the dark, you’re black. We’re all black.’

  We are finally allowed to board the bus, coach, whatever. It’s five o’clock by now, but just about all the light in the sky is gone. There are no stars, and the moon – yes, it definitely must have been the moon I saw – is pale.

  As soon as we’ve taken our seats, Tess switches on the overhead light, the little directional one next to the ventilation nub. She extracts John’s book from her carry bag and opens it at page one.

  The bus driver apologises on behalf of the train company for the delay, and reminds u
s that there is to be no smoking anywhere on the vehicle. He will drive us to each of the railway stations the train would have stopped at, but he’d prefer to bypass some of the ‘really out-of-the-way ones’. Anyone from such a station is invited to come forward and make a special request. No one comes forward. We are all normal, no trouble.

  The bus pulls out of the car park, its headlights sweeping across the gloomy tarmac. On our way to the main road, a few drunken-looking young men wave, but by and large the streets of Perth seem deserted. It’s as if people have hurried home in anticipation of the downpour or the snowstorm or whatever it is that is threatening in the skies.

  On the seat next to me, Tess is reading about the great men and women of history. A very butch-looking Sappho is on the same page as Shakespeare, but little Tess isn’t quite ready for poetry yet. She turns pages until she finds Cleopatra, who is as black-skinned as, well, a chocolate blancmange. The Queen of the Nile sits in a throne flanked by handmaidens and exotic pets. The demographics of this particular nook of ancient Egypt suggest a happy fusion of female gospel choir and zoo.

  I wonder why I’m so irritated by this book, given that these people did exist, and were most likely as black and/or as gay as they’re painted here. Isn’t this better than the history books I grew up with, full of macho white men fighting wars? At random, I read a bit of the text. It says that Cleopatra was a wise and resourceful ruler who did all she could to prevent her peaceable civilisation falling into the hands of greedy Roman plunderers. I somehow suspect that in this book, Cleopatra is not going to spread her legs for any hunky man in armour.

  ‘What does Mummy say about John and me?’ I ask Tess once the bus has been travelling for a while.

  ‘Nothing,’ says Tess.

  ‘Nothing at all?’

  ‘She’s busy.’

  ‘Busy taking care of you?’

  ‘Just busy.’

  Defeated, I look out the window. Even allowing for the tinted windows, it’s bizarrely dark out there. At a time of evening when, only yesterday, it wasn’t even dusk. Car headlights flash past us monotonously. The bus driver murmurs into a mobile phone. I don’t catch the words, but the tone of his voice has a halo of anxiety.

  I become aware that the people travelling in the bus with us are very quiet. I hear a couple of them whisper to each other from time to time, but otherwise nobody says anything. I swivel around in my seat, to take stock of my fellow passengers. They glance back at me, startled, white-faced. No, really white-faced. They are afraid. They, too, remember yesterday. They, too, can’t see any reason why today should be so different.

  As we drive on, we go slower and slower. The driver frequently flashes his headlights in warning to approaching cars. It seems some motorists haven’t accepted the freakish weather conditions and are driving without lights, as though there’s no visibility problem. As though they refuse to be bullied by what they regard as an unreasonable change in the prevailing conditions. Alarmingly, the darker the sky gets, the more motorists seem to be in the grip of this wishful thinking.

  ‘Jesus, wake up, will you?’ mutters our driver loudly, as another unlit car hurtles past us.

  Pretty soon we are travelling at thirty miles an hour. Every fourth or fifth vehicle we pass has no lights on. Some of them hoot their horns mournfully, most just drive by in silence.

  With so little illumination outside, the windows of the bus become mirrors. Each of us stares uneasily at his or her reflected chiaroscuro face. Except Tess, who keeps reading her new book. The great ‘woman of color’ Harriet Tubman is freeing the slaves, with a little help from an unpictured president.

  ‘Interesting book?’ I ask, clearing my throat first.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ she replies. She reaches up to the airconditioning nozzle and fiddles with it. I can tell she’s mistaken this nozzle for a dimmer, and is trying to make her light shine stronger.

  ‘That’s for air,’ I tell her gently. ‘The light isn’t adjustable. It’s either on or off.’

  ‘It’s getting darker,’ she complains.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, squinting out of the window.

  ‘No,’ she says, ‘not out there. In here. The light is getting darker.’

  She points to the book on her lap. A female astronaut is smiling for a photograph taken shortly before she’s blown to atoms in the Challenger. I can barely make out the text. My daughter is right.

  Before long the light inside the bus has faded to a submarine luminescence. The engine still purrs obediently, but it’s as if all the cabin bulbs are connected to their own little batteries, batteries that all happen to be running down at the same time. The overhead lights, the light above the first-aid compartment, the light for whether the closet toilet is occupied or not: all dimming to yellow. It occurs to me that the provision of a toilet is probably what makes a coach different from a bus, but now is not the time to raise this educational fact with Tessa. I’m glad she’s engrossed in her book of great people, oblivious to the mounting tension.

  A woman makes her way up the aisle and alerts the driver to what he can see perfectly well for himself. He answers her irritably. She returns to her seat, and passes on the message to her husband in a tense whimper. He mutters bluff reassurances to her, like ‘Bollocks’, ‘We’ll see about that’, and so on.

  ‘Get a fuckin’ move on!’ someone shouts from the very back.

  The driver speaks tersely to someone on his little telephone. Then, cursing under his breath, he rotates the steering wheel vigorously and veers us off the road.

  The coach cruises on a bay of smooth bitumen, finally coming to rest in front of a petrol station. At least I think it’s a petrol station. Yes: I can just make out the filling pumps standing in shadow, like denuded tree stumps. There is a pale rectangle of light further on, emanating from the glass front of the station building itself. I can see several people standing close together in there, huddled behind the counter, illuminated by a single flickering phosphorescent tube.

  The coach door swings open with a hiss. As soon as our driver rears up from his seat and steps out of the coach, I know, deep in my guts, right inside my bone marrow, that my daughter and I have to get out too. All around us, our heavy-breathing, shadowy fellow-passengers are seething with panic, hesitating on the nightmare brink between passivity and mania.

  ‘Come on, Tess, we’re going.’

  Amazingly, she doesn’t protest that we’re not there yet, or ask questions. She just dumps her book in her carry bag and scrambles out into the aisle. I don’t even bother with my own bag, which has my underwear and dressing gown in it, my dressing gown which always smells of the man I love. I push Tessa along with both hands, and we jump out of the bus like we’re leaping off a spinning merry-go-round.

  The driver is already arguing heatedly with the people through the locked glass door of the service station, but whatever he’s arguing with them about becomes irrelevant when the engine of his bus suddenly roars. One of the panicking passengers has taken over the driver’s seat. Gears squealing, the vehicle lurches out of the parking bay. Its head and tail lights die as it speeds onto the road, making it look less like a bus than a trailer-load of dark metal being towed by an invisible force.

  I scoop Tess up in my arms and run clumsily after it. Not to catch up with the bus, just to get back to the road. I must reach the open road, I don’t know why, I just must. My daughter weighs a ton, struggling and squirming, trying to evade the sharpness of my fingers against her ribs.

  ‘I can run, Daddy,’ she pants, so I put her down. Behind us at the service station, a crash of glass is followed by shouts and screams. Tess and I sprint through the darkness, through a miasma of diesel fumes.

  A few minutes later, we’re standing by the side of a motorway. Not on a slip road: on the fine-gravelled edge of the actual motorway itself. There are large signs warning that this is illegal, but those signs are shrouded in shadow. Only about a third of the motorway lamps have any light coming out of them at all, and t
he glow is so feeble that it’s affected by insects flying round the glass. The sky is inky black, without stars. A sinking moon is diffused like an acid burn against the horizon, subtly outlining the edges of city buildings – an extinguished city.

  ‘I’ll get you home, Tess,’ I promise, as three dark cars whizz past us.

  Tessa takes no interest in the traffic; she’s looking at me, chewing at her lips. There’s something she needs to say, some vital piece of information she feels I can no longer be expected to cope without.

  ‘Mummy sleeps with all the lights on,’ she says, staring at me as if this knowledge is sure to knock me flat. ‘Every room in the house. All lit up. I switch mine off when she’s gone to sleep.’

  Of course I haven’t the faintest idea how to take this. I smile gravely and nod as if I understand, just like I do with John when he’s raging against enemies who seem quite harmless to me, just like I used to do with my wife when she’d try to tell me what it is that a woman needs.

  A car with blazing headlights speeds into view. I stick my thumb out, then wave frantically with my whole hand. The car doesn’t even slow down, and I almost get my arm slammed off by its passenger mirror.

  ‘Don’t get run over, Daddy!’ pleads my daughter. Actually, it’s more of a command, and I feel her fist seizing the fabric of my coat.

  I stand well back, and wait for the next lighted car. Twenty, thirty dark ones pass. Some of them are badly dented, some have unidentifiable smears and splatters on their bodywork. One driver winds down a window and yells something we cannot hear, but other than this the cars might as well be empty shells.

  In between rejections, the motorway is as still and lonely as a canyon. I wonder how long all this is taking, and look at my watch. The electronic numbers have disappeared, reducing my watch to a useless bracelet.

  Time can now only be measured in the gradual dimming of the motorway lamps. A huge articulated lorry looms out of the distance, slows down, and stops for us just as the last of the motorway lights is petering out. We can’t quite believe it as the lorry approaches, a monstrous filthy thing crawling along in the slow lane with its grid of headlights on dazzling full beam. It comes to a standstill right next to us, a balm of heat and diesel radiating from its greasy undercarriage. The driver’s cabin is so high off the ground we can’t see anyone inside. For a few moments we stand staring.