The Fahrenheit Twins

by Michel Faber

  That was the instant he used. He threw himself at her, bringing his body whudding down on her head and the steering-wheel. With a couple of fierce jerks of his torso he got her neck wedged against the upholstered arc of steel and pressed and pressed and pressed, grunting in fear and desperation. She was strong but had no room to move. The most she could do was scratch frantically at his trousers; she had no hope of getting near where he was ticklish, or where he could be hurt.

  When she stopped struggling, he let her slide off the wheel; she slumped first onto the seat and then as much of her as there was room for fell lower. Crying out at the pain in his ribs and back, he heaved her sideways away from the pedals and gears, into the space under the passenger seat, mostly. Then he started the car.

  There was a model of a Husky dog dangling on the ignition key ring, a fluffy one in realistic colours. He’d always had a thing about key ring figures. His own key ring figure collection was lost in the past, gone the way of all football card albums and cornflake trinkets, but this Husky was a beautiful thing, something special.

  ‘Don’t be fucken daft,’ he said aloud.

  He drove to the railway bridge at the edge of the estate, and parked in a lay-by. He dragged the woman’s body down the steeply-sloped embankment to the river’s cemented rim and began to undress her there. He’d decided that if she was found naked, the police would think something sexual had happened to her, and go out looking for the sorts of guys who did stuff like that.

  Dougie’s bruised and swollen fingers fumbled with the fastenings of her clothes; a nauseating pain was starting up behind his eyes. He couldn’t figure out how the bra worked, its clasp was like one of those childproof things on medicine bottles, and he couldn’t tear the fabric with his hands either. But he got the rest of her naked, and launched her into the water, as beautiful as a boat. He didn’t hang around to see if she would sink or float, though, but stumbled back up the slope to the car. He drove that car straight back into the estate and parked it in the same spot where it had come from.

  Finding his own car took longer than he expected. He seemed to have mental block on what kind of car it was –was it white or blue, a Ford or something Jap or what. But he did find it in the end and it did start and finally he was on the home stretch.

  As he drove, he wondered if there were any painkillers at home.

  The police would note the damage done to him on the outside, but what he felt on the inside was invisible, so was it really necessary for him to be in so much pain? A bit of fucken paracetamol wouldn’t do any harm, surely. Especially if he was going to be lying on the floor, with broken ribs probably, and no pillow for his head. Jesus! Life didn’t believe in making things easy for him, did it? Maybe he could rest his head on something soft, something that was already on the floor?

  Shit! All this weakling stuff had taken his mind off the road, and he’d taken a wrong turn. Where the fuck …? He squinted at the street signs, losing focus sickeningly, getting it back, losing it again.

  ‘You’ll lie on the fucken floor and you’ll fucken like it!’ he exclaimed abruptly, bashing his palms against the steering-wheel for emphasis. A spike of pain shot up through his hands to his head, but he’d won the argument. He would do this thing properly. The police would be impressed. He would be the most wretched – ooking fucker they’d ever seen outside of a morgue.

  He saw the road he should have taken first time round, turned down it with a screech of tyres. This one connected with … with … He couldn’t remember the name of the fucken road, but he would know it when he saw it, he knew it like the back of his fucken hand. What the fuck did anything need a name for, anyway?

  He noticed that as he turned the steering-wheel, something sharp was clicking around inside his left wrist like a loose chicken bone or something. Had he maybe broken that as well? Christ!

  This was about where the turn-off should be, but there wasn’t any turn-off there. There just wasn’t. Politicians were always changing the roads, paid good money to sit on their arses changing the maps of the city. He would have to back up, take the first left he could find, drive west until he hit the water again, then start afresh.

  The pain behind his eyes was growing. Maybe there wouldn’t even be any para‥ what was it?‥ paradol‥ in the fucken house. She was always getting pains, woman pains. With a woman swallowing the pain killers all the fucken time, he’d be lucky if there was any left for him.

  ‘Keep the fuck out of it!’ he bawled, impulsively veering around a corner. To lie down anywhere, even on a hard floor, would be bliss. It would be an effort not to tell the police to fuck off and let him sleep.

  For an instant he blacked out, but pulled himself back into consciousness with a wrench at the steering-wheel. He was drenched with sweat.

  ‘I want to get home!’ he pleaded, then felt ashamed, clearing his throat, pretending the childish tone had been caused by something stuck there.

  At last, however, the streets sorted themselves out and looked familiar. He slowed to stop at an intersection, and everything he saw there was what ought to be there. He took the right turn and was rewarded with the houses he expected to see.

  He should’ve taken that Husky key ring, though, Christ! Not the keys themselves, of course, but that little furry model of the dog. He could see it in front of him now: it was the most beautiful, the most valuable thing he would have ever owned, except he would never own it now. What an idiot he’d been! Who’d have known he got it from someone else? Fuck! His only chance to have it, and he’d left it behind. The fucken story of his life.

  All of a sudden the pain behind his eyes got so bad he knew he couldn’t drive any longer, so he skidded to a stop. But like magic, he looked up and saw that he was there after all, parked in front of home.

  Sobbing uncontrollably, he stumbled out of the car, synchronising his shallow breaths with each second he had to endure before he could lie down. She would be there, he would lie down next to her, and when he woke up everything would be all right.

  In the doorway he swayed, half-blind. The pocket of his trousers seemed to have grown much smaller, and his battered fingers groping into the denim slit sent cold thrills of pain up his arms and down his spine. The keys came out at last, but he couldn’t make them fit into the lock.

  He thought of calling out for her to let him in, then laughed and was racked by a spasm of coughing. The pain behind his eyes was beyond belief; he lurched forward and hit the top of his head against the door, which gave a moment’s relief, so he did it again, and again.

  He must have got a bit carried away, because eventually the door opened and he fell forward into the passageway. There was carpet there which hadn’t been there before, and yet he recognized that carpet. It was the carpet he had known all through his childhood – the carpet of his real home, his family home.

  ‘Oh God, Douglas, what’s happened to you?’

  He rolled over on the floor to find her leaning over him: his mother. He had found her. Driving blind through the spiralling streets of his pain, he had found her. She knelt down to him now, and lifted his head up from the floor, cradling it in her lap. Weeping, she wiped his own tears from his face. ‘I’m in trouble, Mum,’ he tried to say, but he could only open and close his lips, open and close, without words.

  She spoke to him in return, but a roaring in his ears kept the sound of her voice from him. He knew what she was saying, though: he didn’t even need to read her lips, nor even her eyes: he understood it from the way she was there for him and him alone, surviving only for his survival, existing only so that he might exist. He knew what she was offering as the light failed inside him: ‘Come back and stay with me. I’ll hide you. Have another chance. Have all the chances in the world.’

  The tunnel was already opening. He curled up, knees against his chest, fists clenched, ready.

  BEYOND PAIN

  Morpheus, drummer of North Ayrshire’s foremost death metal group Corpse Grinder, was defending himself against the
sunshine. The sunshine was out to get him, and he must vanquish it, repel it back to its accursed dominion, and restore the supremacy of night. In the final minutes of his sleep, he’d flung his muscular, tattooed arms across his face, shielding his eyes. It was no use. The dark was gone.

  Morpheus sat up, aware of two things simultaneously: his band’s Eastern European tour was due to start that evening, and he had a strange sensation in his head. He blinked and squinted in the surfeit of winter light beaming into the tiny flat through its uncurtained bay window. The cars parked on the street outside were white with a night’s worth of snow, dazzlingly, belligerently white. Snow-covered cars had never worried Morpheus before, but they worried him now.

  ‘I feel funny,’ he said to his girlfriend Ildiko — in Hungarian. This in itself wasn’t strange. The bed in which they lay together was in Budapest.

  ‘Well, you’re a funny guy,’ said Ildiko, nuzzling her head against his shoulder, pushing him back down onto the bed. Wisps of her abundant mane tickled his brow, or maybe the wisps were his own. Between them, they had enough hair for half a dozen people.

  ‘You’ve got a great sense of rhythm, too,’ she murmured into his ear, humping his thigh playfully.

  He stroked her under the sheets, expecting her to be still naked, but she was snugly wrapped in warm cotton. His palms, callused by years of drumming 240 beats per minute on such songs as ‘Inferno Express’, ‘Pestilential Maelstrom’ and ‘Meet You In Gomorrah’, lingered over the strange scablike textures on her garment.

  ‘What have you got on?’ he said. She sat up, displaying his own black Corpse Grinder T-shirt. She turned to show him the embossed silver letters on the back: European Tour 2000 – Budapest, Bratislava, Prague, Wroclaw, Warsaw, and other places whose names had already been half-disintegrated by the washing machine, even though the shirts had yet to go on sale to the general public. ‘Hand-wash only’ the merchandise said, but let’s face it, who hand-washes T-shirts?

  ‘Looks good on you,’ said Morpheus. It was a relief to be eyeballing something dark.

  ‘I thought it might be nice to do a swap. I have a nice pink nightie you can wear.’

  ‘Ha ha ha,’ he groaned, wondering if the Hungarian for ‘ha ha ha’ was something subtly different.

  Ildiko was the wittiest girlfriend he’d ever had. She wasn’t a groupie; in fact she wasn’t even particularly fond of Corpse Grinder. Ambient was more her thing, cool electronic noises that hung around the room like a whiff of air-freshener. Corpse Grinder’s clamorous epics about disem-bowelment, tortured souls, teeming maggots and impaled Christs weren’t very useful, she said, when she was trying to concentrate on her university textbooks. But she liked Corpse Grinder’s drummer. She liked him a lot.

  ‘I’ve got a strange feeling in my head,’ he said.

  ‘A pain?’ she suggested, getting out of bed, her bottom amply covered by the hem of the XXL T-shirt. ‘PREPARE YE!’ said the slogan under the list of tour dates.

  ‘Yeah, a pain,’ he conceded, frowning.

  ‘A … headache, then?’ she said, pulling her toasty warm tights off the old cast-iron heating duct.

  ‘I don’t get headaches,’ said Morpheus, wincing as she stepped in front of the window and his eyes were blasted by an aura of fierce sunshine all around her silhouette.

  ‘Well, you seem to have one now.’

  ‘Maybe it’s a … a …’ He didn’t know the Hungarian word for brain tumour. ‘Maybe I’m going to die.’

  She tossed his T-shirt back to him in order to put on a bra.

  ‘Start with an aspirin,’ she advised him.

  ‘You know I don’t believe in drugs,’ he chided her, shielding his face with his massive sunlit hands.

  It was true that Morpheus never got headaches. Even when he was a teenager in Maybole, just plain Nicky Wilkie then, he’d never felt pain in any part of his body, except the blisters on his hands when he first joined The Unbelievably Uglies (later The U.U., then Judas Kiss, then finally Corpse Grinder.) ‘Pain is an illusion,’ he used to say. ‘Power of the mind, mate!’

  It was true, too, that Morpheus didn’t believe in drugs. Not many of their fans knew it, but Corpse Grinder were an unusually straight bunch of guys, having long ago ejected and replaced members whose bad habits made them incapable of rehearsing the tricky time signatures of the band’s music, or enduring the punishing pace of their concerts. When Corpse Grinder were still based in Scotland, Neil the guitarist (Cerberus) used to get drunk occasionally, and Charlie the bass player (Janus) might drop an E on his nights off, but now that they were older, and based in Budapest, they were as clean as Cliff Richard.

  ‘Funny the way things have turned out,’ Cerb would say. ‘Ayrshire to Hungary. Back home, nobody wanted to know us: we’d still be playing in the local pub. Here, we’re a stadium act.’

  Morpheus tended to excuse himself when Cerb got started in this vein; at twenty-two, he was a bit young for dewy-eyed reminiscence. Besides, it wasn’t quite true that Corpse Grinder were a stadium act; they only toured stadiums when they landed a support slot to a bigger group, like Pantera or Metallica. That’s what this tour of Eastern Europe was all about, despite the exclusive billing on the Corpse Grinder T-shirt: they were one of several warm-up acts for that hoary old heavy metal warhorse, Slayer. Thousands and thousands of Eastern European adolescents were primed to crawl out of the woodwork to see Slayer, and with any luck they would spare a cheer for Corpse Grinder too, and buy a CD or a T-shirt (‘Hand-wash only!’).

  ‘Maybe your neck is stiff, Morph,’ suggested Ildiko. ‘Maybe you slept in a bad position.’

  ‘Yeah, next to you,’ he grimaced, rubbing his temples experimentally.

  ‘Stop grouching,’ she said, fully dressed and efficient by now. ‘I’ve brought you a coffee.’

  ‘Not that Portuguese garbage in the blue and yellow packet?’

  ‘No, it’s Dutch. Top brand. Inferno Expresso.’ She stared down at him, poker-faced until he twigged she was joking.

  ‘Ha ha ha,’ he said.

  A little while later, she convinced him to go for a walk in the fresh air. His ‘bad head’, as she diplomatically called it, might respond to oxygen and exercise. So, the pair of them dressed up in their anoraks and gloves and fur-lined Polish boots, and took to the streets outside Ildiko’s apartment. Morpheus wore dark sunglasses, a mainstream rock star affectation he usually avoided, but the sun on the snow was still fearsomely bright.

  ‘Fantastic day, Ildiko!’ called Hajnalka, the florist.

  ‘Sure is!’ she called back.

  ‘That’s all people talk about in Scotland, too,’ muttered Morpheus, keeping his eyes on the footpath, where the footprints of pedestrians had scuffed the snow into a more tolerable mud-grey. ‘The weather.’

  ‘Must be a human trait, then, I’d reckon,’ she said, leading him under the tarpaulin canopies of a street market.

  The traders were out in force today. As well as the usual stalls of mobile phones, outmoded Italian leather jackets, counterfeit Gap and Adidas gear, bootleg Hollywood videos, blue-and-yellow packets of Portuguese coffee, Britney Spears calendars and discount confectionery, there were more traditional wares on offer: home-made strawberry jam, fat headless chickens, stamp albums from the Communist era, reams of stolen office paper, gigantic mouldy salamis.

  ‘Would you like a Bounty bar?’ said Ildiko, casting her eye over a trestle table loaded with chocolates from America via the Arab Emirates.

  ‘I feel … there’s a strange feeling in my stomach,’ said Morpheus.

  ‘You feel sick, in other words?’ said Ildiko, buying a Mars for herself.

  ‘I’m never sick,’ insisted Morpeus, shoving his sunglasses up under his hood as he rummaged through some pirated CDs. There was a Slayer greatest hits compilation, called The Biggest Hist of Slayer, as well as the most recent album by (of all people) Cradle of Filth. No Corpse Grinder, of course.

  ‘You wouldn’t want there to be, would y
ou?’ said Ildiko, noting his disappointment. ‘You don’t get any money from illegal copies.’

  ‘We’ve never seen any money from the official releases, either,’ he grumbled. ‘At least the pirates pay their own costs.’

  Ildiko zipped her unopened chocolate bar into a jacket pocket. ‘I want something nourishing first,’ she said. ‘Let’s go to Café Kalvin and have a Halaszle.’

  ‘I’m not hungry.’

  ‘You’ll need something inside you for tonight.’

  It was the first time she’d alluded to the fact that tonight was showtime: the first gig of twenty-two, the firing-on-allcylinders start to Corpse Grinder’s highest-profile tour ever.

  ‘Plenty of time, plenty of time,’ said Morpheus, his eye caught by a glossy magazine that looked as though it might be about thrash metal. It proved to be pornography for leather fetishists.

  ‘Have some of my soup, Morph,’ Ildiko urged him, stirring some cream into her Halaszle.

  ‘It’s too early in the day for anything fishy,’ he said. The lights inside the Café Kalvin were nice and subdued, though the sight of the pale cream revolving in the dark soup around Ildiko’s twirling spoon was making him slightly dizzy.

  ‘It’s one o’clock,’ she reminded him. The gig at the castle was due to kick off at seven thirty, with Corpse Grinder following Ferfiak (the homegrown pretenders) at eight fifteen. Morpheus, still helplessly staring at the swirling cream in the Halaszle, had a sudden pre-vision of his band’s ideal light show – flickering red strobes and sweeping white lariats of dervish luminescence.

  ‘Gonna blow everyone away tonight,’ he declared, picking up a fork and teaspoon, and drumming a high-speed fanfare on the edge of the table. Even through the tablecloth, his power and skill were unmistakable.

  ‘Are you ready to order or what?’ called the waitress.

  Morph walked through the door under the sign that said GYOGYSZERTAR. It could have been the name of an Eastern European thrash metal or Goth group, but it meant ‘pharmacy’.