The Fahrenheit Twins

by Michel Faber

  Don looks down under the table. He’s wearing trainers on his huge feet, military pants. In Scotland, ‘pants’ means underwear. His military pants have lots of pockets and zips and drawstrings and toggles, more than anyone could find a use for. It’s a fashion thing, and he wonders if he’s too old for it. Yesterday, Aleesha was sitting next to him on a different train from this one, and she unzipped a pocket in the calf of his pants, just to see what was in it. It was a toddlerish action, an innocent gesture of playfulness and boredom, but he felt the charge of her maturing sexuality and was disturbed by it. ‘That’s kinda dumb, Dad,’ she’d said, dabbling her fingers in the unzipped slit of fabric, a pocket too narrow for anything bigger than a pen, assuming you’d want a pen stowed against your calf. Idly, Aleesha had zipped him up again.

  He looks across the table at his son. An inflatable neck-cushion is acting as a pillow for Drew’s cheek; his brow rests on his muscular forearms; his hands are loosely balled into fists. From this angle, he’s not the world’s most good – ooking kid. His nose is in the process of mushrooming into the same bulbous schnozzle that all the males in Don’s family have had for generations; his lips are swollen, bee-stung, more feminine than Aleesha’s – an observation that would enrage him if he knew. And, all over his skull, where there used to be a shaggy brown mop of Heavy Metal hair, is now … The Haircut. The haircut they argued over endlessly.

  ‘You can’t bleach your hair like Eminem. You’ll look like an idiot. He looks like an idiot.’

  Drew had sighed, his shoulders hunched against the weight of the pre-senile ignorance being heaped on them.

  ‘Eminem is cool. Besides, it’s my hair, and my money.’

  Frightening, how a sentence of only ten words could provide fuel for so many hours of fierce dispute over a period of days. Whose money was Drew’s money? What did he have to do to make it his own? Was it his if he chose to spend it on boy scout crap or some old Bruce Springsteen record, but not if he spent it on Eminem? And whose hair was Drew’s hair, exactly? (Don felt like a maniac arguing about this, but on the other hand wasn’t it true that he and Alice had created that hair, and the head on which it grew, one night – or maybe one day – fifteen years ago? Every follicle on Drew’s scalp was made according to their secret genetic recipe, and nurtured from egg to brunette boy.) Who did Drew think he was fooling, pledging fellowship with ghetto youth and the hip-hop scene, chanting along with lyrics about smacking bitches and fuckin’ wid de wrong niggaz, when he was a white kid living with his folks in the suburbs of West Springfield, with a holiday in Scotland on the horizon? To which Drew’s response was that maybe he wouldn’t be living with his folks much longer, not the way their attitude was making him puke, and they could shove their trip to Scotland, he’d rather hang out with his friends here, and anyway, Eminem was white, so what’s your problem?

  Which provoked Don to tell his son exactly what his problem was. Eminem, he said, was a walking invitation for kids to give up on everything and wallow in negativity. Thanks to rap stars like him, kids were being sold pessimism the way they were once sold chewing gum. Kids who were too young to know a damn thing about the big wide world were coming to the conclusion that Planet Earth was rotten to the core and there was nothing to be done about it except buy CDs and T-shirts.

  Alice, trying to stop the conflict getting too global, suggested that Eminem had the right shape of face for bleached, close-cropped hair, but that it wouldn’t suit Drew’s features at all.

  ‘It’s only fuckin’ hair!’ Drew had yelled.’What is it with you people?’ He was cursing a lot lately, whenever he got mad, mostly at his father, but even sometimes at his mother. Every time he yelled Fuck, Aleesha would flinch, as if someone had just thrown a glass against the wall.

  Now, Drew lies sleeping on his inflatable cushion, his arms freshly sunburnt, his hair close-cropped and creamy-white. His shoulders are well-muscled, almost a man’s shoulders, and Don realises all of a sudden that his son is better-built than Eminem can ever be — taller, stronger, fitter, handsomer.

  Aleesha wakes from her doze, looks at the window in case it’s Inverness already, then looks to her father for confirmation that it’s not. He shakes his head and she smiles. Why the smile? He doesn’t know, but he smiles back.

  Aleesha leans sideways into the aisle, stretching her arm across the empty space towards her brother. In her hand is the comb she was using as a bookmark just before she fell asleep. Carefully, oh-so-slowly, she runs the teeth of her comb through her brother’s hair. Time slows right down. The comb lifts the nap of Drew’s crop, revealing rich brown roots under the bleached exterior. The way it lifts and resettles as the comb passes through it is mesmerising, like watching wheat being rustled by the breeze.

  Drew doesn’t stir; he’s either deeply asleep or determined to ignore his sister. She combs on, tenderly, aware of her dad watching her, aware of the spell she’s casting over him. Drew’s hair lifts and re-settles, lifts and re-settles, the bristles soft as a brand-new paintbrush, luxury bristle, mink fur. It’s a good haircut after all, damn it. In fact, it’s the best haircut Drew has ever had, the best haircut on this train, the best haircut in all of Scotland north of Inverness, maybe the best haircut in the world.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Don sees Alice repositioning herself, laying her head down on her bag, shifting her weight from her butt to her side. The swell of her butt is sexy, and he gets a glimpse of her naked flesh where the T-shirt has come untucked from her jeans. He still wants her. He’s looking forward to the next time they’re alone together in a bed, at home or not at home, anywhere where he can run his palms over her warm skin and stroke her hair off her face.

  His son snoozes on the table in front of him, a big man of a son, hair feathery and vanilla-bright, almost too bright in the sunlight, and above it hovers the beautiful hand and arm of his daughter, coloured cotton bracelets dangling from her wrist, which flexes rhythmically as she grooms the white pelt of her one and only brother, grooms him pointlessly, for he’s as combed as combed can be, except that there is a point, because this is the happiest moment of Don’s life.

  In thirty seconds from now, a refreshments trolley will come down the aisle, and Aleesha will be asked by a stunted guy in a uniform to move her arm please, and she’ll put it back and Don’s happiness will ebb a little, just enough to make it no longer the happiest moment of his life, but that’s OK, because it was a long moment, longer than Alice’s smile in the doorway of what has since been renamed KFC. In fifty seconds from now, Aleesha will ask her mother if she can have a chocolate bar, and Drew, still slumped motionless on the table, will say, in a deep voice and distinctly, ‘Is there any Pepsi?’ In half an hour, they will be in Inverness; in three days they will be home; in two years, Aleesha will announce to her parents that she’s always hated the name Aleesha, it sounds like one of those dumb-ass names that black people invent, and she’s going to call herself Ellen from now on. And in five years, despite her parents’ confident predictions, Ellen won’t have grown out of being Ellen, she’ll still be Ellen and she’ll have had an abortion and her smile will be different, lopsided and a little discoloured by smoking, but she’ll be engaged to a man who adores her, and pregnant with a baby she intends to keep.

  And by then, Drew will be living in South America somewhere, and Don and Alice will never see him anymore, and their friends will say that they must be very proud of what he’s trying to achieve there, and they’ll say yes, they’re proud, and they’ll show these people a photograph of Drew on a construction site in what looks like a shanty town, and he’ll be wearing glasses perched on his gigantic schnozzle, his dark brown hair slicked with water and sweat. And Alice will go and make coffee, walking stiffly because of her tennis shoulder which isn’t tennis shoulder at all but the first signs of the illness that will kill her when she’s fifty-nine, and after that Don will tell everyone he’ll never be able to love another woman, but three years later he’ll marry one of the people he said
this to, and she’ll be warm and funny and a great cook and not as good in bed as Alice but he’ll never tell her that, he’ll die before he tells her that, because she’ll make him happy, happier than he ever expected to be in his old age, happier than any of the other miserable old coots that live in his neighbourhood, happier than he’s ever been in fact, except for maybe a couple of isolated moments, like the smile of a young woman waiting to be his lover, her face glowing in the light of a fast-food franchise, and like the hand of his daughter floating above the head of his son, on this morning in a Scottish train, the haircut making everything worthwhile, shining so bright it leaves a pattern on your retina when you close your eyes, vanilla-bright like Eminem.

  THE FAHRENHEIT TWINS

  In Memory of Panda and Shiro

  At the icy zenith of the world, far away from any other children, Tainto’lilith and Marko’cain knew no better than that life was bliss. Therefore, it was bliss.

  Certainly they had plenty of space to play around in –virtually unlimited space. All around their house, acres of tundra extended in all directions, unpunctuated by fences, roads or other dwellings. A team of huskies could easily pull a sled with the little bodies of Tainto’lilith and Marko’cain on it, for miles, without even losing the frisk in their step. Time was also no problem: in almost perpetual Arctic twilight, there weren’t any rules about being back by sunset. The only thing the children’s mother absolutely insisted on was that they never leave the house without a compass, since the tundra looked much the same in all directions, especially when the snows were fresh. During the darker months, even the uncannily keen vision of the Fahrenheit twins was strained by the gloom, and navigation by the light of the moon on a sea of grey snow was impossible.

  Still, however dark and treacherous, all that they surveyed was their domain. Nominally, the island of Ostrov Providenya was part of an archipelago that belonged to the Russians, but in reality no law extended far enough to include this barren wasteland encircled by a shifting morass of ice. The Fahrenheits were monarchs here, and their two children prince and princess.

  ‘What lies beyond?’ the twins once asked their father.

  ‘Nothing special,’ Boris Fahrenheit replied without looking up from his journals.

  ‘What lies beyond?’ they then asked their mother, knowing she tended to see things rather differently.

  ‘Oh, darlings, too much to explain,’ she teased. ‘You’ll see it all, when you’re tired of this little paradise.’ And she ruffled their unwashed hair, in that distantly affectionate way she had.

  Physically, there was little in common between parents and offspring. Boris Fahrenheit was a tall thin German, grey of face and silver of hair, walking always slightly stooped as if the weight of his oversized knitted pullovers was too much for his skeletal frame to bear. Una was also tall, a blue-eyed, rosy-cheeked Aryan beauty with dyed black hair cut short in a between-the-wars style. She walked erect, keeping all the flesh firm. She was fifty-nine years old, and had produced her children well past the age where such things were considered feasible.

  Tainto’lilith and Marko’cain were small, even for their age, which was somewhere between nine and eleven. No one had recorded the birth, and it was now too long ago for Boris and Una to recall the exact date. The children were clearly not adolescent yet, anyway. They tumbled around below the furniture, giggling, rounded with puppy fat. They smelled sweet. They wore without complaint the embroidered sealskin jumpsuits sewn together for them by their mother. They conversed with the huskies as equals.

  Their hair was naturally black, hanging long over their ivory-white faces. Each pair of cheeks was sprinkled with cinnamon freckles, as well as a scattering of tiny puckered scars from a mysterious disease that had thankfully run its course without needing medical attention. Their brown eyes were large, with something of the seal about them: all dark iris and no whites, or so it seemed. They resembled neither their father nor mother, despite the fact that the Fahrenheits were, at the time of the twins’ conception, already long exiled from past friends. But Boris and Una had been shaped and coloured by the Old World, and their children by a sub-Polar archipelago, whose glacial contours could not even be mapped.

  More than anything else, the twins’ characters were formed by benign neglect. To their father, they were an indulgence of their mother’s which he tolerated so long as it didn’t interfere with his research. To their mother, they were like robust little pets, pampered and cooed over when she was in a frivolous mood, forgotten about utterly when she had better things to do. Typically, she might spend hours bathing them and massaging whale oil into their skin, scolding them for spoiling their beautiful young flesh with so many calluses and scars; then for the next week she might scarcely notice their existence, nodding absentmindedly as they tore away into the icy night.

  In any case, Boris and Una Fahrenheit were themselves often away from home, advancing the progress of knowledge. Specifically, they were away visiting the Guhiynui people, on whom they were the world’s foremost authorities. The Guhiynui being mistrustful of strangers, however, progress was slow, at least on fundamental issues. Una’s book on Guhiynui handicrafts had already been published and she was compiling another on their cuisine, but there was no end in sight on Boris’s long-awaited history, and despite the Fahrenheits’ best efforts the dark secrets of the Guhiynui’s sexual taboos had not yet been illuminated.

  Of course, it was the Fahrenheits who must travel to the Guhiynui, not the other way around. And, because Boris and Una always travelled together, it transpired that Tainto’lilith and Marko’cain were often left alone in the house, with only the dogs for company, for days or weeks on end. This made them uncommonly self-sufficient, in a way that would have astounded visitors – if there had ever been any visitors.

  The existence of Tainto’lilith and Marko’cain was in fact a secret from anyone in the green parts of the world. Few people had even heard of the island where the Fahrenheits lived, let alone the specifics of its invisible, unreachable population. Una had given birth at home, midwifing herself. Stoical in the face of the duplicated results, Boris had constructed a second cot identical to the first, the memory of how it was done still fresh in his mind.

  The indistinguishable cots were apt. In all respects except genitals, Tainto’lilith and Marko’cain were identical twins. Their expressions were the same. There was even the same amount of light inside their eyes, a difficult thing to reproduce exactly.

  One day their mother told them a story – a true story, she insisted – about how a future would come when their bodies would change beyond recognition. Tainto’lilith would grow teats, and Marko’cain would sprout a beard.

  ‘Oh ho!’ they chortled.

  But their mother was serious, and this sewed a needle of anxiety through the tough skin of their hearts. From that moment on, the challenge of arresting the advance of time became a priority for Tainto’lilith and Marko’cain. The years must not be allowed to pass: they must be kept in check, securely corralled in the present. But how?

  The answer must lie, the twins felt sure, in ritual – ritual being a concept that was much discussed in the Fahrenheit household, in reference to the Guhiynui. But Boris and Una were mere observers, too European to understand ritual in its visceral origins. Their black-maned, seal-eyed children were already devising a way to control the workings of the universe with such ready-to-hand materials as Arctic fox and knife.

  Tainto’lilith and Marko’cain had never met the Guhiynui, but their minds seemed to work similarly – as Una always remarked whenever she saw her children setting off for some solemn ceremony, sled laden with improvised talismans, fetishes and ju-jus.

  ‘Ah, if it was you two trying to unlock the Guhiynui’s secrets,’ she flattered them, ‘instead of old Boris, you would get results in a hurry, wouldn’t you, my little angels?’

  In fact, the twins were capable of great patience when it came to ritual. Certainly, like all children they were impetuous and n
ever walked if they could run, but magic was a different thing from play. It was grand and elemental and couldn’t be rushed. You could wolf your dinner or jump recklessly into the embers of a bonfire, but picking at the threads of the fabric of time required more caution.

  To crack the ‘teats and beard’ problem, for example, Tainto’lilith and Marko’cain planned a ritual which could only be performed once a year, at that potently magical moment when the summer sun rose above the horizon at last. Shortly beforehand, they would trap a fox, and make a cage for it – well, they’d have to make the cage first, perhaps. Then they would take the fox to the horizon and fasten it in position, its head facing where the sun was going to rise. Taller than their captive, the children were sure to spot the first glow of light coming, and, just as the fox was about to see it, Marko’cain would pinion the animal’s head with his knees while Tainto’lilith stabbed out its eyes.

  Afterwards, they would kill it, although this wouldn’t be an essential part of the ritual – merely a gesture of mercy. And every year, they would repeat the ritual with a fresh fox, an eternally reincarnated fox that would always close its eyes rather than witness the changing of the season.

  ‘Do you think it will work?’ said Tainto’lilith.

  ‘I’m sure of it,’ Marko’cain assured her.’I feel it in my testaments.’

  Having said that, there could be no doubt.

  The great house where the Fahrenheits lived stood out from the landscape like an abandoned space ship on the moon. It was a domed monstrosity of concrete, steel and double-glazed glass, attached umbilically to a generator and humming gently all the time. Inside, it was decorated and furnished in the schmaltziest Bavarian style, with intricately carved cuckoo clocks, chocolate-brown tables and chairs, embroidered tapestries, glass cabinets filled with miniature poppets of all nations. A massive oil painting of golden reindeer in a forest of broccoli hung above the fireplace, which was never lit because the central heating took care of all that. There was no vegetation outside anyway, so nothing to burn except (if need ever be) the furniture and the Fahrenheits’ books and papers.