Lullaby

by Bernard Beckett

  I was sure she didn’t believe me.

  ‘So you never dressed the same. What else was different?’

  ‘Not the shoes,’ I said.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘We had this thing, once we were walking, where we always wanted to wear one another’s shoes. So we’d end up in one of each. One red, one silver. That’s how it is in the pictures.’

  ‘Do you think you were rebelling against your mother’s desire to see you as separate?’ Maggie asked.

  ‘I think we were two and wanted shit we couldn’t have.’

  ‘Do you think you grow out of that?’ she asked.

  ‘Have you?’

  ‘Not really.’

  Stories never come loose cleanly; everything’s always tangled up with something else. You talk about shoes and there, dangling off the end, is a haircut. We used to do that, Theo and me, lie in our beds and talk for hours, and then at the end, try to trace our way back through the conversation, all the way to the beginning.

  ‘I remember, we were maybe four, not quite at school. Theo had long hair down to his shoulders, mine was just over my ears. I have a photo of it. We both said we wanted short hair, but Mum wouldn’t allow it. I must have screamed louder than Theo did, because I got taken to the hairdresser. That night, when we were meant to be in bed, I found some scissors and hacked Theo’s hair as short as I could. He asked me to do it. I made a mess of it, of course, and then he made a mess of mine. That’s the sort of thing people should take photos of. Mum was furious. She got the clippers out and reduced us both to fur. There was no other choice. Later, Dad saw us sitting together on Theo’s bed with our foreheads touching, rubbing each other’s hair. The sight of it made him cry. I remember the tears in his eyes, although I’m not sure I really saw them. It became a story, you see, the sort you use as Christmas decoration, so it’s impossible to know for sure.’

  ‘Does that worry you?’ Maggie asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The difference between what you remember, and what really happened.’

  ‘No, I think it’s good,’ I said.

  ‘How’s it good?’

  ‘Stories are good,’ I said. ‘They make it more real.’

  She laughed. She was beautiful, and she had laughed. It felt like a victory.

  The longest pause so far. Her head tilted slightly, and her glasses became opaque.

  ‘How were you different? Tell me about your personalities.’

  Past tense. It wasn’t her job to make things easy.

  ‘That’s a hard question.’

  ‘There are going to be a lot of hard questions.’

  ‘I mean, there’s an easy answer, but it’s wrong.’

  ‘Tell me why it’s wrong.’

  ‘The easy answer is the way other people always describe us,’ I said. ‘When you’re a twin, people make too much of the differences, because they’re trying so hard to prove they see you as individuals. Then those differences grow into stories, and the stories start to choke you.’

  ‘How do people describe you?’

  ‘They say I’m the sensitive one, and he’s the charmer.’

  ‘And that’s not true?’

  ‘Our first three school reports all said it. They used teacher phrases, but it’s what they were getting at. But I know for a fact our first two teachers couldn’t even tell us apart.’

  ‘Why did people think you were the sensitive one?’

  ‘Maybe I got upset more easily. Dad said it was more that when I got upset, people noticed, because they were already looking for it. They said I liked detail. With jigsaw puzzles, and drawing, and then reading, I would stay at one thing for hours, and if it didn’t go right, or they made me put the lights out halfway through a chapter, I’d have a fit. Theo’s myth has him jumping from one thing to another. He always knew when people were watching him, that part’s true. He made them laugh, he made me laugh, all the time. I don’t think he was restless, I think he was just trying to entertain them. The word teachers used for him was resilient. I craved that word, it took on a magical quality. If only somebody called me resilient, then everything would be all right. I was sure of it.’

  ‘But they didn’t?’

  ‘No, it was already spoken for.’

  ‘What word did they use for you?’

  ‘Gifted.’

  ‘That’s not so bad,’ Maggie said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you think Theo craved your word in the same way?’

  ‘Of course. Because every time they called me gifted, they were really saying he was stupid. And every time they called him resilient, they meant I was fragile. Every way you can find of praising a person is also a way of insulting anyone else who’s listening. Twins understand that.’

  ‘But would you say you were different?’

  ‘Compared to what?’

  ‘Compared to each other.’

  ‘No, I mean, what do you compare our difference to, to judge its significance?’

  ‘I see.’

  She didn’t. So I’d have to tell her about the magic bedroom. I would have anyway.

  ‘We were eight. We slept in the same room. I had a poster of a dinosaur on the wall above my bed. Theo had a racing car. Really we both liked fire engines, but Mum made us each choose something different. One night we sleepwalked. It might not have been exactly like that. Maybe, one of us sleepwalked and half woke the other. Or maybe Theo set the whole thing up, as a trick. But I don’t think so. Theo was a good liar, but not that good.’

  I wondered how long she would let me do this: jump from one story bough to the next, hoping to climb high enough that none of the ugliness could reach me. Soon she would have to call me down. We both knew that.

  ‘I opened my eyes and there was a racing car above me where a dinosaur should have been. Across the room I could see Theo still asleep, just beneath the watchful gaze of the diplodocus. For a confused moment I thought I was looking at myself. Then Theo woke up, and looked at me, and for the longest time we just stared at each other.

  I think we must have sleepwalked, I whispered.

  Maybe we didn’t, Theo whispered back. Maybe this is a magic bedroom.

  ‘We loved that stuff. Not magic, but stories about magic. Although when you’re seven, the distinction hardly matters.’

  I could see Maggie liked the story. Everybody did.

  ‘Theo decided we had to let the magic run its course. When night fell, we could return to our proper beds, and the spell would be broken. Until then, we were each other. And that was the day I first understood.’

  ‘Understood what?’ Maggie asked.

  ‘The way we’re made.’

  ‘I think you should tell me about that,’ she said.

  ‘At first it was easy, because it was just Mum and Dad, and I assumed they knew and were playing along. We had to eat each other’s normal breakfasts, which for Theo was peanut butter and banana on toast. I remember chewing and chewing, thinking I’d never
be able to swallow it, while Theo grinned at me across the table. It was just another one of his games.

  ‘But travelling in on the transport, with our friends all around, that was different. Theo’s clothes felt itchy and strange, and I was sure everybody was wondering why I was wearing them. I tried to remember what he sounded like, and how he sat, and which window he looked out, and all that trying froze me up. I waited for somebody to ask why I had Theo’s pink T-shirt on. But the thing is, nobody did. We see what we expect to see, most of the time. I didn’t know that.’

  ‘You were seven.’

  ‘Once you know it, it seems impossible that you ever didn’t.’

  ‘Knowing’s like that,’ Maggie said.

  There’s a way some people have, of listening to you like what you’re saying matters, like you matter. They’re the ones you fall in love with.

  ‘Before that day, I thought there’d be no point trying to be like Theo, because I’d never be able to pull it off. But all it really took to fool people was a T-shirt. Sally sat next to me and asked me if I’d done my homework. I lied and said I hadn’t, but that it was okay because Rene’d just go twice, like last week. Sally laughed. We’d been in the same class for a whole year, and I’d never been able to make her laugh. At the other end of the seat, William was asking Theo to help him with his maths. Who knows how that worked out.

  ‘There was a bigger prize waiting at school. The vote for class captain. I’d forgotten about it. So had Theo. We walked into the room and saw the extra chairs; the senior council got to vote as well. The election was between Theo and a girl called Jennifer Storm, who told us she was going to be a famous actor. All week everybody had been talking about the vote, trying to guess which way their classmates would lean. Theo’s slogan was: Vote for me, get my brother free. It meant, “I’m funny, and he’s smart, what more could you want?” I was happy to be included. The class captain only had to give speeches, and help the council decide what to do with fundraising money, or how to use celebration days. Smart and funny should have been plenty.

  ‘But Jennifer’s father had fought in the war. He had new arms and legs, from those experiments where they grew replacement limbs. I don’t know if you remember the guy who was meant to run at the Olympics, but he was banned. That was Jennifer’s father. The army took the Olympic Committee to court, because they said it was discrimination against fighting men and women, and didn’t we have any respect? We were too young to understand the details, we just knew Jennifer was the girl whose father could run fast and was always in the news. We’d even watched footage of the operations in class, and when Jennifer started a movement banning the class from watching any of the Olympics, we were proud to play along. At school, anyway. We still watched at home, because Theo and I liked to pretend we were the Lopez twins; we dreamed of running the marathon.

  ‘So it was Theo’s famous charm versus Jennifer’s charming fame. Everybody agreed it would be tight. On the morning of the vote, the candidates got to give a speech. I’d been telling Theo all week he needed to get one written, but he said he did better just thinking it up on the spot. Which would have been fine, if I hadn’t been wearing his pink T-shirt.

  Tell them you need to go to the toilet, I whispered. We’ll swap back.

  Can’t do it, he said. Not ’til we’re back in the magic bedroom.

  Why not?

  That’s how it works.

  ‘Arguments are a lot simpler, when you’re eight.

  ‘I sat at the front, watching the class watch Jennifer, sick with the knowledge that I was next. Jennifer’s pitch was mostly pictures of her and her father together, meeting famous people. I watched the eyes of my classmates widen in amazement. I needed to pee. I wanted to run away. But the teacher was calling Theo’s name, and everybody was clapping.

  Sorry, I don’t have any pictures, I said.

  ‘It wasn’t meant to be funny. I was just trying to explain why the screen was blank, and to apologise for how boring I was about to be. If it hadn’t been for the pink T-shirt, I think people would have understood. But they thought I was Theo, and when Theo says: sorry, I don’t have any pictures, it sounds like he’s making a joke. It sounds like a clever way of saying: all Jennifer had was pictures, and why would you want to vote for a picture? So they laughed, and the more people laughed, the easier it was to be funny.

  My father wasn’t in the war, I said. He’s still got the arms and legs he was born with. But he did grow them himself, and he uses them for lots of other things. Like chasing me and Rene. But he can only go after one of us at a time. So that’s why you should vote for Theo, because they’ll never catch us both. Buy one, get one free.

  ‘More laughing. I knew I wasn’t the funniest guy in the room, but they didn’t.

  ‘Normally, I knew what I wanted to say, but not how to say it. Mum said it was because I was thinking up too many different ways of expressing myself, and I couldn’t choose between them. She was being kind. The truth is I was scared of not being as funny as Theo, so it was safer not to try. That morning, I had so much to say the teacher had to ring a little bell to get me to stop. At first I pretended I hadn’t heard it, which people found hilarious, and the second time I froze in the middle of the sentence, like the bell had cast a spell on me, and that got me a standing ovation.

  ‘Forty-three people voted. Twenty-nine of them chose me. Dad was so proud. He said I deserved a reward, and I should think of somewhere he could take me that weekend. After Dad died, I found out he’d once stood for the local council, but he’d campaigned on making people pay for the things they wanted, and nobody had voted for him.’

  3

  ‘That night, when the lights went out, we swapped back into our own beds. Theo whispered, do you believe in magic now? and I told him I did.’

  ‘Do you think you became Theo?’ Maggie asked.

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘You said they voted for you. They didn’t. They voted for Theo.’

  ‘It’s just a way of talking,’ I said.

  ‘An unusual way of talking.’

  ‘I was describing an unusual situation.’

  ‘Okay.’

  She kept hold of the second syllable, stretched it out in disbelief.

  ‘Have you ever done any acting?’ I asked her.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘What about when you were getting dressed for work this morning, when you put on those glasses and pulled back your hair and chose those sensible shoes? Didn’t you become somebody else? Isn’t that how it works?’

  I liked being the one asking the questions.

  ‘It’s hardly magic,’ she answered.

  ‘My point.’

  ‘You told Theo you believed in magic.’

  ‘They’re not the words I’d choose now.’

  ‘What words would you choose?’

  I’ve thought about that a lot. As time went by, Theo and me became more and more proficient at swapping into each other’s lives. I stopped feeling I was an imposter. More, I felt as if I was returning to a place where I’d always belonged. But I still don’t know how you explain that to somebody who hasn’t experienced it.

&nbs
p; ‘Theo had a theory,’ I said.

  ‘I’m more interested in your theory.’

  Maggie sat perfectly still as she waited. Her toes didn’t tap, her face didn’t crinkle, her hands remained together, one placed over the other, passive on her knee. I’ve never been able to do that.

  ‘It’s complicated,’ I said.

  ‘I’m fairly smart.’

  ‘Look at your hands.’

  She glanced down.

  ‘How do you know they’re yours, and these are mine?’ I waved mine before her, like a bad magician.

  ‘They’re attached to my arm?’

  ‘So if we put a cloak over your arms, with only the hands poking out, you wouldn’t know they were yours?’

  ‘I’d still know.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Feedback mechanisms,’ Maggie said. Which was what I wanted to tell her myself. I think, even with all her training, there was a part of her that couldn’t resist showing off. We weren’t so different.

  ‘Clench your fist for me,’ she said.

  I did as I was told.

  ‘Now, when I watch you do that, some of the very same neurons that fire when I clench my fist will be activated, just by watching yours. Mirror neurons. They allow us to put ourselves in another’s shoes, to imagine what it is like to be someone else. They help us understand, anticipate, manipulate even. But clearly, we couldn’t function if the signal from these neurons was so strong that we failed to distinguish between our own hand, say, and somebody else’s. So, the boundary of self is established via feedback. Which is to say, there are other neurons in play when I clench my own fist, those that signal the sensation of my skin folding, for example.’

  Maggie closed her hand slowly. The skin turned taut and smooth. I imagined that skin passing gently over my cheek. Mirror neurons tingled their pleasure.