Lullaby

by Bernard Beckett

  ‘And if it wasn’t your job, if it was just you and me, would you hold me?’

  ‘If it wasn’t my job, I wouldn’t be here.’

  ‘No, you wouldn’t,’ I said.

  ‘That’s not what I meant.’

  In my memory, she looks around, to make sure there’s no one outside, but I suspect I’ve added that detail since. She takes me in her arms and lets her collar grow wet with my tears. Her neck smells of shampoo; her skin is warm, like a mother’s. I lean against her.

  I could have stayed there, and let time pass until there was no decision left to make.

  ‘We need to get back.’ Her voice tickled my ear.

  I nodded and wiped my eyes with my sleeve. ‘Thank you.’

  Theo would have loved her.

  I turned back to him. I looked at his face, properly. My living, breathing mirror. Almost living. With his eyes closed, the eyelashes were even more striking. Long and thick, like a girl’s, curling upwards.

  ‘I always wanted to be him,’ I said. I don’t know if she heard me. Maybe she thought it wasn’t for her. ‘I watched the way he was with people, the way people were with him, and I never admitted it to him, but I spent a lot of time trying to work out how he did it.’

  ‘Maybe he wanted to be like you, too.’ She put her hand on my shoulder.

  ‘Maybe.’

  It was the kind thing to say, but it wasn’t true. I wasn’t even sure, if he’d been given the choice, he would have wanted to be a twin. I never asked him. The millions of words we spent, like we thought we’d never run out, and I never asked him. But I wouldn’t have changed it, not for the world.

  ‘It must have been good,’ she said, ‘to have had someone always looking out for you.’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  She didn’t answer.

  ‘There was one time, when he could have died, trying to help me.’

  Her hand tightened at my collar.

  ‘We were in the forest, with Mum and Dad. They liked to take us camping. For Mum, it was the quiet she loved; it was a place she could sit and sketch. For Dad, it was to do with us all being together. I remember one night when we were still young, and he had all four of us sleeping beneath a fly strung between two trees. A storm came, and the fly flapped loose. We ended up out in the sheeting rain, trying to tame the beast. Mum looked wet and miserable—that’s how I remember it—but Dad was laughing the whole time. Like the storm was the whole point. It always seemed right to me, that he died in the rain. This time though, there wasn’t a storm. Mum went off to draw something, and I followed her, and Theo thought I’d gone missing, so he followed me. Dad found me and Mum, but not Theo.

  ‘They panicked. We all panicked. Mum and Dad wanted me to go to the road with some people we met on the track, but I wouldn’t leave them. Someone must have called Search and Rescue. I remember us all shouting his name out, until we had no voice left. When the calling stopped, there was that silence you only get in the forest, a silence filled with sounds—of the wind moving through the trees, and the river easing over the rocks—sounds that go on forever.

  ‘It took four hours to find him. The Search and Rescue woman had come to tell us we had to get back to our car, because soon it would be dark. Dad was refusing, and Mum had begun to howl. Then I saw his jacket, a flash of blue amongst the green, on the other side of the river. Just a moment, and it was gone. I knew they didn’t believe me, but it made a good negotiating tool. We would cross the river, have ten minutes looking, and then we agreed we would head back. We linked arms for the crossing. The water wasn’t high but Mum and Dad weren’t about to lose another one. I was between them, lifted off my feet for most of it.

  ‘Theo tried to pretend he hadn’t been crying. At some point he’d abandoned his pack. He didn’t know where. The cold that night would have killed him. That’s how close we came to not being twins anymore. I’ll never forget the look on his face. It wasn’t relief that we’d found him, but relief they’d found me. He jumped up and clung to me, and I was so tired I fell backwards. That’s the way I’ll always remember him, inches from my face, his eyes too big for his head, his face so pale. That night I first saw how delicate everything is, how easily it can come apart. In the background there was crying: Mum or Dad, maybe both. But Theo and me, we were already laughing.

  ‘I’ve thought about it so often, imagined Theo alone on the other side of the river, calling out my name until his throat hurts, feeling the chill of damp moss where he’s settled, the cold of loneliness. If someone told me I’d got it the wrong way round, that I was the one who’d got lost, it wouldn’t be hard to believe. That’s what it’s like, having a twin brother. In case you were wondering.’

  I couldn’t look at him anymore, him or the machine or the hospital bed. I closed my eyes.

  ‘He loved you.’ Maggie said.

  I felt the past tense settle on us, like a blanket.

  ‘Yeah, he did.’

  I turned away, knowing it might be the last time, and walked out before the thought took my legs from under me.

  7

  ‘It’s cold in here,’ I said. Maggie turned to her desk and tapped the screen. Warm air whispered over us.

  ‘Now tell me how you came to be a drama student.’

  ‘I already told you.’

  ‘I thought you might be ready to give me the truth.’

  ‘If you already know…’

  ‘I don’t,’ she said.

  ‘Then I’ve told you the truth.’

  ‘I don’t think you have.’

  She didn’t seem to have much trouble, slipping back into role.

  ‘We weren’t always close.’

  I wanted the other story to be true, the easy story: two for the price of one, loyal to the end, inseparable.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Nothing special,’ I said. ‘School, girls.’

  ‘Do you want to explain that?’

  ‘I don’t want to, no.’

  ‘I think you should,’ she said.

  I tried to take a breath, but it wouldn’t go in. I felt the panic rising, prickly and familiar. I tried again and this time my chest froze completely. I thought back to what I had been taught to do. I counted to three, and told myself this airlessness was normal. I swallowed, mouth closed. You’re okay, you’re okay.

  Slowly, as if to creep back up on life before it realised the trick, I let air leak in through my nose. It expanded me. I felt giddy, present, almost hopeful. A second breath, easier than the first. The third almost normal. It had passed. Maggie watched closely, but it didn’t matter. She’d seen my file.

  ‘School was fine, at first,’ I said. I would ignore the incident if she did. ‘We each had our roles to play. Theo’s was to be charming, confident, unshakable. Even when Mum and Dad died, Theo stayed calm. As if he had always expected it.

  ‘I was the clever one, that was my thing. After Mum and Dad died, I tried even harder, I suppose as a way of saying thank you. Early school was good, and middle school too, because there they have a way of letting you know that te
st scores don’t really matter. As long as you say please and thank you, show kindness, and always do your best, you’re doing fine. Our reports always said we were doing fine.

  ‘We had a good group of friends. Theo had the friends; I had Theo and they came as part of the package. If it’d stayed like that…’

  I felt the shadow looming over me.

  ‘But it can’t stay like that, can it?’ Maggie said.

  ‘Maybe it can,’ I said. ‘But it didn’t.’

  ‘When did you first realise?’

  ‘First day of finishing school.’ The real story had begun. Soon, there would be no stopping it, not until we hit the bottom, or collided with the truth on the way down.

  ‘We’d always been in the same class. It was a given. Mum had insisted, which was strange for her, but I think she knew how much we needed it. After Mum and Dad died, the middle-school teachers decided it was even more important to keep us together.

  ‘But finishing school was different: bigger, too busy for anyone to distinguish between waving and drowning. Walking through the gates was like walking into a storm. It was the noise, the movement, but mostly the sense of being swept away. There were more than four hundred first-year students. On the first day we were led into the hall for our entry tests. I remember the visors. The masks were too big, and smelt of sweat and fear; the slide screens were sticky and slow to react. It lasted an hour, orange numbers ticking down in the top left corner.

  They told us the results would be used for our class allocation. When I heard that, I could hardly breathe.’

  ‘You could have done poorly, if you’d wanted to. You could have deliberately given false answers.’ Maggie didn’t miss much.

  ‘Yeah, I could have.’

  ‘But you didn’t.’

  ‘I was equal second. Theo scored forty-third. He tried harder in that test than he ever had in his life. He wanted us to stay together even more than I did.

  ‘The top class was treated differently. We had the best teachers, got the best equipment, went on trips no one else was offered. They said it was reward for how well we were working, but everyone knew it went the other way. The rewards produced the behaviour.’

  ‘Feedback.’

  ‘I should have been top, it was a couple of stupid mistakes, that’s all. Maddy was smart, beating her wouldn’t be easy, but at least I had something to focus on.’

  ‘What about Theo?’

  ‘He’d overachieved in the entry test, and the second class was too hard for him. He started to struggle.’

  Sadness settled deep in my stomach. My eyes were scratchy, my throat dry.

  ‘Did it worry him?’ Maggie asked.

  ‘He said it didn’t.’

  ‘Did you believe him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And that worried you,’ she said.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘What did you do about it?’

  I wanted to be able to give a different answer. I wanted to say I’d been a better brother.

  ‘I suppose I pretended we weren’t growing apart. At lunchtime, or during releases, I’d find him, and we’d act like nothing had changed. Some things hadn’t. People still wanted to be with him and, at a school that big, that gave him a lot of choice.’

  ‘Who did he choose?’

  ‘Anyone who could make him feel special. See, I liked the classroom. I liked plugging in and listening to people who knew more about the world than I did. And then composing responses, and the feedback sessions, taking each other’s work apart—to me class time and break time were all the same, a succession of games I enjoyed. Theo wasn’t a listener. He’d either say, I already understand so why listen, or I don’t understand and listening doesn’t help. I told him there was a sweet spot, just at the edge of understanding, and that learning’s just the art of finding it, but that’s not the sort of thing that makes sense until you’ve been there.

  ‘His was a small group, just five or six of us most days. None of them were properly bad. They knew how to cause trouble, but not enough to be excluded. Just stupid stuff. One of the girls, Harriet, had a pet ferret, and she was told she couldn’t bring it to school, so they all went and caught some ducks at the park, and dumped them in the staffroom.’

  ‘Why?’ Maggie asked.

  ‘I think it was a protest.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘None of us understood.’

  ‘You helped?’

  ‘I tried, but you know how, when something you’re holding wriggles to get free? I’m the sort that lets go.’

  Maggie nodded, as if that much was already obvious.

  ‘What else did they do?’

  ‘They liked drugs,’ I said. ‘That was a big part of it. Canisters mostly, stuff you could come back from quickly.’

  ‘They or we?’

  ‘It wasn’t optional. But I was careful. I looked into it. They called me the professor. People I didn’t know used to ask me for advice.’

  ‘Did it affect your grades?’ she asked.

  I shrugged. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘But you still did well?’

  ‘Sometimes first, sometimes second.’

  ‘How did second feel?’

  ‘Much like first,’ I said. ‘That surprised me. Once I realised I could beat her, it stopped mattering.’

  ‘Do you think Maddy knew you could beat her?’

  ‘She certainly hated me; that could have been why.’

  I wanted to ask again, what her method was. Why she lingered on these things, when all the time the clock was ticking. But I didn’t, because I didn’t want her to think she was getting to me.

  ‘And you got in trouble, sometimes, I imagine,’ Maggie said. ‘A group like that.’

  ‘A little. The others more than Theo or me. Theo had his charm to hide behind, which worked with most of the teachers, and I was their top student.’

  ‘How did you feel about the others? Did you like them?’

  ‘Why wouldn’t I?’

  It came out too quickly.

  ‘Because they were taking your brother away from you.’

  ‘He didn’t go anywhere he didn’t want to go,’ I said.

  It wasn’t true.

  ‘Where was that?’

  ‘He dropped down a class, from two to three. That was when other people started to get interested.’

  ‘Other people?’

  ‘Counsellors. Duty teacher. Mrs Struthers.’

  ‘You don’t talk about her much.’

  ‘She was worried, but she didn’t know what to do about it. I suppose that’s normal, for adults. She threw a party. That was her best idea.’

  ‘A party?’

  Maggie’s eyebrows rose up above her glasses. I liked the way they came and went.

  ‘Not a party for dropping classes. She wasn’t that hopeless. A party for his athletics. We both loved to run. He tra
ined harder than I did; he had a way of getting lost inside his head. He could go for hours.’

  ‘And he had some success?’

  ‘He won a couple of races at the regional level. It wasn’t a big deal, he’d done it before, but Mrs Struthers thought she should accentuate the positive. She told us we could invite any friends we wanted to, only we didn’t want to, because we could see in advance it was going to be a train wreck. Which made it an empty-train wreck, I suppose.

  ‘Our uncle and auntie flew in for it, which rather blew the “only about athletics” cover. And Mrs Struthers didn’t understand the school cloud properly, so she posted a message, inviting people, but, I almost don’t want to think about it—it went…

  ‘There’s an academic flow, where only the disconnected gather, and that’s where the invite ended up. They all turned up, seven strangers who were not used to getting invitations. Then there were some people from the street, and at that stage Mrs Struthers worked part-time at the boat club, she was a cook, so some of her workmates came. The food was the only good thing.

  ‘Imagine a cake in the shape of running shoe, with candles on it. And there’s no song to sing, and nobody’s thought whether you’re meant to blow the candles out, or give a speech or clap. Nobody knows anybody else, or where to look. The only thing we had in common was the knowledge that this was Mrs Struthers’ desperate way of saying to Theo, it doesn’t matter that you’re not smart, like your brother is.

  ‘We’re so very proud of you, is what she finally said, before the wax met the icing. Theo wanted to disappear, and so did I. Mrs Struthers knew it was a disaster. That’s what killed me. She came to me in the kitchen and whispered—we’re proud of you too, you know that don’t you?

  ‘I said, thanks for the party, Theo really appreciates it. Then I had to leave, because I could see if I left that big lie hanging there, one of us was going to start crying.’

  Telling that story was as excruciating as it had ever been. I don’t understand that, the way the awkward moments never lose their cutting edge. With something big, like your parents dying, the pain dulls with time. Somehow the simple act of living absorbs it. But that party could have happened yesterday.