Lullaby

by Bernard Beckett

  ‘No.’

  10

  I waited. I counted the eyelets in my boots. I looked at her feet. I pushed my knees up and down, felt my thighs hang loose above the chair, then fall and splay. I stared at the floor, and didn’t look up again until I was halfway through the explanation.

  ‘I was angry with Emily, but I hadn’t fallen out of love with her. It started on the last night of induction camp, after my performance with the crazy naked woman. There was a party, and Emily and I contrived to stand apart from the preening crowd. We watched, passed comment, moved closer to one another.

  Your piece was great, she said. You looked so genuinely lost, at the end, I wanted to give you a hug.

  I was lost. I didn’t know she was going to take her clothes off. She didn’t tell me. I didn’t know where to look.

  Smart move, from her then, Emily said.

  Not too late for that hug, if you still want.

  ‘I held my breath.

  ‘There aren’t that many moments where you genuinely feel your future splitting in two. Either she would hug me, and I would cling to her, and there would be no pretending, or she wouldn’t. Those two paths would never meet.

  ‘I couldn’t look at her face. She moved first, and when we clung to one another, it was like we were already lovers.

  I’m so sorry, she whispered.

  Me too.’

  Maggie was frowning. It seemed an odd moment to let the mask slip. I’d told her worse.

  ‘Theo wasn’t interested in her,’ I repeated, thinking that might have been the trouble. ‘I wasn’t moving in on—’

  ‘No, it’s nothing to do with that.’ She dismissed me with her hand, as if brushing away a fly. But there was a pale patch on her bottom lip, where she’d bitten at it. ‘And you had sex?’

  ‘Not then.’

  ‘But later on?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Maggie didn’t ask for details, and I wasn’t about to offer them. Some stories work best untold. Emily’s intensity took my breath away. I don’t know what I’d expected from her, not reluctance, but perhaps caution. I carry a fear that if I let my true feelings come to the surface, they will frighten people away. And yet the way she looked at me, the joy in her eyes, the vulnerability, it was startling. She taught me how to let go. What more could you ask for?

  Emily lived in a self-contained unit beneath her parents’ house. For the next three months, so did I. It was like discovering another world, magically suspended between adulthood and childish delight, taking the best from each. Taking whatever we wanted. She’d walk around the house naked, and I would sit up in bed and watch her, and think, this isn’t true. This can’t be true. I have a memory of her walking away from me, into the kitchen, reaching up for a box of cereal. A poem. And it’s mine forever. It can’t be taken away from me.

  We’d set the alarm for an hour earlier than we needed to get up, so we could fuck before breakfast. One of us always woke first, and turned it off. There’s that place, just between sleep and waking…

  There was a park at the valley at the bottom of her street that spread out over the opposite hill. We’d walk together in the afternoon sun, oblivious to the world, but also secretly hoping it was watching us, feeling envious. First love, first sex, first glimpse of the possibility that I might be lovable. First time not being one-half of me-and-Theo. Walking in shoes of my own. Drunk.

  ‘And how did it feel,’ Maggie asked, ‘knowing she’d already had sex with Theo?’

  ‘What sort of question is that?’

  How easy it is to reduce us.

  ‘A necessary one.’

  ‘It didn’t matter so much.’

  ‘So much?’

  ‘I thought about it, sometimes. I didn’t want to, but I did. Then other things took over.’

  One more step. I wondered if Maggie already knew how it went, the last sordid twist of our doubled double helix.

  ‘What things?’

  ‘Mrs Struthers called up and asked me to come back home. She was worried about Theo. He hadn’t enrolled in any of the courses he’d promised to look at. He was out all night and slept through the day. Women came and went. He’d moved on from the canisters; it was hit and miss whether you could even get him to talk to you. When he was lucid, he told us not to worry.

  I’m waiting for the end of the year, he said. Then I’m going to join the army.

  ‘In our family, if you want to reject everything you are, and everything everybody who loves you believes in, you join the army. The threat was enough to get me out of Emily’s bed.’

  ‘Is that why he did it?’

  ‘I don’t know. No. No, he wasn’t thinking that straight.’

  ‘Emily was great about it. She understood. She told me I had to move back home, just for a while, or I’d never forgive myself. She…’

  All I had left was the end of that sentence. I wasn’t going to give it to her.

  Maggie let it hang. Emily, the unspeakable. Fuck.

  ‘What did you do when you got home?’

  ‘Spent time with him. Got alongside him, tried to be his brother again.’

  ‘How did that go?’

  ‘It was slow,’ I said. ‘For a while it seemed impossible. I was at drama school, I was in love, I was happy and I couldn’t pretend I wasn’t. He was lost and miserable. I’d stolen his life. He didn’t have to say it. Mostly he pretended he didn’t care. But we both knew.’

  ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘Pretended it didn’t matter, made sure he never caught me crying. It ripped me to pieces, the way I could see all his choices setting hard around him.’

  I began to cry. A bad story, about to get worse. Maggie leaned forward and squeezed my shoulder.

  ‘I got him running again. That was my first success. There was a part of him that wanted my help, and another part too proud to admit it. Getting fit for the army became the excuse we’d both been looking for. Every evening we headed into the hills. I ran longer and harder than I’d ever run, matching him stride for stride, pushing each other on as a way of inflicting pain, and of making sure there was no breath left for talking. It helped.

  ‘The drug use wound back and he stopped sleeping through the day. Slowly it got so we could talk again, the careful talk of almost-strangers. No mentioning acting, or school, or the future, or Mum and Dad, girls. Just films, sport, music: wallpaper. He was bitter, and I deserved it. He told me it was a tragedy, that I’d given up so young. He said there was no such thing as love at seventeen. That seventeen was for fucking. Then one day I let him get to me.

  You don’t know what you’re missing, I said.

  Oh, but I do, he replied. That was the first time either of us had acknowledged it.

  ‘Inch by inch, we crept back to normal. Eventually I told him I was sorry for auditioning. I’m so grateful I made it to sorry. That was Wednesday, so two days ago. We were sitting in the lounge, shirts off after a run, sweat seeping into the chairs. I saw Mrs Struthers hesitate at the doorway, perhaps thinking about telling us to get off
to the shower, but she read the mood and walked away.

  ‘You can tell when Theo’s about to say something important. He has this half-amused smile, setting up an exit strategy should things get too uncomfortable.

  Thanks, man, he said. Two words, but our whole world was contained within them.

  What for?

  Coming back.

  I should have been here more. I got a little, you know, distracted, disappeared up my own arse.

  Nah, that’s me, Theo smiled. You disappeared somewhere else entirely.

  You’ll be okay.

  ‘Neither of us made any effort to hide our tears.

  Yeah.

  ‘He nodded, and his expression then was of a man on a tightrope, three steps from the end, wobbling, freezing up, praying someone is going to reach out a hand. So I did.’

  I looked at Maggie, and wondered how to explain. I hoped she might just guess, but that was asking too much, even of her.

  ‘I wanted so badly to help him. At the funeral, he was the one who held me, and told me it would be okay. Since Mum and Dad died, we hadn’t swapped places. It was as if that was a thing from another time, from a world of magic and parents. But I knew how lucky I was. I understood what it meant, to have Emily look up into my eyes, and never see the smallest hint of doubt, a flicker of uncertainty. To be captured, just for a moment, in a bubble of gratitude was to be alive in a way I’d never imagined. The idea I had—the idea that perhaps could only ever make sense inside my head—was that if Theo could experience the same thing, just once, if he could see what it was like to be loved, it would give him something to cling to.’

  It sounded every bit as bad as I’d feared. I couldn’t look at Maggie, I couldn’t bear the disapproval. I heard a change in her breathing.

  ‘When? When did you do this?’

  I wanted to say I didn’t. I wanted to be able to tell her Theo laughed me out of the room, that it never happened. So many things I wanted, and couldn’t have.

  ‘Last night. I told him last night. We agreed today we’d swap. I don’t know why he said he’d do it. I think, if I’m honest, he might have thought it would give him some way of getting back at me. Or just the craziness of it, the danger, might have been enough…’

  ‘So you’re saying that when Theo…’

  The colour drained from Maggie’s face. Her skin must have turned suddenly cold, like mine had when the hospital first called. Her hand moved to her earpiece, and her eyes half closed as if she was trying to decipher another language. She swung to her desk, flicked pages. Her movements were loose, chaotic. This was a different Maggie entirely. One that might cry, or laugh, or look confused. She scared me.

  ‘Fuck!’ she said.

  I didn’t get it, but I could see she was panicking, and panic’s contagious.

  ‘They didn’t,’ I said, trying to bring Maggie’s eyes back up from the screen.

  Her lips were moving: a silent, urgent conversation.

  ‘He went around, and they went straight to the park. The flat’s being painted, and we’d been planning a picnic.’

  Nothing, from Maggie.

  I tried again. ‘They didn’t have sex!’

  ‘Rene.’ Her face was grave, her eyes unwavering. ‘Jesus, Rene.’

  ‘That’s me.’ I tried to smile.

  ‘There’s been a mistake.’

  ‘I know. I should never have—’

  I still didn’t see it.

  ‘When your brother came in’—Maggie talked over the top of me—‘Emily was the person who filled in the admission details. She was the person who was with him. And she thought—’

  ‘She thought he was me.’

  ‘Yes.’

  I already knew that, it was one of the things that had registered vaguely, part of a long line of details that would have to be attended to later. Phone friends, apologise to Emily, choose songs for the funeral.

  ‘How did she react, when she found out?’

  When you’ve looked at a puzzle long enough, without seeing the solution, you become blind to it.

  ‘This has happened very, very quickly.’ Maggie’s bottom lip trembled. ‘The hospital has…There’s never been a case like this, and all our energy has gone into making sure this window doesn’t close before we’ve thoroughly—’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re—’

  ‘She doesn’t know.’

  Three simple words, yet somehow I couldn’t make a shape from them. Maggie locked her eyes on mine. I saw her fear.

  She spoke slowly. ‘She thinks it’s you. Emily’s in the waiting room, and she thinks Theo is in here, talking to me.’

  ‘I’m not Theo.’

  ‘No, you’re not.’

  ‘But you know I’m not Theo!’ I shouted at her. ‘Why didn’t you tell her?’

  Now I saw it, the thing that had undone her. Not my mistake, but hers. Maggie had made a mistake.

  ‘The files came through so quickly. Somehow, I read the names, without registering the mismatch, between the admission forms and…’

  Her hand went to her forehead. Long fingers worked the flesh.

  ‘You introduced yourself, in the room, and I was, I was trying to watch you, watch you with your brother, observe you. I’m meant to notice the details. It’s my job to notice the details. But I missed the names.’

  ‘Our names? You missed our names?’ That seemed impossible. ‘But I’ve been using our names the whole way through.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know you are Rene, and I know he is Theo. I just didn’t register that Rene was the name they used when they admitted him. I assumed Emily knew who she was with. I assumed she could be trusted to identify her lover.’

  ‘Well you assumed fucking wrong then, didn’t you?’ My head was turning fuzzy.

  ‘Yes, yes, I did.’ Maggie held up her hand, hoping, I suppose, to stop me.

  ‘So, how do you get to be so stupid? Didn’t it seem strange to you, when I told you about the two of us, that…?’

  ‘We have been working under extreme pressure.’

  ‘You’re under pressure? Try sitting here with your brother dying, and some bitch who doesn’t even know your name deciding the shape of your future.’

  ‘It’s called confirmation bias.’

  For the first time Maggie didn’t meet my eye. Her hands had balled into little fists on her knees.

  ‘What you told me, fitted what I thought I’d read, I…’

  ‘It’s called being fucking useless.’

  Maggie’s tears were magnified by her glasses. She stood up, and turned away. I noticed she wasn’t as tall as I’d thought. I watched her shoulders rise as she breathed deep. She held it in for four slow beats, and exhaled as she turned. Her mask was firmly back in place.

  ‘Rene, you are not the victim. Emily is the one who has been deceived.’

  ‘You can’t turn this back on me,’ I said.

  ‘I fully acknowledge my part in this.’<
br />
  Her part. The smaller part. That was what she meant. She put her glasses back on, but she didn’t sit.

  ‘The bigger picture is unaffected. The time constraints are the same. The options are the same. My assessment of you will be based upon the same evidence. There is good cause to unpack this, for recrimination and reparation, but not good time. The thing that has changed is Emily. You need to talk to Emily. I can come with you, if you like.’

  ‘You bet you’re fucking coming with me.’

  11

  The corridor refused to make sense. The walls wobbled, the floor swayed. Strangers smiled at me, their heads too big for their bodies. All I could think of was Emily, sitting in a room, surrounded by strangers, certain I was as good as dead. Going over and over her last moments with me. The picnic, the jokes, the last time we kissed. Not knowing it wasn’t the last time at all, that the last time sat off in some other place, maybe in the future, maybe in the past. And I was going to have to tell her. It didn’t leave much room for getting walls straight.

  I stood in the doorway of the waiting room, with Maggie at my shoulder, as if she was using me for shelter. Emily’s father walked over, shook my hand, and looked at me with sorrowful eyes.

  ‘Theo, we’re all so very sorry.’

  I flinched at the name.

  Emily remained sitting, her face wet and puffy. She gave me the sort of watery smile she would have given her lover’s brother in a time like this, trying to offer your grief is greater than mine, but unable to believe it. My heart turned small and frightened.

  ‘Mr Watts, this is Maggie. She’s a psychologist. She’s been helping me.’

  He shook her hand. His face couldn’t settle on an expression.

  ‘Mr Watts, pleased to meet you. We need to speak to Emily for a moment please, if we could have the room?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘There’s coffee, down the—’