by Brian Aldiss
Chris Dervish’s suicide made me see life was not as simple as I had tried to pretend. Undisciplined feeling killed him. He could not cope with it. Many other people would have gone down in his position, adulated but a captive of that adulation.
That chapter of life was closed by the time I met Tom and Barry Howe. I drove myself down to Humbleden in my Mini. It was a lovely August afternoon. Although I was no foolish virgin, I did not know what I was getting into.
Humbledon I knew and loved. I liked its style. It stood for a self-assurance, a fine sense of established values, which you had to admire. The house was beautifully sited on a slight rise, with its lake, the work of Capability Brown, lying before it. Through the line of great cedars on the south side of the lake were glimpses of the sea, the vital sea where you could be a child again. Wave-sparkle flew into my eyes, blinking between moving cedar trunks as I drove up. Organic life moved too – swans, ducks, deer in the park, horses in a paddock, never ridden and restless in fly-tormented shade. What was it all but the fruit of ‘privilege’, that word my poor father could not pronounce without pursing his lips? I never subscribed to the notion that all men were equal, or not after the first time I went with Ricky. Besides, why did underprivilege build one half so handsome and enduring?
It was quiet inside the house that afternoon. Quiet, except for the sound of rock from a distant room. No one about. The guy that ran the place, Nick Sidney, was typically not to be found. Not that I felt any great rush to see him again.
In the kitchens, I found Tubby Puller, the Noise drummer, scoffing sandwiches. He greeted me without interest, as if he had seen me only the day before, and told me that ‘the freaks’ were up in their suite on the second floor. I climbed the stairs. Still emptiness. Loud grabby rock issued from what used to be the art gallery on the first floor. It pleased me that I could recognize Paul Day’s guitar.
On the second floor, the house became meaner, the corridor narrower, the rooms smaller. This had been the servants’ floor in the old days.
I walked along the corridor. Someone was playing an electric guitar badly. When I came to the appropriate door, I knocked and marched in.
I had done a fair amount of research on Tom and Barry for my article for Sense and Society, and knew what there was to know about them. I had not met them. My first impression was of confusion – and something else, not quite horror, not quite terror, almost awe.
They were too close. They were always a crowd. They grew together like two trees growing where only one should be, branches hopelessly intertwined, distorting each other.
That was my first impression – one of entanglement. So wild were they, that they leapt up as soon as I entered. I had only an impression of their previous attitude, with Barry sitting on the swelling curve of a Victorian sofa arm while Tom attempted to sprawl beside him. Barry was plucking a guitar while Tom tried to read a paperback book. Their elbows got in each other’s way. The thought crossed my mind that both guitar playing and reading were so foredoomed to failure that they were glad of the diversion I caused.
But it was not like that. They were genuinely wild, backing away from me like untrusting dogs. They were joined to each other just below the shoulder and at the hip. On Barry’s other shoulder was that other head, leaning forward in an attitude of sleep.
‘What do you want?’ Barry asked.
‘I’m a new member of Zak’s staff. Hello. The name’s Laura Ashworth, and I could use a drink.’
‘Pub’s down the road,’ said Tom. They stood on guard, weighing me up, and I countered with my own curious stare. You could not help staring. There was a compulsion to stare.
The twins were strapping young men of eighteen, not fourteen or fifteen as some accounts have claimed. Tension marked them. Barry was more sturdily built than his brother; he had a red peasant face, complete with snub nose and startling light grey eyes which generally regarded you through half-closed lids, as if he were tired, or dangerous, or forever summing you up. His thatch of thick black hair stood up spikily from his low forehead. Tom was not so thick-set and looked slightly taller, though he carried his head to one side. His face was less flushed and thinner than his brother’s. The hair that curled attractively about his neck and ears was a nondescript brown. He appeared more vulnerable than his brother. While he offered me a tentative smile, his brother scowled. There was a sensuous expression about Tom’s lips, I thought.
Looking back, I can no longer be sure of first impressions. I was full of a sort of terror. Though I immediately felt their differences, I was also conscious of their blanket similarity, caused by their inseparable state.
Yet that head dozing on Barry’s shoulder set them apart. It made Barry the deformed twin, as well as the one with power. On that first meeting, I scarcely dared look at it. Afterwards, my glances were always covert – although the fact that it has lain on a pillow against my head makes me as familiar with it as the next person.
The third head seemed to have no relation to Tom or Barry. It lay in repose on Barry’s left shoulder, nodding forward. Barry always held his head away from it, which caused Tom to carry his head straining slightly to the right, so that he always looked at you slightly awry. The third head was small. It appeared to belong to an old man; its features were withered, its hair grey. Its eyes were closed, the eye-sockets sunken. Later I saw how greatly it resembled Barry’s face, despite its pallor, which contrasted with his ruddiness.
‘I thought you’d offer me a drink,’ I said.
‘We’re going out,’ said Barry.
A struggle took place between them, though neither changed position. It was a battle of wills, of impulses, of hesitations, expressed in tensed muscles, clenched fists. Barry took a step forward.
‘We’re going out,’ he said.
Then they were like liquid. The struggle was over, they ran forward with uncanny coordination, four legs complexly moving, as they passed me and headed for the door. In a moment they were gone. As they reached the stairs, they gave a strange united yell, a noise that might have been fear or derision or exultation.
I stood in their room, listening to the sounds of their descent through the house until it was drowned by the music. I was shaken. For a moment, I had thought they were going to attack me. But it was more than that. Their presence had been a challenge to my own being.
At last I turned. Before I reached the door, a movement through the windows caught my eye. The twins were out there.
I went over and looked down. Still running, they had crossed the drive to the paddock. Lightly, they vaulted together over the fence to where four hunters stood in the shade of spreading oaks. They formed one figure when they ran – that was when their unity was most sharply expressed. No two ordinary people could run that close.
The horses backed away. The twins did not pause. Grabbing a mane, they launched themselves up and were astride in no time. It looked from where I was as if each had a leg on either side of the animal’s back. Before I could be sure, they had kicked the horse into action and were off, galloping madly away, parallel to the white fence, dashing through sun and shadow.
Having gone into much detail about my first encounter with the twins, and how that first encounter came about, I find myself in difficulty about proceeding. What happened between Tom and me, and between Barry and me, is private. It may sound funny for a journalist to say that, but I do think that the more details I fill in, the less the magic of what happened will be recaptured. Because I did come to love them both.
An outline it will have to be. A silhouette. The twins got to know me. I stayed unobtrusive, attending their music lessons and the afternoon sessions with the group, and talking to people they were talking to, like Paul Day, the Noise’s guitarist, for whom I had always had respect. I chugged round the lake in Zak’s launch with them, I went on the beach with them, I even rode a horse for their sake – though not bareback. Some of it was fun. More often, it was pain.
There was so much hatred. Nick Sidney
treated the twins as freaks; he had a special weapon – a stun gun – to deal with them, as if he were a wild animal trainer. He had established a pecking order in the manor. The members of the Noise were accommodated as he was, in luxurious rooms on the first floor. When I was offered a similar room, I refused it and took an attic room in the servants’ quarters, where the twins were exiled. They were supposed to eat alone.
Of course, they were rough country lads. But that was not the trouble. The trouble was that they hated Nick, they hated the Noise, they hated each other. They hated their distant father for ‘selling them’, as they put it.
But they enjoyed the singing. They liked to bellow and stamp and project themselves. They wished to be the Bang-Bang and to rant and caper before screaming audiences. This wish was so strong that they submitted to Nick Sidney, up to a point. Training sessions were alarming feats of antagonism, with the Noise rebellious, hating the Bang-Bang and trying to outplay them. In trying to hold it all in one piece, Sidney drank more than ever and used his fists when he felt like it.
The exception to all this antagonism was Paul Day, who rode along with it as if enjoying the storms. He had become a lot more together since the days of Dervish.
Even the sessions failed to unite Tom and Barry. They found it impossible to play guitar together. Their tensions destroyed their sense of unison. Fights broke out, instruments were destroyed. Tom was really not a fighter, although he fought his brother savagely in self-defence. Barry might have been wrestling with a devil. He fought Tom, he fought the Noise, he fought anyone who came within range, including Nick Sidney. Sidney fought back; Sidney used his stun gun.
After one hellish struggle, Barry hit Sidney behind the ear with the edge of an electric guitar and laid him out cold. The twins ran, and were later seen perched on the roof of Humbleden, crouching by a chimney-stack. When I stood in the courtyard and called to them to come down, Barry flung a tile at me.
Some days later, after another violent scene, I phoned Zak Bedderwick. We had never been on particularly good terms, but he was civil enough. I respected him more than he did me; surprisingly enough, he knew a fair bit about music. I asked him if he would summon a qualified surgeon to come and give the twins a thorough examination.
‘I know what’s on your mind,’ he said. ‘You’d better forget it. They can’t be separated and that’s final. Besides, if they were separated, we wouldn’t have an act.’
‘You may not have an act as it is. They are all set to destroy everything. Look, Zak, I know something about their sort of mentality, and they are in pain – mental pain, right? Get another medical opinion. Maybe you could offer them separation in five years if they cooperate now. That could be the only way. Otherwise, someone could get killed.’
‘You really go for that kind of drama, Sunshine, don’t you?’
But he gave in and sent a surgeon to Humbleden.
Zak may have suspected that I was in some way going to get him adverse publicity if a surgeon arrived, since a surgeon could be said to emphasize the medical oddity of Tom and Barry. Although I feared for the mental stability of the twins, I had already given up any idea of writing them up as objects of exploitation. I sensed in them, as in Chris Dervish before them, a blind urge to be exploited. They wanted the world to know of them. I was not going to make theory fit reality, as my father would have done.
The surgeon was Sir Allardyce Stevens. He was a small dapper man in his late sixties, with pale translucent skin and light eyes. He looked as if you could blow him over, and his smile was the gentlest thing I had ever seen. I feared for him in the presence of the terrible twins, yet they became as docile as lambs as soon as they saw him. What they hoped for from him was, I suppose, obvious enough. Sir Allardyce was a man to inspire hope.
He was with the twins for more than two hours.
He talked to me afterwards. Much of what he said was technical and over my head, but the gist of it was clear. Tom and Barry were conjoined twins, joined by ligament from breastbone to hip, in the manner of the original Siamese twins. Their circulatory systems communicated and, as is apparently typical in trunk fusions, they shared organs, including kidneys and other minor bits and pieces I had never heard of.
I felt flattered by Sir Allardyce’s careful explanation and his assumption that I cared. I took him for a drink before his chauffeur drove him back to London. He went into medical details about how surgery was still not advanced enough to separate the two of them and have them both live. There were reasonable guarantees that one would live but not both.
‘Which one?’ I asked.
‘That would have to be decided, my dear,’ he said, sipping his brandy and tonic and smiling at me. ‘Speaking as a surgeon, I would prefer to see Tom survive. Theirs is an unusual case. Superficially, they are symmetrical twins, as were Chang and Eng, the original pair. But Barry himself forms a host or autosite member of a secondary twinning. That extraordinary head on his shoulder forms an undeveloped parasite. It represents a third twin, a triplet or the beginning of one, as you might say, and is dependent on Barry, its host, for nutrition.’
‘A parasite! Is it alive? Couldn’t you operate and remove it?’
He pursed his lips. ‘I wouldn’t care to be the one to try; there are too many random factors. At birth, it would have been a different matter. As for the question of life in the parasite, well, not only that …’
He hesitated.
‘Go on.’
‘Barry is not a communicative lad, as you know. But he said an odd thing to me. I questioned him about the head – for which he has a name, by the way. Significant, that. He wouldn’t tell me the name, and I didn’t press him. He feels protective about it. He said that he relies on the third head.’
‘Relies on it? How?’
‘He’s just a simple Norfolk lad. His attitude is partly superstitious.’
‘But is the head … alive?’
‘Certainly it is alive, or otherwise decomposition would have set in long ago. A more pertinent question concerns cerebral activity. Apparently that question was not considered during previous examinations. The eyes are permanently closed, but I observed REM activity.’
‘What’s REM?’
‘Rapid Eye Movement. Suggesting strongly that the third head is in a dreaming state.’
We were sitting in the bar on the ground floor, in what had once been the library. All books had long ago disappeared. There were some comics on one of the tables nearby. Sunshine poured through the stained glass and coloured crimson and green the carpet at our feet. There we sat, having this extraordinary conversation. I hardly knew what to say.
‘A dreaming state … You mean – the third head could wake up at any time?’
Sir Allardyce took a long sip of his drink and gazed at me as he did so. He smiled. His reassuring manner was at variance with the alarming information he was giving me.
‘We are entering rather a speculative area of discussion. I do not believe it likely that the third head will “wake up”, since its brain has given no indication in eighteen years that it functions normally. As far as we can tell without more rigorous examination, it has remained and will remain in a state of permanent unconsciousness.’
‘Nevertheless, it is … a person?’
‘A latent personality, certainly, yes. But destined to remain latent, unless some unexpected shock wakens it to life.’
I wanted to ask him what would happen then, but the question was too fantastic. I remained silent, trying to digest the information he had given me.
‘It must be a bit creepy for Barry, come to think of it, always having that head with its closed eyes so near to you, mustn’t it?’ I laughed uneasily.
The laugh sounded like a giggle to me. Sir Allardyce laughed heartily in return.
‘Indeed, yes, a bit creepy.’
‘Perhaps that’s why Tom seems the more normal of the two. He’s really a dear … And you’d have him survive – if it ever came to an operation?’
> The brandy was doing him good. He crossed his neat legs and relaxed. ‘As I have said, such an operation is quite out of the question at present, except in an emergency. Modern medicine can supply simple spare parts – like artificial hearts, which are really only straightforward pumps – but we still cannot manage the complicated biological engineering which would be required in a separation, were both twins to survive such an operation.’
We were sitting closely together. I suddenly perceived that he fancied me sexually. A familiar mingling of curiosity, defensiveness, pleasure and power came over me. He was a bit long in the tooth for that sort of thing. On the other hand, I could not help liking him very much, and admiring the qualities I sensed in his mind.
As if he appreciated the current of my feelings, he rose and bought us both another drink. We began to talk more generally.
When it was time for him to leave, he took my hand.
‘Is there anything I can do for the twins?’ I asked him.
He gave me a straight look which had in it both malice and humour. ‘I don’t know; is there?’
I looked down and saw how plump and brown my hand was between his. His were thin papery hands, marked with veins and liver spots. But there was still strength in them.
He said, ‘You are beautiful, Laura, and I see formidable qualities in you. Don’t get too emotionally involved with the Howes – though, heaven knows, they need someone like you. It could bring you a lot of unhappiness.’
Before I could think of an appropriate answer, he had climbed into his car. A wave of the hand and he was gone.
I went back into the bar, feeling I should have responded more adequately. I ordered another drink, then decided I had had enough.
