The Fahrenheit Twins (18 page)

‘Where’s your baby now?’ asked the policewoman.

‘At home.’

‘Who’s looking after him?’

Christine thought for a moment.

‘The neighbours,’ she replied. In truth, she hardly knew the neighbours, couldn’t have picked them out of a police line-up.

The policewoman noticed her momentary hesitation, and sat back formally, to signal the end of the interview.

‘Well, you’d better go and rescue your neighbours then.’

‘Yes,’ said Christine.

When Christine returned home, the sound of the baby’s screaming was leaking through the four walls of the house like a muted fire siren. She looked at her neighbours’ houses on either side; there was no sign of life. Perhaps there were women in those houses; perhaps not. Perhaps there were even women with babies. The curtains were drawn, opaque as the ozone layer separating earth from space.

Christine opened the door of her own little house and let herself in. The screaming was instantly much louder, of course: there were different acoustic principles operating on this side of the threshold.

She walked straight over to her baby’s cot. He was purple from shrieking, and smelled of sewage. It was not his normal bad smell, but something aggressively more evil.

Christine began to undress him, but the stink pierced her sinuses like a needle-thin skewer. Her baby’s eyes bulged as he screamed, as if in outrage at her idiocy in imagining she could make things better for him. Christine refastened the press-studs on his jumpsuit, sealing up the poisonous nappy while she considered what to do.

She picked her baby up and held him above her head, high above her head. She stared up at him.

His body was a black mass against the electric light bulb, a squirming eclipse of this indoor sun. She held him there for a long time, staring up at his dark howling face and his loose broken limbs dangling so close to her face.

Then, with all her strength, she threw him across the room, bouncing him off the wall with a plasticene thud.

As before, she immediately went to retrieve her baby. It was important that there should be no delay between action and reaction. As long as you responded at once, things would always be OK. In a flash, she crossed the room to where her baby’s body lay and scooped it up in her arms. But there was something missing, she could tell.

Her baby’s head had come off from his body. Christine dropped to her knees, still hugging the loose-limbed torso to her breast with one arm, and scanned the carpeted floor from wall to wall. She spied the head at once: it had rolled underneath a table.

Gently Christine laid her baby’s body down on the carpet and crawled over to the table in question. She retrieved the head (too big for one hand: she had to use both) and squatted to examine it. She flipped it over, exchanging the hairy back for the fleshy front. Cradling the baby’s face in her hands, she turned it clockwise until its knitted brows were parallel to hers.

Her baby looked at her as though for the first time. He uttered no sound. An expression of dawning human intelligence replaced his customary look of animal cunning. His lips twitched, as if he might have something to say to her at last.

Then, after two languorous blinks, his eyes fell shut like a porcelain doll’s. Drained of the ruddiness of fury, his skin was pale, like the skin of the glossy babies in glossy baby magazines.

Careful to move smoothly, Christine carried the sleeping head to the sleeping body and reunited the two.

From this day on, Christine’s baby was never any trouble. He kept to himself in his cot, making no demands. Nature had taken over, as the policewoman had hinted that it would.

A window opened in Christine’s existence, inviting her to look through. She hesitated, unsure. Her soul was so tiny, a shrivelled little thing which trembled inside her massive swollen body like an escaped laboratory mouse in an abandoned, echoing research institute.

Experimentally, Christine at last resumed doing something she’d done habitually in a previous life: she began reading a book. It was a hardback novel from the bestseller lists, brought home to her by her husband several days before. Since taking shy possession of it, she had read only a few pages, tiring quickly of the unaccustomed mental exercise. But it seemed good so far. It was what her fellow grownups were reading, right now, everywhere across the country, perhaps even the world.

Her husband stood at their baby’s cot as she turned the pages.

‘How’s my little man, then?’ he murmured, not daring to touch. ‘Very quiet today.’

‘Yes, he’s a good boy,’ agreed Christine. ‘Isn’t it time for the news?’

ALL BLACK

‘Are we there yet?’

My daughter’s head stirs on my shoulder. Lulled by the thrum-da-dum-dum of the train, I have been dozing too. Daydreaming of John stroking the small of my naked back, his middle finger straying into the cleft of my bottom. I blink against the reality of this long journey away from him.

‘Let me see my watch,’ I say, shrugging at my right arm under the weight of her warm little body. She moves just enough for me to get my wrist into view.

‘Ages to go yet,’ I say.

‘But it’s dark.’

‘It just looks that way,’ cause the lights are on and the train windows are tinted.’ It’s an authoritative, grown-up explanation, but inside me I have my doubts. It really does look quite dark out there. I wonder if my watch is wrong.

‘Are you hungry?’

She doesn’t reply. Asleep again. My forearm has pins and needles now; I flex my hand, but carefully. If I move too much, my daughter will get irritable and shift her head from my shoulder to my lap. I can’t afford to be seen with my daughter’s head in my lap, even by total strangers on a train. If my wife heard about it, she’d accuse me of paedophilia, incest, child abuse, whatever. My access rights are hanging by a thread as it is.

Looking sideways, across the aisle, at the man flicking through the free railway magazine, I manage to read the digital numbers on his wristwatch. They’re the same as on mine. Yet outside, it looks like sunset.

I rub my eyes with my left hand. My eyelids are still sore from all the crying. I am in transit between two people who are furious with me. I am travelling two hundred miles only to exchange one tantrum of hysterical jealousy for another.

My wife can’t talk to me for two minutes without letting me know how much it hurts her to live on the same planet as me. We’ll start off talking about Tess, what our daughter has or hasn’t had to eat or drink, and almost immediately my wife will be shrieking, weeping, threatening, invoking the name of her lawyer. Weeks pass without me seeing Tess, and I have to get the woman at legal aid to write a letter for me, so that my wife doesn’t bin it unread. Then finally we come to some arrangement. I can take Tess to McDonalds. Or the zoo. Or the movies. Two hundred miles’ journey, and I pay to sit in a dark cinema with my daughter as she watches sentimental heterosexual garbage from the Walt Disney corporation.

When Tess is with her mother, which is almost every minute of my life, my partner John is happy. He doesn’t mention her, pretends she doesn’t exist. He sucks my cock as if it’s never had any biological purpose except to give him pleasure. He revels in the freedom of unsafe sex with me, secure in the knowledge that I’m no risk. It’s as if he’s encoded my ten years of faithful marriage as some kind of pre-sexual state, a miraculous virginity preparing me for him. All we have to do is be inseparable from each other, and the plagues of the world can’t touch us.

But when I talk about how much I miss my daughter, his face darkens. In a manner of speaking. John being black.

This visit, the first time Tessa came to stay a weekend with me in my new home, has been hell. Hell for me, hell for John. I don’t know what Tessa thought of it all. John didn’t mention her name when he was shouting abuse and recriminations at me, as I was leaving. He was at least mature enough not to do that. He’s growing older too, little by little. Soon – if we can get over this – the age difference between us will matter less and less.

Something is wrong with the train. It’s slowing to a halt. The sky outside is grey, as if overcast, even though it’s cloudless. The train stops.

‘Are we there yet?’

‘Nowhere near.’

‘What’s happening?’

‘I don’t know.’

The train starts moving backwards, smoothly and quietly. Tess sits up and presses her face and palms against the window, watching the trees and electricity poles going the wrong way.

An announcement comes over the PA. There is signalling failure up ahead, and the train is going back a few stops, to Perth. From there, passengers for Edinburgh and beyond will be conveyed by coach. Apologies, unavoidable, every effort being made, make sure you have all your personal belongings with you, don’t lumber us with your luggage.

‘Are we going back to John’s house?’ Tessa asks, frowning.

‘It’s not John’s house,’ I retort without thinking. ‘It’s my house.’

She is silent. My claim is nonsense to her: how can a house that doesn’t have her and Mummy in it be mine? I am sick with misery. The greatest victory my wife can win is for every truly happy memory I have of our daughter and me to be locked in the past – the straight years. I’m not allowed to have any happy parenting memories that don’t have my wife in them, as if all the wonderful moments (chasing the squealing toddler Tess around the garden with the watering can, balancing her on her tricycle, teaching her how to put new laces in her trainers) were only possible because Heather was standing by, approving.

‘No, we’re not going back,’ I sigh. ‘The train has to drop us off at a station. The special lights it needs to see the safe way home aren’t working properly. We’re going on a coach instead.’

‘With horses?’

‘No, coaches are … well, they’re buses, basically.’

I know she’s going to ask me what the difference is, and I’m racking my brains in the few seconds’ grace.

‘What’s the difference between a coach and a bus?’

‘I don’t think there is one. It’s like the difference between films and movies.’

John wouldn’t like that, theatre director that he is. For him, films are uncompromising arty projects made by
auteurs
. Movies are Hollywood hamburgers made by homophobic corporations. But there is a bigger world of language outside John’s narrow queer one. It’s not my world anymore, but it exists. And most people live in it.

‘Has John got a job?’ my daughter asks, as fearlessly as if she were asking if he owned a bicycle.

‘I told you: he’s a playwright. He writes plays.’

‘Like
Peter Pan
?’

‘No. For grown-ups. One of his plays was being performed at a special festival just before we came up to visit.’

‘What was it about?’

My mind goes blank when I think of John’s play. At first I think this is because I’m stressed with grief at the memory of him telling me we can’t go on together, then I think it’s because of how difficult it is to explain a gay play to a child so as not to make her mother go ballistic.

After a few more seconds, I realise it’s neither of those things. In the lurid electric light of the train interior, travelling backwards with my eight-year-old daughter at my side, I suddenly realise that my gorgeous talented award-winning partner’s play wasn’t about anything really, except being gay. Judged next to any children’s story, it had no plot to speak of.

I take a deep breath.

‘It was about … Somebody tries to get a person to give up being a politician.’

‘How?’

‘By telling a secret about him.’

‘What secret?’

I snigger playfully, caught between fatherly tease and infantile embarrassment.

‘It’s a secret,’ I wink.

‘Can I see the play?’ she says, rising to the challenge.

‘It’s over,’ I tell her.

‘Over?’

‘It was on for a while,’ I say, recalling the passions, the intrigues, the arguments, the complicated negotiations, that were poured into those ten long days. ‘Then it closed.’

There is a pause while Tess chews this over.

‘So everybody knows the secret except me,’ she says at last.

‘Yeah,’ I grin, feeling dirty, as ashamed of my cowardice and my compromise as Tessa’s mother would like me to feel of my sexuality itself.

The train is stopping at Perth station: more PA messages about not leaving anything behind. Tessa peers through the window at the descending gloom.

‘Is it night time?’ she says, as she gathers her things together.

‘No, it’s only afternoon. Four thirty.’

‘Is it going to rain, then?’

I’m preoccupied with checking we have everything while people jostle past us through the aisle.

‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

‘My carry bag is open at the top,’ she reminds me. ‘I don’t want my new book to get wet.’

I am shocked by this concern of hers. Her new book is
Great People Through The Ages
, given her as a present by John when she first arrived – when he was still able to keep his feelings under control. I would’ve thought she’d want to dump the book in the nearest rubbish bin as soon as I wasn’t looking. But she is frowning, trying to figure out a way of folding the top of her carry bag so the rain can’t get in.