The Fahrenheit Twins (21 page)

‘Hi,’ said a young woman with big blue eyes and masses of blonde hair.

‘Hi,’ he said.

‘I’m from downstairs,’ she said. She wasn’t wearing lipstick but apart from that she was kind of almost the spitting image of Courtney Love. She had a cardigan on, but it wasn’t too mumsy, more like alternative clothing for students. Her hair was dyed and damaged from the chemicals but you can’t have everything. She had a great figure, great tits.

‘Yeah? I’m from upstairs,’ he quipped.

The woman wasn’t amused. She had a stressed look on her face. She wanted to get down to business. ‘I could use some help,’ she said.

‘Yeah?’ he said noncommittally.

‘There’s a mouse in my flat,’ she said. ‘I can’t stand mice.’

‘Hit it over the head with a whatsaname … a frypan,’ he advised her.

‘I don’t want him killed. But he’s got to go,’ she said.

‘So …’

‘So can you come and help me.’

‘What can
I
do?’

‘Are you scared of mice?’

‘No.’

‘Well, I am, so that makes you more qualified, doesn’t it?’

He fidgeted against the door jamb. He had no shoes on, his armpits were sweaty, he was aware that his Pixies T-shirt was tight around the belly.

‘Couldn’t you just buy a cat?’

She put her hands on her hips, and her bosom kind of poked out of the cardigan all by itself. ‘Look, I would like to be able to go to sleep tonight. Do you have a problem with that?’

The woman’s name was Gee or maybe G, he couldn’t tell which. Her flat was directly below his. Much cleaner than his, grime-wise, although just as messy, stuff-wise. Shoes, crumpled T-shirts and scrunched-up tights were scattered all over. Empty mugs in various pastel colours sat on the carpeted floor. A crappy sound system, balanced on a coffee-table rather than in a proper home entertainment cabinet, was piled high with the plastic cases of CDs by artists he didn’t recognise. A couple of loose discs lay on an angora sweater, reflecting the light from a ricepaper-shrouded lamp. The whole place smelled of Indian food.

‘OK, so where is your intruder?’ said Manny, balling his fists, as if about to engage in a bit of hand-to-hand.

‘I don’t know,’ said Gee. ‘He could be anywhere.’

‘He’s probably interested in nibbles,’ said Manny. ‘Let’s try the kitchen.’

The kitchen was tidier than the rest of the place; maybe Gee had already cleaned it up, to dissuade the rodent. All sorts of weird alternative food was standing around on the worktops: herbal tea, burgul, tamarind paste, goat’s milk. If the mouse had any fucking sense, he would have moved on to another flat by now.

‘What am I supposed to do if he’s hiding?’ said Manny.

‘He comes out frequently,’ said Gee. ‘He’s amazingly brazen about it.’

They stood together in the kitchen. The refrigerator hummed. There was a fridge magnet on the freezer compartment that said ‘UPLIFTMENT THROUGHOUT YOUR DAY’. There was also a reminder about a credit card payment and a half-disintegrated Bugs Bunny sticker.

‘Let’s sit down,’ said Gee. ‘He’ll come out if we sit down. Would you like a drink?’

‘A beer would be good.’

‘I don’t have any alcohol. I’ve got orange juice. Ribena. Goat’s milk …’

‘Coke?’

‘I could make you fresh lemonade, with sugar and lemons. Or if you want something fizzy, there’s a delicious Vitamin B supplement that comes in effervescent form. It’s even brown.’

He looked her straight in the face, to judge if she was taking the piss. Her expression was inscrutable.

‘Just orange juice, thanks,’ he said. ‘With ice. Have you got ice?’

‘I think so.’

She opened the fridge door, and immediately a mouse ran out from under the chassis.

‘Aaaaahhh!’ screamed Gee.

‘Aaaah!’ yelled Manny. They both jumped as the creature scurried near their shoes. Manny stamped his foot onto the parquet flooring but it was more a nervous gesture than a serious attempt to squash the mouse, which darted, unharmed, into the next room.

‘Don’t
do
that!’ cried Gee. ‘I told you I didn’t want him killed!’

‘Well, how do expect …?’

‘Catch him, what do you think?’

He was about to argue with her, but on second thoughts he was too squeamish to squash a mouse’s body under his foot. Besides, it would make a mess and this woman was so damn pushy she might expect him to clean her carpet afterwards.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Have you got a plastic container? Like, a container with a lid, the kind that take-away chinky food comes in?’

She frowned at the word ‘chinky’ but within a couple of seconds she had found exactly the sort of container he meant. It was transparent, with a very faint yellow discolouration from the Indian curry that had once been in it. She handed it over.

‘Thanks,’ he said.

‘I thought you said you weren’t scared of mice,’ she said.

‘It was the sh – shurprise,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t ready for it.’

‘But I
told
you there was a mouse here.’

‘I thought … I thought it might have left by now.’

She gave him a funny look. He wondered if she suspected him of suspecting her to be a nutter, some kind of sex pest who lured guys into her flat on a mouse-hunting pretext.

‘Orange juice, yes?’ she said.

They went and sat in the living room, on a flaccid green velour couch. He had the plastic food container in one hand and a glass of orange juice in the other. He drank the juice faster than he would’ve liked to, so that he could put the glass down and not look like such a pillock. She got settled next to him on the couch. There was a faint halo of milk on her upper lip from a gulp she’d taken in the kitchen; she had her hands free. What did she need her hands free for? He leaned away from her, as casually as he could. It was a small couch, sagging in the middle, and her body was inches away from his.

She picked up a CD from its angora nest and fed it into the CD player. She pressed a couple of buttons with her slender fingers. A sound like the oldfashioned Microsoft bootup ‘wave’ came on, the pleasingly abstract sound that Windows used to have before they changed it to the current annoying little tune. But then the sound from the CD didn’t die off, it went on and on and on, the same tone, like a choir stuck on one note with no need to breathe. Gee handed him the CD cover.
HU
, it said.

‘HU,’ he murmured. ‘Never heard of them. Electronica?’

‘It’s lots of people singing together, maybe a hundred. Somewhere in America, I think. It’s the Sound of Sounds.’

‘Very nice,’ he said. ‘Does anything else happen?’

‘No, it’s like this all the way. You just have to sort of sink into it.’

He slumped back into the couch, demonstrating goodwill. The voices from the sound system went ‘huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu.’

‘Where’d you get it?’ he asked, casting his gaze around the room in search of small grey rodents.

‘I bought it,’ she said. ‘It’s part of my training.’

‘Massage?’ As soon as he’d said it he blushed, in case she thought he meant sexual massage, like in a massage parlour.

‘No, it’s a spiritual thing.’

‘Right.’

‘Its part of Eckankar,’ she said. ‘My religion.’

‘Right.’

They sat together in silence, apart from the Americans going ‘hu’. Gee’s flat was warm and cosy and smelled good. Everything a mouse could want, probably. But the mouse was nowhere to be seen.

Eventually, Gee said: ‘I hear you sometimes.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Through the ceiling.’

‘Yeah?’

‘I hear you when you get angry. You yell “fuck”.’

He blushed again. ‘It’s my computer. It’s playing up. I’m having loads of problems with minidumps.’

‘Minidumps?’

He grimaced. ‘They’re … uh … when there’s a serious error, and… It’s a sort of default thing. The system dumps itself into a swap file for later retrieval. But sometimes… ah… It’s too complicated to explain.’ He stared at his hands, holding the plastic food container. The odd thing was, he could’ve been a lot more articulate if he’d made the effort. He could’ve spoken like a computer instruction manual written by experts. It’s just that Gee’s femaleness put him off. It was as if the equation they made, his gender and hers put together, could only add up to a certain kind of conversational result. A negative number.

‘You shouldn’t have to get so mad at a machine, ever,’ she said. ‘It’s just a heap of wires and printed circuits. You’re a soul. A spark of God.’

‘Uh-huh.’ He wondered if he had what it took to wait around until the mouse decided to show itself. The longer he stayed here, the more chance there was that this freaky woman would try to sell him on her whacko religion. ‘Have you considered rat poison?’ he asked.

‘I told you, I don’t want the mouse killed.’

‘It’s a soul, right?’

‘It could be a person,’ she agreed, ‘on their spiritual journey towards divinity.’

‘But right now it’s taking a cheese break, right?’

She smiled. The goat’s milk traces were still on her upper lip. He wanted to wipe them off, not because they disgusted him but because he thought she probably wouldn’t want to be sitting around with goat’s milk on her face and she couldn’t see it herself and he was too shy to tell her.

‘Can I tell you a bit about Eckankar?’ she said.

He gave it a few seconds’ thought. ‘I’m not much into religion,’ he warned her. ‘I probably wouldn’t get it.’

‘Oh, I don’t mind,’ she said. The room was warmer than it needed to be. She took off her cardigan and tossed it behind the couch. She had the most beautiful skin on her arms. It was lightly tanned, and in the lamplight he could see a very subtle down of pale golden hair on the tops of her forearms. She had thin wrists, exquisite. That was the word that came into his head, exquisite. Not a word that occurred to him often.

‘ECK is the Divine Spirit, the current of life that flows through all living things,’ she said, not particularly dramatically, more as if she was telling him about a great restaurant she’d discovered. ‘Eckankar unifies a person’s soul with Light and Sound, which are twin aspects of the Holy or Divine Spirit. Our souls are eternal and on a spiritual journey of reincarnation to discover our true selves.’

‘I’m with you so far,’ he said, gazing around the room.

‘The Light of God,’ she said, ‘appears in many ways. Sometimes it manifests as a sound. Sometimes it’s like a flash of white or blue light.’

‘Um … That must be brilliant.’

She laughed, a giggly, bronchial laugh. He wondered if she was high on something.

‘It
is
brilliant,’ she said. ‘Through ECK teachings, people can learn from their past lives and understand their Karma. There’s not really any such thing as sin, but we can be in error, and error can hold us back from the next level. The Spiritual Eye aids us on our soul journeys and in understanding our dreams. Do you have dreams, Manny?’

‘Uh … Yeah. Sometimes.’

‘What was the last dream you had? Can you remember it?’

‘Uh …’ He blushed. ‘I can’t remember.’

‘Dreams can be a kind of astral projection,’ Gee went on, raking her fingers through her hair. ‘We leave our bodies and travel to different places and meet different spiritual beings. These beings help us escape the cycle of error and realise ourselves. Dreams are journeys of discovery. And dreams are windows.’

He turned to her, glum. ‘Look, I … I think this is all … It doesn’t mean anything to me.’

‘It didn’t mean anything to me, either, six months ago. I was just like you.’

He snorted. A creature less like him was impossible to imagine. She was sitting so close to him he could smell her femaleness. The brocaded texture of her bra and the swell of her breasts were both visible through her T-shirt. Her wrists were maybe two-thirds the size of his. Her neck was smooth and delicate. He wanted to lie in her arms and come between her legs. He wanted to smash the jewel case of her damn ‘HU’ CD over her head. If there was a God, He would definitely be instructing the mouse to chew right through the electrical cord of the sound system, just to make those annoying Americans shut the fuck up.

‘It’s an American religion, right?’ said Manny, after a deep breath.

‘The spiritual home of Eckankar is the Temple of ECK in Chanhassen, Minnesota.’

‘I could’ve guessed.’ Manny thought of his internet buddy Varez, also located in Minnesota. How close was Duluth to Chanwhatsit, he wondered? Maybe Varez knew some of these Ecky people in his neighbourhood. Maybe the whole area was crawling with them, singing ‘hu’ in the checkout queues at the supermarket, at the chip shop, the bus stop, everywhere. Although maybe Minnesota didn’t have buses. Or chip shops.

‘It’s all about spiritual unfoldment,’ Gee was saying. ‘As you unfold spiritually, you learn to express the love of God through doing things for others.’

‘Well, I’m here to do something for you,’ he reminded her. ‘And I’m not interested in ECK.’

‘Sorry,’ she said, lowering her eyes. ‘I didn’t mean to hassle you. ECK’s not like that. It’s for people who are ready.’

‘Well, I’m ready for—’ He was about to make a wisecrack about a mouse, when lo and fucking behold, the mouse himself walked out from behind a stack of books and just sat there, in plain view, right in the middle of the room. Manny and Gee both froze.

The mouse seemed cool with this. He was the calmest mouse Manny had ever seen. His tiny eyes focused first on the man, then on the woman. He wasn’t even panting. Other than that, he was a standard, unexceptional mouse, with grey fur, pink feet and a tail. He was maybe five inches long, tail included. Gee was hyperventilating at the sight of him. Her bosom shook from the thud of her heartbeat.

Slowly, without taking his eyes off the rodent, Manny lowered himself to the floor. On his knees, he crawled across the carpet, holding the upside-down plastic container aloft in one hand. The mouse turned away from him, apparently unconcerned. Maybe the daft little fucker was stoned on some weird herbal tea he’d made the mistake of nibbling at.

With a swift, smooth motion, Manny brought the plastic container down. The mouse was trapped neatly underneath, with just a bit of tail sticking out.