The Fahrenheit Twins (29 page)

THE FAHRENHEIT TWINS

In Memory of Panda and Shiro

At the icy zenith of the world, far away from any other children, Tainto’lilith and Marko’cain knew no better than that life was bliss. Therefore, it
was
bliss.

Certainly they had plenty of space to play around in – virtually unlimited space. All around their house, acres of tundra extended in all directions, unpunctuated by fences, roads or other dwellings. A team of huskies could easily pull a sled with the little bodies of Tainto’lilith and Marko’cain on it, for miles, without even losing the frisk in their step. Time was also no problem: in almost perpetual Arctic twilight, there weren’t any rules about being back by sunset. The only thing the children’s mother absolutely insisted on was that they never leave the house without a compass, since the tundra looked much the same in all directions, especially when the snows were fresh. During the darker months, even the uncannily keen vision of the Fahrenheit twins was strained by the gloom, and navigation by the light of the moon on a sea of grey snow was impossible.

Still, however dark and treacherous, all that they surveyed was their domain. Nominally, the island of Ostrov Providenya was part of an archipelago that belonged to the Russians, but in reality no law extended far enough to include this barren wasteland encircled by a shifting morass of ice. The Fahrenheits were monarchs here, and their two children prince and princess.

‘What lies beyond?’ the twins once asked their father.

‘Nothing special,’ Boris Fahrenheit replied without looking up from his journals.

‘What lies beyond?’ they then asked their mother, knowing she tended to see things rather differently.

‘Oh, darlings, too much to explain,’ she teased. ‘You’ll see it all, when you’re tired of this little paradise.’ And she ruffled their unwashed hair, in that distantly affectionate way she had.

Physically, there was little in common between parents and offspring. Boris Fahrenheit was a tall thin German, grey of face and silver of hair, walking always slightly stooped as if the weight of his oversized knitted pullovers was too much for his skeletal frame to bear. Una was also tall, a blue-eyed, rosy-cheeked Aryan beauty with dyed black hair cut short in a between-the-wars style. She walked erect, keeping all the flesh firm. She was fifty-nine years old, and had produced her children well past the age where such things were considered feasible.

Tainto’lilith and Marko’cain were small, even for their age, which was somewhere between nine and eleven. No one had recorded the birth, and it was now too long ago for Boris and Una to recall the exact date. The children were clearly not adolescent yet, anyway. They tumbled around below the furniture, giggling, rounded with puppy fat. They smelled sweet. They wore without complaint the embroidered sealskin jumpsuits sewn together for them by their mother. They conversed with the huskies as equals.

Their hair was naturally black, hanging long over their ivory-white faces. Each pair of cheeks was sprinkled with cinnamon freckles, as well as a scattering of tiny puckered scars from a mysterious disease that had thankfully run its course without needing medical attention. Their brown eyes were large, with something of the seal about them: all dark iris and no whites, or so it seemed. They resembled neither their father nor mother, despite the fact that the Fahrenheits were, at the time of the twins’ conception, already long exiled from past friends. But Boris and Una had been shaped and coloured by the Old World, and their children by a sub-Polar archipelago, whose glacial contours could not even be mapped.

More than anything else, the twins’ characters were formed by benign neglect. To their father, they were an indulgence of their mother’s which he tolerated so long as it didn’t interfere with his research. To their mother, they were like robust little pets, pampered and cooed over when she was in a frivolous mood, forgotten about utterly when she had better things to do. Typically, she might spend hours bathing them and massaging whale oil into their skin, scolding them for spoiling their beautiful young flesh with so many calluses and scars; then for the next week she might scarcely notice their existence, nodding absentmindedly as they tore away into the icy night.

In any case, Boris and Una Fahrenheit were themselves often away from home, advancing the progress of knowledge. Specifically, they were away visiting the Guhiynui people, on whom they were the world’s foremost authorities. The Guhiynui being mistrustful of strangers, however, progress was slow, at least on fundamental issues. Una’s book on Guhiynui handicrafts had already been published and she was compiling another on their cuisine, but there was no end in sight on Boris’s long-awaited history, and despite the Fahrenheits’ best efforts the dark secrets of the Guhiynui’s sexual taboos had not yet been illuminated.

Of course, it was the Fahrenheits who must travel to the Guhiynui, not the other way around. And, because Boris and Una always travelled together, it transpired that Tainto’lilith and Marko’cain were often left alone in the house, with only the dogs for company, for days or weeks on end. This made them uncommonly self-sufficient, in a way that would have astounded visitors – if there had ever been any visitors.

The existence of Tainto’lilith and Marko’cain was in fact a secret from anyone in the green parts of the world. Few people had even heard of the island where the Fahrenheits lived, let alone the specifics of its invisible, unreachable population. Una had given birth at home, midwifing herself. Stoical in the face of the duplicated results, Boris had constructed a second cot identical to the first, the memory of how it was done still fresh in his mind.

The indistinguishable cots were apt. In all respects except genitals, Tainto’lilith and Marko’cain were identical twins. Their expressions were the same. There was even the same amount of light inside their eyes, a difficult thing to reproduce exactly.

One day their mother told them a story – a true story, she insisted – about how a future would come when their bodies would change beyond recognition. Tainto’lilith would grow teats, and Marko’cain would sprout a beard.

‘Oh ho!’ they chortled.

But their mother was serious, and this sewed a needle of anxiety through the tough skin of their hearts. From that moment on, the challenge of arresting the advance of time became a priority for Tainto’lilith and Marko’cain. The years must not be allowed to pass: they must be kept in check, securely corralled in the present. But how?

The answer must lie, the twins felt sure, in ritual – ritual being a concept that was much discussed in the Fahrenheit household, in reference to the Guhiynui. But Boris and Una were mere observers, too European to understand ritual in its visceral origins. Their black-maned, seal-eyed children were already devising a way to control the workings of the universe with such ready-to-hand materials as Arctic fox and knife.

Tainto’lilith and Marko’cain had never met the Guhiynui, but their minds seemed to work similarly – as Una always remarked whenever she saw her children setting off for some solemn ceremony, sled laden with improvised talismans, fetishes and ju-jus.

‘Ah, if it was
you
two trying to unlock the Guhiynui’s secrets,’ she flattered them, ‘instead of old Boris, you would get results in a hurry, wouldn’t you, my little angels?’

In fact, the twins were capable of great patience when it came to ritual. Certainly, like all children they were impetuous and never walked if they could run, but magic was a different thing from play. It was grand and elemental and couldn’t be rushed. You could wolf your dinner or jump recklessly into the embers of a bonfire, but picking at the threads of the fabric of time required more caution.

To crack the ‘teats and beard’ problem, for example, Tainto’lilith and Marko’cain planned a ritual which could only be performed once a year, at that potently magical moment when the summer sun rose above the horizon at last. Shortly beforehand, they would trap a fox, and make a cage for it – well, they’d have to make the cage first, perhaps. Then they would take the fox to the horizon and fasten it in position, its head facing where the sun was going to rise. Taller than their captive, the children were sure to spot the first glow of light coming, and, just as the fox was about to see it, Marko’cain would pinion the animal’s head with his knees while Tainto’lilith stabbed out its eyes.

Afterwards, they would kill it, although this wouldn’t be an essential part of the ritual – merely a gesture of mercy. And every year, they would repeat the ritual with a fresh fox, an eternally reincarnated fox that would always close its eyes rather than witness the changing of the season.

‘Do you think it will work?’ said Tainto’lilith.

‘I’m sure of it,’ Marko’cain assured her. ‘I feel it in my testaments.’

Having said that, there could be no doubt.

The great house where the Fahrenheits lived stood out from the landscape like an abandoned space ship on the moon. It was a domed monstrosity of concrete, steel and double-glazed glass, attached umbilically to a generator and humming gently all the time. Inside, it was decorated and furnished in the schmaltziest Bavarian style, with intricately carved cuckoo clocks, chocolate-brown tables and chairs, embroidered tapestries, glass cabinets filled with miniature poppets of all nations. A massive oil painting of golden reindeer in a forest of broccoli hung above the fireplace, which was never lit because the central heating took care of all that. There was no vegetation outside anyway, so nothing to burn except (if need ever be) the furniture and the Fahrenheits’ books and papers.

The kitchen was a Baroque wonderland of polished wood and brass; dozens of weirdly-shaped implements and utensils hung in neat rows on the walls. Few of them were ever used. All the Fahrenheits’ food came from a freezer the size of a Volkswagen, and Una boiled or baked it either in the grey pot with the cracked wooden handle or the singed pink ceramic oven dish, according to what it was. She was a pathologically forgetful cook and any meal not prepared by the children was likely to be a challenging affair, though occasionally she did get into moods when she would create elaborate pastries or even soups.

‘You need vitamins, minerals, and all those mysterious little trace elements,’ she would enthuse, serving each of her children some extraordinary treat on the special plates with the silver rims. ‘You can’t live on rubbish all the time, you know.’

The twins’ bedroom was painted mauve, as a bisexual compromise between pink and blue. Very little of the walls showed through, though, because of the density of prints and bookcases and shelves piled thick with knick-knacks. All these things had belonged to Una when she was a child; she had insisted on taking them with her to the island for her own personal, sentimental reasons, long before she had conceived of Tainto’lilith and Marko’cain. Over time, more and more of it was passed down to the children. Her eyes would mist over, and she would rush to fetch something from a locked cabinet or even a suitcase.

‘Here, I want you to have this,’ she would say, brandishing some ancient ornament or faun-coloured book. ‘If you promise to take care of it.’

From careful study of these things – the little wooden horses with real manes and tails, the crystal baubles with cherubs inside, the music boxes that played Alpine melodies, the stuffed mouse with the Tyroler hat, green velvet jacket and lederhosen – Tainto’lilith and Marko’cain pieced together an impression of who on earth their mother might be.

Conversation was considerably harder to come by. Una addressed perhaps a hundred sentences a year to her children, or even less if repetitions weren’t counted.

In view of this scarcity, the twins were compiling a ‘Book of Knowledge’, in which they faithfully recorded all the things their mother said to them. Not the half-hearted scoldings or the offhand domestic instructions, but anything more pregnant. The book – a hundred or so blank pages bound in stiff, intricately patterned covers – was a sacred object and mistakes were not allowed. Every word, every letter proposed for inclusion in it was discussed by the twins beforehand, practised on scrap paper, then inscribed onto the creamy white pages with great care. Appropriately enough, the first thing written into the book was what their mother had told them about the book itself when she’d presented it to them.

‘This book was once a tree.’

It was an intriguing thought. The Fahrenheits’ house was infested with paper – hardbound texts, maps, German romances, very old newspapers, glossy magazines flown in from Canada, plus of course Boris and Una’s own mountains of notes and journals. All these, if mother was to be believed, had once been trees. The notion was doubly potent because the children had never seen a tree, except in books.

Their own attempt to grow such a miraculous thing for themselves, by pulping a book into paste and burying it in a compost of excrement and yeast, had not been successful.

Disappointed, they’d worked up the courage to knock at their mother’s study, to ask her the exact recipe for trees.

‘Not now, darlings,’ she warned them, leaning further into the pearly light of her desk lamp.

One day, Boris and Una Fahrenheit returned from yet another visit to the Guhiynui, landing their grimy blue-and-silver helicopter just outside the house as usual. They disembarked, one from each side of the cabin, stooping under the whirling blades. Tainto’lilith and Marko’cain watched them from the dining room window, through the trickling shimmer of condensation. Four cuckoo clocks, in various rooms of the house, started cooing simultaneously. In the snows outside, a chaos of huskies swirled around the grown-ups, barking and snuffling.

It was obvious, even before Boris and Una reached the front door, that they were in an unusually subdued mood. They were neither arguing like bitter enemies nor (as was equally common) discussing their findings like affectionate colleagues on the brink of a breakthrough. Instead, Una walked into the house silent and pale, pausing only to let her coat fall to the floor before disappearing into the bedroom.