The Fahrenheit Twins (30 page)

Boris, a few steps behind, followed her to the bedroom door, then thought better of it. He left the house again, and busied himself putting the helicopter away. Tainto’lilith and Marko’cain watched him through the glass, wiping the condensation away with their pyjama’d elbows,
pwoot woot woot
.

Eventually their father was ready to give them an explanation.

‘Your mother has eaten something that disagreed with her,’ he said. ‘Don’t be surprised if this ends badly.’

This was the sum of his thoughts on the matter, but it was enough to galvanise the twins into action.

For the next three days, Tainto’lilith and Marko’cain put aside all childish things in order to nurse their mother in her bed. Holding back offers of nurture only during those arbitrary hours of ‘night’ when their parents were actually sleeping together, they devoted every remaining minute to a routine of snacks, cold compresses, warm towels, fizzy pills and hot water bottles.

‘Oh, you are such little darlings,’ Una beamed at them, her face glowing like a gas flame. ‘My own mother couldn’t have nursed me better than you two are doing.’

Pride in this distinction didn’t blind the twins to the fearsome obstinacy of their mother’s illness. As the days passed, they grew stoical in their acceptance of the prophesied ‘bad end’, which in their minds was their mother having to be transported hundreds of miles to the nearest hospital.

Instead, she died.

Bringing the breakfast as usual, the twins found their father loitering outside her bedroom, fully dressed.

‘She’s dead,’ he said, then smiled a ghastly smile as if trying to reassure them that he would not let a thing like this cast a shadow over their welfare.

‘But we have her breakfast,’ said Tainto’lilith.

‘It’s all right, you weren’t to know,’ said Boris.

Seeing that the twins were not taking his word for it, he stepped aside to let them into the bedroom where, at some uncertain time during the night, his wife had finally left him. The event seemed to have rendered him oddly lenient, almost tender.

Tainto’lilith put down the tray of tea and oatmeal just outside the door, and followed her brother in. Una Fahrenheit was lying horizontal in the bed, sheets pulled up to her chin. Her flesh was the colour of peeled apple. Her mouth hung slackly open, her eyes were only half shut. There was nothing happening inside her skull; it was deserted.

Boris stood in the doorway, arms loosely folded, waiting for Una’s children to confirm the correctness of his judgement.

Tainto’lilith and Marko’cain dawdled around the bed, sobbing and snivelling softly. Then, briefly, they wailed. In time, they stopped moving and made a little space for themselves on the edge of the mattress next to their mother’s body. They sat there, shoulder to shoulder, breathing in turns. Outside the bedroom, the tongues of dogs slurped at oatmeal and cold tea.

‘What happens to her now?’ Marko’cain asked the shadowy figure in the doorway.

‘Burial,’ said their father. ‘Or cremation.’

‘Oh,’ said Marko’cain. He was thinking angels might still come down from the snowy sky and scoop his mother’s body up to Heaven. Hidden somewhere far beyond the featureless gloom of the Polar atmosphere, there might be an exotic paradise of teak and lace, laid out ready for Una Fahrenheit. Perhaps only the reinforced concrete of the ceiling was keeping the angels from getting in.

‘I’ll leave the final decision to you,’ said Boris, with a heavy sigh. ‘Don’t think too long about it, though.’

Left alone with their thoughts, Tainto’lilith and Marko’cain wept a little longer, then began to plan for the future.

They were angry, of course, that the opportunity of saving their mother had not been offered them. Had they seriously imagined she might die, they would certainly have done something to stop it. The universe was not above agreeing to bargains of various kinds, providing enough advance warning was given.

But she was dead now, and that was that.

‘We are orphans now, like in the storybook of
Little
Helmut and Marlene
,’ suggested Tainto’lilith.

‘Well … not really,’ frowned Marko’cain. ‘We have a father.’

‘For how much longer?’

‘He looks quite well.’

‘That’s not what I meant.’

‘You think he will leave us now that mother is gone?’

‘It’s possible,’ said Tainto’lilith.

‘Ours is the only house on the island,’ objected Marko’cain.

‘He may go and live with the Guhiynui. He knows them a lot better than us, and some of them are bound to be women.’

Marko’cain considered this for a minute, then said,

‘We are talking about the wrong things.’

Behind them on the bed, the body of their mother was waiting.

‘True,’ said Tainto’lilith.

The important question was, what ritual would be the right one for their mother – not simply in the matter of removing her body, but also in commemorating all she had been in spirit. She was, after all, no mere piece of refuse to be disposed of.

‘We buried Snuffel,’ recalled Marko’cain. Snuffel was the children’s pet name for Schnauffel, one of the huskies who had died a couple of years before. They had buried him near the generator, in the lush soft earth surrounding the hot water pipes. An elaborate ceremony had accompanied the burial, involving recitations, toys and raw meat.

‘Snuffel was a dog,’ said Tainto’lilith. ‘Our mother isn’t a dog.’

‘I’m not saying we should do it exactly the same. But we could bury her along with her favourite things.’

‘She would hate to have her things buried. Whenever she gave us something, she was always upset if we got it dirty.’

‘But won’t she be in a box?’

‘I don’t know. Father didn’t say anything about a box.

And you remember when we asked about making the fox cage, he said he had no wood to waste on such foolishness.’

Marko’cain sat slumped in thought. Outside the door, the dogs’ tongues stopped lapping and their soft clicking footfalls faded away. These things and more were made audible by the silence of their mother on the bed behind them.

‘I think,’ said Marko’cain at last, ‘Mother should be buried in very deep snow. Then, if after a time we decide we have done the wrong thing, we can fetch her out and she will still be good.’

For some reason this made Tainto’lilith cry again. Her brother put his arm around her convulsing shoulders. The bed shook gently, its three burdens bobbing up and down.

‘She wouldn’t
like
to be buried in snow,’ sobbed Tainto’lilith.

Marko’cain bit his lower lip and frowned.

‘Dead people don’t feel anything, do they?’

‘Don’t they?’

‘It’s in the Book of Knowledge, I’m sure.’

They went and fetched the Book of Knowledge, and found the relevant page. Sure enough, there it was:
Dead
people don’t feel anything
.

The physical act of fetching the Book of Knowledge, quite apart from what was in it, helped the twins feel a little better somehow. It got them out of their mother’s bedroom for a minute, allowing their accumulated grief to escape like harmful fumes into the hallway. When they returned, the bedroom seemed airier and more benign. Una Fahrenheit was lying exactly where they had left her, unchanged to the smallest wisp of hair and glint of tooth. So clear was it from this that her spirit had departed, that the children lost much of their terror of the body she’d left behind. It was a husk, no longer truly their mother – more like their mother’s most treasured possession, which had been given to them as a parting gift.

All they had to do was decide how best to pass that gift on to the universe. There was, after all, a possibility that their mother was taking a lot more interest in her children now that she was dead and her splendid body was in their care. Always so well-preserved in life, she might be watching them anxiously from somewhere up above, to make sure she wasn’t mistreated or neglected in death.

‘I still don’t like to think of her frozen,’ said Tainto’lilith, ‘even if she can’t feel it. She is our mother, not a piece of lamb in the freezer.’

Marko’cain nodded, accepting this, but then an instant later he frowned, stung in the forehead by a new idea.

‘Perhaps we should eat her,’ he said.

‘Oh! What a horrible bad thought!’ cried his sister.

‘Yes, so there must be power in it,’ he reasoned.

Tainto’lilith bit her lower lip, thinking. All ideas must be considered carefully. The universe knew what was best for everyone, even if the way to its heart might sometimes be hard to understand.

Gamely, she tried to imagine the universe smiling down on such a hideous ritual, tried to imagine being brave enough to sacrifice her own feelings to it. Certainly there was a potent appeal in the idea of making their mother disappear inside them, rather than abandoning her body to parasites or the elements.

‘She is too big,’ said Tainto’lilith at last. ‘If I could eat her like an apple – or half an apple – I would do it.’

‘We could eat a little of her for the rest of our lives,’ suggested her brother. ‘Eat nothing else, ever. That would a very strong thing to say to the universe.’

‘This is silly talk,’ sighed Tainto’lilith. ‘I am feeling sick. Think of the hair.’

‘We could do something else with the hair.’

‘This is silly talk.’

‘Yes, you are right.’

Crestfallen, they sat on the edge of the bed, the Book of Knowledge lying closed on the floor at their feet.

‘Well … what is left?’ said Tainto’lilith after a while.

‘The best thing,’ said Marko’cain.

‘What do you mean?’ said Tainto’lilith.

‘All that we have thought of so far is no good,’ said Marko’cain. ‘So, the best thing is still left.’

That was cheering. They pondered with renewed vigour.

‘Father seemed most in favour of cremation,’ remarked Marko’cain. ‘That is, burning her.’

‘How do you know?’

‘It was the way he spoke the word.’

‘He said he would let us decide, though.’

‘But not to take too long.’

‘What time is it?’

‘I don’t know. The cuckoos will tell us soon.’

‘I don’t like the thought of burning mother,’ fretted Tainto’lilith. ‘It is worse than eating her. It’s like starting to cook her and then forgetting, and coming back to find her all black and ruined.’

‘The Guhiynui burn their dead people, I’m sure I heard father say.’

‘Every tribe has its own rituals,’ Tainto’lilith said, struggling with hand gestures to make him understand. ‘The universe knows we are not Guhiynui. The universe isn’t stupid. We have to do something that is right for the tribe that
we
are.’

‘You think we are a tribe?’

‘Of course we are a tribe.’

‘Just the two of us?’

‘There are more of our kind where our mother and father came from. That’s our tribe.’

‘Father says they are all imbeciles and back-stabbers there. And mother said once that they let the streets get dirty, and another time that the trains are always late and full of rude people who will not stand up for a lady.’

‘Still they are our tribe.’

Marko’cain had become agitated, picking at little scabs on his knuckles and shuffling his feet.

‘I can’t remember why we are talking about these things,’ he said despondently.

‘Neither can I,’ admitted Tainto’lilith.

‘If only mother could tell us what she wants done.’

‘Perhaps she will send us a sign.’

‘Perhaps father will come back soon, and tell us we’ve run out of time.’

As if to confirm this, several cuckoo clocks went off at once, filling the house with the sound of mechanical birdsong.

After much discussion, the twins finally worked up the courage to tell their father they wanted to take their mother away with them into the wilderness. Once they were far enough out there, they would wait for a signal from the universe as to the best thing to do with the body.

Surprisingly, Boris Fahrenheit agreed.

‘You
are
little primitives, aren’t you?’ he commented, with new respect. ‘I had thought of commissioning some sort of Christian minister to fly out here and do the job, but I’m sure you would do better. You are blood, after all.’

Uncharacteristically, he began running about like a maniac, gathering together the necessaries for their journey.

‘With the extra weight, the dogs will be slower, and will get hungry and thirsty sooner: you must allow for that,’ he cautioned, filling a large canister with boiling water.

‘You must take a hamper of food for yourselves,’ he went on. ‘And food for the dogs. And fuel for a fire, if … if you need to make a fire. And I will fetch the compass for you. That is essential.’

Within half an hour he had organised them, hamper and all, and escorted them out of the house. In all those thirty minutes, from the moment the twins had announced their intention right up to the moment they stepped onto the snows, he scarcely stopped talking, reminding them of all the things they must do to keep safe. It was a totally unprecedented and, in the circumstances, bizarrely maternal display of fuss. Had there not been an important mission to accomplish, the twins might have considered inaugurating a whole new Book of Knowledge, merely to contain all the advice and instruction their father was shovelling onto them now.

They stood together in the chill wind and the horizon-less gloom, the three remaining members of the Fahrenheit family. The huskies were harnessed and ready, their breath clouding silver in the tungsten porch-light. The corpse of Una Fahrenheit, wrapped in furs and bound with leather straps, was secured on a long sled, shackled behind the twins’ buggy like a tenacious seal.

‘And remember!’ Boris shouted after them as they slid away towards the wasteland, ‘If you need to send up a flare, avert your eyes as you fire!’

Faces blushing hot with mortification and fear, Tainto’lilith and Marko’cain urged the dogs to go faster, to escape from the avalanche of unwanted love.

For what seemed like eternity but was probably only an hour or two, the twins raced full-pelt across the sugary tundra.