Tomorrow (17 page)

27

GEMINI.
On the tenth of June,
1979.
And, as we have told you, without any fraudulent invention, at more or less two in the morning. Something we certainly couldn’t specify, but it was what we got. What an extraordinary, world-transforming little word it suddenly seemed to be: two.

And how did your father feel, even months before—when he looked with me at that wobbly screen? Doubly excluded, doubly dismissed? It’s important for you to know, it’s of the utmost relevance for tomorrow. I was there—I had to be—to see you for the first time, but I also looked at your father. And what I saw, for the first time, was that it was
real
for him. Whatever he may have expected, whatever reactions he may even have prepared, he was smitten from that moment on, as smitten as I was, by you. Quite simply, I saw your father swoon, I saw him tip into love all over again—excuse me for saying so, but I think I could recognise the spectacle. I could almost see the train of thought in his head. Not his? No—not really? Mine, certainly. But none of that was the point. Ours,
ours.

A strange, rather chilly contraption (but thank heaven for it) was resting on my belly and I was trying to keep as still as possible, but I wondered if the rush of emotion passing through me, and, for all I know, through you, was making that little screen wobble and judder—“dance” perhaps I mean—so much the more.

On the way back in the car I was genuinely worried your dad’s mind might not be on the road. “Mikey, the lights have turned green.”

Truly, we’d never supposed, in all our suppositions and imaginings, that you might be two—if I can put it like that. Was that thoroughly short-sighted of us? In all our calculations, and how absurd it seems, we’d used only basic arithmetic, we’d never got beyond the simple addition of one. But for sixteen years now, whatever else they may amount to, we’ve been living in the binary system. This strange equilibrium: a family of two couples. There’s always been that bond and that division between us. I don’t honestly know how it will affect tomorrow. Suppose there were just one of you now to inform. Poor thing. Suppose there were two of you, but with the usual sort of gap. How would that have affected our sixteenth-birthday principle?

You’ll sit side by side on the sofa. You’ll have each other.

And as for your twinness in itself: I bow to it. I don’t pretend to fathom it, even if I am your mother. You’re well aware by now that your parents, this other couple here, consist of two “onlies.” A completely different route into life, a completely different grounding. When we first knew you were two, we had only the usual jumble of uneducated notions. We know a bit more now. But in sixteen years of being the mother of twins and of observing you even more closely perhaps than the average mother, I can’t say I’ve got beyond the conclusion that only twins themselves know what it’s like.

They say you’re a race apart, a separate lore. You’re not like the rest of us, either in your dealings with the world or in your dealings with each other. Do you think that’s all hokum? A special understanding surely gets formed in that double confinement in the womb. It’s not, at least, like the standard experience when there’s only room for one and our arrival on the scene is a big, bawling solo act. Me! Me! Me!

They say you’re less selfish, you’ve learnt to share. They say you’re the opposite: you’re selfishness times two. There’s nothing you won’t do for each other in the eternal struggle with non-twins. Or, then again, behind your interchangeable smiles (but I’ve never thought your smiles were identical), you’re really at war with each other: sibling rivalry without limits.

We’ve seen you slip in and out of almost every version, every interpretation of twinness, play it up, play it down, play against it. Oh you know how to perform. But the truth is, and you both must know it, you were living proof of the harmony principle. You tug against each other now, as if you know that life, for you, will mean the difficult art of separation, but underneath there’s still that sweet solidarity, that glue that you came with. Will tomorrow just bring you together again? Bind you? Thwart you? Delay you?

Nick and Kate; two little balancing sounds. We just liked them. It works the longer way too: Nicholas and Katherine. Apart from that wonderful wobbly image on the screen, I’ve always had the picture in my head of a seesaw. Nick-and-Kate, Nick-and-Kate, a seesaw, your two monosyllables riding up and down. A seesaw can be a grim confrontation: one can give the other a hell of a ride. Or it can be an instrument of swaying delight. And that’s how it’s mostly been, with the occasional rhythmic agitation: swaying delight—in you yourselves, and swaying delight in us, your almost jealous beholders.

What had we done to deserve you? But we knew
exactly
what we’d done or, in Mike’s case, not done. Was it in some weird way
because
of that? Or was the trick of it that you were boy and girl? It’s only with boy-twins or girl-twins that the trouble starts? But a boy and girl born together is like a perfect piece of matchmaking. You even used to say (deny it though you will) that you wanted to marry. So in that way too you took after your parents. A seesaw for four—boy-girl, boy-girl—that’s rocked and swayed away for sixteen years.

And that little discrepancy between you only seemed to enhance the balance. Even with twins, there’s priority—one of you had to be born first. And that was you, Kate, by a length. It’s known among the four of us, but it’s stamped upon you anyway: that edge, that lead you’ve always had. But I never saw it as the sign of some race between you—quite the opposite, in fact.

It’s absurd, when I was
there
, trying my utmost (I assure you) to make the whole astonishing thing happen, that I sometimes picture your birth as if I had nothing to do with it. All your own mutual work. As if you were in some hidey-hole together, waiting your chance, two would-be escapers, and it was you, Kate, who had the courage to poke your head out first and see if all was clear. And the first thing you did was not to make your own quick, brave bolt for it, but to turn back and reach out your hand: “Come on, Nick. It’s okay. Let’s go!”

At two o’clock in the morning, in these small hours, sixteen years ago. I wouldn’t have known if it was raining then, the weather was my last concern.

You helped your brother into the world, Kate. Isn’t that the truth of it? And that’s meant something that I could never have foreseen and that’s occasionally upset the happy motion of the seesaw, if it’s also added, strangely, to its balance. We recognise it between us, I think, don’t we, if it’s never been uttered? That you and I are rival mothers, so far as Nick is concerned. If you both have rival fathers—who will be introduced to you, so to speak, tomorrow—Nick has always had his rival mums.

I think that little pucker was really in his brow at birth, Kate, don’t you? Help me! Wait for me! But since both your faces were such a mass of puckers and creases at that time, I can never be sure. Two little shrimps? Two little livid dumplings! “His father’s frown”—that’s how we say it, that way round. But why shouldn’t we just as well say of a father, why shouldn’t it be just as natural: “Oh, he has his son’s way of knotting his brow?”

Your lungs announced their presence, Nick, seven minutes after your sister. I think your father also gasped.

What will happen tomorrow? But what’s the worst fear of any parent anyway? It starts in the delivery suite. Don’t mix them up with
anyone else’s.
Having got you, and in such an elaborate way, how frightened we were of losing you. I’m not thinking now, at all, of tomorrow. Of losing you
anyway.
Your precious little arrived-together selves. Someone should have told us about this perfectly normal parental terror. But didn’t having it prove that we
were
normal parents?

You can’t have the one thing (or indeed the two) without the other, the possession without the dread: it’s the fundamental contract. Don’t think for one moment that our peculiar contract in any way diminished that. And don’t doubt when you learn what you’ll learn tomorrow that there’s ever been any difference in that respect between the two of us.
We
’re perfect twins, that way, too. Both of us, either of us would lay down our lives in an instant if it meant not losing either or both of you.

But you know this. You’ve even borne witness to it—or almost. You know, of course, what I’m coming to. What shocked me and paralysed me, that terrible day in Cornwall—what added, I mean, to my multiple shock, panic, terror, utter distraction—was your father’s own terrifying insistence. He
screamed
it at me, he
ordered
me: “No! Me! Wait there!” As if, amid everything else, he saw this as his moment of opportunity.

He was the stronger, of course, but I was the better swimmer. He knew this: he’d seen me at Craiginish, he’d seen me in Brighton. He’d seen me, for goodness’ sake, right there in Cornwall. But he dived in almost at the same time as he let out that yell to me. How was he to know that that current that was pulling you out and away from the rocks wouldn’t be as defeating for an adult as for your own nine-year-old frames?

It swept him out to you quickly enough at least. To
both
of you. I’d already, for the second time in my life, taken overpowering and indelible note of your both-ness. That is, that you were being drawn away from dry land by some force that neither of you could resist and you, Nick, even less than your sister, but you weren’t going to be separated from each other. Your two bobbing heads, like linked, swirling buoys—another image of you that’s with me for ever.

Mike moved rapidly towards you, almost too rapidly. I could only see the back of his own bobbing head. I had the unthinkable thought that in the next few gliding moments you would
all
be lost, all pulled away from me, all that mattered to me, and I would have to watch. I saw myself standing alone on bare rock, wishing to turn to rock myself.

Everything in my memory of that day is like some evil blend of the benign and the horrific. It was a beautiful day, it was hot, it was more like a day in the Mediterranean than in Cornwall. It was the third summer we’d spent by that little safe, sandy cove and we thought we could trust you now if you scampered off a bit further. You’d learnt to swim two years before. You were good and confident at it, like me. The sea was blue and wallowy and lazy, the tide was coming in. On the other side of the headland, when we got there, there was a touch of breeze and a bit of swell and slap to the waves, but no one would have called that sea dangerous.

There were other happy people on the beach. The two of us had been swimming not so long before and we were lying, drying, becoming sweetly drowsy. It sends a terror through me, even now, that we might have just fallen asleep. But we both had the sudden simultaneous alarm:
where are they?
It makes me quiver still—I can’t explain our decision—that we might have gone in the
other
direction first.

Even as I stood there, looking at the three of you, about to leave me, I had the mocking, the split-second dream of a thought: that this would be a nice spot to be in, just to stand here or to sit, on this warm, basking shelf of rock, with these beautiful dark-blue waves now and then sending up pleasing spouts of spray, with the cliffs and the blue sky and the whole hazy, summery coastline curving away. I think I even saw myself flipped safely, inviolately back: a girl again, aged nine myself, on the beach at Craiginish, where none of this could possibly be happening.

But I saw something wonderful enough. I saw your father reach you, and I saw some commotion between you: sounds, words that I couldn’t hear. Perhaps he just barked at you too. But I saw that your father was sizing up the situation, he wasn’t just
struggling.
I saw—oh God, this was the vital, the crucial factor—that when he turned, the current was only of infant-threatening significance, he could make his way, with effort, against it. On the other hand, he had to make his way with the two of you.

The wonderful thing is that you acted, all of you, like a team. That is, you took decisions, you made pacts among yourselves, all of which might have been risky, but which turned out in every case to be the right ones. It was almost as if you’d practised it. He couldn’t ferry you
both
in, that might have been disastrous. It had to be Nick first, and that meant that you, Kate (I won’t forget it), had to put yourself at lonely, terrible risk. It stopped me being too angry later. How brave you were, how on your own. I could see there was not much more you could do than hold your own against the current, perhaps make the very tiniest headway. You were thinking of the distance your father would have to cover a second time: you were losing strength and you had to think of how it might be used or wasted.

Meanwhile
your
strength, Nick, as your dad towed you in, had almost vanished. I still see your white, drained face, lolling against the blue. Somehow you managed to hang on to his shoulder and kick a bit yourself, while he managed to swim, with one arm and your weight, and still outswim the current.

Please don’t let go, Nick. And please don’t drown your dad.

He got you to a low ledge of rock, where I was waiting for you. You were already like some piece of limp delivered cargo. He was thinking of Kate. He spluttered out, in that same uncontradictable voice, “Wrists! Quick! Pull!”—the last word almost lost in a watery glug. With a strength I never knew I had I got you by both wrists and pulled you out before the downward suck of the wave made you twice as heavy. But I think, even if it had, I would have
made
you unheavy. I would have
made
you eject. Up you shot anyway, like a cork from a bottle, into my arms, and I screamed at you, with your dad’s fierce force, “Breathe, Nick! Breathe!” I don’t think you needed telling.

On the way up, you scraped your knee against the rock (you complained like crazy later). Blood ran down your shin. It didn’t matter. Blood was good, it was somehow very good. On your way up too, I noticed, with another strange little intensity of mere observation, that under the lip of the ledge, just beneath the glinting waterline, there were clusters of barnacles, little clenched, packed shells, tresses and twirls of swaying seaweed, a whole world of gripping life.