* * *
Just six hours later, yet feeling brighter than he’s done in weeks, Daniel sets about knocking out one of his classic fry-ups. It proves to be one of the tastiest cooked breakfasts he’s ever made (perhaps because the full English normally served as his anti-hangover doomsday weapon, always having to do battle with forces heading up the other way); eggs just perfect, toast soldiers impeccably turned out, bacon crisp, the beans piping hot, tomatoey and sweet.
A quick sweep of the decks and a dash to the bathroom to relieve himself, clean teeth and check hair, and he’s ready for the off. Definitely a coat and scarf job, judging by the flapping bin bags in the yard. Warmth over sex appeal, regrettably. But one step at a time. The main thing is to be with her. On the way out he instinctively snatches a bottle of red wine. A picnic isn’t a picnic without… Then he replaces it.
She’d said tea. That spoke volumes.
The car rounds the corner into her street, his first visit since that cringe-worthy pilgrimage from the Millwrights six nights ago. Shutters are still down at the chemist’s, heavy bars still defending the jeweller’s, but the florist’s, a convenience store and a chippy have now opened their doors for business. Gulnaz is waiting on the pavement as usual. It’s a wonder she doesn’t get propositioned standing there like that. He wonders if she even has a home. She dumps her rucksack on the back seat, climbs in beside him, kisses him warmly on the cheek and asks, with childlike excitement, “So, where are we going?”
On the spur of the moment he opts for The Long Mynd. A destination that’s more than an hour’s drive, with the short midwinter day already half over, may not seem entirely sensible, but nowhere nearer has the kind of magical qualities he’s after. In any case, it isn’t long before the journey itself weaves a certain magic, turning ring-roads into A-roads and crowded towns into open country. The changes of scenery steer them from unpicking last night’s celebrations onto planning the remainder of the day. By Daniel’s calculations, they’ll have sufficient light to trek about two miles out and back, leaving an hour or so for the picnic. It’s Gulnaz’s first taste of Shropshire. She’s never even heard of the Long Mynd. Working such long hours and with no car of her own, she seldom gets away at all, never mind to somewhere as inspiring as this. Yet she’s always loved the English countryside; the lushness, the softness, the wild skies, even the much maligned British weather, all so unlike the world of her childhood. Daniel insists that Devon is far superior – she only has to say the word.
As the road carves a way through the hills it seduces them with one archetypal English town after another – All Stretton, Church Stretton, Little Stretton – like a community closed to outsiders, all the Strettons descended from a single family. At Craven Arms (a place, not a pub, much to Gulnaz’s amusement) the car pulls off the main highway and onto a steep, lonely B-road that zigzags its way up into the clouds. Gulnaz is assigned the job of spotting the first picnic site they come across. A few miles further into the wilderness she sees one: a perfect little hollow in the hills, sheltered from the wind, spacious enough for three or four cars but utterly deserted today, and bordered by wooden picnic tables. A footpath leads directly from it through a gate into the hills.
The weather holds out pretty kindly for them on their walk, all things considered. As fast as the cloud cover builds from the east it’s dispersed again in its tumble over the peaks. Always the sun manages to keep one step ahead, even dodging the lower clouds that scurry along the horizon. The Long Mynd snakes ahead of them, a vast gorge of shifting light and shadow that leads their eyes from one gully to the next. Their chief antagonist, the wind, pulls them off balance, keen and determined to prise them from the slopes. Daniel feels like a speck of dust clinging stubbornly to the grooves of a record as someone tries to blow it clean.
Battling with such elemental forces always has a recalibrating effect. The converging lines of skyline and valley floor bring a renewed sense of perspective. His last visit had been two autumns ago, following a particularly harrowing and tunnel-visioned season at Greenalls. Everyone had gone into meltdown at the council’s approval of a huge new Focus DIY store in the adjacent retail park. Protests and petitions were hastily mounted to ‘fight the demise of local businesses and keep out the corporate bullies’. Some local papers had rallied, others championing the consumer’s right to greater choice and cheaper goods. In the end, money and influence had won over. The new store was built; Greenalls took the hit, refocused its range, laid off some of the workforce and staggered forward. Daniel had survived it. An afternoon of burning muscle and blowing off cobwebs in the Long Mynd had reminded him how trivial it all was; how pointless to get stressed over something so utterly beyond his control.
Now the landscape is talking again. Today it’s something about scale and timelessness, the Mynd’s total disregard for humankind, its mockery of those planners’ sheep-like attempts to funk up his town with foreign fads. In less time than it would take for these hills to heave a single breath, their gimmicks will have been replaced by the next ‘latest thing’; from London, from Paris, from New York, who knows, maybe even from China or the Middle East – maybe her lot: the Iranians, all depending on who gets the next turn to wield world influence and power. Before these slopes have been re-sculpted even by millimetres, great swathes of the town will have been demolished, replaced and demolished again. Famous high street names, family businesses going back generations, bold but ill-conceived new enterprises, all will have been wiped out to make way for fresh ventures; fortunes won and lost; the cycle turning over and over. These hills could tell him stories going back thousands of years, show off old scars inflicted by populations long gone: the scars of battle, scars of agriculture, scars of industrial revolution, even scars of trusts and environmentalists. The Long Mynd endures them all like a patient parent, shakes its head at man’s foolery and arrogance and waits for time to take revenge and heal its wounds.
Progress along the steep-sided slopes is proving slower than he’d expected. Their walking window of an hour and a half most definitely won’t get them two miles from the car. Last time he was here, the regular stretches of level track had offered some respite to his back and ankles, but rains have of the past week have turned these into deep bogs. Gulnaz too he can see is struggling, the stiffness he’d noticed before having visibly spread down her left leg. But none of that seems capable of dampening her mood. She’s clearly ecstatic just to be here. She seems to drink in the space and the freedom. Recalibration: if it always dwarfs the bad things then what about the good things? Does the Long Mynd tell him that this woman is really an irrelevance? And Alex too? Does it laugh at the things he’s feeling now in studying her? He watches her clamber further down the valley to marvel at a bird, at first drawn by its song and now watching it spring from the trees and do battle with the sky. As she gazes back up at him he sees her – not shrunk down to a speck, but magnified, almost as mighty as the clouds and hills. The sensation is unfamiliar and slightly disconcerting. But as she climbs back towards him, stops, snatches her mobile from her jacket like a pistol drawn and cries out ‘Say Cheese!’ Daniel finds himself returning the demanded smile and holding it long after the shot has been fired. So no, oddly, Long Mynd does not belittle the good things. It holds them in respect; it elevates them.
They push on for another hour. She seems set to walk forever, pausing, racing ahead, taking more photos, but at two-thirty Daniel insists they turn around. Despite breakfast, his fuel gauge has dropped well into the red. When finally they make it back to the picnic site he is ravenous.
Gulnaz pulls her rucksack from the back of the car, lays it down on a bench and begins to unload the extraordinary collection that makes up their feast. First out of the bag is a large plastic sheet, which she spreads out, not over the table but rather over the grass beside it. A decorative tablecloth follows, placed at the centre of the sheet, then a container through which Daniel can see something white suspended in water, and another filled with small
dark parcels. A tea-towel next, wrapped to suggest something fragile inside. Then a small glass jar of olives. One of tiny red chillies. A bag of flat bread. A biscuit tin with indecipherable writing on it like hieroglyphics. Fruits of all kinds and a large flask. Finally glasses, plates, cutlery, salt and pepper, other ground spices and napkins.
As the preparations unfold, one by one the hidden secrets are revealed. The white lump in water is in fact feta cheese, the dark parcels a serving of stuffed vine leaves. From inside the tea-towel comes a spray of assorted fresh herbs; in the biscuit tin: pistachio nougat dipped in flour, and in the flask: black tea flavoured with orange blossom.
She seats herself on the sheet just short of the tablecloth and gestures at the space opposite. “Befarmaeed,” she says. “Please, join me.”
Taking his place, Daniel pictures the pair of them in aerial view – knees to their chests, facing each other across this exotic rug like hippies who should be sharing kaftans and a bong. So incongruous and surreal: an iconic British landscape on a cold January afternoon in which sits a man who’s about to sample his first lazy Persian summer’s picnic.
Gulnaz proceeds to delight in offering commentary on each of the items she lays on their plates. The vine leaves are stuffed with rice, herbs and ground lamb, before being simmered in pomegranate juice (a recipe she tells him that came from her mother). The bread is made by adding yoghurt to flour and rolling out extremely thin before baking. The ground spice is sumac, the herbs a mix of tarragon, sweet basil, mint, chives, spring onions and radishes – an essential part of any Persian meal, as fundamental to an Iranian as a side salad to a European, or a portion of frozen peas to an Englishman. Her gentle mockery helps Daniel to relax.
“I don’t get it. You only came up with this idea last night. But this is amazing. How on earth did you get all this together so quickly?”
She chuckles. “You’ve already seen what I can do with a fridge full of odds and ends;” modesty, he strongly suspects, that belies half a night of raiding cupboards and slaving away in the kitchen, if not an early morning dash through the ethnic supermarkets. Though the exotic flavours are strange at first to his palette, they go together so perfectly that they can’t fail to win him over. And to his amazement he finds, for the first time in years, that he has no urge whatsoever to wash it all down with a four-pack of lager or a half bottle of wine.
“God, it’s no wonder your lot don’t drink with food this good,” he tells her.
“Oh! We drink, alright – behind closed doors. Before the revolution you could buy wine, beer, spirits, everything. Muslims aren’t supposed to of course, which is why the government banned it. But as I’d said, I’m from a Christian family. Islam is not the only religion in Iran, though if you could see the country now you’d be hard pushed to believe it.” Her hands busy themselves in sifting herbs and tearing bread. “I was only six at the time of the revolution and didn’t really understand what was happening. But I remember a neighbour of ours keeping wine down in his cellar. One had to be ever so careful not to get caught.”
“What would happen if you were?”
She deliberates for a moment. “Let’s just say there were very strict penalties. They were Muslims actually, our neighbours, but not terribly devout ones. Most nights after supper they would sit on their sofreh, just as we’re doing now, with their tea things laid out, but their estacans actually filled with wine.” She raises her tea glass. “My job was to go round and sit on the small balcony that overlooked the street and watch out for Mullers.”
“Sounds a bit risky then. Did they pay you to do that?”
“Oh no. I used to take my homework with me.”
“So what was in it for you?”
Her mood darkens. “A chance to get my own back on those ridiculous little men in beards.”
“Didn’t your own family drink?”
“No,” she says, still stern-faced. “No, my mother’s constitution couldn’t take it, and my father was no longer with us by then.”
The closing words sound pointedly chosen. Ambiguous yet non-negotiable. He’s relieved now that he hadn’t started delving into her past in the café. It sounded too much like his own. One screwed up childhood is enough for now. As if to underline his thoughts, she suddenly asks, “Do you mind if we talk about Alex again for a moment?”
He looks up in alarm. “What about him?”
She shifts awkwardly on the plastic sheet before replying. “Please don’t get annoyed, I know you’re convinced it was all a mistake and you’re struggling to put it behind you, but I went down to the ICU on Friday and had another look for myself. Daniel, I was just so shocked by the likeness. I see it now, because I know your face so much better. I really don’t think we should lose hope before we’ve seen the DNA results. Dr Prentice said he would hurry them along.”
“You never said.”
“I was going to, yesterday. But there was never a right moment.”
Daniel hopes that dusting the flour off the last chunk of nougat and refilling his tea will convey his indifference.
“I told you. It’s not him.”
“Well, okay.”
He’s not convinced he’s managed yet to close the subject. “Show me the pictures you’ve taken.”
Gulnaz wipes her hands and opens her mobile, scrolls through various menus and retrieves the images. She giggles before handing them over. About fifteen in all, some landscapes and cloudscapes, a couple of birds in flight and far too many pictures of Daniel looking windswept and unkempt.
“And I also had a chance to talk to the vicar yesterday after the service about Christmas Day. A few of the congregation were still around too, including the owner of the shop opposite, who said he knew you.”
He drops the phone on the tablecloth gawps at her. “And?”
“You guessed right: nobody saw or heard anything. But I gave the vicar and your friend my number, and they promised they would ask around again next Sunday. Maybe you should go and talk to them too.”
Her exposé of his private affairs leaves him unnerved. Vicars were establishment, like the police, and the guy in the newsagents was not his friend, just one more busybody. She may as well have gone the whole bloody hog – placed an advert in the parish times, or stuck a poster in the shop window.
“You did say it would be pointless, but I just thought it might help,” she adds, when met by his disparaging shrug. She surveys the sofreh, a little deflated. Pretty much everything has been picked clean. A few olives, a bit of bread and some chillies remain. The herbs, vine leaves, the cheese, as well as the sweets are all gone. “Are we done here then?”
The daylight is fading, the temperature falling sharply. Daniel nods. “Looks like it, doesn’t it?”
On the return journey, Gulnaz’s tries to lighten the atmosphere by naming her choicest moments of their walk. When that brings no response she turns instead to the ‘Mental Health Awareness’ course she’s booked herself onto – a four day residential somewhere in London. It troubles him that she’s about to vamoose just as things between them seem to be taking off; and worse, that she appears so matter-of-fact about it. Having dropped her bombshell, she’s already veered off into new terrain: how she’s been mulling over his collection of books, and the weird pictures on his wall, the Mobius loop trick he’d shown her. Somehow she has come to the view that with his mother gone, Daniel now has no reason not to follow his dream of studying science. What better way to embrace the New Year, she suggests. He could start by signing up for evening classes at the local tech – see how it goes from there.
While the idea vaguely intrigues him, to Daniel this is just another attempt to take control of his life. He curtly points out that with a twenty-four year handicap, crippling rent to pay and bread to put on the table, never mind the slim chance – that she seems so keen to keep alive – of being saddled with a disabled brother, his chances of a new start in life are somewhat dead in the water. An unfortunate turn of phrase, under the circumstance
s. She tactfully lets the subject drop.
When they turn into her street Daniel slows the car in readiness for further directions.
“Just here is fine,” she says, at the exact spot where he’d collected her.
“It’s no trouble to drop you at your flat, you know.”
The moment has suddenly become a litmus test, a measure of just how far she is now willing to trust him.
“I need to get some things from the shop. Might as well grab them while I’m here.”
The fib is not allowed to go unchallenged. He insists he can wait.
“No, honestly, I’m only a few yards up the road. I’ll be in touch. Thank you so much for a lovely day.”
Her buckle clicks; she’s checking to make sure the way is clear before opening her door. Just as he’s expecting her to be gone she’s turning back, bearing over him and pinning him down. Daniel gasps. This is fresh even by his standards. What, she wants to do it in the car? Under the street lights!? Her hands are in his hair, running over his shoulders. Her kiss is more animal than before, her breathing faster. Under the weight of her it’s all he can do to remove his seatbelt. The gesture is clearly misread and it seriously raises her game. Now her hand is on his leg, his inner thigh, fingers crawling across his groin, a spider towards his fly. In response, Daniel burrows his way under her coat and runs one hand up her spine, the other caressing the nape of her neck. He feels ready to explode. His fingers snag on her bra strap, unsure whether to attempt the catch before conceding that it’s impractical. Instead, he pushes down the other way into her pants, but her trousers are tight and he doesn’t get far. Why here, he wonders, when they could be so much more comfortable stretched out over a sofa or tumbling around on a bed? Take him to her flat, for God’s sake. Yet the audacity of it all, the sheer impossibility, has become outrageously erotic. He could even come like this. Could she?
But touching her there is a mistake. Too far, too soon and she recoils, kindly but firmly.
“I’ll ring you. We must arrange to do something before I go to London.”
Just like that. Yanking on the handbrake – leaving him in fifth gear. But there is no time to protest. She’s out of the car before he’s even finished adjusting his trousers and wiping his mouth.
She does indeed make straight for the shop and is immediately lost among the shelves.
Sedgefield Court is deserted, still recoiling from the excesses of the previous night, if the littering of beer cans, fag-butts, streamers and smashed, stolen pint glasses is anything to go by. All the same, Daniel crosses the lobby with senses sharpened. Now that Gulnaz has mouthed off to all and sundry in the neighbourhood, he fears for the anonymity that he’s worked so hard to achieve; everyone whispering behind his back, callers to his flat drawing the attention of other residents. He takes particular care to open and close his door without a sound.
Scoff greets him in the hall. The purrs crescendo as Daniel tops up his water and scrapes the uneaten scraps into the bin, dishing out the next helping of bouillabaisse. The late afternoon picnic has sorted Daniel’s own food for the night, but he’s more than ready now to move up a gear from orange-blossom tea. A few stiff whiskies should help settle his nerves. Like Scoff, he’s happy enough with another night of TV. Maybe a film or two. It doesn’t matter which. Just something to take him out of himself for a precious few hours. He stabs at the remote.
Film 4; 9pm.
‘Twins’.
So, fate has a sense of humour after all. Talk about chalk and cheese: Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito?? This must be the three-hundredth time they’re showing it, but Daniel has always steered well clear. Until then it’s just game shows, makeovers and news. By the time the titles finally begin to roll he’s well into his third whisky.
Ludicrous though the story proves to be, even Hollywood never actually asks its audience to believe in two such polar opposites ever emerging from the same embryo, at least not without a good deal of scientific meddling. But, rendered all the more suggestible by the drink, Daniel is struck at least by one side of the plot – the notion of one twin inheriting all the positive attributes and the other all the negative. Onscreen, the drama works from there towards the twins’ finding understanding, respect and ultimately love for each other. The movie in Daniel’s head has yet to shoot such a scene, but in his growing drunkenness, he feels he’s being sent a message, a script for how to act out his coming future.
Other than Scoff (who’d taken up his seat on Daniel’s lap the moment he’d finished eating), none of the feared busybodies has come a-calling. All the same, Daniel begins to sense he is no longer watching the film alone. A character he has never met yet has known all his life has slipped into the room and placed himself on the far end of the couch. Alex, fully restored, cleaned up, filled out, the perfect specimen of a healthy adult. Daniel lets the scotch tickle his throat and tries to connect with the emotional capital of having him here. At once there’s the same old need to share every thought, every experience, in its wake the same impulse always to defer to his brother – should they change the channel, would he prefer a different seat?
Being forever tied to his stronger brother’s apron strings, is that really what he desires when those DNA results arrive and the doctors ring to say the patient is out of trouble, making a speedy recovery? Can he live again with the inadequacy, with the many jealousies, the constant reminders of the favouritism shown by their father towards his brother?
Or might such a role model prove in the end to be the very inspiration Daniel needs, to shake himself up and pursue that change of career he’s always dreamt of? No sooner has the thought helped him accept this visitor than they are joined by a second. On the armchair before him sits a second incarnation of Alex, crippled, starved and broken, his skin like parchment, irrigated only by tubes and wires. Nothing of this twin remains but a carcass. This is the Alex that has endured some deed so unspeakable that it has kept him locked away from sight for a quarter of a century. This Alex opens the door to the darkest places in Daniel’s psyche, where people can do terrible, terrible things to a child, leaving unimaginable scars. This is the Alex Daniel has so far refused to confront. How dare medical opinion even define this as ‘living’. Blood and breath may still feed the brain, but in that brain, what is there? Any sentience left of the terrible act that had struck it down? Does anything see through those grey, dilated pupils? Is this a man, a lump of meat, or merely a vegetable?
The dreadful affliction has mutilated their visual likeness, but leaves the two of them no less tied together. Only their dependence is reversed. This switch of power, something as a child Daniel had always dreamed of, he sees now for the crippling constraint upon his freedom and drain upon his resources that it is. When similar ill fortune evened the score between him and his mother, placing her firmly under his thumb, was Daniel strengthened or weakened by it? He knows the answer to that well enough. This then is the irony: to become the stronger of the pair is to be made all the weaker.
Daniel turns from the vision in horror and disgust, refills his glass, and tries to drown him out.
The third seat in the room, the space beside him on the three-seater, remains vacant. But the sense of a presence here is almost as disturbing as the last. This seat is reserved for the unknown figure who shares Daniel’s physical form but remains a complete stranger. If the DNA test proves the two of them to have no blood ties whatsoever, then one might expect this man to disappear from the picture. But the empty place for the uninvited guest must be held open. His identity will remain undisclosed, so the fear will perpetuate that his unexplained presence at the graveside clutching a copy of the photograph means that one day he must surely be back.
Daniel comes to with a sense of falling. The film has mutated into some mindless, late-night chat show. Scoff is nowhere to be seen, but a phantom weight in Daniel’s lap still holds him to the seat. Through his half-closed eyelids the images onscreen begin to swim. Three seats are placed in a semicircle,
the middle one empty, the others occupied. The host is talking and his guest responding non-verbally. The two faces are blurred out, but Daniel knows who these characters are. They no longer sit with him in the room.
If these ghoulish visitations are to leave him alone he must shake himself awake, get out of the seat, splash some water on his face, drag himself off to bed…
…When the phone goes, he nearly jumps out of his skin. Who the hell would dare to ring at this hour? But light is breaking through the window; he must have fallen asleep again and spent the whole night in the chair. It’ll be why the alarm in his bedroom hasn’t woken him. Late for work yet again. Another free lunch for Jerry.
But Breakfast News shows it’s only 8:05.
So, not Greenalls. He’s missed the call now. When he checks, it proves to be that same wretched mystery number – the local code. Those bastards will try to sell you double glazing night or day, in your sleep, even on your deathbed. Time to tell them where to stick their UPVC windows, and what they can do with their timeshares and their lottery prizes. He jabs at the numbers and waits for the return call to connect. Of course it’ll be a recording. And indeed it is: of a man’s voice.
“Hi. Guli and Greg are unable to take your call just now. Leave us your message and number.”
A punch to the testicles would have inflicted less pain, a bolt of lightning been less of a shock. Guli and Greg. Gulnaz and Prentice – they’re only fucking living together! Her reluctance to invite him back, even to let him anywhere near her flat, it suddenly all makes sense. With a heat rising behind his eyes, Daniel feels his lips parting at the tone as if to speak, but in disbelieving slow motion he replaces the handset instead. Immediately it rings again; like this predator has further punishment to dish out and won’t be thwarted by disconnection. The malevolent grey box rattles at him at second time; a third. He picks up.
“Mr George?”
“Yes.”
“Good morning. Dr Prentice here. From the hospital.”
Whoa. Malicious little prick. One moment too busy to take his call and now right here in his own fucking kitchen.
“I’m the doctor you met the other day, when you came to see…”
“I know what you are. What the hell do you want?”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I’ve obviously caught you at a bad time. Forgive me. But I thought you’d want to know straightaway. My apologies for the wrong information the nurse gave you – about a two week wait and you having to go through your GP? She thought the DNA test was just routine, you see, not connected with one of our patients here. She…”
“And?”
Daniel holds his breath. His future spins before him like a roulette wheel. The slightest disturbance could bias the outcome: odds, evens or zero. Two of those visitors with whom he has spent the night are about to be executed, the third brought out of the shadows and into the broad daylight of Daniel’s life.
“I have the details here for you. You might want to sit down.”
“I’m fine! Just tell me.”
Prentice’s voice trails off as the phone slips down Daniel’s face.
Without replacing the receiver, he dials Greenalls, tells them he’s sick and grabs his shoes. No change of clothes, no freshening up, no breakfast, either for himself or for Scoff. He snatches up his keys, leaves the flat and sets off at speed out of town.