~~~~~
The journey home is one slow court-martial. Failure to follow orders, disarray under pressure, weakness under enemy fire. Mission catastrophically aborted. Nobody steps forward to present counsel for the defence and the accused is never summoned. Once through the door, Daniel digs out the scotch from one of the carriers, pours himself a stiff measure and knocks it back. A few seconds after that, he unscrews the cough linctus bottle and fills the cap to the brim. Since the loss of the pipette it’s been impossible to measure the correct amount. Half a capful last time hadn’t felt like enough. A whole capful certainly exceeds the prescribed dose. But these are exceptional circumstances. Down the hatch. Now all he can do is hope for this kangaroo court to adjourn. He has other matters to deal with. Alex is to be moved. Somewhere new. Somewhere that sounds alarmingly permanent.
On the off chance that she may be on a break, about ten minutes later he dials Gulnaz’s mobile. Nothing there but a recorded voice. After another thirty minutes he tries again, this time leaving a plea for an address, a number, a name – anything to tell him where Alex is being taken. When he can bear it no longer he rings for a third time. This time Gulnaz picks up, but cuts him off again the moment he speaks her name. Was that Alex he’d heard with her? Did he catch a few words in the background? The night that she’d taken him away, had they slept together? Will he be with her again tonight? How could two people so genetically alike turn out so differently? Prentice told him their DNA was a perfect match. So how can Alex even now be winning the heart of a woman who refuses to give Daniel the time of day? What if he went to her place tonight and told her everything: his feelings for her, his certainty that he can still change? She might let him stay and have sex with him and agree to start over.
‘Never! Never you for your brother. She needs someone strong, athletic, courageous, good in bed. She doesn’t need some snivelling little coward…”
He kicks out at the table. “Stop! Just stop. I’ve had enough. Okay, I’m a coward. And I’m weak. A total disappointment to you. I don’t need reminding. But god knows, Father, I’ve tried.”
‘You really think she’ll ever have you back, after what you did to her?’ The venomous words are spat hard into his face. Suddenly there’s a woman screaming, an accusing finger pointing firstly at him and then towards the bedroom door. Something, an object, a fist, strikes her above the eye. She’s running now, one hand covering her head, the other leading Alex through a barrage of crashing objects. ‘Don’t you ever lay a finger on me again.’ she’d said to him. These are lies. Lies! It was those crazies in the home who’d given her that bruise. He’d turned over his own flat, yes, he can admit to that now, but never, never would he have hit Gulnaz.
If he doesn’t drown out this voice it’ll drive him insane. He staggers through to the lounge, turns on his CD player and racks up the volume. His father is now a physical presence in the room, over to his left by the wall, standing tall and proud behind a hapless child and a sorrowful woman. The Devonport photograph rests on the shelf by the window. Daniel refuses to look, their presence overpowers him, regresses him back to his childhood. ‘In my pocket? They’re my shells, Father. Yes Father, sorry Father. Please, Father – please don’t…’
A silhouette towers over him with raised arm. Why does his mother sob? Why does she always stand aside and weep when he’s being taught his lesson?
If only the drug would hurry up and slay this monster.
Oh, not good, the floor is giving way and swallowing him up. The verticals bow outwards and the ceiling sags like canvas. The sitting room is slithering sideways. But this craziness will soon stop, if he can just stay calm. From the chasms between his clawing fingers swarms of tiny black dots have begun to scurry up his arms. He can feel them too beneath his shirt, and now along his legs, stinging his ankles. An army of ants advances across the carpet, teaming from the wallpaper in their millions; a trail of them leading his eye back up the wall to Escher’s Mobius strip. They scuttle at impossible speeds along that infinite pathway, at the same time escaping it and pouring like a plague from the picture frame. He knows that any moment now the ecstasy will overpower the madness and carry him away, but it’s never been this bad before. Too large a dose this time. Whoa, way too large. Too heavy, too profound. Solid objects are melting into syrup, into free-flowing atoms. Where does his body begin and end? He’s become the whole room. He is the walls expanding, splintering, coalescing, a giant turning kaleidoscope, replicating into four, five, six dimensions. What is this, Hawking’s imagined universe at play? Principles of uncertainty; toroidal space? Well, it’s no utopia in which to dance the celestial dance, this is the fucking apocalypse. This is to writhe in hell’s fucking inferno. Perhaps he can reach the Brief History, search the unread chapters, and find some wormhole back to reality – or at least to the everyday delusion he’s always believed was reality. But how to cross the floor without sinking into this churning swamp? There it is, the slim silver paperback floating on the shelf, its sentences slithering from the pages, words cascading over the books beneath and embedding themselves into the floor. He lunges for it, convinced that his hands will pass straight through. Vital not to look down, or to either side, or up at the ceiling: the room has become a quagmire of bubbling, living, all-consuming black. Black with letters, black with ants.
Every cell of his skin is burning now. The insects are burying themselves below the epidermis. They squirt their eggs into his bloodstream. They are furious with him. They blame him for their life sentence, spent traipsing round and round the same path, feeling the march of their comrades’ feet on the reverse face of the twisting roadway, subconsciously knowing that their own feet have trodden there a thousand times, and will again. And again. And again. And because the ants blame him they devour him. Pulling at his clothes and skin, baying like a wild dog, he stumbles his way to the bathroom, barricading himself inside, wedging a towel into the crack beneath the door. But the windowless room leaves him no escape. If the insects break through he has nowhere to run. They will pare his flesh to the bone. He gulps at the air till his lungs cry out. Hot water gushes from the tap into the basin – soap, scrubbing raw the skin of his hands. Splashing, soaking his face. Thank God, the world is coming to rest, solidifying. He can touch again. The mighty kaleidoscope is turning more slowly and the universe deflating once more to a manageable infinity. He is larger than the Earth, embracing the solar system, orbiting among the planets, circling with the galaxies, spinning around black holes, hoovering up supernovae to spawn another heavenful of stars in a few thousand, million, trillion years.
He is omnipotent.
Now he can see it all: cosmic space, subatomic space, time infinitesimal, time infinite, all just a matter of scale. His mind trawls every far corner, every last second of time, as he becomes as one with the whole, standing astride the universe. It all makes sense now. That’s why Alex and he could be at once so alike and yet so unalike. Because the tiniest difference in their genetic code is a whole galaxy of new stars. The smallest divergence in their chemistry is the nuclear reaction to fuel a Red Giant. Even the tiniest advantage gifted to one twin over the other in the womb is a trigger to change the course of an entire solar system. Insignificant variables with universal consequences. All down to scale. Because the consequences appear unrelated to the cause – the connection is too microscopic for people to see – they are forced to believe in some mystical sleight of hand: God, destiny, coincidence. Now there – see there – a perfect example. Fate? Or God’s fine work? In the mirror on the wall, does that not look exactly like Alex? All along he’s been wearing Alex’s jersey. He could be his twin to a tee. That’s got to be the funniest thing. What would Gulnaz say if he turned up at her door dressed like this! Might even she be fooled? Fooled like the teachers were fooled when he and Alex were kids. Remember that? They had their classmates in stitches. Got him into such trouble when word of it got home. Hey, she’d fallen for Alex; maybe this is exactly how to win her back. W
ouldn’t that be fate? God? Chance? Others might say so. He’d argue it’s just the unseen physics of the universe at play.
The Hawking falls from his grasp and bounces on the tiles, landing on its edge to form a badly pitched roof tent, its ridgepole a crease line in the spine where for years a thick bookmark has been sandwiched. The opened page, he discovers, marks the spot some way into chapter ten where he’d given up reading. But the words drawing his eye now are not those convoluted accounts of string theory that once put him in such knots, but words that bring knots of a different kind: the writing on the bookmark – the text to ‘Marvello Mobius’s Manual of Magic’.
In a mixture of fascination and dread he drops to his knees and flips through the leaflet.
“You can dazzle your friends and astound your family with this easy-to-perform trick…” He reads it aloud, like an incantation, before glancing into the bathroom mirror. His reflection in the glass scowls back at him. ‘What the hell are you doing that for, Daniel? How can you, with me lying crippled out there on the rocks, pounded by the waves? Why don’t we tell our parents what really happened up there on the cliffs?’
His father stands behind, with an eye that commands Alex to continue. Alex leers out from the mirror. ‘My brother has a little confession to make, don’t you, Daniel?’
Daniel hastily drops his eyes again in search of his place on the page.
“…All you need is one of the strips of paper provided, and our Miracle glue stick. But don’t forget your magician’s wand and hat, or the magic won’t work!”
‘Up on the cliff, Daniel,’ Alex snarls, turning beetroot with rage. He points at the door. ‘Put your poor, bereaved mother out of her misery.’
Behind the obscure glass, her image swaying and swooning now, their mother begins to wail like never before. He wants desperately to silence her. “Mum, you know what happened. The boat – Alex thought it was Dad’s, he tried to get down to reach it.”
‘No! For once in your life, tell the truth!’ The figure in the mirror seems to rise in defiance, though Daniel himself makes no move. ‘Tell her why I had to run away, why all these years I could never come back.’
“Stop it! Stop it! You’re a bloody liar!”
His reflection advances towards him, skin like polished white stone, eyes like tiny black pearls; not hair, but fronds of seaweed clinging to his forehead, a row of shells between his drawn lips.
‘Tell them, Daniel. Tell them what you did to me.’
Their mother is turning now and uncovering her face. Somehow she must be protected. “Mum, don’t listen to him. He’s just in my head. He’s not real.”
But Alex remains undaunted. ‘Tell them about the argument,’ he shrieks back. ‘The magic set, whose was it?’
It’s early morning, another room, another quarrel raging. Children’s acrimonious words are volleyed across a no-man’s land of Christmas paper, deafening them to a parent’s attempts at mediation.
‘Whose was it, Daniel?!!’
At the heart of the dispute: two parcels, each neatly wrapped, but missing their labels, and both ripped open.
“It was mine!” Daniel looks beseechingly towards his father. “My present from you, Dad. It was, wasn’t it? You left the parcels for us before you went away. There were no labels; they’d come off. Mum handed them out to us but said we could swap if they weren’t right. I got trainers! They were obviously meant for Alex. But Alex wouldn’t swap.”
He thrusts the sheet between his face and the mirror to close the matter, but a powerful hand rips it from him. ‘You idiot of a boy! You really think I would buy you some sissy magic set? Is that any way to make a man of you?’
At last, the long dreamed of counter-attack can begin. Snatching back the sheet from his father’s grasp, Daniel issues his next commandment. “Now give the ends a twist and glue them together. Ask a volunteer to draw a line along the strip and tell them to keep on going until they arrive back where they began.”
Away they run, the two boys, beneath a tumbling grey sky, across the fairway between the flags, towards a hedging of ragged gorse.
‘So tell them what you did.’ Alex is almost at his throat now. ‘You took me to the cliff edge.’ He turns back. “Father, Daniel said your boat was down there. He said you needed our help.’
Maybe if Daniel’s incantation is made loud enough this Judas voice will be drowned out. “But wait until they see what happens next! Be careful though, they’re going to need the Sorcerer’s Safety Scissors. Tell them to cut along the line they’ve just drawn…”
‘He pointed out the upturned boat, Father. He said he’d seen you struggling, right beneath the cliff. And then…’
A deathly hush. A heart’s missed beat. The agonising pause before the act of betrayal. Then Alex’s lips are moving again.
‘…He pushed me. He pushed me over the edge. Didn’t you, Daniel. Didn’t you!? You’d have me sent to my death for nothing but a stupid box of magic tricks.’
Daniel has stopped reading. The instructions fall unwittingly from his grasp. He stares in incredulous denial at the trio around him. His brother and father are like statues now. Out in the hallway, his mother has also fallen silent. Alex may have been the accuser, their father the witness, but it’s she who passes sentence, even through the frosted glass. Just with her eyes.
But for quite another crime. At last Daniel recognises the obstructions that have been hiding her and the shadows in which she stands, and knows where he must go to be with her. The insanity is passing. He’s ready now to purge himself of this den of phantoms. He climbs slowly to his feet, unlocks the bathroom door, steps through to the lounge and snatches up the photograph on the window ledge. After taking one last look at his uninvited guests, he crushes the paper in his fist as an exorcism, knuckles squeezed so tight that they stand out stark red and white.
From the flat, he runs in a daze, cleansed by the driving rain that is falling. At the north entrance of the churchyard he stops and peers in through the gate. There she is, cut across by the wrought iron, shimmering through the downpour, standing on her own mound of earth staring sorrowfully at the gravestone that bears her name. In seeing her son, she hangs her head and turns away. He’s through the gate now, and leaving the cobbled path.
“Mother?
“Mum. Please.”
Reluctantly, she turns around.
“I know I should have come sooner. I should have come the moment I remembered the truth. I know I’ve done you a terrible wrong.” The icy water is draining the light from inside him. There is precious little time.
“I know you’re not to blame for Alex’s fall. I know I treated you badly for years. I know now how I made you suffer.” Each footfall towards her may crush the very blades of grass that Gulnaz had flattened that day she side-stepped the grave.
“Please. I need you to forgive me. And then this can end.”
Her pale, beautiful hands grip the sides of the stone behind her. The skin sinks softly into the wet lichen, her nails stained olive by moss. He wants to take them, to bring them to his lips. And then to pull her brittle little body closer and shelter her in his arms and nurse her back to health. He wants to see her face again, not just this leather that stretches over a skull. He wishes she could open her eyes and breathe again and jump from her sickbed and dress in her brightly coloured frock and make herself up and gaily whisk her two boys from the house, one in each hand, and laugh and wave as young men’s heads are turned, as friends wish her well and ask after their father, or as strangers wolf-whistle from across the street. He wants her to take him to see the steam trains and buy ice-creams and lift the soot smuts from his eye with her wetted handkerchief. He wants to sit with her and help her glue photographs into an album, and bring her tea and cake and wipe the crumbs and spittle from her mouth. He wants to hold her hand and reassure her when she’s retching for the twentieth time that day with nothing left to retch but yellow bile. He wants to beat with his fists at the doors of the hospital
and scream at the doctors for not saving her. He wishes he could do more than put a hand on her shoulder when they sit on the bench in the hospital grounds and she begins to cry, telling him she is so frightened. And he wants to say thank you when she looks into his eyes and tells him he’s clever, and artistic, and sensitive, and that she’ll always love him, no matter what, till the day she dies.
And he wishes that when that day came just one week later he’d known how to cry and to say goodbye and to tell her he loved her too.
So many things he wants and wishes for when he kneels before her, when he leans forward to bury his head in her lap and reaches out to embrace her, only to connect with cold, wet stone. The darkness envelopes him then. The darkness that is without form. A darkness with no memory, no passage of time. A darkness of no dimension. The darkness that none but God, fate, or the play of the universe can repeal.
~~~~~