I knew from the first that it was an error to think of the twins as my children, whatever the biological reality. It’s only a flaw in the language that confuses kinship with possession, and in this case the kinship was accidental. I had no real connection with these creatures who lay in the basement room, crying and fouling themselves, clinging to a life that I could easily have ended with a basin of water or a length of twine. For a few days after she died, Lillian was a palpable absence in the house, a stain that lingered over the makeshift cot before it faded away, almost imperceptibly. After that she was gone. It was simple, uncomplicated. Nevertheless, I was aware that the twins had been responsible, not only for her death, but also for the pain she had suffered, and for that reason alone, I was free of any instinctive sense of kinship, any desire to protect or nurture them that I might otherwise have possessed. I had read about such things – how, even in the most unexpected circumstances, a kind of paternal instinct would be aroused by the sight of one’s offspring, but from the start, the twins were, quite rightly, nothing more to me than laboratory animals. I had become fond of Lillian, in my way. I had enjoyed having her around the house; I had enjoyed waking in the dark and finding her thin body beside me, warm and lithe, like an animal, and in factual terms, they were her children. Nevertheless, I had no difficulty in proceeding with the experiment. The only difficulty was in keeping them alive and well for the first few weeks, so they might be of use later. I had to spend a fair amount of time and money fitting out the basement room as their permanent home and, at the same time, a suitable laboratory for my observations. To avoid the risk of discovery, I was obliged to do all the work myself. I built them a pen in the basement, so they could be contained easily later. I placed an observation grille in the door, I set up tape machines and video recorders in the room itself, so I could keep them under observation at all times. I knew I would have to ensure they were fed and cleaned, but otherwise I wanted to stay out of the basement as much as I could. It was an essential part of the experiment that they remain isolated. With the recording equipment, I could observe them without intruding into their awareness, just as wildlife photographers observe young chimpanzees at play. The essential point was to create a suitable environment, so they would be deprived of nothing essential to their development. I wanted them healthy, to ensure that my conclusions would not be clouded by any other factors. It was hardly surprising, for instance, that Genie had initially failed to develop intellectually, given the filth and squalor in which she lived. By contrast, the twins would have everything they needed. Everything except language. To avoid any residual possibility of attachment, or of accidentally speaking in their presence, I decided to give them labels rather than names: A for the male, and B for the female. That way, I would always be aware that they were, in essence, laboratory animals, not humans, and certainly not my children.
The following months passed slowly. I recorded every observation, every sign of development, each gesture, each scream, in my log book. The twins passed quickly through all the stages of infancy that I had read about. In text book terms, they developed normally: eyes, teeth and, as far as I could tell, hearing. Soon they were able to move about on the floor, playing with their toys, displaying surprise and wonderment, fear and pleasure, a need for contact. They were obviously aware of one another from an early stage. They vocalised freely, as babies do. At fixed times each day, I provided them with music – Mozart and Bach, but no vocal or choral works – in order to aid the development of their intelligence. For purely scientific reasons, the records I kept at this time are very detailed, but I wasn’t particularly interested in the early stages: I fed them, changed them, kept them clean and waited for that critical moment when, if they were going to speak, they would begin. I wore a surgical mask when I was obliged to handle them: first, to avoid passing on bacteria, and so infecting them with disease, which was a greater risk than it would have been otherwise, given their abnormal situation; second, to avoid their seeing me as anything other than a keeper. I didn’t want them to see me as a parent, or even as another of their kind. I had read books where all manner of creatures, ducks or geese, for example, would latch on to any available parent figure, even when that figure was of a different species. It was important that the twins did not see me in that light – and it appeared that the mask worked. Generally, while they were aware of me, they did not seem to regard my existence as anything more significant than the light in the room, or the music from the stereo system I had set up on high shelves on one wall of the basement. When I was forced to handle them – and I did so as infrequently as I could – they usually cried; most of the time, however, they were too wrapped up in one another to notice me. Their sense of attachment was extreme. Mistakenly, I believed that this was a good sign; perhaps I was thinking fondly of Poto and Cabenga. There had never been a control experiment in that case, after all. If the private language they had created was based on the snatches of German and English they had heard, that was only because they’d had such material to hand. What if there had been no such material? I wondered if I was about to find out.
The singing began late one evening, just after feeding time, when I had dimmed the lights and left the room, so they could rest. At night I normally left the tape machine running, with one cassette in the deck, so I could monitor them until they fell asleep. Thus, if anything out of the ordinary happened, I would be aware of it, even when I was away from my listening post. Until that night, the tape had revealed nothing out of the ordinary: usually no more than a random cry, or a series of gurgles through the quiet hiss of the machine. Often there was nothing – no sound, no movement. As far as I could tell without a control, the twins were quiet for their age, though not abnormally so. They had vocalised in the usual way – or at least, in the way I would have expected. I had no reason to suspect they were holding anything back, and I had no cause for imagining they were deficient as subjects in any way. Yet until that night I felt there was something, if not wrong, then not quite right, something almost eerie about them, and I wondered what they were thinking and feeling, when they lay together, not yet asleep, but utterly silent, utterly motionless. It was absurd, of course, but from the start, I suspected them vaguely of a conspiracy of some kind.
The events of that night changed everything. From my records, I see that they were exactly eleven months old at this time, which, in retrospect, seems extraordinary. I had expected language, if it happened at all, to come somewhat later; more slowly, in fact, than language development in a normal environment. Yet that night, and on the five or six nights following, they moved from almost total silence to a near-constant singing. It came out of nowhere, with no provocation, no stimulus, that I was aware of. One day they were mute infants, the next they had something extraordinary, which pleased and excited them from the very first.
It must have begun quite soon after I left the room. For some minutes they were still then, slowly, almost tentatively at first, they began to vocalise in a different way, taking turns to utter phrases in a soft, haunting singsong that seemed, on a first hearing, a form of improvisation, an exchange on which they were working together, in a hesitant exploration of the possibilities of sound. To begin with it was experimental, almost quizzical, but after a frighteningly short time the singing grew louder and more confident. At the same time, it was more complex, with the twins joining together then moving apart in a kind of counterpoint till, by the time the tape ended, they were already on the way to developing an elaborate, seemingly conversational music. I have to admit that, the next morning, when I reviewed the tape, I found this music utterly beautiful and, from the first, I was certain that something was concealed in those sounds, some logic or pattern quite alien to the sense I knew. I was convinced there was a structure that I could find, in the usual way, by a slow and devoted analysis.
Now, when I look back on those early days, I wonder where things began to go wrong. One mistake I made – and this surprises me, even now – was to assume, at the deepest level of my thinking, that the principal use of language was to convey information. At the surface, of course, I understood the social functions of speech. I knew that most discourse was pretty well meaningless when subject to analysis. Most people, for much of the time, use language as a crude tool: as a means of defence, or a medium of self-affirmation, or a social lubricant. A great deal of talk is aimless. There are times when people speak only to reassure themselves that they exist, or to validate the existence of others. Without language, they might lapse into an uneasy solipsism, unsure of the point at which one thing ended and another began; stripped of their boundaries, they would begin confusing themselves with the world around them. They feel they must speak, and it doesn’t matter very much what the speaking is about.
Of course, there is something a little despicable about this need for small talk. Its ugliness is offensive: the nonsensical exchanges one hears in restaurants, or in theatre queues – they are all so unnecessary, so aesthetically redundant. I remember once, as a change from driving everywhere, I made a long train journey northwards. It was a clear, bright summer’s day: for part of the journey the railway line ran along a stretch of coastline, and I sat in my window seat, gazing out at dark rocks and a wide, empty expanse of shore, at thin veils of water spread over bright wet sand, where a mass of wading birds were hunting for sandworms, stepping out carefully over the glistening silt beds, as if they had just arrived, of a sudden, in a new world: a world that, for them, was mysterious and enchanted, a world that, all things considered, must seem to any thinking mind a logical impossibility. A crude evolutionist would say this world came into being by chance, by a series of random accidents, but even a moment’s thought will confirm that the statistical probabilities of each of these tiny accidents of weather and genetics happening, not only one at a time, but also as part of a complex and delicate whole, are extremely remote. The very existence of anything seemed to me, on that journey, a breathtaking and terrifying miracle – yet the other people on the train treated the whole magical event as something banal, ignoring the light, the sky, and the glittering water, hanging over their seats to chat to their companions, playing word games, droning on about nothing, repeating to strangers the same dull stories they had always repeated, to anyone who would listen, expressing their opinions, mumbling received ideas and half-truths to one another as if they were passing on items of arcane wisdom, or the cryptic messages of an oracle. As they hurtled on through this shimmering landscape, surrounded by wonder – a wonder, moreover, that they had no reason to believe would persist from one moment to the next – nobody looked at the world. Nobody saw it. At one point, a bird – a great tit, I think – flew up alongside the train, dipping and rising, flying along in perfect parallel for two or three hundred yards before turning and flicking away into the bright air. Nobody noticed. Instead, they talked: on and on, they talked about nothing, unravelling the world in their tedious, ugly converse.
This is the nature of social existence. We talk in order to impose limits, to contain the world in a narrow frame. Yet every textbook on language proceeds upon an assumption of communication, concerning itself with structure and grammar, with meaningful exchange, with the possibility of analysis. There is almost no mention of this simple making of noise – even though that is the reason for most speech. People talk in order to make a noise, and so be. Manners demand that they say something meaningful, at some level, but they might as well grunt, or howl.
So, knowing this, why did I assume the twins were conversing? Why did I ever imagine their song was anything more than their way of being in the world, a simple extension of the cries and gurgles they had made as infants? Why did I never seriously suspect that singing was their way of telling themselves and one another that they existed, or even more likely, was the sole strategy they had open to them of casting a veil over all they saw and heard, over every feeling, every flicker and ripple of the world around them, every unexpected change in their own bodies and minds? Why did I imagine they had minds at all, in the real sense of the term. Birds sing. Foxes bark. Dolphins send variable and complex messages across miles of ocean. That doesn’t mean they can think. It was an error to assume that the singing of these children was any more valid than a cock’s crow at dawn, or a seagull’s mocking laugh.
Nevertheless, it was an assumption I did make, for no good reason. I believed the twins were more than animals – more, I believed they were real in a way that the other people I encountered were not. For some reason, I believed they experienced their world with a sensitivity I could only imagine, and it troubled me. In the end, I recorded an open verdict on the twins. Nothing was proven one way or the other by the experiment I carried out. Yet in my heart I knew by the end that they were talking to one another about a world I could not see, or hear, or touch, and the language they were using was so perfect, so fully attuned to their being, that it was beyond any analysis that I might attempt.
For a long time, they lived together entirely, hardly losing sight of one another. They were only physically parted when I took one twin out of the pen to feed or bathe it. From the beginning, this was a distressing experience for them both. A, in particular, cried and struggled desperately whenever I took him away from his sister. After a while, they became slightly more able to cope with separation, but I never kept them apart for longer than was absolutely necessary. Looking back, I see this was probably a mistake, but it did not occur to me that there would be any profit in parting them, and it made life a good deal easier to keep them together. As they grew, they vocalised constantly when they were alone, chanting to one another in their odd singsong and, despite my confusion as to the nature of the song, I was excited. I thought this a good signal for their future development towards language. It didn’t strike me as odd that, whenever I entered the room, they fell silent. Perhaps I felt this was nothing more than an obvious animal caution. I suppose I was still thinking of Poto and Cabenga. The possibility of their developing a private language out of this song beguiled me: if it happened, I could stay clear of them for about ninety per cent of the time, and observe their progress without their knowing, using the video camera and the tape recorders. They could not be aware that their attempts to exclude me were useless.
One afternoon, however, I decided, as an experiment, to remove one child from the pen and take it outside into the garden. By this time they were around fourteen months old, and I felt it ought to be possible to part them, if only for an hour. I chose B, because she seemed the more independent of the two. After the months of confinement, I wanted to see how she would react to the space and the light of the outside world.
As usual, the child’s body stiffened when I picked her up, but she did not cry out, she simply struggled against my hands like a small animal. She kept her face turned away, looking back at the pen, where A sat, flailing his arms in silence. It was no different from all the times I had taken her from the pen to bathe or feed her, until I opened the door. As soon as she could no longer see her twin brother, her body slumped and, for one terrible moment, I thought she had literally died in my arms. It was a moment before I realised she was only playing possum. For the first time, I felt a twinge of resentment at the implication that I was a danger to her.
She remained limp and silent till we reached the stairs. Then her body tensed again and, flexing her arms and legs, she tried to break free, to lever herself out of my grasp. I was surprised at how strong she was. I held her tightly and made my way to the back door. It was a struggle to get it open and hold her still at the same time; I ended up tipping her head forward and holding her with one arm around my waist, while I turned the doorknob with my free hand. B screamed once, at the top of her voice, then the fresh air and the light hit us, and she jerked her head up to see what was going on. From where we were standing, we could see the garden: the dark green of the holly trees on either side of the path, the iris beds in full flower, the paler green of the pleached apple trees against the back wall. The sudden riot of colour must have startled her, or perhaps it was the sudden light; nevertheless, I turned her body around and, gripping her tightly with both hands, I lifted her up so she could see clearly. I had wanted to show her the garden, to let her experience a new stimulus, but she only screamed again then, as I held her still, slumped into the same state of apathy as before, like a baby monkey that has been parted from its mother. I cradled her in my arms and looked into her face. Her eyes were half-open, but she wasn’t seeing anything. By an effort of will, she had closed down her mind. It was uncanny. In a matter of moments, as we stood there in the afternoon sunlight, she became inert, quite lifeless, utterly withdrawn. For the first time, I began to be aware that keeping them together and allowing them to develop so closely might have been a mistake. They were too intertwined. It was as if they were one person. What if it were true that twins could share their thoughts, with no need for ordered communication at all? Their singing might be nothing more than play, or an attempt to mask the real exchanges that were going on under the surface, exchanges so subtle I would never be able to penetrate them.
In retrospect, I realise that I lost track of the experiment at this point. I had intervened unnecessarily, caught up in a fantasy that, by showing one twin a world wider than that inhabited by her brother, I might induce a change of some kind – perhaps a development of their language, or a break of some kind that might allow me a way into their experience. I was unscientific in my approach, I was looking for something that wasn’t there, and missing what was. I had lost sight of the larger picture. The behaviour of the twins confused me: their development was too rapid, the singing was too intricate, too complex, their attachment to one another a red herring that I allowed to distract me. At the time, I wanted to see an order, a structure in their song that was not present. I believe, now, that there was structure, there was even meaning, but not in a form that I could understand. Meanwhile, I was bound by the grammar I understood. I was like a man who sits at a window and looks out at the world: he cannot move, he cannot even turn his head to the side, and all he can see is a brick wall, or a patch of sea, or a corn field, and he thinks the entire world is one undifferentiated brick wall, or sea, or corn field. He cannot imagine diversity, because the only basis he has for imagining a world is the evidence of his eyes. If, as he stares at the brick wall, he notices how the light changes, how sometimes it is redder, or more yellow, or turns black, he might understand that something else exists to cause this transformation, or he might decide that one of the properties of this wall is that of changing its colour on a more or less regular basis, and the rest of the world, the rest of that infinite brick wall, possesses that same property. If, as he sits there, head fixed, eyes trained on the wall, he hears a train, or the cry of a gull, or a child singing, he imagines these sounds are also properties of the wall. If he could turn and look at himself, or at the room behind him, or the chair in which he sits, he might come to understand more of the nature of things – but he cannot. He is so fixed upon the wall, that he sees nothing else.
In one respect, at least, I was this man. I had my eyes fixed upon a structure, an idea of order, which I believed must, of necessity, be universal. I was like the child who draws a tree, who shows a trunk and a leafy crown, a scrawl of brown and green, an asymmetrical lollipop shape, cut off at the bottom, where the trunk of the tree meets the earth. If I had focused on the whole picture, I would have resembled the botanical artist who observes the tree when it has fallen, or who plucks a blade of grass from the earth and draws the roots, and the creeping stems that emerge from each individual plant. I would have seen a symmetry, a deeper order, a more complex and subtle world.
Yet, in another way, I believe my error lay in a kind of passivity. Separating the twins was nothing more than an act of frustration: until that moment I had made no connections, I had never looked closely enough, I had failed to discover the whole picture. I believed that the scientist is the one who observes, who does not interfere, but simply records the data and waits to find the pattern that emerges. If nothing becomes apparent, the assumption is that nothing is there, or nothing that can be described. It was a failure of imagination of the kind that the great scientists would not have tolerated in themselves. Yet, given that it was so impulsive, my intervention was equally unacceptable. As the weeks passed, as the children had developed their song, I had sat patiently and waited, like someone working on a simple puzzle, who believes that everything can be investigated by his normal methods, everything can be described in the accustomed terms.
The twins developed alarmingly. Physically, they were progressing in advance of any expectations I might have had, given their age, and the restrictions of their environment. But it was in their singing that I noticed the most obvious development. Sometimes they vocalised for hours on end, but there was always a freshness about it, an air of improvisation, a freedom that seemed to delight them. I have no clear idea whether the pleasure arose from listening to what the other was saying, or in the making of their own sounds. Maybe it was a mixture of the two. I kept making and analysing the recordings, but I had more or less given up hope of ever breaking the code and, after a while, the singing began to haunt me. I could hear it throughout the house; I even heard it in the evenings, long after I had shut them away in their pen and gone out into the garden. Even when I played music to drown it out, it persisted, like tinnitus. I wanted to know what it meant. I wanted to play the tapes to some complete stranger, to see if I was missing something. Sometimes I told myself that it was no more than an animal form of communication, like the language of dolphins, a rich vocabulary of musical tones and dynamics that were too alien for me to interpret, as arcane as the bee’s dance, that appeared so noisy and erratic, yet conveyed the precise positions of flower beds and clover leys. Yet what could they be telling one another about the world outside, about the position of the sun, or distant meadows, or schools of herring?
I listened to the tapes over and over again. I looked for patterns, but there was nothing I could detect. As far as I could tell, there were sounds that never came up twice in all the recordings I had; others were repeated all the time. The code, if there was a code, was impossible to crack, unless you knew the basic rules, the parts of speech, the syntax. There was no evidence of a vocabulary.
For a long time, I looked for myself in their exchanges: if the singing meant anything at all, I thought, it would surely contain one sound, a special tone or sequence to denote my presence, some constant that would indicate whatever it was they felt for the masked creature who brought them food and drink, who bathed and changed them, the large, inexplicable presence who possessed such power in their small world. I thought this must be the starting point: if I could find myself in their discourse, I would find the key to unlock their secret. Yet, when I analysed the tapes, isolating those occasions when I came in to the room, from the exchanges before I entered to the exchanges that occurred after I left, I could find nothing consistent. They were always silent while I was there. They might have been singing to one another for hours before I appeared, but as soon as they heard the key turn in the lock, they broke off. Then, as soon as I had left, they resumed their singing, but there was nothing to show that they were making any reference to me.
I was discouraged by this fact. I felt as if I had lost something, as if I had become invisible. I really began to feel that I had stopped existing a little. Now I understood why parents taught their children those words first: Mamma, Daddy, Mum, Mummy, Dad, John, Mary – whatever they asked to be called, however they saw themselves in their children’s eyes, it was one proof of their being, an ontological victory, when the child looked up and spoke the appropriate word for the first time – recognising, making certain, becoming complicit. Parents vied for that moment. I had made real efforts to maintain objectivity, to keep my distance; yet, in the end, I have to confess that I succumbed to the most maudlin of emotions. It troubled me, to be excluded from their world. They wouldn’t even sing while I was in the room, even though they knew – and I was certain they knew – that I could not understand.
I worked hopelessly on the doomed experiment for several months more. I would not allow myself to discard the idea that some form of communication was taking place, which meant it was susceptible to analysis, but in the end, it was stalemate. I considered teaching them a single word, to see what would happen. I thought of playing them tapes of people speaking, in a number of different languages, those sample tapes you can send away for, with a few basic sentences of French, German, Italian, Spanish, Greek. Or I might just turn on the radio and let them listen for a while. From a few words, they might still construct a whole language, as Poto and Cabenga had done. It was the last option: the twins had never heard human speech other than their own. I decided I would expose them to language somehow, obliquely, without comment, then observe the results. To begin with, I played vocal works during their daily music sessions: German lieder, Breton folk songs, Tibetan chants, sung masses. I made a conscious decision to avoid English, though there was no logical reason for doing so.
It made no difference. They listened to the voices – and it appeared they were registering something new – but they continued to sing as before, whenever they were alone. I played spoken word tapes, extracts from plays, readings of poetry, recipes, instructions, conversations. They ignored these. While they would often stop singing to listen to what I played, they seemed not to notice the speaking voices, or, if they did, they felt no interest in them.
One afternoon I stopped the tape abruptly and waited to see if I had their attention. Then I began playing one of the first tapes I had made of them singing together, several months before. They sat entranced, enraptured, listening closely. I had no idea if they knew what it was they were hearing, if they knew it was their own voices coming from the speakers. Yet, from their expressions, I guessed that this was the first time they had truly understood that the world is an inhabited place. I think, now, that they were always looking for others of their kind, but all they could see was a wall, a set of speakers, the bars of a pen, a door. Suddenly, after a few minutes of listening, they began to sing back to the tape, back to themselves, in a pure ecstasy of recognition. It was unbearable. I allowed them to converse with themselves for a while, then I couldn’t take it any longer. Hoping they would not notice me, I opened the door quietly and stepped into the room.
They stopped singing as suddenly as they had begun, and looked at me. The recorded voices continued to echo around the walls of the basement room, like the voices of ghosts. Using the remote, I stopped the tape. The expression on their faces was identical: it was the shame of having been discovered, of having, by some weakness, betrayed themselves to me. For the first time, I was real to them. They could see me, they could not help but see me and I felt a surge of triumph, as if I had slipped through the one crack in their defences. I wanted them to know I had been listening all along, that they had made a mistake, they had no secrets from me, but the only way I could do it was to repeat back to them what they had just sung. I rewound the tape and replayed a short section, then, with my head tilted slightly to one side, I tried to reproduce the sound, singing softly, as they did, watching their faces all the while. They stared at me. They seemed surprised and I thought, for a moment, that I had beaten them. Then, as I played back another section, and sang again, more sure of myself this time, more accurate, they glanced at one another and began to laugh, the way children do when somebody makes a mistake or says something foolish. And yet it was a kind laughter. It wasn’t resentful or mocking. Something had collapsed, in that moment of surprise, and I suspect they were seeing me for the first time. For the first time, I think, they understood that I was like them; but at the same time, utterly strange, someone to pity a little, in the same way as we pity a fool, or a madman with delusions of grandeur. From that day on, they did not bother to stop singing when I entered the room. They sensed my coming, but now they knew there was no need for secrecy. Now, as I had so ably demonstrated, there was no risk of my eavesdropping on their conversations. Now they knew, once and for all, that I couldn’t speak their language. Now they had decided, once and for all, that I did not exist.
Looking back at my notes, I see now that I was becoming delirious. The solitude was wearing me down – that and the constant singing, and the suspicion I had, from time to time, that I was being observed. I had no good reason for this feeling, yet I felt it, and even recorded it in my observations, as if it had some relevance to the course of the experiment. It was around this time, in fact, that my notes ran wild: they were highly personal in places, sometimes absurdly metaphysical, occasionally maudlin. One entry, made towards the end, runs as follows.
I know now that what matters is what we choose to consider. All of life is a process of selection: we filter out the irrelevant details in order to come at a truth of sorts, which is no more valid than another possible truth, except in the fact that we selected it, as opposed to something else – and language is the instrument of that process. What matters is not just the story that is told, to ourselves and others, but the way the story is told, the words we select to convey, and to solidify, our vision. Standing in the kitchen tonight, as darkness fell, I saw that I could think of Mother, dying in her white bed, or I could have thought of Lillian’s small, bewildered cries of pain and fear, as I guided her away into death. I could think of the twins in their unassailable world. I could ask myself what choices they are making, what world it is they are constructing. Or I could Fill a glass with water and he amazed by the very fact of surface tension, amazed by the very existence of things in liquid form. I could walk outside into the garden and look up at the sky. It doesn’t matter who I am, or what I have done. I am nothing other than a mind in space, noticing each detail then moving on, noticing then forgetting, looking then moving on. This is all there is: a vast, endless stream of random events – stars, thoughts, spiders, rain, buildings, children, money, lava, blood, sex, pain. Each mind makes what it can of the data but no one can say what sense is. No one can say, with conviction, that one thing is entirely true, while another is false. It doesn’t work that way. When I stop like this, when I stand still and see it all streaming towards me, my own mind empties. The order is coming from somewhere else, and I don’t know what it is. At times like this, language is meaningless. People talk about God, or time, or the great unified field theory, but these are nonsense words. If I allow myself to experience the world fully, I can see that there are no descriptions. Is this what the twins know? Is this why they see, and forgive, me?
It was the hottest summer in years. I barely slept; when I did, I had strange or violent dreams that woke me suddenly in the dark and left me uneasy. I felt close to fever. The twins seemed not to notice the heat: now that they were old enough, I would risk taking them outside with me on some evenings, carrying them one at a time into the garden and letting them play around at my feet while I watered the beds. As long as they were together, being outside seemed to encourage their physical development. In the basement room, they had never got past crawling, in the narrow confines of their pen. Occasionally, B had managed to stand, tottering on her feet a moment before she collapsed into a sitting position again, with a small thud. Out in the garden, they developed by leaps and bounds. I suppose, given the right environment, they were only too ready to make up for lost time. I made no effort to help them: I didn’t teach them to walk, they simply helped one another. It was as if they had both had a bright idea, at exactly the same moment, and had worked out the mechanics of the thing for themselves. I was always amazed at how well they did, as soon as they put their minds to something. It was as if their wills were united, as if they had become one. In the end, that was the cause of their downfall. They got a sense of their own power, and I had to cut them down.
One night they broke free. I still have no idea of what happened. I was asleep in my room, having one of those feverish dreams that seemed to mean so little when I woke and analysed them, yet left me feeling uncomfortable and anxious, in a way most nightmares would not. In this dream, I was walking along a country lane, in the middle of summer. The dream was filled with the same oppressive bright heat that filled the waking day: the road was narrow and dark, tall banks of hogweed and nettles grew up around me on either side and I could feel something moving along beside me in the undergrowth. I could feel it, I could even hear it breathing, but I couldn’t see it. I kept trying to make it out in the dark foliage, but whenever I stopped, it vanished, there was no sound, no movement, only the still beds of weeds, sticky with honeydew and cuckoo-spit. Then, finally, I caught a glimpse of it, out of the corner of my eye. It was utterly hideous: an immense damp-haired creature, with a dark, piglike face, and it seemed ready to attack.
A moment later, everything had changed. I was standing in the hall of my own house, but the furniture and pictures I had known all my life had been replaced with ugly knick-knacks and bric-a-brac, of the sort found in junk shops. It was perfectly still, a clear summer’s day. I could smell the flowers in the garden, I could see the sunlight flickering on the polished floor. I walked to the foot of the stairs and stood listening. Upstairs, someone was crying, a woman, or perhaps a child – I couldn’t be sure – and, suddenly, I was afraid. I ran outside, back into the light, and began walking away from the house as quickly as I could. But I had only walked a few yards when I heard someone calling my name and, when I turned back, I saw a woman running towards me, with a letter in her outstretched hand. I could tell from her face that the letter contained bad news and I wanted to call out, to make her stop, but when I opened my mouth, no sound came. As the woman came closer, I saw that her face was a blank, there were no features, no eyes, no mouth, only a mask of white skin.
I woke in the dark. The room was still, but someone else was there. I could feel it; I had that sense of being watched. I sat up quickly and fumbled for the bedside light.
It was the twins. They were standing in the doorway, eight feet away, in their night clothes, bolt upright, as if standing to attention, or perhaps just trying to stay balanced. I had no idea how long they had been there, or how they had escaped from the basement. I was certain I had locked their door before coming upstairs; but there they were, standing side by side, watching me intently. When I switched on the lamp, they didn’t flinch: it was as if they could see as well in the light as the darkness. It was some time before I noticed that they were soaking wet, as if they had just come in from a rainstorm. They seemed very sure of themselves; they did not resemble toddlers at all. They were more like wild animals, silken and wet and attuned to the night, and there was something about them, some latent power, that froze me. I think for a moment I half-expected them to attack, but they did not move; they simply stood in the doorway, staring.
It was a difficult moment. I was aware of the fact that I had been dreaming, that I might have talked or cried out in my sleep. What if they had done this before, if they had come to my room and spied on me, then left without my knowing? I hadn’t found the basement door open, or even unlocked, but in all the time they had been there, I might have left it open without even realising it. If I had made that mistake, I could easily have made any number of others. The one thing that was established, beyond doubt, was that I had allowed them to escape on this one occasion. Where one error is found, you are bound to assume others have gone unnoticed. If they had heard me speak, if they had heard something other than the abstractions on the language tapes, the experiment was finally ruined, and I still had an idea that something could still be salvaged from this experiment. I was conscious of the fact that I had almost cried out, involuntarily, a moment before, when I had caught sight of them standing there, watching me in the dark. I needed to know what they had seen and heard, most of all, I needed to know how they had come to be standing there, soaking wet, on a warm summer’s night. I was horrified by the thought that they might have made their way out into the world somehow, where they would have been discovered. I had a picture of them, in my mind, wandering unsteadily along the road, in the summer moonlight. Yet what troubled me the most was something I hadn’t really registered at first, something that felt like a false memory, and I might have been mistaken but, later, when I recalled switching on the lamp and seeing them there, I was certain that, for the first time ever, in my presence at least, they were smiling.
* * *
With the benefit of hindsight, I see that it was at that point, with that mistake, that the experiment with the twins ended. I couldn’t trust myself any longer; I couldn’t make even the most basic of assumptions. From that day on, whenever I went out, I would worry that I had left the door unlocked and, at that very moment, they were clambering up from the basement, or stumbling out into the light of day, making instinctively for the gate that led to the road. It was absurd, I knew, but whenever I left the house, I would leave the car running in the drive and go back to check, to see if everything was secure. At first it was just the door I checked; then I would stop to be sure I could see them both, safely locked up inside. Then I began to check the whole house: gas, water taps, electrical points. I had fantasies of fire breaking out while I was gone. A kettle had been left on, it had shorted, the fire had begun in the kitchen and swept through the house – it was only a matter of luck that a passer-by had spotted the flames and called the fire brigade who had, in turn, rescued the twins. I had fantasies of flood. At one point, I started going back two or three times to be absolutely certain. Once, in the supermarket, I left my trolley in the frozen food aisle and drove home in the rain, because I was convinced I had left the key to the basement room in the door. When I returned, my trolley was gone.
It was an absurd situation. It wasn’t only that I was concerned the twins might escape. The fact was, their very existence had begun to affect me in all kinds of ways. It’s hard to believe, now, that I was afraid of them, but I was. Whenever I went down to the basement, I felt sick and dizzy, as if I had been poisoned, or I was suffering from an allergy of some kind. I only had to look at the twins, playing together in their pen, to feel a wave of revulsion sweep through my whole body. It was a familiar sensation. I had experienced it before, I knew, and I racked my memory to remember when. Finally, I recalled the day my father found the cat and brought it home, without a word of warning. It was something I would never have expected from him. The small, rather ugly creature he carried into the hall wasn’t even a kitten, it was just a youngish cat he’d picked up from a refuge, one of those cat protection places, where lost and misbegotten creatures end up, like the souls in limbo, waiting to be redeemed. I remember him now, standing in the doorway, with the cat in his arms; he hadn’t even asked for a box, or a cage, he must have just selected it, more or less at random, then picked it up and carried it away.
It was almost Christmas. He had been sitting around in the kitchen for days, waiting for snow and listening to the songs on the radio – ‘White Christmas’, ‘Winter Wonderland’ – the sort of sentimental nonsense Mother couldn’t stand. I can see, looking back, that he must have been going through a crisis of some kind: he appeared more distant and unreal to me than ever, and I vaguely remember an impression I had that he was thinking something through, trying to come to a meaningful conclusion. He kept drifting into the downstairs study, where Mother and I would be sitting, reading, or talking quietly; he would stand at the window and look out for long minutes at a time, then he would say that he wished it would snow. I couldn’t see what difference snow would make, one way or another, but it was evident that it mattered to him. He must have said it a dozen times or more. Maybe he was trying to remember something from his childhood, and he thought snow would help. Most of the time, Mother ignored this performance but, for a while at least, I was a little intrigued.
Finally, a few days before Christmas, he went out early in the day, and came home around tea-time with a thin, red and white cat. He made a pretence of giving it to me; he said it would do me good to have a pet to make friends with and look after. I stood watching, in utter disbelief, as he released the scrawny, grimy-looking animal into the clean, perfect space of our front hall. Then I turned to Mother. I was certain she would forbid him to keep the cat in the house but, to my surprise, she simply walked slowly upstairs to her own study, without uttering a word. My father seemed not to notice; he took off his coat and led the cat through to the kitchen, where he found a bowl – a bowl for humans, something Mother might have used – and setting it down on the floor, filled it with milk. The cat inched forward cautiously, sniffed at the edge of the bowl, then turned away and began exploring the kitchen, rubbing itself up against every surface, leaving its mark, making our house its own.
‘I suppose he doesn’t want his milk,’ my father said, looking at me kindly, assuming my interest, including me against my will.
‘I suppose not,’ I said, as dryly as I could manage. I couldn’t understand why Mother hadn’t acted. Two words from her, and the cat would have been gone.
‘I’ve got some food in the car,’ my father said. ‘I’ll fetch it.’
He stood a moment, gazing at me. He seemed to expect me to participate, to stroke the cat, or pay it some kind of attention, or perhaps volunteer to feed it. I didn’t say anything. He went back outside, without his coat, and returned a moment later, with a cardboard box full of tinned cat food. He opened one tin, fetched another bowl, then took a fork from the drawer and half-filled the bowl with the dark, foul-smelling meat. When he set the meal on the floor, the cat ran to it immediately and began to feed. That was when I began to feel ill. It started with a knot in my stomach, then dizziness, and I experienced that same sense of personal invasion that comes when you have a stomach bug, or a severe cold. Something from outside – something animal – enters and takes control, depriving your body of its natural autonomy. I was being forced into the most distasteful intimacy. It was evident that my father wanted me to like the cat, that any sign of revulsion on my part would be a rejection, not of the animal, but of him. Yet the longer I stood there, in the warm kitchen, watching this scrawny, somehow parasitic creature eating from Mother’s crockery, the longer I was exposed to the smell, to the sounds it made in feeding, the worse I felt, and I knew, immediately, that I had to do something to protect myself, and Mother, from the consequences of my father’s folly.
Christmas had never been extravagantly observed in our house. Mother disliked sentimentality. My father would buy me several gifts and, on Christmas morning, he would present Mother with a single, discreetly-wrapped package, which she always set aside unopened. I never knew what it was. Generally, however, the whole occasion was over by breakfast-time. Normal order was restored; I put away the toys and books my father had bought me and Mother prepared a light lunch. We did not subscribe to turkey and funny hats, though my parents sometimes had guests on Boxing Day, for drinks, or supper. They always behaved discreetly, omitting any mention of the actual occasion from their conversation, as if they had simply happened over by chance, or on an ordinary invitation.
That year, it was different. We had a large tree, with lights and decorations, and I was perplexed to see Mother taking part, helping my father to dress the tree and hang up decorations, standing in the kitchen, making mince pies and angel cakes. The cat looked on, not quite certain if the occasion was a matter for fear, or for fascination. Though my father claimed he had brought the creature home for me, he was the only one who paid it any attention. He was the one who decided it should be called Rusty, because of its odd colouring; he was the one who fed it and let it out from time to time, standing at the kitchen door to see that it did not stray too far, then going out and calling it in, when he felt it had been outside long enough. Mother had decided to pretend the creature did not exist: I was so convinced of her power that I imagined, for several days, that the animal would sense her rejection and slip away some afternoon, leaving my father at the door, calling out to an empty garden. Instead, Rusty made Mother the central focus of its existence: wherever she went it followed; whenever she appeared, it woke up and went to her, making soft mewing sounds. It must have cost Mother some effort of will to ignore it, but my father, who ought to have been jealous, was pleased.
‘Rusty likes you,’ he would say, grinning at Mother, as if he had just solved a long-term problem, or discovered the answer to a question that had been troubling him for years. Mother wouldn’t answer. She simply kept up the pretence that the cat did not exist, no matter what, even when it tried to jump into her lap, or when it attempted to rub against her legs, smearing her with its scent, making her a piece of its territory. For hours at a time, she would retire to the upstairs study, where the cat was not permitted. It didn’t take long for me to understand that she felt the same sickness at the pit of her stomach, the same slight giddiness that I suffered, whenever the animal was close. For my father’s sake, I didn’t really want to hurt the cat, but in the end I had no choice. For Mother’s sanity, and for my own, I had to do something.
When I returned to school, after that strange Christmas, I found a book about domestic animals in the library. Immediately, I turned to the entry on cats and began a careful study of the subject. I looked at the bone structure, I read about its capacity for night vision, but what I found most interesting, and promising, was the fact that the sense of smell is integral to a cat’s being. I read that every cat had small glands on its body which emitted a uniquely-scented oil, with which the animal would mark its territory, leaving its signature wherever it went. Thus every cat had its own scent, by which it recognised itself; it followed, then, that that scent was its very identity. I was fascinated. For animals, any sense of self they had was defined by something external, by the presence of their body oils on rocks and trees and patches of ground around a given territory. Take away the scent, I reasoned, and the animal was lost. Its own territory, even its body, would become alien and threatening.
The possibilities for experimentation were infinite. It would have been most interesting, for example, if I had been able to substitute one cat’s scent glands for another’s, and observe the results. I could imagine the animal’s confusion, perhaps a kind of madness, as its sense of itself was dissipated – it be would like waking up in a new skin, with a different face, a different body. What would happen, I wondered, if a male’s scent-glands were replaced by a female’s? Would its behaviour change? It was just one of a number of fascinating questions, and I regretted the fact that such an experiment was beyond my capabilities. What I could do, however, was to try to mask Rusty’s natural scent, to remove his sense of identity. That, in itself, would surely be a disorienting experience and it might possibly drive the animal away. I didn’t really want to kill it, to begin with, at least. I was sure, if I could make it leave, someone else would find it and take it in. People are sentimental about cats and dogs, they treat them as they would treat other humans. Better, in fact. They love animals, because animals can be anything you want them to be. They cannot talk.
A few days later, when my father was away on business, I set the experiment in motion. It was a crude affair. I mixed up a cocktail of Mother’s perfumes in an old pump-action rose sprayer, then lured Rusty into the shed. The cat wasn’t suspicious: I had never given it cause to be wary of me, and it was relatively easy to lead it inside and lock the door behind us. I made it think I wanted to play, waving a length of cotton around in front of its nose; then, when I had its confidence, I trailed the cotton into a wooden box, where Mother usually kept plant pots, and eventually managed to trap the animal inside, by covering the box with a large garden sieve and weighting it down. Rusty made no serious attempt to escape; it must have imagined this was part of the game. As I started to administer the spray, it began to panic, but there was no escaping the box, and I had plenty of time to douse it thoroughly with the alien scent. I sprayed it several times, trying to cover the whole body, to mask the creature from itself utterly. It occurred to me that, without its scent, a cat might imagine it was invisible. It would be like the experience a human might have, if he looked into a mirror and saw no reflection.
Finally I stepped back, let the sieve fall, and opened the door. The cat scrambled quickly out of the box and fled out into the garden. I had tried to be careful not to spray near the eyes or the mouth, and I was reasonably sure I hadn’t caused any real injury; nevertheless, as soon as it was outside, it began to cry horribly. It sounded like a child crying, as if, somewhere behind that flat, whiskered face, there was a human soul, trapped in the mind and body of an animal. I had read how some peoples believe that souls pass from one form to another after death, how a man could become a dog, or a rabbit, or a horse, depending on the actions of his life, his sins and errors, the moments of kindness and betrayal, the loves and fears he had endured – and maybe it was true, maybe there was a soul trapped in that cat’s body, something more or less human, yet diminished in some way, a form that was somehow degraded, part-instinct, part-consciousness. Maybe that was another reason why some people wanted animals around them; maybe they saw traces of people like themselves in those dumb, appealing eyes. Maybe that was what my father had seen in Rusty. He had caught a glimpse of himself in this pitiful form, and he had reached out to give comfort – to the animal, to himself, to everything that was weak and needy. The idea disgusted me. There is nothing worse, nothing more distasteful than pity. Rusty had wandered away into the far corner of the garden, and was now standing by the pear tree. It was still crying softly to itself, and the sound irritated and enraged me. I shouted at it to stop, but that made no difference. Then, after two or three minutes had passed, and it still had not stopped, I went back into the shed and fetched a spade. The cat didn’t try to escape. I hit it once, then I struck several more times – I can’t remember how many – till I knew it was dead. I hadn’t planned to harm it, but for that one moment, I had no choice; I had to expunge that scrap of living misery, to destroy its pitiful soul. There was something about it that made me sick to the stomach. Even if it had run away, even if I had never seen it again, I couldn’t bear to think of its continued existence.
Now that same sickness had returned with the twins. There was something about them that transcended the gap between human and animal. They seemed to exist in both states at once, plugged into a current of instinct and blood-knowledge, communicating through song, each enjoying the other’s warmth and scent, as an animal might, with the same creature subtlety. In one sense, they weren’t human. They were aware of things that I could not detect; they lived on a different plane. I couldn’t even guess at the nature of their world. I had already decided that I would never be able to decipher their songs. Perhaps they were meaningless; perhaps their meaning was so different from what I would think of as meaning, that it could hardly be seen as meaning at all. Yet they seemed to know me: even when they had ignored me, during those first months, they must have been watching me all along. That night I woke and found them at my bedroom door, gazing at me in silence, I was aware of a new self-assurance, a contained malevolence that gave them real, animal pleasure. And, suddenly, I understood that I was afraid of them. It was fear that caused the sensation in the pit of my stomach, fear that made me dizzy, just as it was fear that had sickened me when my father brought Rusty home. I can see, now, that it was quite irrational, but after that night, I was always afraid the twins would attack me in some unexpected way, just as I had been afraid that my father’s cat might, at any time and without provocation, steal into my bed and sink its teeth into my throat.
It was too hot to sleep. I had lain awake for over two hours, under a single white sheet: the heat had made me a little feverish, every time I moved, the entire surface of my skin rippled with tiny shivers and waves of sensation. I kept imagining I could hear the twins, deep in the basement, singing to one another, or climbing the stairs quietly, making for my bed. Finally, I went down and fixed myself a cold drink; then I walked from room to room, peering into each moonlit space as if it were somewhere entirely new, a stranger’s house where I had woken up by chance. As long as I was moving, I heard nothing but the chinking of ice in my glass, a sound like tiny bells wrapped in the faint lapping of water; but every time I stopped, every time I paused to listen, I tuned in, once more, to an endless current of creaks and shifts, and that distant music which, the more I tried to convince myself it wasn’t there, the more I strained to hear it. I descended the basement stairs in the dark and stood at the door. I could see nothing through the grille. I switched on the microphone system. The twins were asleep: their breathing was soft and regular, and they were so attuned, each to the other, that it might have been one child sleeping in that dark pen. I think I was a little jealous of them then. Together, they were more individual than I would ever be. Even though they were totally dependent on one another, or perhaps because they were, they defined one another perfectly: for each of them, the world was filtered through the other’s eyes. There could be no sensation that was not tinged by their feelings for one another. I had been sure of that ever since I’d heard them laughing together. They were complicit. Maybe that was the reason for their singing – they weren’t conversing, as such, they were simply performing a ritual of confirmation, a celebration of their combined existence. The complicity that existed between them suggested a world that I was incapable of experiencing, and some of the pleasure of being in that world, part of their private joy, was predicated upon my exclusion. It was as if I was the one who could not speak; as if, for me, the world was nothing more than a jumble of meaningless and disquieting sensations – and it came to me, then, that I was the one who had been placed in the Dumb House.
After that, I was ill for several days. At some point, I fell asleep in a chair, and sat drifting between the day’s long heat and some distant winter of the mind, a journey through dark woods fuzzed with snow and strange, miniature towns, like the towns in naive paintings, all iced bridges and steeples and people skating on the rivers. I had some idea in my head, something to do with parallel lines, and how they meet at infinity. It was as if I was trying to formulate an idea, some hypothesis that would explain the very order of the world, how it was inherent in all things, yet was essentially inexpressible, or transparent to common sense, like the finer points of mathematics. I suppose I was suffering from a kind of fever. Yet, somewhere in my mind, these wanderings seemed part of the experiment to me, a vital stage, as vital as the records I kept, or the hypotheses I had formed.
When I woke, the room was buzzing with flies. I had been asleep a long time, perhaps days: the lamp was still lit, the dust burning slightly, and I caught a trace of a faint fleshy smell, like the smell of a hospital sick room. No doubt the flies had been drawn to the light, sensing an escape then finding only another room, another set of walls, another puzzling window to beat against. My fever was going now, but my throat and mouth were very dry, as if I had swallowed sand, and I still felt disoriented. I had the sensation of having been wrenched out of my body, of only just finding a way back. For a few seconds, I had the strong impression that I had just seen myself from the outside, a man sitting in a chair, like a character in a film – and I didn’t know who it was I was looking at. The image stayed in my mind a moment, still vivid, still real, then it faded. Yet, even for that short time, I was aware of something else, aware of myself, listening for the twins, before I even remembered their existence. That was when I realised fully that they were responsible for my fever, they were the ones who had made me ill, that night, when they came to my room. It was wholly illogical, but I was sure, in that moment, that they had willed my sickness. I could still see their eyes watching me, their silence held; I could feel their complicity against me, utterly malevolent and vengeful. There was no question that their development had been unnaturally rapid over the last two or three months. As they grew, their minds were becoming stronger, more united and I knew, if I did not break their power, they would become too powerful to contain.
I went to bed. I needed to recover my strength, so I could deal with the problem. After all, I told myself, there was no point in becoming hysterical. I understood the dangers of total solitude, coupled with prolonged exposure to some extremely irritating stimulus. I’d read about experiments on war prisoners, where a subject would be kept in solitary confinement for weeks at a time, with no other ambient sound than a tape loop of white noise. Much sooner than expected, the subject begins to experience hallucinations, delusions, prolonged bouts of hysteria. He hears voices. He loses all sense of himself; there are no boundaries between him and the rest of the world. After a few days, the experimenters could turn off the tape and the subject would go on hearing the same sounds, only now his anxiety increases, because there are moments when he becomes aware of the silence, because he no longer knows what is true and what is false. What I needed was to break out of that cycle. I was even on the point of leaving the twins in the basement for a few days, just to get away, to drive to the coast and listen to the sea, or go for a long walk in the hills, to hear the wind, the sheep in the fields, the skylarks. But I couldn’t leave them. It was a ridiculous fear but, even though I knew they were nothing more than a pair of small children, I was certain that if I abandoned them to their own devices they would escape, and the experiment would be exposed.
That was when it came to me – that night, as I lay, in the still heat, straining to hear something that wasn’t there. It made perfect sense: it would be a new stage of the experiment, it might even provide a new insight, the very breakthrough I needed. The question was: what would happen if one of the twins could no longer sing, if one voice was suddenly turned off? How would they react? Would they try to devise some other means of communication? Was it communication? As far as turning off a voice went, I knew it could be done. I could crush the larynx from the outside, or I could open the neck and sever the vocal cords, or even remove the larynx entirely. I knew that much from my medical text books. I also knew the experiment would be hazardous: crushing might cause asphyxiation, and my skills as a surgeon were limited, in spite of my experience in dissection. Even if the operation was successful, there was a possibility that the children would lapse into that state of apathy I had observed when I tried to part them. By now I believed, with utter conviction, that their continued existence depended on their ability to communicate with one another. They weren’t individuals in their own right; they were the two parts of a single entity. That would always be so. That was the reason for my lack of progress: the twins were isolated in their own fortress of sound, and I could not enter, no matter how hard I tried. If one of them could no longer speak, they might try some other method of communicating, something I could interpret; or the one who remained might turn to me, in order to go on living, and then I might break the code, if any code was there. Besides, if things went wrong, if the experiment failed, nothing would be lost. The twins’ song had become unbearable to me.
Of course, I probably knew the outcome all along. By then, I could not escape the feeling that I had failed. It was a completely unscientific attitude: no experiment ever fails, it can only be conducted, observed and recorded. I thought of Michelson and Morley, whose work on the speed of light and the nature of the ether led to Einstein’s discovery of relativity. In science, there are no dead ends. Yet Michelson and Morley were horrified by what they considered the failure of their enterprise; they were Christian men, horrified at the vacuum, the flaw in the fabric of the universe that their observations seemed to expose. There were nights when I lay awake for hours, thinking of opportunities I had missed. There is no more powerful fantasy than the fantasy of what might have been. I could see, with regard to the experiment, that any fault was mine, but now I wanted to destroy the twins and begin again, with a single subject, as the experiment had demanded all along. My mistake had been to keep the two of them together. It was time to resolve the situation, to clear the way for something new.
I began work the following morning. I decided B would be the better subject for surgery. She was physically stronger, and I thought she would have a better chance of survival. I had several books on human anatomy and surgery in the library and I studied them carefully before I started. In my nocturnal meanderings, I had already realised that there were really only three options to consider: temporary disabling of the vocal cords, for example, by the exertion of pressure around the larynx, with the attendant danger of asphyxiation; a laryngotomy, where the vocal cords are severed in situ; or a full laryngectomy, in which the entire larynx is removed. There was no doubt in my mind that the latter would prove fatal to a child. The simplest approach would be to crush the larynx in some way, effecting a temporary, or even permanent loss of speech, but that seemed too crude, too ugly. I decided to investigate the laryngotomy option further. It seemed within my capabilities, no more difficult than some of the experiments I had carried out on mice and rabbits, and there was something attractive about the idea of opening the child’s larynx and looking inside.
According to my surgery textbook, laryngotomy is a relatively straightforward operation – technically, at least. The difficulties would arise during aftercare: B would experience some distress, and I would have to take measures to ensure the wound did not become infected. There was also the problem of the anaesthetic. I could use some of the drugs Mother had been prescribed, or perhaps alcohol to at least immobilise the child during the operation, but I would have to research very carefully the amounts I could use without causing long-term damage. Also, the twins would have to be kept apart for several days arid I had no idea how they would take it. Nevertheless, the experiment was destined to end inconclusively if I did not act, and I was curious to see if B’s larynx was different from the norm, if it had become altered by the constant singing, if there had been some kind of adaptation. However I looked at it, the decision was a reasonable one. Even if B died, I would still have A and, once he had recovered from the separation trauma, we could begin the experiment again, on a new basis. Then again, if he really could not live without his sister, or if I felt the experiment had been irretrievably compromised, there was no shortage of young, homeless women on the streets of every major city in the country. I reflected on how easy it had been to get Lillian to come with me: I had exerted no force, and very little persuasion. All I had to do was find someone similar, someone who was desperate for food and safety, and show her a modicum of kindness – and the experiment could begin again, with a new subject. I would learn from my mistakes with the twins. Nothing would be wasted.
I used some of mother’s old drugs to put B to sleep. I administered them with her food, while she was still in the basement room then, when she was close to unconscious, I carried her upstairs to the study, where the operation would take place. A became distressed as soon as he saw B going under, even more so when I picked up what, for him, might have looked like her dead body, and carried her from the room. I was concerned, of course, but there was nothing I could do to reassure him, and my time was limited. I have to confess, also, that I was excited by the prospect of performing the operation.
I remember once, in school, we were studying poetry for an examination. The teacher was telling us how the key to the poet’s thinking lay in a single phrase, something about how dissection is murder; how, as soon as you chose to dissect a living thing, you lost its essence, something bled away, something invisible. The teacher, Miss Matheson, seemed to agree with the writer: the more she talked about nature, and the soul, and immortality, the happier she became. Finally, I raised my hand.
‘Luke?’
I liked Miss Matheson. She was pretty, and she had a way of saying your name in class, as if she was surprised at your very existence, as if the recognition that you were present was a real pleasure for her. There was a kind of appeal there, too; she wanted us all to join in, to feel the same way about poetry as she did. I asked my question.
‘Where is the soul, Miss Matheson?’
She smiled.
‘That’s a good question, Luke,’ she said. ‘That’s exactly what the poet is trying to tell us.’
She paused for effect. I remember noticing how pretty she looked, standing by the window, in the afternoon sunlight. She was wearing a pleated tartan skirt, and a white blouse, with a red cardigan over her shoulders, hanging a little loosely, as if she had just pulled it on.
‘You can’t pinpoint the soul,’ she said. ‘You can’t just cut a flower or a laboratory rat open and find its essence. All you will see are petals and sepals, bones and blood vessels and organs. The real life of things can’t be seen under a microscope.’
‘Then how do you know it exists?’ I asked.
She smiled again.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘we all know there’s more to life than bones and brain cells. There’s thought. There’s beauty. There’s personality. What the poet is saying is, you can’t take up a scalpel or a magnifying glass and go looking for those things. Science only shows us how the machinery works. It can’t tell us why the machine exists, or anything about what lives inside.’
I nodded. I liked watching her talk, and I wanted her to continue, standing there with the light on her face and hair, her hands moving in the still air as if she were performing a magic trick. I didn’t agree with a word she said; as far as I could see, that poet she admired so much was an aberration. The very image of the thinking individual, ever since the Renaissance, was of a mind overcome by curiosity, descending into crypts and cellars, risking death or exile in order to open and examine and draw the cadavers of suicides, or the newly-executed. Mother had given me books that showed the artists working by candlelight in the cold mortuaries. All anyone knew for sure about the human body was there, in Leonardo’s drawings, or in the flayed bodies that Vesalius drew, as if they were statues, posing in classical landscapes with their tendons, or muscles, or arteries exposed. If the dissectors had obeyed the laws of their day, we would still be throwing our waste into the streets, people would still be dying of plague or diphtheria in Paris and Milan. The sick would die slowly, in dark, foul-smelling rooms, covered with leeches and lance-marks. Throughout history, the important discoveries were made by those who ventured upon the unspeakable. I knew it was so, even then, and I wanted to stay behind after the class, to tell Miss Matheson what I knew. I suppose I wanted to impress her, too. I can see that. Looking back, I understand that all I wanted from her was a reaction of some kind, even if it was nothing more than shock, or dismay. Yet, when the moment came, all I could say was that I didn’t agree with the poet, that I thought science was the most valuable tool we had, if we wanted to know the world. Miss Matheson smiled that smile of hers, and I fled in confusion.
Now, as I prepared my instruments and set out the study for the operation, I saw that I had entered upon that domain of the unspeakable. I had always understood that the human skin was the true frontier. I had dissected animals, but I had never cut into human flesh. Now, as I strapped B to the table and applied the sterilant to the area around the larynx, I considered that immaculate, unbroken surface. I had planned everything. I intended to make the smallest possible incision, to open the skin and tissue around the larynx and, with the minimum of trauma, sever the vocal cords on both sides. This was the most delicate work, a surgical exercise in which I could take real satisfaction; also, the very act of breaking the skin, of entering another human body, intrigued and excited me. I could see why people might kill for that sensation, simply to enter and explore this forbidden region of blood and cartilage and tissue. Such people would be the victims of an exquisite curiosity. They would be haunted by the mystery that existed only a knife’s depth away. As long as we imagine the body as wet and messy, a sack of offal and bile, this desire may never arise. It takes someone with faith in a near-angelic order of things to want to enter another body. Such a person would have to believe in a silent and imperceptible order: not God and his angels, nothing mystical – rather, something entirely scientific: an informing principle, the presence of a spirit that might be detected in every pattern the body revealed. Maybe Miss Matheson was right: there is a soul, there is something that inhabits the body, something that cannot be isolated in the meat of the brain, or the chambers of the heart. Yet it would still be visible, in the sheer beauty and economy of the human body, in the sheer beauty and economy of all matter. Whatever you decided to call it – soul, or mind, or spirit – something as fine as mist was present in the flesh: not soul, but what the Greeks and the Gospel of Saint John called Logos, a universal and impersonal order, informing everything according to its nature. The key was there: order is neutral. The operation I was about to perform was more than a physical investigation, it was a metaphysical enquiry into that universal order. Perhaps this metaphysical – this religious – element is present in any act of dissection, if it is performed in the correct frame of mind. Perhaps it is even present in dismemberment. Perhaps every incision is an act of spiritual love. As I fastened B’s head in place and raised my scalpel, I half-believed I would find something unexpected; some filament of preternatural warmth, some subtlety of design, lodged in her throat like a key.
Everything has its own, peculiar sound: skin; cartilage; vein; the natural flow of living blood. It surprised me. I had worked on living bodies before, but this time it was different. This time, the body was human. For minutes at a time, I felt as if I was working on my own body, slitting open my own skin and clamping it back, peering into my own larynx. Compared to this, every dissection and investigation I had ever performed was the exploration of inanimate matter. Now, for the first time, I felt I was working on a living soul. As soon as I made the incision – I was elated to discover that my hand was steady, that I made no errors – I was aware of the warmth and the movement within. Everything had its own sound and its own colour. Nothing was quite as I expected, despite my researches. Everything was lighter, finer, more distinct than I had thought possible. At the same time, I was more aware than ever of the meatiness of the flesh. When I saw the larynx – that beautiful mechanism, almost birdlike in its delicacy – I was still aware that the nerves, the finely-modified cartilage, the perfectly-adapted muscles were immersed in flesh. At that moment I was aware of an overwhelming sympathy: no matter how carefully it was done, the severing of the vocal cords, with the attendant damage to the larynx itself, seemed more an act of violence than a piece of surgery. I had the sensation in my own throat, of two fine elastic strings, snapping with a sudden jolt, and I had to steady myself to make the next tiny incisions and finish the job. I had to remind myself of my purpose, then. Having come so far, I told myself, there was no stopping on what were, mostly, sentimental grounds.
I worked carefully, yet I finished much sooner than I had expected. The vocal cords were fine and easily severed; after that, I experienced a wave of satisfaction and relief, and the suturing was fairly straightforward. I had a difficult moment when the child moved suddenly, just as I was putting the last stitches in, and I was afraid she would regain full consciousness before I could finish. I realised I hadn’t thought this part of the operation through in full; I’d been too busy thinking about the incisions and the care needed to sever the vocal cords without inflicting too much damage. I had made sure I knew where everything was: the layrnx, the vocal cords, the major arteries. I had studied the problems of after-care: the possible breathing problems, the trauma, the need to protect against infection. When, at last, I had completed my work, and B showed no signs of waking, I carried her into the spare room and placed her in my old cot. Then, exhausted, I got cleaned up, went down to the kitchen, and made myself a pot of coffee. I must have fallen asleep in my chair; when I woke it felt as if a few minutes had passed, at most, but, when I glanced up at the window, I saw that it was dark outside. I ran upstairs to the spare room. B was awake. When I switched on the light she moved her head a little, but she did not look at me. She looked at the light bulb for a few seconds, then she turned her face to the wall. She was expressionless. She didn’t cry, she didn’t even seem to be in pain. She was remote, uninvolved, like some animal in the zoo that refuses to acknowledge the existence of its observers. I checked to see if the dressing was clean and intact. I had considered the danger of her putting her hands to her throat and opening the wound anew, but everything looked fine. Feeling more reassured, I fetched the portable CD player from the study, put on Tallis’ Spem in Alium, and set it to repeat track 1, so there would be music there for her all night. Then I switched off the light and went downstairs, to see how A was.
My plan had been to bring the twins together when B’s injuries had healed. I was hoping for a fairly speedy recovery, in physical terms – I had expected to reunite them after about a week – but B made no real progress that I could detect. She would not eat. She rarely moved. Sometimes she seemed to be sleeping, sometimes her eyes were open, but I had no idea what she was experiencing, whether she was in pain, whether she had the will to get better. I knew that was the key to her recovery. If she wanted to live, she would – and yet, from the very start, I felt she had sustained too great an insult to the system to survive. It wasn’t so much that she had lost some blood, or experienced the usual trauma – I couldn’t fully put it into words, but there had been a moment, just as I was concluding the operation, when I had become aware of the spaces inside the body, how the tissue isn’t as tightly packed as I had imagined, how there are small, vital gaps everywhere. I had been aware of this in animals, but for some reason, I hadn’t been prepared for that in a human body. Yet it was those spaces that seemed important, as I stitched B up and dressed the wound; it was those spaces that seemed most vulnerable, most sensitive. That tiny space in the larynx, that space I had violated, would never be the same again, and I think B knew that, at some level. I could have waited for a full recovery, but I was afraid she would simply give up, and I wanted to see what happened, when I brought the twins together.
So it was that, two days later, I carried B into the basement room and set her down in the pen next to her brother. Neither child made a sound. I waited several minutes, but it was evident that they had no intention of attempting to communicate while I was there. They didn’t even move: they sat side by side in the pen, gazing at one another, waiting for me to go. The expression on their faces was identical: a look of infinite grief, a profound hurt that seemed to affect A at least as much, perhaps more than B. I stepped outside and locked the door behind me. By the time I reached the observation window, they had already moved together, and were holding on to one another, rocking slightly, the way monkeys do when they are hurt or frightened. I watched for a while, then I withdrew. At that moment, I knew for certain that it was hopeless to continue. By performing the laryngotomy on B, I had damaged both twins irreparably. The resilience I had taken for granted in B had been illusory. I didn’t know if it was the operation, or the brief, yet for them, interminable period of separation that had broken their spirit, but all I had left were two injured children, turned in upon their own special world, from which I was exiled forever.
I spent the afternoon working in the garden. It was still warm, and the borders were in bloom. I pottered about for some time, dead-heading the roses, pulling up weeds. For the first time, I allowed myself to fully recognise that the experiment had failed. There was no way of deciding whether the twins’ singing was a language in itself, or whether they were simply singing for the fun of it. Perhaps their song really had been nothing more than a celebration of their own being, their likeness, the sense they had of themselves and of one another. Perhaps it was the running commentary of two perplexed souls, unable to make any sense of their world, but delighting in it, nevertheless. All of a sudden it occurred to me that they had existed all their lives in a state, not of innocence, but of grace – which is to say, awareness, playfulness in the purest sense, a special mix of detachment and interest that made them appear, at times, superior to me in their manner of being in the world. That was it. These children, singing to one another in the confines of a blank laboratory room, possessed something I could not begin to imagine. They had passed beyond the limits of my language and ended up beyond my control, outside the scope, even, of my observation. It was a sobering thought. Nevertheless, there were lessons to be learned. Next time, I told myself, I would set things up differently. I would obtain a new child and keep it in total isolation. It would be a simple matter to find another homeless woman. I could start again. In the meantime, I would make the best of a bad job with the twins. It was evident that A would not sing any longer: he must have known that B could not reply. In other words, there was an imbalance between them. If that imbalance were righted, there was a chance that they might attempt to find some new way of communicating. Perhaps I had allowed them to rely on their singing for too long, and they would be unable to find an alternative. Still, it was worth a try. I would perform one more laryngotomy and, if that failed, I would scrap the experiment and start again.
The second operation was as successful as the first. I found it pleasurable, once again, to linger over the tiny gaps, to see the intricacy and beauty of the flesh in close detail. However, A’s response on recovery was even worse than B’s. He was more listless – less willing, I think, to recover. He developed a fever, and symptoms of infection which, with no worthwhile antibiotics, there was little I could have done to combat. I placed him back in the pen with his sister, and they lay together, gazing at one another, disconsolate, spent. I was relieved, in a way, to be spared their constant singing, but I now understood that I would have to take steps to close this experiment down and make ready for another. Perhaps I felt guilty, too, for taking things so far; either way, I could no longer bear to have them in the house. The experiment was over: it had ended in failure, more or less, and the twins were a constant reminder of how badly it had gone. Besides, it was obvious that they were unhappy, and I realised that it would be a mercy to simply end their lives. I had already sketched out my plans, working out a strategy for finding a new homeless woman, deciding where I would keep her, thinking through all the possibilities. I would have to be careful, but once I had found an appropriate person, once I had managed to get her back to the house, I could keep her in the basement, out of sight and mind. I thought of the girls I had seen in London, hopeless, desperate for food and shelter and a sense of safety. They soon became suspicious and self-aware after a few months on the streets, but how easy it would be to find a young runaway on her first or second night: someone inexperienced, someone vulnerable. I’d read about men who wandered around the stations and backstreets at night, hunting down such girls. If they could do it, I could. How much better for the girl if I found her, rather than someone like Jimmy. Even if she wasn’t a willing partner, even if she didn’t understand what was happening, or what her true purpose was, she would be comfortable and well looked after, for a time at least. Most importantly, she would be engaged in something worthwhile.
Meanwhile, I had to be rid of the twins. I considered several methods of disposal. Drowning occurred to me, but I dismissed it as involving too much direct contact with the children. The truth was, I felt squeamish. The same problem arose with smothering or asphyxiation. I had a good supply of valium and a variety of drugs Mother had been prescribed over the course of her illness, but I felt they might be useful in my attempts to procure a homeless woman. Other possibilities included alcohol and carbon monoxide poisoning, or the simple withdrawal of food and drink. In the end, however, I lighted upon the perfect answer.
I had forgotten that every garden is an apothecary’s shop. It contains narcotics, emetics, astringents, love potions, hallucinogens. A few years before I had begun the experiment with the twins, I had studied the effects of plant substances, especially hallucinogens and poisons. Now it all came back to me: the effects of yew and cherry laurel, laburnum, deadly nightshade, bryony, various fungi. It pleased me to think that the most powerful drugs could be found within a mile’s walk of any home, especially in autumn, when the woods are full of toadstools. Every park, every stretch of waste ground, every local woodland offered the kinds of plants that could destroy a man’s inner organs in a matter of days, or tear his mind open in a few hours. I had read of cases where children had swallowed only a few berries of Atropa belladonna, the deadly nightshade, and had begun to hallucinate vividly, the hallucinations becoming more and more intense as the poison worked, until finally they died – not from the poison that cause the visions, but from another, quite distinct substance. During my earlier researches, I had prepared several extracts of these substances: atropa, foxglove, monkshood, without really knowing what I intended to do with them. Now, all of a sudden, I had my answer.
I was working at the far end of the garden, by the wall, where Mother had trained a pillar of Albertine up a trellis. I was enjoying the scent, the warmth of the afternoon sun, the quiet of the place. The singing in my ears had stopped and, for the first time in months, I was at peace. I’m not sure when, but it was some time in the long heat of the afternoon, the way it sometimes happens, when you’ve been outside, in a closed space, alone for a while. I had my back to the house and, all of a sudden, I felt someone was there, standing at the door, watching me. I turned around quickly. It sounds absurd, but I half-expected to see Mother there, standing at the door, calling me to come in for some tea. I could see her in my mind’s eye, in her blue and red summer dress and her straw hat. She was as beautiful as ever. But when I looked, nobody was there. I saw nothing but the holly trees by the path, the back door, the study window. The sensation only lasted a moment, but it was beguiling, as if I’d been touched, like one of the children in the books Mother used to read me, by the cool hand of some otherworldly presence. It didn’t occur to me that my intruder of two years before had returned: after all, how could he? He was long dead, I thought.
Nevertheless, when I reached the house, the evidence that someone had been there was undeniable. He must have been watching me for some time. It reminded me of the time before, when I’d found Jimmy’s traces in the garden, but it was a ridiculously long time before I actually realised that this was the same individual who had come before, the same all-seeing person, returning to haunt me. In other words, I had killed Jimmy for nothing. That would have explained his behaviour in the churchyard. Now, I suddenly realised, I would have to put all my plans on hold. I would have to delay finding a girl, I would have to get rid of the twins quickly, and clear the basement, in case anyone came prowling. Worst of all, if my intruder returned, I would have to go through the process I had gone through with Jimmy, with its attendant risks, all over again.
That evening, I bought the local paper. It wasn’t something I usually did; I suppose I wanted to check to see if anything out of the ordinary had happened, if there was some new information about Jimmy’s death, or Lillian’s disappearance, or some new evidence that had come to light. I nicked through quickly, looking for anything that might indicate cause for concern, but, to be honest, I was hardly aware of what I was reading. It all seemed so absurd, that mixture of road traffic accidents and advertisements for bridal wear, of births and deaths and recipes for lemon meringue pie. I’m not even sure, looking back, if I was conscious of having noticed the feature story on the cover, but I suppose I must have done. When I began reading, it was the picture that first caught my attention. I recognised Jeremy Olerud right away, though he looked clean and tidy, in a collar and tie, with his shock of yellow hair brushed back, and he looked different – less enraged, almost happy. The story was rather thin. It said the boy had been found drowned in the boating lake at Weston Park. The local police were asking for anyone who had seen the child, or who might have any information about the circumstances of his death, to come forward. It was obvious that they suspected foul play. The story went on to say that Karen Olerud, the mother of the drowned boy, had gone missing in mysterious circumstances. The police were appealing to anyone who knew her whereabouts to come forward. I was surprised at the amateurish quality of the writing, even for a local newspaper. They actually used terms like mysterious circumstances. The report concluded with a summary of Jeremy’s school career and behavioural problems.
In my garden, the seasons don’t just begin and end. Traces of winter remain, far into April and May, films and threads of moisture and blackness, small pockets of leaf mould and frost in the raked leaves behind the shed and in the shady corners of the north wall, where it never really gets warm. Autumn arrives a degree at a time: a flower head tilts and collapses into a mass of inky tissue, a few leaves drift from the pear trees on the wall, an apple ripens too soon, and falls unnoticed. Winter begins with the chrysanthemums. It had taken me years to notice these things. As a child, I had gone to bed in summer and wakened next morning to windows shot with frost and the smell of apples in the kitchen. Spring was one sudden narcissus. The only subtleties I had ever understood were those Mother had pointed out; even then, I made no connections, I took everything at face value.
Now, after my months with the twins, I felt different. Sometimes it was as if every detail was too exquisite to bear: a single petal drifting across the lawn, a single drop of rain suspended on a twig, the first flakes of snow that fell out of a blue-black sky – everything was present. At the same time, I felt completely attuned to my surroundings. Every change in the light, every new sound, every change registered with me at a purely physical level. One evening, only days after I had decided to kill the twins, I was standing at the side door, in a dark place I usually only passed through, where nothing grew but ivy and periwinkle. The side wall was about ten feet high and close to the house; there was a door through to the garage that I always kept locked, and a narrow path that ran to the back wall, past the shed and the compost bins. I had always thought this was where my intruder had entered, clambering over the garage roof and tumbling in over this wall: it had never occurred to me that he might come across the fields, ford the little stream and slip in through the back gate, which I would normally have kept locked, but occasionally forgot. I suppose I was standing out there that night in the hope of catching him. I know I was listening, watching. Then, as I caught the first hint of autumn in the air, the merest hint of water and caramel, I realised someone else was there, just around the corner of the house, quite close, all tension, as aware, suddenly, of me, as I was of him. I don’t know how I knew it, or how I knew it was a person, not an animal, but I was quite certain my visitor had returned. I ought to have been more careful. It might have been one of Jimmy’s friends, or some common burglar – whoever it was, he might have been armed. Yet, before I had thought it through, I walked quickly to the back of the house and turned the corner. Perhaps I expected the prowler to hear me coming and make a run for it; instead, I found myself face to face with Karen Olerud.
She was standing by the honeysuckle Mother had trained along wires at the back of the house, as if she had stopped, casually, on her regular evening stroll around the garden, to inhale its deep, sweet fragrance. Her hair was dishevelled, and stuck here and there with dried leaves, and I noticed there were scratches and streaks of mud on her face and neck – it was as if she had come through a wilderness to find me. I suppose I should have been surprised to see her, but I wasn’t. I was glad. I understood immediately that she had been my mysterious visitor all those months before. She was the one who had left that trail of soft, black footprints in the snow, the one who had become a ghost in order to haunt me, appearing and melting away, staining everything she touched with shadows and dust. She had been a silent witness to my life with Lillian. She must have seen us at the window; she must have watched us, on those nights when I undressed the girl and led her away; she had stood in silence, perhaps for hours at a time, while Lillian moved from room to room, making breakfast, bringing me tea, fetching books from the library, watching television. Perhaps it disturbed her, to think I had chosen this child in her place. She would have thought of me as a lover, no matter what I had done. Suddenly, everything was clear: she had never meant to threaten or intimidate us. I had killed Jimmy for nothing. All she had done to call attention to her vigil had been nothing other than cries for attention, desperate attempts to let me know she still wanted me.
I felt elated. The story from the previous day’s paper ran through my mind and I knew – I knew for certain – what it had deliberately left untold. Karen Olerud had killed her son. She had drowned him deliberately, and now she had come to me, because she was free, and she had nowhere else to go. I no longer had any need to acquire a homeless woman. I had the perfect subject, someone who needed me more than I needed her, someone I knew could be easily managed. All I had to do was take her in.
‘Hello, Karen,’ I said.
She gazed at me as if she wasn’t quite sure I was real.
‘You look tired,’ I said, but that wasn’t the whole truth. She looked beautiful, standing there, in the fading light, and I remembered her body with a sudden rush of desire – the smoothness of her skin, the warmth of her mouth, how wet she had been when I first touched her. I was also intrigued by the idea that, for the first time, her mask would have to be discarded; that, from now on, I would no longer be obliged to play her game. If I took her in, I would have her on my terms and I think she knew that.
‘Do you want to come in?’ I continued.
She didn’t reply. For a moment I wondered if she had lost her mind: she seemed so dazed, so out of touch with reality. Yet I knew she had recognised me. It occurred to me that she had spent all her energy on getting as far as my house and, now that she had arrived, she could barely function. She was only waiting to see what I would do.
I took hold of her arm, gently.
‘Why don’t you come in and rest for a while,’ I said.
I led her inside and she followed me through the house in a daze of gratitude. I helped her out of her wet dress in the bathroom, then I ran a hot bath and told her to finish getting undressed. For a moment she seemed confused, as if she thought I wanted to have sex with her then and there, as the steam rose and clouded the windows, and, when I understood what she was thinking, I have to admit I was tempted. There was something about her, as she stood before me, streaked with mud, with the bruise on her mouth and the cuts and scratches on her arms and face, something that excited me, and I had to collect myself and tell her, gently, that she would feel better after a nice hot bath. The look of gratitude returned to her face and she lowered herself into the hot water and sat waiting, as if she expected me to bathe her. I told her to get cleaned up, then I picked up her dirty clothes and took them away. When I returned, with an old dressing gown of Mother’s, she was still sitting there, helpless, stunned, lost in her own world. I began to wash her then, wiping away the mud, rinsing the blood and dirt from her hair, bathing her cuts and bruises with warm water. I felt an unexpected tenderness for her, all of a sudden. She had come to me just when I needed her, as if she had known all along what was required. When she was clean, I helped her out of the bath and dried her gently, then I draped the dressing gown around her shoulders and led her across the landing to Mother’s room. Nobody else had been allowed into that space since Mother had died; for the first time, I understood why I had kept it intact, just as she had left it, five years before. Karen was exactly Mother’s size: the night-dress I chose for her was an exact fit. I gave her two of Mother’s old pills, so she would sleep soundly through the coming hours, then I kissed her briefly on the mouth and, telling her to get some sleep, I lowered her into the bed and pulled the covers up around her shoulders. When I made as if to leave, she caught hold of me and clung to my arms like a frightened child, and I had to reassure her, stroking her hair, kissing her face, telling her everything was going to be all right. After a while, she let me slip free.
‘Go to sleep,’ I said. ‘Everything’s fine. I’ll see you in the morning.’
I waited a few minutes, till I was sure she was asleep. Then I locked her into Mother’s room and went downstairs to prepare the final meal for the twins. I had to work quickly – and I am aware that, in my haste, I took risks I ought not to have taken. I might have been seen; Karen might have wakened and panicked. Yet I didn’t care about any of that. I didn’t even think of it. I felt utterly confident. It was like the feeling gamblers have, when they know they cannot lose. I was elated, I suppose, that I was about to begin the experiment again. I served the meal, feeding the twins by hand, as they were unable to feed themselves, then I went upstairs to make coffee. Later, I went down to the basement and, in spite of my old fear that they were still alive somehow, still waiting to catch me out, I retrieved their cooling bodies and carried them out into the garden. Strange, how empty their faces looked out of doors. While Karen slept, I did the children next to their mother, in the iris garden, turning the bodies so they lay face to face in the wet earth.
It is remarkable how little Karen has changed, how beautiful she still is, in spite of the scratches and bruises. It’s over three years since I last slept with her, but I calculate that she must still be in her mid-thirties, still capable of having another child, perhaps more. I realise now that I have wanted her, while we have been apart; now that she is here, I feel certain that I can manage the situation. The essential thing will be to make sure she doesn’t become independent enough to question what is happening when I take the children away, but I know, if she becomes difficult, it will be easy enough to dispose of her. Nobody knows where she is. If I had to kill her, I could bury her in the garden, next to Lillian and the twins, and return to the earlier plan of finding another homeless girl. Not that I even imagine it will come to that. I am quite sure I can keep her content; with simple displays of kindness and a regular supply of alcohol, she will accept everything I say and do. Besides, I am fond of her, in my way. It felt good, when I kissed her on the forehead and turned off the lights, knowing I would return later to the warmth of her bruised skin; it feels good, now, to have a woman in the house again. A few hours ago, when I left her in Mother’s room, locking the door carefully behind me, I experienced a sudden thrill of joy, as if I were locking away some hidden treasure that I’d been waiting years to find, the one thing I had never expected: a necessary gift, an indisputable moment of divine grace.