WHEN I CAN’T sleep I get up and sit by the window, where I can see the sky. Sometimes there are stars and I try to remember the names of the constellations, but it’s been a while now since Val was here, and he was the one who really knew all that stuff. I used to try staying in bed, telling myself I would fall asleep after a while, listening in the dark for his soft breathing, and the odd, small popping sounds he used to make with his lips when he was dreaming, though we hadn’t slept in the same bed for years, not since we were small. It bothers me, thinking about him, and about how close we used to be. Now that he’s gone, I have a tendency to brood: I fix on an idea and circle around it, over and over, never coming to a resolution, just lying in bed with my head buzzing. If I get up, I can at least sit by the window and look at the sky. It’s a foolish thought, I know, because there’s probably nothing in the world except the earth and the cold stars and the stones in the cemetery, but sometimes I think Val is out there, not in any one place, but just floating somehow, as if he was part of the whole universe, and not just the other half of me. When I think that, I come close to believing that everything is all right – what I’m looking for is a special thought, an idea that’s almost there at the edge of my mind, a switch, almost, that I could throw, so that something in me would be turned off, maybe for ever. I don’t want to die, or anything like that. I don’t miss Val, or not in the way people think. It’s just that I know what their world contains, all the doctors and nurses and visitors, and I don’t want it. I’ve had my life, really; I’ve had events. Now I just want some time to think.
When I do sleep, I almost always dream about Val. I had no idea our state of being – our state of grace – had a textbook name. Folie à deux is what they call it – shared insanity, madness times two. I never thought of it as a medical condition: Val and I had always been together; we were the two halves of something that, otherwise, would have been incomplete, and whenever I looked at him, I saw myself, perfectly reflected. Now they tell me it was a form of mania; they’re saying he was inside my head all that time, and I wasn’t thinking straight. That’s why they parted us, the way teachers part troublesome children in school, so the weaker child can escape the bad influence. It’s odd how they always assume the strong one is bad – or is it that they think the bad are strong? I don’t know, but they’re wrong about one thing. When they took him away from me, he died, and I went on living. No matter what they say, he couldn’t live without me.
They can do whatever they like in the cause of justice, but as far as I was concerned, parting us was a kind of murder. They took away the one thing we knew for sure, the only identity we had. If they had been right – if I was the weaker one – I should have died years ago, and it’s true that, when we were first parted, I missed Val terribly. It was like having a piece of my soul torn out by the root and thrown away. Now it’s different. As long as he was still alive, I could imagine being together again, and I wanted that, from habit as much as anything else. But one day I realised he was dead – I don’t know how, but I knew as surely as I’ve ever known anything in my life. They wouldn’t confirm or deny it, and at first I was angry. I wanted to see him, to be sure. I know if I had died, Val would have wanted to look at my body: he would have been curious; it would be like seeing himself laid out in the coffin. He’d have wanted to touch the corpse, to lean in close and smell this dead version of his own flesh, identical in every respect to the body that still breathed. Surely they understood what it meant to me, to suspect that a part of myself had been taken away and sealed in a box, without my knowing for sure it was really gone. But they wouldn’t talk about it, and I stopped asking. It was as if I had died too, and nothing mattered any more.
That was how Thomas must have felt, when Jesus was crucified. I remember how excited we were, when we read how Thomas was called ‘the Twin’ – nothing else was said, you just had to take it for granted that, if he was ‘the Twin’, then he must be Jesus’ twin. That was why he couldn’t believe Jesus had come back, unless he touched the wounds – or no, it wasn’t that he couldn’t believe, that was just how the witnesses saw it. They could never have understood why he had to touch the wounds, to slide his fingers into his brother’s body, how he had always wanted to know what it was like, to be inside this identical other, not because he doubted his existence, but because he wanted to be him, for a single, dizzying moment. I remember the same feeling, when the priest came and told us about the soul. He seemed oddly sure of himself, oddly unquestioning, as he stood before us, moving his hands about in front of his body, as if he were performing some conjuring trick. It sounded as if he was describing a physical thing, something almost substantial, hidden in the body somewhere – a shadow on the thalamus, a stain between the liver and the heart. I knew that was wrong, because I knew, if I had a soul, it hovered somewhere between Val and me, a shared atmosphere, a rhythm that only worked when we were together. I couldn’t have challenged the priest. I couldn’t say that I knew what was, for him, a matter of faith, was far subtler – too subtle to be considered, even; but he noticed my slight shake of the head, and he glanced from me to Val, and back, as if he had guessed what we were thinking. Then he went on, averting his eyes, the way a cat does when it wants to pretend you’re not there.
After they parted us, I felt unreal, almost gaseous, unsure of myself. I became clumsy, I kept bumping into people, and knocking things over. Yet later, when I knew he was gone for good, I felt free for the first time in my life. My mind was like a wide, empty room, full of light and space. It wasn’t like that before; it was like in music, when two melodies are going on at once – what do they call it? Counterpoint. I never felt I could tell my story, or even speak, because his voice was always there, entwined with mine, working against me. For years we existed without boundaries; our thoughts were seamless. Now I can say what really happened. I’m not suggesting it was all Val’s fault: I just want to tell what I remember, to get it clear in my own mind. Maybe then I’ll be able to wait for him in peace.
It was the warmest summer for years. I still remember how hot it was; the days merged, one into the next: a continuum of haze and birdsong. Most days, we went swimming. We despised the Lido and the public baths, and always chose the part of the river where it ran deep and quick, out beyond Broadburn Farm. Nobody else swam there, so we had the place to ourselves. We’d lie on the bank and listen to the cuckoo in the distance; in the evenings we’d see a fox wandering back and forth across the next field, scattering the rabbits. He didn’t seem to be hunting so much as trapped in a maze of scent, following the hedge then faring out into the long grass, stopping now and then to listen and watch. Owls would come out to hunt before dark: we’d catch sight of them in the hedges, or floating over the fields, and once I saw one dip out of nowhere to catch a thrush in mid-air, as it flew from one bush to the next in the smoky twilight. In the heat of the afternoons, we’d swim in the deep water, where it was always cold: sometimes I would dive down and come up like a grebe, twenty yards away, and the cattle would lift their heads to look. They always seemed mildly surprised by my existence.
If we weren’t out swimming, we’d go into town. I didn’t like being there: the shops were crowded, and the people were hot and sweaty and ugly, picking things up and fingering them, leaving behind microscopic traces of minerals and dry skin. But Val would talk me into going: we’d wander from Boots to the Army and Navy, stealing things, just for the sake of it. We never took anything worthwhile: we only did it because Val enjoyed the risk. We’d go in once or twice a week and each time he’d steal something larger and more difficult to hide. Usually he threw away what he’d stolen. He didn’t want the stuff. I could have accepted it if he’d only taken something useful.
One day I was keeping watch while he slipped a silver picture frame into his bag. It was by far the most expensive thing he’d ever taken, and I was planning to ask if I could keep it. It should have been a simple matter to take it and go without attracting attention – and it would have been too, but for Will Clark. I didn’t see him till it was too late, but I could tell by the look on his face that he’d witnessed the whole thing. He didn’t give us away – he just watched as we left the store, and I could see he was making a mental note of everything, to use it in evidence later.
When I told Val he got really angry.
‘Why didn’t you warn me?’ he said.
‘I didn’t know,’ I answered. ‘By the time I saw him, it was too late.’
He looked at me in disbelief. Sometimes I tried not to know what he was thinking, but I always did, and he despised me for the pretence. I’ve read how there are tribespeople who believe the human soul is manifold. This is a common notion: rather than being a single entity, the spirit has a number of different aspects, which take up residence wherever they can: a pool of water, an earth formation, a totem creature that the child’s father chooses on the day it is born, placing the afterbirth on a rock and calling the animal out, to snare its hunger. I read a story once, in a magazine, where a woman had created a garden in the grounds of a derelict house in New York City. Here and there, among the undergrowth, she had placed the toys and trinkets she had found abandoned on the streets: teddy bears and dolls, propped in the angles of the trees; a jack-a-lantern, grinning in the rain; mechanical clowns, wound down for ever, marooned among the weeds. In one of the pictures, the garden was peopled with pale, questioning faces, like the faces of lost children, or stylised ghosts. The accompanying text explained that the woman was homeless, an elective mute who devoted her entire life to the creation of this garden, walking the city for miles every day, searching for objects she could use in its decoration. Nobody knew why she was creating this special piece of ground. It could have been that she was building a shrine to the remembered dead, or trying to reassemble her own fragmented self from these random images – but then, she could just as easily have been wandering the streets, like so many others, gathering whatever she could find, choosing one thing and rejecting another, for no good reason, other than the desperate desire for something to do to pass the time.
It’s hard to say why things happen: you read a story in a magazine and suddenly you become aware of something you hadn’t understood till then. Or else the picture is only a prompt, an alarm that brings to the surface something you had guessed was there all along – looking back you remember hints and glimpses, you realise, in fact, that it was staring you in the face all the time. Sometimes I couldn’t tell Val’s thoughts from my own: I would think something and he would do it, or I would think about something without knowing why, and it would only come to me later that it was him who was thinking, it was my brother whose being was so intertwined with mine that we shared our thoughts and our actions, that we could never escape from the bond that united us. At that moment, I knew we were deciding to kill Will – but I couldn’t tell which of us it was who had initiated the idea, even if it was Val who did all the talking. I’m just as guilty – and just as innocent – as he was.
‘What do you think he’ll do?’ I asked him.
‘Will Clark?’ he said, with exaggerated disgust. ‘Will Clark is a creep. He’ll tell somebody, that’s for sure. I’m surprised he didn’t say anything in the shop.’
I couldn’t argue with him. Will was in our class at school – nobody liked him, and even the teachers kept him at a distance, no matter how much he sucked up to them.
‘What are we going to do?’ I asked.
I have to be sure about this. I have to be certain it was him, not me, who decided. I have to be certain he said it out loud, that he didn’t just think it. If I remember him saying it then, at that moment, there could be other reasons than the most obvious one: I could be imagining it to explain what happened later, and so exonerate myself, because it would have been his idea, he would have been to blame, if he really had said, ‘We’ll have to shut him up, won’t we?’
From that day on, we were obsessed. We planned everything to the smallest detail: Val would make friends with Will and invite him to come swimming one morning in our special place. He said Will wouldn’t be able to refuse – he’d think we liked him all of a sudden, and he’d be grateful. He had to know how unpopular he was. Val would tell him to keep the whole thing a secret; he wasn’t to let his parents know where he was going. When we had him in the river, we’d hold him under till he drowned. Will was always boasting about what a great swimmer he was, but even if that were true, he would be no match for the two of us. When he was dead, we would leave him there and go into town. Nobody would suspect we’d been anywhere near the river.
I was pretty sure it wouldn’t work. Will would think we were just trying to get round him – but Val said that was all the more reason for him to come, because it would make him think we were scared. He’d imagine he had some power over us, because of what he’d seen – and as it happened, the plan worked. Val did a real job on Will, as far as I could tell, and it wasn’t long before the date was set.
I didn’t believe we would really go through with it, though. I went along with the plan, thinking we were just going to give him a fright, so he wouldn’t tell about the shoplifting. Of course, I should have known I was only fooling myself. Nobody knew Val better than I did. Once he had an idea in his head, nothing I could have said or done would have changed his mind.
We went to meet Will on a Wednesday, in the middle of the holidays. It was one of those soft, damp mornings, when the sun takes a while to cut through the haze. We didn’t wait for Will: I undressed quickly and slipped into the cold water, and Val followed, gliding away from me immediately and vanishing into the blackness under the willows. He loved it there: he said he could feel drowned bodies shifting in the water, brushing his skin with their bruised fingers. I told him that was the riverweed, but he just laughed.
‘Believe what you like,’ he said. ‘You’re entitled to your opinion.’
But I couldn’t believe what I liked. I couldn’t do anything he didn’t want to do; I couldn’t even tell his thoughts from my own. My existence was so tangled up with his that we shared everything. We even had the same dreams. Now they say that he was the guiding force and any power I had was his, not mine – yet when I swam into the deep water, where the weeds grew, I couldn’t help feelingthose fingers, brushingmyarmsand thighs, and sometimes I could see the blue faces, staring up at me through the water. I couldn’t believe they were sad there; it seemed so perfect an eternity, to lie in the cold river, under the summer heat, letting the current flow through their dreaming minds.
When Will arrived, half an hour late, he didn’t see us. I watched him, standing on the bank, looking downriver; then Val called out and he turned quickly, smiling, too obviously friendly to be trusted.
‘There you are,’ he said.
‘Here we are,’ Val answered, swimming towards him. ‘Come on in. The water’s icy.’
Will looked around hesitantly. For a moment I thought he’d turn and run, but he smiled when Val appeared in the pale sunlight and stood up, brushing the water off his face with the palm of his hand.
‘We thought you weren’t coming,’ Val said.
Will apologised. I was quite surprised that he could act so well, knowing what he knew, but then Val was acting too, and Will had no idea what he intended. He put on his swimsuit – an oddly glossy thing – and lowered himself gingerly into the water.
‘It is cold,’ he said.
‘You’ll soon warm up, once you get going,’ Val answered, striking out for the deep current midstream.
Will followed gamely. I felt a stab of pity, that he didn’t suspect us, but at the same time, I couldn’t see any way out of the plan. I couldn’t let my brother down, just to save this fool. He kept his head above water all the time – it was obvious he wasn’t the swimmer he pretended to be – and he had this self-conscious look on his face, as if he was being watched, as if the whole world was waiting to pass judgment on him. People don’t understand that they’re not always the centre of attention. They don’t see that others have their own concerns. The way Will acted annoyed me, to tell the truth, and when Val gave me that look, to say it was time, I realised it didn’t actually matter whether Will lived or died. I think if I’d been on land, I might have felt differently, but there, in the dark water, I couldn’t care less. Val gave the signal and dived down: the last I saw of Will, he was looking confused – maybe he’d felt something pass between us, but he didn’t know what, and by then it was too late. He didn’t stand a chance in the deep water. A moment later he disappeared and I dived under. I don’t really know what happened then – I caught hold of his arm and pulled him down, and he struggled for what seemed a long time, though it was probably no more than a few minutes. When he stopped moving, we let him go. He shifted away in the water, and I came up, into the light. Val was grinning.
‘Well?’
I couldn’t speak. I just nodded.
‘Easy peasy,’ he said, splashing a handful of water in my face and kicking away towards the bank.
It wasn’t as easy as he’d thought. We’d made one mistake after another. Will had told just about everybody he was going swimming with us that day, but we denied ever seeing him when we were questioned. Then there were the bruises on his arms. It turned out the police knew right away that he hadn’t drowned by accident: there were all kinds of clues that pointed to us, but we stuck to our story, even when we should have known the game was up. Val said you could get away with just about anything, if you didn’t waver: the police were idiots, all we had to do was brazen it out. But in real life the police aren’t stupid, and I had to admire the way they caught us out at every turn. It was fascinating to watch as the case against us grew, till even Val knew in his heart that it was hopeless. They were so sure of themselves, I started to believe they had a witness, someone who’d seen the whole thing. I found out later there was nobody, but by then it was far too late.
The press really took to Val. They cast him as an evil, Svengali figure, a child-sadist who didn’t know the meaning of remorse, but they still couldn’t get enough of him. As far as they were concerned, I was just his puppet, and I didn’t get half the coverage he got. Not that I’m complaining – it helped to have people feeling sorry for me. As long as he lived, Val would never be free. On the other hand, I could be out in a few years.
Ever since it came to me that he was dead, I’ve tried to believe in a vague, cinematic form of transmigration – and I’ve almost succeeded. I almost imagine him passing through a wave of static, or sitting in a room somewhere, some branch-line waiting room with a hint of Christmas about it, where people come and go all day in old-fashioned winter coats, the men in hats and leather gloves, the women in headscarves, entering quietly, leaving trails of snow and dead leaves on the oakwood floor, bringing that scent of ozone and grass that lingers a while before it fades, just as the people fade, then arrive elsewhere. For us, reincarnation would surely be simple, like the conjuring tricks we used to practise when we were children. But in the end, it didn’t work: even when I knew he was dead, the possibility of his being somewhere else, in another body, remained an abstraction. He couldn’t exist without me, you see, and I only exist without him in a kind of limbo, an eternal summer of my own, where I watch and wait, free of identity, beyond all human jurisdiction.