Twins & Old Age Travellers
Two small pieces from my 2017 short story collection, 'Secrets & Wisdom'.
Twins
He sits in his professional leather chair making notes, waiting for me. He is relaxed, cross-legged; his pen - gold, no doubt - writing words that cannot be seen from my couch, even straining my neck in an attempt to use the reflection in the large mirror behind him. He glances up from his pad, sensing my interest. He offers a smile - one is supposed to be reassured - then goes back to his note-taking.
A backdrop of dark wood, books. Everything his visitors would expect to see - from his bow tie to the volumes of Freud. As he looks up again. Even the heavy silence seems manufactured from mahogany.
"Where were we?"
He adopts an over-friendly, patronising tone, meaningfully laying down his pen as he does so.
- ‘We’ were nowhere.
Not that he hears my reply, shielded as it is within my head, private. There is dialogue, but he only gets his half of the story. That makes me feel good.
"You were going to tell me about the accident."
- Like hell!
"When you lost your brother."
He must doubt my sanity, using an undisguised trick like that. "Lost my brother", as if he were a child who had wandered off in the Fun Fair never to be seen again.
And, the accident! Oh, how he would love to hear about that; about my reaction to it - then or now. He would listen, then layer my words with meanings never intended; not by me at any rate. But then that would justify his fee, his work. Him, really.
On the mantle, over what should be a roaring fire, in the silence a large clock ticks. The second-hand sweeps ponderously yet methodically in its confinement; counting down my visit, counting up his bank balance.
"It must have been difficult; especially as you were so close."
- Close? Like this far apart?
He fails to see my mental picture of two fingers measuring some minute distance, yet still studies me with those benevolent dog-like eyes, begging for some morsel to satisfy - what? His curiosity? His professionalism?
"Michael"
Suddenly his eyes seem to harden. His eyes, not mine. The tick of the clock is amplified, pitched a little higher, a little more intrusive. He picks up his pen, writes another note.
- Stephen
My name. My brother’s name. Our names. The names of the two of us; one here, one not here.
- Michael, Stephen. Friends, brothers. An accident.
The room darkens with the memory of it, as if it were taking on the characteristics of that day. And it now seems cold - cold from his trickery! From his magic! The books on the shelves lose definition; their spines begin to mingle in my blinking; the clock grows larger, its face ever brightening above the black hole of the grate. Look away!
It had been a foul day; all rain, sheeting rain. The motorway was dark, wet; lorries spraying water everywhere. We had talked about who would drive, who’d had the least to drink. One of us had driven, one had not. There had been, all of a sudden, too many lights, too much water. Suddenly there was no more road.
- One lived, one died. Twins separated, severed.
One died. One lived. Michael. Stephen. Now which name to answer to? Which name was mine? Both. Both.
Old-Age Travellers
Bob’s partner was a tall slim man. His blonde hair, long and unkempt, gave the impression of having not been combed for a century. It also made it difficult to define his age: thirty-five? fifty-five? His donkey jacket and leather boots - well-worn by love rather than over-use - seemed so much part of him that he might have been welded into them at birth.
We talked as he and Bob made their way down Thackley Field Locks towards Leeds, his weather-beaten smile and self-rolled cigarette suggesting - paradoxically perhaps - a man who had found that elusive and indefinable thing for which we all search. I’ll call him Dave, partly because he looked like a ‘Dave’ - and partly because ‘Bob’ was a woman.
Dave and Bob had spent the winter in Skipton and were now making the downhill journey through Leeds and on to Lincoln. Why Lincoln? I didn’t ask; it didn’t seem relevant - and it probably wasn’t a question a true traveller would deign to answer. He declined to commit to the duration of their journey too, as if that wasn’t important either. The River Trent would, he acknowledged with a mix of anticipation and chagrin, be "faster"; such was the nature of rivers.
Dave liked Leeds. He liked the Leeds and Liverpool canal too - except where it and Leeds met, demanding the navigation of more than enough swing bridges. You could instantly tell swing bridges were not Dave’s favourites. Still, after six years on the canals I guess he’d learned to live with them. To try and impress, I mentioned the largest flight of locks I’d ever encountered, at Foxton. "On the Grand Union,” Dave said pleasantly, his voice lacking superiority or the sense of being a man who’d ‘been there, done that’.
Another boat was travelling with them through Thackley. A jaded blue sixty-footer crewed by a solitary man who, Dave told me, had been on the canals "half a lifetime". What was that, I wondered: twenty years? thirty? Enough at any rate for him to be able to express concern about the "amateurs" they had just encountered, though his adjective - "dangerous" - seemed strangely out of place in this quiet and slow world.
The Field Locks at Thackley are not the most watertight on the network, with Bob - on Dave’s suggestion - removing her long woolly jumper and resorting to a waterproof as she tillered their boat, "Constance", through. On one of the leaking gates (just below where a wagtail now bobbed looking for leftovers from the lock’s draining) a small plaque displayed the date it was commissioned by the British Waterways Board: 1986. Perhaps it is not too surprising that in our age of modern technology some of the more traditional manufacturing skills may now be a little wanting.
I left the boats as they dropped through the middle lock of the flight and made my way back to my car. Driving home via the ring road, through the heavy Bank Holiday traffic, it seemed a little bizarre that based on some trite public image, nine out of ten of us would have all too readily labelled Dave and Bob "new age travellers" - which is exactly what most of us are, and plainly what they were not.
When I wished them well as I turned to go, it seemed fitting that they failed to hear me, my voice drowned out by the torrent of water plunging through the lock gates.