Lullaby (4 page)

‘I opened my eyes and there was a racing car above me where a dinosaur should have
been. Across the room I could see Theo still asleep, just beneath the watchful gaze
of the diplodocus. For a confused moment I thought I was looking at myself. Then
Theo woke up, and looked at me, and for the longest time we just stared at each other.

I think we must have sleepwalked, I whispered.

Maybe we didn't, Theo whispered back. Maybe this is a magic bedroom.

‘We loved that stuff. Not magic, but stories about magic. Although when you're seven,
the distinction hardly matters.'

I could see Maggie liked the story. Everybody did.

‘Theo decided we had to let the magic run its course. When night fell, we could return
to our proper beds, and the spell would be broken. Until then, we were each other.
And that was the day I first understood.'

‘Understood what?' Maggie asked.

‘The way we're made.'

‘I think you should tell me about that,' she said.

‘At first it was easy, because it was just Mum
and Dad, and I assumed they knew and
were playing along. We had to eat each other's normal breakfasts, which for Theo
was peanut butter and banana on toast. I remember chewing and chewing, thinking I'd
never be able to swallow it, while Theo grinned at me across the table. It was just
another one of his games.

‘But travelling in on the transport, with our friends all around, that was different.
Theo's clothes felt itchy and strange, and I was sure everybody was wondering why
I was wearing them. I tried to remember what he sounded like, and how he sat, and
which window he looked out, and all that trying froze me up. I waited for somebody
to ask why I had Theo's pink T-shirt on. But the thing is, nobody did. We see what
we expect to see, most of the time. I didn't know that.'

‘You were seven.'

‘Once you know it, it seems impossible that you ever didn't.'

‘Knowing's like that,' Maggie said.

There's a way some people have, of listening to you like what you're saying matters,
like you matter. They're the ones you fall in love with.

‘Before that day, I thought there'd be no point
trying to be like Theo, because I'd
never be able to pull it off. But all it really took to fool people was a T-shirt.
Sally sat next to me and asked me if I'd done my homework. I lied and said I hadn't,
but that it was okay because Rene'd just go twice, like last week. Sally laughed.
We'd been in the same class for a whole year, and I'd never been able to make her
laugh. At the other end of the seat, William was asking Theo to help him with his
maths. Who knows how that worked out.

‘There was a bigger prize waiting at school. The vote for class captain. I'd forgotten
about it. So had Theo. We walked into the room and saw the extra chairs; the senior
council got to vote as well. The election was between Theo and a girl called Jennifer
Storm, who told us she was going to be a famous actor. All week everybody had been
talking about the vote, trying to guess which way their classmates would lean. Theo's
slogan was: Vote for me, get my brother free. It meant, “I'm funny, and he's smart,
what more could you want?” I was happy to be included. The class captain only had
to give speeches, and help the council decide what to do with fundraising money,
or how to use celebration days. Smart and funny should have been plenty.

‘But Jennifer's father had fought in the war. He had new arms and legs, from those
experiments where they grew replacement limbs. I don't know if you remember the guy
who was meant to run at the Olympics, but he was banned. That was Jennifer's father.
The army took the Olympic Committee to court, because they said it was discrimination
against fighting men and women, and didn't we have any respect? We were too young
to understand the details, we just knew Jennifer was the girl whose father could
run fast and was always in the news. We'd even watched footage of the operations
in class, and when Jennifer started a movement banning the class from watching any
of the Olympics, we were proud to play along. At school, anyway. We still watched
at home, because Theo and I liked to pretend we were the Lopez twins; we dreamed
of running the marathon.

‘So it was Theo's famous charm versus Jennifer's charming fame. Everybody agreed
it would be tight. On the morning of the vote, the candidates got to give a speech.
I'd been telling Theo all week he needed to get one written, but he said he did better
just thinking it up on the spot. Which would have been fine, if I hadn't
been wearing
his pink T-shirt.

Tell them you need to go to the toilet, I whispered. We'll swap back.

Can't do it, he said. Not 'til we're back in the magic bedroom.

Why not?

That's how it works.

‘Arguments are a lot simpler, when you're eight.

‘I sat at the front, watching the class watch Jennifer, sick with the knowledge that
I was next. Jennifer's pitch was mostly pictures of her and her father together,
meeting famous people. I watched the eyes of my classmates widen in amazement. I
needed to pee. I wanted to run away. But the teacher was calling Theo's name, and
everybody was clapping.

Sorry, I don't have any pictures, I said.

‘It wasn't meant to be funny. I was just trying to explain why the screen was blank,
and to apologise for how boring I was about to be. If it hadn't been for the pink
T-shirt, I think people would have understood. But they thought I was Theo, and when
Theo says: sorry, I don't have any pictures, it sounds like he's making a joke. It
sounds like a
clever way of saying: all Jennifer had was pictures, and why would
you want to vote for a picture? So they laughed, and the more people laughed, the
easier it was to be funny.

My father wasn't in the war, I said. He's still got the arms and legs he was born
with. But he did grow them himself, and he uses them for lots of other things. Like
chasing me and Rene. But he can only go after one of us at a time. So that's why
you should vote for Theo, because they'll never catch us both. Buy one, get one free.

‘More laughing. I knew I wasn't the funniest guy in the room, but they didn't.

‘Normally, I knew what I wanted to say, but not how to say it. Mum said it was because
I was thinking up too many different ways of expressing myself, and I couldn't choose
between them. She was being kind. The truth is I was scared of not being as funny
as Theo, so it was safer not to try. That morning, I had so much to say the teacher
had to ring a little bell to get me to stop. At first I pretended I hadn't heard
it, which people found hilarious, and the second time I froze in the middle of the
sentence, like the bell had cast a spell on me, and that got me a standing ovation.

‘Forty-three people voted. Twenty-nine of them chose me. Dad was so proud. He said
I deserved a reward, and I should think of somewhere he could take me that weekend.
After Dad died, I found out he'd once stood for the local council, but he'd campaigned
on making people pay for the things they wanted, and nobody had voted for him.'

3

‘That night, when the lights went out, we swapped back into our own beds. Theo whispered,
do you believe in magic now? and I told him I did.'

‘Do you think you became Theo?' Maggie asked.

‘Of course not.'

‘You said they voted for you. They didn't. They voted for Theo.'

‘It's just a way of talking,' I said.

‘An unusual way of talking.'

‘I was describing an unusual situation.'

‘Okay.'

She kept hold of the second syllable, stretched it out in disbelief.

‘Have you ever done any acting?' I asked her.

‘Not really.'

‘What about when you were getting dressed for work this morning, when you put on
those glasses and pulled back your hair and chose those sensible shoes? Didn't you
become somebody else? Isn't that how it works?'

I liked being the one asking the questions.

‘It's hardly magic,' she answered.

‘My point.'

‘You told Theo you believed in magic.'

‘They're not the words I'd choose now.'

‘What words would you choose?'

I've thought about that a lot. As time went by, Theo and me became more and more
proficient at swapping into each other's lives. I stopped feeling I was an imposter.
More, I felt as if I was returning to a place where I'd always belonged. But I still
don't know how you explain that to somebody who hasn't experienced it.

‘Theo had a theory,' I said.

‘I'm more interested in your theory.'

Maggie sat perfectly still as she waited. Her toes didn't tap, her face didn't crinkle,
her hands remained together, one placed over the other, passive on her knee. I've
never been able to do that.

‘It's complicated,' I said.

‘I'm fairly smart.'

‘Look at your hands.'

She glanced down.

‘How do you know they're yours, and these are mine?' I waved mine before her, like
a bad magician.

‘They're attached to my arm?'

‘So if we put a cloak over your arms, with only the hands poking out, you wouldn't
know they were yours?'

‘I'd still know.'

‘How?'

‘Feedback mechanisms,' Maggie said. Which was what I wanted to tell her myself. I
think, even with all her training, there was a part of her that couldn't resist showing
off. We weren't so different.

‘Clench your fist for me,' she said.

I did as I was told.

‘Now, when I watch you do that, some of the very same neurons that fire when I clench
my fist will be activated, just by watching yours. Mirror neurons. They allow us
to put ourselves in another's shoes, to imagine what it is like to be someone else.
They help us understand, anticipate,
manipulate even. But clearly, we couldn't function
if the signal from these neurons was so strong that we failed to distinguish between
our own hand, say, and somebody else's. So, the boundary of self is established via
feedback. Which is to say, there are other neurons in play when I clench my own fist,
those that signal the sensation of my skin folding, for example.'

Maggie closed her hand slowly. The skin turned taut and smooth. I imagined that skin
passing gently over my cheek. Mirror neurons tingled their pleasure.

‘When there is a mismatch between the two sets of signals, one giving movement, the
other none, my brain concludes that the hand in question is not my own. The lack
of a movement signal overrides the mirror signal.' Maggie smiled, realising she
had taken over. ‘Sorry, it was my research topic, at university. There are simple
experiments you can do that…'

‘The mirror box,' I said. ‘We had one at school.'

‘What did they do with it?' Maggie asked.

This was a good place to hide: no death at our shoulder, no tests, no decisions to
make.

‘You put one of your arms outside the box, behind the mirror. And in that mirror,
exactly where your own arm should have been, there was the reflection of another
person's arm. Then they got you to move the arm you couldn't see, and the reflection
person would mimic those movements, so the reflection was moving in exactly the same
way your arm was moving, and you saw it exactly where you expected your own arm to
be. So your brain believed the reflected arm was its own. It was an amazing feeling,
like…'

‘Magic?'

‘After a minute or so—we were drawing, with a pencil I think—the reflection person
was told to do something different. It just felt crazy, as if suddenly you'd lost
control of your own hand and it was doing its own thing.'

‘It's a most unusual feeling, isn't it.'

‘Me and Theo tried to make our own box at home, but there were two mirrors involved,
and we could never get the angle right.'

‘And you think that's what happened when you swapped places? It was like a mirror
box?'

‘Not exactly.'

Somehow, the fact that she knew about these
things only made explaining more difficult.
I needed vagueness for the idea to work. I needed her to get the taste of the thing,
not the detail.

‘You mentioned feedback. That it's how we build our picture of ourselves, by compiling
the incoming data, and the feedback loops we use to test them. But what if that's
all there is, feedback loops. What if feedback loops aren't the way we discover ourselves,
but rather they are the self? What if we are nothing more than the process by which
we discover ourselves?'

‘I'm not sure I understand.'

‘No, neither do I.'

I'd lost sight of the point I was trying to make, and in my eagerness to impress
her, my mouth had got away on me.

‘There were some interesting cases, in the documentary about Jennifer's father and
his operation: soldiers who grew new arms, but the arms never felt as if they were
their own. They demanded they were removed, because it felt hideous, to have this
lump of meat attached to them. Or the one I really remember, a man who had lost his
leg, and in the hospital bed next door was another soldier who had lost his sight.
And because he knew the other
guy was blind, the amputee didn't feel bad about watching
him all the time. But then he became obsessed with the blind man's leg, and began
to believe it was own missing leg, and that the blind man had stolen it. That sounds
crazy—it is crazy—but it got to the stage where, when the nurses came to bathe the
blind man, the amputee could feel the water trickling down his missing limb. They
had to move him in the end, because he tried to steal the leg back. At night, when
he wouldn't be seen, although given the guy was blind…It was that sort of a documentary,
funny and sad all at once.'