Lullaby (5 page)

Maggie waited the polite length of time before asking, ‘How does this relate to you
and Theo?'

‘Where we begin and end: it's not as simple as it looks.'

‘You think you and Theo are the same person?'

‘I don't.'

I was beginning to get frustrated. She intimidated me, that was the problem, and
all my thoughts shrunk foolishly small before her. And I was scared that if she knew
what was happening inside my head, she could never tell them I wasn't crazy. Because
the thing I was thinking was craziness itself. My balance was gone; everything
I
reached for was moving. There was no place to stand.

‘I'm an actor,' I said. ‘Well I'm trying to be. It's what I'm training for. And on
a good night, when everything falls into place, I can feel the audience's absolute
belief in the person I'm pretending to be. The actor can't do that alone, it takes
a collective act of imagination. That's what I'm trying to explain.'

‘I don't quite follow.'

‘We exist because the world tells us we exist, it sends us constant signals, to assure
us we have been noticed. I was never Theo, and he was never me, but the more feedback
we shared, the more the line between us blurred. That's where the magic lies. Theo's
been helping me write a monologue about it for drama school. It's about a guy who
wakes up and discovers he's the last person alive. He doesn't die, he just fades
away. The only feedback he gets is from the sun and the wind and the rain, no more
than a tree could expect, and, bit by bit, he disappears into the landscape.'

‘It would be difficult to do that on stage, I would think.'

‘That's what my tutor said. She said it's more of a film. But I don't like film.'

‘Why not?'

‘No feedback.'

Something was puzzling Maggie. She tried to hide it by smiling at my joke, but I
noticed. She apologised and swivelled back to her desk, to flick through her screen,
or maybe just to regather. I watched her closely.

I've never known whether women understand the way we look at them. Theo thought they
did, but I'm not so sure. When I hear women talking about the male gaze, it seems
to me they get it all wrong. When we were fourteen, there was a fashion for writing
quotes across our shoulder bags, things we thought made us look clever. Theo had
‘The only thing we can know is that we do not know, and it is important that we know
this.' Socrates, I think. I had ‘A poet looks at the world in the same way a man
looks at a woman'. I didn't understand it then, I just liked the feel of it across
my ribs. Now, I think it's a bad way of explaining poetry, but a good way of explaining
men.

Looking at Maggie was like looking at a poem. I imagined her stretching out, reaching
over to the back of the desk. She would have been the perfect shape to paint on a
vase.

Maggie turned back, and I looked away.

‘What is it?' I asked.

‘Nothing.' But a frown formed. ‘Remind me to ask you more about drama school, later.'

‘I can tell you now if…'

At the time, I wondered if it wasn't just another part of the game, designed to unsettle
me. I could never have guessed the truth.

‘When you were being Theo,' Maggie returned to her task. ‘When you were acting being
Theo, did it ever feel better than being you? Did you ever think it would be more
fun not to go back?'

‘You're always you, even on stage.' It would have been easier, explaining it to an
actor.

‘When you swapped. Was it always for the whole day?'

‘Those were the rules.'

‘Whose rules?'

‘Ours. Theo's. Apart from one time.'

She didn't ask. I suppose she knew we'd get back to it.

‘And you agreed to these rules?'

‘I didn't always want to. One time there was a test in class. I did better at tests
than he did. So it didn't seem fair.'

‘What happened?' Maggie asked.

‘Being him made me worse at tests; being me made him better. It was the only time
we ever got the same grade.'

‘How much better did you usually do?'

It wasn't important. They were only tests.

‘Theo wasn't stupid. He was in the top half of the class, and it was a good school.
Nationally he was on the 85th percentile, most of the time.'

‘Where were you?'

‘95th was a bad day.'

She understood. She'd had days like that too, although probably not as many.

‘How often did these swaps occur?'

‘Not often. Maybe three times a year. Theo thinks the number's higher, but when we
try to remember them, that's all we ever come up with. It sounds right to me.'

‘Did either of you ever use it as a chance to do things you wouldn't otherwise do?
I mean, did you ever use the fact that you wouldn't be the one getting in trouble?'

‘Not on purpose.'

‘Tell me about the time it happened by accident, then.'

‘I don't know. There was nothing really.'

I felt myself closing down. Anger, as unannounced as vomit, rose up in me.

‘Why are you only interested in us being twins? What about me? What about how I'm
feeling about all of this? Isn't that what you're meant to be finding out?'

‘You're raising your voice,' she said. Calm and steady. Exactly the way we were taught,
in conflict-resolution classes. As if she thought I might hit her.

‘I'm angry,' I said.

‘I know you are. I would be too.'

‘Why? Why would you be?'

‘Your brother's dying,' she said.

‘He's dead.'

‘Not yet.'

‘That's a lovely way of putting it.'

I knew it was mistake, to let her see my rage.

‘I didn't do it, Rene,' she said.

The same trained voice. I wanted to take hold of it, twist it until it broke.

‘I'm not to blame,' she said.

‘You're all I have to work with.'

‘We can take a break, if you like,' she said.
‘Would you like to take a break?'

‘No.'

She turned away anyway, and pretended to flick through her screen. On the wall was
a slide of pamphlets, the kind you find in any hospital office: genomic diets, how
to wash your hands, grief and resilience. The last one reminded me of the introductory
week of drama school, a live-in workshop where we slept side by side on the floor
at night, and by day pretended we were pairs of lovers. The script had us in a hotel
room, trying to decide whether to tell our partners about the infidelity or break
off the affair. We were told to reinterpret the scene using the five stages of grief,
an old twentieth-century model of loss. Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance.
I worked with Christy, a mature-age student, who confided in me that she'd hoped
the course would give her a new lease of life, but being around so many young people
was making her feel old and ugly. She didn't say how old, maybe thirty-five, me and
Theo added together. I told her she was pretty, and she laughed at me.

On the last night, after our shared meal and breathing exercises, we performed back
to the class.
Christy decided that we'd end the piece with my hands on her breasts
and her hands on my wrists: a frozen ambiguity, she called it. She didn't warn me
that during the scene she would undress in front of me. She'd lied about feeling
old and ugly; she was as vain, and as terrified, as the rest of us.

Denial? No. From the first moment I got the call from the hospital, the accident
had had the bitter taste of truth about it. Anger? Sure. Not the anger I used on
stage: the clenched up, thrust out, anger-at variety. This was the internal, misty-red
version. Anger-from. And it was coming on again, pushing me out of my chair.

‘I'm glad I'm not you,' I said.

Maggie kept her back to me, as if she thought she could wait it out.

‘I'm glad it isn't my job to deal with people who need me to care, when all you're
allowed to do is pretend.'

She turned back to me, her eyebrows raised above the rim of her glasses, more curious
than surprised. ‘So why are you training to be an actor?'

You can't punch against funny. The fury hissed out of me. I said sorry, a twelve-year-old's
apology: back straight and hands folded on my lap,
like in the family photo we had
taken the one time my auntie visited (she slept inside a mosquito net).

‘I didn't mean to be—'

‘I know you didn't.'

‘It's not you.'

‘No.' She nodded. ‘I know that too.'

‘It's grief.'

‘Probably.'

‘He's dying,' I said.

‘He is.'

‘Anger, the second of the five stages—'

‘We don't believe in those anymore,' Maggie said.

‘What have we replaced them with? Tell me it's alcohol, and happiness.'

She had a great smile.

‘Tell me about drama school,' she said.

‘What about it?'

‘I've seen your records. You were on an academic path. A very good academic path.
Drama school seems a strange choice. People must have said that to you. They must
have tried to talk you out of it.'

‘Sure.'

‘Why didn't you listen to them?'

‘Why do we do anything?' I shrugged.

‘Various reasons, I suppose. What were yours?'

‘I just wanted to act,' I lied. The truth was too ugly, too monstrous to admit just
then, although I knew she would find a way of getting it out of me.

4

There was a knock at the door. Doctor Huxley stood before us, taking in the scene:
my bloodshot eyes, the smeared floor, the way Maggie shifted in her chair when she
saw him. He acknowledged us both with the slightest raise of his head, then dragged
a chair forward, so we made up three spokes in a wheel.

It was Doctor Huxley who'd first taken me in to see Theo. He was older than most
of them, maybe in his sixties, his thick hair proudly white. His eyes were hooded,
and there was a dimple at the centre of his chin that might have been a scar. He
had the body of a thin man who'd grown heavy, the weight concentrated at his middle.
When I first met him, I noticed how carefully he chose his words. I couldn't imagine
him dancing, or
ordering a second dessert. Maggie didn't bother with formalities.
The time was his.

‘I would like to give you more details about the procedure.'

‘Me, or her?' I asked.

‘Sorry?'

‘Does she need to be here for this?' I said. ‘Or can you tell me without her?'

‘It will be useful for Maggie to listen.'

‘And watch.'

It was my default setting: pretending not to be impressed by people.

‘Transplants we all understand,' the doctor began without preamble. ‘I see you and
your brother each have your own stem cell bank. Had it been a case of him having
damaged a heart, or a lung, there would have been little problem growing a replacement.
The brain, however, presents a larger problem.'

‘It contains information.'

I didn't want him to think me stupid.

‘Perhaps more than contains.'

A mild rebuke, a needless show of power.

‘It is only a small exaggeration to say that our brain
is
information. The brain,
more than any
other organ, is constructed of its own past. Its key nutrient is experience:
it grows through interaction with the outside world. Your brother's brain is the
way it is because of the life he has lived. And that means, unlike the heart or the
lungs, we can not grow a substitute in the laboratory. Or rather, we can not grow
a substitute that would function as Theo's brain. When the brain is damaged, there
seems to be no option for transplantation.'

This much I already knew. It wasn't complicated, and the project had been controversial
enough to make it into the news. I was still my father's boy: I liked the news.

‘As you are aware, your brother's case is not our ultimate target. What has happened
is a one in a million occurrence, so even if we could save him, the flow-on benefits
would be very small. Forgive me if this sounds unsympathetic, but I must be clear
on this point. We are not proposing the procedure to help your brother, nor indeed,
to help you. Rather, we are asking you to participate, in the hope that it might
one day help others. Do you understand that?'

I did, at least in the abstract. But understanding is more than abstraction, and
the other part of
me, the part that grasps truth by taste alone, knew Theo was the
only thing that mattered. The same part of me knew how important it was to keep this
knowledge to myself.

‘And so I would ask you,' the doctor continued, ‘to consider who the ultimate beneficiaries
might be. The type of brain injury your brother has suffered, the catastrophic shut
down, is rare. Much more common, indeed the fate of most our brains, is that of slow
decline. For the lucky, it will occur as nothing more than small lapses in memory,
or occasional difficulties concentrating. But for millions, the process of ageing
is less benign. I speak of the grandmother who no longer recognises her grandchildren.
Of the man who has loved his wife faithfully for fifty years and now must watch her
fade from the world, until all that is left is a shell to be ministered to. Quite
apart from the massive burden of care, there is the tragedy of such a shabby farewell.
We deserve better.

‘And now, at last, something better is on the horizon. Our early detection of degenerative
disease is excellent. The challenge ahead is to develop the technology that allows
us to harvest information from the still-functioning brain, transfer it to a
transplant-ready
laboratory substitute, and then complete the physical exchange. The patient would
receive a new, disease-free brain, grown from their own cells, containing the old
brain's information, but not the structural weaknesses. Animal tests have been most
encouraging. The impossible is within our grasp. This is the opportunity for medicine
to bring the same dignity to the end of life we long ago mastered for its beginning.
We don't want to extend lifespan necessarily, despite what the protesters might say,
we simply wish to allow every individual to flourish within their allotted span.
If the measure of a civilisation is the way it treats its most vulnerable, then this
research can be thought of as a most civilised act. Does that make sense to you?'