Parallel Life (3 page)

‘I'm past it.'

‘At twenty-one?'

Harrie shrugged. ‘I may go yet, I suppose. But it would have to be—'

‘It would have to be with Ben. You are your brother's keeper.'

No reply was forthcoming. No matter what, Harrie would keep the promise she had made to her brother. She was to tell ‘them' nothing about him.

‘Well?'

‘No comment.'

Miriam sighed and settled back into her chair. This was promising to be a waste of tremendous talent, but the girl was fixed into her own claw setting, and the person whose talons held her there was a beloved brother. Harrie was clearly bent on hiding all that cried to be released from her troubled mind. ‘You tell me nothing,' grumbled the therapist.

‘It's stopped raining. There's a bit of information for you.' Harrie rose to her feet and walked to the door. Turning, she delivered a beaming smile that almost failed to reach her eyes. ‘I'd try liquorice allsorts if I were you,' she pronounced before leaving the room. ‘You might get somewhere with those.'

‘In truth, you are not ill,' said Miriam. ‘You have a difficult life – and that's different.'

Ben was wet through because of the recent downpour. He watched his sister as she descended steps cut into a hilly part of Wigan Road during the building of several terraces of Edwardian houses. She was beautiful and clever, and he was holding her back.

‘You'll catch your death,' Harrie warned. ‘Get into the bloody car.' She sat in the driving seat and hid her exasperation when he spread his own towel across the passenger side before climbing in. He was getting worse, and she was probably keeping pace with him. At three years of age, Harrie had fed Ben his bottle – under the watchful eye of Woebetide, of course. Even now, she remembered how he had stared at her, how he had chosen her as his sole ally before he could even sit up without cushions.

‘I didn't go,' he said now.

She wasn't going to ask for a reason, as she already knew the answers. It wasn't the pain, wasn't the smell of mouthwash or the whirr of a drill; he didn't like to be touched by anyone. Life, for Ben, was about not making contact. ‘You'll have to phone and apologize.'

‘Yes.'

‘I can't always be there, Ben.' Terrified eyes. If she closed her own, she could still see fear burning in his; it had burnt for many years. But, as long as he could keep Harrie with him, he could manage within certain boundaries. Was he mentally ill, and were such diseases communicable? Had her poor little brother made her sick?

‘What did your shrink have to say for herself?'

‘Nothing much. Too interested in jelly babies and a calm atmosphere.' She started the car. ‘What's going to be done about you? If you can't even get your teeth polished, what about uni?'

Ben shrugged. ‘I'll go to Manchester and come home each evening. You didn't tell her about me, did you?'

‘Of course not.' She turned a corner and headed for Chorley New Road. ‘University is about getting away and broadening your horizons. You're expected to want to leave home. Leaving home is normal.'

‘I'm not normal.'

Harrie dragged the car over to the pavement's edge, braked and turned off the engine. It was the same circle all the time – look after Ben, see to the shop, do the books, visit Gran upstairs, look after Ben, keep an eye on Mum's progress in the other shop, look after Ben, look after Ben . . .

‘I'm sorry,' he whispered.

‘So am I.' It wasn't his fault that his mother hadn't been well enough to want him. Gran had seen to him in the night, while Woebetide had covered days. All the time, he had cried out for his sister. He screamed when she went to school, when she left a room, when his cot was moved into a separate bedroom. He never played with other children, was reading fluently by the age of four, and kicked up a fuss when forced into school, when left behind during Harrie's riding and dance lessons. ‘You do need help, Ben.'

‘Can't let anyone in. You know that.'

‘At some stage in your life, you're going to have to trust someone other than me and Woebetide.'

‘Gran's OK,' he muttered.

‘Gran's moving towards a world of her own.'

‘Lucky Gran.' Ben hugged his bag of books. ‘Get me home, please.'

Home contained the strangest of Ben's many symptoms.

When Gran had invaded the roof, builders charged with the task of creating her suite of rooms were also bidden to do Ben's wishes. Two of five bedrooms on the first floor had been converted into a bed-sitting room, a kitchen and a bathroom for him. His living quarters lay behind a proper front door with several locks and bolts. Inside, the place was pristine at all times. The only visitor was Harrie, and she seldom failed to comment on the fact that Ben would make an excellent housewife, while she, untidy and disorganized, declared herself to be a slob. She dropped on to his brown leather sofa. ‘I am knackered,' she announced. ‘Put the kettle on.'

Through the open doorway between living room and kitchen, Harrie watched her brother as he peeled back cling film from the hob of his cooker. He wiped the kettle before filling it, set it to boil and reached a tray from the top of his fridge-freezer. The cling film was a new development. He lined up two mugs on the tray, taken from a row of hooks beneath the cupboards. Every hanging item faced the same way, and all were graded according to size and colour. No one was allowed to use his personal cup. No one ever came, but even Harrie was not allowed to touch the stainless steel mug.

In the living room, where Harrie sat, floor-to-ceiling shelves flanked the chimney breast. Books were kept in sections, each stretch labelled with a piece of laminated card. He had trouble with books, Harrie knew, because authors allowed their work to be published by untidy characters with a tendency to make changes in the dimensions of their wares. The desk held two computers, one a normal size, the other a laptop. Wire cages contained disks in an order understood only by their owner – Harrie would never dream of touching anything in there.

A calendar on a wall served only to make the rest of the room bare and lifeless. He was a sad, sad boy. She cleared her throat. ‘The lavatory thing, Ben.'

‘What about it?' he called from the small kitchen.

‘You can't bike home from Manchester at lunchtime – you'll have to use a public loo.'

He came in with the tray. ‘I don't need to go to every lecture. Anyway, Gran promised me a car if I passed my test, and I did.'

Harrie snapped her mouth shut so suddenly that she imagined toothache. ‘What? You got in a car with a stranger? You went and did the theory without me to hold your hand?'

He nodded.

‘You must be getting better.'

‘I must, indeed.'

Ben was of the ‘milk second' school. He poured tea, was dissatisfied with its colour, stirred the pot, poured again. When milk had been added, he passed a mug to Harrie. ‘There you go, sis.'

‘When did you do the test?'

‘Yesterday. It was a piece of cake. Would you like a scone?'

She shook her head. ‘Then why not go to Oxford or London? It's time to get away from here, you know.'

‘Manchester will do. I have to do things an inch at a time – you know that. It won't be easy in Manchester, either, but at least I'll have this bolt-hole.'

She felt trapped, wondered when her own life might begin. Guilt moved in immediately, and a panic threatened. Miriam Goldberg had instructed her to go ‘happily' into her panics, because they were proof that she was one of the truly alive. ‘We live among zombies,' she had said. ‘Let that surge of adrenalin remind you that you are one of the few thinkers left.'

Ben's eyes were asking questions, so Harrie told him about the so-called ‘happy panics' she was meant to enjoy. ‘The doc says that the world wears rose-tinted specs and sits at computers all the time. I wonder if the glasses will reduce damage from the screens?'

He stood up. ‘It's all my fault,' he began. ‘If I could—'

‘Neither of us was welcomed into the world,' she reminded him. ‘Dad wanted a boy, a projection of himself, so he was satisfied when you were born. Not that he contributed to your development, of course. He and Mum scarcely speak, so we are bound to be odd.'

‘What
is
normal?' Ben asked.

‘How the bloody hell should I know? I'm too busy having happy panics. Anyway, congrats on passing your test, old fruit. What sort of car will you have?'

He smiled wryly. ‘A van type of car with a chemical lavatory in the back.'

‘You're joking.' But, as she left the room, Harrie wondered about that. It was just the sort of daft thing Ben might do.

Gran sat riveted to her TV. Christopher Timothy was trapped in snow on the less gentle slopes of the Pennines, the Siberian side. With no fear of hypothermia, he and his television crew made unsteady progress across a whited-out Yorkshire moor. Knowing when to be quiet, Harrie sat and waited for credits to roll. During Gran's favourite programmes, speech could be employed only if fire or war broke out.

But Gran was the one who fractured the silence. ‘Have you been with that Jewish doctor again?'

‘Yes.'

‘Are you sane?'

Harrie laughed. ‘Definitely not.'

The old woman laughed. ‘Good – I like a bit of company of my own sort. That's not proper snow.' She waved a hand at her thirty-two inch plasma screen. ‘It's just white stuff. They blow it out of a machine.'

Advertisements were helped along by Hermione's running commentary. ‘Have you seen this one? They play make-yourself-at-home music, then show a household where one child's mislaid her shoes and the other's lost his scooter. In the middle of all that, the mother borrows thousands of pounds on the phone. What sort of a message is that?' She then proceeded to berate a shampoo that stuck split ends together and some ghastly Australian females who sang the praises of a car insurance firm. ‘Nonsense,' pronounced Hermione before turning off the set.

Harrie grinned. There was no need to ask after Gran's health – she was clearly in fine fettle.

‘What did she say?' asked Hermione.

‘Who?'

‘The Jewish woman, of course.'

‘Ah. She seems to think I should run for the hills.'

‘She's right.'

Harrie groaned. Here came another lecture. Words poured in a well-pronounced stream from her grandmother's mouth. It was all Grandad's fault for dying before his time, thereby denying Gus an example to follow. ‘Your father has the answer to the world's problems on a piece of paper he has managed to lose, and he takes no interest in anything that isn't in a laboratory or on miniature rails.'

‘Yes, Gran.'

‘You should have gone to university.'

‘Yes, Gran.'

‘Where's the sense in it? Any of it? There's a danger that Ben will fail parlously because he can't fit into anything – even his own shoes. Shall we get him some new ones? But why should we? It doesn't all centre around Ben, child.'

‘Yes, Gran.'

‘And God knows what your mother is up to these days – not that I blame her completely. Mindless women have to find entertainment somewhere, I suppose.'

‘She isn't mindless,' said Harrie. ‘She may be undereducated, but that's a different matter.'

‘Don't interrupt. You're the brains of this outfit, girl. Do something with yourself. Ben will survive.'

Would he? Harrie gazed out of a dormer window and watched a few birds squabbling at the top of an ancient tree. There was cling film on his hob and an outside lock on the bathroom door. He alone was allowed to use those facilities. Often, an overpowering smell of chlorine came under the door after one of his scrubbing sessions. He could not use public lavatories, would never be examined by a doctor unless his sister stood by, had to be accompanied on shopping trips for clothes and shoes. But he had passed his driving test, must have gone in a car belonging to some driving school, had used Harrie just to practise in Dad's aged Mini.

‘Are you listening?'

‘Of course.'

‘Did he pass?'

‘Yes.'

‘Were you there?'

‘No.'

Hermione beamed. ‘There. I think he may be pulling out of his eighteen-year nosedive. Has he applied for a place at a university?'

‘Manchester – possibly Liverpool, too.'

‘Your father will spin in his test tube.'

Harrie laughed. ‘Let him. I think Ben has to take baby steps, Gran. Better to have him settled on a course in the north than to have him do badly elsewhere. He'll be fine.'

‘Will he?'

Harrie stood up and planted a kiss on the grey head. ‘Of course he will.'

She left the room and went down to the middle floor. Music could be heard coming from Ben's suite. She placed an ear to the door and listened to some eerie Gregorian chant. Why couldn't he go for Eminem like everybody else? Even the odd joint would have been preferable to his obsession with cleanliness and order.

Harrie sat on the stairs. She was sandwiched between two levels that coexisted, no more than that. Dad and Mum used the downstairs rooms, though Dad did not socialize much. They had separate bedrooms and never visited the true head of the household, who had placed herself in the roof. Two stairlifts allowed her to come and go as she pleased, and she would sometimes put in an appearance at one of her daughter-in-law's soirées or coffee gatherings. Hyacinth Bucket was the title Hermione had chosen as Lisa Compton-Milne's nickname. Lisa never got anything quite right.

The Gregorian chant got louder; some blackbirds fretted noisily outside, while the scent of Woebee's cooking drifted up the stair well. Just an ordinary house. With cling film on a hob.

Two

There's a mark on the kettle where I scrubbed too hard. Scouring pads are too harsh for brushed metal. When Harrie and I go for the shoes, I shall buy a new kettle, blue – just like the old one. Bananas are on their steel tree, apples and oranges in the bowl below, no dust on the Venetian blind. The kitchen will need a new coat of paint soon. Blue. I hope I can find the same shade. Checked for flies and ants, nothing found, no need for action. That bleach kills 99.9 per cent of household germs. Should I worry about the other zero point one? I am an idiot. When I read this diary, I know without a shadow of doubt that I am a cracked pot.