Half-Sick of Shadows (25 page)

‘It’s where Father stored all the junk after we got the indoor toilet.’ It never occurred to me to wonder where all the junk went. I must have assumed it flew out the window and got lost in one of the outhouses.

‘But the cellar has always been here. Why not put the junk down here in the first place?’ Not for the first time in recent weeks, her train of thought derailed me. Rather than ask her to explain, I moved on.

‘Junk ends up everywhere. No one knows how it gets where it does. Corners and dark rooms have a magnetic pull that attracts it.’ I remembered Mother telling me I was a dirt magnet.

‘Look at that!’ The beam had gone by a trunk made more splendid than the rest by its brass studs. Sophia relieved me of the torch and went to investigate.

The trunk was unlocked. The lid needed two hands before it creaked open. I saw white material adorned with lace. Sophia knew what we were looking at straight away. She made no sound, but I heard her inward sigh, or moan, or whatever took her breath away. As I looked at her astonished, open-mouthed face, she passed the torch back to me. I shone it on to the contents of the chest. I touched the material, caressed it between my fingers.

Mother’s wedding dress.

Sophia removed it reverently from its container. There were other items of clothing under it, but the wedding dress occupied most of the space. She held it by the shoulders straight-armed in front of her. The dress looked pure white by a trick of the torchlight. The cellar smelled musty and Mother’s wedding dress no better, but that mattered not a jot to Sophia. How could she resist putting it on? She and Mother were similar in size.

When she dropped the dress over the trunk, unceremonious with sudden excitement, I took a few steps back but kept the torch beam
on
her. I had no time to look away, but if I had had time to turn towards the wall I would have rejected the idea and watched Sophia anyway.

Sophia crossed her arms, and grabbing both shoulders of her own drab Cinderella dress she tugged it over her head. I last saw her like that when we were much younger and shared a room. Her ribs stuck out. I do not know why she bothered wearing a bra; she did not need one. Her pants were shapeless because she had no flesh to fill them. Her legs were not much fatter than my upper arms. Did Mother no longer feed her? Had Sophia stopped feeding herself? During those seconds, as she wrestled Mother’s wedding dress over her head and wriggled it down over the rest of her, I thought that I might know the tragedy, the disaster, if I focused my mind to reveal it. My penis stirred and I felt like running away and buckling at the knees at the same time. Run away or buckle? I did neither.

Sophia, in Mother’s wedding dress, smiled at me.

Beauty warped. Grotesque, hideous, my twin became no longer my twin, but something truly in the nature of a curse. In that moment, I knew that she would never marry, and, worse, if ever she loved, and found her love requited, disaster would come of it. God never made Sophia for happiness.

Did she want me to tell her about her beauty? She would not want to hear what I had to say, for her beauty was a wrong beauty, like a sweet cake that makes you sick, like a beautiful sea that you drown in. I used to be able to read her thoughts. She used to know mine. No longer. Did she want me to say something stupid like ‘Who’s the lucky groom’?

She sang a song she must have heard Mother singing. ‘I’m getting married in the morning. Ding dong the bells are gonna chime.’

‘Take it off,’ I scolded her.

Sophia’s smile collapsed.

I raised my voice. ‘Take it off!’

‘Why?’

‘Take it off!’ I shouted. ‘Just take it off.’

Sophia’s lips began to tremble when I shouted at her to take off Mother’s wedding dress. She bunched the skirt in both fists and pulled it inside out, over the bodice and over her head. After a temperamental struggle, her face reappeared red and wet. She flung the dress to the floor, kicked it, grabbed her ordinary clothing and raced up the stairs, out from the cellar, in her underwear.

I raged silently, impotently, in the cellar, more than merely angry with Father for making Sophia promise never to leave the Manse. I raged at Mother for failing to insist that Sophia went to school. I hated the world for its cruelty, and I wanted to die. Most of all, I raged at myself for having raised my voice and shouted at her.

I gathered up the wedding dress and returned it to the chest. As for the coffins, I gave them one last look before I too raced up the stairs. Whichever coffin they intended for me, I hoped it had a pillow.

20

The Seduction

We stayed out of each other’s way, and Sophia and I had never done that before. I heard her in the bedroom across the corridor, probably giving Father his afternoon cup of tea and a biscuit. Mother came home and made dinner. She gave Father his first, upstairs, and spent some time up there seeing to his other needs. When she served dinner for the three of us on the kitchen table, Sophia and I could avoid each other no more. No one spoke. If Mother detected tension between us, she held her tongue about it. Maybe she suspected that we had been up to something in her absence, and maybe she no longer had enough energy to care.

After dinner, I went to my room and brooded. As I brooded, in my mind I saw Sophia in her underwear.

I’d had erections. Of course I’d had them – I was in my late teens, for goodness’ sake! We had girls from girls’ schools in absurdly short gym skirts flapping about on sports days. Sex, however, which I understood to be a sticky and breathless affair, seemed a bit like rugby but without any clothes. Body-contact and balls were involved in both. Not the sort of endeavour that appealed to a chap who hated getting his hands dirty.

I would have thought Sophia the last female on earth, with the exception of Mother, to turn me on. We once urinated in the same
bedroom
at the same time. In the cellar, when she raised her clothing over her head to try on Mother’s wedding dress, my erection came on as suddenly as an electric light. A moment later, I was repulsed and horrified by the sick, lying, mocking hallucination of Sophia in a wedding dress.

Hours later, still I felt dizzy and a little ill.

The anger that erupted inside me when I saw Sophia in Mother’s wedding dress melted away. Its departure left me feeling sad – not because anger had gone, but because it should never have been. If I were to be angry with anyone, the object of my anger should have been anyone but Sophia.

Having locked the trapdoor, replaced the mat, and relocated the table so the room looked as it had when Mother left, I went upstairs to apologize to my twin. Her bedroom was empty, and the bathroom door was closed. I almost apologized through it, but I needed to see her eyes. There was nothing wrong with apologizing to her without looking into her eyes, but I had never done it before and it seemed insincere – to me, although probably not to Sophia. I went to my room instead, closed the door and brooded.

Sophia thought I became angry because she put on Mother’s wedding dress, but I had become angry because of a sadness so sad that I denied it, and it manifested itself in an angry outburst.

I had seen someone, once my other half, more distinct from me than ever. She stood in a halo of torchlight. Because all around the darkness drifted, Sophia seemed to be an image behind smoked glass. If I went behind her, I would see the back of a picture frame. Maybe not a picture frame, maybe a mirror. The grotesque I had seen in the wedding dress might have been myself. How romantic it would be if Sophia were the name given to my twin sister who died at birth. How beautiful if I had carried her around in me all these years. The truth was sadder than that. I had seen, in the cellar, someone who would never wear a wedding dress of her own. I do not know how I knew, but I knew. No one would ever love Sophia as much as me.
I
had seen, somehow, some way, in that wedding dress that did not quite fit or look right on her, Sophia’s death shroud. I had seen the coffin that awaited her.

As I watched the darkness moving outside my bedroom window that night, Sophia came to apologize to me. She had apologized immediately after I shouted at her in the cellar. When Mother wandered in with a bag of clothes pegs, Sophia apologized. She apologized at dinner, and again after dinner. I said she didn’t need to apologize; I had been at fault, and I should apologize for shouting at her. Never were there two more sorry souls.

‘We’ll forget it ever happened,’ I said, standing with my back to the window, hating the tone of my voice; I sounded like a schoolteacher bestowing mercy on an errant pupil.

Sophia, standing directly in front of me, her arms hanging un-defensively by her sides, agreed. We would forget that it ever happened. But although Sophia might, I would never forget. At best, I would try to push it to the back of my mind, a little further each day, like when a loved one dies and the pain hurts a little less with each passing day … but not really. It always hurts just as much; you simply get used to the hurt.

I was going to give her a brotherly hug, but what happened next happened so unexpectedly I lost the ability to move.

No one had ever touched my private parts … except me, Mother – when she used to wash me – Nurse and a couple of teachers at Whitehead House, a boy once, in the shower … maybe two or three boys … and the caretaker. Sophia was the first girl to do it except for Nurse and Mother.

She put the palm of her right hand on the front of my trousers, where the zip is, which surprised me more than Nurse did when she applied the ointment for whatever she thought ailed me. ‘What are you doing?’ stuck in my throat. Silly anyway. Rhetorical question. Sophia rubbed me erect through my trousers, and the feeling was so ridiculously pleasant I allowed her to continue. The poor, open-jawed
male
twin – or was it twit? – stood there trying to think, but thinking only fireworks.

‘Does that feel nice?’ she asked. Another bloody silly question.

‘Yes,’ I replied with vocal cords tight as a catapult ready to shoot.

With big eyes, and staring at her hand working my trouser-front, she said, ‘Gosh! That’s got really, really hard. It needs to be let out.’

I couldn’t have agreed more.

Wanking seemed like such a dunce-headed and juvenile thing to do that I had never tried it. I thought of myself as a cut above. At school, boys wanked in dormitories. They wanked in toilet cubicles. They wanked in the showers. Some of them wanked each other. Senior school crawled with wankers.

When Sophia started to unzip me, I stopped her because of embarrassment. She said, ‘Don’t you like it?’

‘Like hell I bloody like it, but where did you learn about it?’

‘From Father,’ she replied. ‘He likes it.’

She continued to unzip me. I was too stunned to intervene. What she had said, and the pleasure that made my legs weak, were so at odds that they fought to cancel each other out. But the quantity of pleasure was greater than what Sophia said about Father, and it was the pleasure that dominated.

I had an erection you could crack nuts with. But for the wall behind me, I would have fallen. I nearly collapsed anyway. Sophia wanked me slowly, slowly. Faster, faster. Paused, squeezed and teased. Then, she knelt on the floor, and parted her lips, and moved them over my cock, and closed them on it, and wanked me with her whole head, and for the first time in many years, I prayed: ‘Oh God! Oh shit!’

Soon, too soon, when I thought I would burst, but did not know if I would burst with the feeling of it or with tears of rage and helplessness, I made her bring her head up and rest it on my chest. The greatest temptation was to push it back down again. I resisted. Nevertheless, my cock jumped and pulsated and made a sticky mess
on
the front of Sophia’s dress. Feeling it happening, she put her hand down and gently fondled my balls, chuckling.

Struggling somewhat to formulate something to say, at last, I managed, ‘When did, you know, you and Father?’

‘Before he took his first stroke.’

‘Bastard! What about now?’

‘He never asks.’

‘Lie down beside me.’ My voice quivered. She lay beside me on the bed, and I positioned her hand back where I wanted it.

I lay a while with my heart in my throat. Sophia sprang up on one arm, as if she had a good idea. ‘Do you think I should go to him? Maybe he thinks I don’t want to now that he’s had another stroke and he’s going downhill faster than an Easter egg.’

‘No. No,’ I told her. ‘Never go to him. Never ever.’

The image of Sophia with Father worked to subdue my arousal more effectively than an ice-pack. I tucked my useless penis away and zipped up.

When I rose off the bed, to do I knew not what, Sophia asked, in an apologetic, diminutive tone, ‘Will you be angry with me for ever?’

‘Does Mother know what Father’s done?’

‘He told me to keep it a secret.’

‘Don’t you know that what he’s done is wrong?’ She cast her eyes downwards without replying. ‘Why didn’t you tell me? If you’d told me I’d have put a stop to it. I’d have killed him. I still might.’

‘Kill Father?’

‘Sophia.’ She frustrated me so much! ‘When fathers do to their children what he did to you, they call that abuse. It’s against the law. It’s a huge crime. People get locked in prison for doing what he did.’

‘But he didn’t do much to me. I did most of it to him.’

I raised my hands towards the ceiling in something deeper than frustration and worse than despair.

I walked around like a zombie plotting to kill Father. Every time I
tried
to look at him, I could not. I could hardly look at Mother either. I hardly knew where I was much of the time.

My incessant browsing through science books in Whitehead House library, books much more advanced than the textbooks I studied for my exams, taught me a number of elegant truths that my official courses of study seemed to think too obvious to bother with. Take, for example, the nature of facts. I learned that certain phenomena are so likely to occur – that the sun will rise each morning, move across the sky and go down at night – we call them facts.