Whiskey & Charlie (18 page)

They sang songs. They were obsessed with Manfred Mann's 1964 classic “Doo Wah Diddy Diddy,” which they had on a CD they had brought with them from Canada. They sang it at least ten times a day, arguing every time over the parts—which one of them would sing the proper lyrics and which the gibberish refrain. It reminded Charlie of when he and Whiskey were young and their father bought them the record
Peter
Gunn
. Every day they had played it over and over again until their mother called up the stairs that if she had to listen to it one more time, she would break it in half. Then they had taken to humming it instead, squabbling about who would provide the bass line and who the dramatic horn solo.

Charlie was fascinated by the dynamic between the twins. Holly had been born first, Mike had told him, and in their relationships with others, particularly adults, Holly was the spokesperson. But when it was just the two of them playing together, it was often Chloe who made the decisions, defined the parameters of their games, took the best roles. Charlie tried to remember being six years old. Once upon a time, were there ways in which he had taken the lead, made the rules? Had he and Whiskey ever been like Holly and Chloe, each dominant in different ways? Was it just his imagination that Whiskey had always had the upper hand, a convenient fiction he had created which corroborated his other ideas of his brother, himself?

x x x

Juliet liked having the girls around too. She had discovered that they liked old musicals and they had been making popcorn and having matinees, working their way through the films she had grown up with—
Mary
Poppins
and
The
Sound
of
Music
,
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
and
The
Wizard
of
Oz
. Sometimes Genevieve dropped Oscar off, and they played school or took Chester to the park.

In Quebec, they said, their next-door neighbor had a beagle called Boomer, whom they sometimes played with. They began almost every sentence with the phrase “in Quebec.”

In Quebec, we would be at school now; in Quebec, we have underground shopping malls; in Quebec, it's probably snowing.

Charlie teased them that he was learning so much about Quebec that if he ever visited, there would be no surprises left for him at all.

Once Charlie was on school holidays he volunteered to look after the girls some afternoons to give Mike a break. It was one of those afternoons, when Charlie and the girls were watching
Bedknobs
and
Broomsticks
, when Rosa rang in a state, asking Charlie to go straight to the hospital.

“I think I have catched something,” she said anxiously. “I must go straight home.”

“I've got the girls,” Charlie said. “What about Mum?”

“I have called to her already. She is not at home.”

“Have you tried Audrey?”

“She is in Bendigo until tomorrow.”

Charlie thought for a minute. Juliet was at the library, working on her screenplay; she wouldn't be back for a couple of hours, and her phone would be switched off. Mike had had some errands to run that afternoon, and Charlie had no way of contacting him.

“I might be making Whiskey sick, Charlie,” Rosa said. “I must go directly.”

Charlie did not need Rosa to explain to him that Whiskey could not be left alone, that what she feared more than anything was some change in his condition when no one was there, some opportunity to get through to him being lost.

“Hang in there, Rosa,” Charlie said. “I'll be there as soon as I can.”

He left a quick message on Juliet's voice mail, grabbed some coloring books and pencils, and bundled the girls into the car.
They
can
sit
on
the
chairs
in
the
corridor
, he thought to himself.
I'll be able to keep an eye on them through the window. Juliet can come and pick them up as soon as she leaves the library. There'll be no need for them to come into the room at all.

But when they got to the hospital, the girls had other ideas.

“Are we going to meet Uncle Whiskey?” Holly asked excitedly.

“You can't meet him,” Charlie said. “He's sleeping.”

“Daddy said he was in a coma.”

Charlie grimaced. “That's kind of like sleeping. You'll have to wait out here.”

“Can't we have a look at him?” Holly persisted.

He's not a fucking museum exhibit
, Charlie wanted to say. “He's very sick,” he said instead.

“We'll be quiet,” Holly said. “We'll be so quiet, we promise. Don't we, Chloe?”

Charlie pressed his face into his hands. How did things get so out of control? What sort of person took two six-year-old girls to see a man in a coma? But he didn't want to stand out in the corridor, arguing about it. Rosa was waiting.

“All right then. You can come in and see him. But don't touch anything. And don't say a word until Rosa's gone.”

They all went and washed their hands together in the little basin in the handicap bathroom, and then Charlie took them back to the room.

“Thank god, Charlie,” Rosa said through her paper mask. “I thought you never would come.” She patted the girls' heads absently. “Don't kiss me. I have got a sore throat, a headache. The aspirin they give me did not help. I don't want Whiskey to catch this from me.”

Charlie hugged her. “You go home then. Get into bed. Call Juliet if you need anything—leave a message on her phone, and she can pop in on the way home from the library.”

“Sit down then,” Charlie said to the girls when she had gone, motioning to two chairs pushed against the wall. He sat down in the chair everyone thought of as Rosa's chair, next to the bed.

“Can we sit next to you, Uncle Charlie?” Holly whispered.

Charlie looked at his brother.
What
difference
does
it
make?
he thought. He helped them pull their chairs closer to the bed, and they all sat in silence for a while, taking it in.

“Why does he have those tubes in his nose?” Holly asked eventually, in a dramatic stage whisper. “And in his hand too?”

Charlie took a breath. It was natural for them to have questions. He had asked the exact same questions himself the first time he had gone to the hospital. Usually, they explained all the machines to visitors before they went into the room, looking through the window—it was a trick one of the nurses had told them to lessen the shock. But there hadn't been time to do that for Chloe and Holly. He explained all the tubes and machines as simply as he could, omitting the more gruesome details wherever possible, trying to make it sound less frightening than it was.

“When is he going to wake up?” Chloe asked then.

“We don't know.”

The girls looked at him expectantly, as though there must be more to be said.

“We don't know,” he said again, “but we hope it will be soon.”

“Maybe he'll wake up today,” Holly said thoughtfully.

Chloe gasped at this, as though Whiskey were some zombie threatening to rise from the grave. That must be how Whiskey appeared to them, Charlie thought, like some creature from a horror movie.

“Don't worry,” Charlie said. “It probably won't be today.” But he could see them watching Whiskey as though he might take them by surprise at any moment.

“Uncle Charlie?” Holly whispered after a time.

Charlie still wasn't used to them calling him uncle. He didn't think of them as his nieces. They were his half nieces, he supposed, if such a term existed.

“What?” he asked wearily. They had been there for only ten minutes, and he already felt drained.

“Daddy told us you were identical twins, like me and Chloe.”

“That's right.”

“But he doesn't look like you.”

Charlie looked at Whiskey, tried to see him as Holly might see him, as if he were seeing him for the first time.

“Well, the older you get, the less alike you become,” Charlie said, thinking. “But we did look pretty much the same, I suppose, apart from different haircuts and things. Whiskey looks very different now because of the accident.”

Holly and Chloe were listening intently, waiting for more.

“He's very pale because he hasn't been outside for a few weeks—and he can't eat normal food, so he's gotten a bit skinny…and they had to shave his head to have a look at the cuts and things…and his face got bruised, you know, when the car…”

“So when he wakes up, will you look the same again? Will you still be identical twins?”

“We'll always be identical twins,” Charlie started. And then he stopped. He waited until the feeling that he was going to cry had passed.

“I don't know,” he said eventually. He could not believe he had not considered this eventuality, that even if Whiskey recovered, the damage might profoundly change his physical appearance, so that though, genetically speaking, Charlie and Whiskey would still be identical, on the outside they would no longer be exactly the same, or even similar, that a stranger might not even pick them as brothers.

The girls were quiet for a while, and then Holly spoke again. “Why aren't you talking to him?” Holly asked cautiously.

“What do you mean?”

“You're supposed to talk to people in a coma, and it helps them wake up. In Quebec, we saw a film where they did that. Didn't we, Chloe?”

Chloe nodded. “The boy's dad came back to life,” she added.

Charlie knew about this theory of course. But he hadn't tried it himself. He hadn't talked directly to Whiskey once since the accident. There was too much to say, and it seemed too late. He would have liked to believe Whiskey could hear him, but he didn't. He couldn't say that to Holly and Chloe.

“Well, Whiskey already knows all about me,” he said. “I'm sure he doesn't want to listen to me talking. But you can talk to him if you want to. I bet he'd like to hear all about you.”

“But what would we say?”

Charlie thought for a moment. “Introduce yourselves. Tell him what you're doing here.”

Chloe looked excited and terrified at the same time, but Holly was already standing up out of her chair, moving closer to the bed.

“Hello, Uncle Whiskey,” she said solemnly. “I'm Holly, and this is my sister Chloe.”

“Tell him we're twins too,” Chloe whispered.

Holly shushed her. “We live in Quebec. I don't know if you know geography, but that's in Canada. Our daddy is your brother,” she said, as if still trying to understand this herself. “Our grandma died, and Daddy wanted to spend her money on a holiday to meet you. We don't have any more grandmas or aunties or cousins or anything now.” She stood for a moment more without speaking and then sat back in her chair.

“Very nice,” Charlie said, unsure of whether this little episode was perfectly acceptable or entirely inappropriate. There were no books written on how to behave when one member of your family was in a coma and your long-lost brother came to visit with his children. Briefly, Charlie imagined such a book.
Death
and
Adoption: When Worlds Collide
. Anything that made the situation more tolerable for anyone involved must be okay, he decided.

“Do you want to say something, Chloe?” Charlie asked.

Chloe shook her head and didn't move, but after a moment she began to speak, very softly, as though she was saying a prayer.

“Dear Uncle Whiskey,” she began, in the manner of the Lord's Prayer. “Thank you for letting us stay at your house. Auntie Rosa bought us a bunk bed. We like Auntie Rosa and Auntie Juliet too, and we love Chester. When we get back to Quebec, Daddy says we might get a dog, and it might even be a Dalmatian. Maybe when you're feeling better, you can come over to Quebec and see our dog.”

Charlie closed his eyes. “Amen,” he said under his breath. He wished he could say such a prayer.

* * *

New Year's Eve. Whiskey has been in a coma for five weeks. Charlie has never felt less like celebrating, dreads the thought of being at a party or in a bar surrounded by people getting drunk. But Rosa says Charlie and Juliet should go out, that Whiskey has always liked New Year's Eve, that they should have a drink for him. So Charlie and Juliet catch the tram down to Carlisle Street to have dinner at their favorite wine bar. They order a drink on Whiskey's behalf, an overpriced French champagne that Charlie says should satisfy Whiskey's expensive taste. But when they raise their glasses to make a toast, Charlie can't find the right words to say. What he thinks he wants, most of the time, is for Whiskey to be returned to them, exactly as he was before the accident. But it feels ridiculous to say this out loud, when he has spent so many years wishing for Whiskey to be a completely different person. Charlie struggles for a phrase that won't come out sounding trite or fraudulent, can't summon a single thing.

Juliet reaches across the table for his hand. “To Whiskey,” she says simply, touching her glass to his.

Over dinner, Charlie tells Juliet about the only New Year's Eve he'd spent with Whiskey, other than the millennium party where he and Juliet met. It was not long after Whiskey started in his first copywriting position and had just moved out of their home. He was living with roommates in Fitzroy and had organized a cocktail party for New Year's Eve, hoping to impress his new advertising friends, Charlie supposed. Unfortunately, one of Whiskey's guests had baked a batch of hash cookies that turned out to be slightly more potent than anticipated. At midnight, when they should have been clinking martini glasses and kissing each other, at least half the guests were in the bathrooms or the courtyard or out on the grass verge in front of the house, puking their guts up. Within an hour, anyone who hadn't vomited or passed out had staggered home, and the party was most definitely over. Charlie had woken up on Whiskey's bed, still stoned and already hungover, with dried vomit on his shirt. Whiskey, the young sophisticate, was lying beside him, his face scratched and smeared with dried blood from where he had fallen down the front steps and landed headfirst in a rosebush.

x x x

Charlie has never felt guilty about Juliet leaving Whiskey for him. He has always justified it by saying that Juliet would have broken up with Whiskey anyway, whether she had met Charlie or not. Juliet had admitted as much herself. Over time, Charlie has come to think of Whiskey's losing Juliet to him as a kind of payback for Charlie's losing Anneliese Spellman when they were still at school; a rebalancing of the scales that had tipped out of Charlie's favor in the weeks leading up to the eleventh-grade ball and remained out of kilter for years afterward.

Since Whiskey's accident though, Charlie has begun to feel guilty about a whole host of things that never bothered him before, Juliet being one of them. Whether or not Juliet would have eventually broken up with Whiskey anyway, whether or not it was Juliet who had asked for
his
number, Juliet who had phoned and asked him to go out—if he had been a better person, a better brother, wouldn't he have said no to her? Charlie has always been adamant that the way Whiskey behaved after finding out about Charlie and Juliet's relationship was absolutely inexcusable. Now he wonders if his anger had perhaps been warranted.

And was it really Whiskey who had unbalanced the scales with Anneliese? After all, she too had been Whiskey's girl first. And in the long run, they had both lost her. Maybe it was Charlie who had unbalanced the scales from the start.

x x x

Charlie and Juliet are in bed long before the old year gives way to the new. When Rosa's call wakes them, Charlie has forgotten all about New Year's Eve.

“Happy New Year!” Rosa says breathlessly. “Whiskey has opened his eyes!”

Charlie looks at the alarm clock. It is only just after midnight. He wonders if he is dreaming. “Are you sure?” he asks.

“Of course I am sure! I am looking at him right now, and they are open. Come down and see for yourself.”

Charlie is wide-awake then, pulling his jeans on one-handed while he holds the phone with the other. “When did this happen?” he asks.

“About ten minutes ago,” Rosa says excitedly. “I fell to sleep a little, and then when I heard the fireworks, I woke up, and Whiskey was looking at me.”

x x x

Charlie is almost afraid to let himself believe what Rosa has told him, what it might mean. But when Charlie and Juliet arrive at the hospital, Whiskey's eyes are still open. Charlie hugs Rosa, picks her up off the floor. He hugs Juliet, laughing, and then sits down abruptly, overwhelmed with relief. When their mother arrives with Audrey, there is more hugging and kissing. Usually, if there are more than two of them at the hospital at once, at least one person will wait in the corridor. But tonight no one wants to wait outside. No one wants to run the risk of missing something. They bring in extra chairs and arrange them on either side of Whiskey's bed. They watch him expectantly, waiting for him to blink, or perhaps turn his head, to squeeze Rosa's hand, wondering what the next sign of arousal might be.

At around three o'clock, Charlie gets up to go to the bathroom. As he passes the nurses' station, he gives the nurse on duty, Magdalena, the thumbs-up signal. She frowns a little, makes a gesture that Charlie can't interpret, somewhere between nodding her head and shaking it.

“You know Whiskey's opened his eyes, don't you?”

Magdalena nods. “Rosa called me in when it happened,” she says, looking at Charlie with concern.

“What's wrong?” Charlie asks.

“Nothing's wrong.” She hesitates. “It's just that after a period of prolonged unresponsiveness, it's not uncommon for a patient to open their eyes, but it might not be accompanied by any other changes to their condition.”

“But surely someone opening their eyes is a sign that they're waking up. Isn't it?”

Magdalena shakes her head. “Not always. I'm sorry, Charlie. I know it's difficult. But it's better if you don't get your hopes up too much at this stage.”

“Does Rosa know this?”

“I told her, as soon as it happened. Your mother too when she arrived.”

“They didn't say anything.”

“It's hard for people to take in,” Magdalena says kindly.

Charlie looks at Magdalena, at her plain and honest face. There is no possible reason for her to lie to him. In the last few weeks, Charlie has learned she is one of the best people to go to when he wants the simple facts; he has appreciated her frankness and honesty. But now he doesn't believe her. He can't, because he needs, more than anything, to believe Whiskey is waking up.