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Authors: Michel Faber

Tags: #Fiction, #Short Stories (Single Author), #Literary

The Fahrenheit Twins (2 page)

BOOK: The Fahrenheit Twins
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I look up at the darkening façade, and there, eerily framed in the window nearest to the top of the portal, is a very old woman in a nurse’s uniform. She flinches at the rain and, mindful of her perfectly groomed hair and pastel cottons, stops short of leaning her head out. Instead she looks down at me from where she stands, half-hidden in shadow.

‘What can we do for you?’ she says, guardedly, raising her voice only slightly above the weather.

I realise I have no answer for her, no words. Instead, I unwrap my arms from my torso, awkwardly revealing the text on myT-shirt. The sodden smock of white fabric clings to my skin as I lean back, blinking against the rain. The old woman reads carefully, her eyes rolling to and fro in their sockets. When she’s finished she reaches out a pale, bone-wristed hand and takes hold of the window latch; without speaking she shuts the dark glass firmly between us and disappears.

Moments later, the massive door creaks open, and I’m in.

Even before the door has shut behind me, the sound of the rain is swallowed up in the gloomy interior hush of old architecture. I step uncertainly across the threshold into silence.

The nurse leads me through a red velvety vestibule lit by a long row of ceiling lamps which seem to be giving out about fifteen watts apiece. There is threadbare carpet underfoot, and complicated wallpaper, cracked and curling at the skirtingboards and cornices. As I follow the faintly luminous nurse’s uniform through the amber passageway, I glance sideways at the gilt-framed paintings on the walls: stern old men in grey attire, mummified behind a patina of discoloured varnish like university dons or Victorian industrialists.

On our way to wherever, we pass what appears to be an office; through its window I glimpse filing cabinets and an obese figure hunched over a paper-strewn desk. But the old woman does not pause; if my admission to the Safehouse involves any paperwork it seems I’m not required to fill in the forms myself.

Another door opens and I am ushered into a very different space: a large, high-ceilinged dining room so brightly lit by fluorescent tubes that I blink and almost miss my footing. Spacious as a gymnasium and cosy as an underground car park, the Safehouse mess hall welcomes me, whoever I may be. Its faded pink walls, synthetic furniture and scuffed wooden floor glow with reflected light. And, despite its dimensions, it is as warm as anyone could want, with gas heaters galore.

At one end, close to where I have entered, two fat old women in nurse’s uniforms stand behind a canteen counter wreathed in a fog of brothy vapour. They ladle soup into ceramic bowls, scoop flaccid white bread out of damp plastic bags, fetch perfect toast out of antique black machines. One of them looks up at me and smiles for half a second before getting back to her work.

The rest of the hall is littered with a hundred mismatching chairs (junk-shop boxwood and stainless steel) and an assortment of tables, mostly Formica. It is also littered with human beings, a placid, murmuring population of men, women and teenage children – a hundred of them, maybe more. Even at the first glimpse, before I take in anything else, they radiate a powerful aura – an aura of consensual hopelessness. Other than this, they are as mismatched as the furniture, all sizes and shapes, from roly-poly to anorexic thin, from English rose to Jamaica black. Most are already seated, a few are wandering through the room clutching a steaming bowl, searching for somewhere good to sit. Each and every one of them is dressed in a white T-shirt just like mine.

Behind me, a door shuts; the old nurse has left me to fend for myself, as if it should be transparently obvious how things work here. And, in a way, it is. The fists I have clenched in anticipation of danger grow slack as I accept that my arrival has made no impression on the assembled multitude. I am one of them already.

Hesitantly, I step up to the canteen counter. A bearded man with wayward eyebrows and bright blue eyes is already standing there waiting, his elbow leaning on the edge. Though his body is more or less facing me, his gaze is fixed on the old women and the toast they’re buttering for him. So, I take the opportunity to read what the text on his T-shirt says.

It says:

JEFFREY ANNESLEY
AGE 47

Jeffrey disappeared on April 7,1994
from his work in Leeds. He was driving
his blue Mondeo, registration L562 WFU.
Jeffrey had been unwell for some time and it was
decided he would go to hospital to receive treatment.
He may be seeking work as a gas-fitter.
Jeffrey’s family are extremely worried about him.
His wife says he is a gentle man who loves
his two daughters very much.
‘We just want to know how you are,’
she says. ‘Everything is sorted out now.’
Have you have seen Jeffrey?
If you have any information, please
contact the Missing Persons Helpline.

 

Jeffrey Annesley reaches out his big gnarly hands and takes hold of a plate of food. No soup, just a small mound of toast. He mumbles a thanks I cannot decipher, and walks away, back to a table he has already claimed.

‘What would you like, pet?’ says one of the old women behind the canteen counter. She sounds Glaswegian and has a face like an elderly transvestite.

‘What is there?’ I ask.

‘Soup and toast,’ she says.

‘What sort of soup?’

‘Pea and ham.’ She glances at my chest, as if to check whether I’m vegetarian. ‘But I can try to scoop it so as there’s no ham in yours.’

‘No, it’s all right, thank you,’ I assure her. ‘Can I have it in a cup?’

She turns to the giant metal pot on the stove, her fat shoulders gyrating as she decants my soup. I notice that the seams of her uniform have been mended several times, with thread that is not quite matching.

‘Here you are, pet.’

She hands me an orange-brown stoneware mug, filled with earthy-looking soup I cannot smell.

‘Thank you,’ I say.

I weave my way through the litter of chairs and tables. Here and there someone glances at me as I pass, but mostly I’m ignored. I take my seat near a young woman who is slumped with her feet up on a table, apparently asleep. On the lap of her mud-stained purple trousers, a plate of toast rises and falls almost imperceptibly. The forward tilt of her head gives her a double chin, even though she is scrawny and small.

I read her T-shirt. It says:

CATHY STOCKTON
AGE 17

Cathy left her home in Bristol in July 2002
to stay in London. She has run away before
but never for this long. At Christmas 2003, a girl claiming to be a friend of Cathy’s rang Cathy’s auntie
in Dessborough, Northants, asking if Cathy could
come to visit. This visit never happened.
Cathy’s mother wants her to know that Cathy’s
stepfather is gone now and that her room is
back the way it was. ‘I have never stopped
loving you,’ she says. ‘Snoopy and Paddington are
next to your pillow, waiting for you to come home.’
Cathy suffers from epilepsy and may need medicine.
If you have seen her, please call the
Missing Persons Helpline.

Cathy snoozes on, a stray lock of her blond hair fluttering in the updraft from her breath.

I lean back in my chair and sip at my mug of soup. I taste nothing much, but the porridgy liquid is satisfying in my stomach, filling a vacuum there. I wonder what I will have to do in order to be allowed to stay in the Safehouse, and who I can ask about this. As a conversationalist I have to admit I’m pretty rusty. Apart from asking passers-by for spare change, I haven’t struck up a conversation with anyone for a very long time. How does it work? Do you make some comment about the weather? I glance up at the windows, which are opaque and high above the ground. There is a faint pearlescent glow coming through them, but I can’t tell if it’s still raining out there or shining fit to burst.

The old woman who escorted me here hasn’t returned to tell me what I’m supposed to do next. Maybe she’ll escort somebody else into the hall at some stage, and I can ask her then. But the canteen ladies are cleaning up, putting the food away. They seem to have reason to believe I’m the last new arrival for the afternoon.

I cradle my soup mug in both my hands, hiding my mouth behind it while I survey the dining hall some more. There is a susurrus of talk but remarkably little for such a large gathering of people. Most just sit, staring blindly ahead of them, mute and listless inside their black-and-white texts. I try to eavesdrop on the ones who are talking, but I barely catch a word: I’m too far away, they have no teeth or are from Newcastle, Cathy Stockton has started snoring.

After about twenty minutes, a grizzled bald man walks over to me and parks himself on the chair nearest mine. He extends a hand across the
faux
-marble patio table for me to shake. There is no need for introductions. He is Eric James Sween, a former builder whose business had been in financial difficulties before he disappeared from his home in Broxburn, West Lothian, in January 1994.

I wonder, as I shake his surprisingly weak hand, how long ago his wife said she would give anything just to know he was safe. Would she give as much today? The baby daughter she desperately wanted to show him may be experimenting with cigarettes by now.

‘Don’t worry,’ he says, ‘It’s a doddle.’

‘What is?’ I ask him.

‘What you have to do here.’

‘What do you have to do?’

‘A bit of manual labour. Not today: it’s raining too hard. But most days. A cinch.’

The old women seem to have melted away from the canteen, leaving me alone in the dining hall with all these strangers.

‘Who runs this place?’ I ask Eric James Sween.

‘Some sort of society,’ he replies, as if sharing information unearthed after years of painstaking research.

‘Religious?’

‘Could be, could be.’ He grins. One of his long teeth is brown as a pecan nut. I suspect that if I could read the lower lines of his T-shirt, obscured by the table, there would be a hint of bigger problems than the failure of a business.

Which reminds me:

‘No one must know what’s become of me.’

Eric James Sween squints, still smiling, vaguely puzzled. I struggle to make myself absolutely clear.

‘The people who run this place … If they’re going to try to … make contact, you know … with …’ I leave it there, hoping he’ll understand without me having to name names – although of course one of the names is printed on my breast in big black letters.

Eric James Sween chuckles emphysemally.

‘Nobody’s ever gonna see you again,’ he assures me. ‘That’s why you’re here. That’s why they let you in. They can tell you’re ready.’

He is staring at me, his eyes twinkling, his face immobile. I realise that our conversation is over and I wonder if there is something I can do to bring it to a formal conclusion.

‘Thank you,’ I say.

I sit in my dining room chair for the rest of the afternoon, getting up occasionally to stretch my legs, then returning again to the same chair. No one bothers me. It is bliss not to be moved on, bliss to be left unchallenged. This is all I have wanted every day of my life for as long as I care to remember.

Everyone else in the hall stays more or less where they are, too. They relax, as far as the hard furniture allows, digesting their lunch, biding their time until dinner. Some sleep, their arms hanging down, their fingers trailing the floor. Some use their arms to make little pillows for themselves against the headrest of their chairs, nestling their cheek in the crook of an elbow. Others have their knees drawn up tight against their chin, perched like outsized owls on a padded square of vinyl. A few carry on talking, but by now I have reason to wonder if they are really talking to the people they sit amongst. Their eyes stare into the middle distance, they chew their fingernails, they speak in low desultory voices. Rather than answering their neighbours or being answered, they speak simultaneously, or lapse simultaneously into silence.

Eric James Sween, perhaps the most restless soul of them all, ends up seated in the most crowded part of the room, drumming on his thighs and knees with his fingertips, humming the music that plays inside his head. He hums softly, as if fearful of disturbing anyone, and his fingers patter against his trouser legs without audible effect. A little earlier, he found a handkerchief on the floor and wandered around the room with it, asking various people if it was theirs. Everyone shook their heads or ignored him. For a while I was vaguely curious what he would do with the handkerchief if no one accepted it, but then I lost focus and forgot to watch him. My concentration isn’t so good these days. The next time I noticed him, he was hunched on a chair, empty-handed, drumming away.

Occasionally someone gets up to go to the toilet. I know that’s where they’re going because at one point a hulking arthritic woman announces to herself that she had better have a pee, and I follow her. She walks laboriously, obliging me to take childish mincing steps so as not to overtake her. I notice that on the back of her T-shirt she has a lot of text too, much more than on the front. In fact, there is so much text, in such tiny writing, that her back is almost black with it. I try to read some as I walk behind her, but I can’t manage it. The letters are too small, and the woman is contorting her muscles constantly in an effort to keep her ruined body from pitching over.

She leads me to two adjacent toilet doors on the opposite end of the dining hall from the canteen. Fastened to one door is a picture of a gentleman in a frock coat and top hat; the other has a lady in a long crinoline dress, with a bonnet and parasol. I enter the gentleman toilet. It is bigger than I thought it would be and luridly white, more like a room in an art gallery. Above the washbasins is a faded illustration painted directly onto the wall; it depicts a pair of hands washing each other against a green medicinal cross. REINLICHKEIT, it says underneath.

I select one of a long row of teardrop urinals to stand at. They look ancient and organic, as if they have been fashioned from a huge quantity of melted-down teeth. There are caramel stains on the enamel like streaks of tobacco. Yet the drain-holes are bubbly with disinfectant, showing that they are clean.

BOOK: The Fahrenheit Twins
2.09Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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