The Fahrenheit Twins (5 page)

‘I’m not stopping you,’ he said.

She stared pointedly at his elbow leaning in the midst of the plates. He understood he was in the way, got up and walked into the living room.

He sat down in the old armchair and picked up a newspaper to see what sorts of things the world was up to these days.

Meeting his sons was not as much of an ordeal as he’d thought it would be. The eldest was in fact ten (a miscalculation on his part) and seemed uninterested in him or, for that matter, in Bromwyn.

‘See you later, Dad,’ he said, and went up to his room.

The younger boys were curious, shy, and friendly, as if he were an interesting visitor. They asked him how he got well.

‘I don’t
know
,’ he said. ‘
Nobody
knows. It’s a mystery of science.’

They seemed to like that.

They asked him, too, what it was like to be mad. The seven-year-old asked,

‘Can you still make that noise you made when you were mad? You know, like
woo-woo-woooo?
’

‘Sure,’ he said, oblivious of his wife going rigid with mortification behind him. Craning his head back and opening his mouth as wide as possible, he did an impression of his old howl.

‘What do you think?’ he asked his son.

‘Mm,’ said the seven-year-old dubiously. ‘It was better before.’

‘Sorry,’ he said, amused.

‘That’s quite enough,’ said his wife, sounding very careworn, which he supposed she was.

He could no longer see in her the young woman he’d married, the young woman with the black hair and the big dreamy eyes and the inviting satiny neck. If he had lived with her these past five years he’d probably still be able to see her the way she used to be, but he couldn’t. She was from an older generation.

That evening, the family watched television, the way they’d always done, even when the boys were babies. Later in the night, when the children had gone to bed, Andrew and Bromwyn watched television as a couple. They changed channels a couple of times, caught the second half of a murder mystery. Having both missed the start, they were on equal footing and were able to talk a little, conjecturing who the murderer might be. He felt marginally closer to her, but knew it wouldn’t last.

In bed she lay beside him like a folded-up deck chair. He stared at the wrinkles on her neck.

‘Do you want to make love to me?’ she asked. He could tell that if he touched her she would recoil.

‘Not tonight,’ he said. It was true. His erection, hidden away in his oversized pyjamas, was not for her. It was for women in general.

Eventually his wife turned over.

‘I’m falling asleep,’ she announced thickly. ‘Good night, Andy.’

‘Good night.’

At about 2:45 by the strange new alarm clock on his side of the bed, Andrew got out and put on his dressing-gown and slippers. Carefully making his way through the black corridor in case he tripped on foreign junk, he finished up in the living room, trying to look out through the gauzy curtains. It grew in him how good it would feel to be outside.

He stepped out onto the veranda, leaving the door unlocked. There was nothing in the house he would mind a burglar stealing.

The night was indigo and sultry, with a full moon. Static trickled up and down his neck. The world was as still as a forest that had been cut down. He felt like a small bird, hopping uncomprehendingly from stump to stump in the darkness.

Pushing off from his letterbox as if for good luck, Andrew set off down the street. In the dark the neighbourhood was not as familiar as he’d first thought. He didn’t know if he’d be able to find his way back.

THE EYES OF THE SOUL

The view from Jeanette’s front window was, frankly, shite.

Outside lay Rusborough South. There was no Rusborough North, West or East, as far as Jeanette knew. Maybe they’d existed once, but if so, they must have been demolished long ago, wiped off the map, and replaced with something better.

Jeanette’s house was right opposite the local shop, which had its good and bad side. Not the shop itself: that had four bad sides, all of them grey concrete with graffiti on. But having your house right near the shop: there was a good side to that. Jeanette could send Tim out for a carton of milk or a sack of frozen chips and watch him through the window in case he got attacked. The bad side was that the shop was a magnet for the estate’s worst violence.

‘Look, Mum: police!’ Tim would say almost every evening, pointing through the window at the flashing blue lights and the angry commotion just across the road.

‘Finish your supper,’ she would tell him, but he would keep on watching through the big dirty rectangle of glass. He couldn’t really do anything else. The blinds were never drawn on the front window, because as soon as you blocked off the view, ugly though it was, you immediately noticed what a poky little shoebox the sitting room was. Better to see out, Jeanette had decided, even if what you were seeing was Rusborough South’s substance abusers arguing with the law.

‘What are police for, Mum?’ Tim had asked her once.

‘They keep us nice and safe, pet,’ she’d replied automatically. But deep down, she had no faith in the boys in blue, or in the zealous busybodies who tried to get her interested in Neighbourhood Watch schemes. It was all just an excuse for coffee mornings where other powerless people just like herself complained about their awful neighbours and then got shirty about who was paying for the biscuits.

Positive action, they called it. Jeanette much preferred to buy lottery scratchcards, which might at least get her out of Rusborough South if she was lucky.

The one thing that pissed her off more than anything else was window companies. They would ring her up about once a week, telling her they were doing a special promotion on windows just now, and could they maybe send someone round for a free quote. ‘I don’t know,’ she said the first time. ‘Can you just tell me how much you’d charge to replace my front window when kids throw a rock through it?’ But the window companies didn’t do that sort of thing. They wanted to do the whole house up with security windows, double glazing: serious money. Jeanette didn’t have serious money. The window companies kept phoning regardless.

‘Look, I’ve told you before,’ she would snap at them. ‘I’m not interested.’

‘Not a problem, not a problem,’ they’d assure her. ‘We shan’t trouble you again.’ But a week later, someone else would call, asking her if she’d given any thought to her windows.

Then one day somebody called in person. A woman with an expensive haircut, dressed like a politician or a weather girl on the telly. She stood in Jeanette’s doorway, clutching a leatherbound folder and what looked like a video remote control. Parked against the kerb behind her was a bright green van with a burly, shaven-headed man at the wheel. The side of the van was decorated with the words OUTLOOK INNOVATIONS and a stylised picture of a window looking out onto a landscape of trees and mountains.

‘You’re not a window company, are you?’ said Jeanette.

The woman hesitated a moment, seemed a bit nervous. ‘No, not really,’ she said. ‘We offer people an alternative to windows.’

‘You’re a window company,’ affirmed Jeanette irritably, and shut the door in the woman’s face. She hated to do this to another human being, but when she’d first moved to Rusborough, a bunch of red-faced, panting little kids had come to the door asking if they could please have a drink of water. She’d considered shutting the door in their faces, but let them into the kitchen to have a drink instead. Next day, her house was burgled.

Shutting the door in people’s faces had got a little easier after that.

But the lady with the leatherbound folder popped up at the window and looked awfully embarrassed.

‘I’m honestly not selling windows,’ she pleaded, her voice muffled by the grubby pane of glass between her and Jeanette. ‘Not what you’d think of as a window, anyway. Couldn’t I please have five minutes of your time? I can actually show you what we’re offering right here and now.’

Jeanette wavered on the spot, trapped. She should have drawn the blinds, but it was too late for that. Her eyes and the eyes of the other woman were locked, and all sorts of humdrum intimacies seemed to be flowing between them, like
I’m
a woman, you’re a woman
, and
I’m a mother, are you a mother too?

Her shoulders slumping in defeat, Jeanette walked back to the door and opened it.

Once allowed into the living room, the saleswoman didn’t waste any time.

‘What do you think of the view through your window?’ she said.

‘It’s shite,’ said Jeanette.

The saleswoman smiled again, and tipped her head slightly to the side, as if to say,
I’d have to agree with you there,
but I’m too polite to say so
.

‘Well,’ she purred, ‘If you had a choice, what would you be seeing out there?’

‘Anything but Rusborough South,’ replied Jeanette without hesitation.

‘Mountains? Valleys? The sea?’ persisted the saleswoman.

‘Listen, when I win the lottery I’ll let you know where I move to, how’s that?’

The saleswoman seemed to sense she was annoying Jeanette. Cradling her folder against her immaculate breast, she pointed her remote control thingy towards the window, straight at the man in the van. There was a soft
neep
. The man got the message, and the van door swung open.

‘At Outlook Innovations we like to say, windows are the eyes of the soul,’ said the saleswoman, reverently, almost dreamily.

Jeanette considered, for the first time, the possibility that she had let some sort of religious loony into her home.

‘That’s very deep,’ she said. ‘Look, my son’s going to be home from school soon …’

‘This won’t take a minute,’ the saleswoman assured her.

The man had flipped open the hatches of the van, and was leaning inside. His overalls were bright green, to match the vehicle, and had OI emblazoned on them. Jeanette thought of skinheads.

Out of the back of the vehicle and into the arms of the man slid a large dull-grey screen. It looked like an oversized central heating radiator, but was apparently not as heavy, as the man lifted it by himself without much effort. He carried it across Jeanette’s horrible little ‘lawn’ and lifted it up to the window of her horrible little house. He manoeuvred it onto the windowsill, grunting with the effort of not getting his fingers squashed. Then he shoved the screen right up tight against the window, with a scrape of metal on prefab something-or-other. It blocked the entire view snugly, with no more than a millimetre to spare on all sides.

Jeanette laughed uneasily. ‘You’ve had me measured, have you?’ she said.

‘We would never take such a liberty,’ demurred the saleswoman.‘ I think you’ll find that almost every front window on the estate is absolutely identical.’

‘I’d wondered about that, actually,’ said Jeanette.

Slid so securely into place, the screen sealed the room with claustrophobic efficiency, making the electric light seem harsher and yet at the same time more feeble, like the mournful glow inside a chicken coop.

Jeanette tried to be well-behaved about the way it made her feel, not wanting to make a scene in front of a stranger. But to her surprise the saleswoman said,

‘Awful, isn’t it?’

‘Pardon?’

‘Feels like a prison, yes?’

‘Yeah,’ said Jeanette. There were scrabblings going on outside the house, which must be the technician making adjustments. He wasn’t screwing the bloody thing in, was he?

‘If this particular Outlook were installed permanently, the seal would be soundproof, too.’

‘Yeah?’ said Jeanette. Being boxed in was already driving her mental, so the thought of being shut off from all sound as well wasn’t exactly the thing to cheer her up. That cowboy out there had better take his damn panel off her window and put it back in his van ASAP. Jeanette wondered if it was going to be difficult to get these people to leave.

‘Now,’ said the saleswoman. ‘I’ll hand you the control, and you can switch it on.’

‘Switch it on?’ echoed Jeanette.

‘Yes,’ said the saleswoman, nodding encouragingly as if to a small child. ‘Do go ahead. Feel free.’

Jeanette squinted at the remote, and pressed her thumb on the button marked ON/OFF.

Suddenly the screen seemed to vanish from her window, as if it had been whipped away by a gust of wind. Light beamed in again through the glass, making Jeanette blink.

But it was not the light of Rusborough South. Where the hell was Rusborough South? The shop across the road was gone. The dismal streets the colour of used kitty litter were gone. The bus shelter with the poster about saying no to domestic violence was gone.

Instead, the world outside had changed to a scene of startling beauty. The house had seemingly relocated itself right in the middle of a spacious country garden, the sort you might see in a TV documentary about Beatrix Potter or somebody like that. There were trellises with tomatoes growing on them, and rusty watering cans, and little stone paths leading into rosebushes, and rickety sheds half-lost in thicket. Much love had obviously been poured into the design and the tending of this place, but nature was getting the best of it now, gently but insistently spilling over the borders with lush weeds and wildflowers. At its wildest peripheries the garden merged (just about at the point where the Rusborough shop ought to be) into a vast sloping meadow that stretched endlessly into the distance. The tall grass of that meadow rippled like great feathery waves in the breeze. In the sky above, an undulating V-formation of white geese was floating along, golden in the sunlight.