Lullaby

by Bernard Beckett

  ‘Yes, I know. Thank you.’

  And then it was the three of us, sitting like cardboard cut outs in a room made of other people’s grief and donated furniture. On the far wall hung a painting of an icy landscape, beneath it old children’s toys spilled from a cardboard box. A one-eyed rabbit smiled goofily at me, as if anticipating the show ahead. The only window looked back onto the corridor. The couch, which Emily had been lying on, was upholstered in a gaudy floral fabric. The chairs were tidy, but unmatched. The overall effect was of a room thrown together, an afterthought. We’re busy saving lives, it said. You can help us by sitting here quietly and not getting in the way.

  Emily was bent forward, as if her stomach was cramping. Maggie and I sat opposite her. She looked through us, through the wall, into the past.

  ‘Emily, this is Maggie.’

  ‘I heard.’

  She wasn’t trying to be cold, or selfish. She was trying to survive.

  ‘Sorry if I smell,’ I said. ‘I threw up.’

  ‘Me too.’ Her expression dissolved like a cheap digital effect.

  She leapt at me, and buried her wet face into the base of my neck. Her fingers dug into my back. Her torso convulsed. She must have wondered how it was I remained so calm. Or maybe that was exactly what she expected, from Theo. I thought of Maggie, sitting beside me, aware of the clock sweeping time. I waited for Emily’s sobbing to subside. Eventually she straightened and wiped her eyes. She even managed half a smile.

  ‘I don’t how I’ve still got tears in me. Surely you run out of water eventually.’

  I raised an eyebrow in agreement. I thought, there are words that can get this started. There must be words. But I couldn’t think of a single one of them.

  ‘Have they told you, how it happened?’ she asked.

  ‘Not really, I mean, probably. I haven’t taken everything in.’

  I would have been more careful, earlier, not to admit that in front of Maggie. But just then what Maggie thought no longer mattered. There was another thing, a more difficult thing, to get through. Emily could talk, I would sit and listen. That would do. Eventually we’d get there.

  ‘We went to the gardens. Did he tell you? It was our anniversary. Well, six-month anniversary, what do you call that?’

  I saw the way she’d dressed for me, that morning. She knew I loved her in those shorts.

  ‘We were having a picnic, and then later, we were going to…’

  Her lip began to tremble. I reached out without thinking and brushed a tear from her cheek.

  ‘We were watching a little boy flying a kite. He was with his father.’ Emily’s face screwed up, as if she’d just remembered something she didn’t understand. ‘It got caught. The kite, it got tangled, up in a tree, and Rene went over to help get it down. The father just stood there, like he didn’t know what to do. I remember thinking, maybe it would be better to leave them. Maybe if you climb up there, the father will feel bad that he didn’t. Maybe it will affect their relationship. But you know Rene, he has to help.’

  She couldn’t look at me. All I wanted was to hold her.

  ‘I didn’t think, what are those wires? Watch out for those wires.’

  She was crying again, bent over, her hair falling wet and tangled over her face.

  ‘Emily, I have to tell you something.’

  She looked up at me. There was no hope in her eyes, or fear.

  ‘It’s, it wasn’t me.’

  ‘What wasn’t you?’

  ‘At the picnic. Up the tree.’

  I’d hoped it would be that easy, that she’d understand straight away, but her eyes remained empty.

  ‘Of course it wasn’t you.’

  ‘No, I mean…remember how I told you, when we were little, me and Theo would swap places? We swapped. Just this one time, I swear. Just today. I’m him, I’m me. I’m Rene.’

  I was sure, if she looked at me, properly looked at me, she had to see. How could she not see?

  ‘You’re sick.’

  ‘I know. It was an awful thing to…’

  ‘How could…He’s your brother, Theo. Just for once in your life, have a little bit of fucking respect for him.’

  ‘Emily, just…’

  She stood up, but there was nowhere for her to go.

  ‘And you shouldn’t, by the way. You shouldn’t go through with this sick plan of theirs.’ Emily turned to Maggie. ‘You’ve told him that, right? You’ve told him the last thing this world needs is two Theos.’

  ‘Emily, I need you to—’

  ‘I don’t care what you need. I don’t owe you anything, okay? One pissy little night, I was drunk. I don’t even remember it. How many times do I have to tell you I don’t even remember it?’

  A small tear in the curtain, a glimpse of the world that had shadowed my own. Any other time, I would have asked.

  ‘Emily, please sit down.’ Maggie’s voice was calm and clear.

  We both turned to her. The first sliver of doubt lined Emily’s face. She sank back into the couch.

  ‘Don’t take his side,’ Emily whispered. ‘You don’t know him. He’ll manipulate—’

  ‘Emily,’ Maggie said. ‘I’ve come here to apologise to you. I should have done a better job of checking the details. That, in part, is how this has happened. We should have known much sooner. You should have been told.’

  ‘Known what?’ Emily shook her head, as if trying to dislodge the possibility. ‘What didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘Rene is telling you the truth.’

  Beneath every face, there is another face, the one revealed when the defences collapse and vulnerability turns to despair. When it’s a face you love, the sadness is overwhelming.

  ‘You don’t know that. You can’t know that.’ Emily looked up at Maggie. ‘He is lying to you. Theo, you’re an arsehole. Tell her you’re lying.’

  ‘We chose the new paint for the flat together,’ I said. ‘Last Tuesday. You wanted the peach, but the painter explained to you how much brighter it would be when you saw the whole wall.’

  ‘Rene told you that. So what?’

  ‘When we hold hands, you take your little finger and press it against my palm.’

  ‘He tells you everything. I told him not to. I told him it isn’t healthy. You sucked him dry. You know that don’t you?’

  I could have thought of a hundred different secrets to tell her, but belief, in the end, doesn’t turn on evidence. And the truth was, she knew. She already knew.

  Emily might have hugged me. She might have been so glad I was still alive, that nothing else mattered. A tiny part of me expected it. But she didn’t, and I knew then how hard it would now be to ever believe she had loved me.

  ‘If I had my time over,’ I said.

  ‘You’d do it differently,’ she replied. ‘Who the fuck wouldn’t?’

  Emily moved toward the door. I began to follow her, but Maggie’s hand was on my arm.

  ‘You have to wait,’ Maggie said. ‘Let her come back to you, when she’s read
y.’

  ‘I need her now,’ I answered.

  ‘I know you do.’

  It felt as if I was the one still point in a world of flux: that every moment, past and future, was moving away from me.

  ‘Take me back to my brother, please.’

  Let me hold him. Let him anchor me.

  12

  I crawled onto his bed. Maggie didn’t try to stop me. I left my tears on his cheek. I felt his hip bone dig into my stomach, his bony runner’s hip. At some point I stood. I looked down at the face that was no longer his. He was empty, a puppet abandoned by its master. The brow was as flat, the eyebrows as dark, the nose as straight, save for the slight rounding into a bulb at the end. The eyes, beneath the lids, would be as brown, the bottom lip was as full, but he was empty. I ran my fingers over my face, felt every matching detail. Later, I remember, I sat on the floor with my back against the wall, and the sight of the casters on his bed struck me as the saddest thing I had ever seen. The body, to be wheeled away, transient. Was that it? The connection has escaped me. I’m forced to invent.

  I don’t know how much time Maggie let pass. I remember standing again, looking at Theo, trying not to think of the picnic. Failing.

  ‘In half an hour, they’ll need to take him away,’ Maggie said.

  ‘Who says I’ll decide to go through with it?’

  ‘We’re not presuming that. We just need to have him ready, if that is what you want, when the time comes.’

  I thought of Emily, walking away from me. Fully clothed.

  ‘Do you think he ever knew?’ I asked.

  ‘Knew what?’

  ‘That he was dying? Do you think there was a moment?’

  That’s what I wanted to know. That was the pinpoint of tragedy I needed to construct. Theo, all alone, as we all must be, in the end. Terrified. And me, not there to hold his hand, say it will all be okay, tell him lies.

  ‘What are you going to tell the doctors about me?’ I asked.

  ‘We have a little time left,’ Maggie said, ‘before I need to decide.’

  ‘So you don’t know?’

  ‘Not entirely, no.’

  I didn’t believe her.

  ‘You think I might be out of my mind?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s not the test.’

  ‘I am,’ I told her. ‘I’m coming apart. I can feel it happening.’ I don’t know what I was trying to do. Find something else to break, I suppose.

  My cheap theatre left her unmoved.

  ‘Shouldn’t you tell people what’s happened?’ I asked. ‘About your mistake, I mean.’

  ‘I did, while you were talking to your brother. I went out into the corridor.’

  ‘I wasn’t talking to him.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘I know he can’t hear. I understand that. I didn’t even notice you’d gone. How’s that a sign of sanity?’

  ‘What will you decide?’ she asked. ‘Have you thought about it?’

  ‘It hasn’t crossed my mind.’

  ‘These jokes waste time,’ she said.

  ‘It doesn’t feel wasted.’

  ‘What do you want, Rene?’

  As if I was going to tell her that.

  The worth of my life, in that moment, was easily measured. Just three things mattered: Theo, Emily, and my memories of both of them. I’d lost one; the second, I suspected, wasn’t coming back; and the third they were asking me to give away. What did I want? What I wanted made no sense, and there was no way I was telling her that.

  More silence. Our speciality.

  ‘I want him to live,’ I said.

  ‘He’s not going to live though, is he?’ Maggie said.

  ‘No.’

  Me and Emily must have been put together differently, because I was out of tears.

  ‘What’s your next choice?’ Maggie asked.

  ‘I want to do what he’d want me to do. This is for him. I just want to do something for him.’

  It wasn’t true, but it sounded plausible, the sort of thing a young man still in possession of his mind might say.

  ‘What would you tell somebody else, if you heard them saying that?’

  All I had to do was turn it around, put myself on the bed, with Theo standing beside it. The way Emily had thought it was.

  ‘I’d tell them that was grief talking. And grief passes. It does pass, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Often.’

  ‘I still do though. I still want to do what he’d want.’

  ‘And what’s that?’ Maggie asked.

  ‘He’d want me to walk away, scatter him down by the river, where we let Mum and Dad go.’

  I heard the truth in my words. If he could talk, that’s what he’d tell me.

  ‘But?’

  There’s always a but.

  ‘But if we swapped places, if this was him standing here, not me, he’d go through with the procedure.’

  ‘So do unto others—’

  ‘Doesn’t always work,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ Maggie said. ‘It doesn’t.’

  ‘So what does?’ I asked.

  ‘You want me to give you a rule for living?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘I don’t have any.’ She shrugged. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘What if I change my mind?’ I asked her. ‘What if we go through with it, and then I change my mind?’

  She wouldn’t look at me.

  ‘You might find it better to stop thinking like that,’ she said.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Thinking of yourself as just one person.’

  It was like feeling earth crumble at your toes, and only then realising you were at the edge of the cliff top. I teetered, my head swirled, maybe my eyes closed. I remember Maggie took hold of my elbow.

  ‘Is that possible?’ I asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That one of us changes his mind and the other doesn’t?’

  ‘I think so, sure.’

  ‘But if we’re identical,’ I said.

  ‘You’ll have the same memories, the same thought patterns. But inevitably there’ll be differences.’

  ‘What sort of differences?’ I asked.

  She looked at me, as if answering involved making an important decision. Her face was a stage, and back behind the wings another world busied itself with preparations.

  ‘From the moment you wake up, your experiences will diverge, your feedback. And that will set up its own development cascades.’

  ‘That sounds like something you just made up,’ I said.

  ‘I’m not an expert,’ she admitted.

  ‘Can I talk to one?’

  ‘I don’t know there are any,’ she said. ‘Not yet.’

  I felt dizzy. My feet buckled. I reached out to her sho
ulder, leaned against her, sucking in my breath.

  ‘Let’s get back to—’

  ‘No, I’m fine. I’m just, I’m hungry. I need to eat something.’

  It’s amazing to me, the way the mind finds ways of making sense of its fractured world.

  ‘Rene.’

  ‘What?’

  She stood between me and the door, blocking my way. ‘This will definitely be the last time. You should say goodbye.’

  ‘I already did,’ I lied.

  13

  Maggie walked with me to the cafeteria, watching no doubt, taking mental notes the whole way. By then, my constant second guessing had become background static. What would a sane person order for lunch?

  ‘You know your way back to my office?’

  ‘You’re not going to come in, take notes on the way I eat?’ I said. Confident, pugnacious. A sane person would be spoiling for a fight.

  ‘I’m sure you’ll report anything out of the ordinary.’

  Maggie’s eyes darted past me and settled for a moment on something behind my left shoulder. It had affected her, her mistake. Suddenly she was nervous, skittish and uncertain.

  That’s the way it is: the more we are used to having control, the more we react to losing it.

  ‘Sorry,’ she whispered. ‘Come on, I can get food brought to us.’

  She tugged at my sleeve, a strangely childish action.

  I turned to see what had spooked her. Emily. Waiting in line with her food on a tray. Beside her stood a man; he was somewhere between my age and her father’s. Young enough, in some other circumstance, for me to feel a stab of jealousy. The man was thin and casually dressed. His head was held high, as if he was aware of his good looks. He leaned forward, to whisper something to Emily. The body language was easy, familiar. She looked up, and caught my eye.

  ‘We need to go.’ I heard the urgency in Maggie’s voice.

  ‘Why?’

  Emily shook her head, not at me, but at the man.