Either Side of Midnight : A Novel (2020)

by Stevenson, Benjamin

  Harry told the memory lightly, but Jack could tell the experience had left a mark, though not as physical, on him. In particular, the police lights coming through the treetops seemed to upset him, so he truncated the story to the happier parts: the rescue and all that came after. Both brothers had been treated for hypothermia, shock and frostbite. Partly because he’d sat on his hands on the cold metal seat, Sam had been bitten more severely than Harry. Taken a real chomp out of the top of his left ring finger. The doctors hadn’t been able to save it. Harry had found the upside of the situation; he now had something his older brother didn’t and took great joy in pointing out that, although they were identical, Sam now only comprised 99 per cent of him. Until Harry had his appendix out at seventeen, and then they were even again.

  That night was also the beginning of the Midnight Twins. An unofficial nickname at school, because Sam was born fifteen minutes before midnight on 24 March, and Harry was born twenty-two minutes later at 12.07 on 25 March, it was quirky enough to stick in the press that covered the carnival incident. The first stories were low column space: boys rescued, tragedy averted, parents suing the park for negligence. But soon the press realised there were two identical teenagers who looked freak-show-good on a front page or a morning TV couch. That might have fizzled out pretty quickly had they not done an interview on Sam’s, but not Harry’s, actual birthday and confused one host so much it morphed into a bizarre routine:

  Host: ‘Happy birthday.’

  Harry: ‘It’s not my birthday.’

  Host: ‘Sorry, Sam, someone told me it was your birthday.’

  Sam: ‘Yes, it’s my birthday today.’

  Host: ‘And you are identical twins?’

  Together: ‘Yes.’

  Host: ‘Well, happy birthday, Harry.’

  Harry: ‘It’s not my birthday.’

  Host: ‘Are you kidding me?’

  Together: ‘No.’

  Host: ‘So let me get this straight. Sam, it’s your birthday today . . .’

  It had culminated in Harry yelling back at him, ‘It’s not my fucking birthday, you prick!’ That interview had become a viral hit, and then they were on every talk show in the country. They developed a script for the interviews. The audience would roar when Harry accused Sam of being 99 per cent of him. Sam would wriggle his eyebrows just as he’d done in the cabin, hold up his stumpy finger and say, ‘I’d need to lose a lot more than half an inch to get down to 99 per cent.’ They’d play fight. They’d do the ‘Happy birthday’ bit. Their big closer was a game of rock paper scissors – completely unrehearsed – that would go for dozens of rounds, Sam’s stubby ‘scissors’ on show for the camera to hint at the traumatic backstory. They took it in completely unrehearsed turns who won.

  That had died down, until, at nineteen, they did a reality TV show for semi-celebrities that was pitched to them by a network executive as a ‘breast reduction for your career – you’ll go from D to B List in no time’. After they did well, placing equal third in a feat of production-meddling and a perfectly timed double eviction, a promoter, who Harry remembered spoke exclusively with a hand on his shoulder, had encouraged them to do live shows. Like stand-up comedy, but sillier, less structured. Instead of being the guests, as they had been on the talk-show circuit, they could invite others on. The promoter had enough pull to get some cult bands and a few TV actors. People came. Then they went to Montreal, one of the largest arts festivals in the world, where TV executives slink in alleys like they’ve got trench coats full of watches. More hands on more shoulders. Then Gareth Bowman, whose trench coat weighed the most, or so it seemed at the time. And then everything after.

  ‘Left here,’ Harry said. Jack changed lanes, squinting through the chalk numbers on his rear-window in the mirror. Price tag.

  ‘Your parents were mad at the fair?’ Jack said. ‘You mentioned they tried to sue?’

  ‘Half-heartedly. Had to take it out on someone,’ Harry said. ‘You know how parents aren’t allowed to be mad because “thank God you’re okay”? My parents were so thankful we were safe, they would have killed the mailman if he put the paper on a wet lawn.’ He laughed. ‘They were mega-pissed at Sam for flattening the phone battery. Lost the damn thing a day later anyway. Dad hit the roof.’

  ‘How’d the negligence suit go?’

  ‘You ever tried to subpoena a guy who lives in a caravan?’

  ‘No luck?’

  ‘These are the guys that run sideshow alley. Everything’s rigged. They always win.’ He pointed to the left again. Jack rolled up to the kerb next to a squat brick letterbox with a 17 on it. They were in a wealthy suburb; everything had two storeys and long driveways, the exclusive domain of people who don’t put their own bins out. Every lawn was lush, trim and green – no surprise seeing as the sprinklers on either side of the road were in perfect time, fanning between one another in semi-circles without ever touching. The afternoon sun flicked mini-rainbows through the droplets. If you added people in pretty dresses and tap shoes out in the middle of this street, it wouldn’t be out of place in a musical. Suburbs like this are all about conformity. Sprinklers keeping time on lawns clean and clipped. All cars black and waxed. Don’t park it on the street if it’s not washed or a Range Rover. Arses in activewear and almonds activated. Dinner party conversation is politics and allergies. Oh yes, we’re allergic to nuts, paying tax and gluten.

  The house they parked in front of wasn’t bucking the trend. Fresh white paint and washed windows, pillars either side of the snaking drive. It didn’t look garish, but it didn’t look welcoming either. Pulled straight from a catalogue and dropped on an empty plot.

  ‘You okay to see her?’ Jack said.

  ‘Sure.’ A sprinkler thrummed an arc against Harry’s door. He waited until it passed and then levered the handle. A burst of chilled air came through. Sun still up but warmth gone.

  ‘She okay to see you?’

  Harry paused. The sprinkler reversed; he pulled the door shut. The water drummed past and Harry opened the door again. Turned back to Jack. ‘Why wouldn’t she be?’

  ‘I just thought—’

  The intermittent spray came back. Harry shut the door. ‘I’m not waiting in the car like a dog.’ He reopened the door. Put one leg out.

  Jack made to reply, but it was a strange argument, punctuated every ten or so seconds by the rotating waterfall, making it difficult to get into a proper fight, or for either of them to leave. Jack sighed and got out of the car. Harry timed his run to the sprinkler and followed a few steps behind.

  At the large double door, Jack pressed the buzzer and said, ‘Maybe just let me do the talking here. It’s what you’re paying me for, after all.’

  The real answer was that this could be a delicate interview and Jack didn’t need Harry’s big mouth rattling the witness. Witness. There it was again. Jack had to be careful with those words coming into this house. In particular, he had to keep the word ‘murder’ off Harry’s lips. That was a word they could throw around lightly at the television studio, because they were deliberately trying to be confronting and Gareth reacted to it as a professional accusation: negligence, liability. But make it a personal accusation, and the word became much more volatile.

  A clunking from inside the house interrupted Jack’s thoughts. Someone was walking towards the door on what could only be a hardwood floor. Of course it was. In this neighbourhood, the reaction to carpet would be at best disdain and at worst anaphylactic.

  ‘God.’ Harry’s sigh was exaggerated. He took off his brown leather jacket and folded it under his arm. ‘Why are you so worried?’

  ‘You’re wearing her dead boyfriend’s face,’ Jack whispered, just before the door opened. ‘It would throw me off.’

  CHAPTER 13

  Sam’s almost-fiancée opened the door.

  It’s a cliché in film and television to present recent widows as brittle, frail. To have the make-up team use pale foundation, ghost-like, and smear dark circles under their eyes
. Every time a widow opens a door in a film, they’ve just finished crying. The message being that, without their husband, they are barely keeping it together. In films, a husband’s decline is represented with a different mise en scène: beer bottles and guts, empty pizza boxes, stained singlets and peeling wallpaper. But such decline is reserved for the divorced male, not the widower. He might hold a scrunched-up, faded photograph, with tears in his eyes for half a second, before loading up a small army’s worth of guns and kicking some serious arse on those who dared to take her from him. The message is that, when death is involved, men get on with it while women live with the ghosts. They cry prettily. Fragile as ornaments. Pretty enough to be ugly. In reality, Jack had always found women to be more front-footed and practical. They organised the funerals and insurance, and still had the strength to dress the kids and get them to school. It was the men who lived, more often, in the shadow of their past. Asleep in a chair in the corner of their brother’s room.

  Celia Anderson did not have pale skin or dark eyes. She didn’t wipe away a tear as she opened the door. She was barefoot, in jeans and a white t-shirt. Brunette, with her hair tied in a ponytail. Freckles splattered her cheeks: she looked like a child who had just finished baking a chocolate cake and been left alone with the electric beater. She seemed healthy. Well. Jack was reminded of another cliché, that of the widow too pleased and dressed up so they could flit away with a lover or an insurance policy, but he decided that Celia wasn’t so blasé. She was just getting on with it. Jack reminded himself that Celia also may well have agreed with the police and media about Sam’s death, and may have felt it wasn’t worth wasting grief on a recently uncovered paedophile.

  The way she quietly examined the two of them was the only sign of tiredness in her, a woman who’d had a lot of knocks on her door lately. Her eyelids fluttered briefly when they passed over Harry. She gave no sign of recognition to Jack.

  ‘Celia,’ said Jack, holding out a hand. ‘My name’s Jack. I’m a friend of Sam’s.’

  ‘You’re not. But that’s okay.’ She didn’t take his hand. She looked past him. ‘You can’t come in, Harry.’

  ‘I’m not here to upset you—’

  ‘Nothing personal.’ She shook her head. ‘But Heather’s never even met you. I’ve just spent the last two weeks explaining things you should never have to explain to your child. That her dad’s never coming back. The last thing I need is for her to see him standing in the hall.’

  Even Harry couldn’t argue with that. Celia hadn’t meant it as a barb, but by how quickly Harry moved off the porch and walked back to the car, considering how much he’d wanted to be part of this interview mere minutes prior, Jack thought there was some guilt in his surrender. Harry’s words at the studio. We had a falling out five years ago. Over the show. You record that?

  A falling out so bad that he’d never met his brother’s child?

  ‘I’ve had a lot of people who aren’t Sam’s friends around. You may as well come in and tell me what you’re after,’ Celia said, guiding Jack inside. The hallway was indeed hardwood, high ceilings with skylights. Photos lined the hall. Some professional portraits of Heather as a baby, smiling gums in front of a blue velvet backdrop. Others of the whole family smiling on a sepia autumn day, Sam in a baseball jacket with a red stripe down the arm. One of Celia and Sam, sunburnt and happy, holding cocktails on some Greek terrace above deep blue water. One at someone else’s wedding, pulling faces in the photobooth. These were happy photos, memories of a man she loved. Celia had kept them up, so she was either choosing to ignore the post-death pornography charges, or she didn’t believe them.

  She led Jack to a kitchen with a large marble island in the middle of the room. Jack perched on a stool. There was a small girl sitting on a couch in an adjacent room, glued to the television. Children can’t watch television and keep their muscles tight – it’s a multi-tasking strain on their brain to focus on colours and lights – so she sat with the slack-jawed posture of someone hypnotised. Jack was surprised that she was able to watch TV at all. But maybe she hadn’t seen it. Maybe she was too young to understand.

  Celia plucked the kettle from its stand, but then paused under the tap. ‘Is this a tea and coffee conversation?’ She tilted her head at the fridge. ‘Or do I need a beer?’

  ‘Depends.’

  ‘That means beer.’ She plucked two from inside the fridge door. Twist tops. Chinked one down in front of Jack. ‘I’ve had enough of these to know. People have told me a lot of things about Sam the last couple of weeks, and they tend to go one of two ways. Let’s just say I’ve had more beers than coffees.’

  ‘Do you believe them?’

  ‘You know, it sounds strange, but I still don’t know. These things happened. They are physically here. He did what he did. I have the death certificate. Those repulsive photos exist. I paid for a coffin, for a man to push him into a furnace. I mean, it’s all real. But it’s still kind of like it’s all made up. You know? Is that why you’re here?’

  ‘Sort of. I’m helping Harry. We’re trying to look at those things that, as you say, don’t feel real enough.’ He was careful not to use the ‘m’ word. ‘I thought you might feel the same. The material on his work laptop – can I ask: did you ever see anything like it? At home?’

  She shook her head. ‘God, no. Never. I mean they wouldn’t tell me what it was, so I don’t know how bad it was. Not that it, you know, matters. And he loved Heather so much. To think he’d solicit something from someone else’s children . . .’ She just kept shaking her head. ‘Then again, sometimes you don’t know. Maybe I’m one of those women. Didn’t see it. Maybe he played me.’

  ‘I noticed you’ve still got his family photos on the wall. Part of you believes in him.’

  ‘Maybe I’m trying to decide if it’s worth remembering just one side of someone.’ She took another swig.

  Jack knew the etiquette was to follow along, otherwise people start to notice. He raised his beer and realised it was his first alcoholic drink since he had gone to prison. Not that he had ever drunk much anyway. His soldiers were just like any other battalion, and getting on the sauce made them bawdy. It was a slippery slope. Easier to purge with a sloshing belly. He took a gentle sip, held it in his mouth and felt it fizz.

  ‘So now you tell me. What’s your role in this? I can understand Harry wanting to know why, the ins and outs. You can’t be a cop, and you don’t strike me as a PI either, though I’ll admit I’ve never met one.’

  ‘I’m a podcaster. Used to do cold cases, things cops wouldn’t look at.’

  That seemed to satisfy her. ‘You’re in the right place. The police never really seemed to care that he’d died, just the other stuff.’

  ‘That’s all they wanted? Do you remember the times you spoke to them?’

  ‘Well, when I saw,’ she paused, ‘it happen, at first I was just confused. I tried to call emergency services, but I was frantic and they kept trying to send an ambulance here. After that I called Sam. Then Gareth directly. Even the front desk. No one picked up, of course. In the end, I drove with Heather to the police station. They didn’t know what to do with me either. But by then it had really started to hit the media, and so they were sending more people to the scene. They agreed to look after Heather and put me in a car with some of their officers. No one would talk to me when I got there, and I wasn’t allowed in. I still remember how I found out he’d actually died. I was asking everybody where Sam was. An ambulance lady, she just put a hand on my arm and said “Oh, he died, honey.”’ She sniffed for the first time. ‘That’s how I found out – I don’t think she knew who I was. No one knew what to do with me, so eventually they drove me home. Heather and I slept in the same bed. The next day, there seemed to be a more formal process. They came here in the morning, asked me a bunch of questions. Finally they started talking to me, but by then I’d read about it online. Next time they told me about the pictures he had on his work laptop. Asked if they could take the home computer
. A week later they brought it back, gave me some of his clothes. I haven’t heard from them since.’

  ‘The questions they asked you?’

  ‘Almost all of it was about the pornography. Like the questions you started with. They asked about our family. If he’d ever . . . Oh, God. I asked them if any of it was her. I actually asked them that. I hope he doesn’t hate me for that.’

  Jack didn’t need to ask what the answer had been. Family photos were still up in the hall. Mentally, he ticked that question off too. Glad he hadn’t had to ask it.

  ‘And he didn’t leave a note?’

  ‘Nothing.’ She broke this word in two, catching on to Jack’s line of questioning.

  ‘Did he know you’d be watching? Did he’ – Jack thought back to the ring in the dressing room – ‘did he tell you to watch that night? Specifically?’

  ‘He’ll normally tell me if it’s a good one. But, no, he didn’t. Any other show, maybe it’s fifty-fifty? If he was a lawyer, would I be expected to watch him preen in every board meeting?’

  ‘He asked you to change the channel, just in case.’

  ‘Like I said, fifty-fifty.’

  ‘When they took the home computer,’ Jack said, ‘did they find anything?’

  ‘Not a skerrick. You must think what I think then – it’s weird that his home computer is completely clean, and yet his work computer is filled with it, right?’

  ‘Then what is he asking you to forgive him for?’ Jack said. Forgive me. Change the channel.

  ‘It doesn’t get to me quite so much that he killed himself. I mean, it does. I’m not saying it right.’ She licked her teeth. Spoke slower, eyes tilted slightly up in focus, as if she was picturing the words in front of her and plucking them deliberately, one by one, out of the air. ‘Let me put it this way. I resent him for making that choice. For leaving us on our own. But we’ve all had battles. If Sam felt he had only one way out and that was it, I feel sad for him more than anything. And sometimes I hate him for that, but then I feel ashamed. What’s that thing where a snake eats its own tail? It’s like that. But one thing I can focus on is if someone’s protecting themselves by smearing his name after he can no longer defend himself – that doesn’t go either way on the snake thing, it just makes me outright mad.’