C= From the Hip 3

Chapter Two

Interesting, or perhaps diverting is the better word, that the
brothers, particularly Leon, place so much emphasis on their
differences. That is what defines him as a person in the way he talks
and speaks and moves, the way that he does these things differently to
Gil. Just as a young couple in love will seize and chew on anything
that they have in common, inflating it to significance, to fate, to
prove that they love not lust, so any twin will try to mark out their
individuality by their differences. Never is this truer than with
conjoined twins.

They can have no physical separation, no chance for them of moving away
or making friends of their own. They are locked. Far more till death do
us part than any marriage. Just imagine if that's what you had to do
for a lover, to show commitment by merging your flesh with theirs, not
for temporary fulfilment, but for life. Abandon the wedding ring and
wear handcuffs, forsake the lawyer and the forms for a surgeon.

But what chases Leon at every turn is that he is hero-worshipped by his
brother. It is true. Despite their differences, despite the differences
that in truth Leon has manufactured, Gil adores him. And if Leon is
interested in foreign films or modern art or Thai food, then Gil both
by proximity and desire to please, to be pleasing will follow and
develop that interest as best he can. The more Leon tries to mark out
his own space, the more Gil follows.

You can see how that might become frustrating. For both of them.

Leon has always been the leader; he was the brightest at school. To be
fair, Gil was not far behind him at first, but what begin as a chink
widened out over the years and the more it widened, the more Gil was
content to let it. He was shrewd enough to see how much Leon enjoyed
the praise of his teachers, wanted to be thought of as the intelligent
one. It pleased Leon, so it pleased Gil. And anyway, where was the
sense in both of them working hard to do more or less the same piece of
work? Leon's exam results were Gil's results too, in any real
sense.

The pieces of paper Leon acquired from being bright enabled him to go
to university and get another piece of paper, which then passported him
into a job where they paid for his brain. But the salary Leon gets for
working has to be split between the two of them; since Gil can hardly
go out and stand on his own two feet, work on his own. They are knitted
together.

The firm who employ Leon came up with a compromise, that they would
also pay Gil to be Leon's assistant, to type his letters, take his
calls and do his research. Of course, when work took Leon out of the
office, it did the same for Gil. When Leon saw clients, Gil sat with
him and took a note. When Leon attended court, Gil was beside him. When
Leon had to stand to address the judge, Gil stood up too and remained
silent. People got used to them, to it. People can get used to pretty
much anything, if they're exposed to it enough. When the firm takes on
a new member of staff, it sometimes takes Leon's colleagues by surprise
that they stare at the twins.

Here are the bald statistics. Of every 400,000 births, there are 4
conjoined twins. Three of those are stillborn and one survives to term.
The survival rate for conjoined twins, separated or not, is poor. They
tend to die much earlier than the average. Those that live and remain
together die within a very short space of time of each other. The most
classic Siamese twins, Chang and Eng Bunker had four hours between
their deaths; with the survivor bitterly, cruelly aware for the whole
of that time that his death was coming and that it was
unavoidable.

Up until Gil obtained his own source of income, Leon had always been
the leader, had made nearly all of the decisions. He picked out the
ties and shirts, buying them in duplicate; he found the cold, clean
watches that both wore, he wrote the shopping lists.

This is not to say that he did not take account of his brother or
listen to objections (despite his hatred of bananas, they always found
their way into the shopping trolley, although he could not bear to
handle them and made Gil actually undertake all physical manipulations
of the bananas, even down to hanging them on the wooden tree Leon had
purchased for the purpose.) The gas that bananas emit, Leon had
learned, causes other fruit to ripen so bananas should not be stored
with other fruits. Save for when Leon had a pear that he wanted to eat
that was not ready, which he would then pop into a brown paper bag with
a banana overnight, then remove it and wash the pear to remove any
trace of contact with banana-flesh.

Aside from the differences that existed, the brothers were really
remarkably similar, more so than my clumsy descriptions may have
suggested. They both adored the sound of trumpets, the rainbow shine of
oil in puddles on the road, the heat-haze made by aeroplanes, the odour
of rubber cement used in making model aircraft, the quicksand
half-sticking of the gray lining around the inside of their fridge
door, the trailing off of applause at a concert, things found in
rockpools, watching squirrels move around in Hyde Park, the feel of
long-stemmed grass between bare toes.

They both hated the word "envelop" and "cocoon", the way pigeons move
their necks, the false delight with which people eat in adverts, the
colour that Portobello mushrooms turn when fried and touching
clothespegs that had been out in the rain.

Both were somewhat wary of safety-pins and fearful of frogs, barley
sugar whistles and ventriloquist's dummies.

* * *

( a )

Things that up until now, Gil has kept secret from Leon

1. Pillows
2. Bishops

Some elaboration is required.

1. Pillows

In relation to pillows, Gil had an interest in them. Over the course of
a lifetime, how many pillows will anyone use? How many would you
imagine? Think quickly. Guess if you must. Twenty, a hundred?

T S Eliot once wrote of a man measuring out his life in coffee-spoons.
Pillows do nearly as well.

It is a number difficult to calculate, but it just requires some
breaking down. Gil and Leon both slept with two pillows apiece. They
changed their pillows about three times in five years, approximately.
So that would be over a seventy-five year lifespan, ninety pillows each
within their own home.

Add in how many times in a year they stayed in hotels or at friends
houses and used another two pillows, say three weeks in a year - no,
wait. That calculation would assume that the pillows changed every
night. Let us say instead that in the course of the three weeks that
they did not sleep at home each year, they had a completely fresh set
of pillows on five occasions (one for each of their two week-long
holidays and then three short breaks away). That is another three
hundred and seventy-five pillows, multiplied by two, since they each
use two apiece. Add that to the ninety of their own.

Eight hundred and forty each, if they lived to the end of their
days.

Gil adored pillows. He knew them, he loved them. He was familiar with
the bouncy ones that hurt the neck until they became supple and took
the neck's urgings, the soft ones that needed plumping for minutes at a
time and became flat and dead almost as soon as you lay upon them, the
ones with duck feathers poking out in unfortunate places, the ones that
pulled you towards sleep and the ones that weakened and troubled
it.

Ones white as icebergs, ones that had aged the colour of buttercream,
ones that preserved their shape and ones that curved in the middle
where your head had laid. The ones who yielded, the ones who
resisted.

Pillows whispered into your ear, poured dreams in and you nuzzled the
pillow, brushed lips against it as though it were a lover's shoulder,
murmured indistinguishable sounds into it. You left it your skin, your
hair, your fragrance; it took your arms around it.

If he could, if he lived alone, he would save the pillows. They were a
part of him, as much as his toes and the soft flesh behind his knees.
But he cannot do this, and besides, who has room enough to preserve
almost a thousand pillows?

What he can do, what Gil does choose to do, and he does this artfully,
is to rotate the pillows in a way that his brother does not know. When
they make the bed together, they strip the covers, remove the duvet,
perform that flapping flicking motion that makes the duvet settle
evenly within its new cover; so far as Gil is aware this is the only
part of life where one uses this motion to compel an object to perform
your request - on a much smaller scale instamatic cameras used to
require it, where you would agitate the photograph back and forth with
flicks of the wrist until the chemicals dried and the image was
revealed, but hardly anyone uses instamatic cameras now. It is similar
if you shake a doormat outside the back-door to get rid of dust, but he
only remembers his mother doing this. Neither he nor Leon have ever
done this as an adult.

They then dress the pillows, like getting a toddler's legs in a
baby-gro. It is here where Gil makes his subtle switch and exchanges
his own pillow for Leon's. This has never been observed by Leon and he
wouldn't think for a moment of following the movement of the
pillows.

Gil has small flutters of excitement all day; not massive ones, just
the small feeling of pleasure you have when first opening a box of
chocolates and moving your fingers above them before making a
selection, or reading the back of a novel or CD case before starting to
sample what it has to offer. A small moment of foreplay in life, in
short. That night, he will sleep and have his favourite dream, of being
his brother.

2. Bishops

They both play chess, but Leon is superior. He is not afraid to take
his time, to give thought, whereas Gil is always concerned not to keep
his opponent waiting, to make the other bored. Gil prefers, if
possible, to watch Leon playing someone else at chess, because he can
admire his brother's thoughts made tangible, see them come forward and
move and dance. It also avoids his brother rolling his eyes at a poor
hasty move made by Gil.

When the game is over, Gil will pack the pieces away while Leon talks
to their friend. Gil will always slip one of the bishops used by Leon
in the game into his right-hand trouser pocket, the farthest place from
Leon.

He will touch it from time to time, caressing the slender neck. This is
where Leon will lift the piece, hold it a moment in thought, rock it to
and fro considering all of the possibilities before finally acting
decisively and directly.

There could be any piece that Gil picks for this, but it has always
been bishops. He is mistrustful of knights and rarely uses them
himself; they are mere cannon-fodder in his game. The bishop with its
sweeping move, its potential to razor across the board and take
obliquely is more appealing to Gil. It has never occurred to Gil that
the bishop in a standard chess set has something of the phallic about
it, that it is slender and upright, with a pronounced head and a slit
in the head. It has never occurred to him what an analyst might make of
his desire to caress the bishop that his brother has been manipulating.
Oh well.

( b )

Friends

We should broaden out here, at this point. Leon and Gil are seeming
quite insular, which is far from the truth. They love company, they
love to talk and drink. Sometimes they dance. Neither of them are
virgins, which may surprise you. There are methods. Sometimes the women
do not mind an audience of one who does not participate and when they
do mind, when they are shy, the other brother will simply put on
headphones to listen to music and pull the covers over their head -
this means that with shy women, circumstances dictate that the brothers
can only make love with the woman on top. Sometimes? but we do not need
to become that involved.

There is one delicate matter which needs to be touched upon, briefly
and then forgotten. There are ministrations which a gentleman requires
from time to time to perform on himself. The brothers never undertake
this exercise at the same time and generally read a book while the
other busies himself. There are only two generally recognised reactions
to someone in close proximity stimulating themselves in your presence -
arousal or revulsion. Given the circumstances, neither would be
practicable, so the brothers have found disinterest to be most
useful.

Their friends :-

(i) Eve

Eve is the girl who rides gray horses on the beach and likes to paint
the sky in watercolours, using far too much paint so that the paper
absorbs it and fattens with damp in place like the chubby clouds she
paints. Eve has short dark hair, cropped tight to the fringe and due to
strict adherence to diet is rather too thin. Her laugh sounds a little
like a tambourine and her kisses taste of jam tarts, her hair smells
like apples and is sometimes the colour of coal with a blueness to the
black.

Eve is the girl who they drink coffee with, espresso in tiny cups and
every time, they all say in unison and in a bad Scottish accent, "It's
very strong?but very wee". They drink espresso with her and look at the
people who pass and catch up on events.

Eve is the girl who showed them both the delights of cutting things out
of paper with scissors, a pure neat pleasure of childhood they had
forgotten. In adult life, the only time you use scissors is when
cutting wrapping paper to bind a present - this can be nice,
particularly when you have four pairs of hands to call upon and the
wrapping can be made neat and exact; but it is not the delightful
experience of drawing a shape on paper or card and cutting it out. The
gentle crunching noise of the scissors, the way the card slowly buckles
and yields to the blades, the poke of the tongue and catch of the
breath as you turn a corner. They both enjoy this when she visits, as
she always brings Berol colour pens and a variety of cards. They each
have their own scissors now. Leon favours corrugated card for the
scrump sounds it makes.

Eve loves to stand out in the rain, and shelter under a spread out
newspaper. Eve buys candy fishes from old-fashioned sweetshops, always
biting their tails. She loves to drool over photographs of Freddie
Ljungberg and she rubs the perfumed inserts of ladies' magazines on her
wrists, never caring if the scent clashes with what she is already
wearing. If she feels like singing, she sings, despite not having any
sort of voice.

She gets incandescently cross about animal cruelty and is not at all
averse to pulling down circus posters.

Never having worked in an office, she has acquired an over-romantic
view of office life, of its small details and moments. When she visits
Leon at his office, she will stand there gently pulling the drawer of
the filing cabinet out and then pushing it back in with the heel of her
hand, simply loving the rolling, roaring noise. Sometimes she takes
Gil's filing away from him so that she can hole-punch it. She just
loves shaking the hole-punch confetti into the bin. She will fetch
white plastic cups of cool water for them, even if they are not
thirsty. She loves to go to the stationery cupboard to fetch treasury
tags and bulldog clips for Gil, to reach up to the higher shelves to
gently move the boxes. Staff at the firm are used to Eve now, and don't
mind her odd fascination with the mundanities of office life - her
offers to do photocopying for people have the same effect as bribing
policemen in South American countries.

Eve is the girl who Leon loved and who broke his heart. But still, he
loves her so much that he pretends that it does not hurt and that they
can continue being good friends, same as before but without the kissing
and tenderness and expression of feelings. Sometimes when you love
someone very much and they don't love you, you want to keep them close
by and push them away at the same time. Who knows what is the right
thing to do in these circumstances? Not these two brothers. Eve is the
only person of importance that Leon ever could have pushed away, could
have chosen not to spend time with, but when he had the choice he found
he did not want to do it.

Eve is the girl who can't pronounce flageolet beans and called them
flagrante beans and then later, "sexual beans", to which Leon replied,
"We are all sexual beans."

When Leon thinks of Eve, which is often, the soundtrack to his thoughts
is The Pet Shop Boys cover of "Always on My Mind".

Maybe I didn't treat you quite as good as I should
Maybe I didn't love you quite as often as I could
Little things I should've said and done, I never took the time
You were always on my mind
You were always on my mind
Maybe I didn't hold you all those lonely, lonely times
And I guess I never told you, I'm so happy that you're mine
If I made you feel second best, I'm so sorry, I was blind
You were always on my mind
You were always on my mind
Tell me, tell me that your sweet love hasn't died
Give me one more chance to keep you satisfied
Satisfied

(ii) Gommy

Gommy is the man that they met who owns the Turkish Baths on Coleporter
Row and he is not fat and he has barely any body-hair.

He plays chess with them and tells them stories and slaps his leg in
laughter. When they meet he shakes their hands, all four of them and he
is one of the few people who will make eye-contact with both and
preserve it.

The Turkish Baths are one of the places that the brothers feel
happiest. They love the intense heat and the far-off smell of oils and
wood, the warm slip of the tiled bench beneath them; the way that
conversations can be struck up and friendships made. Leon generally
covers their knot with a towel, while Gil would leave it bare, show
everyone that they are brothers.

When they cook for Gommy, he always wants dumplings with every meal. No
matter what they cook, he asks for dumplings. He likes to make them
himself and shape the suet, getting the size and pockmarking just to
his taste. The only time they have got him to desert from the dumpling
fixation was by guiding him towards gnocchi. He liked this,
particularly adding the pattern with the flat of the fork.

Gommy also brings some particularly fine grass with him, which gives a
mellow high. He will talk to them of his dream of being an architect,
building elegant tower-blocks, of his favourite tall buildings, of his
favourite songs from musicals, of great works of literature and how he
would improve them.

(iii) Felix

They met Felix at a gig. Gil and Leon both adore music and go to
concerts whenever they can. They are also fond of nightclubs; Leon
tends to want to dance slightly more than Gil. They have to be aware of
when they want to perform a spin, since it requires co-ordination, so
the one wanting to spin will simply say "Spin!" and they both turn,
always clockwise, always clockwise.

Felix they met at a Mercury Rev gig, and they saw him early on,
drinking soup from a thermos flask while everyone else was drinking
pints or Jack Daniels.

'I have my suspicions / when the stars are in positions/ all will be
revealed'

They admired the way he wiped out the cup with a tissue and then
screwed it back into place. They liked the proud way he carried his
baldness, the way he sang along with his head slightly back like a
wolf, the way he dressed so neatly in slimming black, despite already
being slim.

'I always dreamed I loved you / I never dreamt I'd lose you / in my
dreams I'm always strong'

It was not hard to get talking to him. Felix loves music and is always
coming to the house with new records (like all real music lovers, they
call them records, CDs are for people who buy Dido and David Gray),
which he will insist that they listen to in hushed reverence, the first
time at least. The second time round, they can talk through it.

(iv) Valerie

Valerie is the girl that Leon saw in the street, walking beside her
grandfather underneath a lemon-coloured umbrella with pink eyes and
tears rolling down her face, although she made no sound and seemed to
be talking brightly enough to her grandfather and creating a smile on
her lips. It was a day when rain was falling down and making a cuddling
noise on the arms of wax jackets and on the domed umbrellas.

He couldn't help but stop her, put a hand lightly on her arm and ask if
she wanted to go for a coffee. Leon is fundamentally a nice person,
although it may not seem so thus far. Most of his successes with women
have come through genuinely being interested in them as people, rather
than creatures of desire.

Valerie is reassuringly normal, down-to-earth and knows the value of
silence. They can sit with Valerie and not need to speak, simply listen
to the sounds that they make, being alive. Or they can chatter of this
and that, swop stories and ideas. She works in a dentists' office, as a
receptionist.

She has straight brown hair that falls just in front of each shoulder
and sometimes she wears a hairslide that is fashioned after a
flamingo.

Valerie would date Leon in a heartbeat, but he has never asked. He has
never introduced her to Eve, and probably never will.

(v) Rose

Rose collects bird-cages and books. Her flat is short on space, so she
uses the wrought-iron bird-cages to house the books; which means that
when you see a book and ask to borrow it, it can sometimes involve Rose
wrestling the book out of the gate to the bird-cage.

She doesn't like birds at all. They have both seen her drop her
shopping to the floor and fling up both arms to cover her face if a
pigeon flies up at her.

Perhaps she keeps the bird-cages so that she is prepared in case a live
bird ever finds its way into her house; so that she can trap it and
leave it outside on the steps.

Rose is chiefly Gil's friend. He always looks out for bird-cages when
he passes through a market-place. She wears long afghan coats and
applies perfume from a crystal bottle and old-fashioned diffuser with a
bruise-coloured rubber bulb that she squeezes to force out the
fragrance - she never applies the perfume to her skin, but always
squirts a cloud into the air and then walks through the air. She gives
her narrow dogs the names of Spanish men.

(vi) Sundry others

People from work, people Leon knows through chess, people they speak to
in the supermarket and find shared interests with, people from the
Turkish baths, married couples from the butchers hovering between the
chops and the butterflied lamb, a redhead with a Byron poem tattooed on
the underside of her wrist, people who used to live near the flats, an
old man with trembling hands who does card-tricks, dog-walkers,
cocktail-drinkers, thin men from betting-shops, a man with a soft beard
who sells traditional sweets from large glass jars, Spanish-looking
girls in pubs who roll their own cigarettes, stone-skippers, friends
from school, dancers from clubs, a man who cleans clam-shells with a
clasp-knife that has an apple-green handle, the men Gil has met through
organised crime, record-buyers, leaf-kickers, magazine-flippers, the
girl who launders their shirts, art-lovers, theatre-goers, a blonde at
the cinema who always asks for her popcorn to be half sugared and half
salted, bird-cage collectors, nervous jockeys, ticket-touts sheltering
from the weather, customers in old-style coffee shops by Primrose Hill,
men who collect first edition books, people who sit at the beach
watching jockeys train horses, old flames they still get on with,
people Gil gets talking to in pubs and gigs. Friends and acquaintances
of all these people. There are a lot of people in their life. That's
the way they like it.

(vii) Cotton

Neither of them like Cotton, but he simply won't take the hint.

( c )

More Queen's Evidence

"You shot him in the face, " says Leon, holding a glass of scotch
between trembling fingers.

"It was the best place, " says Gil, "If I'd shot him in the shoulder,
he'd still be alive. "

He opens a bottle of Corona lager. "Have we got any lime? "

"So it was intentional then? " asks Leon, who has already drunk his
scotch, to no effect.

"Indeed, " says Gil, "That's why I was aiming at him. "

"Who was he? "

"Some guy, " says Gil, "Not important. "