In The Genes
3,420 words.
How many families suspect they are sitting on an unexploded bomb? I didn’t - until it went off. I was sixteen – and no one else heard the bang, Since then . . . well, suppose my brother – my twin - needed a bone marrow or a kidney transplant, I’d have to find a way of telling him, much as I loved him, “Sorry, bro. But I can’t volunteer one of mine.”
I remember our mother telling us we were ‘fraternal’ twins, brother and sister, but not identical, not even much alike. I have always been taller than my brother, so people who didn’t know we were twins thought I was his older sister.
I guess I was eight or nine before I wondered what it would be like to not be a twin. Up to then we had rarely been apart. We accepted each other. What else could we do? My ‘other’ was always there so why would I imagine his absence? I don’t remember fighting with him, but I suppose we must have, sometimes. Mostly we got on together. We shared dolls and Action Man and toy cars and Lego, but I have no memory of us sharing each other’s clothes; our upbringing avoided gender bias (or whatever the contemporary psychobabble is) and though getting our baths together inevitably raised questions about the male/female dichotomy, our parents always answered honestly and without embarrassment, so the answers made no difference to us, and were probably forgotten straightaway.
We invented games. We rescued each other from storm-tossed seas and raging forest fires. We treated each other’s imaginary illnesses. We built Lego houses, used our teeth to break the bricks apart, built bigger and better. Mother gave us canned food to play ‘shop.’ We used real money from a tinful of coins that Dad called his old money; playing ‘shop’ taught us to count.
We went to pre-school playgroup when we were four. It was alright, except when I was Fair Rosie, and my brother was the Handsome Prince who came riding by and kissed me to wake me up even though I wasn’t asleep. I thought this was a bit silly. Sometimes the whole group did gym exercises and that was much more fun. I don’t know whether I remember playgroup from being there, or from Mother telling me about it years later. I don’t remember our parents ever hitting us, and if they hit each other, we never saw or heard.
I remember primary school. We were a gang of two, my brother and I, always looking out for each other. The school was within walking distance, and we went hand-in-hand the first day or so, our defence against fear of the new, but we soon stopped holding hands because the other kids scoffed. Mother said we taught each other to read, but I guess our class-teacher did her bit. I loved my word-tin. My favourite word was on the lid, not inside on a bit of card. The word was ‘Elastoplast.’ I think my brother’s tin was ‘Fisherman’s Friend,’ which was not bad but wasn’t as good as ‘Elastoplast.’ We did alright at primary school, I suppose. Mobile phones were only just beginning to catch on. The internet hardly existed. Scrolling addiction, fuelled by Twitter, Snapchat and so on, was decades down the line. The media - and eventually social networking - hadn’t begun broadcasting the idea that anyone who was vaguely unhappy about anything - anything at all - had a mental health problem. So we made it to Secondary School without self-harming or showing signs of PTSD, OCD, ADHD, obsession with body-image, eating disorders etcetera. In my view most ‘mental health’ problems can be cured by throwing your devices away and getting out more. But that’s a thirty-something cynic talking.
So, two twelve-year olds, resplendent in school uniform, moved on to secondary school, to the local Academy. This was the beginning of the inevitable separation because we had some choice of subjects. In addition to a basic curriculum of maths, English, history and so on, my brother took languages while I did science and home economics. Being in different rooms was unsettling at first. He wasn’t there to ask or answer a question or pull a face at. We had rarely been anywhere where we didn’t know what the other was doing. Usually, whatever it was, we’d be doing it together. There was a certain amount of teasing from other pupils, girls mostly. ‘Lost your wee brother then? Your twinny?’ And so on.
We’d been only two or three months at the new school when my cycle started and, urged on by raging hormones and cramps, I went off the rails. I took to arguing with Mother, at the same time seeking support from Dad. Or vice versa. I knew what I was doing. I was trying to drive a wedge between them. Did I know why? Of course not. I loved them both to bits, but, wallowing in self-pity and self-justification I could always find something that validated head-tossing and flouncing and denouncing one parent or the other as toxic, before stomping upstairs and slamming my bedroom door and bursting into tears. At the same time my brother was drifting away. He became secretive; he went into huddles with his mates; he wore his shirt outside his trousers; he spent a lot of time in his room listening to Coldplay and Oasis and letting his hair grow to a length that challenged school dress code. Some days he used Lynx which was truly, truly foul.
My attitude to school uniform changed, too. I took to wearing black or yellow bras under an artfully unbuttoned shirt. We were allowed black tights, and, in imitation of the senior girls, I would roll the waistband of my skirt up till the hem hardly concealed my knickers, but my brother was forever reminding me I was skinny, so the overall effect wasn’t as devastating as I hoped. I always tidied myself up before getting home from school; if I didn’t Dad would frown at me.
In Year Two I started having crushes. To a thirteen-year old these were serious fallings into and out of love, life-transforming but short lived. The gender of my chosen ones seemed not to matter, any more than their rebuffs or acceptances and inevitable rejections did. I lay awake rehearsing what I would say to them before we fell into each other’s arms. I never said any of the things I rehearsed but I did write four-line love poems to my English teacher and asked the jannie to put them in her pigeon-hole in the staff room. They were never acknowledged even though I fixed my adoring gaze on her as she talked about sonnet form and half-rhyme and stuff. She wore trousers and her hair was always cut short.
One lunch time, a Year Three boy sat next to me and muttered things he’d like to do to me. I repeated his intentions aloud to the others at the table, then stood up and invited him to follow me to the Girls’ toilets where we wouldn’t be disturbed. His face turned puce and when one of the other girls said he was like that with everybody but could never get it up, I felt sorry for him. My attractiveness seemed short lived; he never spoke to me or came near me again.
I had to wait until nearly the end of Fourth Year before I got my first kiss, from a Year Five girl called Connie. She had a four-inch scar on the line of her jaw, below her left ear. Her Mum and Dad were divorced. Her Mum worked in a Tesco, so Connie had her own house-key. We’d been spending break time together for a week or so, till one day she’d forgotten her lunch - she said - but there was time to go to hers; we could eat there, and she would show me her nail varnishes which I thought was a seriously weird way for a Year Five to get me on her own. The kiss was alright, once we’d slanted out heads this way and that, figuring which angle fit best. It was full on, lip to lip, and when she drew away and asked if I felt it too, and said she was sure I did and tried to get her hand up my skirt before I could ask her what I was supposed to feel. I pushed her away, then pulled her back and kissed her again, and we lay on her bed till I said it was time to go back for afternoon school but she said she didn’t think so, and we got into her bed and stayed there till her Mum came in and we said we’d got off school early and Connie asked if I could stay for tea and her Mum phoned my mother who said that was OK.
The affair, if you could call it that, ended the day I saw her with a Year Six boy called Knott, a rugby player. When they crossed paths with me, Connie cut me dead and when I turned and caught up with them and asked what was going on, Knott sneered and said she’s moving on from stringy dykes, so get lost. Connie wouldn’t look at me. That’s when I decided females are even further beyond understanding than males, and though the phase of the moon is an easy explanation for our weirdness, it’s probably the right one. I bunked off afternoon school.
I didn’t go down for tea when Mother called up that it was ready. Between fits of sobbing, I harangued my pillows about what hurt most; that Connie was false; that she’d dumped me for a ballplayer; that Knott – and presumably the whole school – thought I was a dyke, and stringy too, which implies dried up. My brother had been kinder; he’d only called me skinny. I was still feeling mega-sorry for myself when he tapped my door and called out that he’d brought me a sandwich and some milk and was it OK to come in? He sat beside me on my bed and put an arm round my shoulders. Then he surprised me, saying Mother was worried about my weight even though I scoffed everything she put in front of me. He said Mother thought I looked peeky, and I should see our GP, just in case. Then he asked me if I was puking my meals, which of course I wasn’t, and when I said I wasn’t, either I leant into him, or he pulled me closer but next thing I was asking him to hug me. I just wanted someone, anyone, close. He gave me an odd look and called me Sis and pulled me down, so we were together on my duvet holding each other. I told him everything about Connie and Knott. He said he’d heard about it. He told me I wasn’t stringy, just tall, the tallest in the family and he loved me, we all did. And then a lot happened. He stroked my cheek where Connie’s scar was and I wanted him to kiss me and I touched him where I shouldn’t have and he said he didn’t know what to say but he didn’t get mad or anything, so all we did was, we shared the sandwiches and then we lay down again and just held hands and listened to my Queen and Motorhead albums.
The bomb? As soon as I turned sixteen, I consulted our GP like Mother wanted, but I didn’t tell her. My period had been irregular when I started but when my cycle settled down it was sometimes so heavy I told myself I could bleed for Britain, plus I was sort of tired a lot of the time, and it was GCE year. Growing pains, the GP said, laughing, and when I said it wasn’t my fault I was tall, she apologised and said anaemia, possibly, which can be serious if there’s a problem with your bone marrow. I’d heard about bone marrow transplants, but wasn’t that when you had leukaemia? She said that was a long way down the road, and I shouldn’t worry, but she would like some blood tests and asked me to see the nurse for this.
It was interesting to watch my lifeblood draining into a glass phial. The nurse joked I’d plenty left and I said I’d wait for the end of the month to be sure of that and the nurse labelled the phial and told me the results would go to the GP. When that was all over, I went into school and met my brother at morning break and told him about the tests and thanked him and when he asked what for I said just for being my brother and he sort of frowned at this, so I said plus he’d never said anything about what happened in my bedroom and he said c’mon, Sis, that was a long time ago.
About a week later the GP phoned. Mother took the call and handed me the phone without saying anything but with her what’s-going-on look. The GP wanted to see me and made an appointment for the next day, first thing. Now I was scared. ‘Next day’ sounded so ominous I dropped the phone and when Mother asked was anything wrong, I blurted something about my period and she said, ‘You not . . . ?’ and I said of course I fucking wasn’t, just a small problem, and slammed upstairs to find my brother.
Next day at the surgery I could tell straightaway the GP was working round to something important. The blood tests were fine. I wasn’t making enough red blood cells was all, but not because of anything nasty like leukaemia. She would prescribe a drug that would help.
Then she said there was no easy way of talking about the rest and she’d thought a long time about whether she should, but I was sixteen and medically no longer a child, so she’d decided. She wanted to ask me something about my medical history that was maybe missing from her records. What, I wanted to know, thinking what doesn’t she want to tell me? That I was dying? I asked her was it serious and she said it’s about your blood groups, you, your brother, your parents. She said she’d been looking at her records for our blood groups, all of us.
Now I was shaking. Were we all dying? Just tell me, for God’s sake. Then she asked, looking squarely at me - was I adopted?
Well, I mean, full marks for tact. Was I what?
I was incredulous rather than angry, so I reminded the stupid GP we were twins, so how could I be adopted? She said that my blood group was simply not compatible with, well, one of my parents - in fact, my father’s.
This was so fucking silly that I just stared at her and shook my head as she meandered through the explanation of how it was all about groups A’s and B’s and O’s and negatives and positives and I couldn’t follow it, any of it, but she told me my mother could produce a child with my blood group, my father couldn’t. What it means, she said, is that my brother and me, we are only half-siblings.
He’s my half-brother. I’m his half-sister.
But right there in the surgery, so shocked I almost wet myself, all I could think was, I’m the different one, taller, fair haired. My brother, he’s a xerox copy of Dad and I’m not a bit like either of them, but I am like her, my mother, who’s a slag and a cow and a tart and a whore who was sleeping around at the time she conceived us, my brother with my Dad, me with some arsehole whose tadpoles ran into a spare egg she’d laid. So who am I? I’m the different one, the oddball, the spare part. I don’t belong. My Dad, my lovely patient Dad is not my Dad, and I don’t know who is and maybe my slag Mother doesn’t know because she had six or seven clients all lined up. Or maybe she does know and has told Dad, and Dad being Dad has forgiven her, or maybe she hasn’t told him, and she’s been sixteen years wondering if he’ll ever find out or wondering if he even suspects. But whether he knows or doesn’t know, or suspects, or whatever, he has always loved me.
They have both always loved me.
Me, a loved child; a lovechild whose childhood is at an end.
The GP, being a moron, or an alien or something, said she could see it would take some getting used to and I would have to decide whether to tell my brother. We could get counselling, she said. Oh, well, that’s alright then. I stared at her until she looked to be on the point of saying something else, so I thanked her and snatched the prescription she was holding and stood up and walked out. My appointment had been before normal surgery hours so there was no one in the waiting room so I threw some chairs around and ripped up some magazines until the reception staff rushed out to stop me and I headed out into the street.
Did I know who I was? Did my mother know who I was? And my Dad?
If he doesn’t know and I tell him, will it break his heart? What will he think when he learns that he is not related to the bawling infant whose nappy he changed, the toddler he pushed in her stroller, the little girl he rolled about on the floor with? And all these things he did along with her brother who isn’t fully her brother? What happens if neither of them know, and I say something? If my mother knows but Dad doesn’t? If both of them have always known? If she does know, and regrets what she did, does that mean she regrets me?
Do I regret me?
I couldn’t go home or to school with this all going round in my head, so I walked and walked. I had the means – BOOM! - to destroy my family, the way the morning was destroying me. I concocted crazy, insane schemes. There was no blood between me and Dad, no shared genes. I loved him so why not sleep with him? That would be a big poke in the eye for my slag mother. Or if she’d been living with her conscience for sixteen years, how about letting her carry right on? Wouldn’t that be more satisfying than telling her? Or killing her?
I got back to school just as lunch break was starting. I found my brother in the line at the hot food counter. He knew I’d had a GP appointment and as we pushed our trays along the rails, I gave him a varnished version of the truth. I told him the doc had prescribed some pep-pill or other and I’d soon be his red-blooded sister again. He grinned and slapped my behind and told me to watch it.
He’d tidied himself up. Got his hair cut, straightened his tie, tucked his shirt in, pressed his trousers, can you believe it. Word was he’d be a prefect next year, maybe even Deputy Head Boy. But never mind all that. We were doing a poem in English with a line ‘when there’s nought for your comfort,’ and that fateful, shitty morning all I wanted was the comfort of his arms round me. I know what I did in my bedroom that day was wrong and bad, but . . .
He asked me what I was laughing at and had anyone ever told me I’d a lovely laugh, well, for someone standing in line for lunch, and I couldn’t tell him I was laughing at the idea that maybe what I did was only half as bad now, and wasn’t so bad at all, really, as long as there’s love. I bumped my hip against his and gave his bum a squeeze, and when he looked at me and told me again to watch it, I . . I . .
I shaped my lips into a kiss.
