“If you’ll stay to hold my hand.” As I said it, I wondered what was happening. I would never try a line like that — particularly when I was quite incapable of following up on it. My concussion must be worse than I knew.
She just smiled. “I’ll be back in twenty minutes. It’s always a good sign when a patient gets fresh. Shout if you need me sooner.”
I lay back and closed my eyes again, to assess my pains jointly and severally. Right leg, ribs, and head were the worst, with stomach and neck a close second. They competed for attention. It was a poor time to try for boyhood reminiscence, or for thinking of any kind, but if it would speed my recovery, I ought to at least give it a try.
Being drugged is certainly no obstacle to recalling your childhood; I would say that it even helps. In the next twenty-four hours, drifting in and out of sedated sleep, I tried to obey Sir Westcott Shaw’s request and worked my way forward from my earliest memories. I took his word for it that the exercise would have some value, and the order of recollection didn’t matter.
I suppose that by my third birthday I already knew that I was a “twin,” and that being a twin somehow made me special. It was unfair. I didn’t know my twin, and Uncle Fred and Aunt Dora did. They would talk about him and about me when I was presumed to be asleep or watching the television.
“It’s not fair to bring them up apart like this,” Uncle Fred would say. “They have to get to know each other. We should send him out there for a visit with Leo.”
“Don’t be daft, Fred. We don’t have the money for anything like that, and you know it.”
“Well, mebbe Tom could find some way to send Leo over here for a holiday to see Lionel.”
“It’s a long trip from out there. It would cost a lot.”
At the age of six I knew that “out there” was Los Angeles , a location as far away to me as the Moon. It seemed farther away. After all, I could see the Moon. In a way, Leo and I were true Moon-children. We were born on July 20, 1969 , the day that humans first landed on the Moon and so far as we were concerned the Space Age began.
When we were one year old, Mum and Dad had been killed. They had gone down to Leeds for a day out, a casual shopping expedition, and they had stayed there for dinner. At seven o’clock in the evening, a big truck had gone out of control in the middle of the town and smashed in through the front of a restaurant. Fourteen people were killed. That was a statistic. Mum and Dad were at a window table and died instantly. If that was also a statistic, it was one that changed our lives forever.
Big Brother Leo went to live with Mum’s brother and his wife, Tom and Ellen Foss. In 1972 Tom lost his job with Marconi and was offered a good one with Standard Oil of California in La Habra . Leo and I, two years old, had a final meeting in December, 1972. Later we both claimed to remember it, but I think we were recreating it from other people’s descriptions.
I stayed on in Middlesbrough , living with Dad’s brother, Fred, and Aunt Dora.
They could have no children of their own. It took me many years to learn that the two deaths they would have given anything to prevent had enriched their life together and given it a new meaning.
The earliest memory I can positively identify came at Christmas, when I was four years old. We had a telephone call from America and I talked to Leo. I was enormously excited when I was told that my “twin” was on the phone, and enormously disappointed when he said nothing more than the sort of things I might have said myself.
Memories came thicker after that. As I lay there in the Reading Hospital I did my best to work my way steadily forward in time, but it was hopeless. Either I was too sick, or I was too full of drugs and mental confusion. Instead of the quiet years at Middlesbrough , through elementary school and then on through grammar school, I conjured up a distorted, surrealistic collage of events. The cold front room where I had practiced on the black upright piano was there, but the used-only-at-Christmas furniture with its shiny covers had vanished in favor of casual, low-slung chairs and couches with bright patterned upholstery, lit by a fiercer sun than the north of England ever knew. My solo performances on the piano, at school and later in the Town Hall, were clearly remembered; but they had acquired a different audience, full of tall, tanned girls with long hair and perfect teeth. They were noisy and cheerful, crowding in toward the stage while I struggled with a Mozart sonata.
I sweated in the hospital bed, tossing and turning, peering into the past until the night nurse, looking in, gave me an injection to bring the relief of a deeper sleep.
The next morning I couldn’t avoid trying again, the way we tend to pick at a half-healed scab once we realize that it’s there. Memories came easier after Leo and I had our first real meeting — which is to say, the first meeting where we were able to understand our relationship to each other.
It happened when we were nearly twelve. A big medical conference took place in Edinburgh , and one of its key sessions had as a theme the psychology and physiology of identical twins who had been reared apart. Uncle Fred had the brain-wave of his life. At his suggestion, the conference committee arranged for Leo and me to attend together and to submit to a couple of days of tests and questions. All our expenses were covered.
My inferiority complex probably began with that meeting. Raised in a house with no other children, I had become used to spending time alone and I was shy with strangers. My public recitals somehow didn’t count; they were encounters with an anonymous and faceless audience. Leo had the advantage of me. Tom and Ellen Foss already had one child, a girl, before they took Leo, and a year later they had another daughter. Leo grew up in what sounded to me like a rowdy, active household, full of visiting California nymphets who came to see his sisters. At the conference in Edinburgh I met a relaxed, tanned version of myself, already a bit taller and heavier (blame those American meals and vitamins), far more self-confident, and with a developed line of small talk that allowed him to meet and impress any girl he happened to fancy. I watched and imitated, but there was no doubt who was the expert.
We had a great time in Edinburgh in spite of all that. Even the tests were fun. We came out with the same IQ’s, rather differently distributed as to skills.
Our memories were about equally good, but I knew more English words. Thank crossword puzzles for that — the only Sunday newspaper that Uncle Fred would allow in the house was the Observer, and I cut my teeth on the “Everyman” crossword puzzles.
In spite of that evidence of wordpower, it was Leo who showed more aptitude for and interest in languages. Concert travels eventually have brought me to the point where I can ask my way to the airport in half a dozen foreign tongues (and sometimes even understand the answers). But Leo was really interested, and by the time he was twenty-five he was fluent in five languages, and had a passing acquaintance with three or four more.
When the Edinburgh conference was over we had a few hours to ourselves before we had to take the train back to Middlesbrough . There was no need to sit and talk any more — we already knew that we got on better together than anyone else in the world. So we hit the fleshpots. I introduced Leo to skate and chips with salt and vinegar, and then to knickerbockerglories, with five flavors of ice cream, pineapple crush, whipped cream, strawberry sauce, chocolate flakes and grated nuts. He insisted he could eat another one. So did I.
On the train back to Middlesbrough I was sick out of the window on one side and Leo was sick out of one on the other. Two days later we watched a shuttle lift-off together on the television in Aunt Dora’s bedroom. That same afternoon we had our first fight.