The Vale - Part One (b)

It’s always the same at this time, late afternoon, early evening. The dropping sun, the hunched commuters scurrying home to the safety of their shelters. There is a bustle on the streets but it’s not like the optimistic buzz of the morning, it’s more of a fight for time, a scramble for a few hours to recenter and claim yourself, with all your edges intact. The work life template has forced us to inhabit a bandwidth, a mere fraction of our true selves. This journey homeward is a flight which always takes too long. If only I could fly once again.

I’m driving through the stop-start of suburbia. I can feel the close of play pressing down as we shunt along in our metal boxes. We’re united in zoning out as we replay conversations with colleagues and clients, dissipating the detritus of the working day. If you look hard enough, you see it escaping from vehicles in the form of a wispy trail, dirty and meaningless, like when children mix all the paint colours together and it settles in a dead shade of greyish brown. Another working day is dead.

Something more unsettling is happening too, at least to me; glancing into the cars travelling in the opposite direction, in the split second blur of their passing, I keep seeing me. There isn’t time for my eyes to linger on the finer details of the other drivers, all I know is that their energy, combined with the rough outline of their features, appears exactly as I do. We were not all cut from the same cloth, rather we’ve been forced into a mould which has shaped us into uniform beings.

I am not special, not with so many clones out there in the wild. Driving along in inoffensive graphite coloured four X fours, dressed in periwinkle blue shirts, open at the neck, the fade of early middle-age, same facial expressions, part pride, part despair, underpinned by grim resignation. I feel weak, diluted, dull, my brand is common in these parts. 

There is some dismay at what we’ve become; corporate drones. It’s been a long day, dull, stressful, productive, a confusing mixture of artificial gratification; that’s what happens when you achieve conventional success. We’re in the swim of life but we are fish out of water. In the shallow world, we’re doing alright but there is a sense of imbalance, a sense of toppling. 

The bulging swell inside all of us must be contained, we must all constantly adjust in order to keep our balance. The question knocks, ‘is this all there is?’ Cracks appear on our walls, for now they are fine, not big enough to let in the draft which will eventually get inside us and blow everything apart.

I’m not alone on this drive. Next to me on the passenger seat is my twin brother Gary. He’s not wearing a seatbelt, he never does but this is of no consequence. He doesn’t wear a coat when it’s cold, he doesn’t wear glasses or the wear and tear of the passing years or the corrosive sweat of life’s endless torments. Gary is quite untouched. He is different, his spirit is pure, his nature has been protected from the abrasions of earthly life. 

I remember when we were on the seabed, holding each other in the warm, salty water, hearing the muffled, underwater sounds of our mother’s voice and the cushioned jolt of her footsteps in block-heeled shoes, walking on the pavement. In the background, the calm, rhythmic whoosh of the ocean and the melody of our big sister, Christina, chattering away. The sun’s rays penetrated gently through the water, lighting our world and at night in the darkness we swam and slept.

Our life was so perfect then. We had everything and were yet to develop the concept of need. There was no weather, no hunger or cold. We were weighted down, anchored to the safety of our subconscious, as in a dream. 

Demands were yet to dawn; the demand to breathe, to smile, walk and make friends, the pressure to fall into the categories which qualify for acceptance; jobs, relationships, stability. I locked some of that peace away and kept it inside me in a sort of emotional locket so that I could draw on it whenever I liked. 

Gary is my twin so there was a floating assumption that we would make the ultimate journey together, physically united. I don’t know what happened, nobody does, there is no way to explain it but I know that there was nothing anyone could have done to prevent it. It was a sort of earthquake, hidden beneath the surface, silent and unexpected. Some part of our underwater garden collapsed and our seabed fell away. My twin brother was sucked down, down and away. I held on. There was some force which enabled me to stay, not quite until the end, just enough for me to survive with a bit of help from the medics, the doctors and nurses.

My mother went into a zone. She fought so long with the truth. It was somehow easier for her to blame it on something she’d done herself or an invisible, malevolent entity and as long as it remained a taboo subject in my family, the more sinister it seemed. As a boy, my imagination tried to fill in the gaps with fantastical details based upon the stories of my childhood, the ones where bad things are always caused by the forces of evil. Perhaps it was the sea witch who stole my twin brother and took my mother’s voice as well. 

From what details I have been able to glean by listening to conversations among extended family members, the prospect of two babies had caused a shockwave of excitement, fear and joy, an instability. Just as she was beginning to adjust to the concept of being a mother to twins, one was lost, causing yet another, larger shock. After that, the water never again settled.

As I grew up I felt an increasing sense that there was never anything sinister involved, it was more like biological fate. We became broken, physically separated but our deep bond had already formed. Our spirits were fused, the emotional frequency of the two of us had already been fine tuned, unique to our mutual consciousness. I heard it then, on the sea bed of our existence and I hear it still, I’ll always hear it until we are once again in the same realm. 

Outside of the womb, I became aware of Gary’s presence from a very young age. In my earliest years, he appeared to me just as another child, I couldn’t differentiate between him and other earthly life forms. There was some point in my development when I realised that his company was different and that he could come and go in a blink. I would go looking for him around the flat and cry when I realised that he had simply vanished. Before long I became aware that he is like the tide. He goes but he never goes away and he leaves behind a comforting fire which burns inside me and keeps me warm.

We grew up together, among the towers. Our family had just enough but I never liked luxuries anyway. I enjoyed my jam sandwiches and there was so much there for us; layers upon layers of space and time among mythical creatures, zombies, hard and soft people living like bees in their hives, doped up by smoke and the insignificance of their being. 

Now I have luxury and I feel out of whack, unsettled, itchy, with a constant feeling that there is so much to lose. I don’t know how I landed here. Somewhere deep inside there’s always a feeling that I could blink and be back there. That world was a different colour. I’d feel pain again, something sharp, the wind whipping around the towers, cold damp air stinging my skin, hunger churning in my belly, the stab of ridicule and the burn of mad eyes staring at me. I’m not sure whether it’s really a fear or a fantasy. The two worlds are light and dark but they constantly change places.

I am mindful not to let the traffic get to me, instead treating the drive home like a game. It's a mistake to waste your emotional energy on road rage but I always want to go faster. I want to fly. Gary has gone now, my passenger seat is empty, he’s returned to wherever he goes, deep into the back of my head or to sit on top of our dead mother, to stifle her so that she can only function at half of herself. 

Who knows if dead people function outside of our own imaginations but that’s how Mum was in life, non-functioning. She let the concept of her stolen child consume her. Gary didn’t die because he was never born therefore he occupies a sort of limbo, a waiting room, a no-man’s land which extends far beyond my own imagination. He is a continuous warm flame, he is my pilot light.

I slow down as I drive into my road, I have to, there are speed bumps. Apparently it’s easy to miss the entrance to the cave, otherwise known as our driveway, so Lori has painted a small white triangle on the top brick of the pillar where the drive meets the pavement. Everytime I see it I feel a low twinge of annoyance. She defaced a perfectly good brick pillar in order to make it slightly easier to turn into our property. That’s despite me telling her that once the red robin hedge grows, the ruby tinged leaves will ensure she has no problem identifying which house is ours. She said she did it for our guests, her parents especially, who think all the houses on our bit of the road look the same.