Terri Paddock - Come Clean

Meanwhile, Dad barrels past the nurses’ desk unannounced, his leather soles dog-whistling along the swept salmon-and-lime-speckled tiles. He heads the wrong way, striding purposefully towards geriatrics until some doctor or orderly or whoever it is at the hospital on glad tidings duty recognises him and steers him in the right direction while attempting to share said tidings. Dad listens with one ear and nods his understanding, but all he hears is ‘boy’ and ‘twins’. And his mind adds those two words together in an equation that goes boys + twins = identical = two sons. Because twins mean identical, right, and identical means, if nothing else, same sex. Right?

You’d think they would have taught him otherwise at some point in all that expensive medical education of his. But what do budding orthodontists know? Dad knows twins are identical and boys are little creatures who grow up into men who carry on the Ziegler name. He hauls up at the viewing station and shoulders his way through some other newborn-gawkers to the front of the glass so he can size us up. We’ve been stashed in the same crib and, to be honest, we’re not too impressive. Downright tiny, only five pounds apiece and drowning in hospital regulation cotton. And we’re yellow, shrivelled and flaky – overcooked, as Mom used to say – these are things she remembered to tell us. But we’re men-to-be. Dad eyes his progenies and, without consulting Mom who’s got many days and weeks of drugged-out-ness ahead, he decrees us Joshua and Justin. He tells the nurse or orderly to write it down. And they keep shtoom, do as they’re told and write down Joshua and Justin Ziegler.

‘How adorable,’ coos Grandma who’s just caught up, towing Grandpa behind her like a badly hitched trailer.

Then Grandpa judders to a halt and follows Grandma’s finger to where it crooks at us through the glass. Just a bundle of baby under a single snowy blanket. He lowers his chin, squints and peers through his Norman Rockwell bifocals. ‘Amazing, Jeff,’ he says to Dad. ‘How on earth did you and Helen manage to have a two-headed baby? Ain’t that funny.’

That last bit is true, Grandpa really did say that, or words to that effect. Grandma Shirland has been telling us that story for years and others around the family have been retelling it to their neighbours, their friends, mailmen and each other until it comes full circle back to us and they tell us again like we never heard it before.

And the naming thing was also true, though Dad didn’t let that one get round quite so far. I imagine he was pretty disappointed when he realised I didn’t have a winky. He tacked an E on to my name on the hospital form, wrote it in himself, a big messy capital letter that didn’t match any of the pretty orchid-like penmanship that blossomed across the rest of the page. And I became Justine.

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