Graham Swift - Tomorrow

A strange, rather chilly contraption (but thank heaven for it) was resting on my belly and I was trying to keep as still as possible, but I wondered if the rush of emotion passing through me, and, for all I know, through you, was making that little screen wobble and judder—“dance” perhaps I mean — so much the more.

On the way back in the car I was genuinely worried your dad’s mind might not be on the road. “Mikey, the lights have turned green.”

Truly, we’d never supposed, in all our suppositions and imaginings, that you might be two — if I can put it like that. Was that thoroughly short-sighted of us? In all our calculations, and how absurd it seems, we’d used only basic arithmetic, we’d never got beyond the simple addition of one. But for sixteen years now, whatever else they may amount to, we’ve been living in the binary system. This strange equilibrium: a family of two couples. There’s always been that bond and that division between us. I don’t honestly know how it will affect tomorrow. Suppose there were just one of you now to inform. Poor thing. Suppose there were two of you, but with the usual sort of gap. How would that have affected our sixteenth-birthday principle?

You’ll sit side by side on the sofa. You’ll have each other.

And as for your twinness in itself: I bow to it. I don’t pretend to fathom it, even if I am your mother. You’re well aware by now that your parents, this other couple here, consist of two “onlies.” A completely different route into life, a completely different grounding. When we first knew you were two, we had only the usual jumble of uneducated notions. We know a bit more now. But in sixteen years of being the mother of twins and of observing you even more closely perhaps than the average mother, I can’t say I’ve got beyond the conclusion that only twins themselves know what it’s like.

They say you’re a race apart, a separate lore. You’re not like the rest of us, either in your dealings with the world or in your dealings with each other. Do you think that’s all hokum? A special understanding surely gets formed in that double confinement in the womb. It’s not, at least, like the standard experience when there’s only room for one and our arrival on the scene is a big, bawling solo act. Me! Me! Me!

They say you’re less selfish, you’ve learnt to share. They say you’re the opposite: you’re selfishness times two. There’s nothing you won’t do for each other in the eternal struggle with non-twins. Or, then again, behind your interchangeable smiles (but I’ve never thought your smiles were identical), you’re really at war with each other: sibling rivalry without limits.

We’ve seen you slip in and out of almost every version, every interpretation of twinness, play it up, play it down, play against it. Oh you know how to perform. But the truth is, and you both must know it, you were living proof of the harmony principle. You tug against each other now, as if you know that life, for you, will mean the difficult art of separation, but underneath there’s still that sweet solidarity, that glue that you came with. Will tomorrow just bring you together again? Bind you? Thwart you? Delay you?

Nick and Kate; two little balancing sounds. We just liked them. It works the longer way too: Nicholas and Katherine. Apart from that wonderful wobbly image on the screen, I’ve always had the picture in my head of a seesaw. Nick-and-Kate, Nick-and-Kate, a seesaw, your two monosyllables riding up and down. A seesaw can be a grim confrontation: one can give the other a hell of a ride. Or it can be an instrument of swaying delight. And that’s how it’s mostly been, with the occasional rhythmic agitation: swaying delight — in you yourselves, and swaying delight in us, your almost jealous beholders.

What had we done to deserve you? But we knew exactly what we’d done or, in Mike’s case, not done. Was it in some weird way because of that? Or was the trick of it that you were boy and girl? It’s only with boy-twins or girl-twins that the trouble starts? But a boy and girl born together is like a perfect piece of matchmaking. You even used to say (deny it though you will) that you wanted to marry. So in that way too you took after your parents. A seesaw for four — boy-girl, boy-girl — that’s rocked and swayed away for sixteen years.

And that little discrepancy between you only seemed to enhance the balance. Even with twins, there’s priority — one of you had to be born first. And that was you, Kate, by a length. It’s known among the four of us, but it’s stamped upon you anyway: that edge, that lead you’ve always had. But I never saw it as the sign of some race between you — quite the opposite, in fact.

It’s absurd, when I was there , trying my utmost (I assure you) to make the whole astonishing thing happen, that I sometimes picture your birth as if I had nothing to do with it. All your own mutual work. As if you were in some hidey-hole together, waiting your chance, two would-be escapers, and it was you, Kate, who had the courage to poke your head out first and see if all was clear. And the first thing you did was not to make your own quick, brave bolt for it, but to turn back and reach out your hand: “Come on, Nick. It’s okay. Let’s go!”

At two o’clock in the morning, in these small hours, sixteen years ago. I wouldn’t have known if it was raining then, the weather was my last concern.

You helped your brother into the world, Kate. Isn’t that the truth of it? And that’s meant something that I could never have foreseen and that’s occasionally upset the happy motion of the seesaw, if it’s also added, strangely, to its balance. We recognise it between us, I think, don’t we, if it’s never been uttered? That you and I are rival mothers, so far as Nick is concerned. If you both have rival fathers — who will be introduced to you, so to speak, tomorrow — Nick has always had his rival mums.

I think that little pucker was really in his brow at birth, Kate, don’t you? Help me! Wait for me! But since both your faces were such a mass of puckers and creases at that time, I can never be sure. Two little shrimps? Two little livid dumplings! “His father’s frown”—that’s how we say it, that way round. But why shouldn’t we just as well say of a father, why shouldn’t it be just as natural: “Oh, he has his son’s way of knotting his brow?”

Your lungs announced their presence, Nick, seven minutes after your sister. I think your father also gasped.

What will happen tomorrow? But what’s the worst fear of any parent anyway? It starts in the delivery suite. Don’t mix them up with anyone else’s. Having got you, and in such an elaborate way, how frightened we were of losing you. I’m not thinking now, at all, of tomorrow. Of losing you anyway. Your precious little arrived-together selves. Someone should have told us about this perfectly normal parental terror. But didn’t having it prove that we were normal parents?

You can’t have the one thing (or indeed the two) without the other, the possession without the dread: it’s the fundamental contract. Don’t think for one moment that our peculiar contract in any way diminished that. And don’t doubt when you learn what you’ll learn tomorrow that there’s ever been any difference in that respect between the two of us. We ’re perfect twins, that way, too. Both of us, either of us would lay down our lives in an instant if it meant not losing either or both of you.

But you know this. You’ve even borne witness to it — or almost. You know, of course, what I’m coming to. What shocked me and paralysed me, that terrible day in Cornwall — what added, I mean, to my multiple shock, panic, terror, utter distraction — was your father’s own terrifying insistence. He screamed it at me, he ordered me: “No! Me! Wait there!” As if, amid everything else, he saw this as his moment of opportunity.