Touched
Fiona Penmaiden

 



Touched




Mica

When we were very young, I used to think I could see into my sister’s mind. It was nothing like the mushroom brain-clouds in my biology book, but rather a pool of mercury reflecting my own image back to me. When our minds were locked - she reflecting me as I reflected her - I saw our images stretching for eternity, growing smaller and smaller until they curved into the distance beyond my sight.
I am older than Leah by six hours. I slipped from the womb with tired nonchalance, world-weary at the age of nothing. Leah only appeared when Mother was white with sweat like a whipped horse. When at last she broke free, Leah had wrapped the umbilical cord tight about her neck. Once loose, her first screams tore through us like a breaking storm. The midwife laughed and lay my sister in our mother’s arms.
“Better out than in, little one.”
As my mother shifted to make room for her, I whimpered. Mother smiled.
“You’d better learn to share.”
She told us this story so many times we began to believe we remembered. Of course it can’t be true. The close white walls, dizzying light, sterile smell of detergent: these are all figments of our imagination, illustrations to Mother’s story. But they feel real. To Leah they are as real as everything else, so in the end who’s to say?


Leah

I remember what I choose. It’s a gift, I freely admit it. I remember everything, and sometimes I remember nothing, but both places are good places to be. Sometimes I have a sister called Mica who looks just like me. She is afraid when she looks in my eyes. Sometimes she isn’t frightened - the same person only smaller - and we’re laughing over something. A daisy chain. A cup of tea. Old pages of a diary, torn at the edges. Our brown heads almost touch. Fingers mixed up so you can’t tell where hers end and mine begin. Sometimes we don’t laugh, we cry, but the feeling is just as good. It fills you up and when you let it out you’re empty again, ready for the next thing. You must always be ready for the next thing.
Sometimes I don’t have a sister at all, there’s only me. Today I do. Today she holds me in the crook of her arm and I feel her breathing. Quick, short breaths. I think they’re hurting her. Something is burning, something close to us. There is heat on my face, on my body, and the flames lick like a big dog. Perhaps I’m screaming, perhaps it’s her. Perhaps I scream for both of us.
This is a bad memory. I don’t want to have it, so it’s going, going, gone.
Daddy used to say that. Going, going, gone. We watched the sunset in Moscow and he pointed to the disappearing orange ball and said going, going, gone. It was cold when it went and the ice-cream church melted into the shadows. He gave me his jumper. He rolled up the cuffs - footballs on the end of each arm. We laughed and then went into a café and I was allowed a cola. I remember. I loved the way the bubbles popped between my teeth and the hiss that didn’t stop, even when it was in my mouth. If you put your face close you can see the liquid dance, like tiny volcanoes are just beneath the surface. Maybe I have volcanoes too, underneath the thin layer of white skin. Maybe they spit and bubble and dance. Maybe they’re in Mica, too.


Mica

Every Saturday I dress in dark colours, even though they don’t suit me. A grey jumper, a black skirt. Dark leather shoes with laces, no buckles. It’s hard to do my hair without looking in the mirror, but I’ve become skilled at smoothing wisps with my fingers. I know without looking that my skin is so pale it has a blue sheen. I am thin; so thin I feel air seep through me, even on a mild day. Today it’s raining so I slip into a brown coat, chunky buttons fastened to the neck.
After dressing I roam about the house, searching for car keys as if I’m not perfectly sure they hang from the hook behind the door. I pretend the carpet must be hoovered, the bathroom cleaned. I have the tidiest house in England. I feed the fish - already fat and close to death - and place milk on a saucer for next door’s cat. The budgie died last month or else I would scatter feed in its cage and replace its newspaper. I miss the budgie. It used to sing when the kettle boiled and was company, of a sort.
When I can no longer put it off I climb into the car and sit, squat like a gnome, behind the wheel. I hate driving. On motorways I like to find a lorry and slip into the shelter of its wake. Today there are no motorways. Today I have to squirm through city traffic and breathe in the poisonous stench of a thousand cars.
I set off. After a mile or so the rain eases to gentle drizzle, then stops. The sun comes out. I begin to sweat in my brown coat, but cannot afford to stop and remove it. I am frightened by streams of traffic which, were I to lose my place, would never let me back. I unbutton the top of my coat and cautiously roll down the window.
It takes an hour before the traffic thins and colour infuses the city with fragments of life. Geraniums are drops of blood in black earth. An honour guard of chestnuts line pink-spattered avenues. Houses boast yellow windowsills, red gates, white roses round a blue door. There is more light here, and a feeling of freedom. I roll up my window and turn on the fan.
Amongst these pretty suburban streets, on the very edge of the city, I flash my indicator. I pull through wrought iron gates and into a car park. I manoeuvre carefully into an empty space and bump the kerb, which tells me I’ve gone far enough. Before me looms a building of rusty brick. The doors are opened wide like weighty arms. Beyond, I catch a glimpse of glass security doors, which I know will only open to the fart of an electric buzzer. I smile at the analogy. I am tempted by the sun visor with its little mirror, but I wear no make-up and by stroking I can feel my hair is fine. I have no reason to stay hunched behind the solid metal of the driver’s door.
The tears begin when a family passes by my window: a young man with two sons dripping from his fingers. The boys pull at his arms, straining to see each other behind the trunks of their father’s legs. Such is their determination they would topple backwards were he not holding them. At that moment I remember. I remember so clearly it cuts into me with fierce pain. Leah and Mica. Mica and Leah. One in Mother’s right hand, one in her left. Our bodies contort as we reach for each other, but she cruelly drags us apart. We used to hate walking with our mother.
I wrench open the driver’s door and step into the sunshine. Leah is the child in my head. I’m still reaching for her.


Leah

I have become a creature of myth: not human at all, but closer to the Gutemensch. My neck has become so stretched it collapses back upon itself, fold after fold of gristle, twisting and looping like a snake’s death throes. My face, perched atop this monstrous tube, is smoothly round, wide-eyed. My body is squat. Legs and arms stick out from each corner and my claws are long, rattling when I walk. Of course, the god of portals says my neck is just fine.
I was here today. I sat and looked at myself for a long time, saying nothing. Then I spoke and I knew it wasn’t me sitting opposite me but Mica, and I reached out and touched her. Or perhaps I was touched. She smiled and took my hand and for a moment it was as though I knew where I was supposed to be. I think I want to go to her but something is between us. Perhaps it’s me. Perhaps it’s her. Perhaps it’s like our fingers and I don’t know where I end and she begins.


Mica

And there she is. Leah. My sister. My twin. Crouched over a tattered book, guarding it with her body as her lips move to the rhythm of the words. All the mirrors in the world couldn’t reflect me so perfectly as my sister’s face. Her hair neatly plaited at the nape of her neck, her skin pink with good health. She likes to have her nails painted every morning, and today the nurse has chosen Russian Rose. As always she is dressed in bright colours: blue jeans and a yellow jumper I have never seen before. A gift, the nurse said, from a fellow inmate. This explains why it’s several sizes too big. The sleeves are rolled up like plump doughnuts. She looks like a teenager.
For many minutes I only look at her. I search her eyes for the mercury pool of her mind. If only I could find it again I would dive in deep, submerge myself, look far below the surface. I would see past my own reflection and find her huddled at the bottom, lost and alone. I could guide her to the surface where our thoughts would mingle and breathe. But I’m not ready to look yet. Where in that great, lost mind did the break occur? It wasn’t only Leah who stood in front of the burning building, waiting for Mother to be rescued. We both watched the flames grow fat on her flesh, swallowing it down with all the stories she ever told. The fire took our father, too. Oh, he had been gone for years by then - before we could walk, even - but only when the black smoke cleared and the bones of our mother were raked from the embers was he truly lost. Our memories of him dried up in the heat, made dust with our mother’s stories. We both suffered. Why did my wounds heal when Leah’s suppurated, leaving her reason to rot? Each time I see her, I see my own madness. I imagine the mercury pool with our faces curving away into the distance, but now we stare into each other’s eyes without recognition. Clouds move beneath the surface: thoughts that merge and divide with ever changing form.
Leah is imprisoned on the edge of the city, in a building the colour of dried blood. She is still very much the academic. She reads books, but now her mind twists what they say to form strange realities. Dr Janus explained there are layers to her insanity: at times she is almost lucid, at others lost in a child-like fantasy world. When I sit opposite her she glances up from her book, but looks down again. I am of no interest, as if she saw me every day. But when I speak her eyes bloom and she comes alive.
She spouts nonsense. I try to control the conversation, as Dr Janus recommends, but she drowns me, making my words as nonsensical as her own. To quiet her I pick up her book: Foucault’s Madness and Civilization. Where she found it I have no idea. She probably stole it from Dr Janus’s office. She has become quite the kleptomaniac. Nurse tells me she spends hours returning Leah’s pilfered odds and ends: a ball of string, a box of paper clips, a tube of glue, sticky tape. She likes things that are used to mend or join. A book is new territory. I wonder what sense she is making of it in her bubbling mind. I flip the wrinkled pages in search of a familiar passage.
There is no madness but that which is in every man, since it is man who constitutes madness in the attachment he bears for himself and by the illusions he entertains.
 Is Leah mad because she fits our illusions of madness, because she gabbles nonsense and steals paperclips? Is it not just that Leah views the world differently? She sees light where I see shadow, beauty where I see ugliness, horror where I see only the normal trappings of every day life. We are two sides of the same coin. But what altered her perception and left mine untouched? What experience did Leah have that forced her path away from mine, made her lose her reason? Was it something that happened years ago and simmered beneath the surface, waiting for the right combination to drive her mad? Or was it more recent? Something that happened at the university, or in her little Cambridge flat?
I am lost in questions. I look at her curled up in her chair, legs tucked cosily beneath her. There is such strength between us: a connection unlike any we could possibly find elsewhere. When I thought her madness had broken our link it left a gaping wound in my soul. Even the loss of my mother was nothing in comparison.
I say her name. “Leah.” It is barely a whisper, but my heart clenches at the sweetness of her responding smile. She is still so beautiful. I stretch out my hand and her skin is smooth and cool to the touch. We mix fingers and her lips curl at the corners.
“Mica and Leah,” she says. My throat closes painfully. The names are naturally double-barrelled. I remember how no one could tell us apart at school. If we dressed once more in dull grey uniforms, bound our hair in the same wispy plaits, tugged our ties to half-mast ... could they tell us apart today?
I get to my feet. Leah’s hand is still linked with mine. I squeeze her fingers gently, help her up. I lead, she willingly follows. On the far wall is a mirror, a plain rectangle of glass, and we cross to stand before it. My heart beats in time with hers. I release her hand and lay my arm across her shoulders. She nestles in the crook. I breathe deeply, close my eyes. When I open them we are gazing into the shining glass of the mirror. Doctors Leah and Mica Gates. The four of us regard each other with fitting solemnity. Our eyes are brown like our hair, though cobweb-strands of grey shine in the light. Our noses are small. Our chins are dimpled. Her eyebrow has a scar, mine doesn’t.
I take her hand and we begin to walk. We walk to the door. Dr Janus runs to my side and we talk, but he can do nothing. The electric buzzer sounds and as we walk out into the sunshine Leah laughs softly. She says:
 “Better out than in, little one.”

I used to think I could see into Leah’s mind. Now I know I never could. The power of my own reflection was such that I could see no further than myself. Now it’s time to look deeper. I look into her eyes and smile. She is as free as I am.


 

 

 


      

 

 

Copyright © 2001 Fiona Penmaiden
Published on the World Wide Web by "www.storymania.com"