(no subject)
My brother and I, that is to say Mark and Anthony, seem identical twins in every aspect except one; his eyes are hazel, and mine blue. In fact when we were teenagers we often swapped identities by way of colour contacts for the purposes of pranks and personal favours: our peers soon became accustomed to identifying us by the thinness of my face, or a scar above Mark’s lips, rather than by eye colour alone. Later on in life, Mark had his ear and eyebrow pierced, and has lately grown his hair to shoulder length, in contrast to my slicked-back hair and designer glasses. Our diverging paths in life could not be more aptly described. I became head of an Internet-based solicitor’s, garnering enough success to rival our father’s riches, and Mark, I think it is fair to say, has wavered. Contrary to his accusations, I cast no great judgement on his lifestyle or relationships with women, except to remark that the aspects of both have taken their toll on his physique and his wallet. Perhaps if he could decide on a singular lifestyle or woman, as I have before averred to him, then the one would cease to inhibit the other. But no matter. A divorcee of three years, my focused lifestyle in London has ceased to provide much attraction for his Florida-based life fuelled by testosterone, liquor and shop-window fantasies and poised between sunglasses-and-surfboards adolescence and sun-raked, gut-haunted, martini-swilling midlife crisis. Subsequently, my views hold no interest with him; our only point of contact now is the shared love of our life - scuba-diving.
To those who have pushed themselves under the black hood of light that emanates from the alien surface of the water above you, as luminous and distant as the moon, and felt the tight shoulders of the water’s currents overwhelm and propel you downwards, I need not wax lyrical about the feelings it produces. The thrill of it all is incredible; the pressure, the darkness and the oxygenated highs and adrenaline rushes have proved equally alluring to followers of both our paths, forming as it were a bridge between his pulsating midnight world and the cool, pressurised frenzy of mine. Fear plays a major part in the attraction, for one is swimming through death alongside masked ghosts with glow-worms in their foreheads as one’s companion into the dark, lifeless void of looming shapes and restless shadows.
There is another bonus for us - and here I shall pick my words carefully - and it lies in the wordless relationship between twins. I consider myself first and foremost a man of logic and science, and it heartily disgusts me when one should be for example watching a children’s programme with one’s offspring and there are two twins speaking in tandem, wearing the same clothes and each acting as the other’s mirror. It is my experience that the reality of being a twin necessitates stating one’s individuality in the most forceful manner possible - as witnessed in my brother’s choices and mine. The symbolic use of twins in art and drama as two halves of the same soul in my opinion utterly dehumanises the subjects and gives ground to the popular myth that the way a person looks must show their inner nature, which in my eyes remains man’s deepest and most innate prejudice. This being said, however, there is a natural understanding that develops between any two people - such as a husband and wife - who have spent a great amount of time together. The fact that my shared existence with my brother preceded our being able to talk has formed between the two of us a sort of wordless language that is extremely potent in that it is able to communicate a great deal through expression alone. Thus it was that I knew my brother’s dislike of my bride even before he opened his mouth to say hello, and that he was going to ask for money far before he ever gained the courage to breach the subject. This ‘relationship’, of course, is invaluable when diving, and has become such an integral part of the experience for me that I wouldn’t consider diving without him.
It was with a heavy heart, then, that I learned that it was his desire to go skiing in the Alps during the summer, our annual bonding time. Learning that he had already booked the tickets was no great surprise, either; my reservations increased with the fact that he had booked a cottage in Switzerland without direct contact with the slopes. The whole thing smacked of impulse, and I had the distinct notion that Mark had envisaged Switzerland off the back of a postcard, with every mile mountainous, and every mountain snow-peaked. Needless to say, I looked forward to the whole thing far more than he did, being as it was for me a break from my lifestyle rather than an extension of it. For this reason I raised no objection even when I discovered that the reservations were for one week only, instead resolving to cherish my time in - I will admit - what was a rare period in natural human company.
Driving back from Zurich airport was an emotional affair of loud and happy conversation between the two of us tempered by the anticlimax of our surroundings. Mark was horrified to discover that the millionaire elite on the slopes drove around in environmentally friendly golf-buggy type vehicles rather than the Lamborghinis of his imagination, and that the rigorous partying he had imagined was somewhat dampened by the ban on loud noises (such as lawnmowers) after 5 pm. It came as no surprise to me, then, to discover that all Mark’s research had gone into locating his latest love interest, the intriguingly named Patroclea, who was staying in a 5 star hotel in a skiing village just off the southern slopes.
Our own ‘cottage’ turned out to be a three-level wooden mansion built on a steep slope inclining into a beautiful lake, so that the levels formed a diagonal that levelled out into a balcony raised above the waters of the lake on an elegant system of stilts. The inside of the house I found to my satisfaction; sweet-smelling pinewood furniture and high-beamed ceilings shone in the light from the windows, their wide frames typical of a country in which it often snowed. The one puzzle of the house was a door that had been painted on the wall in a highly realistic manner; however, we were assured that this was in something called the Pompeii decorative style, in which painted windows gave the impression of greater space. This was queer, because the room was spacious; moreover, I had the impression that between the rooms on either side there were a half-dozen feet. When I told Mark this, he said that that this was most probably the intention of the decorator to make it appear thus, and I was satisfied and most impressed by the Swiss architect’s use of illusion.
We discovered, to our delight, that the lake was a deep one; and I lost no time in ordering our diving equipment from where it was housed in London. In happy anticipation of this future adventure, Mark left in pursuit of Patroclea leaving me to contentedly browse the heavy volumes crowded onto the split-oak shelves in the lightest part of the house. Many of the books were ancient tomes written in languages which I could not understand, and had strange symbols in them, often to the effect of the yin and yang signs. I found a common pattern in one which seemed to have a diagram in which symbols were used throughout to link and change objects. In one, a white cat was daubed in green paint, forming a rudimentary symbol on is forehead, and turned into a black cat with red paint. The opposite page seemed to reverse the process. Although at first interested by this sort of mystical crossword, I soon tired of this practice, and found to my delight that a recent visitor had left a series of Len Deighton books that were altogether more to my taste.
I was curled up by the electrical fire perusing such a novel when Mark brought his young conquest in through the door. Although it was his intention to further his millionaire credentials by introducing his respectable twin (Mark’s love affairs being part romanticism, part con,) I was in no mood to play any sort of role in his games and excused myself, saying I would retire to bed early. That night I had a strange dream, in which I was trapped in the upstairs corridor with the painted door. Though I tried to run away from the door, over which blinked a horrid eye, I ended up at the beginning of the corridor again, while on the walls a living fresco showed red and green cats being drowned by an old woman with her back turned. The dreamed changed and I was in a wood with each tree carved over with the symbols from the mystical tomes which I had looked at earlier, except in the darkness the shapes took on a different meaning. Skulls leered in the chiaroscuro moonlight, severed hands came to life, and everywhere creatures split into half and came together in horrendous forms etched into the tree by no human hands. In the centre of the wood I saw a small man, fearful as I, facing a man in a black cloak. The cloaked man’s hands caught hold of the other man’s neck, and suddenly with a blurring motion, their features blended, skin stretching to touch skin in a bloodless mass, teeth meeting teeth and hands hands, while only the eyes remained constant in the grind of breaking form. A terrible scream that emanated from its apex rent the night air, and as it abruptly ended, I saw the cloaked man fall to the ground, lifeless, and the small man turn to me a terrible face and scream in a horrible, high-pitched voice…
I woke up suddenly to see Mark’s girlfriend silhouetted against the door to my bedroom, her hands clasped to her open mouth still in a silent scream and her eyes wide with shock. ‘Your forehead … it’s bleeding - and oh, God, the eyes!’ With that she ran from the room. I turned to look in the mirror against the wall at the foot of the bed, but could see nothing wrong with my face; I thought to follow her, but my half-awake body prevented me from doing so, and I sank back into a dreamless sleep.
That morning I awoke and immediately my thoughts flew to Mark’s girlfriend. I looked at the foot of my bed; no mirror hung there, so I concluded that it had all been a dream. I went upstairs to breakfast, and found Mark looking at me angrily from behind a magazine.
‘Where’s - er - Patricia?’
‘Patroclea took off in the middle of the night, because you scared her so much with that goddamned screaming! What the hell do you think you were doing?’
It seemed a funny sort of question to ask, so I ignored it, and replied defensively that Patroclea’s flights of fancy were nothing to do with me. Then, seeing him irate, I asked why he was reading through a car magazine. He looked embarrassed and changed tact, and said that the scuba diving equipment had arrived today. I had the feeling that the contents of that magazine would find their way into the smoking room at the sophisticated bar in the skiing village nearby, complete with lavish descriptions of ‘how she handles’ and some anecdote about how he beat a Porsche hands-down over a mountainous stretch. However, I did not voice my thoughts, and to placate his mood I agreed to go diving with him at noon.
The air was cold and thin despite the summer sun as I stepped out of the house in a black wetsuit. Mark had readied the equipment by the side of the lake; he was standing in the water doing breathing exercises, framed by the light from the waves, shimmering darkly around his waist. We ‘geared-up’ briskly and without saying much, Mark only remarking on how his stone-age oxygen reader was reading several percentages too high. This prompted a smirk from me, clad in superior Japanese plastic-mesh suit and sporting the latest in gadgets and breathing equipment; Mark saw my grin and coloured angrily for a second, but did not say a word.
Walking in slowly to the clear lake, we looked at each other and felt the excitement course around us like the tide; approaching the shelf where the stones beneath our feet dropped off into black nothingness, we stopped to don our masks and switch on our oxygen levels. ‘Ready?’ asked Mark. ‘Ready,’ I whispered, my voice thick with emotion: Mark, who had already put in his mouthpiece, gave me the thumbs-up and stepped off the brink and fell beneath the icy waters gently churning before us.
The full shock of the sunless, freezing depths hit me even in my body-heat sustaining mesh: Mark I could see was hit a little harder, but he raised his hand in an upwards gradient which instinctively I knew to mean that he’d warm up in a little while. We turned on our torches, and immediately a field of waving weeds, streaming like human hair, lit up beneath us as the largeness of the lake was illumined by our small electronic lights like a canyon of bruised colour.
Then Mark shook my arm, and with a sudden thrill I realised that sloping before us in the clouds of dust that swirled along the bottom of the lake stood a house, not ten metres below the surface. The unreality of this sensation was intensified by the fact that it looked very much like our house, at night, shrouded in curling wreathes of mist that caught the broken light that fell in shards from the surface and transformed them into teeming, soft-glowing planes. There was an ethereal beauty about the house, that seemed so much like our house, but for a gaping hole in the roof that transformed its countenance into a foreboding, mute scream. Mark gestured, and we swam down through the gleaming light that seemed to pierce our bodies and turn them into luminous apparitions.
For the next half-hour we swam about the house, but there was not much to tell of, except that it was exactly like our own, save the violence that had fallen upon it, that seemed to come in the shape of an avalanche that had broken through the top part and at some point slowly melted throughout the house, giving an indicator as to the cause for the lake’s rising levels. It was then, as our oxygen supplies were getting low, that we swam along the corridor in the middle part of the house. Jutting out before us into the narrow hall, there was a broken door where in the recreated house above it this brown door had been faithfully rendered in paint.
Final part tomorrow (if I get any interest).
To those who have pushed themselves under the black hood of light that emanates from the alien surface of the water above you, as luminous and distant as the moon, and felt the tight shoulders of the water’s currents overwhelm and propel you downwards, I need not wax lyrical about the feelings it produces. The thrill of it all is incredible; the pressure, the darkness and the oxygenated highs and adrenaline rushes have proved equally alluring to followers of both our paths, forming as it were a bridge between his pulsating midnight world and the cool, pressurised frenzy of mine. Fear plays a major part in the attraction, for one is swimming through death alongside masked ghosts with glow-worms in their foreheads as one’s companion into the dark, lifeless void of looming shapes and restless shadows.
There is another bonus for us - and here I shall pick my words carefully - and it lies in the wordless relationship between twins. I consider myself first and foremost a man of logic and science, and it heartily disgusts me when one should be for example watching a children’s programme with one’s offspring and there are two twins speaking in tandem, wearing the same clothes and each acting as the other’s mirror. It is my experience that the reality of being a twin necessitates stating one’s individuality in the most forceful manner possible - as witnessed in my brother’s choices and mine. The symbolic use of twins in art and drama as two halves of the same soul in my opinion utterly dehumanises the subjects and gives ground to the popular myth that the way a person looks must show their inner nature, which in my eyes remains man’s deepest and most innate prejudice. This being said, however, there is a natural understanding that develops between any two people - such as a husband and wife - who have spent a great amount of time together. The fact that my shared existence with my brother preceded our being able to talk has formed between the two of us a sort of wordless language that is extremely potent in that it is able to communicate a great deal through expression alone. Thus it was that I knew my brother’s dislike of my bride even before he opened his mouth to say hello, and that he was going to ask for money far before he ever gained the courage to breach the subject. This ‘relationship’, of course, is invaluable when diving, and has become such an integral part of the experience for me that I wouldn’t consider diving without him.
It was with a heavy heart, then, that I learned that it was his desire to go skiing in the Alps during the summer, our annual bonding time. Learning that he had already booked the tickets was no great surprise, either; my reservations increased with the fact that he had booked a cottage in Switzerland without direct contact with the slopes. The whole thing smacked of impulse, and I had the distinct notion that Mark had envisaged Switzerland off the back of a postcard, with every mile mountainous, and every mountain snow-peaked. Needless to say, I looked forward to the whole thing far more than he did, being as it was for me a break from my lifestyle rather than an extension of it. For this reason I raised no objection even when I discovered that the reservations were for one week only, instead resolving to cherish my time in - I will admit - what was a rare period in natural human company.
Driving back from Zurich airport was an emotional affair of loud and happy conversation between the two of us tempered by the anticlimax of our surroundings. Mark was horrified to discover that the millionaire elite on the slopes drove around in environmentally friendly golf-buggy type vehicles rather than the Lamborghinis of his imagination, and that the rigorous partying he had imagined was somewhat dampened by the ban on loud noises (such as lawnmowers) after 5 pm. It came as no surprise to me, then, to discover that all Mark’s research had gone into locating his latest love interest, the intriguingly named Patroclea, who was staying in a 5 star hotel in a skiing village just off the southern slopes.
Our own ‘cottage’ turned out to be a three-level wooden mansion built on a steep slope inclining into a beautiful lake, so that the levels formed a diagonal that levelled out into a balcony raised above the waters of the lake on an elegant system of stilts. The inside of the house I found to my satisfaction; sweet-smelling pinewood furniture and high-beamed ceilings shone in the light from the windows, their wide frames typical of a country in which it often snowed. The one puzzle of the house was a door that had been painted on the wall in a highly realistic manner; however, we were assured that this was in something called the Pompeii decorative style, in which painted windows gave the impression of greater space. This was queer, because the room was spacious; moreover, I had the impression that between the rooms on either side there were a half-dozen feet. When I told Mark this, he said that that this was most probably the intention of the decorator to make it appear thus, and I was satisfied and most impressed by the Swiss architect’s use of illusion.
We discovered, to our delight, that the lake was a deep one; and I lost no time in ordering our diving equipment from where it was housed in London. In happy anticipation of this future adventure, Mark left in pursuit of Patroclea leaving me to contentedly browse the heavy volumes crowded onto the split-oak shelves in the lightest part of the house. Many of the books were ancient tomes written in languages which I could not understand, and had strange symbols in them, often to the effect of the yin and yang signs. I found a common pattern in one which seemed to have a diagram in which symbols were used throughout to link and change objects. In one, a white cat was daubed in green paint, forming a rudimentary symbol on is forehead, and turned into a black cat with red paint. The opposite page seemed to reverse the process. Although at first interested by this sort of mystical crossword, I soon tired of this practice, and found to my delight that a recent visitor had left a series of Len Deighton books that were altogether more to my taste.
I was curled up by the electrical fire perusing such a novel when Mark brought his young conquest in through the door. Although it was his intention to further his millionaire credentials by introducing his respectable twin (Mark’s love affairs being part romanticism, part con,) I was in no mood to play any sort of role in his games and excused myself, saying I would retire to bed early. That night I had a strange dream, in which I was trapped in the upstairs corridor with the painted door. Though I tried to run away from the door, over which blinked a horrid eye, I ended up at the beginning of the corridor again, while on the walls a living fresco showed red and green cats being drowned by an old woman with her back turned. The dreamed changed and I was in a wood with each tree carved over with the symbols from the mystical tomes which I had looked at earlier, except in the darkness the shapes took on a different meaning. Skulls leered in the chiaroscuro moonlight, severed hands came to life, and everywhere creatures split into half and came together in horrendous forms etched into the tree by no human hands. In the centre of the wood I saw a small man, fearful as I, facing a man in a black cloak. The cloaked man’s hands caught hold of the other man’s neck, and suddenly with a blurring motion, their features blended, skin stretching to touch skin in a bloodless mass, teeth meeting teeth and hands hands, while only the eyes remained constant in the grind of breaking form. A terrible scream that emanated from its apex rent the night air, and as it abruptly ended, I saw the cloaked man fall to the ground, lifeless, and the small man turn to me a terrible face and scream in a horrible, high-pitched voice…
I woke up suddenly to see Mark’s girlfriend silhouetted against the door to my bedroom, her hands clasped to her open mouth still in a silent scream and her eyes wide with shock. ‘Your forehead … it’s bleeding - and oh, God, the eyes!’ With that she ran from the room. I turned to look in the mirror against the wall at the foot of the bed, but could see nothing wrong with my face; I thought to follow her, but my half-awake body prevented me from doing so, and I sank back into a dreamless sleep.
That morning I awoke and immediately my thoughts flew to Mark’s girlfriend. I looked at the foot of my bed; no mirror hung there, so I concluded that it had all been a dream. I went upstairs to breakfast, and found Mark looking at me angrily from behind a magazine.
‘Where’s - er - Patricia?’
‘Patroclea took off in the middle of the night, because you scared her so much with that goddamned screaming! What the hell do you think you were doing?’
It seemed a funny sort of question to ask, so I ignored it, and replied defensively that Patroclea’s flights of fancy were nothing to do with me. Then, seeing him irate, I asked why he was reading through a car magazine. He looked embarrassed and changed tact, and said that the scuba diving equipment had arrived today. I had the feeling that the contents of that magazine would find their way into the smoking room at the sophisticated bar in the skiing village nearby, complete with lavish descriptions of ‘how she handles’ and some anecdote about how he beat a Porsche hands-down over a mountainous stretch. However, I did not voice my thoughts, and to placate his mood I agreed to go diving with him at noon.
The air was cold and thin despite the summer sun as I stepped out of the house in a black wetsuit. Mark had readied the equipment by the side of the lake; he was standing in the water doing breathing exercises, framed by the light from the waves, shimmering darkly around his waist. We ‘geared-up’ briskly and without saying much, Mark only remarking on how his stone-age oxygen reader was reading several percentages too high. This prompted a smirk from me, clad in superior Japanese plastic-mesh suit and sporting the latest in gadgets and breathing equipment; Mark saw my grin and coloured angrily for a second, but did not say a word.
Walking in slowly to the clear lake, we looked at each other and felt the excitement course around us like the tide; approaching the shelf where the stones beneath our feet dropped off into black nothingness, we stopped to don our masks and switch on our oxygen levels. ‘Ready?’ asked Mark. ‘Ready,’ I whispered, my voice thick with emotion: Mark, who had already put in his mouthpiece, gave me the thumbs-up and stepped off the brink and fell beneath the icy waters gently churning before us.
The full shock of the sunless, freezing depths hit me even in my body-heat sustaining mesh: Mark I could see was hit a little harder, but he raised his hand in an upwards gradient which instinctively I knew to mean that he’d warm up in a little while. We turned on our torches, and immediately a field of waving weeds, streaming like human hair, lit up beneath us as the largeness of the lake was illumined by our small electronic lights like a canyon of bruised colour.
Then Mark shook my arm, and with a sudden thrill I realised that sloping before us in the clouds of dust that swirled along the bottom of the lake stood a house, not ten metres below the surface. The unreality of this sensation was intensified by the fact that it looked very much like our house, at night, shrouded in curling wreathes of mist that caught the broken light that fell in shards from the surface and transformed them into teeming, soft-glowing planes. There was an ethereal beauty about the house, that seemed so much like our house, but for a gaping hole in the roof that transformed its countenance into a foreboding, mute scream. Mark gestured, and we swam down through the gleaming light that seemed to pierce our bodies and turn them into luminous apparitions.
For the next half-hour we swam about the house, but there was not much to tell of, except that it was exactly like our own, save the violence that had fallen upon it, that seemed to come in the shape of an avalanche that had broken through the top part and at some point slowly melted throughout the house, giving an indicator as to the cause for the lake’s rising levels. It was then, as our oxygen supplies were getting low, that we swam along the corridor in the middle part of the house. Jutting out before us into the narrow hall, there was a broken door where in the recreated house above it this brown door had been faithfully rendered in paint.
Final part tomorrow (if I get any interest).