Twin Truths Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Part Two

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Part Three

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Epilogue

  The Inspiration Behind Twin Truths

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  TWIN TRUTHS

  SHELAN RODGER

  For Bull

  ‘Between moments an “I” walks.’

  Cruden Rodger

  PART ONE

  Chapter 1

  They say drowning is a good way to die, that panic quickly gives way to the best high you’ll ever have, but I don’t believe it.

  I love swimming. It empties me. There was a time we would swim further and further out, daring each other on, until the shore looked like the sky and white foam meant the end of the reef was only yards away. We knew not to go beyond the white line. We knew that the water beyond the reef would no longer protect us and sharks watched, but sheltered by the reef we were fearless.

  The day I learnt the true meaning of panic, I was in a swimming pool, not thinking, just stroking gently through the water, marking the symmetry of length upon length with blurred goggle vision. Cool, calming, muffling water. Then it happened. The breath I was holding left my body and I found myself gasping inexplicably for air.

  Something seemed to be pulling me downwards. I felt myself sinking, plunging, vaguely aware that the air was above me and yet unable to control my limbs, plummeting deeper under the surface. I tried to scream. I had passed the white line. I was being sucked down into the depths of the ocean, no air, down and down into the devil’s throat.

  When I came to, I was cold and shivering. There were people around me. I was wrapped in something warm and lifted onto a stretcher. The doctors never knew what had caused the fit in the water.

  * * *

  But that was a lifetime ago. Today was just another day in my new life. I went through the motions of normality, stepping out of the air- conditioned skyscraper where I worked into the noisy sauna of Buenos Aires street life. I hailed one of the black and yellow taxis and sank into the back seat, thankful for the sound of tango on the radio competing with the jostle of horns outside.

  ‘Boludo!’ yelled my taxi driver suddenly at an old man who had missed the change of lights and stumbled too late onto the pedestrian crossing in front of us. For a second I caught the look of helplessness on his face before the onslaught of hooting horns and raised voices. Then he stepped back onto the pavement, reprimanded; shaken no doubt, but safe.

  It was a long time since I had felt safe. And yet I tried. I spent my days teaching English to middle managers in downtown Buenos Aires. They found me quirky, I think, optimistic and just mysterious enough to be interesting. Once, a local journalist interviewed me for an article on English people living in Buenos Aires. The focus was not on the Anglo Argentine community, long since a part of the social fabric, but on a small new wave of British ex-pats and travellers. Fifteen years after the Falklands War, we were still a novelty. I was described, rather awkwardly, I thought, as ‘something off a Hello Kitty sticker, able to permit herself the luxury of smoking roll-ups without losing her femininity’. My cropped black hair gave me away as a foreigner in this city of long-haired, stick-thin beauties, and yet it framed my face in a way that gifted me a certain confidence. I knew from people’s reactions that my eyes were my best feature, and most of the time I relished this knowledge, but just occasionally I envied my sister the distance wearing glasses gave her.

  My taxi pulled up outside the ten-storey building where I lived and I went through more motions: tipping the driver, greeting the porter in the lobby, leaving behind the shady street level of cobble stones and pavement cafés to climb into a leafless world of concrete reaching for the sky. The sound of horns and sirens was never far away, so height was at a premium – height bought you light and relative peace.

  Behind closed doors at last in my rented, one-bedroom, ninth-floor flat, I slumped on the sofa with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, and fought with a voice that nagged at me, like an invisible rat nibbling at my feet. It was a voice that mocked me for taking so long to do what I had come here to do and I turned to something else to block it out. I decided to answer Pablo’s sixth unanswered phone message. Pablo. We spoke two languages together that helped me forget. One was Spanish, the other was sex.

  ‘Jenny, llamaste!’ His surprise seemed genuine, and excited me.

  ‘Did you think I wouldn’t call?’ The pause before his reply said more than most of our words ever did.

  ‘I knew you would eventually. Want to come out and play?’

  I bit my tongue. Play the game, play the game. This is what you want. ‘So shall I come and pick you up?’ Him, impatient.

  ‘Do you think I’m going to fall for that one?’ I was firm. ‘No, let’s meet at the restaurant, the usual one.’

  ‘I thought you might like to do something different?’

  ‘No thanks,’ I answered, with as little emotion as I could muster.

  So I dressed in a tight black miniskirt and skimpy white top, and slipped anonymously into the Buenos Aires night.

  * * *

  After three hours of anticipation with Pablo, oiled by a bottle of Borgoña red wine, coffee, cognac and a great deal of eye contact, I am hungry, yet there is something about entering the place that I can never get used to. I think it’s the smugness of it all, the coy yet knowing glint in the eyes of the couple who are just leaving as you step into the red light, or the matter-of-factness about the man behind the counter who asks if you want ‘with video or without’ and the discreet way he hands you the keys. Even in the lift it is difficult. You feel like a cliché, following in the foot
steps of hundreds of others who have had the same banal thoughts as you, and you wonder who was in the room before you. Later this will be spice in your orgasm, but now it makes you queasy and you fret about whether the sheets are clean.

  Click. The room is rich and red and velvet, with mirrors lining the walls and the ceiling. Now comes the interesting part, the part when your consciousness undergoes its ritual metamorphosis and, with the help of his fingers already between your legs, everything that has so recently made you want to retch, including the image on the video screen, which you switched off when you entered the room, suddenly excites you. You are anonymous, at one with the human race because you are all just pieces of flesh. The mirrors juggle images of breasts and hands and thrusting movement and before you lose the urge you come in an orgy of nameless bodies.

  But afterwards, Pablo broke the rules.

  ‘Jenny, why does it always have to be here? Can’t we go to your place one day, or mine?’

  The question was so uncharacteristically direct, his tone so unashamedly appealing, that a wave of tenderness threatened to drown my resolve. I tried to blink away the feeling, tried to fix in my mind the red velvet walls, remembered suddenly the old man trying to cross the street and fought back an urge to cry in Pablo’s arms.

  ‘Please, Pablo, don’t ever ask me that again.’

  Chapter 2

  ‘Live in Brixton, with a bunch of black turd-burglars? Fuck off! I’d rather teach English!’

  It was a Friday night, one of my English evenings. I’d just invested in a barbecue and some potted bamboo plants, which were lined up along the railing at the edge of my balcony in an attempt to block out the city. Being a top-storey flat, there was no roof overhead and so four of us were sitting incongruously around a table under the stars, against a backdrop of rustling bamboo and sizzling steak.

  Conversation often circled, among us voluntary exiles, around why we were here and where else we’d like to be but it was just like Nick to shatter the social surface. The effect was exactly what he’d intended, and a prawn colour crept up Henry’s face and gathered in a frown at his temples as he tried to decide whether Nick was being serious or not.

  ‘Do you mind?’ interjected Sally. ‘Some of my best friends are . . .’

  ‘Yuk!’ spluttered Nick, his imitation gob on the verandah floor turning Henry a shade pinker. ‘You patronising bitch. I bet you tell everyone some of your best friends have short legs, don’t you?’

  If Nick had had a hand in his own genetic make-up he would have combined his penetrating blue eyes and blond hair with the body of a long-legged god, but he was somehow just never as tall as his good looks suggested he ought to be.

  Henry glared at the food on his plate. Sally looked confused. ‘Your legs aren’t that short,’ she pleaded.

  ‘Oh fuck off, Sally, I’m only joking.’ Nick softened. ‘Who’s for more wine? Henry?’

  Perhaps it had been a mistake to invite Henry and Nick on the same night after all.

  ‘So where would you live if you had the choice, Nick?’

  ‘Oh, anywhere really, as long as there’s sun and good wine and beautiful girls.’

  ‘I don’t believe you’re as superficial as you pretend to be, Nick.’

  This, of course, was Henry. Henry the serious. Henry the caring. Henry the man who would deprive a Paraguayan maid of her sole source of income out of principle.

  ‘To Henry, who is in the wrong place at the wrong time, doing the wrong job,’ announced Nick all of a sudden, raising his glass and warming to a line of thought that had tickled him. ‘To the rich minority who can afford the luxury of live-in maids, psychoanalysis, aerobics, sun beds – and English classes with Henry!’

  ‘But he didn’t know it was going to be like that before he came.’ Sally, struggling, but ever faithful.

  ‘Don’t be so fucking stupid, Sally. Teaching English as a foreign language is elitist, wherever you are. How many illegitimate, under- nourished, barefoot Bolivians have you seen floating around International House in London? There is nothing charitable about EFL!’

  ‘Well, that may be a good thing!’ I regretted opening my mouth immediately. ‘I mean, look at it this way,’ I continued, sidestepping. ‘You’ve got to be realistic. You’re providing a tool that benefits Argentina, but of course it has to be the privileged who get that tool – one, because they can pay for it, and, two, because they have the education to be able to use it.

  ‘Don’t get me wrong,’ I added, as I noticed an unsteady hint of approval in the pink on Henry’s face. ‘There’s nothing noble about my motives for being here, I just wanted to shut Nick up!’

  Nick had been in Argentina for seven years now. Twenty-five when he arrived, he had taught for two years, fallen in love with the lifestyle, the status he enjoyed as an Englishman abroad and the opportunities this gave him to avoid the more obvious trappings of growing up. Then he had left the classroom to dabble in translating and journalism.

  Intelligent but deliberately provocative, he either wound people up or charmed them, depending on his mood. He loved women and good times, and his disregard for the privacy of others added spice to conversation. In fact, I admired his ability to be so probing about other people and so private about himself. Once, drunk, I had ended up in bed with him, but he had lost his erection and I had fallen asleep, and neither of us spoke about it in the morning.

  Henry and Sally had only been here six months and were still coming to terms with the reality of non-ethnic, young, buzzing, middle-class Buenos Aires.

  How well did any of us know each other? I thought of the journalist’s description of me. It was a year now since I had come to Argentina and still no one really knew anything about me.

  * * *

  Too much whisky had gone, Henry and Sally had left and Nick was talking to the ceiling from the sofa.

  ‘So what is Jenny going to be when she grows up?’

  ‘What makes you think she hasn’t grown up already?’

  ‘Girl comes to Buenos Aires for no apparent reason, stays for no apparent reason. Devoid of all apparent reason equals not grown up.’

  ‘Nick, you’re drunk. Go home.’

  ‘Seriously, why did you come to Argentina?’

  ‘Do you really want to know?’

  Nick had asked me the same question so many times now, and every time I fobbed him off with some exaggerated anecdote, borrowed from the latest book I was reading or the latest film I had seen. It had become a game which we played as earnestly as children role-playing doctors and nurses. He would ask questions and suggest details in sentences that started ‘And I suppose . . .’ or ‘You must have felt . . .’ and between us we would build drunken fantasies of past lives. This appealed to the side of him that refused to take life seriously, yet underlying the game was a sense of growing irritation that I was holding back the truth. The fact that he was so private about himself never really seemed to register. He was used to prising the lid off other people’s lives. It came as easily to him as opening a tin can, and when he got bored of the contents he would simply take another one off the shelf.

  ‘Yes, really, I genuinely want to know. No bullshit.’

  My stubbornness had created a kind of bond between us and tonight I was tired, so I began to talk. Nick took care not to interrupt and listened with solemn interest in recognition that this time we were not playing.

  I told him about the man I married, about the lack of words and the endless words, about the peace inside me, and the dreams. And then about the day he was diagnosed HIV positive and the way our words and wordlessness broke down. About the battle to make him believe I would stand by him, the slow coming to terms and the rebuilding of our lives around this knowledge we didn’t want. About the way that we adapted and our confidence grew, the feeling that we were bigger than anything else, that together we would defy this thing. And then how I came home one day and found him gone. Worry, panic at first, then a phone call: dislocated, unrecognisable. My hys
teria drowning in a vast, still sea; a pebble jumping on an ocean floor. Smoking, unable to eat, drawing incessant Venn diagrams inside my head in an attempt to make sense of what had happened, because if only I could understand it would be alright. But I never did.

  ‘And so I came to Argentina – somewhere different and faraway – to get away, to forget, to start again . . .’ By the time I had finished talking, the blue light of early morning was pushing down the edges of the tallest buildings, whitewashing over the concrete. Nick stubbed out yet another cigarette and rubbed his eyes.

  ‘For the first time I understand. Are you OK?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m fine. I need to go to sleep.’

  And he gave me a big bear hug as he left the flat, as if my revelations had given him a new status in my life.

  I listened to the clunk of the lift dropping to the ground floor and looked around at the aftermath of the night. Distractedly, I counted the cigarette butts in each of the three ashtrays, a habit of my sister’s which had infuriated me. I collected the glasses and brought the charred remnants of barbecued meat in from the balcony. My eyes wandered, glazed, over the bare walls and I thought for an instant of a house I had once known where every corner nestled a photo, and I wished that I had grown up in that house, surrounded by warmth and stories.

  Moving like a ghost in someone else’s dream, I drew down the blinds in the bedroom, blocking out the now sharp, white light of Sunday morning, and crawled into heavy sleep.

  None of what I had told Nick was true, but it was as close as I could get.

  Chapter 3

  Just time for a coffee before the next one arrived. ‘Clara, who’s next? Can you bring me a coffee?’

  ‘La inglesita, Jenny Patterson. Ya te traigo el café.’

  His eyes drifted over the photos on his desk and fell upon one of his wife, in the days before they’d had children. She was pretty, desperately pretty in the photo, and still pretty now. He knew she resented the fact that he was a psychotherapist, was jealous of the intimacy he shared with his patients. It was no use pointing out to her that the intimacy was one-sided; that he was not ‘sharing’ anything and that all he was really doing was prompting people to confront and deal with their own demons. She held it against him that he did so much listening to other people that he had no time for listening to her, and to a certain extent she was right. When the problems started between them he found he had no patience for them, no patience with her, yet he always congratulated himself on his professionalism.