still rattles and bangs and splutters, but is – according to its loving owner – perfect.
I think about the flask, which is slightly lopsided, the glass of one of its shoulders slightly thicker than the other. I actually go upstairs and hold it in my hand. The little seed fish (which aren’t swimming today) are actually blemishes, bubbles in the glass which shouldn’t really be there, mistakes in the glassmaking process. These imperfections are also the beautiful part of the flask. They are what shimmer and shine as the flask breathes, lives.
Then I think about my brothers lying together in their cot. They are not perfect, they are not even normal according to Paddy.
They’re not any old twins. They’re Siamese.
In the old days, before medicine could make people perfect, conjoined twins stayed the way they were born. Like Chang and Eng. Si showed me pictures of them online. Born in Thailand (or Siam, as it was then) in 1811, Chang and Eng were joined down the chest in just the same way as Richie and Clem. They began life in the circus, just like Paddy said, being exhibited as ‘curiosities’ all over the world. But they broke free, bought a plantation, ran their own businesses, got married to sisters and had twenty-one children between them. They were happy and lived until they were seventy-two.
No one tried to separate Chang and Eng. They were allowed to stay together.
Then I wonder – what’s more perfect? Two little boys joined, or two little boys separated? And I try and imagine a world where everyone is born conjoined and only once every thousand, thousand births, do separate human beings arrive. Then I watch conjoined people bending over the separate cots and gasping. And, all at once, a team of twenty-two doctors (in eleven pairs of two) arrives to sew those little babies together again, so nobody will ever know they were born apart. And when the doctors have done their work and it’s all gone swimmingly, I hear the relatives heave sighs of relief and say, “What perfect little boys.”
While I’m on perfect, I think about Zoe. I haven’t spoken to her since I discovered her name means life , since she shouted over her shoulder, Since when were we joined at the hip ?
And she hasn’t spoken to me either.
This friend I made in kindergarten. This person who bounds into my life two or three times a week and with whom I’ve been as close as Richie is to Clem.
I decide to ring her up, I decide to tell her about her beautiful life-giving name.
“Hello,” I say brightly.
“Hi,” she says, but she sounds suspicious, like I’m just about to go all heavy on her again.
So what I actually say is, “They share more organs than we thought.” It just sort of falls out of me, so maybe I was always going to say this.
“What?” says Zoe.
“The twins. They share ribs and a bit of their lower sternum and their abdominal cavity and a bit of pericardium, which is the heart. Their heart.”
“Oh,” says Zoe.
“And also their liver. They just have the one liver.”
“Urgh,” she says. “That’s gross.”
Gross.
I put the phone down.
She rings back.
“Look,” she says, “I didn’t mean gross like… gross.”
“What did you mean?”
“I meant, you know… Nothing against your brothers or anything. And I don’t have a problem with internal organs, but livers. I mean nobody wants to talk about stuff like that, do they?”
I do. I have to, otherwise it all just sits like a heavy red stone in my brain.
“Since 1950,” I say to my friend Zoe, “seventy-five per cent of separations result in one live twin.” This isn’t one of Si’s statistics. It’s one I found myself. On the net.
“Seventy-five per cent?” queries Zoe, as if she’s trying to work out the maths.
“Yes,” I say. “Or, put it another way, seventy-five per cent of the time, when they separate people who have been,” I pause, “so close… one twin dies.”
“Oh,” she says.
“So who do you think
I think about the flask, which is slightly lopsided, the glass of one of its shoulders slightly thicker than the other. I actually go upstairs and hold it in my hand. The little seed fish (which aren’t swimming today) are actually blemishes, bubbles in the glass which shouldn’t really be there, mistakes in the glassmaking process. These imperfections are also the beautiful part of the flask. They are what shimmer and shine as the flask breathes, lives.
Then I think about my brothers lying together in their cot. They are not perfect, they are not even normal according to Paddy.
They’re not any old twins. They’re Siamese.
In the old days, before medicine could make people perfect, conjoined twins stayed the way they were born. Like Chang and Eng. Si showed me pictures of them online. Born in Thailand (or Siam, as it was then) in 1811, Chang and Eng were joined down the chest in just the same way as Richie and Clem. They began life in the circus, just like Paddy said, being exhibited as ‘curiosities’ all over the world. But they broke free, bought a plantation, ran their own businesses, got married to sisters and had twenty-one children between them. They were happy and lived until they were seventy-two.
No one tried to separate Chang and Eng. They were allowed to stay together.
Then I wonder – what’s more perfect? Two little boys joined, or two little boys separated? And I try and imagine a world where everyone is born conjoined and only once every thousand, thousand births, do separate human beings arrive. Then I watch conjoined people bending over the separate cots and gasping. And, all at once, a team of twenty-two doctors (in eleven pairs of two) arrives to sew those little babies together again, so nobody will ever know they were born apart. And when the doctors have done their work and it’s all gone swimmingly, I hear the relatives heave sighs of relief and say, “What perfect little boys.”
While I’m on perfect, I think about Zoe. I haven’t spoken to her since I discovered her name means life , since she shouted over her shoulder, Since when were we joined at the hip ?
And she hasn’t spoken to me either.
This friend I made in kindergarten. This person who bounds into my life two or three times a week and with whom I’ve been as close as Richie is to Clem.
I decide to ring her up, I decide to tell her about her beautiful life-giving name.
“Hello,” I say brightly.
“Hi,” she says, but she sounds suspicious, like I’m just about to go all heavy on her again.
So what I actually say is, “They share more organs than we thought.” It just sort of falls out of me, so maybe I was always going to say this.
“What?” says Zoe.
“The twins. They share ribs and a bit of their lower sternum and their abdominal cavity and a bit of pericardium, which is the heart. Their heart.”
“Oh,” says Zoe.
“And also their liver. They just have the one liver.”
“Urgh,” she says. “That’s gross.”
Gross.
I put the phone down.
She rings back.
“Look,” she says, “I didn’t mean gross like… gross.”
“What did you mean?”
“I meant, you know… Nothing against your brothers or anything. And I don’t have a problem with internal organs, but livers. I mean nobody wants to talk about stuff like that, do they?”
I do. I have to, otherwise it all just sits like a heavy red stone in my brain.
“Since 1950,” I say to my friend Zoe, “seventy-five per cent of separations result in one live twin.” This isn’t one of Si’s statistics. It’s one I found myself. On the net.
“Seventy-five per cent?” queries Zoe, as if she’s trying to work out the maths.
“Yes,” I say. “Or, put it another way, seventy-five per cent of the time, when they separate people who have been,” I pause, “so close… one twin dies.”
“Oh,” she says.
“So who do you think
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