The Fahrenheit Twins Read Online Free PDF Page A

morning, after a blissfully dreamless sleep, I wake to the sound of coughing. From various recesses in the honeycomb of bunks, gruesomely distinctive snorts, hacks and wheezes are flying out. In time, I will come to recognise each cough and associate it with a name and a history. On that first morning, I know nothing.
    I lean over the side of my bed and look down. On the floor far below, lit up brilliantly by the sunlight shining down through the transparent ceiling, is a silvery pool of urine. The metal towers of sleeping berths are mirrored in it; I scan our reflections trying to find myself, but can’t tell the difference between all the tiny dishevelled faces. I raise one hand, to wave into the glowing pool, to clinch which one is me. Several hands – no, half a dozen – wave back at me.
    I am no longer missing.



ANDY COMES BACK
     
    His eyes fluttered open, and he was surprised to find himself alive.
    If he’d thought about himself at all in the last five years, he’d considered himself dead. Occasionally he’d peek out at the world, and for his peekhole he would use the gibbering, shrieking idiot the nursing staff called Andy.
    But today he’d dropped in to the idiot’s head to have a look, and there he was: alive as anything. It was a hell of a shock.
    He sat up, immediately aware of the institutional pyjamas he was in.
    ‘Morning, Andy!’ said the old man in the next bed.
    ‘Morning,’ he responded vaguely, looking at his bedside cabinet, which had nothing on it but flowers and orange juice.
    ‘Ha! Good for you , Andy boy!’ said his neighbour, as if impressed.
    Andy checked inside the cabinet. It was empty. He twisted around to look at the wall behind his bed. A flimsy plastic bas-relief of Father Christmas had pride of place there, connected by a barbed wire of tinsel to other identical Father Christmases behind other beds. Blu-tacked under Andy’s Santa were photographs of a woman and three children, in various combinations. A child’s painting, rather tattered and signed Robert , was almost hidden behind the bedhead.
    A nurse strolled into the ward and said hello to everyone. She was wearing disposable gloves.
    ‘Andy said good morning just now,’ the old man informed her at once.
    ‘That’s nice,’ she said, obviously not believing it. She strode over to Andy’s bed and without warning pulled back the covers. Briskly uninhibited, she inspected his crotch, then slipped a hand under his bottom to check the white undersheet.
    ‘You been a good boy tonight, Andy?’ she cooed approvingly, addressing his lower half.
    ‘What?’
    She carried on instinctively, before she’d had a chance to decode the sound he’d made.
    ‘Not poo’d the bed?’
    ‘I should hope not,’ he said. ‘What do you think I am?’
    She stared at him openmouthed, stuck for an answer. Then she ran away.
    It turned out he’d been a drooling imbecile for five years. He’d contracted a rare disease, survived it, but lost his mind. When first admitted to an acute ward, he’d presented an exciting challenge to medical science. All sorts of experts had tried to pursue his consciousness wherever it had gone, and bring it back. Then the weeks had passed, and life went on, and the hospital needed his bed. He’d been shifted to a nursing home, and that’s where he’d lived ever since.
    He gathered he’d been very difficult to care for, twitching convulsively and flinging his limbs about whenever the nurses tried to shave or wash him, sending cereal bowls and cutlery flying across the room with one slam of his fist, waking the other patients up at night with dog-like howls. His howls, in fact, could be heard even beyond the nursing home environs. Despite stiff competition from all the other mournful cries these walls had ever contained, his howls had achieved legendary status.
    Calm and soft-spoken now, he asked for a mirror and a razor.
    A nurse fetched him the electric shaver that had been shoved across his squirming