The Fahrenheit Twins Read Online Free PDF Page B

nursing staff, Bromwyn took Andy home. A staunch non-driver all the years that he’d encouraged her to learn, she’d bitten the bullet and got her licence barely six months after his mind had gone. He would never know if mastering the controls had come easily to her. She drove mechanically and without undue concern for the other traffic, like all experienced drivers. He found this oddly unbecoming.
    The old neighbourhood had scarcely changed. This seemed to him an indictment of the sort of neighbourhood it was. He had moved here, reluctantly, for the sake of his job, which of course no longer existed.
    His wife had found work, though. It was all she talked about on the way home, understandably.
    At the front door of their house she could not, for a moment, find her key. This flustered her immoderately. Key found, she insisted on going in ahead of him when she’d opened the door. The house, from what he could glimpse as he followed her through, was cluttered and untidy: young boys’ mess.
    ‘I’m sorry the place is in such a state,’ said Bromwyn, although she sounded irritated, not sorry. He knew damn well he was unwelcome, that he had come back to life at much too short a notice for her. He didn’t care.
    The house was a single mother’s place now. Everything of his had been removed. He found this interesting, but didn’t mind much. Nothing he had ever possessed had been quite what he wanted anyway. He guessed correctly that his den had been given to the eldest of his sons, and he approved of that: Robert would be nine now, an age at which a boy deserved a room of his own.
    Andy wasn’t looking forward to meeting his children, though.
    His wife seemed hell-bent on taking him through a guided confessional tour of what had changed, and why. Extra space had been required for X, which meant that Y had to be shifted to Z, where it got in the way of … He told her he could wait until later for all that, and suggested she make them both a cup of tea.
    The kitchen bench was littered with the mess made by children who’d been too young to serve themselves last time he’d seen them. He cleared a spot to lean his elbow on as his wife stiltedly made the tea.
    ‘Now,’ she said, her back to him, ‘Is it two sugars or one?’
    ‘Two,’ he said absently. They seemed mutually agreed to let this exchange pass as if unnoticed. Instead, they sat at the breakfast bench and drank their tea in silence. This, as far as he could remember, was not unusual for them, although of course it felt that way in the circumstances.
    ‘I have to clean up,’ said Bromwyn at last.
    ‘I’m not stopping you,’ he said.
    She stared pointedly at his elbow leaning in the midst of the plates. He understood he was in the way, got up and walked into the living room.
    He sat down in the old armchair and picked up a newspaper to see what sorts of things the world was up to these days.
    Meeting his sons was not as much of an ordeal as he’d thought it would be. The eldest was in fact ten (a miscalculation on his part) and seemed uninterested in him or, for that matter, in Bromwyn.
    ‘See you later, Dad,’ he said, and went up to his room.
    The younger boys were curious, shy, and friendly, as if he were an interesting visitor. They asked him how he got well.
    ‘I don’t know ,’ he said. ‘ Nobody knows. It’s a mystery of science.’
    They seemed to like that.
    They asked him, too, what it was like to be mad. The seven-year-old asked,
    ‘Can you still make that noise you made when you were mad? You know, like woo-woo-woooo? ’
    ‘Sure,’ he said, oblivious of his wife going rigid with mortification behind him. Craning his head back and opening his mouth as wide as possible, he did an impression of his old howl.
    ‘What do you think?’ he asked his son.
    ‘Mm,’ said the seven-year-old dubiously. ‘It was better before.’
    ‘Sorry,’ he said, amused.
    ‘That’s quite enough,’ said his wife, sounding very careworn, which he