Ordinary Pain

Photo by Vijay Sadasivani, Pexels

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by Lucy Hall

It had been over a year. That was what James was thinking as he wound his way through the plastic bollards. He ignored the street worker who was yelling at him, one hand on his head and the other outstretched, fingers spread like a child holding an apple. It was raining, and James didn’t have a hood, so his face was wet. He didn’t care. It had been over a year. At last, he reached the edge of the field—park, technically—and surveyed its emptiness. He made his strides self-consciously bigger and walked toward the café where his brother waited for him.

Kieran was a giant, knees up like a praying mantis on a chair too small for him. They said hello to each other, and no one around them could have known their relationship or the length of time they’d gone without seeing one another. There were no geographical excuses, just emotional ones. Estranged felt much too dramatic; drifted felt too trivial. A hiatus implied an intention that wasn’t there.

The chair was not too small for James, who was five inches shorter than his brother, despite being a full hour older. James wasn’t short, though—he was actually above the average height for men globally. It was just that Kieran was very tall.

Over a bad flat white and a sparkling water, they caught up. They talked about football—the team they both supported and whether or not either of them still played. They talked about their parents, who lived in the countryside now and whom neither had seen for the past few months. They talked about their older sister, who was a lawyer and worked too hard. The conversation was benign, but it was also banal.

The thing about James and Kieran was that they had once been close. They were twins, after all, and it’s surprising when twins aren’t close. Twins aren’t allowed to be like normal siblings, ignoring each other intermittently in school corridors and yelling at one another to stay out of their bedroom. Twins are expected to have an exaggerated sense of the other, to fight only in a way that conveys how close they are.

Somewhere along the way, their new lives and new iterations of families became more important to each of them than the other one. This is what adulthood does: it insists you move forward and create new structures, leaving the old ones behind. James and Kieran never stopped being close, but sometimes it felt like a secret they had to keep. When partners or roommates behaved in certain ways, they missed their twin so much. Perhaps they would have been happier if they’d stayed living together, defying all societal expectations. It’s hard to be wrenched away from something that was your everything.

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Over the next few days, James was angry at Kieran. He took his anger out on his wife, Jane, who couldn’t understand it. She asked a couple of times, “Does this have anything to do with when you met up with Kieran the other day?” But he only snapped back that of course it didn’t. When he answered, she tried to ask him how Kieran was. She kept saying, “How is Kieran coping?” and James felt betrayed by her when she asked that.

A week after they met, James decided to do something about the way he was feeling. He sat down in front of the computer—a large flat screen they’d invested in for no good reason, considering that James was a carpenter, Jane was a teacher, and their son was only three. James used the flat screen so infrequently that it made a strange noise, like an animal being woken up. Big, misty eyes blinked, so for a moment, James thought the computer really was an animal.

He pulled up a blank document and began to type:

Kieran,
It was nice to see you the other day. I am, as I think I said many times, extremely sorry for what you have gone through. I apologise for my absence over such a difficult time.
However, I do not think you asked me a single question about my own wellbeing. If you had, you would have realized that I have been struggling with an intensity that might not always have been visible from the “outside.”

James stared at the words. Why the fuck was he writing like that? He had never been someone who expressed anger through coldness. Why start now?

He hit backspace, watched the words fly backward off the screen like stones being kicked off a cliff.

He started again.

Kieran.
I don’t think you asked me a single question the other day. You didn’t ask me how I was. I am not in a very good place. Which you would have known, if you’d asked me.
I know there’s nothing in my life that seems objectively bad, but you have to know by now that life isn’t always what it seems on the surface.

Again, weird. Like he was trying to sound a certain way.

Why am I always in your shadow, even in the shadow of pain?

James didn’t send Kieran any email at all.

When Jane got home from being with their son at a birthday party, she told James that she had invited Kieran over for dinner. James couldn’t believe it, but instead of feeling angry, he felt himself plummet—not even slowly, just all at once.

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When Kieran arrived for dinner that Wednesday evening—three days after James had typed and deleted the emails—James was nowhere to be seen. Jane ushered him in and offered him some wine, which Kieran refused because he had been drinking too much lately, and if he was ever going to get his life together again, he had to be able to make decisions like refusing wine.

The kitchen surface was glistening, and Kieran understood that it had been freshly wiped for his benefit. He accepted some sparkling water from Jane and asked where his nephew was.

“Oh, in bed. We’re trying to put him down by seven now.” She was shakily pouring gin into a glass. Kieran wanted to ask where James was but didn’t.

“How are you, Kieran?”

He never knew how to answer this, so he said what he always said:

“I miss her, but I’m holding up.”

Kieran’s wife had died nine months earlier after a short, brutal battle with brain cancer. She had been thirty-six years old, and the thing Kieran hadn’t told many people was that she’d been pregnant when she was diagnosed. The baby was aborted at once, of course. Her chances of survival were even slimmer with another life trying to flourish inside her diminishing one. Kieran mourned the loss of the baby (he knew it was spurious to call it a baby, but he thought of it as one) in private. The only other person who had known was his wife’s sister, and she lived in America. The time difference meant they only ever texted, and Kieran suspected it was a relief to both of them. Each simply associated the other with the worst thing to have ever happened.

“James should be down in a minute,” Jane said, her back to Kieran now, stirring a huge pot on the stove.

“I was a little worried about him the other day.” The sentence had fallen out by itself, and now it sat, like vomit, on the table between them.

“I just mean—” Kieran fumbled, picked up a cloth, put it down. “I just mean that he didn’t seem himself.”

Jane was nodding.

James had been called the moody twin from early on. Unhelpful, of course, but it was the ’80s. He had what their mother called storms, where he’d wreak havoc at school and push boundaries at home, and then he’d disappear into near silence for a few days. At first, there seemed to be no pattern to his storms, but Kieran had by now observed that they happened when James felt he wasn’t being taken seriously. He suspected James was in a storm now.

Kieran had never known what to do when they happened, but his presence alone had seemed enough to nudge James upward. When his wife had gotten sick, Kieran had to shuffle things around, and he resented James and his self-imposed problems. His wife was dying.

Now, he pushed open the door to James’s bedroom and found him standing topless, wearing jeans that fit him badly. He was staring out the window and did not move when Kieran entered.

Neither of them spoke.

“I regret not accepting Jane’s offer of wine,” Kieran said after a minute.

James turned around but didn’t make eye contact. He pulled a T-shirt over his head.

“You can change your mind.”

Kieran shrugged. “Feels like an admission of defeat.”

Ideas of apologies sprang up like shoots around them. Neither said a word. Kieran turned away, facing the landing. Pain climbed up and wound its way around his torso until it became ivy, squeezing his heart—and then, soft, a hand on his shoulder.

“Let’s go downstairs,” said James.

At dinner, they talked about Kieran’s work. He was an economist, high up at a left-wing think tank. He had only taken two months off. James tried to challenge him with questions like, Was government expenditure a good idea when there was debt? and Had progressive taxation actually even been proven to boost the economy?—and Kieran, as always, had an answer for everything.

It would be misleading to describe the atmosphere between James and Kieran as awkward—certainly, that was not the way either of them experienced it, though perhaps it was how Jane felt. Their lives were too bound to ever allow for awkwardness, and frostiness wasn’t quite right either. But there was something stale and unhappy in the air, like a festering loaf of bread that needed to be thrown away. Only neither could quite locate it.

After the dinner, they did begin to text a little. They were watching the same TV show, an odd and comforting one about an American who comes to coach football in the UK. James even suggested they meet at the pub to watch Arsenal one day, but Kieran was in Manchester for a conference on rural poverty (seemed strange to locate such a conference in the city, James thought, but didn’t say).

One, two, then three months passed, and they did not see each other. Then, it was James’s son’s fourth birthday, and Kieran was invited to the celebration.

He received the email from Jane when he was at work. He had been having a hard day; it had recently been the one-year anniversary of his wife’s death, and it hit him in a way he hadn’t expected, given the arbitrariness of time. He was sure he had nearly drunk himself to death that night, had become a caricature of someone struggling—swigging vodka from the bottle, meeting a drug dealer outside at midnight. He’d even considered heroin. The shame he felt after his spiral was almost as bad as the spiral itself, so he coped the only way he knew how: by throwing himself into work, determined to prove he was a functional person. There was a world, and he was in it.

So when the invitation came through for his nephew’s birthday, he thought: I can’t go. And then right after that, he thought: I have to go.

The day of the party, he thought only of his unborn child. Unborn, never born, dead? He sifted through streams of people in his brother’s house, taking wine when he was offered, eating whatever there was to eat. James was busy hosting, and Kieran sensed that he was better in himself. He felt pleased about that, but in a detached way—in the way one might feel pleased about learning that anyone they cared for was happier. After an hour or so, Kieran drifted out the door without saying goodbye. On the next road, he leaned against a garden wall and pulled up the email app on his phone. He felt a bit drunk. He started to write to James.

I’m happy to see you happy again. I’m not sure where we go from here, but I really hope you can find some inner peace.

He thought, I better not send that when I’m drunk, and clicked save—but actually, he had clicked send.

James didn’t see the email until much later, when all the guests had gone and his son was in bed. It struck him as odd, and he showed it to Jane.

“Call him,” Jane said.

The phone rang through and through. James wrote back instead.

It occurred to Jane, who was watching her husband, that he was very casual about his life. He didn’t value it highly, never had. She had something important to tell him. Jane was pregnant and had been waiting for a quiet moment to talk to her husband, who had struggled with being a parent the first time around. In her mind, there was no question of having an abortion, but still, she had to pretend to consider what he wanted. She watched him pacing, tapping fingers on the screen.

“Is Kieran okay?” she asked.

He shook his head in a manner that conveyed he didn’t know.

By the river, Kieran thought about suicide. Life, which he had always taken for granted as being broadly good, had ripped him apart. But even as he pictured hurling himself off the bridge, he knew that death would be just as bad. It was true that death brought oblivion, but life brought hope. He looked at his phone, alight with his brother’s message. How could they navigate this new rupture of meaning? Perhaps they wouldn’t—couldn’t.

He put his phone back in his pocket, turned away from the river, and walked home.

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Lucy Hall is a writer from London and her work has been published in the Guardian, the New Statesman, the Independent, The Metro, and other well known publications. She worked for two years in Labour’s Press office and has worked for five years at a high level as a communications specialist / press officer for a number of organisations. Lucy is also an activist against sexual violence and set up The Sunlight Project which celebrates the survivors of sexual violence. She has recently been offered a scholarship to do a postgraduate degree in Creating Writing in New York.