Beyond Words (2020)

Beyond Words Mary Madec (bio) I look at him across the table. We spend a lot of time looking at each other when he's around. Have you enough? I ask him as he finishes up. We're a twosome a long time. It's not like we need words, but words are comforting. He never allows himself the leisure, the pleasure, the measure of words, although he has talked perfectly twice in my knowing him. He looks across at me and smiles wryly. What does that mean? I'm not sure, but I'm glad he's smiling. This is the way we have been forever. I have walked along the shores of his wordlessness hoping for a message in a bottle. I have searched for writing on the sand and convinced myself that I can read him like a book and he me, and yet sometimes as now when I plunge into the mystery of his life, the life of my twin brother whom I have known forever, I have to breathe deeply as I struggle to find any words to describe what happens between us. He has arrived for holidays, and he is excited. As he gets into the car I see him checking for the gear stick. It's the automatic, Andy, I remind him, and he watches it as I take off. He doesn't look back but gives a wispy side wave of goodbye, glad to be coming away to the water and the wild! As we head off together, I know I will have to put away all thought of work for this holiday. There will be no half measures. I will give him everything because he asks for everything in his need for support. I am all set to do this for the payback: days of super twin intensity, which we both enjoy. I will pour the water over him a million times in the bath and help him dry off and powder his toes. I will give him his socks one by one as he dresses. I will check that his shirt is buttoned in a line and that his sweater is not back to front. And all the time I will chat about this and that to him and he'll say nothing. In the morning I will make oatmeal and he'll fill the kettle to make tea. He loves tea. We'll make tea over and over. We'll listen to music in the afternoon if it's wet, Clifford T. Ward or Simon & Garfunkel, and he'll rock happily. Sometimes I'll talk about memories we share. Sometimes it almost feels like I am talking to myself, I am in the way, but there's something about his attention that tells me he's with me all the same. It's worth doing though for the connection it reignites, a connection I cannot maintain in phone calls or emails. In lockdown we had to resort to WhatsApp, and each time we spoke he sat in silence looking into the phone as I chatted to him for [End Page 7] twenty minutes. I could see he was consoled, especially as he pressed into the screen to give a kiss. It reminded me of his first time when my brothers and I were college students and one weekend back at home we taught him how to give a kiss: Press your lips Andy … like this, and we'd gently nudge him to meet ours. We could see he liked this even if it was rather mechanical. So here he is on his holidays … here we are! I know that he loves it, his affirmation as delicate as an eyelid flicker but there nonetheless. And I need it too, this mysterious love of my twin, this wordless brother who keeps challenging me to put words on unwordy things. I cannot remember a time when he wasn't there, always part of me, always by me in some way, on the edge, in the periphery as we played games he wouldn't play but still liked to be part of. I like to remember this as he comes to me on...