Perfect People

  Another major cause for worry is that Luke and Phoebe seem to go longer between feeds than the books – and Megan, the health visitor – say is normal. The paediatrician thinks this is strange, too, yet he insists they seem totally healthy. And he says they definitely are bigger than normal for their age. Noticeably bigger. But I remember Dr Dettore telling us that they would grow and mature faster than normal babies, so that’s not such a big concern.

  We’ve been told it is important to give them separate identities, not to call them twins, and to be sure on their first birthday, which is fast looming up, that they have separate birthday cakes and presents.

  I’m thinking it’s strange how perspectives change. I know I should be grateful to have two such lovely, healthy babies. But how true that expression is about other pastures looking greener. Los Angeles seems a million years ago. A million years since I had a life.

  49

  Naomi, standing by the kitchen window at seven thirty in the morning, watched John drive off. She saw his brake lights come on as he reached the cattle grid, heard the clatter as he drove over it. Wednesday.

  Baby and toddler group day today. Bliss! And it was, relatively speaking.

  The highlights of her weeks weren’t much. The Wednesday toddler group she had started attending with Luke and Phoebe, held in a house in the village, at which she met other mothers – and caught up on the local village gossip. Occasional visits from friends or her mother. A cup of tea with the health visitor. Then there was the Friday morning arrival of Ron, the World’s Most Miserable Gardener, who came as part of the rental deal, and spent most of the morning tinkering around in the garage until it was time to leave. He was north of seventy and couldn’t dig because he had a bad back. For the same reason he couldn’t mow. He had no conversation and he smelled like damp furniture. Naomi had suggested to the rental agency that he be replaced. The agency had written to the owners out in Saudi Arabia and were awaiting a reply.

  Her thoughts were disrupted by Phoebe banging on the side of her plate with her spoon, and moments later Luke began screaming, drowning out the theme tune of breakfast television. He hurled his cereal bowl onto the floor and the contents spattered all over the place.

  She bit her lip in fury, staring at the mess, yet another thing – on top of the nappies, the sheets, the pyjamas, all the regular laundry and all the regular housework, now she had to scrape sodding breakfast cereal off the floor and the walls.

  She felt like screaming back at him. Instead she found a teething ring and tried to get it into his mouth, but he windmilled it away with his hands, screaming even louder, and almost immediately Phoebe threw her spoon on the floor and began screaming, also.

  Naomi grabbed the remote and hit the volume button, turning it up to maximum. ‘I’m listening to this interview!’ she shouted back at them, defiantly. ‘I like this guy, OK? He’s one of my favourite actors. We’re going to have some Mummy Time here. OK?’

  Blanking out their screams, she stood right in front of the television and watched the interview all the way through, her ears ringing from the cacophony of sounds behind her.

  Then, sinking the volume back down, she turned and, to her amazement, both babies were staring at her in total silence, mouths open, eyes wide.

  Naomi grinned at them. ‘OK. So now we’ve figured out who’s boss around here.’ Then she gave each of them a kiss, made Luke a fresh bowl and spoon-fed him. He ate it all in silence without protesting. Good. Almost too good. ‘Very good!’ she said.

  He stared blankly back at her.

  ‘And you’ve eaten all yours by yourself! Good girl!’ she said, wiping cereal from the edges of Phoebe’s mouth.

  As if in some kind of synchronization with her brother, Phoebe stared blankly back, too, for a moment. Then they both smiled.

  They remained silent as she carried them up and placed them on the bathroom floor while she grabbed her morning shower. Normally, before she had finished, two little heads would be peeking around the shower curtain, watching her. But today they lay motionless, where she had placed them.

  Back down in the kitchen, as she threw the first load of laundry into the washing machine, they continued to remain silent. Usually they would have rolled around on the floor together, sometimes Luke, sometimes Phoebe crawling on top of the other, pinning the other down. But this morning, nothing.

  She began to be a little unnerved.

  At nine thirty she changed their nappies; afterwards, lying in bed, she gave them a feed then snoozed for a while. When she woke, they were still both staring at her, still silent.

  She carried them up to their bedroom, settled them in their cots and went down to the kitchen. After tossing the laundry from the washing machine into the dryer, she made herself a mug of tea, checked the sound of their breathing on the speaker of the baby monitor for some moments, then settled down at the kitchen table to read the Daily Mail. It was ten o’clock. With luck she would have a whole blissful hour to herself.

  Soon after the dryer finished its cycle, she heard them giggling and calling out to each other in their cots, as if they were playing some game. First she heard Luke make a gurgling sound, followed by a burst of giggles from Phoebe, then Phoebe made a similar gurgling sound that was followed by a burst of giggles from Luke.

  She went upstairs. It was time to give them one more feed, then get them dressed for the baby and toddler group. As she entered their room, she was expecting to hear them still making a noise. But she was greeted by total silence. Both of them were staring at her, the way they had been staring at her down in the kitchen, but with even more intensity.

  She stopped in her tracks, spooked out. It really felt, for an instant, as if it was she who was the infant, and they who were the parents.

  50

  John was disturbed by the expression on Naomi’s face as she opened the front door for him. She looked pale and strained.

  ‘Kids OK?’

  ‘They’re fine. Upstairs. Asleep.’

  ‘How was the toddler group?’

  ‘Embarrassing.’

  He heard a gurgle come through the baby intercom. Then another gurgle, like a response.

  ‘Embarrassing?’

  ‘Yes, it was embarrassing, John, I was embarrassed by my children – our children – our wonderful designer babies.’

  He raised a finger to his lips.

  ‘What are you telling me?’ she demanded. ‘Walls have ears?’

  ‘We agreed we’d never say it – and it is dangerous to say it in their presence, they might start repeating it when they’re older.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, how paranoid do you want to be?’

  He looked at her, taken aback. ‘How paranoid?’ He was thinking about the death of Dettore, about the entire Borowitz family, about the O’Rourke family. That’s how paranoid, he was thinking. We can’t afford to stop being paranoid. We really can’t.

  Ever.

  He listened again for a moment to the baby-monitor speaker. ‘I don’t hear music – you’re not playing them music?’

  ‘That’s right, I’m not playing them music. I’m too exhausted to play them music, why don’t you go up and play them music? Why don’t you go and bring the entire London Philharmonic Orchestra down here to play them music?’

  ‘Honey – darling—’

  ‘I don’t think this playing them music, playing them all this ditzy New Age crap, is doing them much good. You seem to think you can bring Luke and Phoebe on like – like – some kind of hothouse courgettes – that if you sprinkle enough music and words all over them, they’re going to come bursting out of their cots and running into our room and recite the whole of Plato’s Republic from memory.’

  John went through to the kitchen, in need of a drink. He knew it was tough on Naomi at the moment, but things would change. Work was going well, they were starting to pay off their debt to Naomi’s mother and to her sister – although both of them insisted they didn’t need paying back. Soon they might
be able to afford an au pair – his mother had already suggested the daughter of a family friend, but it was too much of an expense at the moment. And Naomi was still adamant she did not want anyone else looking after them.

  He took a tray of ice cubes from the freezer and popped half a dozen into the cocktail shaker that was lying, disassembled, beside the drying rack from last night. ‘What was this embarrassing thing that happened at the toddler group?’

  ‘Oh, that?’ She feigned a matter-of-fact tone. ‘It seems something our friend Leo Dettore overlooked was the gene for basic social graces.’

  ‘They behaved badly?’

  She shook her head. ‘It wasn’t that, it was – the way they interacted – or rather, didn’t. They just totally ignored the other kids – all delightful babies. Our two didn’t want to know them. And there was something really strange – when any other baby came up to them, Luke and Phoebe would just give them a cold stare, and the baby would burst into tears and start screaming.’

  ‘They are nine months old, honey. That’s far too young to expect them to be social. I thought the point of the toddlers’ group was for mums to have a break, for you to meet other mums, get to know the community a little?’

  ‘They made the other babies cry, John. They’re so much bigger than the rest of them, that’s part of the problem.’

  ‘Babies are always crying—’ He hesitated, lifting his cocktail glass from the rack. Then, taking the olives out of the fridge, he said, ‘I thought last week they got on fine?’

  ‘They got on fine in the sense that they didn’t really do anything. I thought maybe they were shy, or something.’

  ‘What about the other babies? Were they all playing together?’

  ‘No – not exactly playing. But there was some interaction. There wasn’t any with Luke and Phoebe. It’s as if after a while the others became scared of them.’

  ‘More likely they were fazed because it’s two of them. Naomi, you can’t expect any interaction at this age. Jeez – and you’re hitting on me for expecting too much – I think you’re expecting way too much. And there’s a twins thing,’ John said. ‘All the information we have says that twins prefer each other’s company because that’s what they’re used to.’

  ‘Mix me one of those, too,’ she said. ‘A large one.’

  He looked at her dubiously. ‘You know what that book says about alcohol when you’re breast feeding, that it gets in the milk—’

  The vehemence of her reply startled him. Clutching the Absolut Vodka bottle by the neck in one hand and the dry vermouth in the other, brandishing them like clubs, she screamed with pent-up fury, ‘I don’t give a toss, John, OK? I don’t give a flying fuck about all these books, all these websites on how to have a smarter baby. Get a life, you sad man, and while you’re at it, give your wife a life, too.’

  He stared at her blankly and the next moment found himself holding both the bottles as she thrust them into his hands.

  ‘Once a day, that’s all I breast-feed them now. I’ll have a very large one, John, a double, or maybe even a triple, right to the top, shaken, and I want four olives in it. Are olives OK, will they do something weird to my milk? Will four olives in my martini turn our babies into retards?’

  A ripple of laughter came through the baby monitor. John and Naomi both turned to look at it. It was uncanny timing, as if both Luke and Phoebe were laughing in unison at them.

  The sounds from the babies continued as he mixed their drinks and lanced the olives with cocktail sticks. Happy sounds, calling out to each other, giggling. Listening to them, and the first sip of her drink, seemed to calm Naomi.

  They carried their drinks upstairs and along the corridor, then stopped outside the door. The sounds were continuing, happy little cries, giggles. But the moment John opened the door, they stopped.

  Phoebe lay on her side, thumb in her mouth, surrounded by a pile of her favourite toys – her polar bear, a snake, a zebra and a lion – apparently fast asleep. Luke, too, lay on his side, teething ring clenched in his mouth, eyes shut, breathing the deep, rhythmic breaths of sleep.

  Naomi and John looked at each other, then she signalled with her eyes for them to go back out.

  In the corridor, John closed the door, softly. ‘How can they be that noisy one moment, then sound asleep the next?’

  It was a while before Naomi answered him. There was nothing she could actually put a finger on, it was just a feeling she had, a small current running through her like an undertow, that Luke and Phoebe were already smarter than they were letting on. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, finally.

  In his cot, Luke called out to Phoebe. It was a high-pitched sound, a higher frequency than a dog whistle, inaudible to a human ear, well outside the range of the baby monitor.

  On the same frequency, Phoebe answered him.

  51

  Dr Roland Talbot opened his Wimpole Street consulting room door to greet John and Naomi, who were holding Luke and Phoebe by their hands. ‘Dr and Mrs Klaesson,’ he said. ‘Nice to meet you.’

  Then he peered closely at Luke and Phoebe. ‘Hi, Luke!’ he said. ‘Hi, Phoebe! How are you doing?’

  Luke had blossomed into an angelic-looking child, with a cute snub nose, cobalt-blue eyes and blond hair that flopped down over his forehead; Naomi had dressed him in a yellow button-down shirt, blue chinos and trainers. Phoebe, equally angelic, her hair a fraction darker and much longer than her brother’s, was wearing a red dress over a white blouse, white socks and sandals.

  They gave him the same response they gave most people. Silent stares that were somewhere between curiosity and hostility.

  Still smiling, unfazed, he ushered them all to a toy-littered L-shaped sofa in front of a coffee table, then sat down in an easy chair opposite them.

  Tall and gangly, with amiable good looks and threadbare hair, the psychiatrist was dressed in a rugby shirt that looked a couple of sizes too big, and brown corduroy trousers that stopped short of his battered trainers, revealing, as he lounged back in his chair, several inches of hairless ankle and baggy yellow Snoopy socks that had lost their elastic. Despite being almost forty, he might have been wearing hand-me-downs from an elder brother, Naomi thought. He looked like a big, goofy kid.

  ‘Great-looking children,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you,’ John said, looking down at his son proudly, then at his daughter.

  Then with a frown he said, ‘Nineteen months old, right?’

  ‘Nineteen and a half,’ John said. He smiled at Naomi and she smiled nervously back. They were beautiful and blossoming more each day.

  ‘I’d have guessed quite a bit older than that,’ the psychiatrist said. Then, leaning right forward and crossing his arms, he asked, ‘OK, so, tell me, how I can help?’

  Naomi and John looked at each other. ‘Want me to start?’ Naomi said to her husband.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘OK,’ she said. She told the psychiatrist their concerns, that whilst on the intercom they constantly heard Luke and Phoebe chatting away to each other in baby talk, and sounding like they were playing happily. But whenever they went into the room, the babies fell silent, almost as if they were pretending to be asleep. That they did not seem to be interested in playing or communicating with other kids. And, perhaps even more importantly, that after nineteen and a half months they were not showing any signs of talking, not even saying Mama or Dada.

  Talbot put them at their ease. ‘It’s a twins thing, quite often,’ he said. ‘Because twins become absorbed with each other, they very often take longer to relate to the world around them than a single baby. There are plenty of twins who don’t start to speak until well past the age of two, so that’s not something you need to worry about – at this stage. How is their eating?’

  John and Naomi glanced at each other, uncomfortable on this topic, and unsure how much Dettore had had an influence on this. ‘They don’t really seem interested in food,’ Naomi said. ‘They were hungry as babies, but now they eat about
half of what our paediatrician and the books say they should be eating.’

  Dr Talbot watched Luke and Phoebe alternately for some moments. ‘They don’t look undernourished to me. Kids find their own level with nutrition. How’s their health?’

  ‘So far, touch wood,’ Naomi said, ‘it’s been excellent.’

  ‘No colds, nothing!’ John said proudly.

  ‘I don’t want to tempt fate,’ Naomi cautioned. ‘But they seem very robust.’

  ‘Not one cold in nineteen and a half months?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Remarkable.’

  Dr Talbot engaged eye contact for some moments with Luke then with Phoebe. Then, staring down at the coffee table, he rocked back and forward. ‘I can see curiosity – which is common with all infants. They’re looking at me, trying to figure me out, trying to figure this place out. That’s a pretty healthy sign.’

  ‘There is one thing that I – that we – have noticed, in both of them,’ John said suddenly. ‘They are really fascinated by animals.’

  Naomi nodded vigorously. ‘They are. We were out in the garden yesterday and a neighbour’s cat jumped down from the fence, and they both trotted towards it, giggling. And there was a rabbit in the garden one day last week – bloody thing was eating my roses – and they thought the sight of it was wildly funny.’

  ‘Maybe when they’re a little older you should think about getting them a pet – something they can share between them and look after – pets are terrific for helping develop a sense of responsibility.’

  ‘You mean, like a goldfish?’ Naomi asked.

  Talbot screwed up his face. ‘Goldfish are pretty, but they’re boring. I always advise something tactile, some creature that kids can connect and interact with, like a hamster or a gerbil, or a puppy or a cat – even a rabbit.’

  ‘We thought about getting a dog,’ Naomi said.