Tweedledum and Tweedledee (11 page)

"Come and see the beast," A man standing outside the tent yelled. "It's as ferocious and ruthless as anything you've ever seen. See it before it kills again. Is it a giant two-headed spider? Is it a monstrous dog? Or are they savages, wild humans ready to attack at any moment you're not paying attention. Come and see for yourself. See the beast. Hear it growl. Watch it as it thirsts for your blood."

The twins were getting increasingly afraid of humans and especially of getting beaten with the sticks, so they did as they were told. They growled and writhed their body, making it look like they were trying to get loose, trying to attack the spectators. They had lost their Italian language, forgotten it since it was never used. Now they only had their mutual language in between them, but even that, they never used anymore, since they almost never spoke to one another. But even if they tried to yell for help, no one understood anything they would say or yell. When they spoke, people laughed and clapped their hands. Some even yelled profanities back at them. They called them names and spat at them.

Creeps.

Freaks.

Monsters.

Mutants.

"Look at their sharp teeth," the gypsies would yell. "Look at their claws. Don't stand too close to them. Those teeth will go straight through your skin and they’ll suck your blood, suck you dry till there is no more left."

The crowd then gasped and pulled away with big eyes and open mouths.

"See what happens when I poke it with my stick, the presenter would say. Then he poked the twins in the stomach and they reacted with a huge roar. The crowd gasped again in fear and fascination. Then the presenter swung the stick and hurt the twins so they whimpered, pulling backwards.

"Down!" he yelled.

The crowd clapped and cheered. It was always the same. Every day for eight hours a day. A new crowd every hour. Once the twins returned to their cage in the back of the truck, they were exhausted…beaten and humiliated enough to crumple up in a corner and not speak a word to one another. They hardly ate and soon became very skinny…Something that made them even scarier to look at.

It wasn't until one night when they were back in Rome after two years on the road that they finally spoke to one another again. The gypsies had parked the truck in a parking lot close to the place they had chosen for their show later in the day. Everyone else was sleeping heavily when the twins both opened their eyes at the same second, like had it been synchronized, or had been planned in advance. For the first time in a long while, they looked into each other's eyes.

"Today, we are twelve years old," one of them said in their mutual language.

"Today, we take back our lives," the other replied.

"I love you."

"I love you more."

29

April 2014

"
W
HAT ARE YOU DOING?
I can't see."

"Don't be impatient, Deedee," the man said. "I don't want to rush this. I want it to be perfect."

"I can't wait. Could you do something about this smell soon? I can't stand this smell," Deedee complained.

"You know that’s my next move."

The man moaned and wiped off drops of sweat from his forehead. He was concentrating very hard right now. Carefully, he sewed the pieces of skin together. On the floor, in a black plastic garbage bag, lay the remains of the girl. She was missing an entire leg, cut off at the points directly below the groin. On the back and front of her chest, the man had cut off big pieces of her skin.

She hadn't suffered. The man didn't want her to. No, she wasn't the one who needed to feel pain. Her parents were. It was never the man's intention to have her feel any pain. He had slit her throat in one quick movement as soon as she started screaming. That had shut her up immediately. Blood had gushed onto the floor and he had hurried to put her body into the plastic bag. He would have to clean up the blood later.

He carried her inside the bag into the bathroom, where he had hung her from her feet inside the shower. With a long-bladed knife, he had cut up her dead body. He started at one corner of the jaw and made a deep ear-to-ear cut through the neck and larynx to the opposite side. This severed the internal and external carotid arteries, the major blood vessels carrying blood from the heart to the head, face, and brain. He had let her hang for a while…Draining her blood and letting it all wash out with the bathwater. Then he had cleaned the skin carefully.

The man had carried the dead body back into the living room of his cabin, then thrown her on another plastic bag so he wouldn’t leave traces on the floor. First he cut off the leg, then later, with a scalpel, he started flaying her in certain spots where he knew the skin was best. Then he had started sewing it.

"Hurry up. Hurry up," Deedee said.

"Patience, mio caro."

The man turned to face the girl again. He kneeled next to her and examined her skin. He found a great spot on her stomach and, with a scalpel, he cut it off. The finest skin was found on the back and abdomen. He was careful to just get the skin. The skin was composed of two layers, an outer thinner one with a thicker tissue layer below it. He only needed the outer layer. Carefully and precisely, he flayed the pieces he needed. Then, he cleaned the piece of skin of blood and meat in the bathroom and sterilized it. Then he went back to his needle and thread. With a strong wrist and firm hand, he put the needle through the skin and sewed the piece onto another one.

"What are you doing now?" Deedee asked.

"I’ve finished the leg. Now I'm repairing the other one. It needs new skin. The old one started to rot."

"I know. I can smell it," Deedee said.

"We'll fix it," the man said. "I'll fix it. Just trust me."

"I trust you," Deedee said.

The man walked to Deedee's case and held his creation up in front of him. "See? I'm almost done. Just need to make sure it fits. It's like pants. I made it like pants so you can put them on."

"It looks great," Deedee said. "Help me get it on."

The man placed the leg in the case, then stuffed the bones that once were another leg, into the human-skin pants.

"There," he said, with tears in his voice. "It's perfect."

"Now I have two legs like everyone else," Deedee said.

The man nodded. "Yes, you do."

"I'm the luckiest boy in the world."

"Yes, you are. You're just like all the other boys."

"It's perfect," Deedee said

The man nodded, while holding back his tears. He grabbed his camera. "Smile, Deedee. Smile."

30

April 2014

V
ICTOR HAD A HARD
time calming down after the photograph incident by the pool. He was restless at lunch in the restaurant and couldn't sit still on his chair. I couldn't shake what my mother had said and tried to calm him, constantly telling him to sit still. It created an annoying tension between all of us at the table. I couldn't help feeling that my mother was comparing the two boys and thinking, why couldn’t Victor couldn't be more like Christoffer, who sat nicely at the table and ate quietly?

My dad tried to ease the tension by talking about food and what we were eating. I ordered a huge seafood platter and ate everything, but I couldn't really enjoy it, since I was way too tense.

"I think I'll take the boys back to the suite now," I said, when I’d finished my last shrimp. "Victor needs his rest. There’s too much noise and too many people everywhere."

"Arh, come on," my mom said. "It's not too bad, is it?"

If only looks could kill.

"Well, it is to him. A nap will do him good."

"I thought we were hanging out by the pool after lunch," my mom said. "I was looking forward to spending some time with my grandchild in the water."

"Now, Ulla. If the boy needs his rest…," my dad said.

"You're always taking her side against me," my mom interrupted him. "Why is that? You're all ganging up on me. I feel like I don't really belong in this family anymore," my mom sniffled.

I rolled my eyes. She was playing the victim-card again. I wasn't falling for it. But my dad was.

"No. No. Ulla. That's not true. Of course you're a part of the family, just as much as the rest of us."

"Just because I’ve been away for a little while, doesn't mean I don't love all of you," she said, sobbing.

It was ridiculous. Her little charade was too much for me.

"Of course not," my dad said. "Emma tell her."

I frowned. "Tell her what? That it doesn't matter that she was gone for almost five years of her children's lives? That she missed some of the most important days of her grandchildren's lives? Well, I can't. Because it's not true. It does matter. It matters a great deal."

My mother gasped and held her chest. "How can you say such horrible things Emma?"

"Because it's the truth. It's how I feel. I know you're back and I love that you and Dad are doing so well. It's truly amazing, but you can't come back and pretend like you haven't been away. You can't come here and be condescending towards me because I have a son who is a little different and might not be the perfect grandson you wanted. Yes, he is different. But he is also smart and a great kid. And I happen to be doing this the best way I know how to. You can't just come here after all this time and think you know anything about how he should be treated. You don't know him, Mom. You don't know anything about us."

My mother sighed and gesticulated, resigned. "Okay. So I was gone. So I don't know much about what has been going on with you. What do you want from me? I'm trying here, Emma. I'm trying to get back in your life, but you won't let me."

"No, you're not, Mom. You're not even trying to get to know us again. You never ask about anything. You never asked me about my divorce or how it affected Victor and Maya. You never asked about how it has been for me to have to raise a kid with several diagnoses for mental illnesses, what it has been like to run from doctor to doctor only to get more confused and have no real answers. If you're so interested in us, like you claim to be, you would at least ask me how I've been."

My mom snorted again, then sipped her white wine with tight lips. I felt a knot in my stomach. I hated conflicts. I hated fights. My dad did too. He looked insecure and very, very uncomfortable. He was squirming in his chair and sweating heavily.

"Now, anyone up for dessert?" he asked. "I hear they make a killer Tiramisu. I always wanted to try the real thing in a real Italian restaurant."

I scoffed, leaned over and kissed my dad on the forehead. "Nothing for me, Dad. I need to get Victor back. Come on boys. We're leaving."

31

April 2014

I
WAS EXHAUSTED FROM
the fight when I got back to the upper deck. Victor had calmed down a little now and was trotting along behind me, while flipping pages in his book. I felt horrible. Especially for Christoffer, for coming into the middle of all this. Part of me wanted to go back and apologize to my mother, but the other part was happy that I had told her those things. It was, after all, the truth. It was hard for me to let her into my life again, since I was still so angry with her for leaving. It wasn't something that simply passed after a few days together. It was a deep-rooted anger that was eating me up inside.

I called Morten from my room, while Victor and Christoffer watched a show on the TV. I walked on the balcony and talked with him for almost an hour. It helped a lot. Morten could do that. He could always make me feel better.

"Thank you for being there," I said, when I was about to hang up.

"No problem. Things are pretty boring around here with you guys out of town anyway, so I have all the time in the world."

"Yeah, I wish I could say the same about this place. It's crazy. Well, I better get going. Talk to you later?"

"Absolutely."

I threw myself on the couch next to Victor, who was watching some strange documentary again on the History Channel. This time it was showing some forensic investigator working on a murder case. The story was quite macabre. It was all in English, but I sensed Victor understood a lot of it anyway. He did take English in school, so that was probably why.

I found my iPad and opened Facebook. I scrolled through my friend's updates and soon concluded nothing much was happening in their lives. I opened a Danish news site and read some news updates and soon concluded that nothing much had happened there. But there was one article that made me stop and read. It was the story about the race driver Alonzo Colombo, who was now detained by the police and accused of having murdered his wife and son on a cruise ship along the Italian coast. The article went through the events as the police believed they had taken place onboard the ship. And then the things that puzzled them. For one, they hadn't found the body of the son yet. They had searched the waters at the harbor of Sorrento with divers and boats, but found nothing. They knew Alonzo Colombo had left the ship on the day of the son's disappearance and been away most of the day. Unlike the other passengers aboard, he and his wife hadn't gone on the trip to Mount Vesuvius and Pompeii. He had taken a rented limo and gone to visit friends of his who were vacationing in the town in a place up a great hill. They had searched the house and the cliffs and waters beneath it, but found no trace of the boy.

"It's all very strange," a police inspector was quoted saying. "It's our theory that he must have dumped the body somewhere in the city to hide his actions. Maybe his wife was even in on it. Maybe that was why he had to kill her, as well, later on. But we're not giving up. We will keep on looking. The body will show up sooner or later."

Until then, they were focusing on charging the race-driver with killing his wife. But there was another detail that puzzled the officer. The fact that Alonzo Colombo had no gunshot residue on his hands or any part of his body when they took him in. He hadn't taken a shower, there was still some of his wife's blood on his shirt from the blow. All the investigation of the crime scene seemed to benefit the race-driver's explanation.