The Diptych

Every Monday & Thursday evening my twin sister & I go to the community leisure centre & practice synchronised swimming. In another life we are a carnival. Our mum called our act The Diptych & talked about the Olympics. Your career would be over now anyway , she says, looking at the clock.

We were meant to be good at synchronised swimming. It was a way to turn our neurosis, extreme codependency, failure to think individually into achievement. For the past three weeks, we have been trying again.

Synchronised swimming is a hybrid of swimming, gymnastics & dance. There is a Youtube video titled Hybrid Twin Alien human beings found on a motorway in UK . The hybrid alien twins are Swedish twins with folie à deux or shared psychosis. In the swimming pool cafe, over cheese & onion sandwiches & cherry Coke, my twin sister & I often talk about the twins, Ursula & Sabina Eriksson, & count the ways in which we are not them.

Mona & I are a diptych. In the water, we fuse our bones together, become conjoined, become The Diptych . A synchronised swimming duet is one body split in two. It is radical physical empathy. It requires extreme concentration. It requires the body to be the body to be the body in the water to be the body in the water with another body to be two bodies with a split second to split second routine. We are trying to cure ourselves.

Hello. My name is Yona. What’s your name?

What’s a name? Our great-grandmother’s second husband renamed her Mary from Emma. T o begin some matricial lineage, my twin sister & I have twinned middle names, both Emma. T he only difference between us the Y, M. The Romanov sisters signed their letters with their collective initials OTMA. I often think of another pair of sisters - like another pair of scissors (handy) & what our signature would be: MAYA, YOMA, YEMI. But it wasn’t meant to be, & besides, who would we send letters to except the boy we are (both) (separately) having sex with? My twin sister & I have always been very introverted, isolated, lack communication skills & this has carried on & spilled into adulthood. But we are living in the future now. There are robots & thousands of ways to cure ourselves.

The first way we tried to cure ourselves was imagining we were the undead which meant the half-dead which meant non-committal suicide. In the daytime, we’d hiss at the sun, put our puffa jackets over our heads. At night, become bats, flee to a castle, stalk around.
Mona & I work together cleaning offices. It’s a good job because we don’t have to talk to anyone & have the whole place to ourselves to play the vampire game or the zombie game. We chase each other with hovers & try to bite. My favourite of the two is the zombie game. The concept of the game is that we are in a zombie apocalypse & the only two humans in this area or perhaps even the only two humans on earth. We have to work out how to survive. But sometimes we are just another pair of zombies. We have to mix up our routine every now & again otherwise it is not healthy.

After work, I visit the boy. I like him because we are almost the same height so we have almost the same power. His name is January.
He has never seen the film Labyrinth & we watch it for the first time in adulthood. Mona & I watched it compulsively, if you can watch a film compulsively. I never thought I would ever be twenty three & watching the film Labyrinth with another person. It feels like January is watching my childhood & I’m embarrassed by the whole thing. I shift in his bed & try to talk over it as much as I can but perhaps January loves me, because he is very serious now & wants to watch all of it. At the beginning of the film, the girl says,

why’s it called a labyrinth? There’s no turns or corners. It just goes on and on.

What January & I do in the dark comes out unfuneraled. This is my girlfriend, Yona, stays unkaraoked. Sometimes I fantasise about officiality, of Mona & I being one girlfriend gifted with a made-up, singular name. Being introduced. The secret sitting close & safe between the three of us. But sometimes January is a robin I coax carefully to rest on my hand & sudden movement would wreck the whole thing. My twin sister & I are one body split in two - it is unfair for January to have half a person, so this situation is natural & good. For Mona & I, it is so big to have so big of a complete other person. Sometimes we watch him intently & copy the shapes.

We are not allowed to talk about January in the community leisure centre. Sometimes I imagine us having a group of friends, clever women friends nodding over glasses of wine & saying things like boundaries, like jealousy, like polyamory. & we would mmm & mmm in a psychic way & say yes, it’s necessary. But this is not the reason we don’t talk about January in the community leisure centre. The truth is more clinical & shameful - we don’t want to mix our healing methods. We don’t want to contaminate the cures.

When we swim together, we swim in a daze. There is something narrowing about extreme concentration, the world is smaller when we swim in sync & easier, revised - when we swim in sync we know what comes next & how to do it. When we swim together, it’s rare that a thought could arrive other than the routine, but today I think - I love you. We have never said this to each other because what’s the point, it would be like saying it to the mirror, & besides, no one is threatening to leave. But the thought comes anyway. I think it is here I first feel the horror of being one person & loving a separate person. I think the cure is wearing off.

When we dry off & change back into black jeans, black jumpers with diamanté cats on them, we make our way to the cafe, buy cheese & onion sandwiches, cherry Cokes. I tell her I saw the stitch marks, that she has been stitching again. We have always called it stitching because that was the only word for it & then self harm felt a worse thing to say. When we first stitched, we stitched together, small pink threads on the backs of our hands. It wasn’t about pain for me at first. But then I had to go to school while Mona was still recovering from a stomach bug. It was the first time we had been apart. She stitched a dolphin badge into her arm. The stitches were not like the careful, pink threads. The needle was stabbed through & the skin ripped, bright blood on the yellow fabric, a smear down the forearm. Our mum cancelled our lessons & we were bad at school & everything else, so here we are, sat across the cafe table from each other, talking about that other life again. She says,

There’s still time.

But I’m not sure there is.

The cures are wearing thin. Our lives have always been lives of waiting lists. We are both three months away from a 50 minute phone assessment. The voice on the other side feels robotic. Who is this person I am telling these things to? Confession with none of the glamour. I am sorry I am feeling this way & understand there is no help available if money is something other people have. The voice likes to say it is concerned about some of our answers but we are not at immediate risk. There is a distant mumble of a possible six sessions of CBT in twelve months time if the problems persist. Thank you for your help, I will try a nice hot bath . I am sorry we are always felt this way.

My twin sister tears a piece of bread into smaller & smaller pieces & without looking up, says,

I think we have to focus all our energy on one cure & I think the cure is this. I think January is a distraction to the real cure.

When Mona fell asleep last night, I sat up in bed & watched a video about euthanisia on our laptop with earphones in. The Swiss clinic was so clean, it was perfect newness, constant newness. I remembered reading that cleaning products are designed to evoke a feeling of calmness - blues, whites. I thought about how dirty we are, Mona & I, so soiled with Hoarders, How Clean is Your House. I thought about the man who placed buckets of dettol around his flat, whose death could not be determined - either dying slowly from the fumes or eventually drinking the dettol. Who hasn’t wanted to deep clean their insides?

In the video, a twenty-nine year old woman with borderline personality disorder, depression, attachment disorder, she hears voices, she is in a room with one of the doctors, music is playing. The song & I are so muffled, so underwater. Invisible, time-travelling backwards to seven months ago, parachuted from BBC News, I stand outside the room, both hands on the wall. Twin empathy grabs her instead of Mona, I am stitched onto her. I feel a plastic straw in my mouth & then the cold, weird water. I look over at Mona, who sleeps like a dead woman.

Back at the flat, we put the telly on so we don’t have to speak to each other. There is a sickly smell of chlorine. It was Mona’s turn to go to January’s tonight & she is here with me. I don’t ask what she has told him, if she has told him anything at all. I type out an apology text to January & then delete it & type how was your day? xx & delete it. We watch our programmes dotingly & then go to bed.

We are cleaning an office in Canary Wharf at six in the morning. It’s winter now & dark outside. I ask her,

Are you up for playing the zombie game?

I’d like to save my energy for the pool if that’s alright.

That’s alright.

We can be a carnival in the water, Mona. I don’t say this aloud. I want to say this telepathically. We lied that we could speak to each other telepathically for years. Not even just as children, we told ourselves this till we were nineteen. We both thoroughly believed it. We have never admitted the truth aloud to each other but the lie has slunk off.

I call January in secret from the toilets. I have woken him up & I like this, this way of creating an effect, of banging someone’s day open.

Hello.

I speak for Mona like I have always done. I weave a story where no-one is being used & no-one is acting strangely. I say she thinks the situation is unhealthy & that we, all three of us, are becoming unhealthy for it. January says he is afraid he has to agree. I say I too, am afraid I have to agree. This is a very normal & rational conversation & free from emotional messiness. I would like to cry.

Later, in the swimming pool, we are practicing our routine. We come up from the water to face each other, throw our heads my left, her right. Mona & I are perfect syncrhonicity & I know in this way we are telepathic after all. That we are magical together. There is that thought again, I love you, but this time it comes as I love us & I do. I call January in secret from the changing room stall. Two things can be true at once.

Hello. I’m calling to say I cried after we spoke this morning & that I called you in secret & the call & the cry remains a secret from Mona. This call right now is also a secret. Do you think today is just a day of secrets or the first day of the rest of my life of secrets? I’m the exploding head emoji!

January is so quiet that I ask if the signal has gone funny but then there is his voice saying,

No, I can hear you. I’m just not sure what you want me to say.

It is a very bad thing to see a person as an oracle. You will always be disappointed by their crucial lack of wisdom. Lack of wisdom in these conversations can lead to a distinct feeling of a lack of connection. We feel very far away from each other now.

I tell him it doesn’t matter, that actually, I think this is for the best after all. I hang up without saying goodbye, tie my laces, put my wet towel in my swimming bag. When I open the curtain, Mona is standing there.

You take ages.

Even though we do not talk about January in the community leisure centre anyway - so it is normal & on track not to be speaking about him now, January has become the new telepathy. I can feel the tense, unsaidness of it. Certain powerful things cannot be spoken aloud between the two of us when the powerful thing has worn off or the powerful thing has proven not to be powerful at all, or the powerful thing is not for us.

I click my nail on the cherry Coke can & try to send telepathic waves saying this is a safe space & will cause no arguments in real life: yes or no, did you hear me on the phone to January? Do you know there are secrets between us now? Can you feel the distance if you stretch out your hands? Mona is talking about Tonya Harding again. She likes to think she is the ice-us and we are the water-her. This tells me nothing.

That night, we watch I, Tonya again & for the first time in two years, I feel it. I feel it as though I am watching it for the first time. I feel the film & Tonya Harding & Margot Robbie playing Tonya Harding so thoroughly, so bodily. When she sees the new life, I see the new life too - ethereal & glittery & then smacked away from us, or a life we are too clumsy & dirty for, that we ruin for ourselves. I hold Mona’s hand tightly underneath the fleece blanket & keep it there. I need to be touching her in some way, as though one of us might float off.

I called January today. I’m sorry.

I know you did. I heard you. It’s fine.

Is it fine?

Mona is eating a packet of fizzy strawberry laces very slowly & staring at the screen. The lights in the living room are out, the TV glow makes her ghostly & glitchy. Tonya Harding is arguing with her mother. We feel the mother with the entirety of both of our weird little bodies & she squeezes my hand. To look at each other now would be to say the unsaid thing - we keep our eyes on the screen. I know how bad it would be to check my phone right now. The film moves on - white ice skating boots, blue eyeshadow. After the long, unadmitted silence, time snaps back, she shrugs, says,

He could never replace us anyway.

I say,

I thought it was good for us to have someone else, to have another person. Didn’t you like having someone else to talk to?

She checks her phone. The phone glow with the mirror selfie screensaver of us in our new swimsuits is suddenly heartbreaking. There is the time, 10:27pm over our bodies & nothing else, no notifications, no January.
She says,

Sometimes. But it’s not the same, is it?

(Telepathically I say) I love you.

I rest my head on her shoulder, stare at Tonya Harding tying up her skates, say, No, it’s not the same as us.

In the morning, we wake to a full day off work & pack our orange swimsuits, swimming caps, white towels, grapefruit showergel with a new kind of vigour. Our sports bags are beautiful & the two of us brushing our teeth together in the mirror are beautiful. On the bus, we bundle up to each other in our puffa jackets, share earphones & listen to the Sufjan Stevens song Tonya Harding. I know she is thinking about who we are in the water, who we are when we are together in the water & the other life we live there, two sessions a week, or off-days. The song ends & we play it again. It goes on. I love you.

Annie Dobson is a Creative and Critical Writing graduate. Her work has appeared in Ambit, The Bi-ble and RS21 among others and is upcoming in Cipher Shorts. She lives in London.

Catherine Morton-Abuah is an Illustrator and Creative based in North West London. She aims to represent black people in a diverse and dynamic way. Inspirations for her work derive from an array of films, music, memories and fashion.