Stone Mattress: Nine Tales(23)

“Never too late,” Tin replied. “It’s certainly on my bucket list. But I’m waiting till we get cancer. If we’ve got to go, we’ll go in style; take a few with us. De-burden the planet. More toast?”

“Don’t you dare get cancer without me!”

“I won’t. Cross my heart and spit. Unless it’s prostate cancer.”

“Don’t do that,” said Jorrie. “I’d feel left out.”

“If I get prostate cancer,” said Tin, “I pledge to arrange a prostate transplant for you so you can share the experience. I know a lot of guys who wouldn’t mind heaving their prostates out the window about now. They could at least get a good night’s sleep: dispense with the pee parade.”

Jorrie grinned. “Thanks a bundle,” she said. “I’ve always wanted a prostate. One more thing to whine about in the golden years. Think the donor might like to throw in the whole scrotum?”

“That remark,” said Tin, “is lacking in fastidiousness. As you intended. More coffee?”



Because they’re twins they can be who they really are with each other, a thing they haven’t managed very well with anyone else. Even when they’re putting on a front, they fool only outside people: to each other they’re transparent as guppies, they can see each other’s innards. Or that’s their story; though, as Tin is well aware – having once had a lover with an aquarium – even guppies have their opacities.

He gazes fondly at Jorrie as she frowns at the obituaries through her crimson-framed reading glasses; or frowns as much as she is able to, given the Botox. In recent years – in recent decades – Jorrie has developed the slightly pop-eyed expression of someone who’s had too much work done. There are hair issues as well. At least he’s been able to stop her from dyeing it jet black: way too Undead with her present-day skin tone, which is lacking in glow despite the tan-coloured foundation and the sparkly bronze mineral-elements powder she so assiduously applies, the poor deluded wretch.

“You’re only as old as you feel,” she says too frequently, while trying to talk Tin into some absurdity – rumba classes, watercolour painting holidays, ruinous fads such as spinning. He cannot picture himself on a stationary bicycle, wearing Spandex tights, whirring away like a sawmill and further destroying his wizened crotch. He cannot picture himself on a bicycle of any sort. Painting was a non-starter: if he were going to do that, why would he want to do it in a group of whinnying amateurs? As for the rumba, you have to be able to swivel your coccyx, a skill he lost around the time he gave up on sex.

“Exactly,” he replies. “I feel two thousand. I am older than the rocks among which I sit.”

“What rocks? I don’t see any rocks. You’re sitting on the sofa!”

“It’s a quotation,” he says. “A paraphrase. Walter Pater.”

“Oh, you and your quotations! Not everyone lives in quotation marks, you know.”

Tin sighs. Jorrie is not a wide reader, preferring historical romances about the Tudors and the Borgias to anything more substantial. “Like the vampire, I have been dead many times,” he cites to himself, though he doesn’t wish to alarm her by saying it out loud: an alarmed Jorrie is always a lot of work. She wouldn’t be afraid of vampires as such: being rash and curious, she’d be the first into the forbidden crypt. But she wouldn’t like the thought of Tin turning into one, or turning into anyone other than her idea of him.

Meanwhile, she’s firmly bent on turning into someone else herself. She does not come up to her own standards. Her only superstitions have to do with the labels on expensive cosmetics. Jorrie actually believes the deceitful come-hither labels – the plumpings, the firmings, the unwrinklings, the returning of youthful dews, the hints of immortality – despite having been in advertising herself, a vocation guaranteed to take the bloom off ornamental adjectives. There are so many things in life about which she ought to know better but does not, the art of makeup being one of them. He has to keep reminding her not to halt the sparkly bronze procedure halfway down her neck: otherwise her head will look sewed on.

The hair compromise he finally agreed to is a white strip on the left side – geriatric punk, he’d whispered to himself – with, recently, the addition of an arresting scarlet patch. The total image is that of an alarmed skunk trapped in the floodlights after an encounter with a ketchup bottle. He crosses his fingers about that blood-coloured blotch, and hopes he will not be accused of elder bashing.

Gone are the days when Jorrie – once known for her sultry gypsy image and her vivid African prints and clanky ethnic jewellery – could pull off any fashion whim that caught her eye. She’s lost the knack, though she’s kept her flamboyant habits. Mutton dressed as Spam, he’s longed to say to her from time to time, though he hasn’t said it. Instead he’s clamped himself together and held himself back, and said it about other women to make her laugh.

He does usually manage to steer her away from the steeper and more lethal precipices. There was the interlude with the nose ring, back in the ’90s: she’d sprung the tacky doodad on him without prior warning, and asked him point-blank what he thought. He’d had to sew his mouth shut, though he’d done some hypocritical nodding and murmuring. She’d jettisoned the tawdry accessory once she’d caught a cold and practically torn her nostril off when her handkerchief got snagged on the ring.