Dopple-hanger

This is a true story concerning real events, that include a grisly issue: if you feel you may be affected, perhaps have actually experienced similar, you may not wish to read on. It is not my intention to deliberately offend. We were a family of five, so I believed. Three brothers, a mother and a father: what used to be called a 'nuclear family'. It is in the minority in some places. I moved back home in my early twenties for what transpired to be a short time - a year or so, perhaps less. When I last saw my mother lying in (again, I didn't know in advance) what was to be the death-bed, I had a young blonde English woman accompanying me. She was the most beautiful woman in the world to me. My mother wanted me to promise I would marry her, and in retrospect I can understand why. I said no, and yet did so after her passing. My older brother by two years, and my younger by four years, were with me at mother's funeral only months later. The cancer was persistent, illness usually is more persistent than the life it takes, don't you find? My father I have not said much about, which is fitting, because it turns out I didn't know much about him. He married our mother in the sixties after meeting at one of the 'Services & nurses' dances. That's the important thing. So, we can fast-forward to the same house as mum was dying in, it's the late eighties, and 'Top Gun' has just made Tom Cruise a major heart-throb. Madonna's 'Like a Virgin' seems like an old pop tune, and Tom Hanks has not yet dared to take the starring role of an Aids victim experiencing prejudice in 'Philadelphia', the middle-class white guy finally needs a hand-up from a black man (Denzel Washington played the lawyer). Who knew? We (our remaining 4 of a family) are back together briefly, I remember the dining kitchen in the house I loved the most, where the most important person had gone, they'd only just moved there (down-sizing after I left home), when I was back. I was alone I recall, still rapturously married, still limping from an undiagnosed illness and broken pair of toes (you get used to it when Margaret Thatcher is asphyxiating the NHS), but my wife wanted to keep out of it. Like my two-year older brother, she would display caution as a default position in times or situations where I exhibited forthrightness. It's probably why we burned so brightly for a while. We are assembled in the bungalow, little brother (but he can vote), has come down from his 'Art den' in the miniature but cute room he has in the tall-enough loft. The other room is the big room with a great window-view almost to the train station on a good day, over the exceedingly middle-classness of it's surroundings. Big brother has the other room that sandwiches the hall then living room (mine being the opposite side of the sandwich, only dettached from the living room by a lovingly-created wood and glass partition). He has emerged from 'the pit' - Beefy's room was always called that I don't know why - and all the music and electronics and hi-fi and Sinclair-computer paraphernalia any self-respecting young employed male at that time would be proud of. Heck, there was even an old 2 litre Capri outside, what's not to like? I scraped through a college course the government gave extra living expenses for me to attend, to help get me to this place and time. I only finished it because I assessed that is what my mum would have wanted, let's be honest. The exams were not quite in sight when she died, but close enough. I could have given in, and had I done so, would have possibly been a little less ill-informed about what was happening now. I mean what was really happening now. Not the glossy, surviving-widower-meets-surviving-widow-they-deserve-a-fresh-start crap, but the real inside info. The one where they knew each other for a long time, I mean a really long time, before mum's death. Like, they met before my mum and dad met kind of long time, is what I am talking about. Like I say, I did not know this at the time. So this was during my age of innocence, before my enlightenment. Before the world changed. And I don't mean parents telephone-texting their kids to come down for dinner - we had a gong - nor the fact that the 11th of September was most famous for being after the 10th but before the 12th of September. No, I mean really real stuff that is at the core of one's own life, that defined one for years while growing up. So, we wait for this other lady's offspring to arrive. It's for dinner. It's so we can meet and interact so that at the impending wedding, the way has been paved for a smooth occasion, a perfect frickin' day, not to be soiled with reality thank you very much. Or, at least, if there is to be conflict, let it be detected now, and not appear as a surprise then. Now, before the invitations have been written out, and it would be awkward to retract - not to mention the venue would have been given away. Then they're here. I feel kind of awkward, not a usual feeling for me, but still as all puppies do, I welcome strangers to my home. After all, the master wouldn't allow someone who's not a friend to enter, would he? As with us, there are three of them. But one is a sister. She's in the middle of their ages, like me. The runt is the one who is at university, he's only a runt in cliched metaphoric terms, I mean no insult. The eldest is different to them. A more sceptical observer would have spotted the genetic anomaly immediately. But I am not yet that observer. We get to the dining table. With the caution that he's handed down in the genes to my older sibling, the 'old man' has just the 7 of us here for this evening meal, their mother is not stepping across that threshold. Respect, or lion's den, take your pick as to why. Those three sit across from us three. The old man sits at the head of the table we eat. Yes, the 'dopple-hanger' is coming now, be patient. I relax a bit, they seem like not a threat to us. Why should they be? We are all going to be one big happy family, I already imagine Christmas together and all that, it's what we do in our family. Even now I am married, me and my partner do the hard work that is swap-about, this year your parents next year mine. You know, putting up with it with simmering resentment every second year. After the meal I am more into myself. I explain how I did my course, my HNC Electronics course. The runt is well into his Honours degree. My job in Salford didn't work out, so I moved back home I explain to them in my enthusiastic, overly-dramatic style. I look at these so-called siblings across the table, the flaxen haired sister, the fair-haired boyish under-grad, the darker more serious, well, paratrooper it turns out. I only find out of course, after I intimate I got injured in my own sojourn into parachute-ometery, after the job I could't apparently hack, the single life I despaired of, and the embarrased if not humiliating return homeward from it all. The stable-employed teacher and the under-grad with a future and the established soldier calmly and reservedly do their best to look benignly on from across the table. Of course, there would have been more reaction if they hadn't been kept completely informed beforehand, if they hadn't been 'warned' about me in advance, about the troublemaking one. The one that might be reactionary were he to discover he had been made a total fool of. Don't let's do that before the perfect day. Best to keep the blanket over the cage until after that, then the sting's done, people can be miserable and upset in the privacy of their own shires then. As long as the new wife isn't troubled, hey, it's like nothing happened. So, virtually no reaction to anything I say. I am impressed at the paratrooper, but do feel honesty demands I let him know I wouldn't have waffled on about one, poxy, solitary jump from a perfectly good aeroplane, had I known he'd probably done hundreds! Still, the guarded regarding of me over empty plates. My brothers don't talk much when I am in full flow, they just enjoy the entertainment usually. The old man acts like he's just the referee over a particularly dull match. So that's when I say it. I say, in jocular fashion, well, we'll know if it hasn't worked out, the marriage, you know, because he'll be swinging from the rafters. Ha-ha. All laugh. Well, my brothers politely smile. The other side look like I rape children. Days later, I am cornered in unusually stern fashion by my father. I feel afterwards like a 5-year old and that I might actually cry. I broke my foot without crying. I endure this dreadful dsiease I don't know I have without crying. I make up and break up without crying. This hurts. He's stern probably because he's upset at having to point out how tactless I have been, yet again. He's doing it, probably in retrospect because she's been in tears after she heard what I said. Let's face it, I was not to know her previous husband - another army man - ended his life swinging from a noose of his own making. My suggestion at the dinner table does now look a little in bad humour, somewhat cruel even. That's just one reason why we'll exchange no more than jibes until the end of our days. Because when someone keeps secrets they don't expect you to guess out of the blue what they are. excpet it's not out of the blue, clues have been left all their lives, it's just not consciously realised. So, here's the lesson. If you don't want people to make jocular remarks tactlessly and cruelly reflecting the real world, of things like the fact the last husband hung himself because it's preferable to living with you, don't constrain your next husband-to-be to lie to his own children by omission, while keeping your own offspring completely informed every inch of the way. That's the dopple-hanger story. I later discover that it's a racing certainty two of the other offspring are of my father's genes, and the paratrooper - predictably - was an adopted orphan. One can speculate about how it's all rather connected, but I can inform the reader of some parameters. The most important point is I have a habit of blurting out a prediction or insight without really having to think about it. It's not always useful apparently, but that's questionable. Note that the setting up of the meeting I describe, means that inevitably one side - theirs - create a conversational vacuum that inevitably the gregarious child on the host's side will attempt to fill, being hospitable and not wanting awkward silences. The other is that I think my blurting out is like dreams. Dreams have immutable logic, but simply do not obey the rules of our world, our physical world. I think I have a subconscious that computes and processes away, then like computers do, sends and 'interrupt' to my normal communication or interaction, making me do or say whatever it has come up with that fits the facts. In other words, my subconscious is a lot smarter than I am. It deduced a theory that fitted all known facts, ie that the demise of my father's new bride-to-be's ex might not be entirely due to natural causes. Inequity of information is always dangerous to those on the losing side of the equation - but my story shows those who seek to control and throttle the flow of information, unwittingly leave clues to that in how they and others behave. Copyright Ian R Margetts 2012, licence given for David Spiegelhalter to use it for his research.