The Surface Tension of Water

By Toby Wallis

Mags is driving, sat forward in her seat to look through the heavy rain that the wipers are struggling to keep clear. It drums on the roof of the camper van and gathers thickly on the windows, distorting the world beyond it. I can hardly see two cars in front. Occasionally she runs give way signs and traffic lights but I am not allowed to criticise as I haven't learned to drive yet.

The camper van must be nearly fifty years old. I can hear a heavy grind when she changes gear. The seats in the back are ripped vinyl and the whole thing smells like a charity shop. She borrowed it from an old friend who said he uses it to drive to romantic places and then have sex but I think he only said this to wind Mags up. There isn't room on those vinyl seats for sex. Mags told him it wasn't for anything like that. I'm going on a trip with my twin brother, she had said. She doesn't normally refer to me this way, but recently she has been doing it more.

“Are you actually insured to drive this thing?” I say. The rain gets heavier suddenly and she switches up the wipers, making them move so furiously it looks like they are going to snap off.

“What?” she says. The rain and the engine are so loud she can't hear a word I say. My voice is lost beneath it.

“Are you insured?” I say again, louder.

“Of course.”

“You did the paperwork?”

She doesn't answer right away, she is concentrating on the road. It has only been two weeks since she got her license.

“What paperwork?” she says.

“To become named on the insurance.”

She turns onto a slip road and accelerates toward the motorway, trying to get up a good speed. The whole thing is shaking hard, lots of individual pieces rattling and vibrating.

“I don't need to be named. It's fine. Shut up, wait a minute.”

We merge with the motorway and from somewhere behind the veil of rain a car blasts its horn at us. Mags mutters under her breath. I steal a look at my phone and see I have four missed calls from our mother and a number of text messages. I don't read them. I tuck my phone back into my pocket. Mags didn't want me to bring it. She hasn't got hers. She powered it down and left it in a bedside drawer. I didn't feel comfortable leaving my phone behind so I promised I wouldn't look at it too often, which was just about good enough for Mags. The whole point of the trip, she had told me, was to leave it behind. To break contact. This isn't what we told our mother. We said we were going to take photographs of a waterfall, but she was dubious about this. She didn't think the waterfall seemed important.

Once we are settled on the motorway the traffic behind shoots past, glad to finally be beyond us. I look at the dashboard and see we are at fifty miles per hour, which is probably about as much as we are going to get.

My phone vibrates in my pocket.

I feel bad ignoring the messages but I don't want to answer them. I don't even want to read them.

“We're going to stop at the next services,” Mags says. “I want to get some coffee.”

“Sounds good to me,” I say.

“What?” she says.

“Okay,” I say, slightly louder. I don't like raising my voice. The louder I go, the smaller I feel.

My phone vibrates again and I look out of the side window, watching the lines of rain drops that gather and break.

Mags and I have been apart for almost four months. It is the longest we have ever been away from each other. We are back for the Christmas break now, but in September we each went off to separate colleges. Mags went north to study photography while I stayed local to take a course in analytical chemistry. People used to laugh at how different we were when they saw my terrible drawings and her failing chemistry grades. They said they didn't believe we were really twins at all.

She is a purist when it comes to photography, still using old fashioned 35mm film and chemicals and expensive paper to develop her pictures. She used to drape curtains over the windows in our kitchen to turn it into a darkroom. She bought all her equipment and supplies on the internet. I don't know if anyone even still makes this stuff, or if she is gradually depleting the worlds reserves of ten by eight photographic paper.

Mags told me that the romance of photography is in the smell of the sodium thiosulphate, and I agreed but we had meant different things by it. I had been using sodium thiosulphate to quantitate iodine, which isn't romantic, but I also liked the smell.

At the motorway services Mags parks across four spaces causing a man to shake his head at us, even though it would be impossible to get this camper van squeezed into just one. She hops down out of it, gives the guy a face, locks the door and starts walking away.

“I'm going to the bathroom,” she says. “I won't be long.”

Once she has gone, I take out my phone and look at the messages. They all say the same thing. Give me a call when you can. I dial our mothers number and it takes her two rings to answer.

“Where are you?” she says.

“Service station,” I say, looking around. “Not sure where exactly.” All the signs are for shops and restaurants. None of them say where we are.

“When are you coming back?”

“I don't know. Couple of days. We need to see this waterfall.”

My mother sighs, deliberately loud.

“I don't understand this business with the waterfall,” she says.

“It's for her photography project.”

We pause, both waiting for the other to say something.

“Is Margaret upset with us?”

“Yes,” I say.

Next to where I am standing a street light flicks on and I realise it is later than I thought. One day of not looking at my phone and I have almost completely lost track of the time.

“Can you talk some sense into her?” our mother says. “Get her to come around?”

“We're both upset with you,” I say.

“Well I know you are but you know what your sister can be like.”

We both go quiet. From the other side of the phone the silence is heavy and for a moment I wonder if I have lost the signal.

“What I mean is,” she begins to say, but I don't let her finish.

“Forget it,” I say.

“I don't understand why you need to see this waterfall now.”

To be fair to her, I don't understand that part either. Apparently we have been to this waterfall before but I don't remember it. Mags wants to use the photographs in a project, but there's more to it than that. Whenever she tries to get me to remember she is offended I can't. Like I have been careless with what should have been a precious memory. Like if I could remember we wouldn't need to drive half way across the country to see it.

“You will be back before Christmas, right?” our mother says.

“Yeah. That's four days away,” I say.

“It's three days,” she says, but then from across the car park I see Mags coming out of the public bathroom and looking around for me.

“I have to go,” I say.

“Call again soon, okay?” she says, and I can hear the exhaustion in her voice.

I wave to Mags and she gestures for me to go over to her.

“We should get some dinner,” Mags says when I get near.

“I thought we were just going to get coffee?”

“I'm hungry,” she says, taking me by the arm and pulling me towards a restaurant.

Mags is stronger than she looks. When we were young she used to punch me on the arm, trying to make bruises. Her skinny arms don't look like much but even I used to be impressed by the yellow and purple patterns she made. She used to roll up my sleeves so people could see what she had done, like an artist showing off a watercolour. I didn't mind. I used to feel proud of them on her behalf, looking down at the mottled colours and saying things like 'yep, that's a good one.'

“But then we are getting back on the road?” I say.

“I think we should stay here tonight."

The sun is low on the horizon and now all of the street lights are on, which I think means it is about four-thirty.

"But it's early.” I don't like the idea of spending the rest of the day here, sat in the camper van in the middle of a car park. It doesn't feel good enough. We ought to be stopping by the edge of a lake, skimming stones and making a fire and talking things over, the two of us alone, far from anyone. That's what I thought the point of the trip was.

“Come on,” she says.

“Mags,” I say, “we're only about three hours away. Let's get something to eat and get back on the road.”

She stops and turns to me. She is stood in a puddle and her jeans, which are slightly too long for her legs, are drawing up the rainwater. I want to say that's the capillary effect, but I don't think she would appreciate it.

“We're staying here,” she says.

“Why?”

She rolls her eyes.

“I am scared,” she says, slowly like she is explaining something simple to a child, “of driving in the dark.”

Then she punches me on the arm and I think, maybe that one will bruise, but it's not your best work.

This all started with vintage photography. Mags has always had a love of it. There is an antique shop near where we grew up that sells old prints and photographs. She used to spend hours picking out her favourites, and then trying to haggle the prices down with the owner of the shop who used to patiently explain that his prices were fair. She never once got him to lower them at all.

When we returned home for Christmas Mags wanted to look at our personal vintage photographs. She got the step ladder out of the shed one afternoon and climbed up into the loft, looking for the albums and tins of pictures. She found them all, old biscuit tins filled with faded six by fours, the big books with the family photos pasted in. She even found a box of slides, but no projector so the only way we could see them was to hold them up to the light. We didn't recognise any of the little negative people we saw.

Mags was excited to have found so much. She kept digging deeper into the recesses of the loft, balancing on the beams so she wouldn't fall into the exposed insulation.

She found the paperwork right at the back, under an old suitcase. A box of documents, all addressed to our parents. We pulled the box down and started going through it, trying to make sense of what we were reading. We could hardly make sense of it at all.

“What is all this?” I had asked her, and when I looked up she had tears in her eyes.

In the restaurant Mags orders a steak and a beer and I ask for a Greek salad and a diet coke, but when the waiter brings our food he gets it mixed up. We wait for him to leave before switching it all around.

She drinks the beer quickly and orders another, trying to get over the legal limit as fast as she can.

“We'll set off early in the morning,” she says.

“How long do you think it will take to get there?”

She puts a hunk of steak in her mouth and shrugs her shoulders.

“We'll be there by lunch time, right?”

“Yeah,” she says. “Something like that.”

After we finish eating, the waiter brings over a dessert menu but we just leave some money on the table and walk out. Back in the camper, Mags turns on the electric heater which makes the whole place smell like burning dust.

We sit on the ripped vinyls seats. They are the colour of tan leather but are fooling nobody. There is no way someone could make love on these.

Mags takes out her old 35mm camera and starts loading a roll of film into it.

“What are we going to do?” I say.

“Do about what?”

People often say having a twin must be amazing, but this was never our experience. We never finished each other's sentences. We hardly ever seemed to know what the other was thinking about. We laughed whenever people romanticised it. We laughed at how naïve they were.

“When we get home,” I say. “What are we going to do when we get home?”

“I don't know,” she says. “What do you think we should do?”

I think that after Christmas and New Year we are both going to have to pack up our stuff and head back to our separate colleges. It feels too soon. “I don't know either,” I say.

Mags finishes loading the film and holds up the camera. I smile.

“Don't smile,” she says. “It's worse when you smile. And don't look straight at the camera.”

I let my face drop and I look down at the worn grey carpet, and as I think about everything that has happened, my face drops a little more.

“Perfect,” she says, and takes my picture.

We pull the curtains across the camper's windows and play Yahtzee on the fold down table until we are sick of it. There is a black and white television with an aerial that sits on top but we can't get a signal. Mags moves it around trying to find a spot where it give us a steady image but the closest she gets is by holding the aerial up in the air and her quickly arm goes numb so we give up. By nine thirty we are setting up the bedding because we don't know what else to do with ourselves. I sleep on the ripped vinyl seats and Mags takes the berth over the top of them. It strains and tips as she climbs up into it.

I close my eyes and try to will myself to sleep, but twenty minutes later I am still awake.

“Are you asleep?” Mags says.

“Yeah,” I say.

“Me too. Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“Do you feel like you don't know where you are any more?” she says.

The whole camper lights up as a car goes past and its headlights burst through the thin curtains. Her arm is dangling over the side.

“I'm in the same place as I was before,” I say. “You are too.”

Mags is quiet for a while and when she speaks her voice is soft.

“I guess,” she says, and pulls her arm under the cover.

That evening, when our parents got home we asked them if we could talk. We sat them at the kitchen table the same way they had done to us when we were young and in trouble. The kitchen table is small and square, each side only long enough to seat one person, so we all faced into the centre.

Mags had her elbows on the table, her fingers laced together and pressed to her mouth. Our parents were still chatting about whatever they had been talking about when they walked in.

“So, what's this about?” our mum said. She still had her scarf wrapped around her neck.

“We found papers,” Mags said.

“What papers are those?” our mum said, but I thought I noticed our dad's expression change.

Mags took the bundle of the old letters she had secreted on her lap and put them in the middle of the table.

“These ones.”

Our parents both sat back in their chairs like they were trying to get away from the little sheaf of folded A4 letters.

“Where did you get those?” our mum said. Her voice was brittle but she sounded cross.

“We were looking for the old photographs,” I said.

“You're not allowed to be angry about this,” Mags said.

Our mum pulled the scarf from around her neck and put it on the table in front of her in a little bundle.

“We wanted to tell you,” our dad said.

They were adoption papers, revealing that our parents weren't really our parents at all. But the strange thing, the thing that had taken us the longest to comprehend, was why there were two separate sets. Why there were some letters relating to my adoption, and another set relating to Mags'.

“We didn't know how,” our mum said.

They both looked down at their laps, faces flushed.

Mags and I had laid the letters out so we could try and make sense of them, and the picture slowly revealed itself, like a camera drawing focus. My real parents' surname had been Harris. Mags' had been Green.

Mags folded her arms like she was refusing to say another word, like it was their turn to talk. And so there we were, four perfect strangers sat at the crossroads of our own kitchen table, not a drop of blood between us.

In the morning the sun over the motorway service station is big and red and the sky is a gradient from blue through pink to white. I go to get coffee and pastries while Mags warms up the camper van and scrapes the ice off the front windscreen.

“You should take a picture of the sky,” I say, handing her one of the enormous cups of coffee.

“Black and white film. It won't look good.”

I take a picture with my phone while she isn't looking. There are no new messages from our parents. No missed calls.

The camper roars as we pull away and a puff of black soot coughs out of the exhaust. Mags stalls at the roundabout, but it isn't a problem. There is hardly anyone around. Soon we are back on the motorway and I find a good radio station and turn it up loud so we can hear it over the engine. Mags looks more relaxed behind the wheel than she had before. She has a pair of sunglasses on and her skinny but muscular arms gently turn the enormous steering wheel. Cars race past but it only makes us seem more relaxed and unhurried. The world is moving at its usual pace, but we have stepped outside of it for a little while.

“Have you remembered the waterfall yet?” she says.

“Nope,” I say, “I still don't know what you are talking about.”

She smiles and shakes her head.

The traffic on the motorway is clearer than I was expecting. I figured we would hit the morning rush hour and it would slow us down, but I guess this close to Christmas a lot of people aren't working. The roads are almost deserted and they feel like they belong to us.

“You know what really bothers me?” she says.

“What?” I say. I assume she is going to complain about how people drive too close behind her, or the way they don't indicate correctly.

“They let us think we shared a womb,” she says.

I turn and look at her. She is looking straight ahead as she drives. For the whole trip I have been waiting to talk about it, but she just wouldn't. I figured she wanted to wait until we got to the waterfall. That somehow that would be the moment, when the setting was finally right.

“I'm not even that upset about finding out I'm adopted,” she says. “I didn't see it coming, but it's something that happens all the time. But they let us think that we shared a womb. I didn't even know that was important to me until it was gone.”

I think about the way our forming bodies hadn't been pressed close together inside our mother, the way we hadn't emerged one after the other. That we hadn't always been a set. That she hadn't always been there.

That evening our Dad sat in front of the television, but he wasn't watching it. I could see the way his eyes were resting on something else. He wasn't ready to talk. Our mum had shut herself in her bedroom and was crying. Mags rolled her eyes at the sound of her and went downstairs. She has always been better at being angry than me. She can stay with it for longer.

I knocked gently and went inside. Mum sat up on the bed and wiped her eyes on her sleeve. She had put her dressing gown on over her clothes, which was something she did when she was upset.

“You must think we are terrible people,” she said.

I shrugged.

“We didn't mean it,” she said. “It just sort of happened.”

I sat on the chair in the corner of the bedroom that was normally piled with laundry. On the dressing table was a little framed photograph of the four of us. Mags and I were babies and we looked so alike. I never noticed how young our parents looked in that picture. They each held one of us and smiled at the camera. Dad was wearing a jumper that he still wears nineteen years later. Mum's eyes were big and black. I wondered if maybe this would be a good picture for Mags' project, but then I figured it might be best not to mention it.

“I don't understand how something like that can just happen,” I said.

“We always wanted to have twins,” she said. “We liked the idea of it.”

“So you just pretended we were?”

Mum went to say 'yes' but all that came out was a sob.

“This is a lot to take in, all at once,” I said.

“We shouldn't have done it,” she said.

I moved to sit next to her on the bed and held her in a hug. She cried into my shoulder while I looked out of the window at the darkening sky.

We arrive at our destination at about lunch time. Mags pulls the camper off of the road and parks it on a deserted campsite. It isn't clear we are allowed to park here. We get out and stand in the mud, neither of our shoes suitable for the conditions. Mags is holding a road map, turning it around in her hands, trying to orient herself. The sun is about as high as it is going to get on a December afternoon, showing through the bare branches of the trees surrounding the field. Mags turns on the spot looking for landmarks but there aren't any.

“This way,” she says, and starts walking across the grass.

We end up on a path that winds around the fields and through little copses of trees.

“Do you recognise this place?” Mags says.

“No,” I say.

Mags stops. “Me either,” she says. “But it should be near here.

”I look over her shoulder at the map.

“Where are we trying to get to?”

Mags points at a spot on the map, off the path near a little stream.

“And where are we now?”

“Not sure.” She lowers the map and looks off down the path. “This way feels right.”

She starts walking, full of assuredness, and I hurry to keep up.

“Are we going to be able to find our way back?”

“Sure,” Mags says.

“We should be careful not to get lost.” I turn around and look back at the way we have come, trying to commit the generic countryside to memory.

“I like being lost,” Mags says. “I like the way it feels.”

“Not me,” I say. I am thinking about how much daylight is left and there is a cavernous feeling in my stomach. It is probably the same feeling Mags is describing, but I have a different relationship to it.

For a moment I think she is going to punch me again, but instead she touches the top of my arm gently.

“Come on,” she says, “let's keep going.”

Mags' intuition proves correct and we start to see little signs for the waterfall. We follow them, climbing over stiles set into the fences and jumping over shallow streams. Her jeans have mud splashed all the way up to her knees. My jeans looks similar, even though I am trying to be more careful.

The signs lead us to ravine with the path snaking down inside it. We have to walk single file, and tread carefully. The drop over the edge is steep and rocky. I look over the edge and my stomach turns a little. At the bottom are jagged rocks. There ought to be a fence.

“I think I remember this,” I say.

Mags stops and turns suddenly and I bump into her, knocking us both off balance and we instinctively grab each others arms. We steady ourselves and watch as some stones and gravel fall off the path and hit the rocks at the bottom.

“You do?” she says.

In the distance I hear the feint sound of a waterfall and my vague memory begins to pull into focus. “Yeah,” I say, “I remember.”

Mags smiles. “Come on.”

We go a little faster down the path and when we find our way to the waterfall it is even smaller than I remember. The water spills gently over the rocks, gathering in a small pool at the bottom and then drifting away along a little stream. I think of the years that it is has continued in this way while I had forgotten it existed.

“I think I forgot about this almost instantly after we walked away from it when we were kids, and I never thought about it again.”

“I thought about it a lot,” Mags says.

We stand on the edge of the pool of water watching for a little while. Mags is so close to me that our arms are touching.

“Oh,” she says.

I turn and look at her. “What?”

“I forgot the camera.”

It hadn't even occurred to me that she wasn't carrying it.

“I'm an idiot,” she says.

“Yes,” I say.

She punches me on the bicep. I can feel the bruise starting to develop almost right away.

“Do you want to go back for it?” I say.

“No, it's okay,” she says. “I don't even know what I was going to use the picture for.”

Instead of taking photographs we walk around, enjoying the dying light through the canopy of trees. We reach out and let the cold water run over our fingers. I stop worrying about whether we will get lost on our way back to the van. Whether we'll end up camped out under a bush in the mud. Mags doesn't seem bothered. We've always been fine before.

We sit on a large rock nearby and watch the waterfall. Light catches on it, sparkling and flaring. Mags rests her head on my shoulder and we sit quietly. My toes are cold in my wet shoes and my calves are sore from the walking and I am certain Mags is feeling the same way. I lean my head onto hers and we sink into ourselves, letting the cold air pass over us. We watch the water distorting the rocks behind its glassy surface. We watch it ripple as it lands. We watch as the stream carries it away.

THE END

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