Whenever my brother and I walk into a room, a combined four metres of awkward height and similar fashion sense, we prepare ourselves for a sort of ritualistic questioning from anyone who’s never met us before. What precedes this is the look people give the two of us: a person’s eyes will flicker over one of us, in the nonchalant sort of way one usually looks at a stranger, and then, in what they think will be a continuation of mundane room observation, they will look at the other one of us. And then, something in their brain explodes, as they question whether they’ve had one two many drinks or what was really in the double chocolate brownies. Their head will move from side to side, looking at one, then the other and back again,eyes darting between us, as they begin to comprehend: twins. Suddenly people seem to get excited, as questions rush through their heads.
Unfortunately, a lot of these questions make it out of people’s mouths. On the one level, there are the classics: “Do you feel pain if the other one is hit in the face?”, “Have you ever switched places?”, “Are you telepathic?” These ones are easy to reply to (the odd, completely fabricated anecdote is always good) or the trick of both picking 638 as a number between one and a thousand. Then there are the questions that we answer the same everytime: no, we can’t send messages to each other by thought; yes, it means we were born on the same day; and no, we have never ever switched girlfriends (I mean come on, that’s a horrible thing to do).
Last week, however, I was asked an original question which shook me to my core in a sort of existential way. A friend asked me,“How do you know that you were originallyHugo? Surely at the beginning, two identical looking newborns, you would have inadver- tently switched around, and unless you had badges or something. Surely your parents couldn’t tell, maybe you started life as Patrick?” This freaked me out – my brother’s name could have been mine. Maybe it was only at three, five or even 12 months down the line where I sort of settled on Hugo, finally stopping the ambiguous period of identity swapping. In my pursuit of an answer to the question, I brought it up during the holidays when my mum was looking through baby photos. “Mum”, I asked, “Which one is me?”, picking up the one of us as newborns. She didn’t hesitate; pointing to one of the two tiny little babies in a tiny little cot, she says, “That’s you”. To be frank, I didn’t believe her. My mum isn’t even 100 percent with my name today – she called me Scrabble last week, who is our cat, who is dead, so I viewed h her certainty with suspicion.
Twins have obviously interested people for a long time. Greek and Roman mythology is littered with litters of twins and triplets, from Castor and Pollux to Apollo and Artemis, and this is mirrored in the many twins in films today, from The Man in the Iron Mask to the timeless Parent Trap to Legend. There are actually really cool things about twins that most people don’t know, and no, it’s not telepathy. Most twins, for example, speak their own language during formative infant years. What sounds like babble is communication, which is why twins take longer to learn their mother tongue than non-twins. There have been several experiments done on twins separated at birth which have resulted in some surprising findings.The ‘Jim twins’ were separated at birth, but on meeting for the first time aged 39, they had both married women called Betty, named their sons James Alan, named their dogs Fido, drank the same beer and owned Chevrolet cars. Spooky, right? Mybrother and I imagine that scenario sometimes. The two of us, separated at birth, seeing each other in a train station or somewhere, doing a slow-mo run and comparing lives.
I was really interested about what life would be like at uni, by myself, with my brother on a gap year, as the longest we had been apart in our lives before October 2015 was 10 days. In some ways, it’s nice to walk into a room and have eyes pass idly by, but, thinking of my brother now, teaching orphans in the middle of a Peruvian jungle, I’m certain that he, like me, misses the absurdity of entering a room together.
