Free The Sea by John Banville

to me. On the contrary, it caused me to have a momentary but starkly clear image of the crooked little wooden outhouse standing amid the lupins across from my bedroom window, and even seemed to catch a dry, woody whiff of the torn-up squares of newsprint impaled on their rusty nail just inside the door.
    We came to the Cedars, stopped at the gate. The car was parked on the gravel. It had been out recently, the cooling engine was still clicking its tongue to itself in fussy complaint. I could hear faintly from inside the house the melting-toffee tones of a palm court orchestra playing on the wireless, and I pictured Mrs. Grace and her husband dancing together in there, sweeping around the furniture, she with her head thrown back and her throat bared and he mincing on his satyr’s furred hind legs and grinning up eagerly into her face—he was shorter than she by an inch or two—with all his sharp little teeth on show and his ice-blue eyes alight with mirthful lust. Chloe was tracing patterns in the gravel with the toe of her sandal. There were fine white hairs on her calves but her shins were smooth and shiny as stone. Suddenly Myles gave a little jump, or skip, as if for joy but too mechanical for that, like a clockwork figure coming abruptly to life, and clipped me playfully on the back of the head with his open palm and turned and with a gagging laugh scrambled agilely over the bars of the gate and dropped down to the gravel on the other side and spun about to face us and crouched with knees and elbows flexed, like an acrobat inviting his due of applause. Chloe made a face, pulling her mouth down at one side.
    “Don’t mind him,” she said in a tone of bored irritation. “He can’t talk.”
    They were twins. I had never encountered twins before, in the flesh, and was fascinated and at the same time slightly repelled. There seemed to me something almost indecent in such a predicament. True, they were brother and sister and so could not be identical—the very thought of identical twins sent a shiver of secret and mysterious excitement along my spine—but still there must be between them an awful depth of intimacy. How would it be? Like having one mind and two bodies? If so it was almost disgusting to think of. Imagine somehow knowing intimately, from the inside, as it were, what another’s body is like, its different parts, different smells, different urges. How, how would it be? I itched to know. In the makeshift picture-house one wet Sunday afternoon—here I leap ahead—we were watching a film in which two convicts from a chain-gang made their escape still manacled together, and beside me Chloe stirred and made a muffled sound, a sort of laughing sigh. “Look,” she whispered, “it’s me and Myles.” I was taken aback, and felt myself blush and was glad of the dark. She might have been admitting to something intimate and shameful. Yet it was the very notion of an impropriety in such closeness that made me eager to know more, eager, and yet loath. Once—this is an even longer leap forward—when I got up the nerve to ask Chloe straight out to tell me, because I longed to know, what it felt like, this state of unavoidable intimacy with her brother—her other!—she thought for a moment and then held up her hands before her face, the palms pressed almost together but not quite touching. “Like two magnets,” she said, “but turned the wrong way, pulling and pushing.” After she had said it she fell darkly silent, as though this time it was she who thought she had let drop a shaming secret, and she turned away from me, and I felt for a moment something of the same panicky dizziness that I did when I held my breath for too long underwater. She was never less than alarming, was Chloe.
    The link between them was palpable. I pictured it as an invisibly fine thread of sticky shiny stuff, like spider’s silk, or a glistening filament such as a snail might leave hanging as it crossed from one leaf to another, or