All Kinds of Wrong

The room is unfamiliar. I don’t know how I got here. I’ll just lie here for a minute and everything will make sense, or I’ll just wake up and it’ll be a dream. And he wills himself back to sleep. 

But sleep won’t come, so he lies there, and lies there, eyes wide open despite himself but still it doesn’t make sense. He has worked out where he is, he remembers helping to decorate it, but that was years ago. He just doesn’t understand why he’s there now. Or how he got here. What on earth has he done? This is all kinds of wrong. 

He is still lying there when the body stirs next to him. 

“Oh, please God, no” he thinks, and he wills himself to think quicker. What the fuck has happened to get him here? Because surely understanding that is the key to making it un-happen. To undo it. He’d been awake listening to the noises in the house and outside long enough to convince himself that this was not a dream. 

04:50am. There’s still time to work this out and, again, he works the timeline backwards in his head. What was the last thing he remembered? Getting into bed. He had brushed his teeth. And he was sure it was his bed. Not this bed. And he did not put pyjamas on, but he had them on now. It was the first thing that had alerted him to something being wrong. He never wears pyjamas. That, and the very different smell. Sweeter, but heady. Not Kate’s perfume at all. 

Before then, what? They’d had dinner with Tom and Jenny. It was a pleasant evening, nothing more than that, but as usual, he and Tom had ended up having more than the one too many. Kate was more than a little pissed at something he’d said, for the life of him he couldn’t remember what, and the evening had ended quite abruptly. 

“I’ll get our coats, shall I?” she’d said in that way that could cut through girders, and they’d bickered all the way home. She’d walked straight up the stairs and gone to bed. He’d thought he might let her cool down a bit before he came to bed and poured himself a small whisky. Actually, it was probably a large whisky but what difference would that make? 

Unfortunately for David, Kate was still wide awake, just waiting to carry on the argument. Great. He thought he’d ended up saying something like “If you say so”, or “you’re probably right” in a way that was supposed to be agreeing with her, like you think when you’re drunk. She’d taken the huff, flounced herself down under the duvet and turned her bedside light off, as if to draw an end to the conversation. He did remember breathing a huge sigh of relief that that was the end of it, at least for tonight, and he could go to sleep. But then, and then, and “this is it!” he thought to himself, and then she’d said

“I knew I’d married the wrong twin!”

Now, there was no logic to this next thought at all, and he knew it, but there was also no logic to him waking up in his brother’s bed, next to his sleeping sister-in-law. That must have been like some magic words or something. ‘I knew I’d married the wrong twin’. That must be key. And now he had something to work with, he lay there sending his brother what they called ‘twin vibes’ or their ‘spidey sense’, willing Tom to wake up, to realise that surely he must be in the wrong bed too. 

Exasperated, he rubbed his face with his hands and stopped in his tracks. He did not have a beard. He, David, did not have a beard. It was Tom who had the beard. “Okay. Don’t panic. Let’s just re-evaluate the situation” he thought to himself. This might be a good thing. To casual observers, he was still Tom. Tom’s body was in bed with his own wife. The right wife. He was just David, inhabiting Tom’s head. Oh my god this was so confusing. It can’t be right. Was he still drunk and having some alcohol fuelled illusion? No. he thought it was much more than that. It still needed fixing. As quick as possible. 

He stopped himself for a moment, because he couldn’t quite believe that this was making everything feel a little better. It was still wrong, even though it was only fifty shades of wrong instead of the all kinds of wrong he had thought. It did make things a little less weird. Probably easier to control. Possibly easier to fix? At least that was his hope. Was it clutching at straws? He hadn’t a clue, but it certainly gave him a starting point. 

David sneaked out of bed, grabbed the phone from the bed side table and crept out to the bathroom. Still only 05:30, so there was time to fix this, he thought. There must be. He sent Tom a message.

“R U awake?” and he saw the ellipses that told him Tom was typing back straight away. 

“Jesus fucking Christ Davey, what’s going on? I’m in your bathroom looking at your face in your mirror but its me. Tell me you know what’s going on?”

“Get dressed. Sainsbury’s car park 10 mins.” 

Tom sent a thumbs up emoji, and then quickly sent another message, “WAIT – where ur clothes? U don’t wear pjs”

“Fuck. There’s a tracksuit in the washing basket you’re sitting on. Shoes by the door”

“c u in 10” was the terse reply, but that was all he needed, mightily relieved that he wasn’t on his own in this. 

Dave threw on Tom’s coat that was hanging on the banister, crammed his feet into a pair of trainers and ran to Sainsbury’s on the corner, where he saw his brother running around the opposite corner to met him. 

Sitting on a bench in a corner of the car park, the twins quickly apprised each other of what they thought the situation was. Both brothers had triggered an argument, and both wives had resorted to that much utilised insult ‘I knew I’d married the wrong twin’. They could only assume that this happened at the same time to have triggered some kind of David Lynchian switch of personae. It was obvious to them what they needed to do next, as if anything were obvious in this ridiculous and increasingly terrifying situation. All they needed to do was make Jenny and Kate be glad that they had indeed married the right twin after all. That was all. And if they hadn’t looked a strange sight already, they did now as the brothers burst out laughing. 

The plan sounded like a Comedy Central sitcom, but neither of them were laughing, both equally ignoring the ‘what if it didn’t work’ scenario; at least for now. 

They would call in sick at work, so that neither had to pretend to know what they were doing in the others jobs. Send each wife a message to say they couldn’t sleep so had gone for a run and would see them after work. And then they would spend all day planning a really special apology evening. Everything they could think of to get them back in the good books. Flowers. Rose petals sprinkled all over the bed. Candles in the bathroom. Three-course dinner. Romantic. And, at the absolute heart of their magical plan was that at 10:30pm, each would coax the other’s wife to admit that they had indeed married the right twin after all.  

Jenny would leave for work before long, so they could let themselves into Toms house before they looked too suspicious or just plain strange in the growing daylight, and they spent much of the morning coaching each other on what counted as romantic for each other’s wives. 

What to cook was a challenge because Dave was a good cook and Tom wasn’t, so in a stroke of genius they agreed to buy a three-course meal from their local mediterranean restaurant, with instructions for reheating. 

All day, they planned and prepped in the house that was right for their heads not their bodies, messaging each other with ‘what if’ questions each time they thought of something that might trip the other up, and switching back to the right bodies in the right house just before Jenny arrived home from work. They’d even covered what Tom should do to fill his time in the house that wouldn’t piss Jenny off, because working 7-3 meant she would be home so much earlier than time to get ready for dinner. 

Jenny liked a relaxing hot bath with Blue Skies and Fluffy White Clouds bubbles from Lush and Classic FM playing quietly in the background. Anne-Marie liked a loud playmix of 90s music so she could sing along in a hot and steamy shower. Both brothers vetoed anything that involved nakedness, varying states of undress, and absolutely no sex, although Tom agreed to that just so that Kate wouldn’t realise anything was wrong: he’d always fancied her and would have happily made a valiant attempt but agreed that abstention was the right thing to do. At least until they knew it had worked. Although they were twins, and thought they knew everything about each other, Dave wasn’t sure if that was a joke or not, but laughed anyway, just in case. 

And this was the key to making their wives utter those magic words at 10:30pm. They would each ‘pretend’ to be the other for much of the evening. Although being twins, they had many interchangeable habits and sayings between the two, there were of course differences, and they hoped that playing on these differences to the point of comical irritation would make it okay for them to push in a jokey way that yes, they had married the right twin after all.  

And so it went until they were both exhausted, but absolutely determined that they were never going to give their respective wives any reason ever again to curse that they had married the wrong twin. 

At 10:45pm, Dave was tired after an exhausting day. They both thought they would have to go to bed and wake the next day, in the right beds. He climbed into bed, feigning instant sleep, but there was no way he expected to get any sleep. He probably looked at the time every 10 minutes, but eventually, it was 04:30am. He thought he might risk testing it, and rubbed at his face and it was smooth and clean shaven. Well, slight stubble because he’d be shaving soon, but no beard. He rubbed his face with both hands just to be sure, and yes, he was back to being himself. 

Jesus, he had never felt so relieved in his life. Now he could open his eyes properly, for more than a peak at the time. He was back to being Dave, in Dave’s bed, alongside Kate, the right wife, with the right sweet, heady perfume. He took himself quietly to the bathroom and locked the door before texting Tom. 

“Thank fuck for that mate. Thank fuck for that.” Tom’s reply was instant. 

“Thank fuck indeed matey. Sleep well eh?” replied Tom. “Oh, and best delete your Whatsapp history eh? Just in case…” which they both did before climbing into their own proper beds and sleeping the sleep of the condemned man who just had a reprieve.