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“Take this through to your father,” she said, handing Jonathan the letter she had stuffed untidily back into its brown envelope. The rest of the post stayed spread out before her on the kitchen table, deemed too trivial or too important for her husband to deal with. She leaned back in the wooden dining chair she preferred, in every way identical to the other chairs round the table, and sighed. “You’re a good boy,” she said, looking him over, “but there’s something odd about you.”
Jonathan knew how to handle these moods of hers. He stood on tiptoe to kiss her cheek and she leaned down to meet him halfway, the scent of alcohol a delicate perfume on her breath. “I’ll try to do better,” he promised, following with the smile that appealed to her most. When he received a nod of approval he turned from her and walked through to the living-room to deliver the letter. On the way, he paused between the rooms to carefully turn the folded paper in its manilla casing, smoothing both layers down flat. In the doorway he pulled himself up, gaining all the height available to him at the great age of six, and lost some of the softness in his face by putting a more serious expression on it.
“Mum said to give you this.” He stood by the sofa in a child’s imitation of a soldierly stance and held the letter out to his father, who took it without a word.
The cigarette in the ashtray smouldered away while his father read the news from the envelope. Whatever that news was Jonathan never found out, though he noted that it made his father frown, which meant it could not have been good.
The letter was dropped onto the glass-topped coffee table, traded for the cigarette. His father inhaled once, slowly, before addressing the boy. “I should start thinking about moving back to England – any longer here and you’ll grow up sounding like a bloody Irishman.”
Jonathan could do the accent quite well already, not that he had shared this information with anyone who would not approve of it. Belfast was easiest because it was the most familiar, but he could also produce his grandmother’s Portadown accent and – this being a much later joke told when he had the understanding of an adult – could sound convincingly native to either Derry or Londonderry, depending on who was asking the question.
The boy that Jonathan’s mother wanted was quite different from the son his father wanted, so he had to be both of those boys as well as himself. He thought of them as his identical siblings, raised alongside him in the same home with the same name.
He was another two boys at school. One of those was the teacher’s pet, best in the class at spelling and well-behaved almost all of the time. He had never once scratched his name into the desk assigned to him and ate everything on his plate at lunchtimes. The other boy was more excitingly reckless. He ran like a hare and knew all the rules of football, playing in whichever position was left after his friends had picked theirs (he was always the goalie).
After his father died, one of the Jonathans had to grow up quickly while another stayed young enough to appeal to his now rarely sober mother. By this point the line between the two of them and the line that marked them off from the original had become blurred, but they remained distinct from each other still.
When Mrs Pine lost interest in all of them, Jonathan was sent to live first with his Portadown grandmother and then a year later to the one in London, who spent a lot on his schooling to get rid of the accent he arrived with. This latest Jonathan did well in school – even better than any of his own earlier twins, because Granny insisted upon it – and passed his exams with good enough grades to go to university. The move away from his last interested relative to live with his student peers spawned another six Jonathans while killing off two, which left him only a little more confusing than he had been as an adolescent.
Jonathan Pine graduated with a good degree and with roughly half of him still in existence; a number of Jonathans had been abandoned over the years of his course, for one reason or another. There was a version of him who partied too often and had to be retired to spare the rest of them the embarrassment of academic failure, and one whose brief existence catered to the educational prejudices of one specific tutor – his essays got much better marks than any of the others could have coaxed out of those classes. One Jonathan went to the gym occasionally while another was known by his friends to be exceptionally lazy. One of them kissed a boy and was then swiftly forgotten by the others (all of whom failed to forget about the boy).
After university he became a soldier for a while, inventing a version of himself who was assertive but obedient. The structure of this new life was comfortable in a way that no home had been since Belfast. He was given orders which he followed to the letter, relieved to have almost all of his decisions made for him. Life was very good for a couple of years until Jonathen learned that even he could not compartmentalise as much as Iraq required.
Sadly, the Jonathan who settled back into civilian life was not the man his wife had married and the newer, quieter Jonathan was soon divorced. In the space of a year he had lost a career and a spouse and had found himself whittled back down to one. The version of Jonathan who handled this transition well did not turn up when he was needed, so the gradually increasing collection in his head had to make do with themselves.
His mother, now long in a grave her son had never once visited, had been right: there was something odd about Jonathan Pine, though exactly what that was depended almost entirely on which of him you happened to meet.