Talking about Derek is akin to talking about myself in the Third Person. Derek says this. Derek says that. Derek says another thing.

In a caravan in Wales in a mirror, I can see Derek staring back at me. Head shaved to a violently lurking stubble. Face thinned by dehydration. Eyes sunken. Wheezing: an oscillating pendulum of barely living body. A marvellous plan: to go into the Forest of the Gors Maen Llwyd Nature Reserve, near  Llyn Brenig, and simply wait for the Pandemic to pass over the World. It had been a mistake to come out to the middle of nowhere. The Berwyn Mountains of nowhere.

Derek says I should reconsider my position. That I should return to the development of a Cryptocurrency for Time Travellers. I am no longer convinced by Derek's charming patter. The stories of the wealth of Croesus no longer grip me. Derek only really needed me or my technical abilites. Without me his scam or scheme or whatever it was was doomed to a precipitous failure. Derek knows this and is not going to depart without a fight.

The caravan is more of a mobile home. Cramped. Smelling strongly of belching, farting, and something sweet and decaying. I know what it is. And, I know how it came to be there. And, I know why it is there. And, I know when it got to be there. And, I know how it got to be there.  I know the answers to all of the other questions you could ask. Even the unanswered question.

I have a daily routine. It is to go down to the stream. Draw water. Boil water. Make tea. Make porridge. Soak beans. Sit at the table, write my diary. Looking at my large, blue, Central Electricity Generation Board Diary, I can see where it all changed. I can see it in my hand writing. The change from the neat, tiny, script, to the excited flowing scrawl. It all happened in 2020. We came to the caravan to escape the Pandemic.

It is these lucid moments that are the hardest.

It is hard being a twin. There is a uniqueness that nobody else can experience. When we were younger, Me and Derek would pass ourselves off as each other. People would never know which of us they were talking to. It was a riot. It was a hoot. It was our pathway to darkness. Derek was less than seven minutes older than me. Yet, like all older brothers, he insisted that made him important. In charge. The differences between us were mere molecules. Yet, Derek was atrocious with anything remotely disconnected from technology. Had the wheel not been invented, Derek would have no reason to exist. Myself, on the other hand could never understand anything other than myths and folklore and legends and stories that buzzed out and around my eyes. My mouth. Our resemblance was as deep as the molecules of our skin. To everybody else we are indistinguishable. Between ourselves, we were aliens.

The thing we had in common was the music we grew up hearing. Punk. Derek knew the dates of all the greatest gigs. He claimed to know the names of everyone who attended that world changing Lesser Free Trade Hall Gig in 1976. That list ran to forty two people. Everyone else was a Time Traveller. The difference between us was mere molecules. Derek lived in a world of vivid relationships. Derek really had crawled across pubs in Leeds in the 1980s. We both had. We laid a curious trail: me of stories and Derek of data. Across the landscape and the age.

I could walk away. Vanish. Leave the caravan and Derek behind. Nobody would know. We had spent the time during the Pandemic passing off as each other. It was the same game we played as children. Fooling the world. Derek and Duncan the scandalous twins.  I could return to the mundane world of lecturing about Art and Popular Culture.

On the floor of the Caravan were twenty two metal film canisters. Each inscribed Kodak Limited London. Approximating seven inches or eighteen centimeters in diameter. Each canister contained a single plastic spool of Super 8 film, marked ‘Sex Pistols Manchester 1976 Lesser Free Trade Hall'. Derek had explained that these were all about twelve minutes and thirty seconds - plus or minus eight seconds - and documented that most important of gigs. His plan was to acquire the final canister to complete the collection. The one signed by Howard Devoto. It would give him about four hours of footage. He could make a  killing showing a four hour film of original punk. He had matched up the footage to the bootleg sound recordings. It was all going to be an astounding, magnificent, extravaganza.

I sipped my tea. Hot. Black. Astringent. I could feel the heat negotiate its way around my stomach into my intestines. I could feel the volume filling me. Both me and Derek had not really prepared to weather the Pandemic in any organised way. My mind wanders. Sometimes I suppose Derek was the technical one and other times I admit it was me. That Derek had a dull but regular job lecturing about Art and Popular Culture while I carved a path through Technology.

It is these lucid moments that are the starkest.

The truth, the grinding poverty of the reality of Derek and Duncan the scandalous twins, is that neither Derek nor Duncan understands. Knowing that Time Travel could, theoretically, happen was sufficient to expound a magnificent caper. A story. A winding arc that would keep us amused in a Caravan, in North Wales, during the Pandemic. It was a good story. Cobbled together from bits about encryption and history and all manner of memories about Pubs in Leeds. It was the kernel of a scam. A scam that would make us both rich. Not rich beyond the dreams of whomsoever or whatsoever dreams of avarice but rich enough to self sufficiently suppurate into the oblivion that beckons.

It was a story Derek rattled out, I improvised, Derek wrote down. It was a story I rattled out, Derek improvised, Derek wrote down. It was a magnificent Folie à deux. We even sourced 1976 super 8 Film. In canisters. The plan was simply a scam that grew out of a hoax. A kind of art forgery that would never have fooled the eye of an expert. Inspired by the sale on 14th Sep 2021 of something genuine. Something that really showed the events of 4th June 1976. But it had kept us busy in the Caravan. While the plan grew wilder and more baroque, more arcane, more convoluted - a briciolage of technical ideas smeared out across history - neither of us noticed that the reality was we were sick.

Derek left some time ago. I can see him in the mirror. I look back at my own reflection. I am gaunt. Unlike Derek's dry, taut, powdery skin, I still look living. My eyes are not quite as sunken as Derek's. There is light in my eyes. There was always just a few molecules difference between us. That is what made us identical. That is what let us do the things we did. Those few molecules were the difference between living and dying from the sickness of the Pandemic. The coughing and the struggle for breath. The terror of being surrounded by air and unable to inhale. Derek had scribbled more and more frantically as the infection took hold. Those few molecules saved me: they gave me immunity and Derek death.

In a different Universe, Derek watched me die. In a different, different Universe, everybody lives.

In this Universe, I am alone in a Caravan in North Wales consumed by the grief of knowing a few molecules difference has separated me from Derek. Forever.

--The End--