Chapter 8 - Tweedle-Tay's Story
February 5, 1998 - Tulsa, Oklahoma

"You know, sometimes I wanna rip out your throat, Daddy," Michaela was singing along with her Jewel CD, which was being played at almost full volume. We'd given up on being as quiet as possible in fear that our father might hear us and kick us out of the house. I suspected that he knew all too well where we were and was enjoying every minute of it. Besides, both Michaela and I were now aware that there was no way I would rejoin the band and everything would go back to normal again. Not now. It was too late.
Rather than concentrate on naive dreams like that, Michaela and I were preparing for the day that we would leave the attic. We didn't know when that day would be, it might be next week, next month, next year..... but it would come soon. There was no point in being idol when we were in the attic. We had to have hobbies, be productive, and, most importantly, enjoy ourselves. And, as for the noise, we figured the more we made, the more annoyed our parents would become and the sooner we could leave.
According to Michaela, as soon as we left the attic we would have to return to (in her case) and start (in mine) school. Michaela was used to being in advanced classes and I didn't want to go to LA and find myself in the seventh grade so we devoted about four hours a day to our school work. Michaela assumed that we got more done in those four hours than most people did in the six hours they spent at school. "Tay, you have no idea how much time is wasted at school," she told me. "Lunch, recess, talking before, during and after classes, everyone arrives late, teachers go off the topic, reading magazines, listening to music........ Four hours a day is plenty. We can spend all that wasted time having fun!"
And fun we had. We spent hours reading, trying to learn about the outside world that we hadn't seen in months, we were in the process of painting the attic, like the Sistine Chapel. The attic was becoming gorgeous. We were trying to turn it into a beautiful garden, a bit like our backyard, so that we felt like we were outside, even though we weren't. Occasionally we drew a boy and girl with long blonde hair and blue eyes in the garden, engaged in various activities. Michaela said this was so any future generations of Mansons that might come up into the attic would know a little more about the legend of the blonde, fraternal twins. Tweedle-Tay and Michaela. Us.
Michaela was also doing something else for the future generations of Mansons, and, for that matter, anyone else who may buy this house. Michaela was writing a book, about everything that had happened to us. Occasionally, okay often, she would call upon me to write a chapter, based on what I was feeling on the date she gave me to write about. It was really cool, like a combined journal, sort of. Michaela was even writing chapters about what she thought our parents would have been thinking about at the time, like on the day we were born. She said she'd write a series of books, and probably, after we'd left the attic, someone would publish the books, curious about what had happened to the missing pop star, Tweedle- Tay Manson. The first book in the series was called "Tweedle-Tay and His Evil Twin" named after the day we first met, when Neuton said that Michaela was my evil twin.
I was spending a great deal of my free time preparing for my return to pop stardom once we'd left the attic. I practiced every day and tried desperately hard to write happy pop songs, like the ones on my album "Centre of Somewhere", but what was there to be happy about? Most of my songs centred around attics and death. Michaela was apparently writing songs too, although she wouldn't show them to me. But she said most of her songs were based around attics, evil fathers and revenge. We were such cheerful, happy teenagers......
Just as we were leaving remnants of our presence in the attic for future generations of Mansons, past generations of Mansons had left remnants of their lives in the attic for us. There were masses of piles of paper in the North-Western corner of the attic. Michaela seemed to find great joy in pouring over them for hours on end. She said the papers might explain why our parents were so psychotic as to lock us in an attic. Personally, I thought she was being a little unfair. I mean sure, I had never before heard of this happening to anyone and I guess that did make them a little peculiar, but in the first fourteen years of my life they were nothing but nice to me. They were supportive, they were kind and they only wanted for me what I wanted for myself. It was only when Michaela came along that they started acting strangely. So maybe my sister was right, maybe we did have some sort of family secret. Michaela had barely made a dent in the piles of papers but she had already found out the Mansons had been living in our house since the turn of the century. It was so weird, thinking about all the dead ancestors we had lying in our backyard. Kind of creepy actually.
So Michaela and I tried to use our time in the attic constructively but there was going to come a time when we would run out of things to do and be idle. And idle hands make idle means.