How to describe the cold despair I felt on hearing those words? It was enough to endure that I had not made a success of living in London. This was the worst—this was not just lack of success, it was anti-success, the most wretched of failures. Rory must have recognised something in me, something that echoed inside his own miserable heart. He must have thought I was so desperate that I would say yes.
When I’d said no, unhappily fabricating a jealous Australian boyfriend, knowing that Rory didn’t believe me, I put the phone down, and almost immediately it rang again. It was Emma. She was having dinner with Jerome, and if I was sure it was okay, she would stay at his house. I nearly laughed. I said it was fine and put the phone down again. I switched the kitchen light on, and then, walking out into the sitting room, the lamps and the television. All this luxury. At home I’d been living in a terrace house with nearly a dozen tiny bedrooms. Mine had been small and damp, but there was always the sound of someone on the stairs or in the kitchen. I looked out at the traffic and the bright lights of the off-licence, and the people coming up from the tube entrance, and pulled the curtains shut.
I will always love you. That was what the last page of Peter’s last letter said. I’d taken it out of the envelope, which had already been ripped open, and read it. It was a letter like a suicide note, only he wasn’t committing suicide but quitting commerce to join the defence forces. Finally he would realise his dream of becoming a pilot.
I left it on the kitchen counter. It wasn’t deliberate; the microwave beeped. My tinned soup was ready, and I forgot to put the letter back in the envelope. Top of the Pops was on, which I always had to watch through splayed fingers. Then I rang a friend at home and we talked until I could tell her about Rory, tears leaking out of the corners of my eyes as I laughed. I went to bed and slept heavily, without needing to be aware of Emma beside me.
Next morning I was in the storeroom, kneeling on the floor beside the overstock shelves, with a book open on my lap. I’d just unpacked a box of children’s classics and I was reading The Magic Faraway Tree.
I didn’t hear him approaching, just felt, suddenly, a warm hand cradling the back of my head, the way a mother does a baby’s. I looked up, startled. It was the floor manager, Tony. He smiled at me, and said in his soft London voice, ‘Alright, trouble?’
Behind him I saw Rory, hands on his fat hips, glaring at me. I flushed, and smiled up at Tony and nodded. He nodded back, took his hand away, and left.
I could see that Emma was home as I crossed the road from the tube that evening. Our kitchen light was on. There was someone with her; Jerome, no doubt. I took my time scraping my feet on the metal doormat at the entrance to our building. It had been a long day; Rory was not talking to me, which was more tiring than I could have thought possible.
They hadn’t been there long. As I shut the door I heard the squeal of a wooden stool on the tiled floor, the sound of the fridge opening.
‘Hello,’ I called. I stopped to look at myself in the bathroom mirror, seizing a towel to rub over my hair. Some of the red came off on the towel. The back of my head still felt warm where Tony had touched it.
When I came into the kitchen Jerome was reading Peter’s letter, one long arm outstretched to hold Emma off.
‘It’s private!’ she was saying.
I put my bag on the floor. They didn’t notice me.
‘Give it back!’ said Emma. She was making surprising headway, given her size; Jerome had to brace himself against the bench with one foot to stop himself falling off the stool. Then he simply took his hand away, and Emma cannoned into him. She snatched the letter and stood back, panting.
‘I thought you’d finished with him,’ said Jerome, crossing his arms.
‘I couldn’t finish with him,’ said Emma. ‘I never started.’ She put one hand to her chest, as if feeling her trotting heartbeat.
‘It’s true,’ I said. ‘It was unrequited love.’
They both turned to look at me.
‘Whose love?’ said Jerome. ‘Whose love was unrequited?’
He was so beautiful. He was wearing a green scarf, high around his face. You could see the green in his dark eyes. His skin would be smooth to the touch.
‘Peter’s love,’ I said. ‘He’s had a crush on Emma for years.’
‘So why hasn’t she put a stop to it? Why hasn’t he given up?’
I glanced at Emma. She had become very still, though tears gleamed in her eyes. I shrugged.
‘Were you sleeping with him?’ said Jerome to Emma.
I felt my body glittering with embarrassment.
‘Of course not,’ said Emma.
‘You’re lying,’ said Jerome.
‘Oh, don’t be a fucking idiot,’ I said, suddenly impatient with him. This is why I don’t have a boyfriend, I thought. Jerome was not beautiful at all. His face was rigid with anger, his lips pinched righteously together. What a waste of time, all this to and fro, this fighting over nothing. I picked my bag up again. ‘I’m going out.’
I had already planned to meet Karen; we were going to see another band. I forgot my umbrella again; I ran across the road in the rain, through a clot of cars, and went into the off-licence. I called her on the payphone and asked her to come straight away. I put more lipstick on, looking at myself in the door of the fridge, and bought a four-pack of tall, strong beers. I waited for Karen in the doorway and drank one of the beers. A double-decker bus trundled around the corner, Karen leaned out of a top window and shrieked at me, and I made a run for it, half-blinded by rain.
I climbed to the top floor, my beers banging against my leg. You were allowed to smoke upstairs. Karen lit a cigarette as I sat down beside her. She was smoking Silk Cut.
‘If it rains again tomorrow,’ said Karen, ‘I’m going to kill everyone in London with an axe.’
‘You’ll be tired,’ I said, staring through the rain-streaked window at the crowds forcing their way along the pavement.
‘It’s a big job,’ she agreed, exhaling smoke.
We started to laugh at the idea of her wearily hacking her way through the populace. It was so hopeless. We were having such a terrible time. We hated London, and ourselves. I leaned my forehead against the seat in front of me, and laughed until I was weeping with it.
‘Forget the band,’ said Karen, when we had wiped our eyes. ‘Let’s just go and get drunk.’
When I got home the flat was quiet. The kitchen light had been left on. I padded down the hall carpet to our bedroom. I swayed a little. Jerome and Emma were asleep in her single bed. He lay behind her with his knees bent up behind hers, as though they were one shape. I pulled the covers off my bed and dragged them down the hall to sleep on the couch.
We didn’t get any more letters from Peter, and Emma didn’t mention him, or the fight with Jerome. She had successfully sealed that rupture in the smooth surface of her existence; sealed it so that nothing about Peter and his unhappiness could leak into the rest of her life. We were sisters, Emma and I, which meant we were the same, even though so different. I knew what she was doing, and even wished for some of her strength, her separateness. I understood how important it was for her to keep herself apart from people like Peter, who made a mess of things, who spoiled love with their silliness. I understood, too, that I would always have something to do with the Peters, that awkwardness and trouble would always follow me, because awkwardness and trouble are a part of being alive.
Still, I didn’t want Peter, and I didn’t want Rory, but I didn’t want Jerome either, for all his beauty. I wanted Tony, who’d put his hand on me gently, lovingly. Who’d smiled at me in the food hall. Who’d spoken to me with his body, without needing to be grandiose, without desperation, without the kind of anger that so often mars a man’s attraction to a woman. But I still wasn’t ready for him. I smiled and blushed whenever I passed him, and once he winked at me over the shoulder of Annabelle, who managed the bridal registry, but we didn’t speak. I wasn’t even sure that he knew my name. What he
’d done probably meant nothing to him—it was an unconscious gesture, a small comfort, a way of avoiding conversation. But none of that mattered: he had touched me, kindly, and the relaxing it had brought about in my body would go on for a long while.
THE SINGULAR
ANIMAL: ON
BEING AND
HAVING
Ashley Hay
This little life, lying across my lap. Big eyes open, looking at the wind playing in the curtains, the light catching their fabric, looking up at me now and then, trying to smile and swallow at the same time. This little life, still so new: working out where he is in the world. Working out what his world is, what any world is, who he is.
Our son. Our only child.
I was evangelical about it, always leaping against the assumption that this child was bound to be the first of several.
‘Of course,’ said the lady in the baby-stuffs shop, ‘the advantage of this pram is that when you have your next child, you can clip on one of those skateboard attachments and your toddler can ride there while your newborn’s safe in here.’ She executed a smooth sort of reverse-park glide designed to show off the stroller’s handling, its manoeuvrability.
And although I should have just smiled, kicked the wheels, looked under the bonnet—or the equivalent for stroller appraisal—I felt the words take shape in my mouth, heard them push into the air to disrupt the shop’s bustle of other bumpy women like me, other neat and tidy assistants: ‘We’re not having any other children. Just this one.’
‘No, you’ll have another,’ said the sales lady, patting the pram’s handle as if to reassure it that it wouldn’t be a one-use purchase.
‘Of course,’ said the lady at my childhood beach, tickling our baby under his chin, ‘what you have to do is have another one as soon as you can.’
‘We’re not having any other children. Just this one.’
‘You need to have the next one as quickly as possible,’ she replied, unflappable in her flapping towel.
‘But it’s so much nicer to have siblings,’ said a variety of people, perhaps thinking this was a less proscriptive way to make us see the error of our ways. ‘So much nicer, and so much easier.’
And, ‘Once you’ve got the first one, you’ll end up wanting more, no matter what you think now.’
And because of the evangelism, I jumped each time, trying to explain, to justify. For the most part, I stuck to the numbers. How old I was; how old my husband was. That we were no spring chickens was, I thought, pretty unarguable. People demurred.
I tried a more mathematical approach and came up with a model of hands—our child could hold my hand and my husband’s, and still leave us both with a hand free for each other. This represented a kind of perfection in my head, a kind of complete and safely enclosing circle. People shook their heads again.
Then I tried pointing out that I was an only child, that a family of three had served me perfectly well, that I’d had a ball.
Which only made me more suspect again.
‘Don’t you find it remarkable,’ another only child whispered to me at a dinner party, ‘the things that people feel able to say when they find out you’ve got no brothers or sisters? About what you must be like, and must feel like, and must wish for? And just how rude they can be?’
You must have been spoiled. You must have been so lonely, bossy, selfish, precocious, self-important. You must be antisocial—you must be a loner; you must find it hard to make friends. You must wish you had a sister, a brother.
You must feel like you’ve missed out on so much.
Such a set against singular creatures: I read somewhere that the decision to have one child is even less acceptable to most people than the decision to have none at all. I read somewhere about a woman who was tempted to divorce her pro-single-child husband because she was so ‘terribly worried’ about her son growing up with no siblings. I read somewhere about a mother who felt that with just one child her family was still, somehow, a childless family of single people. But with three children, well: ‘Now I feel like I am a mother,’ she said.
It’s a funny word, ‘only’. It can ring with drum rolls and acclamation— ‘the one, the only’; it can echo with the isolation, the emptiness of lonely, alone. The English-speaking world is rare, having separate words for only’s ‘one-off’ connotation and for its ‘alone’ one. The English-speaking world is rare, too, for the deep suspicion the majority of its speakers have about only children. There’s no distinction in semantics: for most people, most of the time, ‘only’ in terms of ‘only children’ means alone, solitary, lonely. Those other nuances—individual, exclusive, unique—hardly ever get a look in.
In this photograph, Granville Stanley Hall is all beard and authority, the epitome of an eminent late-nineteenth-century American.
Born in 1844 in a small Massachusetts village where sheep outnumbered people by a ratio of eight to one, he could trace his family back to the Mayflower on both sides, and he had a particular passion for climbing hills. His father was a broom-maker by trade, and Granville took obvious pride in being perhaps one of the few people able to say in the early years of the twentieth century that he himself had made, ‘and can still make, a broom’. He is also credited with founding the discipline of educational psychology.
At first glance, Granville Stanley Hall seems like precisely my kind of man—class poet on graduation, pursuer of a polymathic career that bounced around divinity, literature and philosophy and let him settle, briefly, in a Chair of English before he travelled to Germany in 1875 to study the new science of experimental psychology. He was the man who invited Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung to visit America in 1909. He was the man who undertook a formal and academic study of tickling, during which he coined two seductive and lamentably under-utilised words: knismesis, for a light, feathery kind of a tickle; and gargalesis, for the ‘harder, laughter-inducing’ kind. Who wouldn’t warm to someone whose scientific surveys asked about the way laughter spread across a child’s face, about which features were ‘first and what last involved’? Who could help but be drawn to someone whose published work declared that ‘in 107 cases laughter or tickling results from merely seeing a finger pointed with movements suggesting tickling; slow circular movements of the index finger, then stopping these and thrusting it toward some ticklish point, especially if with a buzzing sound, make many young children half-hysterical with laughter’? Or that ‘adult men more often laugh in o and a, while children and women laugh in e and i’? Surely anyone whose contributions to human knowledge include a taxonomy of tickling, an anatomy of laughter, must be a force for good.
Which is why it’s such a shame that Granville Stanley Hall is the villain in this story, given that it was just one statement of his that did all the damage to the Anglophone world’s perception of only children.
According to Hall—a man with two siblings of his own, a man who’d spent all his childhood summers in the company of a large and exuberant country family—‘being an only child is a disease in itself’. He wrote that as part of a study undertaken in the late 1890s, and given that it stood as the sole study of only children for several decades, it simply kept being cited, giving it the patina of currency, accuracy, inviolability. In a 1928 paper that drew on Hall’s work, the writer declared that ‘it would be best for the individual and the race if there were no only children’.
Even now, more than a century after Granville Stanley Hall wrote those nine fateful words, most stories about only children—and even the positive ones—at least nod to it. It’s a singular sentence that allows us to see what someone described as an event as rare as the birth of a star: the birth of a prejudice.
I am five years old and dressed as a frog. My outfit comprises a kind of romper suit made of yellow (for tummy) and green (back) taffeta lining with hand-sewn sequins (the water droplets of a frog recently emerged from a pond); green tights; green felt flippers tied onto my hands and my feet (more sequins; more water drops); and the headdress. This
is a green taffeta skullcap with two modified ping-pong balls decorated and sewn on for eyes. There are possibly also more sequins.
It is bespoke, it is a miracle of amphibianity, and it is the last word in under-six elegance. In 1976, I wear it to the Austinmer Public School Frolic; I believe myself to be the belle (or at least the batrachian) of the ball. We follow it up with a gorgeous mushroom-coloured mouse suit the following year which employs a slightly heavier weight of taffeta lining, a reprise of the skullcap design with a new set of ping-pong-ball eyes, and a tubular stuffed tail of such pleasing weight and length that I can still feel the satisfaction of spinning fast on the spot to make it swish around.
The pièce de résistance, however, is achieved for the 1982 Austinmer Public School Book Week Character Parade, which I attend as the web from Charlotte’s Web: a navy-blue bodysuit onto which is attached a miraculous web French-knitted out of silver twine (the glorious extent of which isn’t apparent until I hold my arms out like a T-square) with the words Charlotte’s Web French-knitted in the centre and a glamorous spider hanging to one side, as if she’s just finished spinning. She’s made of two grey pompoms, with pipe-cleaner legs and dazzling beaded eyes. I can’t remember if she had eyelashes or not, but in my memory she does.
This is how my family does costumes, thanks to two parents of vast imagination—a mother who’s an artist with a history of creating fabulous outfits, and a father who’s an engineer with hidden talents in ping-pong-ball adaptation, French-knitting and pompom fabrication.
I watch the other kids arrive in their shop-bought superhero outfits, their shop-bought cowboy hats and holsters. My flippers sparkle. My tail swings round. My silver web shimmers in the sunlight. Unique.
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