Brothers and Sisters (20 page)

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.