by India Knight
Human company! New people! I practically skip upstairs to get dressed – little vest, green cardigan with brown fur collar, violet tweed skirt and my favourite shoes, pea-green slingbacks. It’s October, but I can never quite manage tights. I stuff my hair into a rubber band, slick some Vaseline on to my lips et voilà: hardly glamorama, but ready to face the day.
Frank must have gone to his studio; there’s no sign of him. I scoop Honey out of Mary’s lap, because today we’re off to playgroup. Felicity, one of our neighbours, recently noticed I had a child roughly the same age as hers and asked me along to Happy Bunnies, a parent-run playgroup a couple of streets away. It’s on Tuesdays and Thursdays and two of you take it in turn to do shifts, reading the children stories and changing their nappies and so on. The other mothers are there too, keeping an eye on things, so it shouldn’t be too difficult. Today is our first time, and I’ll be tailing Felicity as Helper Number 2 and sort of learning the ropes.
I’m really rather looking forward to it. I know hardly anyone locally, let alone anyone with small children, and I sometimes feel leprously alone as I wheel Honey along Primrose Hill or up Hampstead Heath, wishing desperately that I had someone to chat to, and then to go for coffee with afterwards. After today, God willing, I may have. I let out an absurd little squeak of excitement, which Honey copies all the way to the front door.
‘We are mice,’ I tell her happily. ‘We are squeaky mice.’
‘Mama,’ says Honey, who doesn’t say much.
It’s going to be a good day, I feel, as I push the buggy on to the damp pavement.
The church hall that Happy Bunnies is in is incredibly dirty. The lino is smeared and dusty, the equipment covered in smudges and fingermarks and sticky patches. Why haven’t the Happy Bunny parents got busy with the Domestos Wipes? And why are certain kinds of middle-class people so weirdly keen on dirt? I think it’s because they think it’s bohemian and anti-bourgeois, but really, my God. A tousled beauty with a perfect complexion and faint traces of mud under her fingernails is one thing, but this is quite another; and anyway, the dirt thing is a dead giveaway that you’re in a place where every woman has been privately educated, has a name that ends in ‘a’ and sees herself as not a run of the mill member of the bourgeoisie but as something gayer, less predictable, freer: a bohemian. And Primrose Hill, where we live, is boho central. Sometimes I really yearn for the scrubbed surfaces and disinfected floors of somewhere less apologetically middle class, like Balham.
God, the dirt. Why, for instance, do all of these children have runny noses which no one is wiping? And there’s a powerful smell of nappy. Still, best to pretend there is nothing peculiar about this (though clearly there is: if your child has a dirty nappy, change it, for God’s sake – there’s nothing bohemian about shit).
I beam hopefully at the assorted mothers – half a dozen or so of them – sitting on child-sized chairs watching their offsprings’ nasal dribble with pride, and my heart sinks. They’re a dull-looking lot, and then there’s the person directly to my left. She is an elephantine woman wearing – can this be possible in 2001? – a tightly belted pastel-blue jump suit. Her toenails are gnarled and filthy. One enormous, veiny breast is out, being suckled voraciously by a malevolent-looking child with little avian eyes. He must be at least four years old. Christ. It makes my nipples hurt just to look at her. I turn away, but not, I think, quickly enough. The woman, the creature – she reminds me of a cow: perhaps Frank could paint her – shoots me a dark look, having presumably registered the sheer horror on my face. She has the same eyes as her son: they rather suggest their owner would like nothing better than to peck at your corpse.
‘Everyone!’ Felicity says, clapping her hands. ‘Everyone!’
Everyone looks up.
‘This is Stella,’ Felicity says, pointing at me.
Everyone stares a slow, up-and-down stare, and I feel like it’s my first day at primary school. Maybe the slingbacks weren’t such a good idea: this looks very much more like Birkenstock and unvarnished toes territory.
‘And this little bundle – ’ Felicity points at my arms – ‘is Honey. How old is Honey, Stella?’
‘Honey is eighteen months, Felicity,’ I answer in kind, making myself want to laugh, but not daring.
‘Aah,’ says Felicity, sweetly but pointlessly. ‘Eighteen months.’ She raises her voice: ‘Honey is eighteen months, everyone.’ This doesn’t elicit much of a response from the crowd, who keep on staring uninterestedly.
‘Right,’ says Felicity, crazily brightly. (Is she on Prozac? I don’t feel I know her well enough to ask.) She looks around her somewhat wildly. ‘Now. Introductions. This is Marjorie – she’s Play Leader – and little Euan,’ she says, pointing at the woman with the udders. ‘I’ll work my way around the group clockwise, Stella. So, at one o’clock: Emma and Rainbow, Amelia and Perdita, Venetia and China, Kate and Ichabod, Susannah and Mango, Julia with the triplets – ’ IVF, I think to myself – ‘Hector, Castor and little Polly – that’s Pollux, he’s a boy, but we don’t believe in gender stereotypes here, do we, everyone? No, we don’t. Oh, and Louisa with Alexander,’ she adds, almost as an afterthought: name shame, clearly.
I give Louisa-with-Alexander a broad grin, which she returns; I feel myself about to become hysterical. Ichabod? Mango? And call me an O-level Classics swot, but Hector? Hector, whose mutilated body was dragged behind a chariot until his face fell off? And Perdita, meaning ‘the lost one’? What do people think of when they name their children? I know ‘Honey’ is hardly conventional, but we only called her it because we optimistically thought that it would force everyone to be kind to her all the time. How could you snarl at a Honey?
‘Righty-ho,’ says Felicity in her jolly Sloane tones. ‘That’s the intros over and done with. Make yourself at home, Stella. There’s a kettle over there if you fancy – ’ and here she puts on an amusing cleaning-lady voice – ‘a nice cup of char, and then we’ll get on with the activities.’ She raises her voice again and claps her hands: ‘Free time, everyone, free time.’
Oh, dear Lord, what an unprepossessing little group. I put Honey down by a pile of manky-looking Duplo and wander off towards the kettle, but am immediately pulled back by Honey screaming, and then crying broken-heartedly. A small but oddly corpulent boy has pushed her on to the floor and is standing on her hand, stamping his grubby trainer down on it again and again.
‘Oi!’ I shout, like a fishwife. ‘Don’t bloody do that.’ I shove him away – his arm is sticky – and pick Honey up.
‘Ow,’ says Honey. ‘Ow me.’ She starts crying.
The fat child is glaring at me, nasal leakage crusting his upper lip. His skin is the colour of greying underwear. He’s about three years old.
‘Don’t do it again,’ I tell him, showing only a fraction of the anger I feel. ‘You can’t go round hurting people, and look, she’s so much smaller than you.’ I kiss Honey and put her down again.
‘My Duplo,’ the child says, kicking it and narrowly missing Honey.
‘It’s everyone’s Duplo,’ I say, ‘and you weren’t even playing with it.’
The child crouches down by Honey so that they are the same height. Before I can do anything to stop him, he’s put his face right next to hers and bitten her little cheek, hard.
‘Ow!’ screams Honey.
I can’t very well spend my first morning at Happy Bunnies beating children up, but my goodness, I am sorely tempted.
‘I said, behave yourself,’ I hiss. I can feel the poison in my voice, reminding me that I am not one of those nice women who unilaterally like all children. ‘Now go and play somewhere else. Go on, scram.’ Piss off, blob, I want to add, but don’t, obviously.
‘Icky, darling,’ says a voice behind me. ‘Oh, Icky. Were you a little bit silly?’
‘Waaaah,’ wails Ichabod – not a cry, more of a demented roar. ‘WAAAH.’ He kicks his mother right in the shins as she approaches. I see her wince with pain.
‘
Silly? Hardly. He stood on my daughter’s hand and then he bit her face,’ I tell the woman – Ichabod’s mother, Kate, it turns out, a harassed-looking woman with badly dyed hair cut like an old lady’s, with weird clumps above the ears – above Honey’s screams. ‘It seems a bit much in the space of five minutes.’
‘Oh, Icky,’ Kate says. ‘Oh, Ick.’ Can’t she say anything else, like ‘Sorry’? Why isn’t she metaphorically walloping him around the head for being such a little shit? She turns to me, looking none too pleased. ‘I do hope you didn’t tell him off?’ she asks accusingly.
‘Well, I did, actually. Look.’ I show her Honey’s hand, on which the imprint of a trainer sole is coming up in angry welts. There are bite marks on her cheek.
‘We never tell Icky off,’ Kate says. ‘We don’t believe in telling off. He is expressing his anger as best he knows and, being a child, that means physically.’
Zoom, goes my temper. Zoom, and whoosh. ‘I am expressing my anger in the only way I know how,’ I tell her, making a gigantic effort to keep my voice pleasant. ‘And being an adult, that means verbally. Though I’m sure I could muster up something a little more physical if you insisted.’
‘Icky’s just tired,’ Kate says. All the bulgy veins in her neck are showing and she is looking at me with pure hatred. ‘You’re a tired boy, aren’t you? Yes, you are,’ she says, adopting the tone we used to use with our dog.
‘Then I suggest you take him home,’ I say, in the same even tone, ‘and put him to bed.’
‘Felicity obviously hasn’t explained the playgroup’s Basic Rules to you. Telling children off is very old-fashioned. These days – ’ she looks me up and down: that phrase was a reference to my age, I expect, though she can only be a couple of years younger than me – ‘we don’t believe in disciplining children. They just grow and evolve organically, like, like herbs.’ Kate shoots me another filthy look, sniffs furiously and, ignoring my flabbergasted face, stomps away, Ichabod wobbling in her wake.
Herbs? And the vile nappy smell, I register, is coming from him. Tired, my arse. The absolute mantra of crap, middle-class parenting is He’s Just Tired. Hand grenade lobbed right into your face? Excrement smeared over your walls? Setting fire to hair? Walking up and down the dining table kicking glasses on to the floor? Murdering the baby with a kitchen knife? Aah, He’s Just Tired. Which always begs the question, never satisfactorily answered, If he’s so fucking tired, why isn’t he in bed?
I want to scream; ridiculously, my hands are shaking. Honey has calmed down and I put her on the floor again: I really need that cup of tea.
‘Hi, I’m Louisa.’ The pretty blonde whose eye I caught earlier has appeared by my side. She pats my arm and smiles as she hands me the milk. ‘Don’t worry about her. She has some fairly peculiar notions about child-rearing. Ichabod isn’t potty-trained, for instance – Kate doesn’t believe in it,’ she says, rolling her eyes.
‘I’m Stella.’ We smile at each other. ‘Horrible little fucker.’
Louisa, to her immense credit, giggles. ‘Isn’t he?’ she asks rhetorically. ‘Absolute nightmare. Not the only one, unfortunately. As you’ll no doubt discover – you’re doing the activities this morning, aren’t you? I’d better let you get off, then. I just wanted to say hello and, you know, don’t worry.’
‘Well, thanks for coming over,’ I say, feeling immeasurably better. ‘See you later.’
‘I hope so,’ Louisa says shyly. ‘I sometimes feel like I’m in a madhouse when I come here. You – ’ she smiles – ‘have the virtue of seeming reasonably sane.’
‘That’s what you think,’ I clumsily joke back, but I am delighted: a friend! Well, a potential friend, anyway: a counterpoint to Udderella in the corner, who’s finally put away her giant breast and is proudly watching little Euan, who has the springy, hunched walk of a teenager, scamper up the indoor climbing frame, a pleased, satisfied, and – yeurch – bucolic look spreading across her bovine features.
OK. Perhaps it’s me. Perhaps it’s just me, and I am weird and have strange foreign ideas, and prehistorically believe that children ought to have some vague notion of what does and what doesn’t constitute normal, decent behaviour. If it’s me – and it does seem to be – then I apologize. But Jesus Christ almighty, that was surreally horrible. Just after I’d led the children into a sing-song – we’d just got to ‘Hey, Diddle Diddle’ – Euan, son of Marjorie, pulled down his blue corduroys, squatted, grunted and did a poo right by Book Corner. No one said anything. The poo stayed there for minutes, with us all staring at it, until his mother languidly said, ‘Just a little accident,’ picked the poo up in her bare hand and walked over to the bin. Not the lavatory, which is situated just around the corner: no, the kitchen bin. Euan then lay on the floor, his enormous boy’s legs up in the air, while his mother wiped ineffectually at his bottom with a tiny, Economy nappy wipe.
Then, as we were making worm spaghetti out of red Play-Doh, Ichabod punched Mango right in the face. ‘Never mind. Icky has issues with anger,’ Mango’s mother said, in the manner of one attempting self-hypnosis, though I could see she was pretty pissed off. ‘Oh, he’s just tired,’ said Kate, Ichabod’s mother, at which, I am sorry to say, I sniggered out loud – me and this Ichabod are going to have a problem, I’m afraid – and earned myself another black look.
Polly, which is to say the unfortunate boy Pollux, delighted everyone by leapfrogging over gender stereotypes and choosing to dress as a ballerina for the duration of the games; his mother told him he looked very pretty, darling, and I tried not to think about Dr Freud. Polly’s brother Castor didn’t speak once, despite being two and a half, and played obsessively with the same train engine for two hours, screaming like a wild animal whenever anybody approached him, so then I tried not to think of articles I’d read about autism.
Rainbow, Perdita and China, all about four years old, seemed entirely preoccupied with showing each other their knickers; Perdita taught the other two that her mummy called her vagina her ‘pussy’. ‘Miaow, miaow, pussy,’ they chorused for half an hour: one step to the left, one to the right and UP with the skirt. ‘Miaow, miaow, pussy.’
And sweet little Alexander, aged two and a half, sat quietly on the floor by a bewildered Honey and pretended to read her a book about bears.
Louisa and I did go for a coffee, and what do you know? She’s a single parent too. Although I always feel a bit fraudulent when I include myself in this category, a single mother is what I am: a single mother living in a big house, with childcare whenever I need it, which I do see isn’t the same thing as being a single mother on income support on the seventeenth floor of a tower block, but still. Louisa’s husband traded her in ‘for a younger model’, she told me, which is pretty tragic considering that Louisa is thirty-four. She lives in a flat above the organic bakery on Regent’s Park Road and works part-time as a hat maker. Over coffee and hot raisin toast, we had the kind of shy, delighted conversation two lonely people have when they discover they like the same things. Anyway, Louisa and Alexander are going to come over and play next week, and she says we should go for walks to the park together. So there was a silver lining to my gigantic cloud: Happy Bunnies turned out all right in the end.
‘See you on Tuesday!’ Felicity had called out as we left. ‘Marjorie is going to teach the children yoga!’
‘Yoga?’ I’d asked Louisa.
‘That’s what she does – she’s a yoga teacher,’ she’d answered.
‘Why does she weigh twenty stone, then? I mean, she’s hardly toned and sinewy, is she?’
‘Maybe she’s twenty stone and very bendy,’ Louisa had replied, and we’d laughed all the way up the hill. Yes, things are definitely looking up.
3
We go to Sainsbury’s after Honey’s afternoon nap, and when we come back at about six o’clock, exhausted (toddler in the trolley: total nightmare) the living room has Casablanca lilies on every available surface: in vases, in jugs, in the tiny Sèvres teapot my father gave me
on my eighteenth birthday, and crammed into glasses and jam jars. There’s a delicious smell of lemon and rosemary permeating the house. Bang on cue, Frank appears, wearing my rose-patterned Cath Kidston apron. ‘Amends,’ he says, smiling his goofy smile. ‘I am making amends. Flowers, and then roast chicken, roast potatoes, glazed carrots and chocolate tart.’
‘You shouldn’t have,’ I say, beaming, as I bend down to undo the clasps on Honey’s buggy. ‘But I’m glad you did.’
‘The way to your heart is through your stomach, I know. And I’m really sorry about last night,’ Frank says, holding Honey while I scrabble underneath the pushchair to fish the three squashed bags of shopping out. ‘Hello, Honey.’
‘Oi here,’ Honey says, smiling at him. I don’t know why she talks like a simple yokel. It’s one of the mysteries: why does my daughter speak like Pam Ayres?
‘There’s no need to be. You’re a grown man – you’re allowed to have sex.’ Though so much sex with so many different people isn’t ideal, I think to myself. ‘Anyway, I’ll just whisk miss upstairs for her bath, read her a quick story, and then I’ll be all yours.’
‘Cool,’ says Frank. ‘It’ll be ready at eight. Oh, and by the way, your dad phoned.’
Oh, God. ‘What did he say?’
‘Something about coming to stay for a couple of days – he’s ringing back later.’
‘Do you know,’ Frank says at dinner, ‘you’ve been in every night since I moved in.’
‘Not quite every night – I’ve been out a few times, Frank. And anyway, I’ve got another bloody translation hanging over my head, and I can only work in the evenings. Besides, you’ve been out enough for both of us. Pour me some wine, will you?’
