in dribs and drabs, but pretty close in age all the same, as if the bank had threatened to foreclose on the mortgage unless a baby was produced by a certain date.
Back in those days we had no idea how that worked, babies getting born. We had no concept of all that’s involved, or of the possible consequences. We simply appeared out of nowhere, from one moment to the next, to our parents’ immense joy. They leaned over our cribs, they cradled us in their arms—carefully, because we were such precious little darlings—and showed us that we really had the best of both worlds: bathrooms with all mod cons and hygienic stainless-steel kitchens, but also the countryside outside our back doors, brimming with cow parsley in bloom and mud that would ooze into our wellies when we were a little older, squishy and delicious.
We sucked air into our lungs and screeched with delight. We hollered so loudly that we could hear one another right through the walls right and left of us and across the street. This, too, was part of the deal: little friends our own age, thrown in for free. What fun it would be to grow up together—first steps, first words, first tooth, first bloody lip. And we’d ride our tricycles together! Where else could you ride a tricycle as safely as down our lane?
We had it made. We were in clover. As if the whole world knew exactly what we deserved.
The heart of the original village consisted of four narrow streets around a central square. It was there that our mummies headed every day to do their shopping.
Shaking their highlighted curls, they parked our pushchairs inside the musty-smelling greengrocer’s; the man’s fingers were so swollen with arthritis that he had trouble wrapping the crisp fresh lettuce in newspaper, and if you didn’t have the exact change on you, you had to slip behind the counter and help yourself from the till. No place else in the world had such tasty vegetables, our mothers assured him, I really mean it, Mr De Vries. They squatted down in their tight jeans and handed us carrots to suck on. Then they dawdled for a while longer, hoping for a chat; it wasn’t as if they had that many people to talk to, but Mr De Vries just went on silently weighing the split peas, and, suddenly embarrassed, they fled from the gloomy shop, needing to put distance between themselves and old age and aching bones and hard work—out, out!
Once safely outside, they collected themselves. They bent down and with flushed cheeks made shushing noises into our perambulators. You could tell how glad they were that we, even more than they, were helplessly dependent on things beyond our control. After all, they didn’t need anyone to wipe their little bums. They stuffed the lettuce firmly into the pushchair’s shopping net, and once again we felt ourselves going bumpity-bump over the cobblestones. Overhead we could see blue skies with the odd cloud here and there that looked like an elephant, or a chicken. Then we’d pop our thumbs into our mouths, because nobody was asking our opinion anyway.
The butcher’s. Meat slaughtered on the premises.
The baker’s. A country brown loaf.
When our mums were done with their shopping, they’d gather on the village green across from the former rectory. We lay dozing on plaid blankets, snuggled against their hips. Their tanned, pale, or freckled faces glistened in the sun; they dabbed their necks, their voices brayed. Even in our semi-comatose state it made us uneasy, we got itchy, we began to whinge for no reason, just to get their attention. Their panic was understandable. To be twenty years old, far from the big city, banished to a brand-new housing estate in some itty-bitty backwater no one’s ever heard of, left to cope all by yourself in this suburban Wild West while your husband was stuck somewhere out there in a traffic jam—but then they would shake themselves, grabbing their painted toenails or the ends of their bleached hair and then tugging as hard as they could, and they were off again, shrieking with hysterical laughter. There was always something to gossip about. There was always some scandal you could freely dish the dirt on, even in the presence of infants. And there were always good snacks, too, to be shared around.
The summer we first opened our astonished eyes, the treat was often strawberries: it was a great year for them, they were as big as duck eggs, the whole world reeked of their sweet, cloying aroma. With their tapered fingernails our mothers pinched the stems from the berries, they bit them in half and gently prodded the pieces into our drooling mouths. The juice ran down our chins, staining our baby knits.
‘Watch out for wasps,’ Lucy’s mother cautioned.
In the sea of maternal bodies she was the only one you could have picked out blindfolded. That was because she smelled of patchouli, whereas our mothers all smelled of Yves Saint Laurent’s Paris. Because our mummies had our daddies, they had real husbands who could afford to buy them perfume recommended in Avenue magazine, and a closet full of sexy summer frocks besides.
Lucy’s mum, in her slinky, home-made, invariably black dresses, with her sleek black hair, was the exception in more ways than one, because she was the only one who lived in the old village. Oh, not very long, she replied when asked how long she’d been there, and laughed. Even though our mums couldn’t find out as much about her as they’d like, they were fond of her. She was the merriest of them all and could always be counted on to come up with a solution to any problem. She could tell your fortune with the help of a deck of Tarot cards. There was no point looking back, she would say, you should always look ahead at what was next. ‘Look, this is the Three of Cups. The card of friendship,’ she told our uprooted mothers. ‘That’s the most important card in the deck.’
In unison we burped and in unison we produced stinky nappies. We slept, we had the colic, we learned you were supposed to chortle if someone cooed ‘ta-ta’ at you, we stuffed things into our mouths, we grew. We grew like cabbages. At first we reconnoitred the world on our hands and knees, but soon we started walking and pulling breakables off tabletops. We explored electric outlets and discovered the stairs. We said ‘Mama’ for the first time and were practically hugged to death. Every new milestone was recorded for posterity by video cameras. As far as we knew, the world revolved around us, and every so often we got to blow out another candle on our birthday cake.
Our daddy gave us a brightly coloured abacus, so that one day we’d be able to do sums, to calculate the costs and the benefits, credit and debit and all the rest, or, alternatively, a doll with eyes that shut and real hair, to prepare us for a role no less important. With his heavy daddy-hand he ruffled our hair. He squeezed us close. He rolled around the bathroom floor with us. His face was set in a har-dee-har expression. He sprayed us with the garden hose. On Saturday afternoons we washed the car together, each armed with our own scrub-brush, for the rims. On Sundays we dug in the garden. We planted bulbs and raked leaves. ‘Is this paradise, or what?’ Daddy asked. But then he’d gaze over our head at the spindly elms poking up in the flat polder landscape, and let out a deep sigh.
At night, when they thought we were asleep, our mummy would snap at our daddy, ‘But who insisted on moving here in the first place?’
‘Oh, not you, I suppose!’
‘And now you’re home late for dinner every night.’
‘What did you expect? Did you think my office would open a branch out here in the boondocks?’
‘You’re away all day long, while I’m trapped here, cooped up with the kids!’
Through the walls we heard how mad our mummies were. They wanted a chance to show who they were—to the universe, to our fathers, perhaps even to us. They were special, goddamnit; they had talent and potential, far greater than your average Jane! After one of these outbursts you could bet your boots that the next morning we’d find them buttering our bread with a resentful glint in their eyes; it was we, after all, who were tying them down hand and foot. It was because we had to grow up in a place where the air was pure and the cow parsley grew that they were now stuck out here. We were their cross to bear—day
