Brothers & Sisters - Charlotte Wood [59]
The implication rubbed and jarred: if I died, these stories suggested, my parents would feel better if they had someone else to fall back on. If something happened to my child, I would feel it less if I had another one. They were strange ideas for an only child to think about—strange ideas, too, for the mother of one. As Bi Kaiwei’s wife would know: pregnant with another child by early 2009, ‘I feel this is the return of our daughter,’ she said. Yet, she continued, ‘even though I’m comforting myself, telling myself this is her, I still don’t feel very cheerful. I’m very depressed.’ She and her husband visited Bi Yuexing’s grave every day.
I am four years old and standing in a cupboard in the laundry. This cupboard can be, variously, a shop, a lift, a bank, a travel agency, depending on my mood, but today it is what it is, a broom cupboard, and I am pretending to be Alice.
Alice-in-the-Broom-Cupboard is the imaginary friend of a character in Russell Hoban’s book A Birthday for Frances. Frances, in the book, is a badger.
Outside the cupboard, my mother is doing the ironing. If the cupboard was a lift, she’d say, ‘fourth floor’ or ‘haberdashery’ from time to time. If the cupboard was a bank, she’d say, ‘Five dollars in change, please.’ But when the cupboard was home to Alice, she simply let it be home to Alice.
She does not, fortunately, subscribe to Dr Spock’s theory that children invent imaginary friends to make up for some deficit in their lives. Perhaps it was a shortfall of ‘hugging and piggyback rides’, he suggested, recommending that any child still nattering to an imaginary being by the age of four should be shipped off to a ‘child psychiatrist, child psychologist, or other mental health counsellor [who would] be able to find out what they’re lacking’. At the age of four, I am not and never have been deprived of either hugs or piggybacks. At the age of four, my own gallery of imaginary friends is not only intact, I also like to pretend that I am the imaginary friend of a badger out of a book. And no one tells me I shouldn’t.
If imaginary friends were symptomatic of a problem, then the problem was thought to be more pronounced and more common among only children. Of course it was the lack of siblings, the lack of conversation between peers, the lack of interaction in long days. We were lonely little souls, deprived of real conversation with real playmates and desperately trying to make some up for ourselves. Best not to talk about it; best to hope we grew out of it as quickly as we could—with or without the assistance of Dr Spock’s retinue of experts.
I can’t remember what being Alice-in-the-Broom-Cupboard required me to do, other than stand in the broom cupboard. I can remember the sound of my mother’s voice as we chatted through the door, the sound of steam as her iron went on gliding and surging, gliding and surging. And Alice-in-the-Broom-Cupboard is still part of our family, referred to and remembered in the way of Percy the Parrot (whose adventures my father channelled for me), the Six Fairies (channelled by my mother), and Mrs SeeWee, my imaginary neighbour in the garden who lived beyond a doormat that sat— inexplicably—in the middle of a bed of sasanquas for years.
One of the first things I did when we thought about becoming parents ourselves, more than thirty years later, was track down a copy of A Birthday