Vox Meditantis

Friday, 9th December 1955

You know, don’t you, what it is to be the other one? The shadow? The one who came second, even if only by minutes, and has been catching up ever since, always just behind, always nearly there but never quite?

She’s downstairs now, in the good parlour with Mrs Davison, being shown the wireless set and offered the comfortable chair by the gas fire. I heard them laughing as I came up. That particular laugh she has – light, musical, the sort that makes people turn round and smile without knowing why. I have the same laugh, or I ought to. We have the same throat, the same tongue, the same teeth. But when it comes out of me it sounds forced, doesn’t it? Shrill. People don’t lean in when I laugh. They lean away.

This room smells of carbolic and old wool, with something underneath – damp plaster, perhaps, or mice. The eiderdown is worn thin at the corners. There are two iron bedsteads, both narrow, both cold to the touch, and a washstand with a china jug that’s chipped at the spout. The other bed is hers, naturally. She’s taken the one by the window, though she said I could have either. That’s what she always says, and somehow I always end up with the draught, the lesser view, the lumpy mattress.

Mother would say I’m being theatrical. “Don’t make such a scene, Evelyn,” she’d say, in that tired voice of hers. “It doesn’t become you.” But Mother isn’t here, is she? She’s at home with Father, and the Sunday roast, and the old routines. The traditions. Whereas we – or rather, she, with me dragging behind – we’re here in the city, in lodgings, with shorthand certificates and the promise of positions in proper offices. Progress, they call it. Opportunities for young women that our mothers never had. And yet somehow it still feels as though the real opportunities go to the girls like her – the bright ones, the ones who don’t try too hard, who make everything look easy.

Do you know what she asked me yesterday? We were walking back from the labour exchange, and she turned to me with that interested, open expression of hers and said, “What’s your favourite cartoon?” Just like that. As though it were the most natural question in the world.

I didn’t know what to say at first. I thought she meant the cartoons in Punch, or perhaps the strips in the Daily Mirror – you know, the Gambols, Andy Capp and his sort. But no, she meant the pictures at the cinema. The animated things they show before the main feature. “Mine’s the one with the little deer,” she said, not waiting for my answer. “You know, the one from a few years back. I saw it twice. I cried both times, right there in the Odeon, and I wasn’t even ashamed.”

I wanted to say something clever. Something that would show I had depths she hadn’t suspected. But all I could think of was that I preferred the ones where something actually happened – where the cat chased the mouse, or the sailor got into scrapes, or there was a proper story with a bit of excitement. Not tears. Not sadness. I get enough of that without paying ninepence for it.

But I didn’t say that either. I just said, “Oh, I don’t really have one,” and she looked at me with something like pity, which was worse than anything.

She cries at picture-shows and people think it’s sweet. I cry at picture-shows and people think I’m weak. Do you see? It’s the same action, the same salt water, the same rumpled handkerchief, but on her it’s charming and on me it’s merely pitiable. That’s what it means to be the other one. The copy that didn’t quite take.

I can hear her coming up the stairs now. Her step is lighter than mine, or perhaps I only imagine it is. In a moment she’ll come through that door smelling of tea and biscuits and warmth, and she’ll ask me if I’m all right, and she’ll mean it, which is the worst part. She’s not even cruel. She doesn’t even know what she’s doing to me, being herself so effortlessly while I struggle and strain and never quite manage it.

The gas lamp on the landing is hissing. I should go down and be sociable, show Mrs Davison that I can be pleasant too, that I’m not just the difficult one, the moody one, the one who needs drawing out. But I think I’ll stay here a little longer, in this cold room with its smell of carbolic and disappointment. At least here I can be the only one of us, even if only for a moment. Even if only until she knocks on the door and calls my name and everything starts again.

Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.