Billions of years ago, your most distant ancestor emerged from the primordial soup and set into motion a chain of events so intricate that a single sneeze could have made them crumble like shortbread, which eventually led to you. You are unlikely. In the grand scheme of things, we are all accidents.
I happen to know that I was an accidental accident. Whether I know more details about my conception than most other people know about theirs, I’m not sure. What I do know is this:
In August 1988, on a Turkish package holiday with my dad, my brother and my sister, my mum got food poisoning. She was on the pill, which she unceremoniously puked up, resulting in my existence. I am, in my dad’s words, the “daughter of diarrhoea”. Not that I wasn’t wanted. My parents have always (euphemistically, maybe) referred to me as a surprise rather than an accident. I don’t mind “accident”. I’ve become quite comfortable with the fact that a swarm of flies dive-bombed a hotel breakfast buffet and left behind some pestilence that caused vomiting, explosive shitting and me.
But as someone who emerged, almost intruder-like, into an already fully formed family, my unlikeliness is one of the most visited exhibits in the museum of my anxiety. When I look at family photos from the 80s, pre-me, I see a complete unit waiting, unwittingly, to be rudely interrupted by some infected yoghurt. There was this whole world before me. One where my mum wore boiler suits and my family did family stuff – birthdays, theme park visits, Christmases – all while I was half ovum, half nothing. And nothing gets you into a “how did I not exist?” K-hole quite like looking through piles and piles of pictures of your immediate family having a decade’s worth of fun without you; a kind of ghost in reverse.
My brother and sister, who were eight and 10 when I was born, had very different reactions to my appearance on the scene. To my sister, I was a kind of living doll to whom she was quite happy to play second mother.
To my brother, I was a screaming blob slash case study. When I was eight, he tried to teach me trigonometry, just to see if you can teach an average eight-year-old trigonometry. Turns out you can’t. There’s the inevitable cruelty of the older brother, then there’s outright psychological warfare waged by a child you have middled. Like the time my brother told me, when I was about four, that Mum and Dad were robots. Or the time he managed to convince me, after I hit him over the head with a camping flask, that he’d called the police.
Even when he deigned to play nicely with me – the resented baby sister – he’d usually take things too far. As playmates, a three-year-old and an 11-year-old are woefully mismatched. The recurring theme was that, at some point during the game, my brother’s morbid 11-year-old sensibilities would kick in and he’d decide to “die”.
“Dying” was my brother’s melodramatic way of expressing boredom at having to play spaceships with an intellectual inferior. Every game (including board games) I played with my brother ended in a hammy and protracted death scene.
I don’t know exactly when and how I learned I was an accident. As a revelation, it has a distinct older brotherly feel to it. At the same time, I’m sure I must have become curious about why hardly anyone else I knew had siblings a decade older. For obvious reasons though, dwelling too much on your own conception is uncomfortable. It’s hard to be too precious about the fact that mine was far from beautiful, when an especially romantic and planned conception is – in my mind’s eye – equally shuddersome. Most of us are living proof that our parents aren’t, sadly, amorphous sexless entities who get pregnant via a kind of psychic osmosis that requires no touching whatsoever. As Sarah Silverman once tweeted, “Before you get too confident, remember: your dad came you.”
I was a clumsy kid who, in a perpetual maelstrom of dropped hamsters and splattered paint, was told, again and again (too young to appreciate the irony) that accidents happen. Those two words, and all the thinly veiled exasperation contained within them, are branded on to my memory. The phrase would make a great “I was drunk on a Greek island” tattoo, I think. Across the arse, to emphasise the accidentalness, but also in Latin, perhaps, to give it some gravitas. It would stand as a permanent reminder that, yes, accidents happen, but accidents also make things happen. As TV art shaman Bob Ross said, “There are no mistakes, only happy accidents.”
Leonardo da Vinci was, largely speaking, unlike Bob Ross. Although he did germinate the idea of accidental art. Leonardo encouraged his proteges to look for inspiration in wall stains. I don’t consider myself, or any other human being except maybe Tilda Swinton, to be art. But I like to think I’m at least equivalent to a wall stain imbued with meaning.
Sometimes I meet other accidents. The subject usually comes up when we realise we both have much older siblings. There isn’t exactly a “my parents were insufficiently cautious” secret handshake, but fellow wall stains share a special bond. And, more often than not, a mutual understanding of what it’s like to never stop being “the baby”.
If I live to 90, I’m sure my accidental juniorness will still feel as real and present as my fear of spiders or my hatred of the word “nipple”. And, in terms of my relationship with the rest of my family, this goes both ways. As “the baby”, on every single birthday you wonder if that long-awaited feeling of adultness is going to kick in. It didn’t on my 27th birthday and, now, seems unlikely that it will on my 28th, my 45th or my 77th. Meanwhile, I think my siblings and parents are waiting for the day they look at me and no longer see a giant toddler. That disjointed decade of my absence will probably always stand out like a missing tooth.
The “kids’ table” – the scourge of weddings and Christmases – weighs heavily in the mind of everyone who has been a child. But, having turned up 10 years late to my family, I know that, no matter how grey my hair gets or how long my hangovers last, I will never leave the kids’ table of my mind.
