No and Me Read online

  ‘So, well, I really dread presentations. I mean, I get really scared and the teacher’s no pushover. The problem is that I said I’d do something on the homeless . . . something that explained, er . . . (I’d got to the heart of the matter, the tricky bit. I couldn’t remember what I’d rehearsed at all. It’s always like that when it comes to emotions) . . . how women, especially young women, end up on the street. Like you.’

  ‘I told you I slept at mates’ places.’

  ‘Yes, I know. I meant, women with no permanent home, you know . . .’

  ‘Did you mention me?’

  ‘No . . . well, yes . . . not by name of course, but I said that I was going to do an interview.’

  ‘An interview?’

  Her eyes have got bigger. She automatically brushes away the hair that’s fallen over her eyes.

  ‘I’d love another beer.’

  ‘Sure, no problem.’ (I’ve started. I mustn’t stop and break the thread, I’ve got to keep going.) ‘So if you liked, I could ask you questions, which would help me illustrate things, like a first-hand account. Know what I mean?’

  ‘Sure.’

  I haven’t clinched it yet. She signals to the waiter, who nods without coming over.

  ‘Are you up for it?’

  She doesn’t reply.

  ‘You could just tell me how it works, you know, eating, sleeping. Or if you’d rather, you could talk to me about other people you know in the same situation.’

  Still nothing.

  ‘And that way I’ll come back to see you. We can have a drink.’

  The waiter puts the beer on the table. He wants to cash up right now. I’ve noticed before that waiters have their own language. They’re finishing their shift and so they’re cashing up right now. Even if they’re still there two hours later. It’s the same all over Paris. I hand him my five-euro note. No lowers her head, which gives me a chance to look at her closely. If you ignore the grubby marks on her face and neck, her dirty hair, she’s very pretty. If she was clean, dressed in nice clothes and had her hair done, if she looked less tired, she might even be prettier than Léa Germain.

  She raises her head.

  ‘What’s in it for me?’

  It’s late and my father will be worried. I take the quickest way home and replay the conversation, which is easy because I record everything, down to the smallest sigh. I don’t know why, but I’ve been able to do it since I was little – words are printed in my head like on a scroll, stored for several days. I erase them when I need to in order to avoid a traffic jam. The dinner’s ready, the table set. My mother’s gone to bed. My father puts the serving dish in front of me and picks up my plate to serve me. He pours water into our glasses. I can tell he’s sad. He’s making an effort to seem jolly, but his voice gives him away. That’s one of the things I can spot, voices that conceal a lie within them, and words that say the opposite of feelings. I can spot it in my father’s sadness, and my mother’s, it’s there like an undertow. I swallow the breaded fish and the mashed potato and try to give him a reassuring smile. My father’s very good at keeping a conversation going and giving the impression that something’s happening when it’s not. He knows how to ask questions and give replies, get a discussion going again, digress and make links on his own while my mother stays silent. Usually I try to help him, put a brave face on it and join in. I ask him to clarify, to give examples, I push his arguments, look for contradictions. But this evening I can’t. I’m thinking about my presentation, and Lucas and No. Everything’s mixed up in the same feeling of fear. He’s telling me about his work and a trip he’s got to make soon. I’m looking at the wallpaper in the kitchen, the drawings I did when I was little stuck to the wall and the big frame with the photos of the three of us. Photos from before.

  ‘You know, Lou, it’ll take time to get your old mum back. A lot of time. But you mustn’t worry. We’ll get there.’

  In bed I think about No and her jacket. I counted the holes in it. There were five – two cigarette burns and three rips.

  In bed I think of Lucas and this phrase comes back to me: ‘Don’t worry, Chip, I’m sure it’ll turn out OK.’

  .

  Chapter 7

  When I was little I used to spend hours in front of the mirror trying to get my ears to stay back. I thought I looked ugly and wondered if they could be fixed, maybe by squeezing my head into a bathing cap or a cycling helmet every day, summer and winter. My mother had told me that when I was a baby I used to sleep on my side with my ear folded over. When I was little I wanted to be a traffic light at the biggest junction. I thought there was nothing more worthwhile or more respectable than directing the traffic, going from red to green and green to red in order to protect people. When I was little I would watch my mother putting on her make-up in front of the mirror, following every movement – eyeliner, mascara, lipstick. I breathed in her perfume, I didn’t know it was so fragile. I didn’t know that things could come to an end just like that and never return.

  When I was eight my mother got pregnant. They’d been trying to have another baby for ages. She’d been to the gynaecologist, taken medicine and had injections – and then finally it happened. I’d studied reproduction in my encyclopedia of mammals: the uterus, ovaries, spermatozoa and all that stuff, so I was able to ask precise questions about what was going on. The doctor had talked about an in vitro fertilisation (it would have been cool to have a brother or sister made in a test tube), but in the end they didn’t need it, my mother got pregnant just when they’d given up hope. The day she had the test results we drank champagne and raised our glasses in a toast. We couldn’t tell anyone during the first three months, when mothers can lose their babies. I was sure it was going to be OK. In my encyclopedias I followed the growth of the embryo, the different stages of its development and all that. I studied the diagrams and did extra research on the Internet.

  After a few weeks we could tell everybody, and we began the preparations. My father moved his desk into the living room to clear the bedroom and we bought a cot for the baby, who was going to be a girl. My mother got out my old baby clothes and we sorted through them together and put them all neatly folded in the big lacquered chest of drawers. That summer we went to the mountains. I remember Mummy’s tummy in her red swimming costume by the side of the pool, and her long hair blowing freely in the wind and her taking siestas under the parasol. When we got back to Paris, there were only two or three weeks to go before the birth. I thought it was incredible imagining a baby coming out of Mummy’s tummy, that it could start just like that with no warning, even if I’d read lots of things about it in her pregnancy books, even if it could all be explained scientifically. One evening they went to the hospital. They left me with a neighbour across the hall for the night. My father was carrying the case that we’d packed together, with the little pyjamas and bootees and everything. You could tell they were happy. He rang very early in the morning: I had a sister. The next day I was able to go and see her sleeping beside my mother in a see-through plastic cot on wheels.

  I know they can send supersonic planes and rockets into space, and identify a criminal from a hair or a tiny flake of skin, and grow a tomato that will keep in the fridge for three weeks without getting a wrinkle, and store millions of pieces of information on a tiny chip. But of everything that exists and is still evolving, there’s nothing more incredible to me or more amazing than this: Chloe came out of my mother’s stomach.

  Chloe had a mouth, a nose, hands, feet, fingers and nails. Chloe opened and closed her eyes, yawned, suckled and moved her little arms, and this high-precision mechanism was all my parents’ work.

  Sometimes when I’m alone in the house I look at those first photos: Chloe in my arms, Chloe sleeping on my mother’s breast, the four of us sitting on the bed in the hospital – my grandmother took that one and it’s a bit wobbly, not very well
framed, you can see the room in the background, the blue walls, the gifts, the boxes of chocolates. Most of all you notice Mum’s face – it’s so incredibly smooth – and her smile. When I rummage in the little wooden box the photos are kept in, my heart beats like it’s going to burst. Mum would go crazy if she caught me.

  After a few days they came home. I loved changing Chloe, bathing her, trying to comfort her when she was crying. I rushed back from school to see them. When she started drinking from a bottle, I’d sit on the sofa with my arm propped up on a cushion and give her her evening feed. I remember you had to be careful about air bubbles and not let her drink too fast.

  Those moments aren’t ours any more. They’re shut up in a box, buried at the back of a cupboard, out of reach. They’re frozen like on a postcard or a calendar. The colours will end up disappearing, fading. They’re forbidden to our memories and our words.

  One Sunday morning I heard Mum scream. It was a scream I’ll never forget.

  Even today, when I let my mind wander, when I’m not paying attention to where my thoughts are going, when that day floats into my head because I’m bored, that scream comes back to me and tears at my stomach.

  I ran into the bedroom and saw Mum shaking Chloe, shouting. I didn’t understand. She held her against her, shook her again, kissed her. Chloe’s eyes were closed. My father was already calling an ambulance. And then Mum slid down on to the floor. She was hunched over the baby, on her knees, crying and saying ‘no, no, no’. I remember that she was only wearing a bra and pants and thinking that that wasn’t suitable if people were coming. And at the same time I could tell that something was happening, something that couldn’t be fixed. The doctors came quickly. They examined Chloe and I know that Mum saw in their eyes that there was nothing they could do. It was at that moment that Dad realised that I was there and took me out of the room. His face was pale and his lips were trembling. He held me very tight in his arms without a word.

  Then there were the announcements, hushed conversations, endless telephone calls, letters and the burial. And then a huge void like a black hole. We didn’t cry that much – all together, I mean. Maybe we should have. Maybe that would have made it easier. Life picked up again as before with the same rhythm, the same timetable, the same habits. My mother was there with us, preparing the meals, doing the washing, hanging out the clothes, but it was as if a part of her had gone away to be with Chloe in a place which only she knew. She extended her first period of sick leave with another, and then another, and then she couldn’t work any more. I was in the last year of primary school. The teacher asked to see my father because she thought my behaviour was abnormal for a child of my age. I was at the meeting. She said that I was withdrawn and solitary. That I displayed ‘a disturbing maturity’, I remember those words. She alluded to Chloe’s death. The whole school knew about it. She said that it was a great trauma for a family, that each of us risked losing our way, that we needed to seek help. She was the one who recommended that my father took me to a psychologist. That’s why I went to see Mrs Cortanze every Wednesday till the end of that year. She made me take IQ tests and other tests with funny names and initials that I can’t remember. I went without complaining, to make my father happy. I refused to do the drawings and all the stuff psychologists get children to do to work out what they think without really thinking it or without knowing they’re thinking it, but I was willing to talk. Mrs Cortanze nodded with great conviction and rarely interrupted me. I shared my theories about the world with her (that’s when they started) – my theory about subsets, my theory about infinite stupidity, about polo necks, equations without unknowns, visible and invisible segments and so on. She really listened and always remembered what I’d said the time before. She would come up with connections or deductions and I would nod back so as not to contradict her or hurt her feelings, because Mrs Cortanze had an incredible bun on top of her head that was so high it was probably a sign of pure magic.

  My mother got ill. We saw her drift away little by little without being able to stop her. We held out our hands, but we couldn’t touch her. We called out to her, but she didn’t seem to hear. She stopped speaking, stopped getting up. She stayed in bed all day or sat in the big armchair in the living room dozing in front of the TV. Sometimes, as she stared into space, she’d stroke my hair or face. Sometimes she’d squeeze my hand, out of the blue for no reason. And sometimes she’d kiss my eyelids. She didn’t eat with us any more, didn’t do the housework. My father talked to her for hours. Sometimes he’d get angry with her. I’d hear raised voices coming from the bedroom. I tried to make out the words and the pleading. I’d glue my ear to the wall and fall asleep sitting up in bed and wake with a start when my body slumped sideways.

  The following summer we went to stay with friends at the seaside. Mum stayed in the house nearly all the time. She didn’t put on her swimming costume or her sandals with the big flowers in the middle. I think she dressed the same way every day, when it occurred to her to get dressed. It was hot that year, a strange, damp, sticky sort of heat. My father and I tried to stay happy, to recapture the holiday atmosphere, but we didn’t have the heart.

  Now I know without a shadow of doubt that you can’t chase away those images, let alone the invisible holes that burrow deep down inside. You can’t chase away the reverberations or the memories that stir as night falls or in the early hours. You can’t chase away echoing screams, still less echoing silence.

  Then, just like every other year, I went to spend a month with my grandparents in the Dordogne. At the end of the summer my father came down: he had important things to tell me. My mother had been admitted to a special hospital for people with serious depression and my name was down for a special school in Nantes for gifted children.

  I asked my father what he was planning to do that was special. He smiled and hugged me.

  I spent four years in Nantes. When I think about it now it seems like a lot. I mean, when you count one, two, three, four school years, each with about ten months, each month with thirty or thirty-one days, it seems ages, and that’s not counting the hours and the minutes. Yet it’s as if that time is folded in on itself, empty as a page left blank in an exercise book. That doesn’t mean I can’t remember anything about it, but the colours aren’t true, they’re blown, like in an overexposed photo. I went back to Paris every other weekend. In the beginning I’d go to see my mother in hospital with my heart in my mouth and a feeling of dread in my stomach. Her eyes were glassy like a dead fish, her face frozen. She’d be watching the TV in the day room. I recognised her hunched body from a distance, her trembling hands. My father tried to reassure me: she was taking a lot of medicine and they had side effects, but the doctors were hopeful, she was doing better. Later, after she got out, she’d come with him to meet me at Montparnasse station. They would wait at the end of the platform. I’d try to get used to her motionless, broken silhouette from a distance. We kissed unemotionally. My father took my bag and we’d go to the escalator. I filled my lungs with the smell of Paris and the three of us got into the car. The next day they’d take me back to the station. Time went so quickly. Then it was time to go.

  For weeks I dreamed that one Sunday my father would say, ‘This can’t go on. Stay with us. You can’t be so far away.’ He’d turn the car round before we got to the station. For weeks I dreamed that at the last traffic light or as he turned off the engine, he’d say, ‘This is crazy’ or ‘It’s ridiculous’ or ‘This hurts too much’.

  For weeks I dreamed that one day he’d put his foot down on the accelerator, flat to the floor, and drive all three of us into the wall of a car park, and we’d be together for ever.

  I ended up coming back for good. I rediscovered Paris and the bedroom that belonged to a child who was no longer me. I asked my parents to send me to a normal school for normal children. I wanted life to go back to how it was before, when everything seemed simple and connected and we didn�
�t have to think about it. I didn’t want anything to make us different from other families any more, where parents spoke more than four words a day and children didn’t spend their time asking themselves bad questions. Sometimes I reckon that Chloe must have been gifted too and that’s why she gave up on it all, when she understood what a struggle it was going to be, and that there was nothing that could be done – no cure, no antidote. I just want to be like other people. I envy their ease, their laughter, their stories. I’m sure they’ve got something I haven’t. I’ve spent ages looking in the dictionary for a word that means ease, casualness, confidence. A word that I can put in my notebook in capital letters, like a magic spell.

  It’s autumn and we’re trying to pick up the threads of our life. My father’s got a new job. He’s had the kitchen and the living room repainted. My mother’s doing better. That’s what he tells people on the phone. ‘Yes, yes, Anouk’s doing better. Much better. She’s recovering. Little by little.’ Sometimes I want to grab the phone from his hand and shout at the top of my voice, ‘No, Anouk’s not better. She’s so far away from us that we can’t talk to her. Anouk hardly recognises us. For four years she’s been living in a parallel world that we can’t reach, a sort of fourth dimension, and she couldn’t care less about whether or not we’re alive.’

  When I get home she’ll be sitting in her armchair in the middle of the living room. She doesn’t put the light on. I know she sits there from morning till night without moving. She spreads a blanket over her knees and waits for time to pass. When I get back she gets up, makes a series of gestures and movements out of habit like she’s on autopilot, gets a packet of biscuits out of the cupboard, puts the glasses on the table, and sits down beside me without saying anything, collects the washing-up, puts away what’s left and wipes the table with a sponge. The questions are always the same: did you have a good day? Did you have a lot of work today? Weren’t you cold in that jacket? Distractedly she half listens to my replies. We’re in a role play – she’s the mother and I’m the daughter. Each of us sticks to the script and follows the stage directions.