To Throw Away Unopened

by Viv Albertine

  21 Mum’s nose and the tips of her fingers were turning blue and the paramedic asked me if he should take her to hospital. Mum had a Living Will saying she didn’t want to be resuscitated, but I asked her again if she wanted to go. You never know. Faced with the real thing, Death, you might not feel the same as you did when you made that calm, rational decision six months ago. Mum clamped her lips together, frowned and shook her head once. She couldn’t speak – she hadn’t been able to speak for three weeks – but she could still think. The paramedic was satisfied and left the room. Pascale and I started blabbing at Mum, talking over each other: ‘I love you,’ ‘You’ve been a great mother,’ ‘You’ve lived a good life.’ Mum tried to lift her head off the pillow. She gulped in a big breath, puffed out her cheeks and let out a throaty roar. It erupted from the very depths of her being. Not a happy sound, more the sort of noise you make when you’re trying to shout for help in a dream, an unintelligible bark dredged up from the bottom of your lungs. I reached into the back of my mind. I must get this right for her, must interpret her needs at this crucial moment. What is she trying to say?

  ‘Be quiet?’ I ventured.

  She nodded.

  Madeleine Moment

  … sometimes the key arrives long before the lock.

  Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby, 2013

  I wasn’t sitting by my father’s side as he lay dying. I received a phone call from France saying he didn’t have long left, so I went to visit him in hospital but could only stay a week. When I got back to London I rushed round to Mum’s flat to tell her he was nearly dead and tried not to sound too delighted about it, even though she had just as gleeful a glint in her eye as I did.

  My father, Lucien (I can’t call him ‘Dad’ easily), had been hassling, crying, demanding and emotionally blackmailing me on the phone and whenever I visited him for years. He threatened not to leave me anything in his will unless I persuaded Pascale to visit him too. French Napoleonic law states that you have to leave your money equally to all your children when you die, whatever your feelings about them. I didn’t know this but I still refused to coerce Pascale, and told him it was up to her. I visited my father because I felt sorry for him, and also I wanted to try and work through the fear of maleness that had built up in me during my childhood. He was an ignorant man and violent towards my sister and me when we were children. I didn’t like him, no one did, and he didn’t like anyone back. Why doesn’t he just die? I thought for years. He obliged three weeks after my visit to France, at the same time as my marriage fell apart, and he left me enough money to pay for a solicitor and get out. I couldn’t have done it without him dying. It wasn’t just the money, I’m not sure I would have had the emotional strength to contemplate a divorce if he wasn’t out of my life. My father’s absence created enough space for me to reassess the other man in my life and see him in a clearer light.

  I was Lucien’s only living relative (apart from Pascale, who lived in Canada), so after his death I went to France to organise his affairs. It was the height of summer, and sorting through the rubbish he’d hoarded in his flat over forty years was boiling hot and dirty work. One afternoon I came across a handmade trunk wedged into the bottom of a large mahogany wardrobe. It was painted blue with aluminium edges. He’d made it himself. He was always making crates and boxes and filling them with things. I dragged the chest out of the wardrobe and onto the floor. It landed on the tiles with a crack.

  A tattered plastic carrier bag full of wooden-handled Opinel paring knives of assorted sizes was the first thing I pulled out. French men love these knives. They have one wide blade indented with a tiny curved groove for your thumbnail that folds out from a tawny wooden handle. My father used his Opinels all the time, to slice apples, cheese, sharpen a pencil, clean his fingernails, cut an almond from a tree. He’d hold the knife in one hand and a nub of cheese in the other, curl the blade towards his thumb, stopping just as the metal touched skin, then gobble the cheese off the blade.

  Underneath the bag of knives was a bundle of papers. I lifted out a fistful and sat cross-legged on the cool floor – Don’t sit on cold floors, you’ll get piles, said Mum’s voice in my head – to check if there was something important hidden among all the bills and newspaper cuttings. I’d already found his Last Will and Testament wedged between layers of smoothed-out madeleine cake cases. Coming across my father’s will under the pile of frilly glassines heartened me. Albertines and madeleines, together again, just like in Proust. Even though our surname was only linked to greatness via a character in a novel and some eggy little cakes, it somehow seemed significant. The first time I ever liked my surname was when I read about Albertine in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Until then I hated the foreignness of it and the taunts of ‘Albert’, ‘Albatross’ and ‘Albuquerque’ at school. The second time I liked my name was when the footballer Demetrio Albertini played for AC Milan and Italy. Over time I came across more namesakes, such as the artist Bill Albertini and Princess Elisabeth Albertine, of African descent, whose daughter married King George III. The best finds were the Algerian author Albertine Sarrazin and her book L’Astragale, and ‘The Albertine Workout’, a poetic dissection of Proust’s fictional character by Anne Carson. Each discovery was another little ledge to hold on to, giving me faith that I wasn’t from such terrible stock after all and could make something of myself.

  Other documents I found among Lucien’s papers were:

  a typewritten copy of Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘If’;

  a carte du combattant, proof he was in the Free French Navy during the Second World War;

  a little book with a sage-green linen cover titled ‘Aliens Order 1920 – Certificate of Registration. You must produce this certificate if required to do so by any Police Officer, Immigration Officer or member of His Majesty’s forces.’ Lucien was trying to become a British citizen. The black-and-white photograph inside the green book was dated 1945. He gazed out of the picture and up to the left, eyebrows raised, large brown eyes drooping at the outer edges, making him look sad and sensitive. Thick fair hair brushed back from a young forehead, high cheekbones, neat ears, mouth pursed as if he was about to kiss someone or say something French. A dimple in his chin. Overcoat collar turned up, a sliver of white shirt, thin black tie. The image could have been a frame from a 1940s French film. I peeled the photograph off the page and turned it over. On the back was written ‘November 1st – 1944 – I could say what I feel about you for this is the first time I do’ in Lucien’s hand, followed by ‘The word to say “I love you” is not enough to mean it’ in my mother’s writing.

  Lucien (Albert) Albertine was twenty-three and my mother, Kathleen Ruth van Baush, twenty-five when they met at Queens Ice Skating Rink in West London. There weren’t many young men left after the war and Mum thought she’d hit the jackpot when she clapped eyes on the handsome French sailor in a white hat with a little red pom-pom on top. He was two years younger than her, but what the hell. ‘You can either be a young man’s fool or an old man’s darling,’ her mother, Frieda, warned her. Mum told me that she and her friend Joy had never been ice skating before. They only went along that night for one reason – to see if a girl in their office was lying about being a good skater. Mum and Lucien fell in love at first sight. All three girls met their future husbands that night.

  There were two cardboard folders in the trunk. One was a faded buff colour, labelled Letters – Kathleen & children. Adrenalin shot through my body when I saw these words. No warning, no time to control the anxiety. A series of images flipped through my mind: spirit level, carpenter’s pencil with flat lead, measurements in feet and inches scribbled onto pieces of plywood, stubbly chin grinding as he ate. (Mediterranean men’s jaws seem to move from side to side when they eat. They look like they’re enjoying their food, whether it’s a piece of chicken or a square of chocolate. You can sense their pleasure, see them savouring the flavours. British men’s jaws go up and down with little chopping movements, like they want to g
et the process over with.) I heard my father’s laugh, a childish giggle which didn’t go with his big body, the way boxers often have high voices that don’t go with their bulk. I saw the red marks on my legs left by the leather belt he hit me and my sister with when we misbehaved.

  I lifted the bundle of letters out of the folder and discovered my parents’ marriage and divorce certificates tucked between them. They married in 1947 and their divorce was granted in 1970 on the grounds that each party was guilty of cruelty to the other. I only looked at two of the letters: a note detailing Lucien’s maintenance arrears from the Petty Sessional Division of Highgate Magistrates’ Court – seven pounds a week he was supposed to pay, I knew that figure well, it was a risible sum even then, and Mum often spoke angrily about it – and a ruling from the European Commission of Human Rights dated 1970, responding to my father’s complaint that he’d ‘lost all contact with his children of whose present whereabouts he does not know’. The reply stated that a court welfare officer saw the children and ‘they did not wish to meet their father under influence of mother’.

  The second folder was blue, faded at the corners to a pinky yellow, and contained a document titled The Diary of L A Albertine (Esq) 1965–1967. These were the last two years we all lived together as a family. I didn’t read any more letters or the diary, just shoved everything back into the trunk, but the next day I went to Galeries Lafayette, bought a large canvas bag the colour of wet brown earth, half the size of a sack, and emptied all the papers, diaries and knives into it. The following week, when the funeral was over and all the cleaning and tidying was finished, I boarded the train to London carrying two suitcases, my father’s rattan chair and the big brown bag. I was stopped at the border because of all the Opinel knives, but when I told the French customs officer in broken French that my father had just died, he nodded and waved me through.

  Something Nasty in the Wardrobe*

  The first time I visited Mum after Lucien died her grey eyes swept over my face like a prison searchlight looking for an escapee. She knew it was likely I’d come across something damning – Mum knew enough about life and death to know that when going through a person’s lifelong accumulation of papers and possessions it’s inevitable you’ll unearth some secrets, and she had so many secrets. I didn’t mention the papers, which felt like a betrayal as I usually told her everything, and stowed the brown bag at the bottom of a cupboard in my flat. But whenever I passed the cupboard I felt uneasy, like I’d locked a living thing in there. I was aware that if I threw the bag away, my anxiety would probably disappear with it, but I left it in there. Even when I moved to Hackney I took the bag with me; this time I stashed it in a shed. I wondered if I was being a masochist by hanging onto my father’s diary. I questioned myself, Which action is bravest, throwing away the diary or reading it? Why do I think I always have to be brave?

  * See Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm, 1932

  22 I detected a bitter glance from Pascale after Mum agreed to my suggestion that we be quiet. It occurred to me she was jealous that I’d guessed right, like I’d shown I knew Mum best. Mum was in a bad state. She could hardly breathe, her throat was blocked and she was making curdled, death-rattly sounds as if she was choking and gurgling on phlegm. Mia, who’d been standing quietly in the corner, stepped forward with two tubes attached to what looked like a washing machine on wheels. ‘I need to clear your mother’s airways,’ she explained to Pascale, who was still sitting on the mattress next to Mum’s head. ‘No,’ Pascale replied. ‘I’m not moving.’

  Encased

  Pascale was born when I was eighteen months old. My reaction to her arrival was to climb into her playpen and not get out again, unless I really had to, for a year. I felt robbed. I wasn’t ready to not be the baby any more, I wasn’t done with it. I wasn’t done with Mum. Pascale didn’t want to be in the playpen. As soon as she could crawl, she was off round the garden, eager to explore the world – we were living in Australia at the time, where there were lots of dangerous bugs and spiders. I felt safe huddled behind the wooden bars of the cage. I’d gather the blanket and soft toys in close and suck my thumb. When I was sent to school a year early because Mum couldn’t cope with two of us at home I felt even more wronged. I hated being deposited at the school gates and watching Mum wheel the pushchair round in a circle and stride off with Pascale, leaving me behind. I cried and shat myself every day. That childhood desire to be in the playpen has never gone away (shitting still a bit of a problem too). I still like to feel safe and contained. You try all your life to be an adult, but something deep down inside you will always be that child.

  It wasn’t just daytime, I liked to feel confined at night too and begged Mum to heft layer after layer of grey army blankets, winter coats and, if they still didn’t feel heavy enough, old curtains on top of me when I went to bed. Once I was suitably weighed down I’d push the top of my skull, where a newborn’s fontanelle is, up against the headboard. I still have to remind myself not to do that. I equated being crushed or squeezed with feeling safe. Every night after she tucked me in Mum would go to the bottom of the bed, tunnel under the sheets, blankets and coats, grab hold of my ankles and pull me back down the bed so my head was in the middle of the pillow, but as soon as she left the room I’d wriggle back up again. (Other rituals Mum performed on me at night were exercising my legs by gripping my knee and ankle and circling one leg at a time so I wouldn’t be bow-legged, weaving plaster in and out of my toes so they wouldn’t be crooked, and taping a penny onto my stomach so I’d have a flat navel, all of which worked.)

  My need for boundaries and pressure is never far below the surface. I was even reluctant to have my braces removed after wearing them for two years in my forties because I liked how they hugged and gripped my teeth. And when Eryk said, ‘I’ve encased you,’ after he finished constructing the walls and partitions in my Hackney home, I thought that was hot. I’ve since discovered there are other people in the world who find it comforting to be held or pressed tight. Temple Grandin, one of the first adults to publicly identify as autistic, suffered from chronic anxiety and found she became less distressed when she shut herself in the holding device that calmed the calves at her aunt’s ranch.* She later invented the ‘hug box’, a piece of equipment designed to calm people who are on the autistic spectrum.† After reading about Grandin and how the need to be held tight or weighed down can be an autistic trait, it occurred to me that I may be on the autistic spectrum myself (or a calf).

  Half a Sixpence

  Imagine you were asked in a maths paper at junior school, ‘Which would you prefer, a shilling or two sixpences?’ and you answered, ‘Two sixpences,’ because thinking of the two tiny silver coins jingling together in your pocket made you feel good and you loved those cute little sixpences. But when the test paper was returned you saw a big red cross through your answer, and that night your mother explained to you that it was a trick question, two sixpences and a shilling were worth the same amount – which you knew, but you’d still prefer two sixpences. It wasn’t that you were stupid, you just saw things from a different angle. Sixpences had character, shillings didn’t. And you felt richer with two sixpences because there were two coins, not just one. But despite all these explanations, you were still wrong and you kept getting tripped up by these trick questions over and over again, in exams, in relationships, friendships, jobs and interviews. In fact, these misreadings of situations happened so often that you started to view the world as a tricksy and untruthful place. Then you noticed that the people who saw the tricks behind the questions were popular and always at the top of the class. Baffled by life and its unseen rules, you began to doubt everything around you. You felt you had to approach all of life as a trick, just to get it right a few times.

  The sixpences episode happened to Pascale, but it could just as easily have happened to me.

  There were no allowances made for people who were a bit different in the 1960s, especially children. We didn’t know or use terms
like ‘autistic spectrum’, ‘Asperger’s’ or ‘Attention Deficit Disorder’. Even being ‘artistic’ was considered a defect. Teachers, parents, classmates and the medical profession thought children who didn’t conform were just difficult, annoying misfits. Girls were considered even more of an aberration than boys.