Not only is she the eldest and the only reader among her siblings; she is also the cross-eyed family freak. She’s the quiet, teary child. Her photographs show her on the edge of things – the outcast of the five. Even while choosing a life of exile and banishment by breaking all their rules, she constantly strives to return to the unwelcoming womb. She once says to me: ‘All I have ever done with your father is try to recreate the climate of my childhood.’ Poum is always looking backwards. Her childhood is her El Dorado of eternal promise – this land of the dead is more alive to her than her life with us. Is that why they always speak of death and summary executions? An operation at the age of eighteen dealt with her strabismus. She nevertheless remains the same outsider she was as a child. After her father’s death, she will never fit in with her family or with the world, however hard she tries. Under trial, grilled by their jeering remarks, she will obsessively seek her siblings’ ever-receding approval. Even though the operation probably gave her that mystical gaze that will never leave her, her perception of reality stays flawed and uncertain.
Only death has solidity. Life will always wobble and waver for Poum.
7
THE MOON
The whole family business seems fraught to me. The fact that my parents are cousins does not improve matters, as their hovering families, instead of behaving like in-laws, create minefields of doubt with each of their comments. They know too much; there is no place to hide. But one relationship I am sure of: my mother is wedded to the moon. She will suddenly run outside, interrupt a conversation, stand up in a restaurant, beg my father to stop the car and … there is the moon, waiting for her in the night sky. She always knows when it’s there. Her sister will stare at her in blank exasperation. Alexandre will smile, but carries on with whatever he is doing. That’s where I move in. When we, my mother and I, are under the moon, I can be her real child. Once she even gropes for my hand. Marie-Antoinette never gives the moon other names or lapses into quoting The Odyssey when referring to it, she just smiles up at the night sky and breathes: ‘How beautiful she is.’ When I am older she wakes me up at two in the morning just to say: ‘Look at the moon!’ The full moon deeply affects my mother, just as it does wolves, lunatics, hysterics and criminals.
When I am eight, a kind of night falls over me because Sylvia has mysteriously left me. Even her belongings have disappeared – her tea bags, her smell, her slippers, her radio, her jumpers and her enormous bras in the drawer. The BBC, Marmite, Daddy John and Bill and Ben the Flower Pot Men recede into the distance. Instead, long meals stretch out in French. To make it easier for Sylvia to take me away, in the middle of the night I pack my bear, my nightie and my book, dress, creep down the stairs and wait for her on the dark pavement. I do this for months on end, until night and day blend for me in a foggy mix. I know she could come and get me at any time. I have to be ready. At school, I always sit near the classroom door so we can make good our escape if she ever decides to come and get me there. I watch out for her on the way back to my parents’ apartment. I am sure she will come. I have no doubt whatsoever. It takes me months to finally understand that she won’t. She has left me to my parents. My mother says she’s going to get another Sylvia, but I become so good that she forgets the idea.
After Sylvia’s disappearance, the moon is still there and I check on it every night. Sylvia is now working as a nurse at a mental hospital. My aunt tells me that looking after schizophrenics in a high-security hospital is probably a relief for Sylvia after working for my parents and looking after me. My French is still sketchy, but I do get the sneer. What I concentrate on is that I am finally going to see Sylvia again, months and months after she left. When my parents take me back to England at last, I jump on the bus by myself to Graylingwell Hospital. It lies behind mellow grey walls and there is a guard at the gate. He lets me in when I say Sylvia’s name: Nurse Lee.
I am in a frenzy of anticipation. I wander around, sure I will find her without asking anyone, like Agent 007, because clues will be staring me in the face – where she walked, where she sat, where she laughed. Odd little posses of two or three people are sitting on benches under trees as big as baobabs. They don’t speak to each other. One is knitting, another is staring at her shoes, and a third is talking earnestly to his praying hands.
The building is sadly welcoming. There are soft, whispering plastic doors that belch doctors and nurses onto the grounds. They walk with swift, inattentive steps, with a focused yet distracted look on their faces – not so different from other grown-ups, only worse. I lose myself in wide corridors with big windows staring out onto the grounds where the giant trees bow down to the earth. I walk through light-filled wards with rows of beds bearing men and women of every age. They all have the same dazed look on their faces. Curtains surround some beds and you can see shadows, hear bedside voices murmuring behind them. ‘Now, now, just swallow this.’ Or ‘Your mother is coming soon, Amelia.’ The reassuring tones are not comforting. A quiet violence is relentlessly ironing out anything or anybody that disagrees with it – like school, but worse. I have to tiptoe and hop so as not to squash the frightened bubbles in the linoleum, seeking refuge away from the competent tread of medical feet. At the end of one corridor I see a spindly flight of steps, with small flat windows looking out that remind me of Nelson’s ship The Victory. I run up there to get out of the way of another posse of nurses. On the tiny landing is a door with a very smooth handle. It is silvery and soft with use, yet it seems to belong to a forgotten door. There is a key in the lock with a number written in bright red letters.
To my surprise it opens easily, and suddenly I am walking into a room full of men – not a woman in sight. There’s a pandemonium of noise and the shadows of the bars on the windows are like bruises on the floor. The growls and sighs, the oaths and moans seem hardly human. Yet something carries me quietly forward. I’m not afraid. All that is here is on my way to Sylvia; even the most frightening thing wouldn’t frighten me at all. Some men are tied to their beds, some have strange pieces of flesh hanging out of their pyjamas, some are smiling sweetly, others are calling out or whispering to me as I walk past.
I wade through their cries and stop straight in front of the kindest eyes I have ever seen. They belong to a tall black man with very clean pyjamas. I stand in front of him and explain that I’m looking for Sylvia, but he doesn’t appear to know her. He extends his arms towards me, but doesn’t touch me. Instead, he lays them gently on the air. His skin is night dark, but he feels full of light. I am so comfortable with him I wish I could stay, but I have to find Sylvia. I make him a little bow because I can see he is not going to take me on his knee like Daddy John. I turn around again and wave him a small wave. I wish he were not in this room. I wish he were in a garden or a forest. It must be hard to be with these other yelling people all the time, behind barred windows and locked doors. Why are they separated from the rest of the patients in the airy open wards? I continue walking and some men say strange things I don’t understand. Others jeer or even howl. I just smile at the sad ones, the lonely ones, the ones who stare as if I were the ghost of someone they have lost forever. I know this place is wrong for them all.
Just before I reach the door at the other end of the room, the very last man smiles at me. He is immensely fat; his body dribbles all around him. His skin is as white as my mother’s moon and his hair is the finest, blackest hair I have ever seen. His cheeks are smooth like a baby’s. I know he also is a night person, like my other friend. They would never go to Bognor beach or stand on The Victory at Portsmouth with the sun on their faces. I stop to stare at him before reaching for the door handle. His podgy hands are lying on the ripples of flesh his pyjamas can hardly contain. He doesn’t move and something about his silence and quiet in all this deafening noise is fascinating to me. If a man were the moon, it would be him. I move closer. Soon I am standing so near, he draws me to him and pats my hair. ‘Don’t worry,’ he says, ‘it’s going to be all right.’ Then, it’s as
if everything is sewn back inside me, even Sylvia’s leaving. I know then as he holds me close that even if I find her, she will not come back. He holds me at arm’s length to look at me and I see his sad, joyous, night-filled eyes telling me Sylvia is gone. Sylvia, they seem to say, won’t return to you. He wipes my cheeks with his thumb and I hug him. He has a sweet, slightly sickly smell that is not disgusting, like a spicy cake from a far-away country. Then suddenly I feel a coldness in the back of my neck as if the whole ward has moved behind me. He has felt it too, for he gently thrusts me to the door. That’s when a white coat bursts in. The white coat yells, catches me up, and rips me from the air of the room. I wriggle round to see the Moon, my friend, and wave and wave. The door closes with a slam. I am in big trouble.
There are more yells and questions I don’t understand. They ask each other: ‘What was she doing in the high-security ward? Who let her in there?’ They squat in front of me and hold my shoulders. ‘Did anything happen to you in there?’ My father told me that American prisoners in Vietnam repeat their service number over and over again when they are caught. This pops into my head. So I whisper the same thing over and over too. ‘I am looking for Sylvia Ann Lee. I am looking for Sylvia Ann Lee.’ I am really scared now. More white coats come, women and men. They are all excited and look completely mad. When they are all talking to each other I run away, but they catch me again. Before it gets worse, out of nowhere, Sylvia is there. She’s dressed in white too. Everything feels strangely calm all of a sudden as if the sea has stopped churning even on Bognor beach, or the clouds have stopped moving above the roof of the asylum, or the dogs of the world have stopped barking. When I am sad I listen to dogs barking in the night and I know they are warning each other, helping each other. But it feels as if I won’t hear these things ever again.
I forget about the doctors and nurses and I stare at Sylvia and smile at her tentatively. She’s very matter-of-fact. She doesn’t like people making a fuss, even doctors. ‘Oh, Catherine,’ she says, ‘you’ll forget your head some day.’ She turns to the white coats and shrugs. ‘She’s such a little scatterbrain.’ The doctors whisper to her. She frowns. ‘Has anything happened to you in that room, Catherine?’ My instinct is to tell her everything about my two friends, but in that second something in me dies, just like a candle. I decide there and then I will never tell anyone about meeting Night and Moon locked up in a room with a lot of strange men. I stitch it into myself. I look at the door and wish it were made of marshmallow, so I could go back to their smiles. I won’t be allowed to see them ever again. I know that. Sylvia shakes my arm. ‘What were you doing in there? It’s dangerous. Wasn’t the door locked at the other end?’
I shake my head. ‘No, it was open,’ I say. ‘It was up a tiny, little staircase and then I just walked through a long corridor with people in their beds.’
She nods and lifts her eyes to the ceiling, tapping her forehead for the benefit of the doctors and nurses. ‘Trust you to trip into the high-security ward by mistake. Never mind, come on, my poppet,’ she says. She hugs me a few steps later, but I don’t even recognise her smell. Everything about her is different. For years I will hang on to snippets of her presence, while knowing the Moon was right: Sylvia has left me; she has gone away to a place I don’t know about.
Being in that place also helps me understand that wolves, werewolves, the criminally insane and schizophrenics are like my mother, Poum, Marie-Antoinette. They swim in the same pond and understand the same things. They pat Hector’s remains, throw their children in the fire. They are the captives and the slaves. They are the prisoners in locked rooms. They are the exiled and the banished.
Once, Sylvia long gone, I am in Provence with my mother and some neighbours. They come with their child of eight. We are sitting in the kitchen; the lights are warm and yellow. The small house is huddled around us against the night. My mother rushes to close the curtains of the tiny windows and light the lamps. She loves night like other people love the beach. There’s no moon. She has checked. We sit around the round table and they want to play a game. My mother and I know no games. We stare at each other, but comply. Suddenly, this marvellous game unfolds. ‘It’s magic,’ says the little girl to my mother. Poum narrows her eyes and nods hopefully. ‘You whisper a spell to someone and they have to go out of the room. Then all the others choose an object in the room and the person who has gone out has to guess it,’ explains the child. They play first and my mother is open-mouthed. Of course, there is a trick or a code to this game but Poum does not understand that. Now it is our turn. She jumps up, glances at me proudly and rushes out without consulting with me for a code. The child and her mother share an aghast chuckle as Poum runs off, relying entirely on the magic. The secret is out – my mother’s hidden world is exposed. I feel like rushing forward with a blanket to cover her. We decide on an object and I squirm knowing this is not a game anymore but a cheap laugh at my mother. When we call Poum back after a minute, the girl can hardly contain her giggles. Poum walks in with a calm, happy look on her face. She stares at me and through me before extending her arm and pointing straight at the fire – which is exactly the thing we have chosen.
My mother’s victories are sensational. They shine like the lighthouse of Alexandria just before the earthquake.
But fear, not victory, is my mother’s real companion. It informs her behaviour and filters all her decisions. One of her odd friends, Olivier Valéry-Radot, keeps bringing her presents. Alexandre dislikes this. ‘But he likes men,’ laughs Poum.
‘You’re the one he is giving expensive presents to, not I,’ shoots back my father.
When Valéry-Radot appears with a pre-Columbian drinking vessel for Marie-Antoinette, Alexandre’s cup is dangerously full. But my mother won’t go near it. She can hardly contain her recoil when Valéry-Radot gives it to her. Luckily, he’s in a hurry and has no time to fathom her lack of enthusiasm. She refuses to touch his gift and it’s put in a remote place among the gloomiest books of my father’s library. When I ask about the black bowl with its distorted wide-open mouth, Poum strides up to me, grabs my arm and pulls me towards it. ‘Look,’ she says, ‘at the horrible monster’s yell.’ For years, the ‘yell’ remains in the shadows of bookcases.
One day, many years later, an art critic friend walks into my flat in Paris. His hand goes unerringly to Valéry-Radot’s vessel.
‘Where did you get this?’
Instinctively I step back. ‘Don’t touch it. It’s the monster’s yell.’ He laughs so hard that his head jerks back. He is rather stiff usually, but sometimes he loses it, and you see the sweet person he is underneath. Gently, he pulls my arm, the same arm my mother dragged towards the very same monster. He pats me on the back with surreal kindness.
‘Catherine, you idiot,’ he says ‘it’s not a monster, it’s a little frog croaking to the moon. Look.’
‘The moon,’ I whisper, as his fingers outline the tiny frog.
‘It’s a happy vessel, probably for a child,’ he says.
If only I could have told her.
8
STATION JAVEL
In Paris, a population of cleaning ladies lives in a seamlessly close parallel world to that of the city’s other inhabitants. You recognise them easily in the streets or in the Metro. They have chapped hands and heavy legs. Their bearing is a little stately, like people still in the thrall of an effort that encompasses too much of their being. If you sit next to them, you will often get a whiff of eau de Javel, the French bleach, named after the little village where it was invented in a small factory in 1774 by Claude Louis Berthollet. Like Proust’s madeleine, eau de Javel takes you back to France quicker than a postcard of the Eiffel Tower. Palms folded in the small of their lap, these women sit with their knees tight as the Metro thunders past stations Maubert Mutualité, Bastille and the strangely apt Filles du Calvaire. There is even a Station Javel. From time to time, they will pensively smooth creases out of their skirts or flick imaginary fluff from their sl
eeves. Cleaning ladies can be angels or demons, they can be young or middle-aged, but they all have shadows under their eyes and a claw of exhaustion between their eyebrows.
They are not the only cleaners. In many buildings the concierge also climbs up the back stairs to tidy people’s apartments. Her official role is to deal with the mail, wax the staircase, keep a general eye on things and hold on to the residents’ extra set of keys, but she also often has a second job as a cleaning lady. The concierge lives in a loge near the front door of the building. In some cases it is as tiny and dark as a confessional, in others it has French windows and white curtains. Concierges can be Spanish or Portuguese; they can even be French. The French ones are generally widows with varicose legs that they air in summer on the trottoirs. Even if they’re not inquisitive by nature, they are an institution, an information bank. Tips are as essential as the hyperbolic phrases of respect and consideration: that is the tradition. Ignoring them as you go past their door can thrust you out of favour. A Parisian apartment building is a mini Versailles. The Sun Queen is the concierge.
Poum and Alexandre Page 6