Ghosts by Daylight (15 page)

But when Luca arrived, we became close, as close as I have ever been to anyone other than Bruno, for the first time in my life.

Although I sometimes felt, in that way that children in large families do, lost inside my strange, large family, I loved my mother fiercely. But her love, it seemed, was for ever divided between seven people: me, my five living siblings and my father.

I was Cat Cat’s baby, her seventh child, born when she was forty-two, her last. A sister had died from meningitis a decade before I arrived and before me there were five boys and a much older sister, who was seventeen when I was born. It was a complicated arrangement: so many children, such scattered ages.

Much later, I would realize that perhaps I came into her life at a difficult time, an exhausted time, a time when she would need replenishing, and instead, there was another baby to care for. And yet, once when I was a teenager, she told me woefully, ‘I so wanted a little girl after all those boys. And then you came.’

I remember sitting on a church pew on a wintry Sunday morning next to my mother and burying my face in her chinchilla coat. The aroma was musky and reminded me of the summer storage cupboard; but I wanted to be as close to her as I could get. I wanted to be inside her skin – it was always soft, and smelled of the cream she used, rosewater and glycerin. I took baths with my mother when I was tiny. I saw her breasts and said, ‘I want those.’ I wore her high-heeled shoes and sat at her dressing table – she was the kind of woman who had a dressing table with porcelain perfume bottles and elaborate pieces of jewellery. I loved her smell of Guerlain, of Shalimar. I loved her dark auburn hair and her pink frosted lipstick.

I loved her even when I did not notice how annoyed she was to have me constantly trailing behind her when she wanted to be alone, wanted to be with my father, wanted to be unencumbered.

When I was five or six, before I started school, she would take me to a restaurant called the Hamburger Train. It was a sweet little diner with booths shaped like trains for children. She would order me a hamburger and she would have a cup of coffee. She would light a cigarette – an elegant, long, white-filtered cigarette – and leave lipstick marks on the edges. One day, when we went next door to go food shopping at the A & P, she sat me in the cart, in the front part for babies and children. We went through the aisles quickly – everything always seemed to be in a rush because there were other children with other lives who needed attending to – and she put boxes of crackers and pasta and washing powder in the wire cart, and when she got to the meat counter, the butcher, a man called John whom she told me was a widower – I did not know what that word meant, and when she explained it, I got a terrible fear that she would die, too, like the man’s wife – John flirted with her, and she flirted back. But I was too young to know that then.

When she went clothes shopping at JM Townes, a fancy shop in town, there was a tiny child’s theatre inside the shop where she left me alone in a big cushioned chair. They played cartoons, Looney Tunes and Bugs Bunny and Popeye the Sailor Man, so that the mothers could shop in peace. The other children laughed and hooted, but I always sat near the door, fearful that my mother would never come back. When she appeared, her arms full of gift-wrapped boxes in beautiful colours, with curling ribbons and bright paper, I would grab her around her stocking legs, and she would always shake me off. ‘Calm down, darling,’ she would say. ‘Time to go home.’ But I was a neurotic child, afraid of the dark and being left behind.

My parents drank gin martinis on Saturday afternoons. They drank one each, and smoked a cigarette – in my father’s case, it was his one and only all week; he was an athlete and he went running each and every morning. It was their treat, their time to relax and forget about bills, children, chickenpox, the mortgage and the school board. They sat outside our big house in the suburbs and drank the martinis out of frosted glasses.
Where am
I
? I wonder now. My brothers are off playing somewhere else, no room for a little sister. I am playing somewhere in the vast backyard, the American backyard with a weeping willow tree and woodlands that sweep back towards streams and unimaginable things, dark things, bad things. Maybe I am in the wood eating the poison berries I have been warned not to eat, but which I pick off the branches and weigh in my hand, wondering.

My parents started preaching fear to me early on. I should not walk for long in the woods by myself – I liked to go there and the pick berries and imagine there were fairies under the bridge – because there were bad people who would snatch me. I mustn’t stay alone in the house, because there could be fires or earthquakes or disasters. I must be suspicious, cautious, on guard. Terrible things happened in the world, which was a frightening, large place; it was better to stay at home with my family and my cats and the dog.

When I think of my childhood, my mother is in her forties. She has that thick curly auburn hair which she wore in a fashion called the flip. In the 1960s, she wore Gucci print shifts, skirt-and-jacket suits, high heels and a yarn-like thing that held her hair back. When she exercised to a television programme called
Jack Lalanne
, she wore grey stretch trousers with a hook around the foot. My brother Joe and I would sit and watch her and laugh at her silliness. She never, ever went out of the house ungroomed, although she never had her nails done because she hated her hands. I inherited her hands with their long fingers and so did my son.

She smoked Benson & Hedges 100 Lights, and was naturally beautiful: she wore hardly any make-up, except when she went out in the evening, when she would put on eyeliner with a pencil. She had a gold charm bracelet which my father had given her, heavy with tiny objects that had been presented over the years. Sometime in the future, she would sell it when one of my brothers went into rehab and they needed money.

My mother had wanted to be a girl reporter like Lois Lane on
Superman
, but it was not a respectable profession in the late 1930s when she graduated from high school. Her uncle, who was a doctor and had offered to pay her university costs, would not pay for her to study to become a newspaperwoman. She did not really need to work, but for a short while she did at an insurance company that was renowned for only taking girls from good families, and she saved her money for beautiful dresses, and dated my father. They married, and she worked her entire life as a mother, and first and foremost, a wife. She believed in taking care of her husband and her children.

When I think of her in that frosty haze of my childhood, I think of her in that church on a Sunday, and me next to her in the pew. It’s that same memory. I am resting my head on her collar. The softness of the fur comforts me, and she is warm, and for a moment, my mother, who belongs to my father and my five other siblings, belongs only to me.

This does not happen often in my childhood; she is more often than not exhausted when I ask her to sit at my tiny table and have a tea party, or read to me. There are too many children and too many problems. There is my father’s melancholia, which hangs over the house in a kind of cloud, but which no one ever talks about. There is my dead sister. My mother told me only once of the aftermath: ‘I could not get on a bus alone for a year.’ But she did not often talk about it, and could not bring herself to dive into the sorrow she must have felt at losing a child. When I was small, I would say, ‘But you have
us
. Why did you need another baby?’

‘You don’t understand. You won’t understand until you are a parent.’

For ten minutes during Sunday mass, while my brothers are at the front of the church, altar boys, and my father is lost in thought, I have my mother to myself. It feels magical.

She first saw the baby when I came down the hall of rue du 29 Juillet, holding him unsteadily in my arms.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘That must be Luca!’ She looked eternally happy.

And so, with the birth of my son, I got my mother back. She taught me so many things those three weeks: how to cook foods I remembered from my childhood; how to fasten the nappy tighter so it did not explode on the bus; and she sat next to me while I breastfed, even though she had not breastfed any of us – ‘It’s not what we did in those days’ – and she wrote in her careful handwriting which breast the baby nursed, and the time.

She taught me how to heat the bottles and how to test the temperature on the back of the wrist. She taught me how to lower the baby into the bath, and how to dress him. And she sat on the sofa, rocking and singing to him, something I am fairly sure that she never had time to do with me.

It was the same as having her to myself in church for those ten minutes. And I was, finally, after so many years of being angry at my mother and angry at my family, at peace. I could see that she loved this tiny baby, how special he was to her.

When my mother left Paris, I left the baby with the new nanny, Raquel, and I went with her to the airport by taxi. I had gotten the Air France representative to take her to the gate, even though she insisted she did not need it and felt insulted that I had asked for it. She was not very agile and the walk to the planes at Charles de Gaulle airport takes half an hour. She relented, we checked her in, I got her boarding pass, and then suddenly, a small Algerian man was there, waiting to take her away.

I was not ready to say goodbye to my mother. ‘Don’t cry,’ she said in a hoarse voice. She was dressed in ballet flats and a tailored suit and a hat – my mother comes from a generation of women who still dress in suits and hats and elegant shoes when they travel, a hangover from the era when only the wealthy travelled on aeroplanes. Don’t leave me, I wanted to say. I only just got you back.

Looking at me in alarm she said, ‘Don’t cry.’ Then the little Algerian took her away and before I could say, ‘I won’t,’ he had her through customs, and all I could see was the brim of her hat – she always wore hats, this one was a beautiful leopard hat with a white ribbon. She was gone so quickly, and I was alone in Paris once again. Alone in my apartment with a small, helpless baby.

I felt as forlorn and lost as a five-year-old, as lost as when I was a child and someone forgot to pick me up from school, and one by the one the yellow buses left with children going home, and one by one the other mothers came and then the playground was empty. Surely, it could not have been empty – there must have been a teacher, or a grown-up at least, making sure that there were no strange people around. But I think no one thought like that in those days. In my mind, looking back at a childhood memory, I am alone in the playground waiting for my mother or perhaps it was one of my brothers who was meant to get me, but forgot.

I stood there watching the line of people showing their passports and wheeling large bags and adjusting the straps of their backpacks, and then I sat in one of those plastic chairs for a long time, infinitely sad at her departure.

A large African woman standing near me said, ‘
Ça va
?’ and I said, ‘
Oui, ça va
,’ and she handed me a Kleenex, and I wiped my nose. I cried all the way home on the RER. I cried when I could not manage to get the ticket into the machine, cursing even though it was my own fault; I saw people leaping over the turnstiles, and I almost leaped too, but then the metal gate swung open. I stood on the smelly RER as it ran through the grim suburbs of Paris that no tourists ever see, but which is the real Paris of immigrants and the poor, the displaced; places where people lead lives of real desperation and never get to see the Eiffel Tower; where they finally get fed up that they will never get jobs or a chance at life and they riot and burn cars.

I stopped crying by the time I got to Châtelet, and changed to line 1, and got myself home.

I cried for a few weeks after my mother left, and until I got used to being alone, even though Bruno was very much there, and very aware of my fragility. He made me rest. He continued to do the night shifts. And he tended to me as though I was ill, which in fact I was.

A specialist in post-traumatic stress disorder, which I had been tested for extensively in the 1990s by a Canadian psychiatrist writing a book about war reporters, said I did not have it. Aside from one brutal flashback after the murder of two of my colleagues in Sierra Leone by rebel forces, and weeks of seeing people amputated at the wrist or the elbow, I managed, somehow, to escape a syndrome with which so many of my colleagues had been afflicted. At one point, a psychiatrist in Sarajevo told me that nearly the entire population of the besieged city probably suffered from it.

I had never had nightmares in the years of moving from war to war – perhaps some inner survival mode would not allow me to be introspective enough to see it – but they started now: vivid dreams of burning houses, of people without limbs, of children trapped inside shelters. I thought endlessly of the days in Chechnya when I listened to the helicopter gunships and put my hands over my ears, sure I would go mad from the sound of the bombs. Or the time that I rode on the back of a motorcycle in East Timor and smelled the burning of the houses, saw the terror in people’s faces.

Every time something terrible happened to me, Bruno was there to save me. In January 2000, I had gone to Chechnya, knowing what I would find: a brutal war, perhaps worse that what I knew in Bosnia. Before I left, I phoned a friend, a seasoned reporter, Miguel – one of the two who was killed in Sierra Leone – and he told me pointedly that the shelling would drive me to the point of madness. He advised me to ask the Chechen rebels at least one week before I reached my breaking point to bring me out. ‘Because they won’t let you go right away, it will take them a while to organize.’