How to Kill Your Family(14)

So that’s my dad. Not the one I’d have picked had I been consulted, but there we are. Some people have fathers who beat them, some have fathers who wear Crocs. We all have our crosses to bear. I haven’t told you much about his personality or his background, have I? That’ll come. But if you really want to understand why I did what I did, I have to go back to my childhood again first. Hopefully it won’t sound too self-indulgent, but even if it does, well, it’s my story. And I’m currently lying on a bunk bed in a cell which smells like a potent mix of sadness and urine, so I’ll take any excuse to escape into my memories.

Here are some early memories: Marie not having enough money for food, electricity, and on one grim occasion, for sanitary products. Getting up at 6 a.m. so that Marie could get to work on time, where I would sit in the backroom of the coffee shop and do my homework. Seeing my mother so tired that she looked yellow and hollowed out day after day. Being cold all through winter because we only used the heating at the beginning of the month when Marie got paid. Being cold instils a raw fear in me to this day. I paid to have extra radiators installed in my flat as a grown-up, much to the bemusement of my landlord, and forked out an obscene amount of money for a, in hindsight, fairly hideous fur throw to blanket my bed, because I needed certainty that I wouldn’t wake up shivering, as I had done so often as a child. Fur might be unethical but truly, it feels wonderful next to the naked body.

Marie dealt with our lack of money and support as best she could. Her parents, disapproving of her life choices, as they put it, gave her nothing. Hortense met us for lunch once, on one of her trips to London on which I can only assume she terrorised shop girls and made waiters cry for fun. My mother put me in my best outfit, which consisted of an itchy jumper she’d bought for me at M&S one Christmas (which I hated, but she was proud of, because it was real wool and had a pie-crust collar), and corduroy trousers, which pinched at the stomach and had belonged to another child at my primary school, before being handed on to me. My grandmother said hello to me, then promptly turned to my mother and spoke in French for the rest of the meeting. Marie would answer in English, which served only to make Hortense even more determined. As we left the restaurant, Hortense bent down, pulled my jumper sleeve towards her face and sniffed. She said something to my mother as she gestured back at me, and my mother’s eyes sprung with tears. That was the last time I ever saw the old witch. When Marie died, she sent me a letter, which I didn’t open, opting instead to flush it, piece by piece, down the toilet at Helene’s house. She must be dead by now, but I hope she isn’t. I hope she sees the news reports about me. I hope she and her repressed old husband got doorstepped by scummy tabloid journalists during my trial, and I pray that their neighbours view them with suspicion, or worse – faux sympathy.

So we were poor, and Marie had nobody, apart from Helene. Bea, her only other real friend, had fled back to France after a doomed love affair and a mean model agent who suggested in so many words that she should try to develop an eating disorder if she wanted to make any money. Occasionally, my mother would write long letters late at night, as I pretended to be asleep. She’d sit at the kitchen table, tearing up pieces of paper, and starting again and again. In the morning, the letters would be propped up on the table, ready to take to the postbox. I didn’t recognise the name until I was older, when I saw a discarded attempt in the bin and fished it out.

My darling, I know we cannot meet again, and I have always respected your decision. You know how much I loved you, and that I would never do anything to hurt you or jeopardise your family. But Grace is growing up, and I wish so much for you to know her – just a little. I do not ask for money, or expect that we can ever experience the closeness we once revelled in. But she needs her father! Sometimes she tilts her head and gives me a little smirk, and she looks just like you, which inflicts such a mixture of pride and pain you could never imagine. Perhaps you could come and meet us one Sunday at the park in Highgate, just for an hour? Please write back to me, I never know if you are reading these letters.

From this letter, I learnt three very important things. First, that snooping will almost always pay off. Second, that my father was married and wanted nothing to do with me, despite Marie’s attempts to spin me a different story. And third, and most importantly, I found out the name of the philanderer who broke my mother’s heart and left us to live in misery. I already knew his name, it turned out. Most people do. My father is Simon Artemis. And he is one of the richest men in the world. I should say was, back when he was still alive.

That was the bell. I have to go and do laundry. Endless greying sheets to wash and fold. The glamour is sometimes too much to bear.





CHAPTER FOUR


My younger years were not like something out of one of those terrible books you see in airport bookshops, usually called something like ‘Daddy Don’t’, which might be a story of unimaginable suffering, but only sell because people like to read about other people’s misery and feel good about themselves afterwards, simply for feeling the merest shred of sympathy or horror. ‘I read this and cried my eyes out, such a sad story :(’ is the usual review on some online mum book club. Oh, you read about child abuse and constant trauma and found that upsetting did you, Kate1982? (Kate just sounds like the name of someone who’d frequent a site like that.) So glad you could tell us all how it affected you.

Anyway, my childhood (the part Marie was alive for anyway) had some good moments. I was very loved, and I knew it – even though it all came from just one person. Mothers are adept at providing love from all angles, so much so that you often don’t realise you’re missing out on love from other people until much later in life. Marie took the brunt of the hardship and hid it well from me. Of course I knew she was struggling, children always do, don’t they? But children are also astonishingly selfish, and as long as she successfully managed to paper over most of the cracks, I was more than happy to go along with it. My mother would save up her wages – from her job as a barista at a coffee shop in the Angel where hot drinks were at least ￡3 and cake was made without flour for those women who’d recently discovered gluten intolerance, and from her cleaning gig which took her to the homes of the ladies up in Highgate who probably didn’t eat cake at all. Every three months she would have just enough to take me on a ‘magical mystery tour’, which just meant a trip to the Cutty Sark, or a Tube ride down to Selfridges to see the Christmas lights. Once she took me to the fair up on Hampstead Heath, where I ate candy floss for the first time and won a fish during a game of hoops. We put the fish in a vase on our kitchen table and called it RIP, which I thought was funny since fairground fish never live very long. Marie thought it was mean, and nurtured that fish, cleaning out its home every week and adding in some green plants and a desultory rock. I lost interest in that fish, but under her early care, RIP ended up living for ten years. He outlived my mother.