How to Kill Your Family(15)

Marie and I struggled on. I went to a nice primary school just off Seven Sisters where I made precisely one friend, a boy named Jimmy, whose family lived in a very large house with an excessive number of rugs and cushions and books stacked from floor to ceiling in every room. His mother was a therapist, and his father was a GP, and they easily could have sent their son to a prep school not situated next door to a pawn shop which did a nice side hustle in hard drugs. But they had a big Labour poster in their window and carried a huge amount of liberal guilt about their good fortune, and Jimmy’s education was one of the ways they squared it. Jimmy is still in my life. In fact, our relationship has matured somewhat in recent times, I guess you could say.

We might have gone on like this, Marie and me. I went to secondary school down the road (with Jimmy initially, who was mercilessly teased for being posh in Year 7 and so was sent off to a private day school which had goats and did a lot of art – another tortured compromise made by his parents), and I made a few more friends. Perhaps if we’d had longer, Marie might have got a better job, and who knows, maybe met a nice man to take some of her burdens. I might have made it to university, and later earned enough to look after my mother, buy her a flat, get her a car. But if that had been our fate, then I wouldn’t be here, writing this, waiting for Kelly to burst into our cell and try to lure me into a conversation about her brassy DIY highlights. Instead, Marie got slower, greyer, and slept more, to the point where I was getting up for school and leaving her in bed. She lost a cleaning job because she didn’t wake up until 11 a.m. one morning, and some starch-faced witch in a house which had six bathrooms and no soul fired her by text at 11.30 a.m. Her back ached, she said one night, chatting to Helene on the sofa as I dozed in bed. Helene urged her to see the doctor, but she dismissed it. ‘When have I not had aches and pains since we’ve been in this cold damp country?’ she laughed.

Who knows how bad she really felt? Certainly not me. Kids are self-absorbed and parents are supposed to be invincible. That’s the deal. But Marie broke it. Two months later, she took me on holiday for the first time, to Cornwall. We stayed in a caravan park on a cliff overlooking the vast sea, and we walked along coastal paths and I ate a lot of ice cream. Marie drank wine on the doorstep of our van as I lay on the grass and asked her questions about her childhood in France, about how I could train to be a photographer when I grew up, about whether I would ever like boys in the way that grown-ups did if they were all as immature as the ones in my class. She laughed at that one. She laughed a lot that holiday.

I had just turned 13 when it became obvious that her aches weren’t just a sign of endless work and constant worry. Helene picked me up from school early one day, and took me to the hospital. Marie had collapsed at work, and before I could see her, my mother’s only friend sat me down in a visitors’ room and told me that my mother had cancer. She’d held off going to the doctor and, like so many women who care for others, she’d neglected her own needs entirely. She didn’t want me to know, Helene explained, but I deserved to. I gazed at the strip lighting overhead, and felt my ears hum as Helene asked if I could keep calm and be brave in front of my mother. I felt something switch off in my brain at that moment, as though I were suddenly on standby, not able to function at full capacity. I later learnt that this is called disassociation, when your brain disconnects to protect you from stress or trauma. It’s a horrendous feeling but it has served me well in times when, well, I’ve had to do some pretty unpleasant things. Frankly, when you’re surrounded by blood and the sound of someone screaming for their life, it’s actually a relief to switch off.

Marie never came home, and six weeks later, my lovely, tired mother was dead. In the brief window between her diagnosis and her death, my mother and Helene had agreed that I should live with her from now on – as if there was anywhere else I could go. My grandparents didn’t even come over for the funeral, which was a small affair made up of some former models from my mother’s early years in London, a few of her work colleagues and Jimmy’s parents John and Sophie. We toasted her at the local café where we used to go for hot chocolate on Saturday mornings when we needed to escape the damp and cold of our flat. And with that, my childhood was pretty much done. I moved to Helene’s flat in Kensal Rise, and had my own bedroom for the first time – a small space which used to house her clothes and long since abandoned old exercise equipment. The fish came with me, its bowl dumped on a dressing table. Helene never envisaged a teenager in her life, but to her credit, she did as well as she could by me. There was always food, and she gave me money for travel and clothes. I never said it out loud, in case I was struck down by some vengeful deity, but it was a much better standard of living than the one we had in our depressing bedsit. I moved to a school nearer her flat, and became pretty independent almost immediately. Helene worked at a modelling agency, and was out a lot, so I would walk around the local park for hours after school to pass the time, or go and sit in the local Costa and nurse a tea. Anything rather than go back to the empty flat and think about all that I had lost.

Helene had cleaned out my mother’s flat, and although there was nothing of much value to give me, she did make sure to pass on Marie’s favourite opal ring, which fitted my thumb perfectly, and which I would rub constantly throughout the day. She also gave me a box of letters, documents, and photos from Marie’s younger days, including her prized Kookai poster. I never opened them. Apart from the ring, I’m not hugely one for sentimental relics (of course, I was never immune to keeping a few prized tokens after a murder, but that could hardly be called sentimental). But one day, while foraging around under Helene’s bed for her hair straighteners, I found another box. This was unlike the one I had in my room, which was decorated with flowers and hearts. This one was like those I was used to seeing in my head teacher’s office – sturdy and formal. And it had something written carefully on the spine in red ink: ‘Grace/Simon’.