The Storyteller of Casablanca (62)

We have until the 20th January before our American paperwork expires and we’re back to square one again. Papa is redoubling his efforts at the Portuguese consulate.





Josie’s Journal – Thursday 1st January, 1942

Happy New Year. It’s a whole twelve months on from when I first started writing in this journal and we’re STILL in Casablanca. But we have some news. Mr Reid has told Papa that there’s a ship due in from Portugal in a couple of weeks’ time and we should be able to leave on it. Papa says he will go and sit in the middle of the Portuguese consulate next week, and refuse to move if need be, until someone sorts out our transit visas. Then he just has to go to the Préfecture de Police with all the paperwork to get our exit permit, but he says that should be a mere formality.

I’ve just realised that my New Year’s resolution still needs to be to stop biting my fingernails. Maybe now is not the best time.





Zoe – 2010

I sit beside the window in Grace’s room, with the stack of twelve hand-sewn blocks that I’ve finished beside me. I’m stitching the thirteenth – and final – one. By now, my fingers have grown accustomed to the sewing and I’m able to work on assembling the neatly cut triangles into the Tree of Life design almost automatically. Concentrating on my needlework has helped me avoid worrying with my teeth at the sides of my fingernails and the skin has healed a bit, making it less sore to hold the needle. My hands are still cracked and dry, and the rough, scaly patches burn and itch, but when I’m sewing the pain fades into the background a little and my mind feels calmer, having something else to focus on. Each triangle of material needs to be stitched to its neighbour, once I’ve considered how best to arrange the colours and prints so that they sit together harmoniously as a whole and yet allow each piece to tell its own individual part of the story.

The memories ebb and flow as I sew. Sometimes they make me smile. And sometimes a tear runs down my cheek and I brush it away with the back of my hand, the salt stinging the rough, red skin. I think of the day Tom and I met, for lunch in the pub with a group of friends, and how we ended up, just the two of us, deep in conversation after everyone else had left. We didn’t want the day to end and we walked for miles along the river, while Tom told me about his work and his plans for the future in a world with limitless horizons, as the autumn leaves tumbled around us. We ended up back at my flat, hugging mugs of tea to warm our chilled hands, and I knew, as he very deliberately set his down on the coffee table, that he was going to lean over and kiss me and that our lives would never be the same again once he did.

I remember my first day in my new job, when thirty six-year-olds filed in to my classroom and sat down at their places, as excited as I was on the first day of the new school year. I’d already pinned some bright posters to the board behind my desk and filled the little set of shelves in the reading corner with books I loved and wanted to share with my pupils. Their faces, filled with joy and curiosity, float before my eyes as I sew. I also see the faces of the children in the refugee centre, their eyes filled with so many other things, things no child should have to endure. And yet there are glimpses of that same innocence and amusement when they listen to my stories and laugh at the ridiculous antics of the characters in them.

Picking up another triangle, I remember the day Tom and I married and the way the wind caught my veil and made it stream out behind me, as though it was my spirits and not a gust of wind that made it soar. We had everything before us then and it felt as if we were setting sail, together, on the ocean of our dreams.

And I remember my pregnancy, the way my belly took on a life of its own as Grace grew and somersaulted and flexed her feet against the warm, cocooning walls that constrained her and how she arrived in our arms, perfect, scarlet, yelling in outrage at the indignity of birth, and then immediately grew calm as we held her and laughed and cried, our love for her and for each other spilling over as I covered her tiny face in kisses.

I turn the block I’m sewing so that I can pin the next triangle in place, shifting my chair so the light falls on my lap and I can see what I’m doing more clearly. The colours of the pieces remind me of the photographs on Tom’s phone of the sunrises he’s encountered, morning after morning, as his feet pound the boulevards and avenues of the sleeping city. I feel a pang of sadness for him on his lonely runs. He’s been asking again if I’ll consider some sessions with a marriage guidance counsellor. I’ve told him I’ll only do so if he stops drinking, creating a stand-off in which neither of us is able to make the first move. We seem to be arguing more and more these days, following the same old well-worn tracks, going round and round over old ground – his drinking; my suspicions; his frustration at my inability to move on from the blows our marriage has already suffered; my frustration and anger at his past mistakes, his absences, his need for company that I can’t fill. I know he’s as unhappy as I am. But talking to a stranger won’t change what we’ve been through. The wounds we both carry will never heal, but that’s no reason to stick a knife into them all over again. I still can’t bear the pain. It’s all I can do to get through each day as it is. My coping strategy may be avoidance, mixed with a large dollop of what the professionals call denial, but it does help me to cope. I’m too scared to admit the truth to myself, let alone to a counsellor in a featureless office, a box of tissues sitting on an otherwise empty table between us. I know my refusals frustrate Tom and only make him turn all the more often to the comfort and numbness he finds at the bottom of a bottle of whisky. I suppose he means well and he’s only trying to do the right thing. But I’m afraid nothing can make it all right, ever again. And I’m even more afraid that trying might only prove that to both of us.