‘They came in envelopes,’ I said. ‘My dad threw them away.’
I was always prepared to dig the next layer of fiction and entrench myself. From childhood onwards I went through every tale, but my mother was a story with no answers. According to my dad she left before I was one, but I only began to feel her absence more keenly when I started primary school. It was when all the other mums came to the gates, chatting to each other with their arms folded, swinging from side to side as their children tugged the hems of their puffa jackets. At birthday parties, these same mothers organized such smooth afternoons of games and food and fun, making sure I was always given extra attention, which made the other children hate me. It was nice to be looked after, but I always wondered: Where is she right now? What is she doing? Why isn’t she doing it with me?
I used to love stories about babies coming out of plants, or turning into humans from animal form. I pored over the Greek myths – how a baby could be born from a ray of light, or a thunderbolt, or from a swan. I felt an affinity with these babies, these other kinds of humans – a dangerous affinity, I should add, for in fact I was simply a very normal human being. Ovid would not write about me. I was not a god. But where had I come from, out of whose body? Whose heart had beaten for my father?
I didn’t find any answers, and I began using my unseen mother to make myself seem mysterious and unusual rather than pitiable. I offered inconsistent drama, romance, wild supposition. I tried hard. From what I can remember, there was the Russian acrobat story, the criminal-on-the-run story (she’d stolen a priceless diamond necklace, but it wasn’t her fault) and the ship story – her being the captain of a trading vessel that moved around the Bahamas. But children are suspicious, and fond of order, normality. My classmates thought I was weird, even careless. What kind of creature was I, that my mother would not even stick around – even if it made it difficult for her as a jewel thief? When we read those myths and fairy tales at story time, Hamilton Tanner, for whom my feelings of hatred were mutual, said to me, ‘Your mum made a pact with the Devil. She’s been turned into a beast.’
*
All I knew about her was what my dad had told me: her name was Elise Morceau, and she had me young, when they were living in New York. And she had left, thirty-four years ago, before I turned one. There were no photos of us together; my father had none. No trace of her on paper, or in the heft of objects once in her possession, left behind. As far as I was aware, my father had never managed to find her after her flight – either he gave up, having no inclination to chase her, or she had told him not to. He wouldn’t say. I would wait for opportune moments – these were rare – to ask about her, and occasionally Dad would cede information. She had short legs. (Short legs! How does that contribute to a personality – or indeed, an ability to flee quickly?) She had hair your colour. (I liked that one.) She was difficult. She was positive. Once, when he’d drunk too much: It wouldn’t have worked. She had a temper.
Dad would tell me that he didn’t remember enough, or that it was so long ago – and so much has happened to us since, Rosie – and you’re OK, aren’t you? So I did not know the circumstances of how he met Elise, and I didn’t know why he’d been given custody of me. I knew the stay in New York had been relatively short, because he had brought me back to England before my first birthday. He wanted to protect me from hurt, I suppose, and he threw himself into being both parents, asking me just to think of myself and of my life, not what had come before. He was always loving. He wanted to spare me. But I can’t help feeling that this refusal to find the words caused more damage than anything.
It’s hard for him to talk about, my Grandma Cherry, Dad’s mother, would say before she died. I thought it was harder not to talk about, but it seemed a consensus had been reached, and I was not privy to the reasons why. Grandma Cherry was also tight-lipped about Elise, as if to talk about her was to unleash a curse.
When I asked my grandma if she’d ever met Elise, she said that she had not. ‘She was a tricky woman,’ my grandmother said, which I thought was an unfair thing to say about someone you’d never met. But to my grandma, how could Elise be anything other than a tricky woman, a woman executing this sleight of hand, a disappearing act where she climbed into a box and cut herself in two.
So in the end, I killed her myself. My fictional adventures for her became as embarrassing to me as they had been for my schoolmates. By fourteen, I didn’t need the Hamilton Tanners of this world to tell me what had happened to my mum. She did not snap her neck on the Russian trapeze, nor waste away in a jail for emerald thieves, nor wreck her ship on Bahamian rocks. She was not a beast. She was just . . . dead. And my dad was in agreement: in fact, he seemed to think it was better just to pretend she’d never existed, a fairy tale to be forgotten by adulthood. He’d maintained this pattern of behaviour when I was tiny, and as I grew up the only way I can describe it is that he didn’t know how to break the spell. Not having learned the mother tongue, he couldn’t teach me. Absolutely better she was dead.
But as I entered my twenties, I began to know people who had real parents – people who they’d lived with their whole lives – who’d really died on them. I witnessed their devastation, the reeling disbelief, the feeling that the pain would never end. I went to a funeral of a friend’s mother and watched her coffin disappearing behind a curtain, my friend watching it too, her face unrecognizable in grief. The loss of my mother was to me a palpable but different kind of pain. My version of grief was a locked box, a house to which I did not have a key, a place on a map I could not pronounce. One day it might be revealed to me, and duly overwhelm me, but I never told anyone about this fear. I didn’t have a mum, and I’d never had her, so how could I miss something I’d never really lost?
I don’t tell people about the yearning. The wonder. I tell them, You can’t miss what you never had!
*
There were swathes of time when I didn’t think about her. There were other periods of my life when I felt her absence intensely. Once search engines on the Internet became a thing, I used their shrinking nets of existence to trawl for her – but I could never find an Elise Morceau, during long nights alone when all I had for company was one bottle of wine too many and irresistible rabbit holes of family tree sites. My guess was that Morceau was not her real surname. Morceau is French for bit or part, and I think this must have been a joke – on her part. It was all fruitless. Nothing ever came of my virtual journeys.
I don’t think she gave my father the full pieces of her puzzle – lover to lover, who does? But in her case, maybe she gave him even less. A borrowed name from a list of characters. She gave my dad only the littlest crumbs, he passed them on to me, and there seemed nothing I could do with them at all.
3
My boyfriend Joe and I spent the last week of the summer of 2017 with my dad in France, where he now lived. My father had recently recovered from prostate cancer, and had tasted his mortality; his wife, Claire, was originally from Brittany, so they’d gone there to live permanently, in a small cottage that had belonged to her parents. These days, our visits were too intermittent, sustained only by text message – and this fact, together with the remission, had made this particular trip seem important. Joe thought that me and Dad were ‘constipated’ with our feelings – but then again, Joe came from a family who made you feel you were in an amateur production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.