twenty

“To make a future, shared storytelling was needed. I read what she had to say about the healing power of writing. That we needed to tell the tales of the past to better shape the future. Jane had opened up a vital literary space. I sat up straight, my mind clear. There was nothing wrong with my head, I knew; it was my circumstances I had got so spectacularly back to front. Pills were not going to heal me. What I needed was work. Real work.

When I went back to my hotel, I would think about Jeanne and her daughter Andrea. They were watching Ryan die, slowly and painfully. They had prayed for a miracle, but the miracle never came. They had every right to feel angry and resentful. But they didn’t feel that way. They were stoic, they were forgiving, they were patient and kind. Even in the most awful circumstances I loved being around them, but they made me feel ashamed of myself, in a way I’d never felt before. I spent half my life feeling angry and resentful about things that didn’t matter. I was the kind of person who got on the phone and shouted at people because the weather outside my Park Lane hotel didn’t suit me. Whatever else had been wrong with my childhood, I hadn’t been brought up to behave that way. How the fuck had I become like this? I’d always managed somehow to justify my behaviour to myself, or to make a joke of it, but now I couldn’t: real life had barged into my celebrity bubble.

He would smile, perhaps relieved by my unaffectedness. Sometimes Yasmeen cried. I thought two crying daughters would be too much for him, so I trained myself to wait until I was alone, in my closet or in the bath. My father would wipe Yasmeen’s face, hug us both, ask us if we wanted chocolate milk.

“Good girl,” he’d whisper in my ear. I was good because I was restrained. My father, I believe, carried a lot of hurt from his relationship with my mother. He did not like to see the related pain radiating from his daughters’ eyes.

Those letters taught me about longing. Reading them in front of my father taught me to hide it, often even from myself. I know now what a dangerous kind of denial that is. It leaves you ravenous. It makes your seismometer vibrate when the phone call you are shocked to discover you have been waiting for your whole life offers you precisely what you are terrified to want: Hello, Nadia. This is your mama.

She places her hand on my fist. Her hand covers my fist. I let my hand fall open. She moves her hand down and crosses her wrist against mine and now I’m almost asleep. When and where were you happiest? My one remaining contact with wakefulness is the flat inside of her wrist resting on the flat inside of mine, as though each wrist were seeking the other’s pulse. I listen for the soft beat of blood through the skin. I listen as best as I can in the dimming stillness. I slow my breathing and soon I hear nothing.

She continued to read and he was almost asleep when Peter heard her say, ‘I missed her more than ever this time. Everywhere we were made me think of her, I almost thought I’d see her if I turned my head.’

He was fully awake now.

‘Sometimes I think I see her too,’ Peter said, ‘out of the corner of my eye. If you can see a feeling.’

‘Yes, I think you can.