Even now, just thinking about that man makes me tense up. I force myself to breathe deeply. I am a master of self-control. It hasn’t come naturally. As a child, I used to throw tremendous tantrums and dive on the floor if something displeased me, as my mother gazed on in amusement and apologised to those around us. That sense of drama lives on inside me, but I’ve long learnt to keep it in check. If you’re going to execute a plan to, well, execute a bunch of people, you cannot let your emotions run wild. It would all get very messy, and there would be nothing worse than to be found out because you were too self-indulgent to maintain self-control. As when I was a child, I have ended up suffering the indignity of having to use a toilet three feet from my bed. But at least it wasn’t because I gave myself away with a foolish flair for the dramatic.
I am breathing normally again within a minute. Did you know that Hillary Clinton practised nostril breathing when she lost the 2016 election to Donald Trump? She relied on wine as well of course, but losing to such an ignoramus required more. Nostril breathing requires you to breathe in heavily through one nostril, and expel the air deeply through the same cavity. You might scoff, but it helps to calm me down quickly, and it helps to have techniques like this in prison, where you can’t rely on quality pharmaceuticals, or a decent glass of Merlot at the end of the night. At night, when I cannot sleep and my thoughts invariably turn to my life’s work, I often think of Mrs Clinton, up against that flashy orange moron. Whatever her politics, she stood up to a bully who refused to abide by convention or decency. A person like that can drive you to madness without any noticeable exertion, while you employ all the strength you have just to hold the line and maintain a sliver of your humanity. Hillary had one advantage over me. Her opponent was a man she could walk away from in defeat. Mine was my father. OK, perhaps I had the advantage. Clinton couldn’t kill Trump, much as she must’ve wanted to. I wish she’d had the opportunity, I find it relaxes one far more than plain old nostril breathing.
* * *
Marie met my father in 1991. He was gone before I was born. She made sure that I grew up surrounded by love, but by the time I went to primary school, it became clear to me that this love, fulsome as it was, was only coming from one direction. Other children had daddies, I would tell her, as she fussed over my dinner, or washed my hair in lukewarm water over the little sink. In the beginning, my mother would try to distract me, but by the time I was nine, she understood that my wilful nature was only growing stronger, and she sat me down one day after school, and told me about my father. Most of what I know I learnt from digging around later on, since Marie obviously wanted to give me a Disneyfied version of the man who willingly gave up his seed to create me without a thought about the later consequences.
Marie met him at – where else – a nightclub. He had been a little older, she said (later I found out that he was twenty-two years older. How little young women think of themselves), and he had sent champagne to her across the dancefloor. Marie had sent the bemused waiter away, she was having too much fun dancing, with no need for a bucket of Veuve Clicquot. I have been to clubs like this and I have seen men like my father, night after night, as they make themselves comfortable in dark corners, watching young women putting on a show for whomever they think might be watching, waiting to be invited to a table where someone will buy them prohibitively expensive drinks. If my mother had been like all the other girls, there would have been some dancing, a whispered exchange, perhaps even a pleading dinner or two. And that is where it would have fizzled, just another beautiful girl, just another entitled rich man. Except my mother sent back the champagne. And nobody had ever done such a thing to this particular rich man. I conjure up this moment in my mind from time to time. I like to imagine that he couldn’t stand to watch her dancing so joyously, throwing off his attempts to impress so easily. I can see him now – reassessing, working his reptilian mind harder than usual to come up with a new plan, a way to command her attention. To bend her to his will.
Two weeks later, she bumped into him outside another club. It was raining, and she was huddled in the queue, holding her coat aloft as she jostled with the other hopefuls trying to gain entry into the exclusive nightspot, all desperate to experience the decadence promised within, or at the very least get out of the rain. As we sat there on the sofa bed, my mother looked into the distance and her voice grew soft, as she described how a blacked-out sports car pulled up outside the club, splashing the pathetic crowd as it screeched to a stop. By the time she told me about my father, he had already treated her with a cruelty that makes my stomach burn, and yet she spoke about him with affection in her voice, and perhaps even awe. ‘He got out of that car, and threw his key to the valet who was standing by. I only noticed him because of the awful noise from the car. And when I saw him throw the keys … bouf … I thought it was a horribly arrogant move, to park a car in the middle of the road like that.’
She looked away, she insisted, as the bouncers unclipped the red velvet ropes to usher him inside, and the crowd pushed forward, angry that they were still stuck in the cold. And then a hand beckoned her towards the rope. A stern-looking woman with a clipboard nodded rapidly as if to say ‘yes, you’, and Marie weaved through the throng, and presented herself to the doormen. She was directed inside, she explained, and wasn’t about to question it, even as the people behind her grumbled and booed. As she got to the bottom of the stairs, she was met by him, leaning against the wall, arms crossed, smirking. I’ve seen that smirk many times in the press. It’s almost his signature expression. A powerful combination of arrogance and charm. An infuriating combination too, since you quickly find that with men like that, the arrogance always overcomes the charm and yet by then it’s too late, for the initial mix is intoxicating and hard to forget.
‘So you don’t want my champagne, but you’ll accept my hospitality?’ he said, looking her up and down. Honestly, I still think poorly of her for not turning around and walking away right then and there. Even aged nine, when she relayed their initial meeting to me, I remember thinking that this was a truly pathetic opener. If I’d ever imagined that my father might have been some mythical figure who we lost to a heroic act of bravery, this is the moment when that unspoken assumption died. My father was a cheesy charlatan in an expensive suit, and my mother ate it up.
I assume she played it cool at first, batting him away with some witheringly French put-down, but even if she did, it still counted for nothing. By the next day, he’d found out her address and turned up in a soft-top filled with flowers. Her flat-mates woke her up screaming with laughter, as Helene told me much later, teasing her about the British man in the flat cap who was tooting the horn and holding up traffic. A week later, he flew her to Venice on a private jet, taking her to St Mark’s Square for cocktails (honestly, how tacky), and telling her that he loved her. The extravagant displays of affection continued over the next few months, as they would go out for dinner, to the nightclubs they both loved, to walk in Hyde Park on sunny Monday mornings. Her barriers were demolished, no longer was she cautious and dismissive of London men and their intentions. Marie stopped going to castings as much, preferring to be available if he happened to call. And he did, frequently. But only between Monday to Friday, and he rarely stayed the night with her, crying off with work, or explanations about his elderly mother and her need for him to stay sometimes.
Did your eyes just roll back inside your head so hard it made you wince? Well yes. We can dwell on my mother’s stupid decision to place her faith in a man who wore large buckled belts and enjoyed the music of Dire Straits, or we can move on. I don’t have enough time in this place to unpack the manipulation on his end or the naivety on hers. Obviously, my father was already spoken for. Not just spoken for, he was married with a baby, and he lived in a house high on a hill in North London which had several live-in staff, two pedigree dogs, a wine cellar, swimming pool, and several acres of grounds. He wasn’t just committed, he was embedded.
This bit of the story was left out when I was first told about him. I don’t blame Marie for glossing over some of the more delicate details I probably wouldn’t have fully understood anyway. Instead, my mother attempted to explain why my father never came to see me, never sent me a birthday present, never turned up at parents’ evening. Stroking my arm, Marie told me that he was involved in big and important business deals which affected the lives of thousands of people, and that’s why he couldn’t see us. He flew around the world, she said. He loved us both very much, and when the time was right, we’d all be together, but right now, we had to let him work hard and prepare for the time when we could live as a family. Did she believe it herself? I’ve often wondered. Was my smart, kind mother really so, to be blunt, stupid? Maybe. My sex is so often disappointing – I remember once reading about a woman who married a man who convinced her that he was a spy. He persuaded her to sign over her life savings to him, to the tune of £130,000, saying that he was undercover and needed it to tide him over until his handlers could safely make contact. She’d never asked for proof, so desperate was she for this ridiculous charade of a love affair to be real. And to compound her humiliation, she’d willingly posed for photos in a weekly magazine and told her story, looking downtrodden and sad. Was I supposed to feel sorry for this person, a grown-up who dreamt of fairy-tale romance, and didn’t question why this man whisked her, a woman in her fifties (who looked every inch of it), off her feet? Marie was a cut above this woman and those like her, but she obviously still had the capacity for similar delusion.
For all the ridiculous promises that Marie made to me about my father and our eventual life together, she was wise enough to only tell me selective information about him. Enough to stop my questions, not giving me anything too concrete. But she did make the mistake of pointing out his house to me after a trip to Hampstead Heath a few months later. We got lost in a wooded area, and it started to rain. My mother grabbed my hand and marched me up a hill, attempting to find a route to the main road where we might get a bus. But when we finally got to the bus stop, she briskly carried on, as I grumbled and pulled my anorak tightly around me. Despite the torrential skies, we walked another ten minutes down a long private road, until she slowed down and finally stopped.
We stood in front of a house and Marie stared up at it silently for a moment, until I yanked on her hand impatiently. I say we were looking at a house, but the enormous iron gates with security cameras attached deliberately obscured most of the actual property. We lived in an attic room on a main road. I had never imagined that a house could be so important it would have to be hidden from view. Without looking down at me, my mother gestured towards the gates, almost reverentially. ‘This is your father’s house, Grace,’ she said, still not looking at me. I didn’t know what to say. I felt uncomfortable lingering in front of this grand place, drenched to my skin. Marie must have noticed that I was slowly moving backwards, trying to encourage her to head to the safety of the bus stop and home, so she smiled brightly. ‘Such a shame your father isn’t in today, but isn’t it lovely, Grace? One day you will have your own bedroom there!’ I nodded, not knowing what else to do. She took my hand, and we turned around, and headed away, back down the hill to our home. We never mentioned that trip again. But I thought about that bedroom she’d promised would be mine many times growing up. I imagined it, with pink wallpaper and a big double bed, and maybe even a wardrobe full of new clothes, but even when I burrowed down deep into this rabbit hole, I knew that Marie had been lying, and that there would never be a bedroom behind those grand gates for me. And even then, I remember understanding so clearly, that something very wrong had been done to Marie and me.
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.