It was long enough to sit on, my hair. My thing. Everyone I met commented on it. I loved its hippy vibe, its flow.
I loved it.
The night before, confidence up after a ‘good’ week – for us – I had made a flippant comment about Marc losing a little hair. He was still handsome, carried it off – who cared?
It was a mistake.
Loll sat down on the bed. Held her breath.
‘You’re serious?’ she said. ‘He cut your hair off?’
‘I know you try to understand what I’m telling you has been going on,’ I told her then, sitting down on the bed. She sat next to me. ‘But the truth is that some of it, you can’t. This sort of thing … I stopped realising it wasn’t normal.’
Pause.
‘I think Ella might get that.’
Why did I think that?
A gut instinct. Her extreme reaction to me getting in touch. A curl of his lip when her name came up. A belief, the longer time went on, that this was dug so deep into his inners that he couldn’t not behave this way in a relationship.
‘It’s different blocking a faceless person,’ I told Loll, standing up, throwing pyjamas into a bag. This time she didn’t put them back in. ‘But when I’m there, and I’m a human being, and she knows what I am going through, I know she’ll speak to me.’
‘So what?’ said my sister. Her patience was at its edges. She had been through a lot too. ‘Even if she does? What will that achieve?’
‘She can help me prove it.’ I was defiant. ‘When he tells people he did nothing to me, that this is all in my head. He will do that, you know.’
I looked at her. Wondered if she had any doubts. If any part of her believed the brother-in-law making up bottles for his baby over the wild-eyed sister throwing pyjamas in a bag.
‘And how will she help you prove it?’ asked my sister.
‘She’s been through it herself,’ I insisted. ‘So she will have evidence. She can help me build a case.’ It was the first time I had said it. ‘A domestic abuse case.’ I paused. ‘If I don’t go, Loll, I honestly believe that I won’t see my daughter again. He is that fucking vindictive.’
I was deadpan, a simplicity in the statement as fact. I needed something to tip the balance in my favour. Marc was smart; he was playing this well. Ella was the only card I could think of to play.
Loll scoffed. ‘Of course you will see your daughter again. Romilly, as if we would ever let that happen.’
But she didn’t get it. Didn’t know his malice. Hadn’t heard his threats. If he cut my hair off when I teased him about his hairline, what would he do when he realised I’d tried to snatch away his child?
What revenge did that require?
‘Oh for God’s sake, let me come with you at least then,’ begged Loll.
But I needed to do this alone.
‘Besides, you have to get my baby back,’ I told her.
So we booked flights and Loll dropped me at the airport, broken, belonging in a bed, a giant sanitary towel only just stemming the constant flow of the blood childbirth brings with it.
‘I can’t change your mind?’ she said, when I got out of the car.
‘You can’t change my mind.’
People tried to chat to me on the plane.
I tried to shrink myself.
They looked away, like people do when you don’t paint a picture of normal.
Shortly after I arrived in France, I vomited next to a tree at the airport, in shock at what I had done. How far I was from my girl. But I believed what I had said: this was the only way.
As I climbed into my hire car and headed off, thoughts dripping of the baby, the baby, the baby, I drifted away from reality and then back, so that the whole journey had an unreal quality. The signs showing the wild white horses of the Camargue as fantastical as unicorns. Later, I wondered if I had dreamt flamingos so pink they were almost luminous when I woke up with the loose skin that had been stretched around my baby girl lying defeated in front of me.
No baby cried; it was like the silence of a death.
I went straight to the English language school I knew Ella worked at but she wasn’t there. I left a message, no one connecting me to the woman who had called previously. They smiled, wished me a happy holiday. Hoped I got to catch up with my friend Ella.
At the campsite later, I got a message. She would see me, since I had come so far, but she warned me: there was nothing to tell.
‘Meet me at Lake Peiroou after work tomorrow, 5 p.m.,’ she said. I smiled. Before she blocked me, I had stared at that lake on her Instagram. She was a swimmer, too.
My sleep that night was fitful.
At one point too I dreamt I was on a boat, bobbing, and the waves waved and the tour guide spoke in French, as I clutched my translation. Something about the egrets. The woman next to me peered through binoculars. Mum asked if she could borrow them for a quick look. I stared at her, baffled by all of this. I was not even sure in the dream if she was real, this Romilly, that any of it was real, and maybe I was nineteen, and I was having an adventure and my nipple felt wet only because it had been splashed slightly when I climbed off the boat and waded through the water to walk onto another terrifyingly beautiful island, a million miles from anywhere. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.
I gasped awake. My top soaked; my breasts full.
I left the tent to get some water and looked around at other women I passed on the campsite. The stomachs unlived in. The faces with no need to wail; the mouths with no urge to vomit. I realised what I missed the most: being a blank canvas.
I glanced down at myself. Stomach, jutting. Legs unshaved since before my baby was born. I could smell my stale breath. The wetness of my constantly leaking nipples.
Not a blank canvas but one inked over with black. I was chargrilled inside too, burnt out.
We met at the lake, Ella and I. Full circle: it was the way I had tracked her down in the first place, a deep dive into the local area sending me eventually to her school.
I drove my hire car up the dirt road. No sign, of course, no one knew it was there but the locals – she had told me that – so the swing to the left in my hired Peugeot was sudden and sharp. I held on to my tender belly. Cupped a palm between my legs as though holding in insides that felt like liquid.
I headed for the unkempt shade of the woodland further back from the water, the edge of it next to a large field of horses.
Early. Of course I was. I had walked for as long as I could in the hills but I was aching now. And I had nothing else to do here, nowhere else to be.
I took my loose jersey dress off and left it where it fell and I walked across the stones in bare feet to the water. Nothing tentative, despite the pain. Despite how I’d felt about water by then for months.
But the panic didn’t come this time. The flashbacks stayed away. Something had shifted and I was desperate to be submerged.
In the lake, I glanced down at my chest and saw a small wet patch developing around my nipple and the fleeting feeling of calm faded.
When it was deep enough I flung my body hard into the water, like a slap. In seconds I was immersed.
When I swam though, I felt like I was swimming in a postcard. It was as unreal as that; life could have been a rectangle of paper, sent in the post.
I stayed in there until she arrived, slipped her espadrilles off and came in with me. To the edge at least, sitting on the shore with her legs out in front. I swam to her.
‘Come in?’
Anything to make you stay.
She pulled her knees up to her chest. Shook her head. Didn’t speak for a good minute.
She looked around. I sat down next to her.
‘Thanks for coming,’ I said. A smile. She didn’t respond.
‘I don’t go in the water any more,’ she said eventually. ‘The mistral wind was attacking me the last time, I remember.’
She put her face up to the sun.
‘Hard to imagine, isn’t it, on a day like today. But it is brutal.’
I saw her hands shaking.
My skin was dry in seconds.
Whatever this mistral had up its sleeve, the sun in early summer was just as determined and my shoulders burned with yesterday’s lack of sun cream.
Protecting yourself from sun damage is self-care.
I had abandoned my daughter.
I didn’t deserve self-care.
I didn’t deserve anything.
‘I’m sorry you’ve come all this way,’ she said eventually as we sat at the edge of the water. ‘But I have already told you that I can’t help you. That hasn’t changed.’
I felt my heart harden. This had to work; it had to. I had moved further from my daughter. Left the country.
‘But you were with Marc for a long time,’ I said, I could hear the desperation. ‘The way he talks about you isn’t normal. I need someone to back me up. Someone who understands. Someone who can prove this isn’t me, but him. Someone who …’
She shook her head. ‘No, you have that wrong,’ she said, pity in her eyes but her voice hard. ‘It was a brief relationship. Not a major part of my life, to be honest, Romilly. I am married now. I have absolutely nothing to tell you about Marc. In truth, I barely remember him.’
And she stood, walked across the stones with grace in bare feet, carrying her shoes.
‘I came all this way!’ I shouted at her, and it turned into a guttural sob. ‘My baby isn’t even a week old! And I am here, with you! That is how desperate I am, Ella. That is how desperate!’
I thought I saw her hesitate.
‘Please!’ I shouted, and I tried to head after her but everything still ached and I moved slowly over the stones. ‘I know you’re lying! I know, Ella!’
But she disappeared into her car, skidding on the gravel as she pulled away sharply.
The French twenty-somethings murmured to themselves; giggled. One checked if I was okay but I couldn’t reply.
Half an hour later I still sat on the shore sobbing. It felt like Ella had slung my last bit of hope in her boot and driven away with it.
The entire reason I left the country when my baby was days old, to find somebody else who had been through what I had with Marc, someone who could back me up, and she says it was a brief relationship. Barely remembers it. It meant nothing.
It didn’t happen to her.
Then why – when you live in a hot climate near a beautiful lake that you visit all the time, when I know you were a swimmer, once at least – do you not go in the water, Ella?
Is it for the same reason as me?
I reach over to the cool bag. Get Adam another beer. Take one for myself too.
‘I know it’s hard to hear about your friend,’ I say, as he takes the bottle from his mouth. Swallows hard. ‘To hear that he treated me like this.’
Adam says nothing.
I look at him. Expecting to see the pain of betrayal, the horror of the lies.
But when I look up, what’s in his eyes is none of that; only pity.
‘So she told you Marc didn’t do anything to her?’
I nod. A light sigh from Adam.
‘Didn’t that ever make you wonder?’ he says gently. ‘Whether, if it didn’t happen to her, it didn’t happen to you either?’