Alice in Wonderland

WHEN I TURNED AROUND Simone was standing there, a slender white-faced ghost.

‘They weren’t policemen,’ she said in a small voice.

I wasn’t sure what she meant. ‘They were plainclothes traffic policemen.’

‘Didn’t you see their shoes?’

‘Their shoes?’ I went closer to her, not sure what was going on. She was shaking uncontrollably, her arms crossed in front of her body.

‘Do you know them?’ I tried again.

‘Don’t you see anything? You’re blind! Blind! Blind! They’re going to take me away and you won’t be able to do a thing about it. They’re looking for me.’ She was almost hysterical.

It had happened a couple of times before. Esmeralda, the social worker assigned to Simone’s case, said it was akin to a panic attack and I should just reassure her, let her know I was always there for her, and that I would fight for her.

‘Simone, listen to me, you’re not in hiding. The more you live a normal life the harder it is for them to spirit you away. We won’t let them hurt you, do you hear me?’

Suddenly her eyes were rolling back. She collapsed at my feet and her body went into spasms. I racked my brain desperately for anything that would help. Use a spoon … I need to put a spoon in her mouth or she’ll swallow her tongue … I stumbled over my own feet, getting to the kitchen drawer. Her body had started convulsing by the time I got back, snapping back and forth with her shoulders arching and an arm straightening out haphazardly as I tried to jam a teaspoon between her clattering teeth. Shit, shit, shit! It’s too small, why the hell didn’t I get a soup spoon? Oh God help me, don’t let her swallow it … A few months ago we’d had a first-aid guy come in from the security company to give us a day’s course as part of a building evacuation plan. Call for help as soon as you can. So obvious. I tipped my handbag over, grabbed my mobile phone with trembling hands and rang the emergency alert number I’d hoped never to have to use – the same number I’d put onto Simone’s smartphone so she could be located with GPS positioning wherever she was.

When my mother once asked in her snarky way why a young girl like that should have such an expensive mobile phone, I’d snapped, ‘So we can find her wherever those bastards take her.’

‘Ma no!’ my mother had said incredulously, breaking out in Italian. ‘The nightmare with Simona is not over?’

‘I think they want her more than ever before, just because we stopped them,’ I’d replied grimly. My mother’s hands shook as she filled a glass with water at the tap. How could she be so naïve? Ever since we’d rescued Simone from the home of Nada and Albert Sarrazin, porn empire kingpins, I’d often imagined her alone and terrified in the boot of a car, or a basement, or sitting on a bed in a frilly pink room with a barricaded window, but not unconscious with me holding her tongue in place with a teaspoon.

They had her in hospital on a drip for a couple of days, but after a gamut of tests they couldn’t find anything specific. The neurologist called it a dissociative non-epileptic seizure, prescribed anxiety medication and said I should keep an eye on her. In the safe anonymity of her office, she explained that if it had happened once, it could happen again. In some cases there were specific triggers but often it was impossible to say what might set it off. Had it happened before? Did some stressful event happen to set it off? Had my daughter been under emotional pressure lately? Between Detective Marcel Olmi, Detective Klaus Knappman, and me, combined with the fact that she’d been a minor throughout the whole drama of her rescue and Albert Sarrazin’s eventual execution at sea by an unknown assassin, we’d managed to keep Simone’s name and picture out of the newspapers. The neurologist sitting opposite me knew nothing of Simone’s history and I planned to keep it that way. I’d found that a modicum of truth worked best.

My husband, her father, had left home. Recently? No, not recently. Policemen had come to our door about some unpaid speeding fines; that had sent her spiralling into a panic attack. That’s all it was, I explained firmly, a panic attack. Simone was fine now. The neurologist nodded as she made notes in a file. Something like that might do it. But often there was some build-up of trauma that affected the nervous system and eventually resulted in physical symptoms. In cases of this kind, where an underlying medical condition has been excluded, the seizure appears to act as a cut-off mechanism. It happens when a child can’t cope with terrible memories; she tried again, using simpler words. She looked up, waiting for something more, but I didn’t oblige with an answer. The neurologist closed the file.

 

‘What did the doctor say?’ Simone asked when we drove away from the pharmacy where we’d stopped to get her medicine on the way home from the hospital.

‘She said it’s probably a once-off,’ I said, keeping my eyes on the traffic. Not too light, not too heavy. ‘That it’s probably a hormonal thing because of your age.’ I’d grown accustomed to using poorly concealed lies to tide us over these bad moments. What else was I supposed to do? Simone was fourteen years old. Hormonal changes didn’t seem that unlikely.

Simone sank lower into her seat. ‘Probably, probably,’ she mimicked cruelly. ‘You sound just like Alice in Wonderland.’

There were moments when my adopted daughter seemed like the oldest person in the world to me, and in those moments I wanted to kill the Sarrazins for what they had done to her.

At the next traffic light she sat up as a thought hit her. ‘Does that mean I won’t get my period like all the other girls? Rad! Yuck, all that blood. If I do get it, is there some way you can switch it off?’

Where had that come from? She made the ‘you’ sound like this was something she thought I could personally accomplish, if I really cared for her, instead of just pretending. Simone had had a conflicted relationship with her female body; she’d refused to wear the same ‘doll shoes’ (her name for them) that other girls wore to school and her dress style veered from the shapeless bag lady to preppy schoolgirl in a porn movie. I learnt from Amber’s mom that when my daughter was at their house, she and Amber watched music videos all day long, with big-bosomed supple women gyrating to the beat, and that sometimes they gyrated along. I found this hard to imagine. At home Simone always chose old black-and-white romance movies for us to watch, occasionally muttering from behind a pillow that kissing was gross. She was never going to kiss anyone. Gina said kissing spread germs. Simone was prone to quoting her adoptive grandmother because she knew I found my mother’s constant lecturing on acceptable norms of behaviour annoying. Had Daniel and I kissed? Why did people kiss? The slightest intimation of physical passion and the channel was changed with deliberate nonchalance.

All I knew now, sitting in the car next to Simone, was that what I wanted for her more than anything in the world was that she could be an ordinary girl living a normal life.

‘No! It does not mean you will not get your period. There is nothing wrong with you. It just happens later for some girls. And no, you don’t just get to “switch it off”.’

She gave me a pitying look.

‘Sadie has hers and Tamara has hers. They can have babies now.’

‘Oh, yay,’ I muttered.

‘I’m the only one that hasn’t started.’

‘I didn’t know you were so keen to become a teenage mom. There’s always adoption; a lot of kiddies out there need a good home.’

‘Whatever,’ she mumbled through a mouthful of thumbnail, slumping back into the seat. ‘Gina calls it the curse.’

‘It’s not so terrible. You’ll get used to it. Gina’s generation didn’t have disposable sanitary towels. They used reusable cloths that they washed. It wasn’t pleasant in a European winter during the war.’

‘Nada hated her period too. She always refused to sleep with Albert when she had it, then they’d fight.’

The unexpected mention of those names shook me.

‘Nada talked to you about her period?’ I tried for a tone of casual interest.

‘You don’t understand how it was. She talked to me about lots of things.’

‘What else did Nada tell you?’ My neutral tone required an effort of will. At work, my composure under stress and the ability to separate human emotions from the task at hand had earned me the moniker Super-Bitch Dante; at home, conversations with Simone often made me feel as if I’d fallen through ice. I’d read somewhere that, in such a case, one had a minute to get control of one’s breathing and that it was not a good idea to thrash around. The trick was apparently to stay horizontal and avoid drowning.

‘She came from Czechoslovakia. She said in her country some men believe women turn into she-wolves when they get their period and that the blood of your first period has special powers.’

‘That’s just superstition.’

‘If you say so.’

We sank into silence.

‘Hey, mom-person …’ The voice was casual.

‘Yes?’

‘You can relax. I’m not actually scared of blood. Nada told me you can’t switch nature off − obviously …’ The voice was infinitely knowledgeable and superior. ‘But there is contraception that works. She had to find out so that the girls she hired could still work in Albert’s films. Otherwise they’d have lost lots of money.’

Breathe, Paola, breathe.

‘I see,’ I say weakly.

‘I just wanted to see what you’d say.’

And I’m sure she told you a great deal besides. Nada, Nada, Nada. The source of Simone’s sex education. It was unbelievable. Each mention of that name, Simone’s first non-biological mother figure, a professional porn actress and queen of the night, might as well have been a stake driven into my heart, and Simone knew it. Her innocent expression made me think of Truschka pretending not to watch the Indian mynahs on our balcony.

I recalled hearing the other mothers talking about their daughters’ menses: Valeria gets such backache she can’t go to school on some days, I was just the same; I told our GP I wanted Amber to take the pill as soon as she had her first period; I don’t want Sophie to start the pill too early, they say it can give you cancer; all the women in our family get their periods early … On and on the mothers went until I could have screamed with boredom. I was clearly not mother material or I would have worried more about my daughter not getting her menstrual cycles and asked the specialist’s opinion.

Why hadn’t I realised it? The swings in mood from feverish excitement to lethargic dullness, the random cruelty – this was full-blown puberty on my doorstep.

The rest of the drive home she stared out the side window, her iPod on, and I ruminated over my inadequacy as a mother. When we got home, she let me put a new plaster around her thumbnail, which she’d chewed down to a bloody stump in hospital while they did all the tests.

‘Are the policemen going to come back?’ she asked in a muffled voice as we ate sardines on toast.

‘Those oafs?’ I scoffed. ‘They were just after their commission. I’ll pay the fines tomorrow. How does that sound?’ Artificial cheeriness was all I could come up with.

Truschka chose that moment to jump onto Simone’s lap and start purring. My mouth opened and shut. For once I wasn’t going to complain about the cat on her lap while she was eating. Simone stroked Truschka gently and then looked up, a small smile on her face.

‘What’s that story Gina tells about the man that was murdered with cat hairs?’

‘It was during the war. They lived in a villa on their own inland in the lake area of Northern Italy. A woman − she was his second wife − put a cat hair in her husband’s soup every day. He became sicker and sicker and eventually he died. He was a very rich man and he’d left everything to her, so the family demanded an autopsy. They found a cat-hair ball the size of a golf ball in his stomach.’

‘What do you say, Truschka?’ Simone crooned. ‘He probably deserved it. Why do people get married anyway?’

On the way to bed that evening my gaze fell on the wedding photo the traffic officer had bent down to scrutinise at some point, an unpleasant smirk on his face.

The groom wore a linen shirt as white as a cloud. The bride had flung a short veil back over her high brow. But the glowing young woman with her soft brown curls and bold chestnut eyes had changed into someone else.

Nowadays my thick dark hair was cut in a boyish bob with a side parting, and my lips were fashionably nude, a colour that went with everything. Yet that wasn’t it. Occasionally I’d catch a glimpse of myself in a mirror and I’d think to myself how odd it was that my essential features remained the same yet something had unalterably changed. It was in the way my eyes, half gleaming and half shadow, looked out at the world.

 

When I woke up in the morning I found her and the cat curled up on Daniel’s side of the futon under the duvet she’d taken off her bed. Over breakfast she announced she was going to watch YouTube videos in her room. What about a walk on the beach later? Tomorrow, she was tired today. Besides the odd foray to the bathroom or to the kitchen she spent most of the day in her bedroom behind a closed door. This was a recent thing, the long hours spent on her computer. Still, it was pretty standard teenage behaviour and far preferable to morbid anxiety.

 

 

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Tell me a secret (I)

https://secrets.net/chatlounge/
(Everyone. Has one. What’s yours?)

diable:		Tell me a secret
butterfly:		Who are you?
diable:		An admirer
butterfly:		Saccharine
diable:		Let’s play secrets and then you decide. You first
butterfly:		You don’t have a father
diable:		In a way. Lucky strike
butterfly:		Not dead then. DI?
diable:		Smart butterfly
butterfly:		Quit stalling. Your turn. Tell me a secret
diable:		I like to start fires
butterfly:		Vague. Specifics?
diable:		24 rue de l’etoile, paris. Burnt to the ground
butterfly:		Fatalities?
diable:		Bloodthirsty butterfly. One hamster. One parrot
butterfly:		You didn’t like the house?
diable:		What was she thinking bringing an admirer home?
butterfly:		Who?
diable:		Mother
butterfly:		Mommy’s boy?
diable:		Mommy has a fat purse
butterfly:		What did she do?
diable:		Sent me away. The modigliani wasn’t insured. How was i to know?
butterfly:		Send me a picture of her while I fetch some ice cream. BRB
diable:		Je t’attends
butterfly:		Where’s your manners? ENGLISH
diable:		For you, i will wait
butterfly:		I’m back, frenchie. No photo? Are you in some kind of a reformatory?
diable:		Au revoir nectar princess. Until next time

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