We grew up in a labyrinthine apartment in the Île Saint-Louis in Paris. We lived in the top two floors of a three-storey Beaux Arts building on Quai de Béthune at the corner of Rue Pouelletier in the 4th arrondissement. The furniture was superannuated, fusty and leathern, and the flaking yellow paint on the walls throughout I strongly suspected had once been bright white; but what our house’s interior lacked in style it made up for in books. There were books everywhere, and bookshelves built from floor to ceiling in almost every room (the kitchen being a notable exception, though the lack of shelving didn’t stop us from piling books in there anyway). My dad ran the Île-de-France Film Commission, my mum was (still is, I think) a painter of some renown, a neo-neo-realist whose speciality was portraits, usually of celebrities, but from the neck down. She wouldn’t paint their faces. That was the gimmick. In order to be a successful painter you have to have a gimmick. This has never not been true. Her studio took up the rez-de-chaussée (in fact we owned the whole building, fine), but we rarely went in there.
Her paintings sold briskly for outlandish prices; but to me, my mother’s paintings might as well have been wallpaper, because that was their function in our apartment. The only one I noticed was a portrait of me and my sister that hung in our bedroom (we shared a bedroom until age ten; it was a large bedroom). It was unusual in that Mum had painted our faces, for reasons that she never explained. Also unexplained was the decision to hang the portrait in our shared bedroom, though there are greater mysteries in life. Can’t believe I ever looked so innocent, even at eight years old. As I grew up and out of the shared bedroom, the painting advanced to a hallway I passed every day on the way to the bathroom, and through some reverse Wildean alchemy, I grew less and less like the sweet young girl in my mother’s painting, and more and more like – whoever it is you’re reading right now.
My body changed, and drastically, starting at about twelve years old, but those aren’t the changes that registered when I compared my childhood portrait to my teenaged face in the mirror. My adolescent eyes knew something that I didn’t yet know I knew. In an adult you would call it scorn, but in a teen – perhaps the foreshadow of an intuited future outlook, expressed also in the slant of my smile, and in my words any time I opened my wide mouth wide and commented, acerbically, on everything. My wit had teeth as sharp as my actual incisors, and I was fast in every sense of the word. Unlike my sister, who was as demure as I was immodest – but, may it please the court, who turned out the turncoat? I may have withered a few plump egos on the vine with my invective, but I was never volitionally dishonest. I was blunt, I was impolitic, I was rude, and much of the time obnoxious. I was a hoyden, in short. A loud, dirty, boozy girl – such are always in demand. But I told the truth. I didn’t have an agenda. If you had the intelligence of a soap dish, I told you so. If your face resembled a rotting meat balloon, I told you so. Right into said face. Never behind your back, which looked like a botulistic sausage. I delivered my observations with savour and stuck round to watch the dismay work its way across your casing.
Angelica and I were outwardly alike. The same large, expressive, mallow-green eyes, the same golden-brown complexion, even – before she dyed it black at M. Kidfucker’s request (and decided to keep it that way) – the same russet hair, now blonde, now red, depending on the season or the light. I’ll take my jasper locks over her inky quills any day of the trip. Our lips are bee-stung and rose pink, though A has taken to wearing the brightest, glossiest shade of red lipstick available, the better to contrast with her artificially marmoreal skin and jet hair. It’s an effective look, if your idea of effective is to project a frigid, unapproachable allure, but you can’t argue with its success in her case.