Marie had come to England because she’d been told she was pretty enough to be a model, and she was. My mother was strikingly beautiful, with olive skin, and shaggy brown hair which she clipped up in a bun no matter how many times I implored her to wear it down. She had that effortless French girl vibe, which every fashion influencer tries to copy now, to varying degrees of success. No bra, ever. Wide slacks and a long gold chain upon which hung a miniature portrait of an old man, his identity lost to time. Before I came along, she’d done a few small campaigns, modelling for high street stores that were long gone by the time I was born. Kookai, she insisted, was the coolest shop of its day, and she kept a rolled-up poster that she’d featured in, which had hung in their shop windows for an autumn campaign. In it, she’s crouched on the ground, a brown cardigan draped over her knees, covering a short dress and platform trainers, which I’ve seen making a regrettable return to high streets recently.
My mother was too short for catwalk modelling, and her career never took off in the way she had dreamt about when she came to London and shared a flat with two other European girls seeking success. But she certainly had fun for a while. The London nightlife in the early Nineties, was, to hear Marie tell it, a golden age. Evenings at Tramp, a private members club which opened in 1969, were almost as glamorous as when Liza Minnelli used to frequent it. At night, when I couldn’t sleep, she’d lie next to me on my small bed and tell me about the champagne served with sparklers in it, and the leather banquettes in the restaurant, where she would dine with actors and sports stars and dance until dawn. You could smoke inside, she used to tell me, and the richest women wore fur unapologetically. Her life before me appeared to be one long whirl of parties and castings. A woman blessed with such innate beauty doesn’t have to try particularly hard, it’s always seemed to me, and Marie never worried too much about money or the future. Someone would always look after the French girl who never wore a bra and wanted to have fun. Someone will always zoom in on the girl who doesn’t know her worth.
Besides, my mother had already met the man she would give her whole heart to. The man who would become my father. The man who would promise her the world and shower her with gifts. The man who I would grow up swearing to ruin.
CHAPTER THREE
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.