Anyway, my childhood （the part Marie was alive for anyway） had some good moments. I was very loved, and I knew it – even though it all came from just one person. Mothers are adept at providing love from all angles, so much so that you often don’t realise you’re missing out on love from other people until much later in life. Marie took the brunt of the hardship and hid it well from me. Of course I knew she was struggling, children always do, don’t they? But children are also astonishingly selfish, and as long as she successfully managed to paper over most of the cracks, I was more than happy to go along with it. My mother would save up her wages – from her job as a barista at a coffee shop in the Angel where hot drinks were at least ￡3 and cake was made without flour for those women who’d recently discovered gluten intolerance, and from her cleaning gig which took her to the homes of the ladies up in Highgate who probably didn’t eat cake at all. Every three months she would have just enough to take me on a ‘magical mystery tour’， which just meant a trip to the Cutty Sark, or a Tube ride down to Selfridges to see the Christmas lights. Once she took me to the fair up on Hampstead Heath, where I ate candy floss for the first time and won a fish during a game of hoops. We put the fish in a vase on our kitchen table and called it RIP, which I thought was funny since fairground fish never live very long. Marie thought it was mean, and nurtured that fish, cleaning out its home every week and adding in some green plants and a desultory rock. I lost interest in that fish, but under her early care, RIP ended up living for ten years. He outlived my mother.
Marie and I struggled on. I went to a nice primary school just off Seven Sisters where I made precisely one friend, a boy named Jimmy, whose family lived in a very large house with an excessive number of rugs and cushions and books stacked from floor to ceiling in every room. His mother was a therapist, and his father was a GP, and they easily could have sent their son to a prep school not situated next door to a pawn shop which did a nice side hustle in hard drugs. But they had a big Labour poster in their window and carried a huge amount of liberal guilt about their good fortune, and Jimmy’s education was one of the ways they squared it. Jimmy is still in my life. In fact, our relationship has matured somewhat in recent times, I guess you could say.
We might have gone on like this, Marie and me. I went to secondary school down the road （with Jimmy initially, who was mercilessly teased for being posh in Year 7 and so was sent off to a private day school which had goats and did a lot of art – another tortured compromise made by his parents）， and I made a few more friends. Perhaps if we’d had longer, Marie might have got a better job, and who knows, maybe met a nice man to take some of her burdens. I might have made it to university, and later earned enough to look after my mother, buy her a flat, get her a car. But if that had been our fate, then I wouldn’t be here, writing this, waiting for Kelly to burst into our cell and try to lure me into a conversation about her brassy DIY highlights. Instead, Marie got slower, greyer, and slept more, to the point where I was getting up for school and leaving her in bed. She lost a cleaning job because she didn’t wake up until 11 a.m. one morning, and some starch-faced witch in a house which had six bathrooms and no soul fired her by text at 11.30 a.m. Her back ached, she said one night, chatting to Helene on the sofa as I dozed in bed. Helene urged her to see the doctor, but she dismissed it. ‘When have I not had aches and pains since we’ve been in this cold damp country?’ she laughed.
Who knows how bad she really felt? Certainly not me. Kids are self-absorbed and parents are supposed to be invincible. That’s the deal. But Marie broke it. Two months later, she took me on holiday for the first time, to Cornwall. We stayed in a caravan park on a cliff overlooking the vast sea, and we walked along coastal paths and I ate a lot of ice cream. Marie drank wine on the doorstep of our van as I lay on the grass and asked her questions about her childhood in France, about how I could train to be a photographer when I grew up, about whether I would ever like boys in the way that grown-ups did if they were all as immature as the ones in my class. She laughed at that one. She laughed a lot that holiday.
I had just turned 13 when it became obvious that her aches weren’t just a sign of endless work and constant worry. Helene picked me up from school early one day, and took me to the hospital. Marie had collapsed at work, and before I could see her, my mother’s only friend sat me down in a visitors’ room and told me that my mother had cancer. She’d held off going to the doctor and, like so many women who care for others, she’d neglected her own needs entirely. She didn’t want me to know, Helene explained, but I deserved to. I gazed at the strip lighting overhead, and felt my ears hum as Helene asked if I could keep calm and be brave in front of my mother. I felt something switch off in my brain at that moment, as though I were suddenly on standby, not able to function at full capacity. I later learnt that this is called disassociation, when your brain disconnects to protect you from stress or trauma. It’s a horrendous feeling but it has served me well in times when, well, I’ve had to do some pretty unpleasant things. Frankly, when you’re surrounded by blood and the sound of someone screaming for their life, it’s actually a relief to switch off.