I don’t know.
Each day disappears when another one starts.
As if we no longer need the eternal round of gestures and rituals, the to and fro of a day. So I forget and disappear only to begin again.
One day, it’s not the day. The door of the fifth floor is half-open. I cross the room. It’s strange, it’s as though this scene has already happened. Sitting at your desk, you are staring at the screen. A long text is scrolling down in front of you.
We have tea.
You call London. And those pages that were making you cry have disappeared.
Little, so little, so wild that I am. Silent witness of uncontrolled minds. Silence becomes a voice without words. Irresistible urge of violence contained. Impulses that collide and knock me off course. Scattered through my story as markers of my way.
I’m back. I’m not quite sure where at the moment.
Sarah is sensual and defenceless somehow, I’m not sure really how to explain it. She has an uncommon grace and innocence. On that day I am playing big sister, that’s the part I’ve been given. I am her bodyguard, her protector.
Sarah is sixteen and I am just fourteen. We are wearing light, summery dresses. Tom, her boyfriend, is on his own in the front of his tiny three-wheeler bubble car. I am sitting on Sarah’s lap in the back. We are racing through the countryside on our way to Oxford.
The bubble car is going down a long hill at top speed when a construction truck slowly pulls out without seeing us. Tom brakes like mad. We are going far too fast. We are far too heavy. Death is inevitable.
Miraculously, our bubble car got past. We drove another hundred yards, then Tom pulled over to the side, trembling, white as a sheet. We sat on the grass in the sun. I’ll never forget the sensation, the feeling of being alive.
Later, on that same summer day, Sarah and Tom slipped away, their arms around each other’s waists. They walked off and lay down in the grass. I sat patiently waiting. I was just there. I was probably hoping for some whispering, rustling. Then Tom emerged into the sunlight, followed by Sarah. Scrutinising her beautiful face, I saw she was different, excited, miles away. I sensed a mystery in her.
Sometimes I wish that all of life could be contained in my gaze.
What cannot be said must be dreamed. When you dream, you cherish your secret.
My father had a bubble car too: an eccentric amalgam of metal and plastic with three wheels and no door. To get in you lifted up the see-through bubble and climbed in over the handlebars. Colonel Rampling was a sight to behold driving through Stanmore in his uniform, upright and concentrated. People would turn and stare as he passed, but he took no notice.
Later, I found out the make of Tom’s bubble car that nearly killed the three of us on that day of sunshine and pleasure: it was a Kabinenroller. Because they had worked for the Reich, Messerschmitt was forbidden to produce aircraft after the war, so their factories recycled planes into these strange vehicles… Then the bubble cars disappeared – along with transparency, the colonel, certain memories, playfulness, the aircraft factories – and then cars all looked the same.
London was dancing. The Blitz was a thing of the past. No more tears and deprivation. We were alive.
Everything was different: skirts, music, objects, language, freedom, the riot of colour on every wall, friends, bars and restaurants, the visible and invisible. We were the baby boomers. All the codes were turned on their heads. There was a rhythm, a mutation, a collective heartbeat.
A historic, indefinable moment.
And soon we would never be the same again.
I’ll keep silent about the things that are not in these pages. Other people will talk.
And they don’t know. They poke around and repeat what others have said. Who wouldn’t want to walk joyously down the King’s Road in a miniskirt in the 60s? Who wouldn’t want to devote their life to the movies? To photographers? I was, and I still am, that woman.
Eventually I opened the diaries my mother kept as a young girl, with her writings in purple ink, pale shades of violet and coloured pencils. I discovered events and thoughts detailed in her careful handwriting. My mother was a romantic. She made lists of the boys she liked, as though she was learning how to fall in love. Some were good dancers. Others were fun, distant. Charming, dashing or dreadful. My mother was dreamy and had many suitors. At one point someone called Godgers appears in the lists – her affectionate nickname for my father. Gradually the lists stop, and the diaries with them, as if they had been suspended in time until they landed in my hands.
I found out the truth about Sarah three years after her death.
She took her secret away with her when she took away her life.
She killed herself on 14 February 1967, after having given birth prematurely to a baby boy on 13 January in a hospital in Buenos Aires.
When I asked my father why he had kept such a secret, he said, ‘It would kill your mother if she knew.’
So this became our secret and I’ve always wondered if Mum was protected by our pact or poisoned by the lie.
Perhaps this is it, the cutting edge of truth: a secret that keeps us human.
My mother and I stand in front of the mirror. We contemplate our images. Her reflection mirrors a woman she no longer recognises. Her eyes follow the trail of my sister. Her mouth speaks but I cannot hear. Silence settles between us.
My father stands before me. He says I am young. He says I must go out into the world and not look back. He says he will always be there for my mother. He says, ‘Charlotte, you don’t have to come back for us’.
I am standing at the window of a hotel in a country whose language and customs are strange to me. I am a stranger.
I am in a city that I do not know and that does not know me.
I observe from afar the daily ritual of everyday lives. The distance is reassuring. The hidden side of life shows a truth that transparency conceals.
Everything is still, nothing moves. The city drowses in the scorching heat. I wait by my window for the movement to begin again. Waiting is anything but passive. Waiting is listening. Waiting is about knowing when to move on.
I am immobile. I am weary. I wait for time to pass. I am haunted by the passage of time.
I have come here to forget who I am. To find other images to erase those that hide the truth.
I want to listen to a language with unfamiliar words. I want to perform rituals without knowing from whence they came. I am seeking a silent encounter to understand what I mean.
My sister died a violent death.
I saw my family sink into silence.
I took flight and became a stranger among strangers. An unconscious quest guided me here.
I spent a long time in the wilderness before I could shed my first tear and be relieved of the pain so long denied.
The colonel died peacefully in his sleep.
He had just turned a hundred and he joined my mother who had died ten years earlier.
At the end his skin was grey, his pulse slow. I didn’t go back to see him, without really knowing why. There’s still always time, isn’t there?
A few prayers, a little music, two readings, the family. Absolute simplicity, just as he would have wanted.