E-Book, Englisch, 416 Seiten
Lambert Birthright
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80533-445-3
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
E-Book, Englisch, 416 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-80533-445-3
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Charles Lambert is the author of several novels, short stories, and the memoir With a Zero at its Heart, which was voted one of The Guardian readers' Ten Best Books of the Year in 2014.In 2007, he won an O. Henry Award for his short story The Scent of Cinnamon. His first novel, Little Monsters, was longlisted for the 2010 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Born in England, Charles Lambert has lived in central Italy since 1980.
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CHAPTER TWO
Fiona first came across proof of the other girl’s existence when she was sixteen. She was searching in her mother’s dressing table for a bracelet she wanted to borrow when she spotted a loop on a small velvet cushion in the top drawer. Curious, she lifted the cushion and there she was. The other girl. But she didn’t know that then. She thought she’d found a photograph of herself.
It was a newspaper cutting, a girl in clothes she didn’t remember wearing, a woman she didn’t recognise, and above the photograph the headline ‘Pot-induced madness, a modern mother’s shameless antics’. And she thought, I don’t remember this. But the woman wasn’t her mother. And her mother wasn’t modern. And, well, pot. She couldn’t see her mother smoking pot. Her mother wouldn’t let people smoke normal cigarettes in the house, she’d make them stand on the patio while she fussed around inside, pretending not to mind that they preferred their filthy vice to her company.
She wasn’t sure what to do. The cutting had been hidden, so there had to be something wrong about it. But it had been worth keeping, and running the risk of its being discovered. She remembered being told by someone – Ludovico maybe, because this was the sort of clever-clever comment he would make – that the things people hide are the things they most want to be found. Maybe her mother had wanted her to find this. She sat on the bed and looked at herself, she lost all track of time, trying to understand what she’d discovered. She stared at herself in the photo and wondered if she’d been drugged and kidnapped, and that was how she’d ended up in the paper, but she didn’t look as if she’d been kidnapped, although she might have been drugged, and you don’t take a kidnapped child to what looked like a rock festival. She had a big smile on her face and daisies in her hair. She looked like a hippie and so did the woman with her, the woman the paper said was her mother, and she supposed that’s why the paper – the Sunday Express, it had the name at the bottom edge, and part of the date – had thought she was using pot. She looked maybe nine or ten in the photograph, but she was hopeless with ages. Later, when she knew, she told her earlier self sternly that she had to stop thinking ‘I’ when she thought about the photograph because it wasn’t her at all. It was someone else. Someone she didn’t know.
It was the summer after her father died, and they were in England, and it was too hot to bear without a swimming pool or the sea. Before his death, they spent the summers in Italy, with Ludovico and his family in their villa in Liguria. It was modern and not very nice, and there were mosquitoes, but it was only a few minutes from the sea and the two families had met up there every August for as long as she could remember, long sunbaked summers, with everyone except Ludovico speaking Italian all around her so that she’d found herself learning it without even trying. They made fun of her when she answered them back in their own language, all those skinny boys and girls, tanned so dark they looked like Turks, the girls in tiny costumes she wished her mother would let her wear, constantly rubbing oils into their skins, the boys playing football along the edge of the beach until someone’s mother told them to stop. She was almost as dark as they were by the end of the summer, and then it was the girls at school who made fun of her, but that was envy, because their parents hadn’t taken them anywhere decent. And the food, fruit that tasted of fruit, the first time she’d eaten real fish with a head and tail on it, the glass of cold white wine she’d be given as though it were the most natural thing in the world for a thirteen-year-old girl to drink wine with her dinner. And Ludo always there to defend her when she needed to be defended, to peel her prickly pear with a tiny penknife he carried around with him so she didn’t get the hair-like prickles in her fingers, to hold her by the waist as she learnt to swim, like a friend and then like a brother and then, one summer, more than a brother. But that hadn’t lasted long, those moments – no more than three or four – when no one knew where they’d gone, when they’d sneaked away from the others to hide inside a beach cabin, giggling at first and then kissing, with Ludo’s hands on her hard new breasts. And then Ludo’s father had spoken to him, and her mother had spoken to her, and then the summer was over, and the summer after that a boy she’d never seen before that year had promised he would love her for ever if she let him put his penis inside her, and so she had, glad that she’d got that over with. She couldn’t remember where Ludo had been, but she remembered wishing it had been him. Perhaps he’d had another girl that summer. He’d have been at university by then, maybe already in the States. She’d see him talking to their fathers sometimes, like an equal, about money and politics, because that was all their fathers cared about, and mostly it was money. Money was what bound them together, her family and Ludovico’s. It was all about money in the end, but money was men’s business; the women of the house had no part in it. His mother was always in the kitchen, shouting at the Filipino woman who looked after the villa with her husband. Her mother would be reading a book in the shade somewhere, her white-gloved hands holding the book up close to her face because she didn’t want to be seen in glasses, until the book fell to her lap and she slept, her mouth half open, and Fiona would find her when she came back up from the beach and take the book out of her hands and close it. And then Ludo would see her and walk across to talk to her and she’d tell him what she’d been doing that day, but not a word about the boy. Not that. Not a word about what the boy had done.
That summer, though, when she found the cutting, she was at home in England and nothing she owned was cool enough or light enough and she had no one to talk to. She hadn’t understood why they shouldn’t go to Italy, even if Daddy had died. She lay on the lawn, on a beach towel in a new bikini until she glistened with sweat. She missed Ludo, and the sea. She wondered if the other boy would be there, and what she might have done if he had been. It was her mother’s decision, she’d told Fiona that it was time to free themselves of Ludo’s family while they could. They didn’t need to maintain a friendship with one of her father’s employees, she’d said, her lip curling at the word friendship, as though it were something infinitely compromised. She said she didn’t trust him, he would stab them in the back as soon as look at them now that Daddy was gone. Fair-weather friends, she said when Fiona insisted, quite the worst kind of people. Which was her way of saying foreigners. Fiona wondered if a letter addressed to the villa would reach Ludovico, but never wrote. She didn’t know what to say, other than that her father was dead and she was unhappy, and he would already know that. Besides, she thought, if Ludo cared he would write to her.
What made it worse was that all her friends had gone somewhere nice for the summer and she hadn’t been invited because her father was dead and no one knew what to say or do. She was stuck in the house with Mummy, who just kept bursting into tears, and closing curtains to keep the heat out. She mooched from room to room, lay around in the garden pretending to read a magazine, her transistor radio beside her head until she couldn’t take another note of Abba and Kiki Dee, and stomped back into the house to snap at her mother and her mother’s awful friends when they asked her how she was. She began to keep a diary. ‘I do love her in my way,’ she wrote, ‘and I suppose she loves me in her way, although I don’t know what that is, and I never have. She’s always shown me off to other people as though she’s got nothing else to be proud of but her daughter. Maybe she hasn’t. She hasn’t done anything at all with her life, really. She hasn’t lived. She’s been pampered from start to finish, or at least from the day she hooked Daddy, and so have I, I suppose. I’m spoilt. And I wish I wasn’t. It’s not my fault. I wish I was someone else.’ And then she padlocked the diary with the key provided, and put it away in a drawer. Because Fiona had secrets as well.
She took the cutting into town the next day and found a shop that made photocopies. The youth in the shop, a year or two older than she was, looked at the photograph and then at her. ‘You were really pretty,’ he said, then added, with a hopeful grin, ‘And you still are.’ She didn’t answer. At home, she put the original cutting back where she had found it. The copy she slipped into her diary, snapped shut the tiny padlock and put it away again. She tried not to think about it any more, but the girl with her crown of daisies kept coming back into her mind. Is it me? she thought, and if it isn’t me, who is it? And if it is me, why can’t I remember?
A few days before she was due back at school, she asked her mother if she’d ever been taken to a rock concert. Her mother was reading a novel and didn’t answer. Fiona coughed, then asked...
