Telling My Lost Child the Story of His Life
Excerpt from The Orange Notebooks by Susanna Crossman
I remember this:
We’ve just got off the Channel ferry. On the motorway, we’re heading to London. In the backseat, you say:
“Mama! Mama! The wire things are round and then go straight.”
“Sorry, I can’t hear.” I overtake a yellow Spanish lorry, glare at the driver beeping his horn. “Speak up, buba,” I yell, tired from the overnight crossing. I didn’t sleep.
“Mama, the wire things!” you shout. “The wire things are round and then go straight!”
“Be quiet, buba. I am driving!”
A sports car with the number-plate LUV U is close behind me. The driver flashes his lights.
“But Mama, the wire things by the road. . .”
In the rear mirror, I see your small finger. From your car seat, it points to a pylon. By the road, the wires reach into the horizon. Heading out to nowhere, they seem to come from the sea. The past is behind us, I think, and wish I was still on the night boat, being cradled by the swell. Briny billows. Sailing into great waters— You interrupt my daydreams:
“Mama, the wires go round and then straight.”
Glancing up, I notice that from a distance, the curves dangle like crescent moons. As we approach, the wires seem to flatten into straight lines. In my mirror, the lines continue and then disappear.
“That’s an optical illusion.” I explain, because I am a mother and, buba, it is my job to give you instructions about the workings of life. I try to tell you the rules, about danger and love, and all the things we cannot see. “An optical illusion means things are different to how they appear. An optical illusion.”
“An illusion. An illusion,” you repeat.
I look up at a road sign. We’re sixty-three miles from London, yet already I can smell Edgware pollution and fried fish, and I feel the dry powder on my mum’s skin.
In the back of the car, you whisper, over and over again:
“Illusion. . . illusion. . . illusion.”
“Illusion” is an eighties song by the group Imagination. One of my mum’s favourite tunes. As I drive on the motorway, it echoes in my ears. The world is just an illusion.
It is June. Two years later. France. Early afternoon. I go to ring the bell. A bee flies past my ear, landing on the brass door handle. Six black legs. A quiver of fur. In my mind, thoughts swarm of nectar, of the honey cake my Aunty Deb baked, a bittersweet mouthful, swallowed and gone. For an instant, I wonder about bee-killing pesticides, bee stings, pain, and draw back my hand. In Europe, there are almost two thousand species of bees. I know they are under threat. Recoiling, I think of the movie Lou watched, hour after hour, as children do in the comfort of evermore. The film, Bee Movie, portrayed bees as humans: the bee mummies and bee daddies with two bee children. Bee mornings. Bee afternoons. Clean bee nights. Bee school. Bee work. Bee retirement. Bee conformity. Bee longings. Bee love and bee hate. This humanising of the natural world is an outrageous anthropomorphic act we must not forget. The bee world has its own mystery: bees are born. Bees die. The bees are dead. The bees are buzzing. The thoughts rattle inside me. I am an empty can. No filling. No stuffing. A mother with a dead child is no longer. A mother with a dead child is a joke.
Closing my eyes, I listen to the bees. They are flying through labyrinths of grey-green stalks, gathering pollen from pale mauve blooms. The scent of lavender coats the air. A slick veneer. The sudden heat of French summers. Siesta hour. Sweat trickles down my back; the drops draw damp lines. There is an orchestral stillness, a muffled silence I know well. It seems like an odd moment to come back, while the whole world is sleeping. As though everyone is waiting, and here I am. Finally, de retour with the lavender, the sunflowers and the fig tree in the garden. Even the cicadas seem to be resting; the only thing I hear is bees. Some legends say bees never sleep and they go on and on making honey.
Over ten years ago, on the only occasion that we met, my late Basque mother-in-law, Katixa, gave me fair warning about bees. Inside the kitchen of her cold two-hundred-year-old house, nestled in the Spanish Pyrenees, we drank hot cups of moss-coloured verbena tea sweetened with chestnut honey. Outside, mist collected on every corner. It hung over the half-timbered house, drifted in green valleys, and shrouded the steep mountain peaks. Rain fell in a soft drizzle. Water coated everything, and it felt like we were floating inside a cloud. At her table, Katixa turned to me. Her grey hair was short and neat round her heavy face. Placing her hand on my shoulder, she said to me quietly in French, for it was the only language that we shared:
“Anna, when any death occurs you must go and tell the bees. You should knock gently on the hives. Inform them of the passing. Tell them the name of the deceased and their age. You must not forget to ask the bees politely to produce wax. Their wax will make the candles to light the path of the deceased, so they may travel safely to the other side.”
In the garden, I am wondering whether the bees have been informed, when I am startled by Antton opening the door. On my way here, I practised a speech to tell him: 1) where I had been; 2) what had changed; 3) what I had understood. But he looks furious, and I step back and trip over my suitcase. Before I can say “bonjour” or “hello,” Antton blurts out:
“I can’t believe you’ve finally come home.” Shaking his head, he strides back inside. Behind my sunglasses, tears form. Antton cannot see, which is a relief. These lunettes make my face feel at home. Inside here, I am safe. Some things shouldn’t be opened. Outside there are monsters, sieges, and storms.
I step into the hallway of our house. My feet shuffle and hesitate. One of them inside and the other out. Suitcase in hand. Seven years earlier when we bought La Place, the estate agent described it as “un petit château perdu.” We joked about, “our little lost castle,” bought cheap due to a leaky roof and bad wiring, miles away from everything, except for the farm down the hill. The farm called Devant-La-Place, In-Front-of-The-Place. It is time to come home. Where to begin?
Antton paces the stone corridor in his beige trench coat. Underneath, he wears a white-ironed shirt, dark trousers, and trainers with the laces tied in neat knots. His hair swept back. New white strands in the black. He looks older, like something I once read about becoming a whisper of a man. Yet he’s still carelessly refined. After all this time, I have never understood how he remains elegant in all circumstances: working and living, birth and death. But it is the trench coat that worries me.
As he walks it flaps around him, fabric brushes against fabric and makes a swish, swish sound. The coat is too severely belted for such a hot day and should be worn unbuttoned. I want to warn him: the belt is a tightening noose. By the granite staircase he turns, pulls on the buckle. The beige colour is insipid to my eyes. I feel it gnawing in my stomach, and however much I reason with myself this feeling will not go away. Antton’s mouth twitches, as it does when he is angry.
“I’m going into town for a school meeting.”
“Could I come in with you?” I ask. “We could talk in the car. I can wait while you work. . .”
He nods and comes toward me, smelling of coffee and cologne. He kisses me. Not on the lips. His kisses land on my cheeks. Two times. Old school. La bise. Inside I smile, but sadly, I’ve always liked his formal ways. It is one of the reasons I fell in love with him, his mixture of ceremony and despair, and his ability to quote philosophy and poetry, lines of Heidegger, Foucault, Plato, and Celan. “We are made of words,” Antton said, and we joked that we had grown up in bookless houses and were building our own library in the château, and that books belonged to everybody and books could change the world. We knew that once you were inside a single book it led to other books. Each single book was a library, a universe. Long ago, word after word fell in a delicate rain, and the words became a lake from which we drew our water.
“How are you?” I move backwards. I can’t touch the beige coat; I don’t want to get too near. Antton shrugs his shoulders and takes in my tracksuit trousers, crumpled T-shirt, dirty hair. The shades. The journey to get here was long. I hope he cannot smell the whisky on my breath. The bottle is in my suitcase, wrapped in clothes, stiff with salt water. But I will not drink again.
I can’t touch the beige coat; I don’t want to get too near.
“I can’t believe you’ve finally come home,” Antton repeats, but this time with less anger and more defeat, and I want to take him in my arms and apologize. But he adds, “I’m leaving in thirty minutes. Don’t be late,” and disappears into the kitchen.
It is a struggle to carry my suitcase up the limestone steps. At the bottom are things waiting to be taken upstairs (a blue jumper, a stack of unpaid bills, a screwdriver, and a plug). At the top, I know there will be things ready to be taken down. For seven years stuff has ascended and descended this way.
Now, my legs wobble as I notice Antton has added more books to the piles on each stone step: a new biography of Freud, editions of the local newspaper, Sud-Ouest. A copy of Orpheus by Cocteau with lithographs. This play, I once told a class, was “Inspired by the Greek myth of a grieving troubadour, his descent to Hades—a katabasis—to find Eurydice, his dead wife. It’s been revamped a million times. The story told a different way. Cocteau included mirrors—troubling gateways to the underworld.”
“Greek and Roman gambling,” Antton called the classic myths. “Gods playing at the cosmic game of life.”
Snakes and ladders, I think, heading upstairs, everything rises and falls, comes and goes. But the Ancients are still everywhere. Our shelves are lined with les belles lettres, red volumes and mustard copies of the Orphic hymns. “Your house is like a bookshop,” visitors joke. But, as I reach the landing, dust jackets curl, and piles of books topple onto the floor. All the paper feels suffocating, and in the heat, it smells of mildew as though mould has attacked the core. Antton has accumulated stuff while I was away; he’s been building a shelter to hide from the storm.
At the top step, my foot hits the corner of a stacked collection of second-hand French detective novels: Cet homme est dangereux by Peter Cheyney and Pas d’orchidées pour Miss Blandish by James Hadley Chase. Covers show revolvers, cadavers, and long stockinged legs. Each Série Noire is printed in yellow and black. Books striped like buzzing bees. It makes sense, I think. My Basque mother-in-law was right. The bees need to be informed.
Outside our son’s room, Antton has piled more dusty cardboard boxes. Inside one is a collection of Basque comic books written in the Latin alphabet that Antton always wishes he knew. Glancing over, I see the comic books are stories of separatists, berets, and gastronomy. Witches and mountain cheese. I wonder why he’s bought books that no one in our house can read. Antton often tells people, “All I have from the Basque language are the two awkward T’s in the spelling of my name.” But I picture these T’s like trees with outspread branches. They hold his centre.
Wiping the sweat from my forehead, I go into Lou’s room, put my suitcase down, and slide onto his bed. Around me are Lou’s toys, clothes, and his drawing stuff. Everything is the same yet Lou isn’t here. He is gone. My Lou is gone. Months have passed since I last lay here, but the grief remains, and it falls on me, a tumble of pain. If I could give it a shape it would be a boulder, a weight. Every day, I topple. Every day, I’m felled. Yet, his death has been easier when I am beneath this rock, resting in the dirt, next to Lou.
“It is more suitable,” I told my psychiatrist, Dr. Vidonne, in one of my first sessions, “when I don’t try to pretend things are normal.”
On his bed, I ache for him, in my heart, my belly, my womb. Twenty-two bones in my head miss him, and the rough grain of my senses remembers his skin. Those two square metres that my doctor friend Rachel told me are the largest bodily sense organ. Cutaneous receptors captured Lou’s touch, the feel of his small fingers, and his arms tight around me, tickles and hugs. My baby is stuck in my deep skin, absorbing shock.
A crack runs across the ceiling plaster, reaching the light. The dangling lampshade is patterned with stars, and it sets me thinking of orientation, and the damp map in my suitcase. Yann gave it to me on our very last morning together, to show me our path and notre destin.
“There must be hope,” Yann insisted, and traced our journey on the blue paper sea. At the port, we prepared to leave as the sun rose. Beneath the dawn sky everything was still, and we could never have imagined what would happen that day. On the deck, Yann’s eyes scanned the waves. “Don’t forget. Without hope we cannot breathe.”
Clutching the duvet, hope shifts inside me. Things have changed, and I don’t want them to be the same.
During the weeks I was away, I often pictured Lou’s room. Late at night, or early morning, when I couldn’t sleep, I imagined my head on his pillow, the starry lampshade swinging above. Since he has gone, the room hasn’t been touched. Small folded T-shirts and crayons gather dust. No one is allowed to tidy or clean. For inside this room are particles of Lou, flecks of his skin and strands of his hair. Tucked in his sheets, I glance over at a mirror on the wall. Lou spent hours playing here. Eyes wide open; he plunged into a trance, frowning, grinning or opening and closing his eyes. His hand stroked the glass, an incomprehensible door.
“Hello,” I remember him saying, “Hello.”
In his bed, his soft toys surround me, and I press my face into worn fur. A cocoon of fuzz: three stars from his godfather Miguel. A teddy. Two unicorns. Beside me is Lala, a small fluorescent pink rabbit that Antton won at the local fair. White stuffing leaks from a rip. Absentmindedly, I tug at this hole. Often, Lou pulled at Lala’s stuffing. Now, I roll fluff between my fingertips, repeating his gestures as if Lou’s movements were a dance and if I learn the steps, I’ll bring him back. It is wrong but somehow right, and I cry and cannot stop.
Then I remember—must unpack. But when I open my suitcase the orange notebooks are on top. An amber pull. Turning pages, I read jumbled sentences, and a series of obituaries. During my time away, I collected announcements of death, French notices nécrologiques, for: Monsieur Roger Aguinet, a happily retired butcher, the much-loved Madame Louise Pennec, the beautiful Clotilde Tressier, and the erudite journalist Marie-Bernadette, devoted Ingrid, Paul the husband, Alain and Nicole. Hubert and Dominique. Karine and Ingrid. Loved. Cherished. Beloved. Never forgotten. The last name on the page is in capitals. Letters scratched in blue. They stand five centimetres tall. LOUIS.
When I finally admitted to Dr. Vidonne that I was keeping these notebooks, she looked at me curiously. I’d never mentioned them before because despite trusting her I was frightened she would want to read each private page. I muttered, I was always muttering with her:
“It is so difficult for me, even now, to get things to make sense. Everything blurs. Me. Lou and Antton. There is so much wreckage. Irrevocable blank spots. All this.” I waved my arms in the air as I often did when I spoke, “It does not stop. But when I write in these notebooks it’s different.”
Dr. Vidonne said:
“Writing it down may help you to remember what came first, what came after and next.” Then, she looked at me with that slow stare of hers, and whispered, almost tenderly, “Write it all down, Madame. Write!”
At La Place, Antton appears in the bedroom. When I sit up, the sight of his beige coat is too much. “I’m not coming with you,” I tell him, slurring slightly. In the mirror, I catch a glimpse of myself. It is as though my face has been left out in the rain. My hair stands on end. My eyes are swollen and red. White fluff is stuck to my chin.
“I can’t believe it!” Antton shouts, and then he lowers his voice. “You’ve only just got back and you’re already playing games. I don’t even know where you went with that sailor, the man from the hospital. Do you know how terribly worried I’ve been?”
Antton storms out and slams the bedroom door. Seconds later, he yells “Merde!” I hear the sound of tumbling books, and imagine the yellow and black Série Noire falling. An avalanche of books. A swarm of bees.
I read in my notebooks:
The word swarm designates a cloud of bees or insects. There is a general sense of a large dense throng. But in old Norse “swarm” is also connected to the word for whispering. The bees are whispering, and I cannot decipher their code.
My hands tremble, and I wish I had talked to Antton, and I hope that when he gets back I find the words. I begin to think about his school meeting, and then worry about the beige coat. It is like a bird. This fact is apparent, and I am not sure where it is flying next. I pick up another orange notebook, and with a blue biro I try to draw the trench coat’s shape. The front angles of the coat stretch into vast, flapping wings. The collar rises into two horns, or eyes. It isn’t clear, and my sketch is badly done, but I am trying to depict the coat as a gigantic bird.
This beige bird, I suspect, is linked to Lou’s death. But Lou is not the only one, there are other names, everything is connected and I will write to my local magistrate. There is a list, and it will form part of the case condemning the coat, not Antton, but the power leading the beige.
For a while, I have realised people think I am going crazy, so methodically I have prepared my case, documenting my theory with hard facts, ascertaining what is behind the plot.
Closing my eyes, I think I will explain everything to Antton later, but when I push my nose into the duvet, I catch my buba’s scent. For a happy moment, I inhale Lou’s little boy smell, and everything returns. . .
It all began nine months ago, last September. Before, everything was different. Two hundred and thirty-seven days ago, my world spun, rolled, and crumbled. It is like a pregnancy wound backwards. Before that I was a language teacher, a reader, a lover, and a mother.
Back in Monsieur Kassar’s school, the Centre Via Langues, I taught English to students from all walks of life: tourism, business, medical, and literary. It was a way to make a living, and I wrote on paperboards and led conversations, explaining the difference between the phrasal verbs “getting on” and “getting off.” Each week, Monsieur Kassar, an amateur poet, placed a single rose in a vase on his desk, “in memory of the Lebanese Bekaa valley of my childhood where thousands of roses are grown each year.”
“You’re sentimental,” his wife complained.
“I am romantic,” he replied. “We are symbolic animals. We need metaphor.”
When I finished work, at home, I played dinosaurs with Lou, moving plastic models from sofa to floor. Some evenings, Antton and I discussed future renovations for La Place, for everything was unfinished, needed re-wiring, and tiles fell from the roof. But “It will be done when we have time.” We threw our hands up into the air because “que sera.” Instead, I read Duras in bed, and when the dawn lit the garden at La Place, I had sex with Antton. Days began and ended and, for six years, time turned that way.
Then, nine months ago, Louis went.
We were unhinged from the axis of the earth. A creak of tangled iron. A groaning fall. But perhaps the beginning is elsewhere.
Golden light fell into darkness, and we went to meet death and tried to journey to the end.
Maybe we could draw the starting line at the moment Yann (the boatman) and I met, the day I arrived at the hospital, or four months later, when we climbed over the wall. That June night when we left, I barely knew Yann, but it felt like a lifetime had passed between us, as though we’d been young and grown old beneath the moon. Golden light fell into darkness, and we went to meet death and tried to journey to the end. At least, I think that is what we were doing, for I am still trying to understand. It was the journey of a mother (me) refusing to abandon her child. Alone in the underworld. Alone in a non-world. I was a woman who had lost time, who went to look for the end of time. At the start of time, I found something else.
Or. . .
Maybe everything began the August day our son was born, and we chose his name. For a name can be a fresh beginning, and we wanted a name that started anew. We wrote down names for both girls and boys: James, British names, Marguerite, French names, Hannah, Jewish names. Arrosa, Basque names, Pierre, classic names, names of poets, writers, and philosophers. Finally, we chose Louis, as it suited our baby, and the pronunciation was similar in English and French. From that day on, we called our son: Lou, Louba, little Lou, mostly I called him buba.
But, after his death, I wanted Antton and I to be the only ones allowed to pronounce his name: the soft “L” followed by the voiced OU and the unvoiced IS. Louis. In silence, my lips say his name, and I call him: Louis.
Or. . .
The beginning could be the once-upon-a-time summer day I met Antton, when I was working on the ferries. The ship sailed across the deepest part of the Channel. A red line tracked our path on a TV screen. Without this meeting, our son could not have been born. A child demands a name, a place, and a destiny.
That eighteenth summer I began to equate liberty with water and got to know the sea. To start my first job, I had travelled down from London. A turn on a coast road revealed a vista, a vast blue-green. Water moved as far as the eye could see. Fourteen years ago, something rose inside me a bit like a fighting energy. Winds spilled across the surface. Tides rose and fell. Water also forms this story. There is a surface and a deep. Froth and abyss. Water has currents. It pushes and pulls our boats.
Or. . .
We could go back earlier, to a linguistic initiation, when I was five, and my mum paid our neighbour Betty to teach me French, sparking off my love for the langue française. I learnt the lyrics to the song “Alouette” and sang about larks plucked from wing to tail. French became my second language, unlocked another world. And later, that morning bird flew me from suburbia across the sky to the ferries and Antton, to the other side of the Channel. In France, I spoke and translated birth and death. Louis and I lived and died in two languages. Gentille alouette. Kind lark.
Or. . .
I could start with my roots, dig into the past, the clay, my land, my geology, the scraps and clutter of my origins, my absent English Christian father, my omnipresent Jewish mum, Helen, Aunty Deb, my stepfather, Cyril. My family. Floating around is what they also call “the gift” which I still can’t grasp. Sometimes, it feels like a river runs fast through my veins, and I must follow its course. Is the gift the fact that until last year I was never scared? Aunty Deb called me a “plucky kid,” because I was headstrong and once slapped the school bully for calling my best friend, Rachel, a “Paki.” Or is the gift my solitary, awkward character? Because since I was small, I don’t fit-into-the-crowd, can be charming or haunted by a black dog, a sullen fury. The “gift” was bestowed on Aunty Deb and her mother, my great-great-grandmother, who in 1912 foretold her own death on the Titanic.
My friend Dr. Rachel says superstition is all in the mind. She told me, “It’s just the brain taking a break. A recent study in Helsinki showed that sceptics possess greater powers of cognitive inhibition. They have the ability to reject superstitious impulses.” According to neuroscience, giving meaning to randomness is the easy way out, the basic reaction. Yet, the water inside me does not stop trying to reach out and find the answer.
For the past few months, I’ve written about this in the orange notebooks. Pages and pages trying to find the start. But what are beginnings? Shifting, treacherous things. It is like trying to identify the movement between silence and sound. Lou took piano lessons, pressed small fingers on the keys, and I tried to see when sound emerged or went. It was almost impossible. Beginnings are harder to pinpoint than ends. Full stops are a sign to show where a sentence is completed.
“Read to the end,” Lou always said when we had stories at bedtime and it got too late, “Don’t stop in the middle, Mama. Not the middle. Get to the end.”
In his room, it strikes me I need to finish the story. Put the parts of Lou together before it is too late. A Roman philosopher believed that after death there is a scattering of the union. This scattering is forgetting. Things get washed away. I must gather everything I have written in the orange notebooks. Lou cannot be left stuck in the middle. These thoughts sound like a pulsar. A rapid breathless beat.
An urgent plan emerges from the crack in the ceiling, the lavender, old books, and the nectar-drunk bees. Recently, I read that 9 percent of European bees are threatened with extinction. A red list has been made. Things have happened to the bees: habitat loss, pesticides and fertilizers, urban development, and climate change. Things are getting lost. Bees and boys.
Frowning, I write in the orange notebook:
- Assemble Lou. Every memory, recollection.
- Explain the journey I have been on. What I’ve understood.
- Tell Lou his story. My story. The story of Antton and I. Tell him the things I never got a chance to say.
I must put Lou in the right burning place in my heart, for my baby wanders; he haunts me, day and night. Sometimes, I feel his small hands clinging to my legs, and his grip stops me from advancing. He is calling me. Yann heard him too. Antton may have caught Lou’s whispers, but we couldn’t talk about this. It was a pain that hurt too much if we went too near.
Lou is lost, and our little buba is adrift. He roams between worlds unable to find his way home. Lou should have lost his milk teeth, finished childhood, become a teenager, grown into an adult. He should have, I have said to myself so many times, because “should have” is a conditional tense, expressing a past expectation that was not met. I taught this to students, wrote on a blackboard:
We use “should have” to describe a situation with regret, where we wish to go back in time and transform an event. A “should have” clause is often followed with a BUT.
Lou should have been here BUT he is dead. Death is definitive. Death will be definitive. The grammar tense does not change.
Yet, I wrote in the notebooks:
Orpheus went down into Hades to get his dead wife, sang songs charming the underworld. He did the impossible: wept 247 litres of tears. Used 350 boxes of Kleenex bought in bulk. He spent sleepless nights reading thousands of self-help books. Orpheus implored to a gaggle of Olympian gods, who told him grief had five stages he should accept. But Orpheus couldn’t follow that path. “I mean,” he told them, “I can’t erase my wife’s photos from my timeline. She’s been there for 2,000 years.” Instead, he dared to pass through the Gates of Tenaro, and the dark torrents of Styx to reach the place of the dead.
As for me, I’ve read the book, got the T-shirt, seen the movie, and re-told the story. I am a mother with a dead child. A not-mother, stuck between worlds.
I am writing these notebooks. All of it is here, even if my psychiatrist said, “There are memories we’ll never recall, and our memories of things can change. It is a healthy process for everything we have known to evolve. The present affects the way we understand the past. Memories are living things.” Dr. Vidonne used the word “vivante,” which means “living” in French. The opening “vee” sound feels buoyant and fresh. On the periodic table, V is the symbol for vanadium, turning certain emeralds a milky-green. Green is a sign of life. In the lush Basque valleys, the word for life is bizitza, pronounced bee-zitz-ah.
When I have finished writing, I will try and get the notebooks to Lou, I can teach him languages, about bees and the chromatic wheel. If he is growing up somewhere, he can read this when he is ten, eighteen, or thirty-four. He can flip through these notebook pages in his forties or fifties. He will be older than me.
Snuggling under the covers, I glance at myself a final time in the mirror.
I forget to take off my sunglasses and fall asleep thinking about bees.
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