Here was a scene: Anouk at the breakfast table, three years old. In front of her, the bowl of maple syrup with her dose of Creon. A red plastic spoon gripped in one tiny, angry hand, and here she was flicking the maple syrup across the table, round eyes fixed on Nora and combative, and here was Nora sitting on the kitchen floor, hair in her eyes, angry enough to want to strike the child, hard, but reasoned enough not to. Two bowls on the floor, flipped over. Nora engaged in a battle that she knew, the harder fought, the harder lost. The kitchen walls, the cupboards, dripping with maple syrup. Like some manic gingerbread house. Anouk hadn’t eaten anything for three days.

Another scene: Anouk, six years old, perched on the edge of a hard chair in the office of her dietician. Cartoon posters on the wall of fruits and grains and fish, and a toy box of plastic foods. Plastic fried egg. Plastic chicken leg. Plastic bundle of green beans.

‘Can you tell me about your poo?’ the dietician asked.

Anouk, who’d been through this before, squirmed and looked at Nora. Anouk hated this.

‘Go on,’ Nora said, not wanting to speak for her daughter.

‘What’s the consistency?’ said the dietician. ‘Does it look hard or soft?’

‘Soft.’

‘And how does it smell?’

Anouk took a deep breath. Nora wanted to take her out of this room. ‘It smells like poo?’ Anouk suggested.

The dietician wrote something down. Smiled at Anouk. ‘Is it oily? Are you getting caught out at all?’

What she was asking was: have you shit your pants recently? The answer was yes. Anouk got caught out a lot, another perk of the condition. Nora answered this one for her.

Last scene: Late September 1977, early evening. Nora in a chair by the river. Anouk was one week old, swaddled, sleeping. Across the lake, one rogue alder, bright fire-red amongst evergreens and other trees only just beginning to turn. The sky was settling into a lilac dusk, and the river, this night, was swift and speckled with wood and leaves and other debris after a day of rain. Nora gazed at the puckered face of the stranger she held in her arms. This, a day or two before Anouk was diagnosed. This was the baby who first touched her in the womb, that moth-wing quiver, soft as powder, that. There but not there. This baby could have been healthy. Lived without medication. Swum across a body of water so vast you couldn’t see the opposite shore, couldn’t even see where you were swimming to. This baby could have lived to an old, old age.

28

L’Inconnue

Paris, 1898

The hotel nicolas chose in Montmartre was tucked into the end of a tiny cul-de-sac, midway up a steep and garbage-strewn lane where several of the cobbles were loose and moss-covered and rotting like bad teeth. This was a place that would have been damp even in a drought. The concierge at the hotel took me for a whore, and there was nothing I could say to this so I said nothing. In the room, the walls were papered yellow and peeling. The sheets, grey and stiff, and the smell, sour and lingering and shameful.