Tell the truth, I didn’t miss him. How could I? I had nothing against which to measure his absence. I imagined him dark, and slightly sinister; a relative, perhaps, of the Black Man we fled. And I loved my mother. I loved the world we had made for ourselves, a world we carried with us wherever we went; a world just out of reach of ordinary folk.

Because we’re special, she would say. We saw things; we had the knack. You choose your family – and so we did, wherever we went. A sister here, a grandmother there; familiar faces of a scattered tribe. But as far as I could tell, there were no men in my mother’s life.

Except for the Black Man, of course.

Was my father the Black Man? It gave me a start to hear Anouk come so close. I’d considered it myself, as we fled all shirt-tailed and carnival-coloured and ragged with the wind. The Black Man wasn’t real, of course. I came to think my father was the same.

Still, I was curious; and from time to time I would scan the crowds – in New York or Berlin, in Venice or Prague – hoping perhaps to see him there – a man, alone, with my dark eyes . . .

Meanwhile, we ran, my mother and I. First, it seemed for the sheer joy of running; then, like everything else, it became a habit, then a chore. In the end I began to think that running was the only thing that kept her alive as the cancer ran through her, blood, brain and bone.

It was then that she first mentioned the girl. Ramblings, I thought at the time, born of the painkillers she was taking. And she did ramble, as the end approached: told stories that made no sense at all; spoke of the Black Man; talked earnestly with people who weren’t there.

That little girl, with the name that so resembled mine, could have been another figment of those uncertain times – an archetype, an anima; a snippet from a newspaper; some other little lost soul with dark hair and dark eyes, stolen away from outside a cigarette kiosk one rainy day in Paris.

Sylviane Caillou. Vanished as so many do; stolen from her car seat aged eighteen months, in front of a chemist’s near La Villette. Stolen away with her changing-bag and toys, last seen wearing a cheap silver baby bangle with a lucky charm – a little cat – dangling from the clasp.

That wasn’t me. It couldn’t have been. And even if it was, after all this time . . .