My Clo,

I don’t know if you’re as stubborn now as you were when you were little, but there’s something I’d like to ask of you.

Tomorrow, when you visit Arcanu Farm to see Cassanu and Lisabetta, please go and stand for a few minutes beneath the holm oak, before night falls, so that I can see you.

I will recognise you, I hope.

I would like your daughter to be there too.

I ask nothing else of you. Nothing at all.

Or perhaps just that you raise your eyes to the sky and look at Betelgeuse. If you only knew, my Clo, how many nights I have looked at it and thought of you.

My whole life is a dark room.

Kisses,

P.

Waves splashed against the entrance to the cave, as if God had created it at exactly the right height for it to be showered with sea spray without being flooded. In Clotilde’s hand, the paper shook like a sail blown by the wind.

But there was no wind. Just a calm morning, already warm, the sun gently beginning to probe the deepest recesses of the cave.

Kisses.

It was her mother’s handwriting.

P.

It was her mother’s signature.

Who but her mother could call her ‘My Clo’? Who but her mother could remember those details? The Goth-punk outfit that she hadn’t worn since the accident.

Who else would have remembered Beetlejuice. Betelgeuse, to give it its proper name. Clotilde had hung the poster in her bedroom at the time. It was Maman who had given it to her for her fourteenth birthday, having ordered it directly from Quebec.

Clotilde stepped forward and studied the path leading down to the sea, then above her the clifftop track that led towards the beaches at Alga and Oscelluccia. At the end of the path, a teenage girl was wandering alone, clutching her mobile phone, perhaps searching for the network, or trying to read a message secretively, without her parents peering over her shoulder.

Clotilde looked down at the letter once more.

Who else but her mother would have remembered that phrase that had obsessed Lydia Deetz? That cult phrase from her cult film, that phrase that Clotilde had thrown in her mother’s face, during the intimacy and violence of an argument, one evening when they were alone together?

Their secret. Between mother and daughter.

Her mother had wanted to drag her into town the following day to buy more presentable clothes – presentable meaning comfortable, colourful, feminine. Clotilde, before slamming the bedroom door in her mother’s face, had hurled at her those desperate words borrowed from Lydia Deetz. The answer like a summary of her teenage life.

My whole life is a dark room. One big. Dark. Room.

7

Friday, 11 August 1989, fifth day of the holidays
Alfalfa-blue sky

My father, on the other hand, I like.