The first stage occurs on the motorway just after Paris, when Papa takes out of God knows where some cassettes of Corsican music to put on in the Fuego. The second is once we’re on the island, our first meal, local charcuterie, cheese and fruit from the village, stocking up on produce from the little shops, buying coppa, lonzu and brocciu, pretending that everything else, everything we put in our shopping trolley for the rest of the year, is just rubbish. The third is the interminable family visits, the grandparents, the cousins, the neighbours, the conversations in a foreign language, and Papa struggling because I can see that these days he speaks better English with the boss of Fast Green than he does Corsican with his friends, but he sticks at it, my Daddy does. It’s touching even if, like Nicolas, you don’t understand a word, or only bits and pieces. They talk about politics, about the world that is turning around quicker and quicker, and shrinking as if it’s losing bits along the way, and their island which doesn’t move at all, in the eye of the hurricane, and which looks on in astonishment at the commotion made by humanity. Papa tries his best to follow, like a devotee of a religion who thinks that learning the prayers and reciting them once a year will be enough to get him into paradise. But I watch him all the time, my Ryegrass Papa, and I can tell you that he is no more Corsican than I am, no more Catholic than a Catholic who only hails Mary when he’s being christened, married or buried.

Papa is a Corsican in shorts.

He wouldn’t be happy with someone who said that to him. Not even me. Even if I’m the only one would dare.

But I won’t do it.

It would only annoy him. And I don’t want to do that.

I like my Papa more than Maman. Perhaps because he likes me too. Perhaps because he’s never had anything bad to say about my Goth Lydia get-up. Perhaps because he likes my black clothes, perhaps because they remind him of the clothes Corsican women wear.

The comparison stops there.

Black for old Corsican women is the uniform of submission. For me, it’s the symbol of rebellion. I wonder which kind of black-clad women my father prefers? Both, Captain? Submission in public and rebellion in private. A way of owning a treasure that you keep to yourself. A bird that you can put in a cage.

Like all men, I think.

Wanting a mother, a housewife, a cook, but hating you because that’s what you’ve become.

That’s the impression I get of how couples live, from the lofty vantage point of my fifteen years.