her biological father long absent now, leaving her nothing but his surname. Which was? Moore. Connie Moore â
a terrific name
, I thought,
like a village in Ireland
. Her step-father could not have been more different, a Cypriot businessman who ran a number of questionable kebab shops in Wood Green and Walthamstow, and she was now an anomaly in her family: the arty, smart one. âI have three half-Cypriot brothers, little bulldogs they are; they all work in the business, and they have no idea what I do. Same as my dad â heâll be watching telly and heâll see a view of the Dales, or weâll be on holiday and heâll see a sunset or an olive tree and heâll say â she slipped into an accent, she has always been very good at accents â ââConnie, you see that? Draw that! Draw it, quick!â Or he tries to commission me. âDraw your mother, sheâs a beautiful lady, do a painting. Iâll pay.â To Kemal, thatâs the supreme achievement of the artist, to draw eyes that look in the same direction.â
âOr hands.â
âExactly. Hands. If you can fit all the fingers on, youâre Titian.â
âCan you draw hands?â
âNope. I love him, though â Kemal â and my brothers, too. They dote on my mum and she sucks it all up. But I donât see me in any of them, or in her either.â
âWhat about your father? Your biologicalââ
She shuddered. âHe left home when I was nine. Iâm not really allowed to mention him because it sets my mum off. He was very handsome, I know that. Very charming, a musician. Ran off to Europe. Heâs ⦠out there ⦠somewhere.â She gestured towards the east. âDonât really care,â she said, and shrugged. âChange the subject. Ask me something else.â
The biographies we give ourselves at such times are never neutral and the image she chose to present was of a rather solitary soul. She was not mawkish or self-pitying, not at all, but with the bravado gone, she seemed less confident, less self-assured, and I felt flattered by her honesty. I loved the conversation that we had that night, especially once she had stopped hallucinating. I had an infinite number of questions and would have been happy for her to recount her life in real time, would have been happy to walk on past Whitechapel and Limehouse into Essex and the estuary and on into the sea if sheâd wanted to. And she was curious about me, too, something that Iâd not experienced for some time. We talked about our parents and our siblings, our work and friends, our schools and childhoods, the implication being that we would need to know this information for the future.
Of course, after nearly a quarter of a century, the questions about our distant pasts have all been posed and weâre left with âhow was your day?â and âwhen will you be home?â and âhave you put the bins out?â Our biographies involve each other so intrinsically now that weâre both on nearly every page. We know the answers because we were there, and so curiosity becomes hard to maintain; replaced, I suppose, by nostalgia.
32. many strange horses in our salty bedroom
In planning our trip I had initially adopted a no-expense-spared attitude, until I calculated the full extent of this expense, at which point I adopted a comfortable-but-no-frills policy. It was this that brought us to the Hotel Bontemps, which may or may not translate as the Good Times Hotel, in the 7 th arrondissement. Room 602 was clearly the result of a wager to determine the smallest space into which a double mattress can fit. Brassy and vulgar, the bed frame must have been assembled inside like a ship in a bottle. On closer examination, it also seemed our room was a repository for all of Europeâs spare pubic hair.
âAll in all, Iâd have preferred a chocolate on the pillow,â said Connie,