0. Who would she have been? The better side of me? Procreator, cake baker, follower of traditions? What happens to a life unmarked? When death is just a bloody bogie flushed down a loo in a French campsite. No grave. No plant. No petals to count. Somebody else will fill in the details: the soft downy hair at the temples, the crooked finger, the blue-grey eyes.

6. My grandmother had a twin and it runs in families. They played cards and smoked. Neither of them talked much about the past. The story went “it made them feel old” but I was suspicious, even as a child. I felt something must have happened to them and I never found out what it was. Maybe they were supposed to be three. They were both petite and had the same way of tucking their legs to the side underneath themselves when they sat on a rug by a fire. Along with my grandfather they took driving holidays through France. Great Aunt did not have anything like the right flavour for this third grandparent who also tucked a five pound note into birthday cards, watched endless tap dancing routines, wanted to know about my favourite teachers at school and was always up for a game rummy. The day of her funeral, us children stayed in the summer room of the big old house where the shelves were stacked with folded road maps of the different departments of France. 

…

In the campsites in France, each tent had its own little plot and a BBQ. Everyone’s mother was on the lookout for semi-suitable playmates for her children. Everyone’s mother would throw a few extra sausages on the BBQ. The clever children knew this and ate supper several times a day on different plots. Everyone’s mother called them in when the hoards of white moths descended around the pretend lamp-posts. Just before dusk you could still hear the rattling wheels of small bicycles furiously spinning, the crunch of gravel, the smell of singed meat.

…

7. I was wheeling along those campsite streets, too small to have names, the saddle hard between my legs when I felt a strange new thrum of pleasure laced with something forbidden, dangerous. My other half would not have been caught touching herself in the changing rooms or been called a Little Animal. She would have played with dolls like little girls are supposed to do. She would have brushed their hair and washed their clothes. I only ever owned one doll and named it after a family friend who was later killed in a car crash, such was my ability to nurture something, keep it alive. Doll ownership, for me, had to do with playing a part, trying to be more like my invisible other half.

9. Would I always feel like an odd number? Tracing my finger around the edge of a shapeless hole, trying to decipher messages like braille. Nearly touching - but not touching - the pearl of pleasure that I had learned was bad. I tried to be helpful, but always ended up saying the wrong thing. Getting changed on the shingled shore, I told my best friend that she had seaweed caught in her knickers. She looked at me with pity and contempt. Years later, I understood that the seaweed had been the innocent sprouting of pubic hair pushing through the smooth skin of the wrong season. 

…

In the campsites in France, there were blocks of loos and that - I suppose - is where my mother went with cramps, and where I suppose I hung on tight, while the tsunami raged inside of her. I found a stronghold and clung on for dear life which is what animals have been hard-wired to do. 

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11. In the car on the way to the ferry, my Mum attempted a rudimentary explanation of sanitary options available to me. She had been leaving “The Usborne Book of Growing Up” in conspicuous places around the house for weeks leading up to the school trip. She seemed to want to check I knew that tampons went in the hole. The hole I was picturing was that thin little slip of fabric inside the inner crotch of a swimsuit. People said tampons were a good option for swimmers. It breaks my heart now to think that this level of misunderstanding was possible between us. On the school trip, we visited the graves in the war cemetery and the tapestry at Bayeux. I was impacted by the rows of concrete crosses, what it must have entailed to create an inventory of all those dead, by that human need to ensure that a life does not go unmarked. I realised that it is possible to mourn what you never knew. I started my period. 

13. We were in my bedroom and my best friend was showing me how it worked. She clenched and puckered her hand to make her thumbs and forefinger into a pair of lips with which to demonstrate. I paid special attention to the angle of her head, how she tilted it ever-so-slightly to one side. I was disproportionately worried about noses, how surely they must collide or get in the way. I couldn’t know how noses become completely irrelevant once you start French kissing. We had experienced different kinds of kisses but French kissing was new territory and, on the other side of the border, where my best friend now stood looking back at me, a new land awaited. 

…

In the campsites in France, someone would invariably get sick. This didn’t have to do with the food available at the campsite but rather the food that - exceptionally - we had been allowed to buy at the supermarket in preparation for the trip; things that, in real life, my mother would never have sanctioned. Sugary cereals which camouflaged a plastic surprise that would fall like a charm into someone’s lucky bowl, tinned sausages or meatballs in a pre-concocted gravy. Our stomachs were not primed for these neon flavours. For those who didn’t get sick in the campsites, there were unsupervised hours and French boys who looked different to the boys you got at home and our attempts to reach them which involved wrapping our tongues around phrases like “ou es la ville?” And “je ne comprends pas”. The gulf of language was a warm sea in which we could stretch out our limbs, float and, perhaps in the floating, brush our fingers past someone else’s.  

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14. Just Seventeen was the name of the magazine we were reading when we were fourteen and we were the target audience. Sometimes it came with a free lipgloss or five brightly coloured hair scrunchies or a poster of Wet Wet Wet. Crucially, it laid the intimacies of girls bare for us. “Candice” told us calmly what we should do if our boyfriend asked for a threesome (this seemed a very long way off) and spoke consolingly about how masturbation was a perfectly normal way for us to “explore our own bodies”. This new language was as soothing and foreign to me as French. Language we learn first by listening; the thrum of words vibrate in our bodies long before we really know what they mean. 

16. I was involved in a strange love triangle with my French exchange partner Cecile and her neighbour Damien. Offstage was an alcoholic father and the inconvenient fact that - despite years of lessons - I didn’t really speak French. We walked to the Lycée in invincible hoards, stopping on the way at the boulangerie for braided baguettes studded with small chunks of chocolate. On the way home, we ambled and smoked in the cold light of afternoon, stopping in the bar on the corner for a demi-peche. No-one said it, in case we broke the spell, but we all thought we’d arrived in heaven. In children’s books, the parents are often done away with so that the children can expand to fill the pages. I was wearing an electric blue polo neck made of very soft wool that I had stolen from my mum when I kissed Damien. Rubbing myself against him, I came. It was like a surprise encounter with an old acquaintance and two contrasting pieces of fabric inside of me were stitched together. Orgasm in French is sometimes called Une Petite Mort - a little death. It was pleasing that Damien came on his moped to wave goodbye to our school bus. I had never known anyone to drive a moped. We kissed on two cheeks, the French way (at least the way French people kiss politely, in public) and he gave me a cheap silver pendant in the shape of a heart. I cherished this amulet despite having a boyfriend back at home, because I was tired of being sorry for everything.

17. The age that Francoise Sagan was when she wrote Bonjour Tristesse. Also, the age S.E Hinton was when she wrote The Outsiders. Unlike Susan Eloise who abbreviated her name so that her gender would not lead male book reviewers to dismiss her work, Francoise Sagan had the audacity of being French and kept her name exactly as it was. Unapologetic is a word which could describe every French person I have ever known. That lover’s mother who said that the air that came out of her arse in the morning was something entirely different from a fart. Cecile who stood in the doorway of the room where Damien and I were fondling each other with clumsy words, and lifted her towel up as though it were a lace curtain, the man in the campsite tat shop who said “this little boy is next” and nodded at me.

19. Me and my mother were looking for somewhere for me to live during my study year in Toulouse. Climbing the rickety staircase, the emaciated landlady whose face had been pasted on with questionable precision pointed darkly at the final flight leading up towards the roof. “Forbidden” she said, “Very dangerous”. A teetering pile of ash fell from the end of her cigarette onto the floor. I was now old enough to know that France holds all the most sordid delights. When she told us that the bar across the street was frequented by low-lives and forbade us from going there too, we exchanged a look. We paid the deposit, took the keys and, as soon as the landlady left, headed to the roof terrace - no bigger than a shower - from which you could look across the terracotta rooftops, swallows swooping between the tiles. Then we went to the dive bar across the street and celebrated with a kir. We had both taken up smoking. We moved all my things up the rickety staircase into that attic flat. I pinned the curtain to the beam above the bed. As the car drove away and I was left alone in the middle of Place Du Capitol, I wept. Walking through Toulouse, I was unable to recognise any of the animals in the butcher's window, and eventually bought a baguette and some cheese. My first night on that mattress under the eaves was the loneliest night of my life. 

20. I knew what it meant to have a room of my own but I did not understand why my solitude was so soothing. I pulled the little makeshift curtain across the sloped eaves at night. I pulled heads off prawns and dipped them in mayonnaise. I confessed everything to my French lover, told him how I had learned to masturbate on a bicycle in a French campsite. I picked flowers for his mother on mother’s day. This made my new friends laugh but to me it was the most natural thing in the world. This man was covered in hair and wanted to hold the wild thing inside of me. When I told him my darkest secrets, he didn’t flinch, and I felt the solace of someone who could not be alarmed by me.

…

In the campsites in France, there was invariably a little tat shop. Children brown as hazelnuts, the soft hairs on their legs bleached gold, would queue up for souvenirs: liquorice sticks, beaded bracelets, cheap adjustable rings in the shape of butterflies, boxes of snappers that you could throw at the ground in handfuls, making a spattering of tiny explosions. We realised that some things - explosives for example - were allowed in France that were not permitted anywhere else. 

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21. Hot sweaty nights, sticky sheets and the bubble of galettes. Friends who cared about the world and got sad, not because they had their period or were homesick, but because of some coup in South America. Twinkling lights in dark cobbled streets and cafés that glowed from the inside out like fireflies, the cheapest crepes in town. A rat running over the prostate body of a man lying down by La Garonne the night of La Fete de La Musique, reading Jacques Prevert under almond blossom falling like those white moths from the campsites. Walls pasted with postcards and flyers and pressed flowers and names that sounded like our names but were different, exotic: Emilie, Nico, Sebastien, Luc. Staying in bed all day having sex and only surfacing to walk through market stalls soaked in shadows, to get a croque monsieur and then start drinking and having sex again. The outskirts of town where the best Halal butcher sold bright red merguez next to a container full of second hand shoes. The perfect use of the imperative il faut que j’y aille even though there was really never any great imperative need to go anywhere, what with the university being on strike for almost the whole year, the lecture halls barricaded floor to ceiling with chairs and loud graffiti which read Fac Off! Instead I smoked joints and watched A Bout de Souffle and Jules et Jim. One night, after a campfire, I inexplicably tried to move a hot stone and burnt my hand so badly that I could smell singed flesh. I remembered the smell from the campsites in France. 

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In the campsite in France my mother said NO. Then when she got home, she said NO again: NO to being scraped and cleaned out. NO to being flushed like a dirty toilet. No to a procedure enigmatically referred to as a D&C. No to a blank slate just because she had lost that bloody bogie down the loo at the French campsite. And inside of that NO, she was saying YES, YES to me. She was saying grow grow, I know that you are in there. 

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21. I wrote my final thesis on the Entente Cordiale and had this familiar feeling that I should have paid more attention. But to what? Which way was I supposed to be looking? Who I was supposed to be listening to? My thesis was poorly researched and leaned too heavily on a threadbare metaphor borrowed from the name of the English pub in Toulouse Le Frog & Rosbif. I had spent too much of the year drinking kir and watching black and white films, trying to find out if the French word for bellows that my grandfather swore was bouffadou could be corroborated by even one single French person. My French friends did not understand how personal history was more interesting to me than any other kind, nor why I was always saying sorry. I started writing a story about a French aristocrat who keeps a journal of his dreams. In my retelling, he loses a twin at birth - a fact which is obscure to him - and he spends his life trying to discover what is just beyond his conscious understanding. I was much more enthralled by my story than by my essay on the Entente Cordiale. All I knew was that France held some part of me that could not be explained, not by the Channel Tunnel or the price of wine or either of the World Wars. 

23. I was officially what you might call a francophile and had work experience at Living France magazine. My Nan was dying and I was staying with them because the Living France magazine offices were just down the road from their house. We indulged in a lovely fiction featuring me as a real-life writer. I crept into bed with her every evening to tell her about my day. We were both thrilled when I was given a real assignment which was to be featured in the magazine, interviewing a gay couple who were renovating a chateau in Provence. As Nan read through the first draft, she scrunched her eyes and giggled in delight at the line “and thus, a long forgotten shade of peach was finally recovered”. I hadn’t intended it to be funny but it was a price I was willing to pay for her joy. On Friday, we set off a series of fireworks outside her bedroom window so that she could see them from her bed and her face shone like a flickering bulb, glowing that long-forgotten shade of peach. 

…

In the campsites in France these days, there are little wooden huts as well as plots for putting up tents. I love to be alone in French campsites - it’s a peculiar loneliness that relies on being surrounded by the cheerful chaos of young families and the smell of BBQ smoke but not being responsible for anyone. I open a small bottle of wine, shove a whole tomato into my mouth, I tear open the baguette and slice into a saucisson with my Opinel knife. I lay out my supper on a napkin on top of a stone table. The spinning of spokes on bicycle wheels, the noise of children, fade into the background and I cannot - in any language - describe how that peculiar loneliness is also a kind of ecstasy, a little death.

…