Page 1 of Vianne

After that I was done with New York. That had been her dream, not mine.

I spent our last dollars on a cheap flight to Marseille, and found myself three days later on a very different harbour front, looking out over the Mediterranean.

The heat was the same, but there was a breeze, and a scent of salt and ozone coming from the water.

I had the clothes I stood in and a single canvas travel bag, containing my papers, my wallet, a change of clothes, my mother’s ring and the little toiletries kit they hand out in economy class.

A battered pocket-sized map book of France and my mother’s Tarot cards in their sandalwood box.

I had barely five hundred francs, no family and nowhere to go.

The name on my passport said Sylviane Rochas. Time for a change of scenery.

My mother and I have always kept largely to the cities.

It’s easier to disappear in a city, she used to say.

Easier to be no one. Easier to pass unseen.

I never asked her why she longed so much for oblivion.

But cities are crowded; impersonal; filled with people passing through.

Cities are pockets to be picked; cheap hotels left without paying the bill; cheap food; second-hand clothes; no one asking questions.

A child alone in a city provokes no curiosity unless she is clearly in distress.

And I was a resourceful child who knew where to go; how to find things; how to source free food in markets; how to trade work for necessities.

But now, for the first time, I was truly alone.

My mother was gone, and so were her fears; the fear of staying too long in one place; of putting down roots; of the shadow.

Of the shadow most of all – the Man in Black that pursued us.

All gone now; all scattered into the breeze of the Hudson on that fourth of July. I was free.

Except it didn’t feel that way. Total freedom sometimes feels like a kind of paralysis.

So many choices. So many doors all clamouring to be opened.

But with every choice we make, so many more must be put aside.

Discarded futures, unknown friends; lives unlived and paths uncrossed.

My mother had always been the one who had decided where to go.

So many plans – and in the end, so little time to pursue them.

And here was I at twenty-one, with nothing but choices ahead of me.

I felt like something blown on the wind; disposable as litter.

That wind. Oh yes, I can feel it now. It changes its name as we always have: Tramontane ; Santa Ana ; Sirocco ; Levant ; Ostria , Mistral . I can feel it pulling me – to Italy, perhaps, or Spain; or along the coast to Montpellier, or inland, to Toulouse or Armagnac.

Which will it be, ’Viane, which will it be? Bordeaux, or Montpellier, or Nice? Rome, or Venice, or Milan? London, Oporto, Strasbourg, Berlin? But never a place we have been before. And never Paris. Never there.

I open the map book at random. Sometimes she used to do that, just to see what synchronicities might emerge.

Spread before me, the pages reveal a section of the river Ba?se, with a handful of little bastides clinging to it like leaves on a vine.

It is a part of France that I do not know well, but to which I have returned at last, as if almost by instinct.

One of the bastides has a woman’s name. Vianne .

I like the sound of that. It’s almost my name, but not quite; a name like a shoot growing out of a tree.

A sign, perhaps, of things to come. A place of reinvention.

It sounds like a good place to head for, at least until something better occurs.

Yes, maybe I will head for Vianne, and find myself along the way.

For now, though, there are the questions of where to sleep tonight; what to eat; how to find my place in this city where I am a stranger.

And there’s something else, too. A kind of space inside me.

Not grief – grief is not an absence. Grief is the weight of memories.

The things you did together that you now must do alone.

The knowledge that, even now, those memories are blurring like a chalked outline on a wall, and that soon – not today perhaps, but maybe next week, or next month, even next year – I will forget the shape of her face, the exact colour of her eyes.

I can see no trace of her when I look in the mirror. Only the shared things that come with a lifetime of companionship; the things that are etched on the body. Skin tanned by the same sun; the same laughter-lines around the eyes. We laughed a lot, my mother and I. I hope that my body remembers.

But there’s a space. It feels like a space.

Something waiting to be filled. A living potential, even in death; an echo of voices and laughter.

If I were alone, I would read the cards to find out what the feeling means.

The cards know better than you do , ’Viane .

Listen to what they have to say. And now, at noon, by the water’s edge, with the scent of diesel and salt and fried fish drifting over the harbour, it feels as if the answer is here, right here in the trembling air, waiting to reveal itself.

Looking up, I see a sky of perfect Virgin’s-mantle blue, except for a double contrail, scratched against the summer sky.

Its shape is almost like a rune, forking a path across the sky.

It seems to point to the top of the hill that dominates the old quarter of the city; a hill topped by a blunt, square tower, like a fortress, crowned in gold.

Sunlight heliographs from the tip. A cathedral?

Where there is gold in a city like this, it always seems to belong to the Church.

I know nothing about Marseille – though I will come to know it well – and so, for want of a better plan, I turn my face towards that gold splinter in the summer sky, and make my way up through the narrow streets, the many stumbling sets of stone steps, towards what I will soon come to know as Notre-Dame de la Garde, or to the locals, the Good Mother – Bonne Mère .

It feels like a long, long walk to the top.

There must be a thousand steps to climb, linking the many cobbled streets.

The cobbles are hot. I can feel them through the thin soles of my shoes.

My legs ache, and suddenly I feel close to tears.

I’ve felt that way a lot recently. I suppose it’s only natural.

My pregnancy is still in the very early stages, but I can already feel it.

Something has changed. No nausea, but a sense of something building, like the edge of a storm cloud.

I see serious trouble ahead. Not just because I am alone, or because I am too young, but because a child will anchor me.

A child will force me to put down roots.

I never learnt how to do that. She never allowed me to think that way.

We were creatures of the air, nourished on light, on rainwater.

The thought of responsibilities, of having possessions – even so much as a change of clothes – was dangerous. A precedent.

Stuff weighs you down , she used to say. It makes you think you’re special. It tells you that this piece of earth could be yours, instead of reminding you that we’re insects on the skin of the world, dancing on a volcano.

My mother talked like that a lot, especially in her last year, when the cancer had taken hold. We bought her medication from black-market sources in New York; strong opiates that dulled the pain, but which made her confused and volatile.

Why did I bring you? she used to say. Why did I think you could save me?

Of course, she wasn’t herself at those times.

But her changing moods had been a part of my earliest childhood.

I remember the good days; the laughter, her delight at the smallest of things; and on her bad days, her growing fear of the thing that shadowed her.

Later I came to understand. The Man in Black was a symbol of the future as well as the past. He was the reason we never stayed for more than a week or so anywhere; the reason she threw away my toys – the elephant, the old brown bear; Molfetta, dear Molfetta – whenever I got too attached.

He smells it on you , she used to say. He knows when you begin to care. The only way to escape him is not to rely on anything, not to believe in anyone.

I often wondered if that meant she would leave me behind some day.

Some days I almost wanted her to. This is my secret shame, the fact that I sometimes wanted my mother to leave me behind.

And now that I am soon to become a mother myself, I wonder if my child will ever think that of me, and dream of digging up the roots that I will have put down for her?

Because I already know that this child will be the centre of my world.

I feel that already, even though they are no more than a heartbeat.

Just as I know that they will need a place to grow away from me.

That’s what children do, ’Viane , my mother used to say to me. They learn to grow away from you. Your job is to love them. Theirs is to escape from you. And you have to let them go, because that’s what you owe to the universe.

That was the lesson I had to learn, she told me, with Molfetta.

Molfetta was a rabbit, the last and dearest of the toys of my early childhood.

She was a kind of grubby pink, with a piece of ribbon around her neck, and I kept her with me for years.

Even after I lost her, I whispered to her in the dark of innumerable motel rooms. I bathed her in the sinks of innumerable roadside cafés.

She smelt of whatever passed for home in the furtive life we led, and when I was eight, my mother left her on a bench by a railway in Syracuse, to teach me not to get attached. Because travelling light is easier.