Читать книгу Undressing Emmanuelle: A memoir - Sylvia Kristel - Страница 10

6

I love my little sister. I’m glad she’s here, life isn’t as cold. My mother finds it amusing to tell how when I was two years old she found me trying to strangle baby Marianne. That story doesn’t make me laugh. I was jealous, it seems. Strangle Marianne? No, I would miss her. I prefer to pull her ear or pinch her chubby cheeks, not really hurting her, just reminding her firmly that I’m the eldest, the strongest, that we are here for each other.

We don’t hug in my family. Physical contact is reduced to a minimum. Touching would be letting the body express its tenderness, and what’s the point of that? Work, bustle and distance act as a substitute for everything.

‘Do you have to touch each other to make babies?’ I ask, curious.

My mother is embarrassed and tells me her cabbage-patch theory. Aunt Mary cracks up. How strange, I think to myself.

Tonight the hotel has lapsed into its night-time silence. I can’t sleep and I am listening out for the slightest sound, the potential movement of the china doorknob. I’m watching for my mother’s exhausted face, for it to come round the door and ask us to leave our room, whatever the time and the depth of my sister’s sleep, to go even higher, even further, into a space so small we can hardly fit, so small there could be no smaller space. We would be invisible, forgotten forever.

This childhood moving of rooms orchestrated by my mother, these nocturnal migrations to make way for strangers for the sake of a few extra florins, leave me with a deep conviction that sometimes eats into me beneath my calm façade: I’m in the way, too much, cheap, cut-price. I wander from room to room.