From the Ashes

This is a creative nonfiction piece of writing from my time in Paris that explores PTSD, the importance of reading, and refers to child sexual abuse. Please take care of yourself, should you find reading this triggering.

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I am going to Shakespeare & Co and will look at every book.

It is my treat after making the journey to France to speak about poetry and trauma at Sorbonne University. It has been intense deciding what to say, saying it, and listening to people’s responses. I am changed by the experience. I know it but I can’t articulate what is different. It bothers me, this inarticulation.

Going to Shakespeare & Co, this iconic bookstore, is the thing I have held onto as my reward. It is the thing that will soothe this vulnerability, that will answer the question of whether I am only my trauma.

So much of me is trauma.

Some days the PTSD dominates, my stomach churning with anxiety while my head is ready to burst with anger. At night my sleep reflects the level of PTSD I am experiencing—night terrors the epitome of fear—but, as I have healed, my nights have settled into unrest, ill-defined angst, and unspecific, low-level fear. It’s getting better. I have mostly slept well here in Paris, an unexpected relief, but then, I feel oddly safe in our little apartment, walking each day, as we do, to the university.

Even with the social unrest happening beyond our life here in the Latin Quarter, I feel settled. Calm. Although everything is a challenge—using the Metro, ordering food, managing myself—and I am growing tired of the constant problem-solving, I am sleeping as much as the jetlag allows. The only startle I have had was a natural response to a workman banging an iron support with a sledgehammer as we walked past. Surely even the most well of people would have jumped at that. My friend did, and I don’t think she has PTSD. She might—we PTSDers tend to be private about it.

I was nervous presenting, but it is done now, and nearly my turn in this iconic bookstore.

The day is warm and the line not too long. We have come at just the right time. I always knew we would.

I breathe in the knowledge that I am going to find myself in this place. I am not always confident about what I know or think but I am this time. There are books waiting for me. Books that know I am coming. Books that will call to me, present themselves, and climb into my arms. Books that are mine already, simply waiting for me to find them.

It is my turn.

I step into this transcendent space. A place of becoming. A place of knowing. This place where others who love words like I do have come and read and written. I steady myself, overwhelmed as I am by the enormity of the moment, by the bliss and the promise.

Moving slowly, I run my fingertips over the fresh spines, asking, are you mine? Most books lean away. No. Some lean in. Yes, we’ve been waiting for you. I pick them up. Open them. Admire the font. Feel the paper. Hold them in my arms. Hug them to my heart.

It is all part of what it means to read. Each book, as it is read, becomes an extension of the person reading. Identity is fluid, encompassing not only the person’s body but all the body engages with. Even the act of picking up a book makes it temporarily mine. They wriggle and resist, those that are not part of me, and I gently put them back, returning them to the shelf, making sure not to crease the cover or damage the pages. Excusez-moi, I say and politely move on.

The number of books in my arms has grown and I am almost ready to carry them upstairs to the reading room. I have heard about the reading room, a space with old books that may be taken down and read, while sitting in this sacred space. I have decided: I will sit awhile and pay homage to all things literary, before purchasing all that belongs to me, but not yet. There is one more section here on the ground floor to view and room for one or two more books in my aching arms.

It is the fiction section. I make a face, I am not here for fiction—I am here for philosophy and poetry and travel and literary greats—still, this is Shakespeare & Co, a place full of treasure, even in the fiction section.

I Capture the Castle.

My breath catches.

Unwanted tears fill my eyes.

Here on this shelf in front of me in this bookshop is the book that changed my life.

Time collapses.

I am eleven years old again.

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‘Do you want this?’

My mother has been helping the Wife of the man she is having an affair with clear clutter. The blue hardcover book is thick and looks too hard for me, but I don’t hesitate. Books are a treasure, and I want this one, even though I don’t know the title or anything about it or even if I will like it. I want it.

My mother has noticed me, remembered that I like books, thought to offer it to me before throwing it out. It is nice of her. Not as nice as being smiled at or hugged or listened to, but almost. I’ll take what I can get, and books are a wonderful thing to have. It makes all of those other missing things not matter so much.

The tidy-up has happened just before my mother is to leave with the Husband to go to work with him at his knackery. It is early summer and the dead cows on the back of the truck are starting to smell. The blowflies are making noise. Soon they will lay their eggs. The beasts need to be processed and put in the cool room before the day gets any hotter, before the rot really sets in.

It has been the pattern of my life to come here to Their house after school, on weekends and holidays. I wait for my mother to return from the knackery and take me home. Each time she leaves, I am enveloped by sadness knowing she won’t return for at least six, maybe even eight, or ten hours, if it is really bad. I have worked it out: it takes an hour to drive into the hills where the knackery is, an hour to do each cow, more if there is a bull—they are bigger—and then an hour to drive home. And maybe some time to have something to eat and a cup of coffee, and other things I don’t let my mind dwell on.

Even knowing how long I must wait and counting down until her return, the days drag here at Their house. The Wife and the Sons—all of them older than me—are angry that I am here. They wait until the Husband is gone before taking their rage out on me. My days are dangerous. I have been chased, hunted, and cornered like Piggy from Lord of the Flies. Death is inevitable in this place—it is a lawless place full of angry boys.

But now I have a book.

My aunt sends me a book every Christmas and birthday, but she writes my name wrong—Chelle. I forgive her because she can be trusted each year to get me an almanac that has both stories and dot-to-dot pictures in it. I have learned to leave things like this at home, safely away from the questions, the comments. They tell me, ‘Michelle’s your name—can’t even get that right.’ I keep silent. My mother only ever calls me Shell, like the seashell. I know that this confusion over my name has to do with my father. I found my birth certificate in my mother’s private dresser draw and discovered that the name my mother uses for me is wrong in two ways. I have my father’s last name. They don’t need to know. No one does. My father is a mythical creature that matters only to me. My mother pretends he never existed. She has given me her name, even though it isn’t legal.

Now I have this book I must find somewhere safe to read.

I am not allowed in Their house during the day, unless my mother is there and only then to speak to her. When she is not there, I can only come in once it is dark and dinner has been called as being ready. Then, I am only allowed to sit on the one chair in the lounge room, behind the couch away from the fire, and I am not allowed to tuck my feet under me on the chair, that is ‘putting my feet on the furniture’. It isn’t allowed. In winter it is so cold that I entwine my legs like a rope. They wrap around each other several times, given that I am skinny and quite bendy.

I don’t want to be inside reading anyway. The Wife hates me and mostly just swears at me. She tells me my mother let other people raise me and tells her sons that I am a bastard, explaining to them that that it is someone whose parents didn’t have the decency to get married before having a child. Somehow my parents’ actions have become my shame.  

But I don’t want to be too far from the house to read, either. It isn’t safe.

There is a wide path to the kitchen door where everyone comes and goes. I want to be able to see who is here, just in case my mother comes back and doesn’t tell me. It is important, though, not to be overly visible. Anyone seeing that I am enjoying a book will take it from me or, worse, force me to go somewhere with them. So the place can’t be too private either and I don’t want to have to be on the lookout for anyone who might sneak up on me, who might grab me from behind, covering my mouth and nose with their hand.

In the neglected garden, beyond the house, along the path to the toilet, grows an old plum tree. It’s away from the door, but not too far that I can’t see what is going on. The fence immediately behind it has the supports on the inside, so cannot be climbed from the other side. There is a flat bit of ground at the base of the tree, on the side hidden from the door. I can sit unseen and mostly safe. Yes, there will be the people walking past going to the toilet, but I can manage that. I know how to say hello to visitors and how to keep my eyes down when it is those who live here.

Sitting in my new spot, the tree offers another unanticipated benefit. It is cool. Even in the middle of the day, the shade holds back the baking sun. I had hoped to avoid going to the river this summer and this will help. Sitting here, they may forget that I am even at Their house and not include me.

I open the book.

It begins: ‘I write this sitting in the kitchen sink’.

I stop.

I have never heard of anyone else sitting in a kitchen sink, ever. Our house is on tank water, and, until I grew too big, I washed in the kitchen sink, unless it was Sunday night when my mother washed my hair in the bath. Normally, I washed in the kitchen sink, sitting on a folded towel on the draining board, shivering as I hugged my knees to my chest, the stainless-steel ridges digging into my bare bottom.

My heart expands with affection for Cassandra who explains, ‘I have found that sitting in a place where you have never sat before can be inspiring’. The shame I feel about washing in the kitchen sink loosens a little. Perhaps it was a bit inspiring, sitting in the sink. Perhaps, like Cassandra, I can see my life differently. Perhaps it allows me to see things in a new way, to understand things better. Like the day a strange man came to steal me away and I climbed up onto the sink to look out the window, only to see my mother waving the axe around and shouting something I couldn’t quite hear. He didn’t stay.

I feel it then. The call to write it all down.

I resolve to get myself a notebook and capture this life of mine. Cassandra makes things sound normal and maybe even a little bit wonderful. She lives in a castle, after all. She makes me feel better, holding up a mirror so I can see that I, too, want to ‘let the words flow out of me’, that I will feel better if I can just say the things that need to be said. This belief buries itself deep into who I am.

The reading is slow going.

I am in over my head, so Cassandra takes her time telling me her story, and I am glad. Each day my mother brings me here and leaves, I go to my place behind the tree. It soothes me to put my own world aside and spend time with Cassandra.

In her world, I learn that I am ‘too old to believe in fairy tales’ and I am. For, just like Cassandra, ‘I know all about the facts of life. And I don’t think much of them’.

My body is about to change.

One of the Sons sees it too and has started checking for hair down there and under my arms. I feel afraid in a new way. Up until now being a bastard has protected me. They have done things to me but stopped before the very worst. I know in my bones that once I have a woman’s body, they will not care that I am a bastard. Soon nothing will protect me.  

I cling to Cassandra.

Maybe she will tell me what to do, but her life, difficult as it is, is not my life. When Cassandra walks in the darkness with her father, he is cheerful. When I walk in the darkness with my mother it is because we have stayed at Their house late into the night and my mother has not thought to bring a torch to light the way from the car down the hill to our house. I am frightened enough to say so, and she instructs me to hold onto her coattail. There is no fondness, no reassurance, just annoyance that I cannot see and am afraid. Still, there is just enough of a scrap of kindness in the act of offering her coattail that I take comfort from it and hold tight.

I want Cassandra’s life.

I want so very much to be far away in a castle.

But I am here, and worried now about something Cassandra has said about kissing Simon: ‘Then I wondered if he had thought I expected it, if I had somehow invited a kiss’ (p. 381). I wondered at the things that have happened to me, have been done to me. Did I invited those things? Some of them felt nice, wrong, but nice. Cassandra voices my feelings: ‘That made me want to die of shame…’.

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In the bookstore, my cheeks flush with shame.

Still.

After years of therapy.

I take a deep breath and add I Capture the Castle to the pile of books in my arms. I blink away the tears. This is the first time since I was eleven that I have seen this book.

It’s time to go to the reading room. I climb the narrow stairs.

It is warmer again up here and busier than I expect. I take a seat near the open window hoping to catch a breeze, and look out, breathing deep regular breaths as I gather myself back together.

Things weren’t perfect for Cassandra. She was confused and impulsive and spontaneous, and made mistakes, but she also stayed true to herself.

She chooses not to go with Simon to America even though she loves him, even though part of her wants to. Still, she chooses what is right for her. She allows logic to speak into emotion. At the end of the summer, when I finished the book, I choose what is right for me.

I refuse to go back, declaring that I am fine to stay home by myself. My mother berates, bullies, and denigrates me in an attempt to make me love them like she does. She is confused and hurt.

I stubbornly hold my ground. She cannot force me to go there again.

I know that if I tell her the truth, if I try to explain what is happening, she won’t believe me. She loves them all too much and me, too little.

I step into my power—borrowed from Cassandra.

Now that I can keep myself safe, I do.

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Through the open window, framed by vines and red geraniums, stands Notre Dame Cathedral. She did nothing to deserve being burned when fire took hold in 2019, and when the fire could be stopped, it was. As the restoration work progresses, under the ashes, new frescoes are being discovered.

Surrounded by scaffolding, she rises again.

She is both the past and the future, who she was and who she is becoming.

I am, too.