For Blanche, it was a hangdog homecoming. Back in her parents’ house in a well-to-do clifftop village, filled with polished wood and British self-importance, her grand seduction by the world of Scherezade and the thousand and one nights seemed like a quick, ill-judged rub on a grubby lamp.
Her mother, Soraya’s grandmother, Nana, was warm and welcoming. Always at her finest when others were down, Nana swept in, majestic, statuesque, the very emblem of powerful personality, and dominated everything. Before she knew it Blanche was a child again, directed and cared for, fussed over and thoroughly bossed around. Always with a hat and gloves for formal occasions, always elegantly shod, Nana was a fine woman, an Aberdeen hospital midwife and ward sister in the war, a splendid woman, a force with which to be reckoned. She came from a long line of Scots landowners and academics; her grandfather had been a philanthropic scholar who had taught Greek and Latin to the children of the workers on his land, to give them a chance of betterment. She was proud, and snobbish. There was almost no situation she did not dominate.
The exceptions were the long nights with her husband, a former naval officer turned merchant sea captain, who would come ashore and drink and harangue her, force her body and denigrate her mind. She was unable to dominate that situation, or rather, perhaps it was because she so dominated him personally, with her wit, her intelligence, her superior birth, of which they were both so very conscious, that he drank himself into the courage to bully her.
Into that world Soraya was born; wriggly and giggly, with skin the colour of fresh cream, a huge shock of black, black hair, a birthmark like a bindi on her brow and big blue eyes that turned in a few days into peridot-green pools. And she was loved, immensely loved, by two women: by her mother, Blanche, through her acute pain, crying for her disappointing love, and by her grandmother through her longer, duller pain, hardened by her years of loneliness and submission to her husband’s bile. Nana found new purpose caring for this infant who had arrived like a changeling, dropped straight from the Arabian nights.
Blanche, on the other hand, would sit on her bed at night and weep, night after night, and long to die, and only looking into Soraya’s enquiring little face would bring her back. And when Soraya felt the distress around her, and cried, sleepless Blanche was one night so despairing that she had to lock her, warmly tucked in her Moses basket, in the garage to be sure not to harm her. From the first, Soraya was loved, adored, through tears of grief and loss, across the sharp edge of desperation. Thus, at the deepest, most granular level, she learned that her job was to try to repair everyone, to save everyone, even if she was never able to do it.
Sikander visited briefly, full of enthusiasm. He and Blanche took Soraya to a Sufi holy man, and he told them that her birthmark brought good fortune, that this was a blessed child who would have in life anything she wanted, if she wanted it enough. When Soraya had her first passport, she was noted as having “birthmark on brow”.
A few years later, carrying a cold-sore on her upper lip, Nana kissed Soraya plum in the middle of her forehead, on the place of the birthmark. Up flowered a cold sore there, bubbling up in Soraya’s tender skin, sprouting up again throughout her life every time she was run down, every time she let the sun shine on her face. During those times Soraya felt stigmatized, unclean. She didn’t get close to others. It was like a purdah. Sometimes Soraya wondered if that cruel sore was the outlet for the pain, the stress, the darkness that accumulated in her body, that it brought it outside her and purified her. She heard that a Sikh homeopath had said such a thing. But mostly she thought of it as a curse, thoughtlessly passed on to her in a gesture of love.
When Blanche’s father, the sea captain, came ashore and found Blanche and Soraya installed in his home, he was grudging but not hateful. Blanche was his favourite, and he was happy to have her back. But there was an awkwardness between them – it had been there since she was fifteen, and shopping with her father in the department store in Berwick. He had picked up a chiffon baby doll nighty from the rack, rather furtively, sexy and see-through, and told Blanche he would buy it for her if she let him see her wear it. She turned away, in shame, and relations between them cooled. She didn’t have to see him much, as he was usually at sea, and from then on that was how she liked it.
Having him around Soraya made Blanche uncomfortable for reasons she didn’t want to think about, but happily he gave her other reasons to reject him. When Soraya was nine months old she was playing on the floor with some wooden bricks. He watched her, screwing up his sharp, blue eyes, and told Blanche – “here she’s playing with toys, but if she were with her father’s family she’d be playing with cow dung on the street.”. Blanche’s lips pursed. She knew her daughter’s heritage was not cow dung on the street, and equally she knew her roast-beef-and-potatoes father would never understand it. Already, she was fighting for her little girl, with her faraway culture, her creamy skin and her lost fatherland, defending a country that had not been kind.
When next the sea captain packed his trunk and sailed away, Blanche went to her mother and told her:
“I’m going. I’m taking Soraya, and I’m leaving. I’m going back to Oxford. I’ll get work. If you want to get out, if you want to come with me, mother, this is your chance”.
This was the second journey. Together they packed up their belongings in their Ford car, with the baby and the collie dog, turning away from all they had inherited and collected, and off they went, in the night, with a few pieces of jewellery and a child’s blue plastic potty, silently, and never came back.
The sea captain sought them high and low. When he rang Nana’s sister, and threatened her, she stood firm, trembling as Blanche and Nana listened like ghosts beside her. When Soraya learned of his real death, years later, learned of all the hiding from him, she began to muse on the fact that her family was not as she had thought.
Stories sink into you like the food that builds your bones, like the faces of those who bring you up. They become part of the architecture of your mind, the furniture of your sense of self. Soraya learned these stories can be fictions, that her earliest years had been built on excuses, on make-believe. She realised that the lies of others can form part of the fabric of your being - your memories, the building blocks of your personality - that growing up in a fiction makes that fiction into your own reality.
But it was her family’s fictions, her family’s lies, and they created her, just as they had given their DNA and blood and bones to create her. They gave their lies lovingly, like the kiss that covered Soraya’s birthmark with a sore. Soraya lived with both on her brow- the poison of the sore, and the lucky charm of her birthmark. The harm and the beautiful lie. Both branded together on one cream-skinned girl.