Faces on the Tip of my Tongue by Emmanuelle Pagano

Author:Emmanuelle Pagano [Emmanuelle Pagano]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781908670557
Publisher: Peirene Press
Published: 2019-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Seeing the therapist always reminded me of the moment I’d been most frightened in my whole life. That moment wasn’t the one with the fox. It wasn’t even in winter. It was a simple, summer fright, on a very hot day. The summer I turned six, a man picked me up in his car. He was looking for the police station and I knew where it was because my grandad was a policeman. I was in the village with Granny and had let go of her anxious hand. The man came up to me. I don’t know what came over me, but I suddenly forgot all the well-worn phrases that Granny, Mum and Dad used to recite about not talking to strangers. I’d never really known what a stranger was. I didn’t know what one would look like, how old he’d be, what sort of clothes he’d wear. So I wasn’t suspicious of this one because I didn’t know he was one. I got into his car with him so I could show him the way more easily, and I wasn’t scared until he suddenly jammed the brakes on in front of the police station and asked me to get out, just in case people thought … I looked at him and realized what could have happened. I started to panic as I undid my seat belt, and I ran all the way to my grandparents’ flat.

The therapist was looking for a link between the fox and the stranger. I thought he was stupid. It was he who was like the stranger: I didn’t know him but there I was, sitting just behind him. Every Friday I sat behind the stranger, every Friday I got out of the car at my mum’s house while the stranger sat at the wheel. He was a bad driver. It made my stomach churn. Ups and downs inside me. For a therapist, he wasn’t very good at analysing things. He kept saying that he wasn’t a stranger, that I did know him. And then in a different voice he would say that I still hadn’t told him anything about the fox. I never replied. He would ask if the fox was a symbol of fear and if I knew what a symbol was. I would just smile and then (and it was exactly like this, every Friday) he would start to talk about my parents, about their separation, and my rather wild, isolated life with my dad. The fox, the symbol and Dad. In that order. But the fox’s fear wasn’t my fear. It was the fox’s. The fox was afraid, not me. One day I’d really had enough and I suddenly asked him, right in the middle of telling the story of the summer I spent with Granny and Grandad when I was six, whether he’d noticed the roadside man. We’d just driven right past him. I asked if he’d seen him waiting for his dead to return, there on the bend, leaning against the safety barrier.

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