My name is Michael Vignal. Michael, not Michel. My mother was French and my father English. Not that it matters. Countries are countries and as for my parents... well, their role in this story is crucial but brief: they gave life to my brother Louis and myself, and then they died.

My father was the first to go, back when we lived in England. I was still at nursery then, and can remember almost nothing about him. Not his voice, not his face — when I look at the photographs I see a stranger.

I do remember waving to him one morning from the sitting-room window. In the memory, he is in the front garden, though I can’t actually see him; only my hand, and my faint reflection in the glass, and, in a blur beyond this, the edge of the porch and some sparkling grass and a low grey sky. I can sense, but not see, my mother stood behind me, encouraging me to keep waving.

It might have been any morning, I suppose — my father was probably on his way to work — but I can’t help associating it with his death. He was killed on the first of April, the fool, when he accidentally ran his electric lawnmower over its cable.

I have only one other memory of our life in England. I remember staring at a distant patch of woodland, and the way it made me feel. I had no word for the feeling then, of course, but I suppose you might call it longing.

We lived in a suburban housing estate in the Midlands. Ours was a long street: two rows of detached modern houses with neatly trimmed grass verges laid out in front like placemats. Two hundred years earlier, it would have been part of a great forest, but now the only trees were pruned dwarfs, planted at regular intervals next to the road — little slave-trees, kept to remind all those managers and accountants and salespeople of the vast green wilderness crushed beneath their patios.

From our bedroom, though, if you stood on a chair and leaned on the windowsill and put your cheek to the glass and looked as far sideways as you could, the end of Commercial Drive was just visible. There, beyond a barbed-wire fence and a muddy field, was a forest.

My memory is of staring at it one dusk: the sun was setting over the treetops, turning them silver and gold, and I had to keep rubbing my condensed breath from the window-pane so I could see it properly. I felt sad and excited at the same time, and a little afraid, though I don’t know why.

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A few weeks after my father died, we moved to France — to stay with our mum’s elder sister, Aunt Celine.

This experience, too, is pretty much a blank. According to Louis, who was six at the time, we took the boat from Portsmouth and drove down through France, staying with various relatives en route, and reached St Argen in the late afternoon. He said Aunt Celine seemed different then — younger, kinder, less angry. He said the four of us went for a walk up the road to look at the Pyrenees, and then came back and ate dinner together. He said that our mother seemed happy. He said that was the night he and I made our pact to always speak English together when we were alone.

You can believe as much of that as you like. Personally, I give more credence to Aunt Celine’s recollections: that she asked me to choose a bunny rabbit from the hutches by the side of the house, and that, when the one I pointed to was picked up by its ears and killed with a single slap to the head, I cried. Our mother comforted me, but Aunt Celine just rolled her eyes and said, ‘He’ll learn.’

Seven months later our mother died. I have no memory of that either. According to Louis we were kept behind at school later than usual while her body was removed from the house. She had cut her wrists in the bath that morning, and our aunt found her when she got back from work. I didn’t discover that until much later, though; at the time Aunt Celine told us she had died of a broken heart.

When I look at the photographs of her, I get flickers: half-memories of her face hanging over mine, the softness of her voice and her skin. But I don’t know how much of that I truly remember, and how much I have stitched together from other people’s remarks. Everyone in St Argen remembers my mother. I have her eyes, they say.

Apparently I was inconsolable when she died, though the only emotion I remember feeling in later childhood was annoyance. It seemed a careless way to go, breaking something as important as a heart.

Aunt Celine claimed I was a normal, happy, outgoing child until then; only afterwards did I become sullen and withdrawn. I am sure she’s right — I did change at that age — but I’m not convinced it was because of our mother’s death. I suspect it had more to do with the clocks.

I had seen clocks before, of course, but I probably imagined they were just funny ornaments. It was not until I went to school that I fell under the spell of their ticking — under the universal tyranny of time.

Before you go to school — before you believe the lies that clocks tell — time is liquid and mysterious. Yesterday. Tomorrow. Eleven o’clock. These are only names, their meanings unguessable. I have a vague memory of seeing Yesterday as a man’s face, with a moustache and a hat, his features sharp and frowning. Tomorrow was a woman, turned half away, her eyes wide and agleam. Eleven o’clock was a jolly, mischievous little goat-boy in a green suit.

But when you go to school, time starts to freeze, to take those false shapes you will later know and hate. At school, you learn to obey the numbers; you learn to see the bars of your cage. Of course they may be imaginary bars — the cage may be an illusion — but that does not mean you¸ are not imprisoned by it. It is not what exists that matters, after all. It is what you believe exists.

And so, at some point during that purple-skied autumn when little Michael started school and little Michael’s mother slit her wrists, the dead skin of the happy child was shed, and I emerged.
Aunt Celine even gave me a new name to go with my new personality. She called me The Stranger.

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It is hard for me to recall The Stranger’s first memories. They are all not so much blurred as superimposed, one upon the next, hundreds of days the same: the same actions, the same sights, the same moods repeated ad nauseum (literally, on certain occasions). The prevalent mood I suppose you would call melancholy, though that sounds more poetic than it fel t at the time. How it felt, in retrospect, is deathlike. Or rather — and this really is a fate worse than death — the feeling of never having lived.

Luckily, I had a secret. I had found a way to escape this feeling, to escape between the ticks and leave time behind...

I daydreamed pretty much all the time as a child, but if I had to choose a single memory to capture how it felt, it would be of sitting at the kitchen table, staring at the slices of boiled carrot that I had removed from my stew. Of staring at but not seeing the carrot slices. Of hearing but not listening to Aunt Celine’s gothic threats (‘If you don’t eat your vegetables your skin will turn yellow and you’ll die’).

Of being in the kitche:n, with its brown and beige wall tiles, its dark-stained oak beams, its ever-burning wood stove, its ever-ticking wall-clock, and simultaneously of being in a parallel wonderland. Of the saucepans not squatting drearily on the hob but floating through space.

Of myself not sitting silently at the table, a fork suspended halfway to my mouth, but flying secretly, invisibly out of my body and through the window, across the yard, over the village, and away into the twilit woodland which I could see silhouetted beyond the reflection of the electric lamp in the glass.