The Lollipop Shoes (17 page)

Yanne handed her a macaroon.

I said, ‘The home-made chocolates have all sold out.’

‘I know.’ She grinned. ‘Now I suppose I’ll have to make some more.’

‘I’ll help, if you like. Give you a break.’

She paused at that. Seemed to consider it, as if it were something much more than simple chocolate-making.

‘I promise you, I’m a fast learner.’

Of course I am. I’ve had to be. When you have had a mother like mine, you either learn fast or you don’t survive. An inner-city London school, fresh from the ravages of the comprehensive system and packed with
thugs, immigrants and the damned. That was my training ground – and I learnt fast.

My mother had tried to teach me at home. By the time I was ten, I could read, write and do the double lotus. But then the Social Services got involved; pointed out Mother’s lack of qualifications, and I was packed off to St Michael’s-on-the-Green, a pit of roughly two thousand souls, which swallowed me up in less than no time.

My System was still in its infancy then. I had no defences; I wore green velvet dungarees with appliquéd dolphins on the pockets, and a turquoise headband to align my chakras. My mother picked me up at the school gates; on the first day, a small crowd gathered to watch. On the second, someone threw a stone.

Hard to imagine that kind of thing now. It happens, though – and for far less. It happened here, at Annie’s school – and for nothing more than a headscarf or two. Wild birds will kill exotic ones: the budgies and the love-birds and the yellow canaries – escaped from their cages, hoping to get a taste of the sky – usually end up back on the ground, plucked raw by their more conformist cousins.

It was inevitable. For the first six months I cried myself to sleep. I begged to be sent to some other school. I ran away; I was brought back; I prayed fervently to Jesus, Osiris and Quetzalcoatl to save me from the demons of St Michael’s-on-the-Green.

Unsurprisingly, nothing worked. I tried to adapt: changed my dungarees for jeans and a T-shirt, took up smoking, hung out with the crowd, but it was already too late. The bar had been set. Every school needs its freak; and for the next five years or so, I was it.

It was then that I could have used someone like Zozie de l’Alba. What use was my mother, that second-rate, patchouli-scented wannabe witch, with all her crystals and dreamcatchers and glib talk of karma? I didn’t care about karmic retribution. I wanted my retribution to be
real
: for my tormentors to be laid low, not later, not in some future lifetime, but paid back in full, in blood and in the present.

And so I studied, and studied hard. I made up my own curriculum from the books and pamphlets in Mother’s shop. The result was my System, every piece honed and refined and stored and practised with only one objective in mind.

Revenge.

I don’t suppose you’ll remember the case. It made the news at the time, of course; but there are so many similar stories now. Tales of perennial losers armed with handguns and crossbows, blowing themselves into high school legend in a single bloody, glorious, suicidal spree.

That wasn’t me at all, of course. Butch and Sundance were no heroes of mine. I was a survivor: a scarred veteran of five long years of bullying, name-calling, punching, thumping, taunting, pinching, vandalism and petty theft, the subject of much spiteful locker-room graffiti and a perpetual target for everyone.

In short, I was It.

But I bided my time. I studied and learnt. My curriculum was unorthodox, some might say profane, but I was always top of the class. My mother knew little about my research. If she had, she would have been appalled. Interventionist magic, as she liked to call it, was the very antithesis of her belief, and she held a number of quaint
theories, promising cosmic retribution on those who dared to act for themselves.

Ah, well. I dared. And when at last I was ready, I went through St Michael’s-on-the-Green like a December wind. My mother never guessed the half of it – which was probably a good thing, as I’m sure she would have disapproved. But I’d made it. I was just sixteen, and I had passed the only exam that mattered.

Annie, of course, has a way to go. But with time, I hope to make something rather special of her.

And so, Annie. About that revenge.

5

Monday, 19th November

TODAY SUZE CAME
to school with her head in a scarf. Apparently the hairdresser, instead of giving her highlights, has made her hair fall out in clumps. Some reaction to the peroxide, the hairdresser says – Suze told her she’d had it before, but she lied, and now the hairdresser says it isn’t
her
fault, that Suzanne’s hair was already damaged by all the ironing and straightening she’s done to it, and that if Suzanne had told her the truth in the first place, she would have used another solution and none of this would have happened.

Suzanne says her mother’s going to sue the company for distress and emotional trauma.

I think it’s hilarious.

I know I shouldn’t – Suzanne’s a friend. Although perhaps she isn’t – not quite. A friend stands up for you when you’re in trouble, and never goes along when someone’s being mean.
Friends put out
, is what Zozie says. With real friends, you’re never It.

I’ve been talking to Zozie a lot lately. She knows what it’s like to be my age, and to be different. Her mother had a shop, she says. Some people didn’t like it much, and once, someone even tried to set it on fire.

‘A bit like what happened to us,’ I said, and then I had to tell her the rest, about how we blew into the village of Lansquenet-sous-Tannes at the beginning of Lent, and set up our chocolate shop right in front of the church, and about the curé who hated us, and all our friends, and the river people, and Roux, and Armande who died just the way she had lived, with no regrets and no goodbyes and with the taste of chocolate in her mouth.

I don’t suppose I should have told her all that. But it’s quite hard not to, with Zozie. And anyway, she works for us. She’s on our side. She understands.

‘I hated school,’ she told me yesterday. ‘I hated the kids and the teachers too. All those people who thought I was a freak, and who wouldn’t sit with me because of the herbs and stuff Mum used to put into my pockets. Asafoetida –
God
, that’s rank – and patchouli because it’s supposed to be spiritual, and dragon’s blood, that gets everywhere and leaves these red stains— And so the other kids used to laugh at me, and say I’d got nits, and say I smelt. And even the teachers got drawn in, and one woman – Mrs Fuller, she was called – gave me a talk about personal hygiene . . .’

‘That’s rotten!’

She grinned. ‘I paid them back.’

‘How?’

‘Another time, perhaps. The point is, Nanou, that for a long time I thought it was my fault. That I really
was
a freak, and I’d never amount to anything.’

‘But you’re so clever – and besides, you’re gorgeous.’

‘I didn’t feel clever or gorgeous then. I never felt good enough, or clean enough, or nice enough for them. I never bothered to do any work. I just assumed everyone was better than me. I talked to Mindy all the time—’

‘Your invisible friend—’

‘And of course, people laughed. Though by then it hardly mattered what I did. They’d have laughed at me anyway.’

She stopped talking, and I looked at her, trying to imagine her in those days. Trying to imagine her without her confidence, her beauty, her style . . .

‘The thing about beauty,’ Zozie said, ‘is that actually it doesn’t have much to do with looks at all. It’s not about the colour of your hair, or your size, or your shape. It’s all in
here
.’ She tapped her head. ‘It’s how you walk, and talk, and think – and whether you walk about like
this
—’

And then suddenly she did something that really startled me.
She changed her face.
Not like
pulling
a face, or anything; but her shoulders slumped, and she turned her eyes away, and her mouth drooped somehow, and she made her hair into a limp kind of curtain, and suddenly she was someone else, someone else in Zozie’s clothes, not
ugly
, not quite, but someone you wouldn’t turn round to see twice, someone you’d forget as soon as they’d gone.

‘—or like
this
,’ she said, and she shook her hair and straightened up and just like that she was Zozie again, brilliant Zozie with her jingling bangles and her black-and-yellow peasant skirt and her pink-streaked hair and bright-yellow patent platform shoes that would have just looked weird on anyone else, but on Zozie they looked
terrific, because she was Zozie, and everything does.

‘Wow,’ I said. ‘Could you teach me that?’

‘I just did,’ she said, laughing.

‘It looked like – magic,’ I said, and blushed.

‘Well, most magic really
is
that simple,’ said Zozie matter-of-factly, and if anyone else had said it I might have thought they were making fun of me, but not Zozie. Not her.

‘There’s no such thing as magic,’ I said.

‘Then call it something else.’ She shrugged. ‘Call it attitude, if you like. Call it charisma, or chutzpah, or glamour, or charm. Because basically it’s just about standing straight, looking people in the eye, shooting them a killer smile and saying,
fuck off, I’m fabulous
.’

I laughed at that, and not just because Zozie had said the f-word. ‘I wish I could do that,’ I said.

‘Try it,’ said Zozie. ‘You might be surprised.’

Of course I was lucky. Today was exceptional. Even Zozie couldn’t have known. But I did feel different, somehow; more alive, as if the wind had changed.

First there was Zozie’s whole attitude thing. I’d promised her I’d try it, and so I did, feeling just a bit self-conscious this morning with my hair just washed and a little of Zozie’s rose perfume on, as I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror and practised my killer smile.

I have to say, it didn’t look bad. Not perfect, of course, but really, it makes a world of difference if you stand up straight and say the words (even if it’s only in your head).

I
looked
different, too: more like Zozie; more like the type of person who might swear in an English tea-shop and not give a damn.

It isn’t magic
, I told myself in my shadow-voice. From
the corner of my eye I could see Pantoufle, looking slightly disapproving, I thought, his nose going up and down.

‘It’s all right, Pantoufle,’ I said softly. ‘It isn’t magic. It’s allowed.’

Then there was Suze and the headscarf, of course. I hear she’s going to have to wear the scarf until her hair grows out, and it’s not a good look for Suzanne at all. She looks like an angry bowling ball. Plus people have started going
Allah Akhbar
when she walks past, and Chantal laughed, and Suze was upset, and now they’ve fallen out completely.

So then Chantal spent all lunchtime with her other friends, and Suze came to complain and to cry on my shoulder, but I suppose I wasn’t feeling too sympathetic just then, and besides, I was with someone else.

Which brings me to the third thing.

It happened this morning, during Break. The others were playing the tennis-ball game, except for Jean-Loup Rimbault, who was reading as usual, and a few loners (the Muslim girls, mostly) who never play at anything.

Chantal was bouncing the ball to Lucie, and when I came in, she said –
Annie’s It!
– and then everyone was laughing and throwing the ball across the room to each other and shouting –
Jump! Jump!

Another day I might have joined in. It’s a game, after all, and it’s better to be It than to be left out altogether. But today I’d been practising Zozie’s attitude.

And I thought:
what would she do?
And I knew straight away that Zozie would rather die than be It.

Chantal was still shouting, ‘Jump, Annie, jump!’ as if I
were a dog, and for a second I just looked at her, as if I’d never seen her properly before.

I used to think she was pretty, you know. She ought to be; she spends enough time on her appearance. But today I could see her colours, too, and Suzanne’s; and it was so long since I’d seen them that I couldn’t help staring now at how
ugly
– how really ugly – both of them were.

The others must have seen something, too, because Suze dropped the ball and no one picked it up. Instead I sensed them forming a circle, as if there was a fight in the air, or something extra-special to see.

Chantal didn’t like me staring at all. ‘What’s wrong with
you
today?’ she said. ‘Don’t you know it’s rude to stare?’

I just smiled and kept on staring.

Behind her, I saw Jean-Loup Rimbault look up from the book he was reading. Mathilde was watching too, her mouth open just a little bit; and Faridah and Sabine had stopped talking in their corner, and Claude was smiling, just a bit, the way you do when it’s raining and the sun comes out unexpectedly for just a second.

Chantal gave me one of her sneery looks. ‘
Some
of us can afford to get a
life
. I guess
you
just have to make your
own
entertainment.’