The Lollipop Shoes (19 page)

Seconds passed. For a time I could not take my eyes away from that sign – the neat blue letters, that name. My name. Of course it was a coincidence: what else could it be? I gave her the brightest smile I could. ‘It’s lovely,’ I said.

She sighed. ‘You know, I was starting to worry.’

And she gave me a smile and tripped over the threshold – which, by some trick of the sun or the new colour-scheme, now seemed almost luminous – leaving me craning my neck at a sign that read, in Zozie’s neat, cursive script:

Le Rocher de Montmartre

Chocolat

P
ART
F
OUR

Change

1

Tuesday, 20th November

SO NOW I’M
officially best friends with Jean-Loup. Suzanne was away today, so I didn’t get to see her face, but Chantal made up for both of them, looking really quite ugly all day long, and pretending not to look at me while all her friends just stared and whispered.

‘So are you going out with him?’ said Sandrine in Chemistry. I used to like Sandrine – a bit – before she fell in with Chantal and the rest. Her eyes were round as marbles and I could see the eagerness in her colours as she kept saying, ‘Have you kissed him yet?’

If I’d really wanted to be popular, then I suppose I’d have said yes. But I don’t need to be popular. I’d rather be a freak than a clone. And Jean-Loup, for all his popularity with the girls, is nearly as much of a freak as I am, with his films and his books and his cameras.

‘No, we’re just friends,’ I told Sandrine.

She gave me a look. ‘Well,
don’t
tell me, then.’ And stomped off in a sulk to rejoin Chantal, and whispered
and giggled and watched us all day, while Jean-Loup and I talked about all sorts of things and took pictures of them staring at us.

I think the word is
puerile
, Sandrine. We’re just friends, like I said, and Chantal and Sandrine and Suze and the others can just fuck off – we’re fabulous.

Today after school we went to the cemetery together. It’s one of my favourite places in Paris, and Jean-Loup says it’s one of his, too. Montmartre cemetery, with all its little houses and monuments and pointy-roofed chapels and skinny obelisks and streets and squares and alleys and flatblocks for the dead.

There’s a word for it –
necropolis
. City of the dead. And it
is
a city; those tombs could almost be houses, I think, lined up side-by-side with their little gates neatly closed, and their gravel neatly raked, and flower-boxes in their mullioned windows. Neat little houses all the same, like a mini-suburbia for the dead. The thought made me shiver and laugh at the same time, and Jean-Loup looked up from his camera and asked me why.

‘You could almost live down here,’ I said. ‘A sleeping bag and a pillow – a fire – some food. You could hide away in one of these monuments. No one would know. The doors all shut. Warmer than sleeping under a bridge.’

He grinned. ‘You ever slept under a bridge?’

Well, of course I had – once or twice – but I didn’t want to tell him that. ‘No, but I’ve got a good imagination.’

‘You wouldn’t be scared?’

‘Why should I?’ I said.

‘The ghosts . . .’

I shrugged. ‘They’re only ghosts.’

A feral cat strolled out from one of the narrow stone
lanes. Jean-Loup snapped it with his camera. The cat hissed and went skittering off between the tombs. Probably saw Pantoufle, I thought; cats and dogs are sometimes afraid of him, as if they know he shouldn’t be there.

‘One day I’m going to see a ghost. That’s why I bring my camera here.’

I looked at him. His eyes were bright. He really believes – and he cares, too, which is what I like so much about him. I hate it when people don’t care; when they move through life without caring or believing in anything.

‘You’re really not scared of ghosts?’ he said.

Well, when you’ve seen them as often as I have, you tend not to worry about that kind of thing – but I wasn’t going to tell Jean-Loup
that
, either. His mother’s quite the Catholic. She believes in the
Holy
Ghost. And exorcisms. And communion wine turning into blood – I mean, how gross is that? And always having fish on Friday. Oh, boy. Sometimes I think I’m a ghost myself. A walking, talking, breathing ghost.

‘The dead don’t do anything. That’s why they’re here. That’s why the little doors in these chapel-of-rest places don’t have handles on the inside.’

‘And dying?’ he said. ‘Are you scared of that?’

I shrugged. ‘I guess. Isn’t everyone?’

He kicked a stone. ‘Not everyone knows what it’s like,’ he said.

I was curious. ‘So what
is
it like?’

‘Dying?’ He shrugged. ‘Well, there’s this corridor of light. And you see all your dead friends and relatives waiting for you. And they’re all smiling. And at the end of the corridor there’s a bright light, really bright and –
holy
, I
guess, and it talks to you, and it says you have to go back to your life now, but not to worry, because you’ll be back one day and go into the light with all your friends and . . .’ He stopped. ‘Well, that’s what my mum thinks, anyway. That’s what I told her I saw.’

I looked at him. ‘What
did
you see?’

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Nothing at all.’

There was a silence, as Jean-Loup looked through his viewfinder at the avenues of the cemetery with all their dead.
Ping
went the camera as he pressed the switch.

‘Wouldn’t it be a joke,’ he said, ‘if all of this was for nothing?’
Ping
. ‘What if there’s no heaven after all?’
Ping
. ‘What if all those people are just
rotting
?’

His voice had got quite loud by then, and some birds that had been perching on one of the tombs went off in a sudden clap of wings.

‘They tell you they know it all,’ he said. ‘But they don’t. They lie. They always lie.’

‘Not always,’ I said. ‘Maman doesn’t lie.’

He looked at me in a funny way, as if he were much, much older than me, with a wisdom born of years of pain and disappointment.

‘She will,’ he said. ‘They always do.’

2

Tuesday, 20th November

ANOUK BROUGHT IN
her new friend today. Jean-Loup Rimbault; a nice-looking boy a little older than she is, with an old-fashioned politeness that sets him apart. Today he came over directly from school – he lives on the other side of the Butte – and instead of going out straight away, sat in the shop for half an hour, talking to Anouk over biscuits and mocha.

It’s good to see Anouk with a friend, although the pang it causes me is no less strong for being irrational. Pages of a lost book.
Anouk at thirteen
, the silent voice whispers;
Anouk at sixteen, like a kite on the wind . . . Anouk at twenty, thirty and more
—

‘A chocolate, Jean-Loup? On the house.’

Jean-Loup. Not quite a usual name. Not quite a usual boy, either, with that dark, measuring look he shows to the world. His parents are divorced, I hear; he lives with his mother and sees his father three times a year. His favourite chocolate is bitter almond crisp – rather an adult
taste, I thought; but then he is a curiously adult and self-possessed young man. His habit of watching everything through the viewfinder of his camera is slightly disconcerting; it’s as if he is trying to distance himself from the world outside, to find in the tiny digital screen a simpler, sweeter reality.

‘What’s that picture you’ve just taken?’

Obediently, he showed me. At first sight it looked like an abstract; a dazzle of colours and geometric shapes. Then I saw it: Zozie’s shoes, shot at eye level, deliberately out of focus among a kaleidoscope of foil-wrapped chocolates.

‘I like it,’ I said. ‘What’s that in the corner?’ It looked as if something outside the frame had cast a shadow into the picture.

He shrugged. ‘Maybe someone was standing too close.’ He levelled his camera at Zozie, standing behind the counter with a mass of coloured ribbons in her hands. ‘That’s nice,’ he said.

‘I’d rather not.’ She didn’t look up, but her voice was sharp.

Jean-Loup faltered. ‘I was just—’

‘I know.’ She smiled at him and he relaxed. ‘I just don’t like being photographed. I find I rarely look like myself.’

Now
that
, I thought, I could understand. But the sudden glimpse of insecurity – and in Zozie, of all people, whose cheery approach to everything makes any task look effortless – made me a little uneasy, and I began to wonder if I wasn’t relying too heavily on my friend, who must have her own problems and concerns, like everyone else.

Well, if she does, she is hiding them well; learning fast, and with an ease that has surprised us both. She comes in
at eight every day, just as Anouk leaves for school, and spends the hour before opening-time watching as I demonstrate the various chocolate-making techniques.

She knows how to temper couverture; how to gauge the different blends; how to measure the temperatures and to keep them constant; how to achieve the best kind of gloss; how to pipe decorations on to a moulded figure or make chocolate curls with a potato peeler.

She has a knack, as my mother would have said. But her real skill is with our customers. I’d noticed it before, of course: her knack for dealing with different people; her memory for names; the infectious nature of her smile and the way she manages to make everyone feel special – however crowded the shop may be.

I’ve tried to thank her, but she just laughs, as if working here were a kind of game, something she does for fun, not money. I’ve offered to pay her properly, but so far she has always refused, although now the closure of Le P’tit Pinson means that once more she’s out of a job.

I mentioned it again today.

‘You deserve a proper wage, Zozie,’ I said. ‘You’re doing far more now than just helping out occasionally.’

She shrugged. ‘Right now you can’t afford to pay anyone a full wage.’

‘But seriously . . .’

‘Seriously.’ She arched an eyebrow. ‘You, Madame Charbonneau, should stop worrying about other people and look after Number One for a change.’

I laughed at that. ‘Zozie, you’re an angel.’

‘Yeah, right.’ She grinned. ‘Now shall we get back to those chocolates?’

3

Wednesday, 21st November

IT’S FUNNY, THE
difference a sign can make. Of course, mine was more of a beacon, of sorts, shining out into the Paris streets.

Try me. Taste me. Test me.

It works; today we saw strangers and regulars alike, and no one left without something – a gift box, beribboned, or some little treat. A sugar mouse; a brandied plum; a handful of
mendiants
or a kilo of our bitterest truffles, packed loosely in their cocoa powder like chocolate bombs ready to explode.

Of course it’s still too early to claim success. The locals, especially, will take longer to seduce. But already I sense a turn in the tide. By Christmas, we will own them all.