The Lollipop Shoes (3 page)

Still we ran ahead of it: picking cherries in season and apples in season and working for the rest of the time in cafés and restaurants, saving our money, changing our names in every town. We grew careful. We had to. We hid ourselves, like grouse in a field. We did not fly; we did not sing.

And little by little the Tarot cards were put aside, and the herbs went unused, and the special days went unmarked, and the waxing moons came and went, and the signs inked into our palms for luck faded and were washed away.

That was a time of relative peace. We stayed in the city; I found us a place to stay; I checked out schools and hospitals. I bought a cheap wedding ring from the
marché aux puces
and gave my name as Madame Rocher.

And then, in December, Rosette was born, in hospital on the outskirts of Rennes. We had found a place to stay for a while – Les Laveuses, a village on the Loire. We rented a flat above a
crêperie
. We liked it there. We could have stayed—

But the December wind had other ideas.

V’là l’bon vent, v’là l’joli vent

V’là l’bon vent, ma mie m’appelle—

My mother taught me that lullaby. It’s an old song, a love song, a charm, and I sang it then to calm the wind; to make it leave us behind this time; to lull the mewing thing that I had brought back from the hospital. The tiny thing that neither fed nor slept, but cried like a cat night after night, while around us the wind shrieked and tossed like an angry woman, and every night I sang it to sleep, calling it
good wind, pretty wind
, in the words of my song, as simple folk once named the Furies, addressing them as
Good Ladies
and
Kindly Ones
, in the hope of escaping their revenge.

Do the Kindly Ones pursue the dead?

They found us again by the side of the Loire, and once again, we had to flee. To Paris, this time – Paris, my mother’s city and the place of my birth, the one place where I’d sworn we’d never go back. But a city confers a kind of invisibility on those who seek it. No longer parakeets among the sparrows, we now wear the colours of the native birds – too ordinary, too drab for a second glance or even a first. My mother had fled to New York to die; I fled to Paris to be reborn. Sick or well? Happy or sad? Rich or poor? The city doesn’t care. The city has other
business to attend to. Unquestioning, it passes by; it goes its way without a shrug.

All the same, that year was hard. It was cold; the baby cried; we stayed in a little upstairs room off the Boulevard de la Chapelle and at night the neon signs flashed red and green till it was enough to drive you mad. I could have fixed it – I know a cantrip that would have done it just as easily as switching off a light – but I had promised us
no more magic
, and so we slept in little slices between the red and green, and Rosette went on crying until Epiphany (or so it seemed), and for the first time our
galette des rois
was not home-made, but from a shop, and no one felt much like celebrating anyway.

I hated Paris so much that year. I hated the cold and the grime and the smells; the rudeness of the Parisians; the noise from the railway; the violence; the hostility. I soon learnt that Paris is not a city. It’s just a mass of Russian dolls boxed one inside the other, each with its customs and prejudices, each with its church, mosque, synagogue; all of them rife with bigots, gossips, insiders, scapegoats, losers, lovers, leaders, and objects of derision.

Some people were kind: like the Indian family who looked after Rosette while Anouk and I went to the market, or the grocer who gave us the damaged fruit and vegetables from his stall. Others were not. The bearded men who averted their gaze when I walked with Anouk past the mosque in Rue Myrrha; the women outside the Eglise St Bernard who looked at me as if I were dirt.

Things have changed a lot since then. We have found our place at last. Not half an hour’s walk from Boulevard de la Chapelle, Place des Faux-Monnayeurs is another world.

Montmartre is a village, so my mother used to say; an island rising out of the Paris fog. It’s not like Lansquenet, of course, but even so, it’s a good place, with a little flat above the shop and a kitchen at back, and a room for Rosette and one for Anouk, under the eaves with the birds’ nests.

Our
chocolaterie
was once a tiny café, run by a lady called Marie-Louise Poussin, who lived up on the first floor. Madame had lived here for twenty years; had seen the death of her husband and son, and, now in her sixties, and in failing health, still stubbornly refused to retire. She needed help; I needed a job. I agreed to run her business for a small salary and the use of the rooms on the second floor, and as Madame grew less able to cope, we changed the shop to a
chocolaterie
.

I ordered stock, managed accounts, organized deliveries, handled sales. I dealt with repairs and building work. Our arrangement has lasted for over three years, and we have become accustomed to it. We don’t have a garden, or very much space, but we can see the Sacré-Coeur from our window, rising above the streets like an airship. Anouk has started secondary school – the Lycée Jules Renard, just off the Boulevard des Batignolles – and she’s bright, and works hard; I’m proud of her.

Rosette is almost four years old, although, of course, she does not go to school. Instead she stays in the shop with me, making patterns on the floor with buttons and sweets, arranging them in rows according to colour and shape, or filling page after page in her drawing-books with little pictures of animals. She is learning sign language, and is fast acquiring vocabulary, including the signs for
good
,
more
,
come here
,
see
,
boat
,
yum
,
picture
,
again
,
monkey
,
ducks
and most recently – and to Anouk’s delight –
bullshit
.

And when we close the shop for lunch, we go to the Parc de la Turlure, where Rosette likes to feed the birds, or a little further to Montmartre cemetery, which Anouk loves for its gloomy magnificence and its many cats. Or I talk to the other shop owners in the
quartier
: to Laurent Pinson, who runs the grubby little
café-bar
across the square; to his customers, regulars for the most part, who come for breakfast and stay till noon; to Madame Pinot, who sells postcards and religious bric-a-brac on the corner; to the artists who camp out on the Place du Tertre hoping to attract the tourists there.

There is a clear distinction here between the inhabitants of the Butte and the rest of Montmartre. The Butte is superior in every respect – at least, to my neighbours of the Place des Faux-Monnayeurs – a last outpost of Parisian authenticity in a city now overrun with foreigners.

These people never buy chocolates. The rules are strict, though unwritten. Some places are for outsiders only; like the
boulangerie-pâtisserie
on the Place de la Galette, with its art deco mirrors and coloured glass and baroque piles of macaroons. Locals go to Rue des Trois Frères, to the cheaper, plainer
boulangerie
, where the bread is better and the croissants are baked fresh every day. In the same way, locals eat at Le P’tit Pinson, all vinyl-topped tables and
plat du jour
, whereas outsiders like ourselves secretly prefer La Bohème, or even worse, La Maison Rose, which no true son or daughter of the Butte would ever frequent, any more than they would pose for an artist at the terrace of a café on the Place du Tertre, or go to Mass at the Sacré-Coeur.

No, our customers are mostly from elsewhere. We do have our regulars; Madame Luzeron, who drops by every Thursday on her way to the cemetery and always buys the same thing – three rum truffles, no more, no less, in a gift box with a ribbon around it. The tiny blonde girl with the bitten fingernails, who comes in to test her self-control. And Nico from the Italian restaurant on the Rue Caulaincourt, who visits almost every day, and whose exuberant passion for chocolates – and for everything – reminds me of someone I once knew.

And then there are the occasionals. Those people who just drop by for a look, or for a present, or an everyday indulgence: a twist of barley; a box of violets; a block of marchpane or a
pain d’épices
; rose creams or a candied pineapple, steeped in rum and studded with cloves.

I know all their favourites. I know what they want, although I’d never tell. That would be too dangerous. Anouk is eleven now, and on some days I can almost feel it, that terrible knowledge, trembling inside her like an animal in a cage. Anouk, my summer child, who in the old days could no more have lied to me than she could have forgotten how to smile. Anouk, who used to lick my face and bugle –
I love you!
– in public places. Anouk, my little stranger, now grown stranger still, with her moods and her strange silences and her extravagant tales, and the way she sometimes looks at me, eyes narrowed, as if trying to see something half-forgotten in the air behind my head.

I’ve had to change her name, of course. Nowadays I am Yanne Charbonneau, and she is Annie – though she’ll always be Anouk to me. It’s not the actual names that trouble me. We’ve changed them so many times before.
But something else has slipped away. I don’t know what, but I know I miss it.

She’s growing up, I tell myself. Receding, dwindling like a child glimpsed in a hall of mirrors – Anouk at nine, still more sunshine than shadow, Anouk at seven, Anouk at six, waddling duck-footed in her yellow wellingtons, Anouk with Pantoufle bounding blurrily behind her, Anouk with a plume of candyfloss in one small pink fist – all gone now, of course, slipping away and into line behind the ranks of future Anouks. Anouk at thirteen, discovering boys, Anouk at fourteen, Anouk, impossibly, at twenty, marching faster and faster towards a new horizon—

I wonder how much she still remembers. Four years is a long time to a child of her age, and she no longer mentions Lansquenet, or magic, or worse still, Les Laveuses, although occasionally she lets something slip – a name, a memory – that tells me more than she suspects.

But seven and eleven are continents apart. I have done my work well enough, I hope. Enough, I hope, to keep the animal in its cage, and the wind becalmed, and that village on the Loire nothing more than a faded postcard from an island of dreams.

And so I keep my guard on the truth, and the world goes on as always, with its good and bad, and we keep our glamours to ourselves, and never interfere, not even for a friend, not even so much as a rune-sign sketched across the lid of a box for luck.

It’s a small enough price to pay, I know, for nearly four years of being left alone. But I sometimes wonder quite how much we have already paid for that, and how much more there is to come.

There’s an old story my mother used to tell, about a boy who sold his shadow to a peddler on the road in exchange for the gift of eternal life. He got his wish, and went off pleased at the bargain he had struck – for what use is a shadow, thought the boy, and why should he not be rid of it?

But as months passed, then years, the boy began to understand. Walking abroad, he cast no shadow; no mirror showed him back his face; no pool, however still, gave him the slightest reflection. He began to wonder if he was invisible; stayed in on sunny days; avoided moonlit nights; had every mirror in his house smashed and every window fitted with shutters on the inside – and yet he was not satisfied. His sweetheart left him, his friends grew old and died. And still he lived on in perpetual dusk, until the day when, in despair, he went to the priest and confessed what he had done.

And the priest, who had been young when the boy made his deal, but who now was yellow and brittle as old bones, shook his head and said to the boy: ‘That was no peddler you met on the road. That was the Devil you bargained with, son, and a deal with the Devil usually ends in someone or other losing their soul.’

‘But it was only a
shadow
,’ protested the boy.

Once more, the old priest shook his head. ‘A man who casts no shadow isn’t really a man at all,’ he said, and turned his back and would say no more.

And so at last the boy went home. And they found him next day, hanged from a tree, with the morning sun on his face and his long, thin shadow in the grass at his feet.

It’s only a story. I know that. But it keeps coming back to me, late at night when I can’t sleep and the
wind-chimes jangle their alarm and I sit up in bed and lift up my arms to check my shadow against the wall.

More often now, I find myself checking Anouk’s, as well.

3

Wednesday, 31st October

OH, BOY. VIANNE ROCHER.
Of all the stupid things to say. Why do I say these stupid things? Sometimes I really just don’t know. Because she was listening, I suppose, and because I was angry. These days I feel angry a lot of the time.

And maybe too it was because of the shoes. Those fabulous, luminous high-heeled shoes in lipstick, candy-cane, lollipop red, gleaming like treasure on the bare cobbled street. You just don’t see shoes like that in Paris. Not on regular people, anyway. And we
are
regular people – at least Maman says so – though you wouldn’t know it, sometimes, the way she goes on.