The Lollipop Shoes (35 page)

As for the names and the symbols we use – Zozie says they’re Mexican. They could be anything, I guess, but we use these because they’re interesting, and the symbols are not too hard to remember.

There are a lot of symbols, though, and it may take a while to learn them all. Plus I don’t always remember which names to use – they’re so long and complicated, and of course I don’t know the language. But Zozie says that’s OK, as long as I can remember what the symbols mean. There’s the Ear of Maize, for good luck; Two Rabbit, who made wine from the maguey cactus; Eagle Snake, for power; Seven Macaw, for success; One Monkey, the trickster; the Smoking Mirror, that shows you things that regular people don’t always see; Lady Green Skirt, who looks after mothers and children; One Jaguar, for courage and to protect you from bad things, and Lady Moon Rabbit – that’s my sign – for love.

Everyone has a special sign, she says. Zozie’s sign is One Jaguar. Maman’s is Ehecatl, the Changing Wind. I suppose
they’re like the totems we had, back in the days before Rosette was born. Rosette’s sign, Zozie says, is Red Tezcatlipoca, the Monkey. He’s a mischievous god, but a powerful one; and he can change his shape to that of any animal.

I like the old stories Zozie tells. But I can’t help feeling nervous sometimes. I know she says we don’t do any harm – but what if she’s wrong? What if there’s an Accident? What if I use the wrong kind of sign and make something bad happen without meaning to?

The river. The wind. The Kindly Ones.

Those words keep coming into my mind. And they’re all tied up somehow with the Nativity scene in Place du Tertre – the angels and the animals and the Magi – though I still don’t know what they’re doing there. Sometimes I think I can almost see, but never quite enough to be sure, like one of those dreams that makes perfect sense until the minute you wake up, when it just dissolves into nothing at all.

The river. The wind. The Kindly Ones—

What does that mean? Words in a dream. But I’m still so afraid, though I don’t know why. What is there to be afraid of? Perhaps the Kindly Ones are like the Magi: wise men bearing gifts. It feels right, but it doesn’t stop me feeling scared, that something bad’s about to happen. That it’s somehow my fault—

Zozie says I shouldn’t worry. We can’t hurt anyone unless we want to, she says. And I don’t ever want to hurt anyone – not even Chantal, not even Suze.

I made Nico’s doll the other night. I had to pad it to make it look real, and I made his hair from the wiry brown stuff that was inside Zozie’s old armchair, upstairs
in her room with her other things. Then you have to give it a symbol – I chose One Jaguar, for courage – and whisper a secret in its ear. So I said:
Nico, you need to take control
– which ought to do it, don’t you think? – and I’ll put it behind one of the doors in the Advent house, and wait until he comes along.

And then there’s Alice, who’s his opposite. I had to make her a bit fatter than she really is, because peg-dolls can only be so thin. I tried taking some wood off the sides of the doll, and that worked OK until I cut my finger with the penknife, and Zozie had to bandage it up. Then I made her a pretty little dress out of a piece of old scrap lace, and whispered,
Alice, you’re not ugly and you need to eat more
, and gave her the fish sign of Chantico the Fast Breaker, and put her next to Nico in the Advent house.

Then there’s Thierry, wrapped in grey flannel and with a wrapped sugar lump painted to look like his mobile phone. I couldn’t get hold of a strand of his hair, so instead I took a petal from one of the roses that he gave Maman and hoped that might work instead. Of course I don’t want anything bad to happen to him. I only want him to stay away.

So I gave him the sign of One Monkey and put him
outside
the Advent house, with his coat and scarf on (I made them out of brown felt) just in case it gets cold out there.

And then, of course, there’s Roux. His doll isn’t finished yet, because I need something of his, and there isn’t anything I can use – not even a thread – that belongs to him. But I’ve made it look like him, I think, all in black, with a piece of orange furry stuff glued on to look like his hair. I gave him the sign of the Changing Wind, and whispered
Roux, don’t go away
– though so far we haven’t seen him at all.

Not that it matters. I know where he is. He’s working for Thierry at Rue de la Croix. I don’t know why he hasn’t come back, or why Maman doesn’t want to see him, or even why Thierry hates him so much.

I talked to Zozie about it today, as we sat in her rooms as usual. Rosette was there, and we’d been playing a game – quite a noisy, silly game, and Rosette was excited and laughing like mad, with Zozie being a wild horse and Rosette riding on her back, and then suddenly, for no reason, the hairs stood up on the back of my neck, and I looked up and saw a yellow monkey sitting on the mantelpiece, as clear as I sometimes see Pantoufle.

‘Zozie,’ I said.

She looked up. She didn’t seem all that surprised; it turns out she’s seen Bam before.

‘That’s a clever little sister you’ve got,’ she said, smiling at Rosette, who had got down from her back and was playing with the sequins on a cushion. ‘You don’t look at all alike, but I guess looks aren’t everything.’

I hugged Rosette and gave her a kiss. Sometimes she reminds me of a rag doll, or a flop-eared bunny, she’s so soft. ‘Well, we don’t have the same dad,’ I told her.

Zozie smiled. ‘I guessed,’ she said.

‘But that doesn’t matter,’ I went on. ‘Maman says you choose your family.’

‘She does?’

I nodded. ‘It’s better that way. Our family could be anyone. It’s not about birth, Maman says. It’s about how you feel for someone else.’

‘So – even I could be family?’

I smiled at her. ‘You already are.’

She laughed at that. ‘Your evil aunt. Corrupting you with magic and shoes.’

Well, that set me off. Rosette joined in. And above us, the yellow monkey danced and made everything on the mantelpiece dance too – all Zozie’s shoes, lined up like ornaments, but so much cooler than china figurines – and I thought how natural it seemed, the three of us, all together like that. And I felt a sudden pang of guilt about Maman downstairs, and about how, when we’re up here, it can sometimes be easy to forget she’s there at all.

‘Did you never wonder who Rosette’s father was?’ said Zozie suddenly, looking at me.

I shrugged. I’ve never seen the point. We always had each other, of course. We never wanted anyone else—

‘It’s just that you probably knew him,’ she said. ‘You would have been six or seven at the time, and I just wondered . . .’ She looked down at her bracelet, playing with the charms on it, and I got the feeling she was trying to tell me something, but something she didn’t want to say.

‘What?’ I said.

‘Well – look at her hair.’ She put a hand on Rosette’s head. Her hair is the colour of sliced mango, very curly and very soft. ‘Look at her eyes.’ Her eyes are a very pale green-grey, just like a cat’s, and as round as pennies. ‘Doesn’t that remind you of someone?’

I thought about that for a little while.

‘Think, Nanou. Red hair, green eyes. Can sometimes be a pain in the arse.’

‘Not Roux?’ I said, and began to laugh, but all at once I was feeling jittery inside and I wished she wouldn’t say any more.

‘Why not?’ said Zozie.

‘I just know.’

As a matter of fact I’ve never really thought much about Rosette’s dad. I suppose that at the back of my mind there’s still the idea she never had one at all; that the fairies brought her, just like the old lady always said.

Fairy baby. Special baby.

I mean, it’s not fair what people think – that she’s stupid, or retarded, or slow.
Special baby
, we used to say. Special, as in different. Maman doesn’t like us to be different – but Rosette just is, and is that so bad?

Thierry talks about getting help for her. Therapy, speech coaching and all kinds of specialists – as if there might be a cure for being special that a specialist would be bound to know.

But there’s no cure for being different. Zozie’s taught me that already. And how could Roux be Rosette’s dad? I mean, he’s never seen her before. Didn’t even know her name—

‘He
can’t
be Rosette’s dad,’ I said, although by then I wasn’t sure.

‘Well, who else could it be?’ she said.

‘I don’t know. Not Roux, that’s all.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because he’d have stayed with us, that’s why. He wouldn’t have let us go away.’

‘Well, maybe he didn’t know,’ she said. ‘Maybe your mother never told him. After all, she never told
you
.’

I started to cry then. Stupid, I know. I hate it when I have to cry, but I couldn’t make it stop, somehow. It was like an explosion inside of me, and I couldn’t work out if I hated Roux now, or whether I loved him even more—

‘Shhh. Nanou.’ Zozie put her arms around me. ‘It’s OK.’

I put my face into her shoulder. She was wearing a big old chunky sweater, and the cable knit pressed into my cheek hard enough to leave marks. It isn’t OK, I wanted to tell her. That’s just what adults always say when they don’t want kids to know the truth; and most of the time it’s a lie, Zozie.

Adults always seem to lie.

I gave a great big shuddery sob. How can Roux be Rosette’s dad? She doesn’t even know him. She doesn’t know that he takes his hot chocolate black, with rum and brown sugar. She hasn’t seen him make a fish-trap out of willow, or a flute out of a length of bamboo, or know that he hears the call of every bird on the river and can copy them so that even the birds can’t tell the difference—

He’s her father, and she doesn’t even know.

It’s not fair. It should have been
me
—

But now I could feel something else coming back. A memory – a familiar sound – a scent of something far away. It was getting closer now, moving in like the pointing star in a Nativity scene. And I could almost remember now – except that I didn’t
want
to remember. I closed my eyes. I could hardly move. I was suddenly sure that if I moved even a little bit, then all of it would come rushing out, like a fizzy drink when someone’s been shaking the bottle, and that once opened, there’d be no going back—

I started to tremble.

‘What’s wrong?’ said Zozie.

I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak.

‘What are you afraid of, Nanou?’

I could hear the charms on her bracelet moving and the
sound was almost exactly the same as that of the wind-chimes above our door.

‘The Kindly Ones,’ I said in a whisper.

‘What does that mean? The Kindly Ones?’ I could hear the urgency in her voice. She put her hands on my shoulders then, and I could
feel
how much she wanted to know, it was trembling all through her like lightning in a jar.

‘Don’t be afraid, Nanou,’ she said. ‘Just tell me what it means, OK?’

The Kindly Ones.

The Magi.

Wise men bearing gifts.

I made the kind of noise you make when you’re trying to wake up from a dream, but can’t. There were too many memories crowding me, pushing me, all wanting to be seen at once.

That little house by the side of the Loire.

They’d seemed so kind, so interested.

They’d even brought gifts.

And at that moment I opened my eyes very sudden and very wide. I didn’t feel afraid any more. At last I remembered. I understood. I knew what had happened to change us; to make us run away, even from Roux; to make us pretend we were regular people when we knew at heart we could never be.

‘What is it, Nanou?’ said Zozie. ‘Can you tell me now?’

‘I think so,’ I said.

‘Then tell me,’ she said, beginning to smile. ‘Tell me everything.’

P
ART
S
IX

The Kindly Ones

1

Monday, 10th December

AND NOW AT
last, here it comes, that December wind, screaming down the narrow streets, stripping the year-end rags from the trees.
December, beware; December, despair
, as my mother always said. And once again, as the year draws in, it feels as if a page has turned.

A page – a card – the wind, perhaps. And December was always a bad time for us. The last month; the dregs of the year; slouching towards Christmas with its skirt of tinsel dragging in the mud. The dead-end part of the year looms; the trees are stripped three-quarters bare; the light is like scorched newspaper and all my ghosts come out to play like fireflies in the spectral sky—

We came on the wind of the carnival. A wind of change, of promises. The merry wind, the magical wind, making March hares of everyone, tumbling blossoms and coattails and hats; rushing towards summer in a frenzy of exuberance.

Anouk was a child of that wind. A summer child; her
totem, the rabbit – eager, bright-eyed, and mischievous.

My mother was a great believer in totems. Much more than just an invisible friend, a totem reveals the secret heart; the spirit; the secret soul. Mine was a cat, or so she said – thinking perhaps of that baby bangle and its little silver charm. Cats are secretive by nature. Cats have split personalities. Cats run scared at a breath of wind. Cats can see the spirit world, and walk the line between light and dark.