The Lollipop Shoes (5 page)

Is that so wrong?

I suppose it is.

But Yanne Charbonneau (or Vianne Rocher) is hiding something from the world. I can smell the scent of secrets on her, like firecrackers on a
piñata
. A well-placed stone will set them free, and then we’ll see if they are secrets that someone such as I can use.

I’m curious to know, that’s all – a common enough characteristic of those fortunate enough to be born under the sign of One Jaguar.

Besides, she’s lying, isn’t she? And if there’s anything we Jaguars hate more than weakness, it’s a liar.

5

Thursday, 1st November
All Saints

ANOUK WAS RESTLESS
again today. Perhaps the aftermath of yesterday’s funeral – or perhaps just the wind. It takes her like that sometimes, cantering her about like a wild pony, making her wilful and thoughtless and tearful and strange. My little stranger.

I used to call her that, you know, when she was small and there were just the two of us. Little stranger, as if she were on loan from somewhere or other, and one day they’d be coming to take her back. She always had that about her, that look of
otherness
, of eyes that see things much too far, and of thoughts that wander off the edge of the world.

A
gifted
child, her new teacher says.
Such extraordinary powers of imagination, such vocabulary for her age
– but already, there’s a look in her eye, a measuring look, as if such imagination is in itself suspect, a sign, perhaps, of a more sinister truth.

It’s my fault. I know that now. To bring her up in my mother’s beliefs seemed so natural at the time. It gave us a plan; a tradition of our own; a magic circle into which the world could not enter. But where the world cannot enter, we cannot leave. Trapped inside a cocoon of our own making, we live apart, eternal strangers, from the rest.

Or we did, until four years ago.

Since then, we have lived a comforting lie.

Don’t look so surprised, please. Show me a mother, and I’ll show you a liar. We tell them how the world
should
be: that there are no such things as monsters or ghosts; that if you do good, then people will do good to you; that Mother will always be there to protect you. Of course we never
call
them lies – we mean so well, it’s all for the best – but that’s what they are, nevertheless.

After Les Laveuses, I had no choice. Any mother would have done the same.

‘What was it?’ she said again and again. ‘Did we make it happen, Maman?’

‘No, it was an accident.’

‘But the wind – you said—’

‘Just go to sleep.’

‘Couldn’t we magic it better, somehow?’

‘No, we can’t. It’s just a game. There’s no such thing as magic, Nanou.’

She stared at me with solemn eyes. ‘There is,’ she said. ‘Pantoufle says so.’

‘Sweetheart, Pantoufle isn’t real, either.’

It’s not easy being the daughter of a witch. Harder still being the mother of one. And after what happened at Les Laveuses I was faced with a choice. To tell the truth and condemn my children to the kind of life I’d always had:
moving constantly from place to place; never stable; never secure; living out of suitcases; always running to beat the wind—

Or to lie, and to be like everyone else.

And so I lied. I lied to Anouk. I told her none of it was real. There was no magic, except in stories; no powers to be tapped and tested; no household gods, no witches, no runes, no chants, no totems, no circles in the sand. Anything unexplained became an Accident – with a capital letter – sudden strokes of luck, close calls, gifts from the gods. And Pantoufle – demoted to the rank of ‘imaginary friend’ and now ignored, even though I can still sometimes see him, if only from the corner of my eye.

Nowadays, I turn away. I close my eyes till the colours have gone.

After Les Laveuses, I put all of those things away, knowing that she might resent me – hate me, a little, perhaps, for a while – hoping one day she would understand.

‘You have to grow up someday, Anouk. You have to learn to tell the difference between what’s real and what isn’t.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s better this way,’ I told her. ‘Those things, Anouk – they set us apart. They make us different. Do you
like
being different? Wouldn’t you like to be included, just for once? To have friends, to—’

‘I
did
have friends. Paul and Framboise—’

‘We couldn’t stay there. Not after that.’

‘And Zézette and Blanche—’

‘Travellers, Nanou. River people. You can’t live on a boat for ever, not if you want to go to school—’

‘And Pantoufle—’

‘Imaginary friends don’t count, Nanou.’

‘And Roux, Maman. Roux was our friend.’

Silence.

‘Why couldn’t we stay with Roux, Maman? Why didn’t you tell him where we were?’

I sighed. ‘It’s complicated.’

‘I miss him.’

‘I know.’

With Roux, of course, everything’s simple. Do what you want. Take what you want. Travel wherever the wind takes you. It works for Roux. It makes him happy. But I know you can’t have everything. I’ve been down that road. I know where it leads. And it gets so hard, Nanou. So very hard.

Roux would have said:
you care too much
. Roux with his defiant red hair and reluctant smile and his beloved boat under the drifting stars.
You care too much
. It may be true; in spite of everything I care too much. I care that Anouk has no friends in her new school. I care that Rosette is nearly four years old, so alert, and yet without speech, like the victim of some evil spell, some princess stricken dumb for fear of what she might reveal.

How to explain this to Roux, who fears nothing and cares for no one? To be a mother is to live in fear. Fear of death, of sickness, of loss, of accidents, of strangers, of the Black Man, or simply those small everyday things that somehow manage to hurt us most: the look of impatience, the angry word, the missed bedtime story, the forgotten kiss, the terrible moment when a mother ceases to be the centre of her daughter’s world and becomes just another satellite orbiting some less significant sun.

It has not happened – at least, not yet. But I see it in the
other children; in the teenage girls with their sullen mouths and their mobile phones and their look of contempt at the world in general. I have disappointed her, I know that. I am not the mother she wants me to be. And at eleven, though bright, she is still too young to understand what I have sacrificed, and why.

You care too much.

If only things could be that simple.

They are
, replies his voice in my heart.

Once, maybe, Roux. Not any more.

I wonder if he has changed at all. As for myself – I doubt he’d know me. He writes to me from time to time – he got my address from Blanche and Zézette – briefly, at Christmas, and on Anouk’s birthday. I write to him at the post office in Lansquenet, knowing that he sometimes passes by. I have not mentioned Rosette in any of my letters. Nor have I mentioned Thierry at all; my landlord Thierry who has been so kind and so very generous, and whose patience I admire more than words can say.

Thierry le Tresset, fifty-one; divorced, one son, a churchgoer, a man of rock.

Don’t laugh. I like him very much.

I wonder what he sees in me.

I look in the mirror nowadays and there’s no reflection looking back; just a flat portrait of a woman in her thirties. No one special; just a woman of no exceptional beauty or character. A woman like all the rest, which is precisely what I mean to be, and yet today the thought depresses me. Perhaps because of the funeral: the sad, under-lit chapel-of-rest with the flowers left over from the previous client; the empty room; the absurdly enormous wreath from Thierry; the indifferent clergyman with the runny
nose; the piped music (Elgar’s
Nimrod
) from the crackling speakers.

Death is banal, as my mother used to say, weeks before her own death on a crowded street in mid-town New York. Life is extraordinary.
We
are extraordinary. To embrace the extraordinary is to celebrate life.

Well, Mother. How things change. In the old days (not
so
old, I remind myself) there would have been a celebration last night. All Hallows’ Eve: a magical time; a time of secrets and of mysteries; of sachets to be sewn in red silk and hung around the house to ward off evil; of scattered salt and spiced wine and honey-cakes left on the sill; of pumpkin, apples, firecrackers and the scent of pine and woodsmoke as autumn turns and old winter takes the stage. There would have been songs and dancing round the bonfire; Anouk in greasepaint and black feathers, flitting from door to door with Pantoufle at her heels, and Rosette with her lantern and her own totem – with orange fur to match her hair – prancing and preening in her wake.

No more – it hurts to think of those days. But it isn’t safe. My mother knew – she fled the Black Man for twenty years, and though for a while I thought I’d beaten him, fought for my place and won the fight, I soon realized that my victory was just an illusion. The Black Man has many faces, many followers, and he does not always wear a clerical collar.

I used to think I feared their God. Years later, I know it’s their
kindness
I fear. Their well-meaning concern. Their pity. I have felt them on our trail these past four years, sniffing and sneaking in our wake. And since Les Laveuses they have come so much closer. They mean so well, the Kindly Ones; they want nothing but the best for my
beautiful children. And they will not relent till they have torn us apart; until they have torn us all to pieces.

Perhaps that’s why I have never confided in Thierry. Kind, dependable, solid Thierry, my good friend, with his slow smile and his cheery voice and his touching belief in the cure-all properties of money. He wants to help – has already helped us so much this year. A word from me, and he would again. All our troubles could be over. I wonder why I hesitate. I wonder why I find it so hard to trust someone; to finally admit that I need help.

Now, close to midnight, I find my thoughts straying, as they often do at such times, to my mother, the cards, and the Kindly Ones. Anouk and Rosette are already asleep. The wind has dropped abruptly. Below us, Paris simmers like a fog. But above the streets the Butte de Montmartre seems to float like some magical city of smoke and starlight. Anouk thinks I have burnt the cards; I have not read them for over three years. But I have them still, my mother’s cards, scented with chocolate and shuffled to a gloss.

The box is hidden beneath my bed. It smells of lost time and the season of mists. I open it, and there are the cards, the ancient images, woodcut as they were centuries ago in Marseille: Death; the Lovers; the Tower; the Fool; the Magus; the Hanged Man; Change.

It is not a true reading, I tell myself. I pick the cards at random, without any idea of the consequences. And yet I cannot rid myself of the thought that something is trying to reveal itself; that some message lies within the cards.

I put them away. It was a mistake. In the old days I would have banished my night demons with a cantrip –
tsk-tsk, begone!
– and a healing brew, some incense and a
scatter of salt on the threshold. Today I am civilized; I brew nothing stronger than camomile tea. It helps me sleep – eventually.

But during the night, and for the first time in months I dream of the Kindly Ones, snuffling and slinking and sneaking through the back streets of old Montmartre, and in my dream I wish I had left just a pinch of salt on the step – or a medicine bag above the door – for without them the night can enter unchecked, drawn in by the scent of chocolate.

P
ART
T
WO

One Jaguar

1

Monday, 5th November

I CAUGHT THE
bus to school, as usual. You wouldn’t think there was a school here but for the plaque that marks the entrance. The rest is hidden behind high walls that might belong to offices or a private park or something different altogether. The Lycée Jules Renard; not so large by Paris standards, but to me it’s practically a city.