The Lollipop Shoes Read online

  The object of the game was to hang up the piñata over a doorway and to throw sticks and stones at it until it split open, releasing the presents inside.

  Death, and a gift – all in one.

  It couldn’t be a coincidence. This day, this shop, this sign in the sky – it was as if Mictecacihuatl herself had put them in my path. My very own piñata—

  I turned away, smiling, and noticed someone watching me. There was a child standing very still about a dozen feet away: a girl aged eleven or twelve, in a bright red coat, with slightly scuffed brown school shoes and flossy black hair like that of a Byzantine icon. She looked at me without expression, head cocked slightly to one side.

  For a moment I wondered if she’d seen me take the letters. Impossible to know for sure how long she’d been standing there; so I just gave her my most appealing smile and pushed the bundle of letters deeper into my coat pocket.

  ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Annie,’ said the girl, without smiling back. Her eyes were a curious blue-green-grey; her mouth so red it looked painted. Striking in the cool morning light; and as I watched, her eyes seemed to brighten still further, to take on the shades of the autumn sky.

  ‘You’re not from here, are you, Annie?’

  She blinked at that; puzzled, perhaps, at how I knew. Paris children never talk to strangers; suspicion is hard-wired into their circuitry. This girl was different – wary, perhaps, but not unwilling – and far from impervious to charm.

  ‘How do you know?’ she said at last.

  Strike one. I grinned. ‘I can tell from your voice. What is it? The Midi?’

  ‘Not quite,’ she said. But now she was smiling.

  You can learn a lot from talking to children. Names, professions, the small details that give an impersonation that invaluable authentic touch. Most internet passwords consist of some child’s name, a spouse’s, even a pet’s.

  ‘Annie, shouldn’t you be at school?’

  ‘Not today. It’s a holiday. Besides . . .’ She looked at the door with its hand-lettered notice.

  ‘Closed due to bereavement,’ I said.

  She nodded.

  ‘Who died?’ That bright-red coat seemed less than funereal, and there was nothing in her face that suggested grief.

  Annie said nothing for a moment, but I caught the gleam in her blue-grey eyes, their expression slightly haughty now, as if debating whether my question might be impertinent or genuinely sympathetic.

  I let her stare. I’m used to being stared at. It happens, sometimes, even in Paris, where beautiful women are more than plentiful. I say beautiful – but that’s an illusion, the very simplest of glamours, barely magic at all. A tilt of the head, a certain walk, clothes befitting the moment, and anyone can do the same.

  Well, almost anyone.

  I fixed the girl with my brightest smile, sweet and cocky and slightly rueful, becoming for a second the tousled elder sister she has never had, the glamorous rebel, Gauloise in hand, who wears tight skirts and neon colours and in whose impractical shoes I know she secretly longs to be.

  ‘Don’t you want to tell me?’ I said.

  She looked at me for a second more. An elder child, if I ever saw one; tired, so tired of having to be good, and perilously close to the age of revolt. Her colours were unusually clear; in them I read some wilfulness, some sadness, a touch of anger and a bright thread of something that I could not quite identify.

  ‘Come on, Annie. Tell me. Who died?’

  ‘My mother,’ she said. ‘Vianne Rocher.’

  2

  Wednesday, 31st October

  VIANNE ROCHER. IT’S been a long time since I wore that name. Like a coat, well-loved but long since put away, I’d almost forgotten how good it felt, how very warm and comfortable. I’ve changed my name so many times – both our names, changing from village to village as we followed the wind – that I should have outgrown this wish by now. Vianne Rocher is long dead. And yet—

  And yet I enjoyed being Vianne Rocher. I liked the shape of the word in their mouths. Vianne, like a smile. Like a word of welcome.

  I have a new name now, of course, not so different from the old. I have a life; a better life, some might say. But it’s not the same. Because of Rosette; because of Anouk; because of everything we left behind in Lansquenet-sous-Tannes, that Easter when the wind changed.

  That wind. I see it’s blowing now. Furtive but commanding, it has dictated every move we’ve ever made. My mother felt it, and so do I – even here, even now – as it sweeps us like leaves into this backstreet corner, dancing us to shreds against the stones.

  V’là l’bon vent, v’là l’joli vent

  I thought we’d silenced it for good. But the smallest thing can wake the wind: a word, a sign, even a death. There’s no such thing as a trivial thing. Everything costs; it all adds up until finally the balance shifts and we’re gone again, back on the road, telling ourselves – well maybe next time—

  Well this time, there will be no next time. This time, I’m not running away. I don’t want to have to start anew, as we have done so many times, before and since Lansquenet. This time, we stay. Whatever it takes. Whatever it costs us, we stay.

  We stopped in the first village that didn’t have a church. We stayed six weeks, and then moved on. Three months, then a week, a month, another week, changing our names as we went, until the baby began to show.

  Anouk was nearly seven by then. Excited at the thought of a baby sister; but I was so tired, so tired of those interminable villages with the river and the little houses and the geraniums in the window-boxes and the way people looked at us – at her especially – and asked their questions, always the same.

  Have you come far? Will you be staying with relatives here? Will Monsieur Rocher be joining you?

  And when we answered, there’d be that look, that measuring look, taking in our worn clothes and our single case and that fugitive air that speaks of too many railway stations and passing-places and hotel-rooms left neat and bare.

  And oh – how I longed to be free at last. Free as we had never been; free to stay in a single spot; to feel the wind and ignore its call.

  But however hard we tried, rumour followed us. Some kind of scandal, the whispers said. Some priest was involved, so someone had heard. And the woman? A gypsy; in with the river people; claimed to be a healer; dabbled in herbs. And someone had died, the rumours said – poisoned, perhaps, or simply unlucky.

  In any case, it didn’t matter. The rumours spread like dogwort in summer, tumbling us, harrying us, snapping at our heels; and slowly, I began to understand.

  Something had happened along our road. Something that had altered us. Perhaps we’d stayed a day – a week – too long in one of those villages. Something was different. The shadows had lengthened. We were running.

  Running from what? I didn’t know then, but I could already see it in my reflection; in hotel-room mirrors and shiny shop-fronts. I’d always worn red shoes; Indian skirts with bells on the hems; second-hand coats with daisies on the pockets, jeans embroidered with flowers and leaves. Now I tried to blend with the crowd. Black coats, black shoes, black beret on my black hair.

  Anouk didn’t understand. ‘Why couldn’t we have stayed this time?’

  The perpetual refrain of those early days. I began to dread even the name of that place; the memories that clung like burrs to our travelling clothes. Day by day we moved with the wind. And at night we’d lie side-by-side in some room above a café, or make hot chocolate over a camping-stove, or light candles and make shadow-bunnies on the wall and tell fabulous stories of magic and witches and gingerbread houses, and dark men who turned into wolves, and sometimes, never turned back again.

  But by then, stories were all they were. The real magic – the magic we’d lived with all our lives, my mother’s magic of charms and cantrips, of salt by the door and a red silk sachet to placate the little gods – had turned sour on us that summer, somehow, like a spider
that turns from good luck to bad at the stroke of midnight, spinning its web to catch our dreams. And for every little spell or charm, for every card dealt and every rune cast and every sign scratched against a doorway to divert the path of malchance, the wind just blew a little harder, tugging at our clothes, sniffing at us like a hungry dog, moving us here and moving us there.

  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.