You care too much.
If only things could be that simple.
They are, replies his voice in my heart.
Once, maybe, Roux. Not anymore.
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—brief ly, 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, underlit 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 Midtown 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 burned 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 oflost 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 backstreets 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.
✶
PART TWO
✶ ✶
One Jaguar
Monday, 5 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.
My school in Lansquenet had forty pupils. This has eight hundred boys and girls; plus satchels, iPods, mobile phones, tubes of underarm deodorant, schoolbooks, lip salves, computer games, secrets, gossip and lies. I have just one friend there—well, almost a friend—Suzanne Prudhomme, who lives on the cemetery side of Rue Ganneron and who sometimes calls in at the chocolaterie.
Suzanne—who likes to be called Suze, like the drink—has red hair, which she hates, and a round, pink face, and she is always about to begin a diet. I actually rather like her hair, which reminds me of my friend Roux, and I don’t think she’s fat at all, but she complains about these things all the time. She and I used to be really good friends, but she can be moody nowadays and sometimes says quite nasty things for no reason, or says she won’t talk to me anymore if I don’t do exactly what she wants me to.
Today, she wasn’t talking to me again. That’s because I wouldn’t come to the pictures last night. But the cinema’s expensive enough already, and then there’s popcorn and Coke to buy—and if I don’t buy any, Suzanne notices and makes jokes at school about my never having any money—and besides, I knew that Chantal would be there too, and Suzanne’s different when Chantal’s around.
Chantal is Suzanne’s new best friend. She always has money to go to the cinema, and her hair is always perfectly neat. She wears a Tiffany diamond cross, and once, at school, when the teacher told her to take it off, Chantal’s father wrote a letter to the newspapers saying that it was a disgrace that his daughter should be victimized for wearing the symbol of her Catholic faith when Muslim girls were allowed to get away with those head scarves. It caused quite a fuss, actually; and afterward both crosses and head scarves were banned from school. Chantal still wears hers, though. I know because I’ve seen her with it on in gym. The teacher pretends not to notice. Chantal’s father has that effect on people.
Just ignore them, Maman says. You can make other friends.
Don’t think I haven’t tried; but it seems that whenever I do find someone new, Suze finds a way to get to them. It’s happened before. It’s nothing you could put your finger on, but it’s there all the same, like a perfume in the air. And suddenly the people you thought were your friends start avoiding you and being with her; and before you know it, they’re her friends, not yours, and you’re alone.
So all today Suze wouldn’t talk, and sat with Chantal in all her lessons, and put her bag on the seat next to her so that I couldn’t sit there, and every time I looked at them they seemed to be laughing at me.
I don’t care. Who wants to be like those t
wo?
But then I see them with their heads together, and I can tell from the way they’re not looking at me that they’re laughing at me again. Why? What is it about me? In the old days at least I knew what made me different. But now—
Is it my hair? Is it my clothes ? Is it because we’ve never bought anything at the Galeries Lafayette ? Is it because we never go skiing to Val d’Isère, or to Cannes for the summer? Is it some kind of a label on me, like on a cheap pair of trainers, that warns them that I’m second-rate?
Mamam has tried so hard to help. There’s nothing unusual about me; nothing to suggest we haven’t got money. I wear the same clothes as everyone else. My schoolbag is the same as theirs. I see the right films, read the right books, listen to the right music. I ought to fit in. But somehow I still don’t.
The problem is me. I just don’t match. I’m the wrong shape, somehow, the wrong color. I like the wrong books. I watch the wrong films in secret. I’m different, whether they like it or not, and I don’t see why I should pretend otherwise.
But it’s hard when everyone else has friends. And it’s hard when people only ever really like you when you’re being someone else.
When I came in this morning the others were playing with a tennis ball in the classroom. Suze was bouncing it to Chantal, who was bouncing it to Lucie, then across to Sandrine, and around the class to Sophie. No one said anything as I came in. They all just kept playing with the ball, but I noticed that no one ever passed it to me, and when I called out—over here!—no one seemed to understand. It was as if the game had changed; without anyone actually saying so, now it was about keeping the ball away from me, yelling Annie’s It, making me jump, spinning it wide.
I know it’s stupid. It’s only a game. But it’s like that every day at school. In a class of twenty-three, I’m the odd number; the one who has to sit on her own; the one who has to share the computers with two other pupils (usually Chantal and Suze) instead of one; who spends break alone, in the library or just sitting on a bench while the others go around in groups, laughing and talking and playing games. I wouldn’t mind if someone else was It sometimes. But they never are. It’s always me.
It’s not that I’m shy. I like people. I get on with them. I like to talk, or play tag in the playground; I’m not like Claude, who’s too shy to say a word to anyone and who stutters whenever a teacher asks him a question. I’m not touchy like Suze, or snobby like Chantal. I’m always here to listen if someone’s upset—if Suze gets into a quarrel with Lucie or Danielle, then it’s me, not Chantal, she comes to first—but just when I think we’re getting somewhere, she goes and starts some new thing, like taking pictures of me in the changing room with her mobile phone and showing them to everyone. And when I say, Suze, don’t do that, she just gives me that look and says it’s only a joke, and so I have to laugh, even when I don’t want to, because I don’t want to be the one with no sense of humor. But it really doesn’t feel funny to me. Like the tennis ball game, it’s only funny when you’re not It.
✶
Anyway, that’s what I was thinking as I came back on the bus, with Suze and Chantal giggling on the backseat behind me. I didn’t look round but pretended to read my book, although the bus was bumpy and the page blurred into nothing in front of my eyes. Actually my eyes were watering a bit—and so I just looked out the window, though it was raining and nearly dark, and everything very Paris-gray as we approached my stop just after the Métro station by Rue Caulaincourt.
Maybe I’ll take the Métro from now on. It’s not so close to the school itself, but I like it better: the biscuity smell of the escalators; the rush of air when the trains come in; the people; the crowds. You see all kinds of strange people in the Métro. People of all races: tourists; Muslim women with the veil; African traders with their pockets filled with fake watches and ebony carvings and shell bracelets and beads. There are men dressed as women, and women dressed as film stars, and people eating strange food out of brown paper bags, and people with punk hair, and tattoos, and rings in their eyebrows, and beggars and musicians and pickpockets and drunks.
Maman prefers me to take the bus.
Of course. She would.
Suzanne giggled, and I knew she’d been talking about me again. I stood up, ignoring her, and moved toward the front of the bus.
It was then that I saw Zozie, standing in the aisle. No lollipop shoes for her today, but a pair of purple platform boots with buckles all the way up to the knee. Today she was wearing a short black dress over a lime green roll-neck pullover; her hair had a bright pink streak in it, and she looked fabulous.
I couldn’t help it. I said so.
I was sure she would have forgotten me by now, but she hadn’t. “Annie! It’s you! ” She gave me a kiss. “This is my stop. Are you getting off? ”
I looked back and caught Suzanne and Chantal staring, forgetting even to giggle in their surprise. Not that anyone would have giggled at Zozie. Or that she would have cared if they had. I could see Suzanne with her mouth hanging open (not a good look for Suzanne); next to her, Chantal
was nearly the same shade as Zozie’s pullover.
“Friends of yours? ” said Zozie as we got off the bus.
“As if,” I said and rolled my eyes.
Zozie laughed. She laughs a lot, quite loudly, actually, and never seems to mind if people stare. She was very tall in those platform boots. I wished I had some.
“Well, why don’t you get some ? ” said Zozie.
I shrugged.
“I have to say that’s a very—conventional look you’ve got.” I love the way she says conventional, with a gleam in her eye that’s quite different from just making fun. “Now I had you down as more of an original, if you get my drift.”
“Maman doesn’t like us to be different.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Really? ”
Again, I shrugged.
“Oh, well. Each to his own. Listen, there’s a spectacular little place just down the road that does the most wonderful saint-honorés this side of paradise—so why don’t we just stop by there to celebrate ? ”
“Celebrate what? ” I said.
“I’m going to be a neighbor of yours! ”
Well, of course I know I’m not supposed to go off with strangers. Ma-man tells me often enough, and you can’t live in Paris without picking up a few cautious habits. But this was different—this was Zozie—and besides, I was meeting her in a public place, an English tea shop I hadn’t seen before which did have, as she’d promised, the most fabulous cakes.
I wouldn’t have gone there on my own. Places like that make me nervous—all glass tables and ladies in furs drinking fancy teas in bone china cups, and waitresses in little black dresses who looked at me in my school clothes with my hair all over the place, and looked at Zozie in her purple platform boots as if they couldn’t believe either of us.
“I love this place,” said Zozie in a low voice. “It’s hilarious. And it takes itself so seriously—”
It took its prices seriously too. Way out of my league—ten euros just for a pot of tea, twelve for a cup of hot chocolate.
“It’s all right. My treat,” said Zozie, and we sat down at a corner table while a sulky-looking waitress who looked like Jeanne Moreau handed us the menu as if it gave her a pain.
“You know Jeanne Moreau? ” said Zozie, surprised.
I nodded, still feeling nervous. “She was fabulous in Jules et Jim.”
“Not with that poker up her arse,” said Zozie, indicating our waitress, now all smiles around two expensive-looking ladies with identical blond hair.
I gave a snort of laughter. The ladies looked at me, then down at Zozie’s purple boots. Their heads went together, and I suddenly thought of Suze and Chantal and felt my mouth go dry.
Zozie must have noticed something, because she stopped laughing and looked concerned. “What’s wrong? ” she said.
“I don’t know. I just thought those people were laughing at us.” It’s th
e kind of place Chantal’s mother takes her to, I tried to explain. Where very thin ladies in pastel cashmere drink lemon tea and ignore the cakes.
Zozie crossed her long legs. “That’s because you’re not a clone. Clones fit in. Freaks stand out. Ask me which one I prefer.”
I shrugged. “I guess.”
“You’re not convinced.” She gave me her mischievous grin. “Watch this.” And she flicked her fingers at the waitress who looked like Jeanne Moreau, and just as she did, at exactly the same time, the waitress stumbled in her high heels and dropped a whole pot of le mon tea onto the table in front of her, soaking the tablecloth and dripping hot tea into the ladies’ handbags and onto their expensive shoes.
I looked at Zozie.
Zozie grinned back. “Neat trick, hey? ”
And then I laughed, because of course it was an accident, and no one could have foreseen what was going to happen, but to me it looked exactly as if Zozie had made the teapot fall, with the waitress fussing over the mess, and the pastel ladies with their wet shoes, and no one watching us at all, or laughing at Zozie’s ridiculous boots.
So we ordered cakes from the menu then, and coffee from the special bar. Zozie had a saint-honoré—no dieting for her—and I had a frangipane and we both had vanilla latte, and we talked for longer than I thought, about Suze, and school, and books, and Maman, and Thierry, and the chocolaterie.
“It must be great, living in a chocolate shop,” said Zozie, starting her saint-honoré.
“It’s not as nice as Lansquenet.”
Zozie looked interested. “What’s Lansquenet? ”
“A place we used to live before. Down south somewhere. It was cool.”
“Cooler than Paris? ” She looked surprised.
So I told her about Lansquenet, and Les Marauds where we used to play, Jeannot and I, by the banks of the river; and then I told her about Armande, and the river people, and Roux’s boat with its glass roof and the little galley with its chipped enamel pans, and the way we used to make the chocolates, Maman and I, late at night and early in the morning, so that everything used to smell of chocolate, even the dust.