The Lollipop Shoes

by Joanne Harris

  Oh, I can see the trap now. Too late, as always in stories like this, I understand what she wants at last. To force my hand, to trick me into revealing myself, to blow me away like a leaf on the wind, with a new set of Furies on my tail—

  But what’s a name? I ask myself. Can’t I choose another one? Can’t I change it, as I have done so many times before, call Zozie’s bluff, and force her to leave?

  Thierry is staring at her in astonishment. ‘You?’ he says.

  She shrugs. ‘Surprised?’

  The others are watching her, stupefied.

  ‘You stole the money? You cashed the cheques?’

  Behind her, Anouk is very pale.

  Nico says: ‘It can’t be true.’

  Madame Luzeron shakes her head.

  ‘But Zozie’s our friend,’ says little Alice, blushing furiously at making even such a short speech. ‘We owe her so much—’

  Jean-Louis interrupts. ‘I know a fake when I see one,’ he says. ‘And Zozie isn’t a fake. I swear.’

  But now Jean-Loup speaks up. ‘It’s true. Her picture was in the newspaper. She’s really good at changing her face, but I knew it was her. My photographs—’

  Zozie gives him a barbed smile. ‘Of course it’s true. It’s all true. I’ve had more names than I can count. I’ve lived from hand to mouth all my life. I’ve never had a proper home, or a family, or a business, or any of the things Yanne has here—’

  And she shoots me a smile like a falling star, and I can’t speak, can’t move, captivated like the rest of them. The fascination is so intense that I could almost believe I’ve been drugged; my head feels like a hive of bees; colours shift around the room, making it spin like a carousel—

  Roux puts out his arm to steady me. He alone seems not to share in the general feeling of consternation. I’m vaguely aware of Madame Rimbault – Jean-Loup’s mother – staring at me. Her face is pinched with disapproval beneath the dyed hair. She very clearly wants to leave – and yet she too is mesmerized, caught up in Zozie’s narrative.

  Zozie smiles and carries on. ‘You might say I’m an adventurer. All my life I’ve lived on my wits; gambling, stealing, begging, fraud. I’ve never known anything else. No friends, no place I liked enough to stay . . .’

  She pauses, and I can feel the glamour in the air, all incense and sparkling dust, and I know that she can talk them round, can twist them round her little finger.

  ‘But here,’ she says, ‘I found a home. I found people who like me, people who like me for who I am. I thought I could reinvent myself here – but old habits die hard. I’m sorry, Thierry. I’ll pay you back.’

  And as their voices begin to rise, confused and distressed and wavering, the quiet Madame now faces Thierry; Madame, whose name I don’t even know, but whose face is pale now with something she can barely articulate, her eyes like agates in that hard face.

  ‘How much does she owe you, monsieur?’ she says. ‘I’ll pay it myself, with interest.’

  He stares at her, incredulous. ‘Why?’ he says.

  Madame straightens up to her full height. It isn’t much; beside Thierry she looks like a quail facing down a bear.

  ‘I’m sure you have a right to complain,’ she says in her nasal Paris voice. ‘But I have good reason to believe that Vianne Rocher, whoever she is, is far more my concern than yours.’

  ‘How so?’ says Thierry.

  ‘I’m her mother,’ she says.

  12

  Monday, 24th December

  Christmas Eve. 11.05 p.m.

  AND NOW THE silence that has bound her in its icy cocoon splits open in a broken cry. Vianne, no longer pale but flushed with pulque and confusion, now steps out to face Madame in the little semicircle that has gathered around her.

  A bunch of mistletoe hangs above their heads, and I feel a wild, mad, relentless urge to run up to her and kiss her right there on the mouth. She’s so easy to manipulate – like all of them – and now I can almost taste the prize, can feel it in the rhythm of my blood, can hear it like surf on a distant beach, and it tastes so sweet, like chocolate—

  The sign of One Jaguar has many properties. True invisibility is, of course, impossible outside of fairytales, but the eye and the brain can be fooled in ways that cameras and film cannot, and it is easy enough, while their attention is focused on Madame, to creep away – not quite unnoticed – to collect the case I have so neatly packed.

  Anouk followed, as I knew she would. ‘Why did you say that?’ she demanded. ‘Why did you say you were Vianne Rocher?’

  I shrugged. ‘What do I have to lose? I change my name like my coat, Anouk. I never stay in one place for long. That’s the difference between us. I could never live like that. I could never be respectable. I don’t care what they think of me – but your mother has so much to lose. There’s Roux, and Rosette, and the shop, of course—’

  ‘But what about that woman?’ she said.

  So I filled her in on the sorry tale: the child in the car seat; the little cat charm. Turns out Vianne never mentioned it. Can’t say I’m really surprised.

  ‘But if she knew who her mother was,’ said Anouk, ‘then couldn’t she have found her again?’

  ‘Perhaps she was afraid,’ I said. ‘Or perhaps she felt closer to her adopted mother. You choose your family, Nanou. Isn’t that what she always says? And perhaps . . .’ I faked a pause.

  ‘And what?’

  I smiled. ‘People like us are different. We have to stick together, Nanou. We have to choose our family. After all,’ I told her slyly, ‘if she can lie to you about this, then can you be sure you weren’t stolen, too?’

  I left her to think about that for a while. In the other room, Madame was still talking, her voice rising and falling in the rhythms of the natural storyteller. She and her daughter have that in common; but it’s not the time to hang around. I have my case; my coat; my papers. As always, I travel light. From my pocket I bring out Anouk’s present; a small package wrapped in red.

  ‘I don’t want you to go, Zozie.’

  ‘Nanou, I really have no choice.’

  The present gleams among the folds of red tissue paper. It’s a bracelet; a slim band made of silver, lustrous and new. By contrast, the single charm that hangs on it is dark with age – a tiny blackened silver cat.

  She knows what it means. A sob escapes her.

  ‘Zozie, no—’

  ‘I’m sorry, Anouk.’

  Quickly I cross the deserted kitchen. Plates and glasses neatly stacked along with the remains of the feast. On the stove, a pot of hot chocolate simmers; its steam is the only sign of life.

  Try me. Taste me, it implores.

  It’s a small enough glamour, an everyday charm, and Anouk has withstood it for the last four years, but all the same it pays to be safe, and I turn off the heat under the pot as I make my way towards the back door.

  With one hand I carry my case. With the other I cast the sign of Mictecacihuatl like a handful of cobwebs in the air. Death, and a gift. The essential seduction. More potent by far than chocolate.

  And now I turn to smile at her. Outside, and the darkness will swallow me whole. The night wind flirts with my red dress. My scarlet shoes are like blood on the snow.

  ‘Nanou,’ I say. ‘We’ve all got a choice. Yanne or Vianne. Annie or Anouk. Changing Wind or the Hurakan. It’s not always easy, being like us. If you want easy, you’d better stay here. But if you want to ride that wind—’

  For a moment she seems to hesitate, but I already know I’ve won.

  I won the moment I took on your name, and with it, the call of the Changing Wind. You see, Vianne, I never meant to stay. I never wanted your chocolaterie. I never wanted any part of the sad little life you’ve made for yourself.

  But Anouk, with her gifts, is invaluable. So young and yet so talented, and most of all, so easy to manipulate. We could be in New York by tomorrow, Nanou, or London, or Moscow, or Venice, or even good old Mexico City. There are plenty of conquests waiting
out there for Vianne Rocher and her daughter Anouk, and won’t we both be fabulous; won’t we go through them all like December wind?

  Anouk is watching me, mesmerized. It all makes so much sense to her now that she wonders why she never saw it before. A fair exchange; a life for a life.

  And am I not your mother now? Better than life and twice as much fun? Why would you need Yanne Charbonneau? Why would you need anyone?

  ‘But what about Rosette?’ she protests.

  ‘Rosette has a family now.’

  A moment while she thinks about that. Yes, Rosette will have a family. Rosette does not need to choose. Rosette has Yanne. Rosette has Roux—

  Another sob escapes her. ‘Please—’

  ‘Come on, Nanou. It’s what you want. Magic, adventure, life on the edge—’

  She takes a step, then hesitates. ‘You promise you’ll never lie to me?’

  ‘Never have. Never will.’

  Another pause, and the lingering scent of Vianne’s hot chocolate pulls at me, saying try me, taste me in its smoky plaintive dying voice.

  Is that the best you can do, Vianne?

  But Anouk still seems to hesitate.

  She’s looking at my bracelet; at the silver charms that are hanging there: coffin, shoes, ear of maize, hummingbird, snake, skull, monkey, mouse—

  She frowns, as if she’s trying to remember something that’s just on the tip of her tongue. And her eyes brim with tears as she looks up at the copper pan cooling on the stove.

  Try me. Taste me. A last sad fading perfume, like a ghost of childhood on the air.

  Try me. Taste me. A skinned knee; a small damp palm with chocolate dust imprinted into lifeline and heartline.

  Taste me. Test me. A memory of both of them lying in bed, a picture book on the blanket between them, Anouk laughing wildly at something Vianne said . . .

  Once more I cast the sign of Mictecacihuatl, old Lady Death, the Gobbler of Hearts, like black fireworks into her path. It’s getting late; Madame’s tale will be done and very soon they will miss us both.

  Anouk looks dazed, watching the stove with a look of one half in a dream. Through the Smoking Mirror I can now see the cause: a small grey shape sitting by the pan, a blur that might be whiskers, a tail—

  ‘Well?’ I ask. ‘Are you coming or not?’

  13

  Monday, 24th December

  Christmas Eve. 11.05 p.m.

  ‘I LIVED DOWN the hall from Jeanne Rocher.’ her voice had the typical clipped vowels of the native Parisienne, like Stiletto heels rapping out the words. ‘She was a little older than me, and she earned her money doing Tarot readings and helping people to quit smoking. I went to her once, a couple of weeks before my daughter was taken. She told me I’d been thinking of having her adopted. I called her a liar. All the same, it was true.’

  She carried on, her expression bleak. ‘It was a bedsit flat in Neuilly-Plaisance. Half an hour from the centre of Paris. I had an old 2CV, two waitressing jobs at local cafés and the occasional handout from Sylviane’s father, who by then I’d realized would never leave his wife. I was twenty-one and my life was over. Childcare ate what little I earned; I didn’t know what else to do. It wasn’t that I didn’t love her . . .’

  The image of that little cat charm flashes briefly through my mind. There’s something touching about it, somehow, the silver charm with its lucky red ribbon. Did Zozie steal that too? Perhaps she did. Perhaps that’s how she fooled Madame Caillou, her harsh face softened now with the memory of her loss.

  ‘It was two weeks later that she disappeared. I left her for two minutes, that’s all – Jeanne Rocher must have been watching me, biding her time. When I thought to look for her she’d packed up and left, and there was no proof. But I always wondered—’ She turned to me, her face alight. ‘And then I met your friend Zozie, with her little girl, and I knew, I knew—’

  I looked at the stranger opposite me. An ordinary woman of fifty or so, looking rather older, perhaps, with her heavy hips and pencilled brows. A woman I might have passed a thousand times in the street without thinking for a moment that there could be any possible kinship between us, now standing there with that look of terrible hope on her face, and this is the trap, I know it is, and my name is not my soul, I know.

  But I can’t, I just can’t let her believe—

  ‘Please, Madame.’ I smiled at her. ‘Someone has played a cruel joke. Zozie’s not your daughter,’ I said. ‘Whatever she may have claimed, she’s not. And as for Vianne Rocher—’

  I paused. Roux’s face was expressionless, but his hand found mine and held it tight. Thierry’s eyes were on me too. And I knew at that moment I had no choice. A man who casts no shadow, I know, isn’t really a man at all, and a woman who gives up her name—

  ‘I remember a red plush elephant. A blanket with flowers. I think it was pink. And a bear with one eye made from a black button. And a little silver cat charm tied with a piece of red ribbon—’

  Now Madame was watching me, eyes bright under her pencilled brows.

  ‘They travelled with me for years,’ I said. ‘The elephant went pink with age. I wore it down to the stuffing inside and still I wouldn’t let her throw it away. They were the only toys I really had, and I carried them in my backpack with their heads sticking out so they could have a chance to breathe—’

  A silence. Her breath, a rasp in her throat.

  ‘She taught me how to read palms,’ I said. ‘And Tarot cards, and tea-leaves, and runes. I’ve still got her pack in a box upstairs. I don’t use it much, and it isn’t quite proof, but it’s everything I have left of her—’

  She was staring at me now, lips parted, mouth drawn in a grimace of some emotion too complex to identify.

  ‘She said you wouldn’t have cared for me. She said you wouldn’t have known what to do. But she saved the charm with her Tarot cards, and she saved the newspaper clippings, and before she died, I think she meant to tell me, but I couldn’t quite believe it then – I didn’t want to believe it then.’

  ‘There was a song I used to sing. A lullaby. Do you remember?’

  For a moment I paused. I was eighteen months old. How could I remember such a thing?

  Then suddenly it came to me. The lullaby we always sang to turn aside the changing wind; the song that soothes the Kindly Ones—

  ‘V’là l’bon vent, v’là l’joli vent,

  V’là l’bon vent, ma mie m’appelle.

  V’là l’bon vent, v’là l’joli vent,

  V’là l’bon vent, ma mie m’attend.’

  And now she opened her mouth and wailed, a great, torn hopeful cry that cut through the air like beating wings. ‘That was it. Oh, that was—’ Her voice wavered helplessly and she fell towards me, arms open like a drowning child.

  I caught her – she would have fallen otherwise – and the scent of her was like old violets and clothes kept too long unworn, like mothballs and toothpaste and powder and dust; so absurdly unlike the familiar sandalwood scent of my mother that it was all I could do to hold back the tears—

  ‘’Viane,’ she said. ‘My ’Viane.’

  And I held her, just as I’d held my mother in the days and weeks before her death, with quiet words of reassurance that she did not hear, but that calmed her a little, and finally she began to sob, with the long exhausted sobs of someone who has seen more than their eyes can bear, felt more than their heart can withstand—

  Patiently I let them subside. A minute later those tearing sounds in her chest had settled into a series of low tremors, and her face, ravaged now by the flow of tears, turned to look at the circle of guests. For a long time, no one moved. Some things are just too much to take; and this woman in her naked grief made them shy away like children from some fierce animal dying in the road.

  No one offered a handkerchief.

  No one looked her in the eye.

  No one spoke.

  Then, and to my astonishment, Madame Luzeron got to her feet and spoke up in her
cut-glass voice. ‘My poor dear. I know how you feel.’

  ‘You do?’ Madame’s eyes were a mosaic of tears.

  ‘Well, I lost my son, you know.’ She put her hand on Madame’s shoulder and guided her to an armchair nearby. ‘You’ve had a shock. Have some champagne. My late husband always used to say that champagne was largely medicinal.’

  Madame gave a wavering smile. ‘You’re very kind, Madame—’

  ‘Héloïse. And you?’

  ‘Michèle.’

  So that was my mother’s name. Michèle.

  At least I can still be ’Viane, I thought, and now I began to shake so violently that I almost collapsed into my chair.

  ‘You OK?’ said Nico, concerned.

  I nodded, trying to smile.

  ‘You look like you could do with something medicinal yourself,’ he said, handing me a glass of cognac. He looked so earnest – and so incongruous – in his Henri IV wig and frogged silk coat that I started to cry – absurd, I know – and for a time I quite forgot the little scene that Michèle’s story had interrupted.

  But Thierry had not forgotten it. Drunk he might have been, but not drunk enough to forget why he had followed Roux here. He’d come in search of Vianne Rocher, and he’d found her at last, perhaps not as he’d imagined her, but here, and with the enemy—

  ‘So you’re Vianne Rocher.’ His voice was flat. His eyes were pinpricks in red dough.

  I nodded. ‘I was. But I’m not the person who cashed those cheques—’

  He cut me off. ‘I don’t care about that. What matters is you lied to me. Lied. To me.’ Angrily he shook his head, but there was something pitiable in the gesture, as if he couldn’t quite believe that, once again, Life had failed to live up to his exacting standards of perfection.

  ‘I was willing to marry you.’ Now his voice was slurred with self-pity. ‘I would have given you a home, you and your kids. Another man’s kids. One of them – well – I mean, look at her.’ He glanced at Rosette in her monkey suit, and the familiar rictus came over his face. ‘Look at her,’ he said again. ‘She’s practically an animal. Crawls on all fours. Can’t even speak. But I would have taken care of her – I would have got the best specialists in Europe on her case. For your sake, Yanne. Because I loved you.’