The Lollipop Shoes Read Free Page A

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 acamping-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 otherbusiness 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