The Lollipop Shoes

by Joanne Harris

  I sensed it at once – the change of balance. Scott had talked a little too much, and the rumours chased each other like dead leaves from one end of the school to another. Graffiti appeared on shower-room walls; people nudged each other as I passed by. My greatest enemy was a girl named Jasmine – scheming, popular, and picture-pretty modest – who launched the first wave of rumours. I fought them with every dirty trick at my disposal, but once a victim, always a victim, and I soon returned to my usual role; a target for every snide comment and joke. Then Scott McKenzie joined the side. After a series of increasingly half-hearted excuses, he was seen out openly in town with Jasmine and her friends; and finally was pushed, cajoled, shamed and taunted into a direct assault. On my mother’s shop, no less; long since the butt of ridicule with its displays of crystals and books on sex-magic, now once more the target of their attack.

  They came by night. A group of them; half-drunk and laughing and shushing and pushing each other. A little too early for Mischief Night; but the shops were already full of fireworks and Hallowe’en was beckoning with long skinny fingers that smelt of smoke. My room looked out on to the street. I heard them approach, heard sounds of mirth and tautened nerves; heard a voice – go on, do it! – a muttered response, another voice saying urgently – go on, go on – then ominous silence.

  It lasted almost a minute. I checked. Then came the sound of something exploding, very close by, in a confined space. For a moment I thought they had put firecrackers in the rubbish bin – then the scent of smoke reached me. I looked out of the window and saw them scattered – six of them, like frightened pigeons – five boys and a girl, whose walk I recognized . . .

  And Scott. Of course. Running ahead of the pack, his blond hair very pale in the street-light. And as I watched, he looked back at me – and just for a moment, our eyes might have met—

  But the glare from the shop window must have made it impossible. That red-orange flare as the fire spread, leaping and tumbling and somersaulting like an evil acrobat from a rail of silk scarves to a trapeze of dreamcatchers and finally to a stack of books—

  Shit. I saw his lips move. He halted – the girl at his side pulled him on. His friends joined in – he turned and ran. But not before I had marked them all; those sleek and stupid teenage faces, fire-blushed and grinning in the orange light—

  It wasn’t much of a fire, in the end; out before the fire brigade came. We even managed to salvage most of the stock, though the ceiling was blackened and the place stank of smoke. It had been a rocket, the firemen said; a Standard rocket poked through the letter-box and set alight. The policeman asked me if I’d seen anything. I said no.

  But the next day, I began my revenge. Claiming sickness, I stayed at home, and plotted, and worked. I made six little dolls from wooden pegs. I made them as realistically as I could, with hand-stitched clothes and faces carefully cut out of that year’s class photograph and glued into place below the hair. I named them all, and as the Día de los Muertos approached, I worked and schemed to have them ready.

  I collected stray hairs from coats on pegs. I stole clothing from the locker room. I tore pages out of exercise books, ripped tags from satchels, raided bins for used tissues and removed well-chewed pen-lids from desk-tops when no one was looking. By the end of the week I had enough material of one kind or another to invest in a dozen peg-dolls, and on Hallowe’en, I called in the debt.

  It was the night of the half-term school disco. Nothing had been said to me officially, but it was well-known that Scott was taking Jasmine to the disco, and that if I was there, there would be trouble. I didn’t intend to go to the dance, but I certainly intended trouble; and if Scott or anyone stood in my way, then I could guarantee that they would get it.

  You have to remember, I was very young. Naïve, too, in many ways, though not as naïve as Anouk, of course, or indeed as prone to guilt. But I came up with a two-pronged revenge; one that satisfied the demands of my System whilst providing a solid underpinning of practical chemistry that would add authority to my occult experimentation.

  At sixteen, my knowledge of poisons was not as advanced as it might have been. I knew the obvious ones, of course; but so far I’d had little chance to see them in action. I intended to change that. And so I made up a compound of all the most virulent substances I could lay my hands on: mandrake, morning glory, yew. All on sale in my mother’s shop, and, if dissolved or infused into a quantity of vodka, rather difficult to spot. I bought the vodka from the corner shop; used half of it for the tincture, then added a few extras of my own – including the juice of an agaric mushroom that I had the good luck to discover under a hedge in the school grounds. I then strained the tincture carefully back into the bottle – marked now with the sign of Hurakan the Destroyer – and left it in my open schoolbag, where I was certain karma would do the rest.

  Sure enough, by Break it had gone, and Scott and his friends had acquired a collective smirk and a furtive manner. I went home that night almost happy, and completed all of my six peg-dolls with a long, sharp needle through the heart as I whispered a little secret to each.

  Jasmine – Adam – Luke – Danny – Michael – Scott—

  Of course I couldn’t possibly have known that for sure, just as I could not have known that, instead of drinking the vodka themselves, they would use it to spike the bowl of fruit punch at the disco, thereby spreading karma’s bounty even more generously than I could have hoped.

  The effects, I heard, were spectacular. My brew induced projectile vomiting, hallucination, stomach cramps, paralysis, kidney dysfunction and incontinence – affecting over forty pupils, including the six original perpetrators.

  It could have been worse. Nobody died. Well, not directly, anyway. But poisoning on such a grand scale rarely passes unseen. There was an inquiry; someone talked; and at last the guilty parties confessed, incriminating themselves – and me – as each tried to put the blame elsewhere. They admitted to pushing the rocket through our letter-box. They admitted to stealing the bottle from my bag. They even admitted to spiking the drinks – but denied all knowledge of the bottle’s contents.

  Predictably, the police came to our house next. They expressed a good deal of interest in my mother’s herbal supplies and questioned me rather closely – with no success. I was an expert in stonewalling by then, and nothing – not their kindness, nor their threats – could make me change my story.

  There had been a bottle of vodka, I said. I’d bought it myself – reluctantly – and on Scott McKenzie’s express instructions. Scott had big plans for the disco that night, and had suggested bringing a few little extras to (as he said) liven up the party a bit. I’d taken this to mean drugs and alcohol; which was why I’d chosen not to go rather than betray my lack of enthusiasm for his plan.

  I admitted that I’d known it was wrong. I should have spoken up at the time; but I’d been afraid after the rocket incident, and had gone along tacitly with their plan, fearing possible repercussions.

  As it happened, something must have gone wrong. Scott didn’t know very much about drugs, and I guessed he must have overdone it. I wept a few crocodile tears at the thought; listened earnestly to the officer’s lecture; then looked relieved at my lucky escape and promised never to get involved in anything like that, ever again.

  It was a good performance, and it convinced the police. But my mother had her doubts all along. Her discovery of the peg-dolls did much to confirm this, and she knew enough about the properties of the substances in which she dealt to have more than an inkling of whom and what.

  I denied it all, of course. But it was clear she didn’t believe me.

  People could have died, she kept saying. As if that hadn’t been my plan. As if I cared, after what they’d done. And then she began to talk about getting help – about counselling and anger management and maybe a child psychiatrist—

  ‘I never should have taken you to Mexico City that year,’ she kept saying. ‘You were fine till then – a good little girl—’<
br />
  Crazy as a coot, of course. Believing in every crackpot notion that came her way, and now, this growing delusion that somehow the obedient little girl she’d taken to Mexico for the Día de los Muertos had been taken over by some evil force – something that had changed her and made her capable of these terrible things.

  ‘The black piñata,’ she kept repeating. ‘What was inside? What was inside?’

  But by then she’d grown so hysterical that I hardly knew what she was trying to say.

  I didn’t even remember a black piñata – it was such a long time ago, and besides, there were so many in the carnival. As for what was inside – well, sweets, I suppose, and little toys, and charms, and sugar skulls and all the usual things you’d find inside a piñata on the Day of the Dead.

  To suggest that it might have been anything else – that perhaps some spirit or little god (perhaps even Santa Muerte, greedy old Mictecacihuatl herself) had entered me during that Mexican trip—

  Well, if anyone needed help, I said, it was the person who’d dreamed up that fairytale. But she insisted; dared call me unstable; quoted her Creed and finally told me that if I didn’t own up to what I’d done, then she would have no other choice—

  That finally decided it. That night I packed for a one-way journey. I took her passport and my own; some clothes; some money; her credit cards, cheque-book and keys to the shop. Call me sentimental; I also took one of her earrings – a little pair of shoes – as a charm to add to my bracelet. I’ve added to it a lot since then. Every charm here is a trophy of sorts, a reminder of the many lives I have collected and used to enrich my own. But that’s where it really started. With a single pair of silver shoes.

  Then I crept softly downstairs, lit a couple of fireworks I’d bought that day and dropped them among the stacks of books before very quietly letting myself out.

  I never looked back. There was no need. My mother always slept like the dead, and besides, the dose of valerian and wild lettuce that I’d slipped in her tea would surely have quietened the most restless of sleepers. Scott and his friends would be suspects at first – at least until my disappearance was confirmed – by which time I fully intended to be over the seas and far away.

  I toned it down for Anouk, of course, omitting all mention of the bracelet, the black piñata or of my fiery farewell. I painted a touching picture of myself, alone and misunderstood, friendless upon the Paris streets; racked with guilt, sleeping rough, living on nothing but magic and wits.

  ‘I had to be tough. I had to be brave. It’s hard, being alone at sixteen, but I managed to fend for myself somehow, and in time I learnt that there are two forces that can drive us. Two winds, if you like, blowing in opposite directions. One wind takes you to what you want. The other one drives you from what you fear. And people like us have to make a choice. To ride the wind, or to let it ride you.’

  And now at last as the piñata splits open, lavishing bounty on the faithful, here comes the prize I have waited for, the ticket to not one life, but two—

  ‘Which one will you choose, Nanou?’ I say. ‘Fear or desire? The Hurakan, or Ehecatl? The Destroyer, or the Wind of Change?’

  She fixes me with that blue-grey gaze, the colour of a stormcloud’s edge just as it begins to break. Through the Smoking Mirror I can see her colours shifting in the most turbulent of purples and blues.

  And now I can see something else. An image, an icon, presented here with more clarity than an eleven-year-old child could possibly articulate. I see it for less than a second, but even so it is enough. It’s the Nativity scene on Place du Tertre, the mother, the father and the crib.

  But in this version of the scene, the mother is wearing a red dress, and the father’s hair is the same colour—

  And at last, I begin to understand. That’s why she wants this party so much; that’s why she lavishes so much attention on the little peg-dolls in the Advent house, grouping, positioning them with as much care and attention as she would have given the real thing.

  Look at Thierry outside the house. He has no role to play in this strange re-enactment. Then there are the visitors – the Magi, the shepherds, the angels. Nico, Alice, Madame Luzeron, Jean-Louis, Paupaul, Madame Pinot. They serve as the Greek chorus: to give encouragement and support. Then there is the central group. Anouk, Rosette, Roux, Vianne—

  What was the first thing she said to me?

  Who died? My mother. Vianne Rocher.

  I took it as a kind of joke, a child’s attempt to be provocative. But knowing Anouk a little better now, I begin to see how serious those seemingly flippant words might be. The old priest and the social worker were not the only casualties of that December wind, four years ago. Vianne Rocher and her daughter Anouk died just as surely on that day, and now she wants to bring them back—

  How alike we are, Nanou.

  You see, I too need another life. Françoise Lavery dogs me still. Tonight’s local paper showed her again, now otherwise known as Mercedes Desmoines and Emma Windsor, among other aliases, and showing two blurry pictures taken from CCTV. You see, Annie, I have Kindly Ones of my own, and they may be slow, but they are unwavering, and their pursuit of me now goes beyond irksome into something that almost threatens me.

  How did they find out about Mercedes? And how did they catch up with Françoise so soon? And how long do you think it will be before even Zozie falls to their relentlessness?

  Perhaps it’s time, I tell myself. Perhaps I’ve exhausted Paris at last. Glamours aside, perhaps the time has come for me to take to another set of roads. But not as Zozie. Not any more.

  If someone offered you a whole new life, wouldn’t you take it?

  Of course you would.

  And if that life could offer you adventure, riches and a child – not just any child, but this beautiful, promising, talented child, untouched as yet by the hand of karma, that sends every bad thought and questionable deed straight back at you with threefold strength – something to toss to the Kindly Ones when at last there’s nothing else—

  Wouldn’t you, if you had the chance?

  Wouldn’t you?

  Of course you would.

  3

  Wednesday, 12th December

  WELL, THAT’S MORE than a week of lessons so far, and already she says she can see a change. I’ve been learning more of the Mexican stuff – names and stories and symbols and signs. Now I know how to raise the wind with Ehecatl, the Changing One; and how to invoke Tlaloc, for rain, and even how to call down the Hurakan to bring revenge on my enemies.

  Not that I’m thinking of revenge. Chantal and Co. have been out of school ever since that day at the bus stop. Apparently they’ve all got it now. Some kind of ringworm, Monsieur Gestin says, but anyway, they have to stay at home until it gets better, in case they infect anyone else. You’d be amazed at the difference it makes to a class of thirty kids when the four nastiest people are away. But without Suzanne, Chantal, Sandrine and Danielle, it’s actually nice to be at school. No one’s It; no one laughs at Mathilde for being fat, and Claude actually answered a question in maths today without stuttering.

  Today, in fact, I’ve been working on Claude. He’s really nice when you get to know him, although he stammers so badly most of the time that he hardly ever talks to anyone. But I managed to slip a piece of paper marked with a symbol into his pocket – One Jaguar, for bravery – and it might just be that the others are away, but already I think I can see a difference.

  He’s more relaxed now; he sits up instead of slouching and although his stammer hasn’t actually gone, it didn’t sound too bad today. Sometimes it gets so bad that his words jam up completely and he goes red in the face and almost cries – and everyone’s embarrassed for him – even the teacher – and can’t look (except for Chantal and Co., of course), but today he talked more than he ever does normally, and that didn’t happen, not even once.

  I talked to Mathilde as well today. She’s very shy, and she doesn’t talk much; wears big black sweaters to hide h
er shape; tries to be invisible, hoping that people will leave her alone. They never do; and she moves around with her head down, as if she’s afraid to catch someone’s eye, and it makes her look tubby and awkward and sad, so that no one sees that she’s got great skin – unlike Chantal, who’s getting spots – and her hair is really thick and beautiful, and with the right attitude, she could be, too—

  ‘You should try it,’ I told her. ‘Surprise yourself.’

  ‘Try what?’ said Mathilde, as if to say: why are you wasting your time on me?

  So I told her some of what Zozie told me. She listened, forgetting to look at the floor.

  ‘I couldn’t do that,’ she said at last, but I noticed a hopeful look in her eyes, and this morning at the bus stop I thought she looked different: straighter and more confident, and for the first time since I’d known her, she was wearing something that wasn’t black. It was just an ordinary top, but dark red and not too baggy, and I said, that’s nice, and Mathilde looked confused, but pleased, and for the first time ever, went smiling to school.

  All the same, it feels kind of weird. To be suddenly – well, not popular, exactly, but something like it, anyway; to have people look at you differently; be able to change the way they think . . .

  How could Maman ever give that up? I wish I could ask her; but I know I can’t. I’d have to tell her about Chantal and Co.; and about the peg-dolls; and Claude and Mathilde; and Roux; and Jean-Loup—

  Jean-Loup was back in school today, looking a bit pale, but cheerful enough. Turns out his illness was only a cold, but his heart thing makes him delicate, and even a cold can be serious. Still, today he was back, taking pictures again, watching the world through his camera. Jean-Loup takes pictures of everyone: teachers, the janitor, pupils, me. He takes them very fast, so that no one has time to change what they’re doing, and sometimes this gets him into trouble – especially with the girls, who want to be able to primp and pose—