Madame Bonbon paused.
‘I want to know how you travel through time.’
As she said this last thing, there was an unmistakable look of challenge in her eyes. Madame Pamplemousse held her gaze but made no reply.
Madeleine knew that it was hopeless. Madame Pamplemousse would never tell her, for there was no limit to the harm Madame Bonbon might do with such a secret. And even if she did tell her, they had no guarantee that Madame Bonbon would actually release them. Either way they would be imprisoned here for ever.
But then she heard a voice; a gruff, guttural-sounding voice that seemed both strange and familiar. Though she had heard it many times before, until now Madeleine had never understood what it was saying.
‘You will find what you’re looking for in a café in Montmartre,’ said Camembert. ‘Its name is the Café of Lost Time.’
Everyone stared at him in astonishment. Madame Pamplemousse looked horrified.
‘No, Camembert!’ she whispered. ‘You mustn’t tell her! Be quiet!’
Camembert looked up and shrugged. ‘We have no choice,’ he said. ‘The owner of the café is called Monsieur Moutarde,’ he carried on to Madame Bonbon. ‘Tell him that I sent you. And there are certain ingredients that you will need to bring with you.’
Camembert explained how the Generator worked, converting specific flavours into locations in time and space.
‘And one more thing.’ He paused.
‘Yes?’ she said impatiently.
‘Our special code,’ he replied. ‘The word “mirror”.’
There was a long silence.
‘Well,’ said Madame Bonbon. ‘Thank you, Camembert. I’m glad to find you more amenable than your mistress.’
‘She’s not my mistress,’ he growled.
‘If you insist. However, I’m sorry to inform you that I will not be releasing you after all. At least not yet, until I have confirmed that what you’re telling me is the truth. So, if you excuse me, now I’ll be leaving you in the company of my associate here.’
She bowed towards the Moon Man, who responded with an elaborate flourish.
‘Until we meet again,’ said Madame Bonbon, vanishing into the mist.
x
Chapter Nine
Later that day, in Montmartre, at the Café of Lost Time, Monsieur Moutarde received a customer. She was a small, skeletally thin woman who wore a great quantity of make-up. However, rather than disguise her ugliness, this only made it appear all the more grotesque. At first sight, Monsieur Moutarde was quite taken aback, although being a perfect gentleman he pretended not to notice.
‘What can I get you, Madame?’ he asked.
Madame Bonbon stared at him in silence, her eyes darkly piercing. Monsieur Moutarde smiled, gesturing to the café bar.
‘A coffee, perhaps? Or something stronger?’
‘Your friends are in danger,’ she said suddenly. She spoke quietly, in a dry, rasping voice. ‘If you ever wish to see them again then you must do exactly as I say. You have a device here called the Generator, and I wish to use it.’
Monsieur Moutarde looked confused. ‘Generator?’ he said, frowning. ‘That’s not a drink I’m familiar with. May I suggest a glass of cognac instead?’
‘Don’t play with me!’ she snarled. ‘I mean what I say. I have your friends held captive. They are counting on you to save them. That is why they told me where to find you and why they gave me your special code –’
‘I’m sorry, Madame, but I really have no idea –’
‘The code “mirror”,’ she interrupted.
On hearing this word, Monsieur Moutarde’s expression froze. He remained silent for some time and when he finally spoke again, it was in a quite different tone.
‘To what precise time do you wish to travel, Madame?’ he asked softly.
Madame Bonbon told him what he asked and then removed a hand from her pocket. In her palm was a single lemon bonbon. Moutarde took this with a short nod and then went over behind the bar to what looked like a large, silver espresso coffee machine – for this was, in fact, the Generator.
The Taste-Automated Space-Time Déjà-Vu Generator was a complex device but its main principle was quite simple. It produced a liquid whose flavour gave you a strong feeling of déjà vu; the sense you were reliving an especially vivid memory or dream. The Generator then tricked the universe so that this feeling became reality. The liquid would actually transport you through time and space.
On top of the Generator there was a large silver funnel, into which Monsieur Moutarde dropped the lemon bonbon. He then adjusted several dials and turned on a switch. There was a loud hissing and a cloud of steam issued from out of the machine. At the same time a thin dribble of hot liquid was dispensed into a cup. He gave this to Madame Bonbon together with a small Thermos flask.
‘The flask contains coffee,’ he told her. ‘It will bring you back to the present time when you wish to return. And this,’ he said, handing her the cup. ‘This will take you to your chosen destination.’
She stared at it in silence.
‘Hurry, Madame!’ he whispered. ‘You don’t want to let it cool.’
Madame Bonbon tipped her head back and drank the liquid down. Almost at once it took effect. At first everything in the room became still, as if it had been captured in a snapshot. But this image began revolving, turning faster and faster like a merry-go-round. The room became a whizzing blur, then just a wheel of spinning colour. As it spun faster, so the colours grew darker, until eventually they turned to black.
Suddenly, Madame Bonbon realised that the spinning had stopped. The café had disappeared and she was standing in darkness.
After a time, she reached into her pocket for a match. She struck it and the match flared. Gradually she became aware that she was somewhere underground, in a cavernous, dank space. The air was cold and damp and smelled strongly of mildew. Madame Bonbon struck another match and that was when she saw the child.
She was lying on the floor, her body curled up tight into a little ball. Madame Bonbon was so shocked by the sight of her, at how vulnerable she seemed, that tears began pricking at her eyes. For the figure that she saw lying there was herself as a seven-year-old child.
‘Mama?’ said the girl, sleepily raising her head. She was wet through, with filthy clothing and her cheeks black with soot. Slowly the girl’s eyes grew accustomed to the light and then they became wide with fear.
‘Coco?’ whispered Madame Bonbon. ‘Coco?’ She reached out her hand.
The girl backed away but Madame Bonbon came closer, making her scream.
‘Shh, don’t be afraid,’ said Madame Bonbon softly. ‘I’m your friend, and I’m here to help you. I’m going to tell you a secret.’
Then she whispered to the child, who was trembling with fright. She told her all about a certain fungus, called the Witch’s Cap toadstool, that grew in the nearby woods. One day, she said, this toadstool would change her life for ever.
‘But listen to me, Coco,’ she said. ‘You must be very careful to make sure you pick the right one, for there is another kind, very similar, that is not poisonous at all –’
She broke off in mid sentence. For Madame Bonbon had just experienced the most extraordinary déjà vu.
She remembered then, with sharp clarity, how she had first heard about the Witch’s Cap. It was now – this very moment – when she was seven years old. She remembered being locked in the cellar and how frightened she had been. And she remembered meeting the witch. It was a memory so terrible that she had since blocked it from her mind. But now she was reliving it, at the very same moment as it first happened in time.
x
Soon after inventing the Generator, Monsieur Moutarde discovered that it held a potential danger. He realised this quite by chance shortly b
efore travelling back to his childhood. Travelling to your own past, he reasoned, was actually highly dangerous, since it could give rise to what he called a ‘Mirror Déjà Vu’. And it was just such a Mirror Déjà Vu that Madame Bonbon was now experiencing, because the universe was confused. It could not decide which was real: the woman experiencing the memory from when she was a child, or that same child experiencing what would later become the memory. However, as the universe generally tends to err on the side of life, it chose the child, and the woman vanished away altogether.
x
Chapter Ten
No sooner had Madame Bonbon disappeared from Paris than Madeleine found herself waking up there. She was in a television studio, surrounded by anxious-looking producers.
‘She’s awake!’ one of them cried, and a loud cheer went around.
A taxi was arranged to take Madeleine back home, but on his way the driver was instructed to make a small detour via the Café of Lost Time. Madame Pamplemousse met them outside the door. She asked the driver to leave the meter running, as she had something to give Madeleine and they would only be gone a moment.
One of the great advantages of time travel is the ability to go on long holidays and return only seconds later. Madame Pamplemousse thought Madeleine would be in need of relaxation, so she took her to an era in Earth’s history known as the Late Devonian Period, 350 million years ago. It was a time of great tranquillity and mild, tropical climates, long before the dinosaurs had evolved.
During the timeless days, Madeleine swam in the ocean or lazed in the sun. Or sometimes she would go off exploring across the plains with Camembert. In the evenings, however, the three of them would always meet to dine out under the stars.
It was over dinner that Madame Pamplemousse told Madeleine how they had found her. Camembert’s friend, the Blue Burmese, had led Camembert to the sweet shop, where he had stolen a box of the white chocolate truffles. Madame Pamplemousse had then extracted the special ingredient: the silvery-white mould known as Silver Moonshine. That was when she guessed Madame Bonbon’s true identity, for she remembered this mould from her child-hood in Provence. It grew down in the cellar, in a house she and Coco had once shared.
‘Long ago,’ said Madame Pamplemousse, ‘when I last saw Coco, she attempted to commit an act of great evil. If she had succeeded, it would have cost many people their lives.’
‘What did she do?’ asked Madeleine.
‘She tried to poison my cooking. But fortunately, her plan failed, for the toadstools she used were not poisonous at all. The only damage she did was to give my stew an unwarranted flavour of mushrooms. But I knew that was why she wanted the Generator: to undo her mistake.’
‘But weren’t you afraid she might succeed?’
Madame Pamplemousse shook her head. ‘Whatever happened back then merely happened over again. Or rather, it only happened once but Coco was forever doomed to repeat it.’
But even with her gone, Madeleine secretly feared that Madame Bonbon’s spell was not broken. She never mentioned these concerns, although one evening Madame Pamplemousse broached the subject of her returning to school.
‘I understand you may not wish to discuss this, Madeleine,’ she said, ‘but there’s something you ought to know.’
Camembert miaowed. Since leaving the spirit world, Madeleine had not been able to understand him but Madame Pamplemousse translated. She explained about Mirabelle’s cruelty to the Blue Burmese.
‘But he says the Burmese always knew she was a bad business. He never liked her that much to begin with.’
Camembert miaowed some more.
‘He says he plans to get his revenge. Being dropped in hot baths will be the least of her problems.’ Madame Pamplemousse broke off.
‘That won’t be necessary!’ she told him firmly. ‘Although he may be right,’ she said to Madeleine. ‘Mirabelle may have been under Coco’s spell, and will have no memory of what happened, but I’m afraid you won’t find her significantly changed.’
Madeleine closed her eyes, burying her face in her hands.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Madame Pamplemousse gently. ‘But I do promise you: the bullying will stop.’
‘No, it won’t,’ said Madeleine. ‘How could it? I’m too much of a coward.’
‘On the contrary, I have always thought you remarkably brave. But the truth is, Mirabelle and Coco are two of a kind. In both cases their power lies in turning people against themselves. Mirabelle made you feel bad for being special, by making you feel different. Well, Madeleine, I have to say, you are different, but that’s nothing to be ashamed of. And as for “fitting in”, personally I never have, nor do I intend doing so. But you know,’ she paused to smile, ‘that has never stopped me having friends.’
x
When the day finally came for Madeleine to go back to school, it was just as she had been dreading. Coming through the school gates she felt that old twisting in her stomach and the tightness in her chest.
She caught sight of them immediately on the other side of the playground: Mirabelle and her gang. They had seen her too and were already smirking to each other and beginning to sidle over. Madeleine closed her eyes, trying to stop herself from trembling. She tried to recall that brilliant light, the deep quiet and open spaces of the prehistoric Earth. She wished she could escape there now, drink the time-travelling liquid and disappear.
‘So?’ said a voice curtly. ‘What happened to you?’
Madeleine opened her eyes to find Mirabelle with her arms folded, giving her an insolent stare. There was no question after her health, not even a hello. Previously Madeleine would have tried to compensate, fawning all over Mirabelle in an effort to appease her. But this time she just stared back and replied matter-of-factly.
‘I fainted,’ said Madeleine.
‘Well, we could see that!’ Mirabelle made a face to approving laughter from the group. ‘But we wondered if you faked it, because really you’re a liar. Actually you’re not such a brilliant cook after all!’
The barb was well chosen and intended to wound. It might easily have done so had Mirabelle said it only minutes earlier. For then it would have been true: since the television show Madeleine had indeed lost all her ability to cook. Until that very moment, when something extraordinary happened: from out of nowhere she suddenly had an idea.
It was an idea for a cookery book. Her first cookery book, whose recipes would all involve the use of fresh herbs. But the recipes’ true connection would be subtler, more mysterious, and could only be guessed at through tasting.
Such ideas were rare. They arrived in the mind almost fully formed and yet were themselves the seeds from which other ideas grew. That was when Madeleine knew she had never really lost her talent. It had simply withdrawn out of fear, like a plant in winter, only to come back stronger than before.
She was so delighted to discover this, and so beguiled by her idea, that for an instant she quite forgot about Mirabelle. She even forgot to be afraid of her and, seeming to sense this, Mirabelle quickly changed tack.
‘Anyway, it’s cool,’ she said, flicking her hair. ‘The producers said I’m a natural. They want me to do an advert.’
‘What for?’ asked Madeleine.
‘Chocolate,’ she replied.
Madeleine could not help but smile at the irony of this.
‘Oh, look, everyone, she’s smiling!’ said Mirabelle. ‘What’s so funny, Madeleine? Aren’t you going to share the joke?’
Madeleine shook her head.
‘Oh dear,’ Mirabelle sighed. ‘What are we going to do with her?’
She pretended to be disappointed, though Madeleine could tell she was relieved. It must have been a huge threat to her, the prospect of Madeleine becoming a star. Apart from the feelings of envy, it would have severely undermined Mirabelle’s authority.
&n
bsp; ‘I’m sorry, Mirabelle,’ said Madeleine, ‘but I don’t have time for this any more.’
‘Time?’ Mirabelle glared at her. ‘Time for what?’
‘For playing games.’
‘Are we playing?’ She looked for confirmation from the other girls. ‘Sorry, Madeleine, I don’t think so. We’re chatting. This is called having a conversation – you know, the way normal people do with their friends –’
‘But you’re not my friends,’ said Madeleine quietly.
Mirabelle fell silent. She stared at Madeleine with her eyes boggling and her mouth gaping open. This was the last thing she would ever have expected Madeleine to say and it made any retort impossible. All she could do was disagree and that would look as though she were begging Madeleine to be her friend. So instead Mirabelle just gave a mocking laugh.
But Madeleine found she no longer cared. She turned her back on them all and walked away to a quiet corner of the playground. There she could continue thinking about her cookery book undisturbed.
She did not hear their jeers or any other noises in the playground; for that moment she was perfectly happy just being by herself. But the moment did not last for long, as soon afterwards she was joined by Tagine and his friends.
x
x
Also by Rupert Kingfisher
x
Madame Pamplemousse and Her Incredible Edibles
Madame Pamplemousse and the Time-Travelling Café
.
Bloomsbury Publishing, London, Berlin, New York and Sydney
First published in Great Britain in 2010 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
36 Soho Square, London, W1D 3QY
Text copyright © Rupert Kingfisher 2010
The moral right of the author has been asserted
This electronic edition published in September 2010 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Madame Pamplemousse and the Enchanted Sweet Shop Page 5