The Lollipop Shoes (37 page)

Were
we responsible? Logic says not. But logic goes only so far, it seems. And now that wind is here again. And if we do not obey its call, then whom will it choose to take in our place?

There are no trees on the Butte de Montmartre. For that at least I am grateful. But the December wind still smells of death, and no amount of frankincense can sweeten its dark seduction. December was always a time of darkness; of ghosts holy and unholy; of fires lit in defiance against the dying of the light. The gods of Yule are stern and cold; Persephone is trapped underground and spring is a dream a lifetime away.

V’là l’bon vent, v’là l’joli vent

V’là l’bon vent, ma mie m’appelle—

And in the bare streets of Montmartre, the Kindly Ones still roam abroad, shrieking their defiance to the season of goodwill.

2

Tuesday, 11th December

AFTER THAT IT
came easily. She told me their little story in full: the chocolate shop in Lansquenet; the scandal that followed; the woman who died; then Les Laveuses, the birth of Rosette, and the Kindly Ones who had tried and failed to take her away.

So that’s what she fears. Poor little girl. Don’t think that because there’s something in this for me that I am entirely heartless. I listened to her disjointed tale; held her when it became too much; stroked her hair and dried her tears – which is more than anyone did for me when I was sixteen and my world collapsed.

I reassured her as well as I could. Magic, I said, is a tool of Change; of the tides that keep the world alive. Everything is linked together; an evil done on one side of the world is balanced by its opposite on the other. There is no light without dark; no wrong without right; no injury without revenge.

As for my own experience—

Well, I told her as much as she needed to know. Enough to make us conspirators; to link us in remorse and guilt; to sever her from the world of light and draw her gently into the darkness—

In my case, as I said, it began with a boy. It ended with one, too, as it happens; for if hell has no fury like a woman scorned, then there’s nothing on earth like a cheated witch.

It went pretty well for a week or two. I queened it over the other girls, enjoying my new-found conquest and the sudden status I had achieved. Scott and I were inseparable; but Scott was weak and rather vain – it’s what had made him so easy to enslave. And very soon the temptation to confide in his locker-room friends – to boast, to strut and, finally, to mock – became too much for him to resist.

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—’

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.