‘Will Madame describe the person I’m standing next to?’

The clairvoyant sat straighter still and lifted her head, her odd neck extending. She brought one long-fingered hand up to her throat and placed it there in a kind of loose stranglehold, and thrummed her fingers just below the ear. She spoke calmly and with a foreign accent. I suspected her hair was a wig. ‘She wears a heather blouse with blue stripes. An oyster-white skirt and wide black belt. A black ribbon adorns her hat.’ She raised her hand to hush the crowd, which was now gasping. After a moment, she spoke again. ‘Her bicycle is black. It once had a bell affixed to the front handlebars, but the bell became defunct so she removed it.’

People around the girl looked to her for confirmation. Her face had gone white and she was nodding, clutching the arm of her friend. The sound of hammering could be heard from somewhere else. The bell of a passing omnibus. No one spoke.

‘Would Mademoiselle care to know her fortune?’ the man prompted, jangling his box below the poor girl’s nose. ‘Only a sou. Always true.’ Caught in the wax of his moustache, a crumb.

‘She only wants to know one thing!’ her friend honked, releasing another coin into the wooden box. The crowd laughed, perhaps relieved that some black-magic spell had been broken.

The girl gave her friend an elbow to the ribs, but faced the man with her chin up, determined. ‘Should I or should I not accept the proposal I received just yesterday?’

The crowd jittered. The man held up his hand for silence and the people obeyed, and he turned to the clairvoyant, whose hand was again poised at her own throat.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And there will be children. The first to be born in the autumn of next year.’

I left this debacle, smirking, anxious to bring Madame her lunch.

6

Nora

Ottawa River, 1977

Nora named her daughter Anouk two days after she was born, and by the fourth day she and her husband Red knew something was wrong with their child. She wasn’t feeding, and had not yet passed the green-black sludge Nora was expecting, had read about. Meconium: earliest stool. Tar-like, odourless, composed of materials ingested in utero.

They went to the doctor in Pembroke, and were sent to the children’s hospital a few hours away in Ottawa. Anouk was given a blood test, a cruel pinprick to her heel, purple and round as a plum. She was given a test where a gel was applied to her thigh to make her sweat, and her sweat collected by a square of paper so they could test its level of chloride.

Nora said to Red, while they waited for their baby to wake up from the surgery that was needed to remove the dry rocks of meconium and cut out a dying twist of bowel, Nora said: ‘This is like that dream you have, when you can’t get anywhere; the one where you’re trying to run but your legs just won’t.’