The morning is long and languid. Rat gets bored, but even the boredom is pleasant. When she finishes reading her Lucky Luke, and leafing through her mother’s magazines, she wanders off into the backstreets. There’s a small square with a fountain where Gypsy women and children hang out. The mothers are even younger than Vanessa, but they wear long black skirts. They speak a strange kind of Catalan. Lots of the old people in Saint Féliu still speak Catalan, and Rat can understand a bit. But just when she thinks she’s ferreted out a word or two of Gypsy chatter, the women, as if sensing her interest, dive into something high-speed and utterly impenetrable.

The girls are playing in the dried-up fountain. There are four or five of them, the oldest about Rat’s age. None of them Rat recognizes from previous excursions.

“Is Sephora around?”

“No.”

“Is she coming back soon?”

“She’s off with her aunt.”

“Oh. Do you want to play?”

They look at Rat’s bare feet and look at each other and giggle. Finally, the oldest one answers. “What do you want to play?”

“What games do you like? Wolf?”

The Gypsy girls don’t know Wolf, so they end up doing clapping games. Rat knows some clapping songs they don’t know, they know some rhythms and moves she doesn’t. She teaches the girls a clapping song whose words are always verging on obscene, before veering clear. Every time she says the almost-swear word, the girls giggle and hide their faces in each other’s shoulders, although to Rat, the language is pretty mild.

Later on, people will tell her she shouldn’t play with Gypsies, the way they tell her not to hitchhike alone or not to let a dog lick her on the face, but she doesn’t pay much attention to what people tell her to do or not to do.

When the mothers call the girls for lunch, Rat wanders back to the market square. She passes the bar where they had breakfast. The man in black is sitting at an outside table with a couple of other men. His German girlfriend isn’t with him anymore. The men are drinking pastis. She lingers just a second too long, and he spots her.

“Hey, barefoot,” he says. “Where you going?”

Rat shrugs. “Nowhere special.”

“Your mom lets you run around town on your own?”

Rat’s insulted. “I can look after myself. I’ve been going around on my own for years. Everybody knows me.”

She glances fiercely at the waiter who is bringing them another round, and he nods in confirmation.

“No doubt,” says the man in black, and his companions chuckle not altogether pleasantly. “You look thirsty. What would you like, a syrup?”