And Vanessa, who is in a lousy temper, feeling unappreciated by her now teenage daughter, laughs shortly and says, “Did you really believe that?” There never was any birthday money from Rat’s daddy, she explains. It was Vanessa who in the fullness of her heart invented this offering the year Rat moved from preschool to primary and was getting bullied by older kids at recess. “I did it to cheer you up,” she says.

Rat is so shocked her normally sharp tongue momentarily fails her. She feels made a fool of. She feels tampered-with, defiled in her innermost sanctuary, the place where she dreams about people who to her waking life are marginal.

“You made me write a letter you were never going to send?”

Vanessa shrugs. “I thought it might help you. You had things you needed to say to your father.”

“Like thank you?”

It’ll be years before Rat discovers that although her English father doesn’t send her birthday presents, he does pay Vanessa child support—a monthly sum which by London standards is probably pretty basic, but which, for the Pyrénées-Orientales, where they live, is royal.

Vanessa is a rich woman, but nobody knows, least of all her daughter. The monthly payments which are intended for Rat’s maintenance pile up in a Crédit Agricole account, separate from their regular account, which is always bumping on empty. And meanwhile, Vanessa and Rat live hand to mouth like everybody else they know, off a combination of welfare benefits, undeclared earnings, and gleaning.

To her friends, Vanessa is wide-open generous. The generosity is genuine. Vanessa would give you her only winter coat, and it wouldn’t be a game. It’s as if she’s unconscious of the fact that, unlike her friends and neighbors, she’s got serious money in the bank—if she knew, she would buy a new car, instead of rattling around in a broken-down Renault 5. Poverty is also something mental, and Vanessa honestly feels skint.

And Rat, later on when she learns about the child support and thinks it over, doesn’t begrudge her mother the money that should logically have been spent switching her to private school after she flunks out of eighth grade because the public high school at Canet is so big and rough that you spend all your mental energy figuring out how not to get beaten up. Or even just taking them on vacation somewhere nice.

Rat doesn’t mind, because thanks to Vanessa’s teaching, she’s learned to fend for herself. Later on, when she meets people who’ve been born rich, they will seem to her like dogs without a sense of smell. Bank accounts belong to the realm of the unreal. What’s real is your quick wits.