Or else picture this. You’re in London with your granny. You’re riding on the top of a bus—one of those red double-decker elephants that look like they belong in a circus. It’s Christmastime. A wet winter’s day that’s sleeting into purple dusk, but inside, you’re toasty warm. From the top story of the bus, you look down on the big boulevards festooned in Christmas lights. The bus is fuggy with warmth. And the traffic lights reflect off the melted snow in the street, making pools of shimmery red and green.

You are squeezed into a seat at the front of the bus, and beside you is your grandmother, Celia Kidd. Your grandmother’s an old lady, but she’s still whip-thin and her eyes are electric green, and she wears red lipstick and magenta leather gloves like the girl in the Hermès ad taped up on your wall. Even just thinking of those magenta gloves is a good way of banishing the image of snoring Thierry splayed wide across your mother’s bed.

You and your granny have been Christmas shopping. You’ve been to all the fancy department stores, the shops that sell perfumed bath oil, the food shops that sell hams and caviar and chocolates and cheeses.

You’ve bought presents for your father and you’ve bought presents for your mother and you’ve bought presents for Morgan, and you’ve chosen something very beautiful for your grandmother.

Everybody in the shops recognizes Celia Kidd. And she tells them, This is my granddaughter, who is also named Celia. She looks just like you, the shop assistants say. It’s nice to have a beautiful granddaughter named after you.

And now you are headed home to a white terraced London house, where Gillem is waiting for you in the midnight blue drawing room, in front of a roaring fire.

Celia will serve tea and cakes in front of the fire, the three of them will be snuggled tight on the pink velvet sofa, and Celia will tell you wild stories about London in the sixties.

“And tomorrow,” she says, running her fingers lovingly through your hair, “I’ll take you ice-skating in the park.”

Book Two

Chapter 1

The radio alarm is jabbering again, cracking Rat out of sleep. Beady digitals say it’s 6:58 a.m. The sky is silvery blue, the remaining streaks of snow on Mount Canigou are gleaming in the early morning light, the broad new leaves on the vines trellising their neighbors’ terrace trembling pale green.

Rat can’t deny it’s day, even though it feels like somewhere between night and death. Radio’s tuned to Radio Blue Roussillon, and the announcer’s reporting on the third day of riots in Perpignan.