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.

I toned it down for Anouk, of course, omitting all mention of the bracelet, the black piñata or of my fiery farewell. I painted a touching picture of myself, alone and misunderstood, friendless upon the Paris streets; racked with guilt, sleeping rough, living on nothing but magic and wits.

‘I had to be tough. I had to be brave. It’s hard, being alone at sixteen, but I managed to fend for myself somehow, and in time I learnt that there are two forces that can drive us. Two winds, if you like, blowing in opposite directions. One wind takes you to what you want. The other one drives you from what you fear. And people like us have to make a choice. To ride the wind, or to let it ride you.’

And now at last as the piñata splits open, lavishing bounty on the faithful, here comes the prize I have waited for, the ticket to not one life, but two—

‘Which one will you choose, Nanou?’ I say. ‘Fear or desire? The Hurakan, or Ehecatl? The Destroyer, or the Wind of Change?’

She fixes me with that blue-grey gaze, the colour of a stormcloud’s edge just as it begins to break. Through the Smoking Mirror I can see her colours shifting in the most turbulent of purples and blues.