But Yanne Charbonneau (or Vianne Rocher) is hiding something from the world. I can smell the scent of secrets on her, like firecrackers on a piñata. A well-placed stone will set them free, and then we’ll see if they are secrets that someone such as I can use.

I’m curious to know, that’s all – a common enough characteristic of those fortunate enough to be born under the sign of One Jaguar.

Besides, she’s lying, isn’t she? And if there’s anything we Jaguars hate more than weakness, it’s a liar.

5

Thursday, 1st November
All Saints

ANOUK WAS RESTLESS again today. Perhaps the aftermath of yesterday’s funeral – or perhaps just the wind. It takes her like that sometimes, cantering her about like a wild pony, making her wilful and thoughtless and tearful and strange. My little stranger.

I used to call her that, you know, when she was small and there were just the two of us. Little stranger, as if she were on loan from somewhere or other, and one day they’d be coming to take her back. She always had that about her, that look of otherness, of eyes that see things much too far, and of thoughts that wander off the edge of the world.

A gifted child, her new teacher says. Such extraordinary powers of imagination, such vocabulary for her age – but already, there’s a look in her eye, a measuring look, as if such imagination is in itself suspect, a sign, perhaps, of a more sinister truth.

It’s my fault. I know that now. To bring her up in my mother’s beliefs seemed so natural at the time. It gave us a plan; a tradition of our own; a magic circle into which the world could not enter. But where the world cannot enter, we cannot leave. Trapped inside a cocoon of our own making, we live apart, eternal strangers, from the rest.

Or we did, until four years ago.

Since then, we have lived a comforting lie.

Don’t look so surprised, please. Show me a mother, and I’ll show you a liar. We tell them how the world should be: that there are no such things as monsters or ghosts; that if you do good, then people will do good to you; that Mother will always be there to protect you. Of course we never call them lies – we mean so well, it’s all for the best – but that’s what they are, nevertheless.

After Les Laveuses, I had no choice. Any mother would have done the same.

‘What was it?’ she said again and again. ‘Did we make it happen, Maman?’

‘No, it was an accident.’

‘But the wind – you said—’

‘Just go to sleep.’

‘Couldn’t we magic it better, somehow?’

‘No, we can’t. It’s just a game. There’s no such thing as magic, Nanou.’