People do sleep in the cemetery. The gardien turns a blind eye as long as they don’t make a mess, but you sometimes find a stash of blankets, or an old kettle, or a trashcan packed with fuel for tonight’s fire, or a neat little stack of tins hidden away inside some chapel-of-rest that no one uses any more, and sometimes at night, so Jean-Loup says, you can see as many as half a dozen little fires in different spots inside the cemetery walls—

‘You’re sleeping here, aren’t you?’ I said.

‘I’m sleeping on my boat,’ said Roux.

But he was lying – I could see that at once. And I didn’t believe he had a boat. If he had, he wouldn’t be here, and he wouldn’t have stayed at Rue de Clichy. But Roux wasn’t telling; he just kept playing with Rosette, tickling her and making her laugh, while Rosette made wet squeee noises with her new whistle and laughed in that silent way she has, with her mouth open as wide as a frog’s.

‘So what are you going to do now?’ I said.

‘Well, for a start, I’ve got a party to go to on Christmas Eve. Or had you forgotten?’ He made a face at Rosette, who laughed and hid her face behind her hands.

I was beginning to think that Roux wasn’t taking any of this seriously enough. ‘You’re coming?’ I said. ‘Do you think it’s safe?’

‘I promised, didn’t I?’ he said. ‘In fact, I’ve got a surprise for you.’

‘A present?’

He grinned. ‘Just wait and see.’

I was dying to tell Maman I’d seen Roux. But after last night I knew I had to be careful. There are things I don’t quite dare tell her now, in case she gets angry, or doesn’t understand.

With Zozie, of course, it’s different. We talk about all kinds of things. In her room I wear my red shoes and we sit on her bed with the furry blanket over our knees and she tells me stories about Quetzalcoatl and Jesus and Osiris and Mithras and Seven Macaw – the kind of stories Maman used to tell, but doesn’t have time for any more. I guess she thinks I’m too old for stories. She’s always telling me I should grow up.

Zozie says growing up’s overrated. She never wants to settle down. There are too many places she hasn’t seen. She won’t give them up for anyone.

‘Not even for me?’ I said tonight.

She smiled, but I thought she looked sad at that. ‘Not even for you, little Nanou.’

‘But you’re not going away,’ I said.

She shrugged. ‘That depends.’

‘Depends on what?’

‘Well, on your mother, for a start.’

‘What do you mean?’