Chocolat by Joanne Harris Page A

square ringing with their catcalls and laughter.
           “Jeannot’s friends.”
           I saw what she meant. Louis Clairmont. Lise Poitou. Hisfriends. Without Jeannot the group would soon disperse. I felt a sudden pang for my daughter, surrounding herself with invisible friends to people the spaces around her. Selfish, to imagine that a mother could fill that space completely. Selfish and blind.
           “We could go to church, if that’s what you want.” My voice was gentle. “But you know it wouldn’t change anything.”
           Accusingly, “Why not? They don’t believe. They don’t care about God. They just go.”
           I smiled then, not without some bitterness. Six years old, and she still manages to surprise me with the depth of her occasional perception.
           “That may be true,” I said. “But do you want to be like that?”
           A shrug, cynical and indifferent. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, as if in fear of a lecture. I searched for the words to explain. But all I could think of was the image of my mother’s stricken face as she rocked me and murmured, almost fiercely, What would I do without you? What would I do? Oh, I taught her all of this long ago; the hypocrisy of the Church, the witch-hunts, the persecution of travellers and people of other faiths. She understands. But the knowledge does not transpose well to everyday life, to the reality of loneliness, to the loss of a friend.
           “It’s not fair.” Her voice was still rebellious, the hostility subdued but not entirely.
           Neither was the sack of the Holy Land, nor the burning of Joan of Arc, nor the Spanish Inquisition. But I knew better than to say so. Her features were pinched; intense; any sign of weakness and she would have turned on me.
           “You’ll find other friends.”
           A weak and comfortless answer. Anouk looked at me with disdain.
           “But I wanted this one.”
           Her tone was strangely adult, strangely weary as she turned away. Tears swelled her eyelids, but she made no move to come to me for comfort. With a sudden overwhelming clarity I saw her then, the child, the adolescent, the adult, the stranger she would one day become, and I almost cried out in loss and terror, as if our positions had somehow been reversed, she the adult, I the child.
           Please! What would I do without you? But I let her go without a word, aching to hold her but too aware of the wall of privacy slamming down between us. Children are born wild, I know. The best I can hope for is a little tenderness, a seeming docility. Beneath the surface the wildness remains, stark, savage and alien.
           She remained virtually silent for the rest of the evening. When I put her to bed she refused her story but stayed awake for hours after I had put out my own light. I heard her from the darkness of my room, walking to and fro, occasionally talking to herself — or to Pantoufle — in fierce staccato bursts too low for me to hear. Much later, when I was sure she was asleep, I crept into her room to switch off the light and found her, curled at the end of her bed, one arm flung wide, head turned at an awkward but absurdly touching angle that tore at my heart. In one hand she clutched a small Plasticine figure. I removed it as I straightened the bedclothes, meaning to return it to Anouk’s toybox. It was still warm from her hand, releasing an unmistakable scent of primary school, of secrets whispered, of poster paint and newsprint and half-forgotten friends.
           Six inches long, a stick figure painstakingly rendered, eyes and mouth scratched on with a pin, red thread wound about the waist and something — twigs or dried grass — stuck into the scalp to suggest shaggy brown hair.
           There was a letter scratched into the Plasticine-boy’s body, just above the heart; a neat capital J.