Page 65 of Vianne

It was late afternoon when I got home. A small cold rain had started to fall, and my hair was all barbed with raindrops. Guy was sitting in the kitchen, drinking coffee. Stéphane was round the back of the shop, doing some kind of work on the van. Mahmed was nowhere to be seen.

‘He hasn’t been in all day,’ said Guy. ‘Went out sometime late last night, and hasn’t been back.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘He’ll be back soon.’

‘Of course he will.’ He gave a wan smile. ‘And your idea for the van was a good one. I’ve got Stéphane working on it right now.’

I touched the coffee pot. It was cold. ‘Here, I’ll make another.’

‘Thanks, but I should get back to work. Someone broke a window last night. I’ve had to order a new one.’

‘Did someone try to break in?’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t think so. Just vandalism.’

He led me to the front of the shop, where the front window had been smashed. A messy pile of glass fragments had been swept against the wall, along with the half-brick that had been used to do the damage.

‘Why would anyone do this?’ I said.

Guy shrugged. ‘Any number of reasons. This isn’t the first time we’ve had hate for who we are, what we’re doing. That’s why it’s important for us to fit into this community. People look out for each other here.’

I thought of the Tower, all neon, and the scent of eucalyptus smoke, and wondered how Khamaseen had fitted into the community.

She moved away . I wonder why. People didn’t look out for her.

She was a foreigner, a weed in this garden of roses.

The scent of eucalyptus smoke is more than just a memory.

It’s like a seam of something dark running through the walls and floors; a hint of something dangerous trembling on the edge of the air.

‘I wonder if she felt that too,’ I said. ‘The previous owner. The herbalist.’

He shrugged. ‘I never met her. The property’s on a long-term lease. I took it over when she left.’ He looked at me. ‘Why this curiosity?’

I explained about Marguerite, and Louis’ long-harboured resentment of Khamaseen, and all she stood for.

‘So that’s why Louis hates us,’ he said. ‘You don’t think he could have done this?’ He indicated the broken glass.

I shook my head. ‘He wouldn’t do that. In fact, I think I’ve made progress.’

I told him about the cemetery, and the santons de Margot .

Guy listened, and the drawn look softened into a little smile.

‘I knew you were good at this,’ he said.

‘You have a knack.’ He paused, then went on in an altered tone: ‘Did you know that the Aztecs associated the cacao pod with the human heart? Not in a romantic way, but in sacrifice and blood. Funny, how over centuries it has been tamed and sweetened. But underneath, the truth remains. The heart is anything but sweet.’

It was an odd thing for Guy to say, and I wondered what had prompted it.

I still sometimes find it hard to believe the lie he told his family.

But lies, my mother used to say, will seed like dandelions in spring: overrunning the roadsides; sinking their roots into everything.

A lie has a hundred different names; it crosses over continents.

It grows from an infant into a child, then into a mother with lies of its own, each with the face of an angel.

The wind brought you to me , she said. The wind could so easily take you back.

That’s why we take up as little a space as the world will allow us.

Because if the world knew, then everything would be taken away from us.

Who we are. Who we chose to be. Of course at the time I didn’t know the fear my mother was nursing.

To me, it was just a story. But now her voice is just as strong as it was when she was alive, and it tells me: Children are on loan.

The world will always try to take them back.

That’s why we keep moving, ’Viane . That’s why we change with the seasons.

I suppose on some level, I’ve always known.

Even as a child, I knew. The memory of that Christmas night, that night in the confessional, keeps coming back: the stricken tremor in her voice, the scent of books and incense.

My own voice rising, furious, from inside the wooden box: You’re not my mother!

Get away! I know you’re not my mother! And later, in our room, her tears; her soft cajoling, her promises.

I promise I’ll find Molfetta, she said. I should never have left her behind.

I know that now. Give me a chance to make it right with you again.

We never found her, though we looked for her on every bench; on every train; aboard every bus; in every lost-luggage department.

But I kept her close in my heart; whispering to her in the dark; sometimes glimpsed from the tail of my eye as we moved through the faceless crowds.

Sometimes, Maman saw her too, especially in those later years.

Your invisible friend , she called her. Remember your invisible friend?

But we both knew what Molfetta was. She was the secret my mother had carried with us all my life, the thing that follows, and bides its time; the thing from the confessional.

I swept up the broken glass into a dustpan while Guy went back into the conching room.

The constant burr of the machine was like the sound of the sea in a shell.

And the scent of chocolate, so much a part of the fabric of the building, now seemed to have tempered to something almost acrid, almost burnt.

A memory of sadness, perhaps; chocolate responds to emotions.

But then I heard Guy’s voice from the back room, rising and falling in the rhythms of profanity, and went in to see what was happening.

The acrid scent was stronger here: a kind of scorched and angry scent. Guy, in his chocolate-stained overalls, was peering into the conching machine.

‘What is it?’ I said.

‘The chocolate has seized. Water must have got in, somehow.’

I looked over his shoulder. The chocolate in the machine looked like cinders; rough and bitter and calcified, with none of the gleaming smoothness of correctly tempered chocolate. Water in the machine will do that; and yet there was no sign that the mixer had been tampered with in any way.

‘The whole fucking batch is ruined,’ said Guy. ‘There’s no way I can salvage this.’

Sometimes, chocolate that has seized can be brought back to life again, but not to the standard it was before.

‘We can still use it for ganache,’ I suggested, but Guy shook his head impatiently.

‘I know you want to help,’ he said. ‘But just leave me with this for now. Maybe go for a walk or something. I’m no fit company today. ’

I nodded. A spoilt batch of chocolate is not the end of the world; but for Guy, it represents more than that.

The cacao beans deserve better than this, after everything they’ve been through.

The fact that he can start again does not dispel the sense of loss.

And there is the financial aspect of this to consider.

Our profit margins are already low. This only adds to the pressure.

‘I’ll see if Stéphane wants a coffee,’ I said.

‘And if Mahmed comes back, send him in here.’