She sighs. She looks up the street towards Nice’s old town, down the street towards the ocean. She even looks at the dog, as though he might have a good suggestion to make. He looks at her eagerly as though there might be another plate to lick. There’s only one place to go and it’s the last place she wants to be. But she finds a smile.
‘I know,’ she says, ‘let’s go and see Mémé!’
Marco groans. Stella looks uncertain. They both remember how it was last time they stayed with Stella’s grandmother. Samia was once a film star in Algeria. Now she is seventy years old, blind in one eye and living in a scruffy seventh-floor apartment in a tower block in l’Ariane with her disabled adult daughter. Her husband died when she was just fifty-five and her only son, Stella’s father, disappeared three years ago and hasn’t been in touch since. Samia is angry and raw and rightly so. But she has a roof and a floor; she has pillows and running water. She has everything right now that Lucy can’t offer her children.
‘Just for one night,’ she says. ‘Just tonight and then I’ll sort something out for tomorrow. I promise.’
They reach Samia’s estate just as the rain starts to fall, tiny water bombs exploding on to the hot pavement. In the graffiti-daubed lift on the way to the seventh floor, Lucy can smell them: the humid aroma of unwashed clothes, of greasy hair, of trainers that have been worn too long. The dog, with his coat of dense wiry hair, smells particularly horrible.
‘I can’t,’ says Samia at her front door, blocking their entrance. ‘I just can’t. Mazie is sick. The carer needs to sleep here tonight. There is no room. There is just no room.’
A crack of thunder booms overhead. The sky behind them turns brilliant white. Sheets of rain sluice from the sky. Lucy stares at Samia desperately. ‘We have nowhere else to go,’ she says.
‘I know,’ says Samia. ‘I know that. I can take Stella. But you and the boy and the dog, I’m sorry. You’ll have to find somewhere else.’
Lucy feels Stella push against her leg, a shiver of unease run through her small body. ‘I want to stay with you,’ she whispers to Lucy. ‘I don’t want to stay without you.’
Lucy crouches down and takes Stella’s hands. Stella’s eyes are green, like her father’s, her dark hair is streaked hazel-blond, her face tanned dark brown from the long hot summer. She is a beautiful child; people stop Lucy on the street sometimes to tell her so, with a soft gasp.
‘Baby,’ she says. ‘You’ll be dry here. You can have a shower; Mémé will read you a story …’
Samia nods. ‘I’ll read you the one you like,’ she says, ‘about the moon.’
Stella presses herself tighter against Lucy. Lucy feels her patience ebbing. She would give anything to be allowed to sleep in Mémé’s bed, to be read the book about the moon, to shower and slip into clean pyjamas.
‘Just one night, baby. I’ll be here first thing tomorrow to collect you. OK?’
She feels the flutter of Stella’s head nodding against her shoulder, the intake of her breath against tears. ‘OK, Mama,’ says Stella, and Lucy bundles her into Samia’s flat before either of them can change their mind. Then it is just her and Marco and the dog, yoga mats rolled up on their backs, heading into the heavy rain, into the darkening night, with nowhere to go.
For a while they take shelter beneath the flyover. The constant fizz of car tyres over hot wet tarmac is deafening. The rain keeps falling.
Marco has the dog held in his lap, his face pressed against the dog’s back.
He looks up at Lucy. ‘Why is our life so shit?’ he asks.
‘You know why our life is shit,’ she snaps.
‘But why can’t you do something about it?’
‘I’m trying,’ she says.
‘No you’re not. You’re letting us go under.’
‘I am trying,’ she hisses, fixing him with a furious gaze. ‘Every single minute of every single day.’
He looks at her doubtfully. He is too, too clever and knows her too, too well. She sighs. ‘I’ll get my fiddle back tomorrow. I can start making money again.’
‘How are you going to pay for the repairs?’ He narrows his eyes at her.
‘I’ll find a way.’
‘What way?’
‘I don’t know, all right? I don’t know. Something will come up. It always does.’
She turns from her son then and stares into the parallel lines