The Night Rainbow A Novel - By Claire King Page 0,13

We all mix up together in the market but we are as separate as apples and oranges in a bowl.

Maman came here on holiday too, once upon a time. She said she was looking for peace and quiet. But instead she found Papa and stayed for ever. Whenever Maman told me about meeting Papa – and I made her tell me about it a lot – she would turn pink and smile so hard that tears squeezed out. Even before he died. Papa was her handsome prince, she said.

Maman is pushing through the crowds belly first. She has her hands on it, so no one bumps the baby, but it looks as though someone has tied a string to her belly button and is pulling her along. As she marches through them, people step away from her, making a bubble of air around us like a cage.

There are some children from my old nursery school. I wave at them as I am tugged past and shout, Coucou! But they don’t wave back. They start to laugh.

Papa was an orange but we are apples, I say.

You know why you are super-clever? says Margot.

I’m not.

You are.

Why?

Because you can speak all the languages and they can only speak one.

I can’t speak all the languages, I say. What about Spanish?

Well then most of the languages.

We have come to a corner where a man is roasting chickens on spits. The air is full of roasting flavours and the corner is blocked by people huddling by the stand just to taste the chicken smell, even if they aren’t going to buy one. We have never bought one of these chickens but I am sure I know how delicious it would be. I slow down, letting the saltiness fill my mouth and my ears eat up the sizzling sound. Maman grabs me by the hand and pulls me away.

As we turn the corner, there is Claude. He is standing with Merlin at the butcher’s van. The butcher is wrapping up meat in white paper parcels. Merlin is staring at it, then he sniffs the air and turns his head my way. When he sees us he barks a loud hello and wags his flappy tail.

Claude turns too and looks over in our direction then says something to Merlin. He looks at Maman, then at me and Margot, then back at Maman. He smiles half a smile. He looks like he wants to be friendly but thinks Maman might bite him. With the head she has on her today I am afraid she might.

He needn’t worry, because Maman doesn’t see him at all; she is following her list. As we pass by him I look up. He is turning back to the butcher to pay for his sausages, but not before winking at Margot and me.

At the market we have a routine. It means we do the same things every week. We get our meat first and it goes in the bottom of the basket. Then we go to the vegetable stall and we buy something green, depending on the weather. In the summer that means courgettes and artichokes, green beans and peas in pods. After that we go to Marcel the fruit man under his stripy yellow awning. He is quite fat with white hair and a red face and an apron covered in seeds and juice. And he has one gold tooth. His wife is there too. She is thin and happy-looking and doesn’t say much. As Marcel juggles plums into brown paper bags, for weighing, she is arranging the fruit and bringing out new trays of things from the back of a white van.

While Maman is choosing between different kinds of plums and apricots, round tomatoes on vines or the ones that look like small red pumpkins, we stand in the queue – there is always a queue. Margot decides on one kind of fruit and does counting; she can count all the numbers, which is clever but quickly becomes boring. What’s worse, if someone buys some of whatever she is counting she has to start again. I just like to press my nose close to the fruit displays to breathe in the warm, ripe smells. Marcel always notices me and comes to tell me how beautiful I am.

Today there is a cantaloupe cut open on top of the others, green on the outside but orange on the inside. I can smell the honey-sweetness from far away. I put my face so close to it