Free The Death-Defying Pepper Roux by Geraldine McCaughrean Page A

PEPPER PAPIER
    Like the cash canisters in the Marseillais Department Store, Pepper fired his stories off into space and saw them—miraculously!—appear in print between the advertisements for hair oil and chest rub, between accounts of war atrocities and reports of murder trialsand escaped convicts roaming the countryside. The chief copy editor put them into better French (because copy editors cannot read anything without changing it), so Pepper was able to read them afresh when they were printed, and feel proud—to share in the happiness of his invented characters all over again. Pepper planted his stories around like little night-lights to keep nightmares away. Because, he reasoned, the readers almost certainly suffered nightmares.
    Just like his.
    Pepper dreamed of a giant squid embracing L’Ombrage. He dreamed of Roche beckoning, beckoning, calling out to him, through bloodied lips and two thousand fathoms of water: Throw down a line! Pull me back up! He dreamed of being driven in a tumbrel toward a guillotine like a giant meat slicer; of wading waist deep among soft, decaying pheasants toward a hangman’s gallows. At the foot of the gallows steps stood his father, holding a noose and a placard, protesting about his son’s crimes. At his shoulder stood Aunt Mireille, looking at her pocket watch, its ticking so loud that it drowned out Pepper’s excuses. He dreamed that the fire brigade was hosing him downwith ink, indelible ink, and that ink-black rooks, as thickly strewn as the pheasants, were stuffing up the sky, blocking out the sun. Time and again they would swoop down and slash at his face, trying to pull it away, trying to see who he was under the mask….
     
    “This piece about the creature that’s been discovered, Papier…,” said the editor.
    “With the rainbow fur, sir?”
    “With the rainbow fur. And a taste for…what was it again?”
    “Crows, sir.”
    “Crows, yes.”
    “And candles.”
    “And candles.”
    “And household rubbish, sir.”
    The editor’s insatiable eyes trailed over Pepper’s latest article. “Do you have any pictures?”
    “No pictures—no, sir.”
    “Pictures would help, Papier. A photograph.”
    “I could describe it to the designer man and he could sketch one, sir.”
    “If you knew what one looked like.”
    “I could guess, sir.”
    The editor’s eyes opened very, very wide. His complexion darkened. “You do realize, Papier, that the public looks to us for fact . Absolute factually accurate, factual fact . The buying public cannot abide… fiction . The buying public detests fiction .” When he said it, his lips drew back from his front teeth as if he might, at any moment, spit the word back out again into a handkerchief and throw it in the trash. His eyes swerved to and fro now across the surface of his desk: an invoice for paper; Pepper’s article on the rainbowy lemurs raiding trash cans in Avignon; a child’s drawing of “Daddy.” They came to rest on the latest circulation figures of the newspaper, and there they stopped. For he saw, to his astonishment, that sales of L’Étoile Sud had actually risen ten percent in the last month. Advertising revenue was up eighteen percent. It was inexplicable: L’Étoile Sud had been on a downward slide for years. The editor shook himself, shut his gaping mouth, and thumped the desk.
    “Give me something meaty, Papier. Something weighty. Something verifiable before the end of the week, or I’m sorry, but I’ll just have to…” He let the threat hang in the air, unspoken. “Give me some coldhard facts, man! News, man! I’m killing the lemurs.” And he crushed the article into a ball and threw it in the trash without once resting his eyes on its author. Then and there, Pepper’s rainbow-colored lemurs ceased to exist. Amazing how a living creature could be bounding around one moment and extinct the next.
     
    Pepper was frightened. He liked being a journalist. He liked spread-eagling himself on the paper