Free Sex and Stravinsky by Barbara Trapido Page A

just the same as she is about having a boy? Oh God! Oh no! Puke!
    Maman is driving sort of angrily, veering sideways and lurching back and forth, as she keeps on trying to overtake other cars on the way home. Zoe’s been given no explanation for her exchange partner’s absence and, while Maman and Véronique are having these rather staccato exchanges between themselves, they’re talking much too fast for Zoe to follow a word and both of them are behaving as though she wasn’t there. Zoe’s stomach has risen unstoppably to her throat and she’s just in time to throw up discreetly into the freezer-bag, which she clamps shut, and she then starts reaching for her backpack, but not before Maman and Véronique have noticed.
    ‘ Merde !’ says Maman, without slowing down or even turning round, but Zoe can see her contemptuous expression in the rear-view mirror, while Véronique looks at Zoe and smirks.
    Maman makes a right turn and swerves to a jerky stop.
    ‘ Descends !’ she says. And, when Zoe hesitates, she reaches over and wrenches open the back door. ‘ Descends et jette le !’ she says, making throwing gestures, i.e., that Zoe should litter the verge with her vomit bag. ‘ Voilà, et maintenant, remonte !’
    When Zoe’s back inside the car, she hears Maman say to Véronique, as she roars off like she’s on a starting block, ‘ Cette fille est une idiote !’
    They skirt around the town centre, on and on, and eventually end up in this new suburb, where all the roads look like Scalextrics, but the houses are kind of different-horrible to the ones where Zoe’s gran lives. These ones have steeply pitched grey pyramids for roofs with plastic dormer windows and white-plastered outside walls and crazy-paving paths to the front doors that look a bit like the Yellow Brick Road. And, while true to Caroline’s map there’s lots of woodland just behind the houses, the only trees in the gardens that she can see are these nasty little dwarf conifers. It’s like there’s a rash of them all over the housing development and there’s also quite a lot of dog crap. Plus the Tall Merry Fellow’s house has got these clinky-clunky wind chimes that are supposed to sound like the rainforest hanging over the front door.
    ‘ Alors ,’ Maman says, throwing her fag-end into one of the two dwarf-conifer pots that stand to the left and right of the front door, just as Zoe is deducing that Maman will probably be driving her and Véronique and the Tall Merry Fellow to school every morning, dodging and weaving and lurching, so that she will be throwing up over and over, until soon there won’t be any freezer-bags left. Or will they be allowed to catch a bus?
    On the floor, inside the conifer house, are those scratchy Dutch carpet tiles and there’s an open staircase to the upstairs rooms. It stinks of dog, though there doesn’t seem to be any dog, worse luck. No Mimi is there to come and greet them. Véronique is instructed to show Zoe to her room, which she does in a big huffy sulk from halfway up the staircase. She just waves her arm haphazardly in the direction of a bedroom door to the left.
    Zoe opens the door and then shuts it behind her. She plonks the hat box and her backpack on the bed. Then she turns round to look at what is obviously a boy’s bedroom. It’s got shelves with animal skulls – like maybe from deer and rabbits – and there are several torches on the bookshelves. Quite big ones. After a little snoop, Zoe finds a tobacco tin containing a survival kit with a length of fishing line and waxed matches and a compass and a miniature folding knife and water-sterilising pills. Then she sees that there’s a football on the desk and a black T-shirt over the chair that says ‘Zizou’. Nobody has even bothered to tidy away a pair of walking boots that are standing in the middle of the floor, with balled-up hiking socks stuffed into the tops.
    Zoe puts Lola Keeps a Secret and her Ballet Class book on the table beside