Peaches for Monsieur Le Curé by Joanne Harris Read Free Book Online

mosque. Certainly, there were features which (as I had to point out) contravened local planning regulations. But these were very minor, and I only mentioned them in passing, to avoid unpleasantness later.
    Certainly, the result was modest enough. A bland old yellow-brick building with very little on the outside to indicate that it was a place of worship. Inside, a rather beautiful space, with a tiled floor and pale walls stencilled in gold. As a priest, I try to be sensitive to the beliefs of others, and I made a real effort to convey to the community of Les Marauds how much I admired their handiwork, and to make myself available if ever anyone needed help.
    Even so, a shift had occurred. Somehow, during our interchange, old Mahjoubi had become defiant. He had always been a stubborn old man, and possessed of a curious levity that sometimes made it hard to know whether or not he was joking. His son Saïd was of a much more serious bent, and I sometimes wondered if it would not be better for the whole of Les Marauds if the father were to step down and leave the decision-making to his son.
    Perhaps old Mahjoubi sensed this. In any case, his attitude seemed to have developed an edge. If ever I came to Les Marauds (which I still do, every day, out of a sense of duty), Mahjoubi never missed a chance to make some kind of comment. These were always good-natured, I am sure, but others may not have understood.
    ‘Here comes Monsieur le Curé,’ he would say in his thickly accented voice. ‘Did you run out of sinners on your side of the river? Or are you here to join us at last? Have you learnt to smoke kif ? Or is your incense heady enough?’
    All in good humour, I know that; and yet there was something in his manner that seemed defiant, combative. His followers started to echo him, and before I knew it, almost overnight, Les Marauds had become hostile territory.
    So – when did things begin to change? Hard to know for certain. Like looking in the mirror one day and seeing the first signs of old age: the wrinkles around the eyes; the way the skin around the jaw seems to slip out of alignment. There were a few new arrivals; friction within the community – nothing, when you looked at them, to justify my growing unease. But it must have been enough, père . Like the turning seasons, Les Marauds changed its colours, somehow. More of the girls began to wear black, with hijab scarves (so like a nun’s wimple) completely hiding their hair and neck. The coffee mornings tailed off. Caro Clairmont had fallen out with one of her regular visitors, and after that the rest of them came less often, if at all. Saïd Mahjoubi extended his gym at the end of the Boulevard P’tit Baghdad – it wasn’t a complicated affair, just a big, bare room with some weights, a spa pool and some running machines – and it became a meeting-place for all the young men of Les Marauds.
    That was over five years ago. Since then, the community has grown. There have been more new arrivals – mostly relatives from abroad, coming to join their families. Last year, old Mahjoubi’s granddaughter Sonia married a man called Karim Bencharki, who came to live in Lansquenet with his widowed sister and her child. Saïd Mahjoubi admired Karim, who was twelve years older than Sonia and had managed a business in Algiers, selling clothes and textiles. I was rather less certain. I had known Sonia since she was a child – not well, but we’d often spoken. She and her sister, Alyssa, had been bright, outgoing girls, who even played football with Luc Clairmont and his friends at weekends. Married, Sonia changed; wore nothing but black; abandoned her plans to study. I saw her a couple of weeks ago, shopping at the market; she was veiled from head to foot, but there was no doubt that it was she.
    The husband was with her, and the sister-in-law; standing between them, she still looked like a child.
    I know what you are about to say. The community of Les Marauds is not my