The Death-Defying Pepper Roux by Geraldine McCaughrean Read Free Book Online

of the street. The local fire brigade was hosing down a group of protesters gathered in front of the town hall. The water pressure was low, so the demonstrators were not being knocked off their feet so much as gently doused, like potted plants watered from a high window. They milled around—men, women, and students—carrying placards and chanting doggedly up at the closed windows of the town hall. They had the look of clerks or shop assistants, in grays and browns. But their faces were bright with excitement and outrage, as if the protest had livened up a tedious week. Even the hoses were only making them gasp and giggle.
    Pepper couldn’t make out what they were chanting.He went closer to read the words painted on their soggy placards:
     
    R EPEAL C LAUSE F IVE OF THE H ONGRIOT -P LEUVIEZ A MENDMENT !
    R EPEAL I T N OW !
     
    Pepper gave his umbrella to a woman who had curled her hair that morning and wanted to keep it nice. The demonstrators closed around him, like schooling fish, and he found himself part of the protest, given a placard to hold:
     
    D OWN WITH THE H ONGRIOT -P LEUVIEZ A MENDMENT (C LAUSE 5)!
     
    “Excuse me…I don’t quite know what the—” he began, but the chanting scribbled out his words.
    The women had started up a simpler chant: “Hear what we say! Repeal the HPA!”
    In his drab, braidless jacket, Pepper was a tadpole in a pool of other tadpoles. Water ran down his neck, his shoes squelched, but apart from that, it was a goodfeeling. The dockside clock struck noon, and the fire brigade stopped for lunch.
    So the demonstrators went to buy their lunches from the grocery store on the corner. Rather than stand alone in a puddle outside the town hall in a strange town, Pepper tagged along. The grocery store was closed. The students of philosophy accepted this philosophically, with a shrug, but the clerks were in a reckless mood and decided they would go up to the grand department store at the top of the hill and buy sausage from the delicatessen there. It would be an outrageous extravagance, but demonstrating had made them all feel slightly bigger, bolder, more deserving than on a normal working day. Hungrier, too.
    Inside the store, they formed an orderly line, speaking in low voices, as if they were in church. Indeed, the Marseillais Department Store was almost as grand as a church, with its high vaulted ceilings and checkered marble floors. The delicatessen was a harvest festival of deliciousness laid out in a side chapel—yellow cheeses as large as collection plates, and great organ pipes of sausage dangling at the back. It was also crypt cool, and there was nobody behind the counter.
    The water ran down out of their clothes and formed a pool on the checkered marble. The umbrella—which proved to be a parasol—began to drop sodden shreds of dyed paper pulp. Assistants at the dried-flower and pastry counters looked across disapprovingly at these shabby invaders. But they did not offer to serve. Nobody did.
    The line of people began to shiver. The delicious array of quiche, pâté, olives, and giant hams was making them hungrier than ever. Each pointed to the kind of sausage they liked best, and said how thick they would ask for it to be cut:
    “Every slice a mouthful, that’s my style!”
    “Oh, I prefer mine wafer thin! It feels like more.”
    But still nobody came to serve them. Pepper handed out the little macaroons the Malays had given him. Ten minutes passed. A teacher took out her knitting.
    “We must get back before the fire brigade,” said the woman with Pepper’s parasol. “Otherwise they’ll think they’ve won!”
    They discussed buying a loaf of bread and sharing it. But as demonstrators, they had developed a stubborn streak not normally in them. They had set theirhearts on sliced sausage and would not—could not—turn their backs on the idea.
    “We’re not stylish enough to serve, that’s what,” complained a secretary.
    “The rich live to eat and the workers