The Japanese Devil Fish Girl (6 page)

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Authors: Robert Rankin

BOOK: The Japanese Devil Fish Girl
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6
 
‘I
n this year of our Lord eighteen hundred and ninety-five,’ called Professor Coffin above the cacophony of the steam traction engine, ‘there are nearly one hundred travelling circuses plying their trade across England. Countless more lesser travelling shows and single sideshow attractions. Hounslow Fair is a yearly event that can be traced back five hundred years. You will see much to amaze and amuse you, but do keep your hands in your pockets.’
 
George Fox made a thoughtful face.
 
‘Keep a firm hand on your purse.’
 
‘I see.’
 
As they approached Hounslow it was clear that there would be considerable competition in the field of the ‘Educational Attraction’. George espied the rear ends of several wagons that he recognised. ‘Toby the Sentient Swine’, ‘The Dark of the Moon Monster Medicine Show’, ‘Pinchbeck’s Automated Minstrels’, ‘The Travelling Formbys’, ‘Soft Napoleon and the Screaming Nova’. George raised his eyebrows to that one. ‘Dick, Dack and Dock, the Siamese Triplets’ and the ever-popular ‘Mechanical Turk’, which had once soundly thrashed George at chess.
 
More than just ‘considerable competition’, perhaps, was this varied ensemble. And the day, to George’s growing misgivings, looked to be turning into a hot one. Which would not suit a small tent housing an evil-smelling pickled Martian.
 
Such thoughts as these clearly also entered the head of Professor Coffin, who said to George, ‘You, my boy, will hasten upon our arrival to the nearest pharmacy and purchase five cannisters of formaldehyde and ten of distilled water. Also violet nosegays, to the number one hundred, and two of those new facial masks worn by surgeons at the London Hospital.’
 
‘And all of that they have on hand in Hounslow?’
 
‘Surely you know the musical hall song,’ said Professor Coffin, who, without waiting for a reply, launched into it.
 
If you need a lady’s bonnet
With fine dinky goggles on it,
Or a stately coat for strolling up and down,
If they ain’t got one in Brentford,
Or in Neasden, Penge or Deptford,
They’re bound to have the lot in Hounslow Town.
Oh—
 
 
But George cut Professor Coffin short. ‘I will seek out the items you require,’ he said, ‘as long as I am furnished with the financial means so to do.’
 
‘Good boy, we’ll see what might be taken on account.’
 
George Fox shook his head. Slowly and firmly. ‘Look at the state of me,’ he said. ‘Ragged and besmutted and stinking of a Martian’s foul and fetor. Trust me upon this, Professor, no apothecary, chemist or fellow of the pharmaceutical persuasion will offer
me
any credit.’
 
Professor Coffin did smackings of the lips. ‘You really must be prevailed upon to spend some of the generous largesse I heap about your person to purchase new duds. The Rubes take not to an evil-smelling zany.’
 
‘Assistant,’ said George Fox. ‘Assistant.’
 
‘Quite so. A trusted and valued assistant.’
 
George smiled proudly at this.
 
‘Who I will now require to stoke up the firebox, as pressure is dropping in the boiler.’
 
 
An hour later saw the professor’s engine, wagon and all, positioned on Hounslow Heath. Dick Turpin had once robbed the rich upon this very land. Certain parallels might be drawn upon this very day.
 
Professor Coffin pressed a pound note into the outstretched palm of George Fox. ‘I will erect the tent myself, whilst you hasten off to the pharmacy,’ he said.
 
George, although an honest lad, looked long and hard at that pound.
 
‘If you choose to abscond with the money,’ Professor Coffin told him, ‘I will of course be forced to have you pursued, tracked down and murthered.’
 
‘Murthered?’ queried George.
 
‘Murdered,’ said the professor. ‘A word sometimes employed by Mr Charles Dickens, who would have it that working folk go about doffing their caps to the gentry and saying such things as “fank you werry much, your ’oliness”.’
 
‘I have never held a pound note before,’ said George Fox.
 
Professor Coffin nodded thoughtfully. ‘So you were simply thrilling to the experience – I understand.’
 
‘No,’ said George. ‘Not precisely that. I was simply wondering whether an experienced pharmacist, with such knowledge of chemicals as he must necessarily attain to, would recognise, as I most instantly did, that this one pound note has been rendered in crayon and ink. And is indeed a fraud.’
 
With another of those grumbling sounds, Professor Coffin snatched back the bogus one pound note and furnished George with a real one.
 
‘I will be as expeditious in my endeavours as it is possible to be,’ said George.
 
‘And take the handcart,’ said the professor.
 
‘And bring it back!’ he added.
 
 
George Fox reasoned that the transportation of so noxious a substance as formaldehyde was something that should be entered into with considerable care. You just could not rush a thing like that. You had to take your time. Any employer, such as his own, who knew about the volatile nature of such a chemical, would naturally know that such things
did
take time. He would not expect George to return for at least an hour or two.
 
Surely not.
 
And so George strode off pushing the cart, but soon slowed to a stroll.
 
There was just so much to see. So many marvels.
 
Certainly George’s time in the employ of a showman had taught him that what you saw was not necessarily what it was claimed to be. The verbiage splashed across the showmen’s wagons in letters big and bold promised a great deal more than it actually delivered. That gorgeous pouting beauty, with the long golden hair showering over her naked breasts as she coquettishly fondled her fish’s tail, was not entirely representative of the exhibit that lurked within the showman’s enclosure. That wrinkled, varnished, wretched thing, an ungodly chimera of monkey and halibut that was hailed as a captured mermaid.
 
But the magic of the showground would never be lost upon George. After all, he
had
run away from a perfectly respectable family in order to join the circus. And after discovering that the circus did not require his unskilled services, he had taken various lowly jobs in various doubtful showmen’s booths, prior to meeting the professor.
 
The professor certainly engaged in numerous doubtful practices. But it did have to be said that at least his Martian was real. Whether the means by which he had acquired it were wholly creditable, who was George to say? But it
was
a real exhibit.
 
Though George Fox hated it!
 
George steered the handcart in between the showmen’s tents and through the growing crowd. Not the sophisticated crowd of worthies who had attended the concert the previous evening at the Crystal Palace, this. This was more your common crowd of roughs and ne’er-do-wells. The cackles of laughter from toothless hags and the drunken oaths of their partners failed to raise the spirits of George.
 
These were not his kind of folk. Perhaps he should just return to his family. Become an apprentice at this father’s firm, which produced the Tantalus. George gave an inward shiver. He did not want to do that. He wanted adventure and advancement. He wanted to experience the zeitgeist.
 
The voice of a ‘barker’ reached George’s ears, bawling out to the crowd. George caught sight of a colourful fellow mounted upon a high podium. Above him and spelled out in the new electric light bulbs flashed the words:
MACMOYSTER FARL
THE APOCALYPTICAL EXAMINER
 
 
 
The barker wore a red velvet suit of the formal persuasion, topped with a red velvet topper. The hues of his nose mirrored those of his clothes and his fine waxed mustachios coiled like twin watch-springs and jiggled to each exhortation. The substance of the barker’s words caught George’s interest. They held a certain relevance to his breakfast conversation with Professor Coffin.
 
‘Gather round,’ bawled the barker, raising his cane, ‘and hearken unto me. Would you know your own futures? Would you care to speak directly to the dead? You, sir—’ and he caught a passing fellow’s eye ‘—you, sir, I feel, have recently suffered loss.’
 
‘That is true for the truth of it,’ said the fellow, halting so as to speak. ‘My dear daughter Mary went down with the consumption a week ago. Just as her mother, my dear wife Mary, did a decade past. Though she was one of those carried off to Heaven in the early Rapture, by all accounts. Or at least that was what was telled us by the doctors when I came to view her empty bed.’
 
‘And would you wish to speak with your dear ones again?’
 
‘Would that I could, sir. Would that I could. But these seance-callers and spiritualists are naught but a pack of rogues, to my thinking.’
 
‘And mine too,’ agreed the barker, calling the fellow forwards into the gathering crowd. ‘But within this tent sits a man who can speak with the spirits. A scientist of Christian worth and high moral rectitude. He learned his craft in a secret Government ministry – what think you of that?’
 
‘I think I would care to know more,’ said the fellow.
 
‘Macmoyster Farl,’ quoth the barker, making expansive circlings with his cane, ‘who learned his craft at the secret Ministry of Serendipity where he worked with a team of psychic prestidigitators who were engaged in contacting the dead with a view to extending the British Empire into the realm of the hereafter.’
 
‘Oooh,’ went the crowd, for
this
was a revelation.
 
‘Yes,’ cried the barker. ‘A revelation, is it not? And whilst on the subject of Revelations, Macmoyster Farl witnessed a seance where the intention was to invoke the Beast of Revelation also.’
 
‘My oh my,’ went some of the crowd. Others expressed themselves more crudely.
 
‘I must add,’ the barker added, ‘that
that
seance was a
French
seance.’
 
Which caused the crowd to cheer somewhat and blow out raspberries too.
 
‘For a shiny penny, nothing more, my friends,’ the barker continued, ‘you may speak with Macmoyster Farl, who will intercede with spirits upon your behalf. If not entirely genuine and if not every question satisfied with an appropriate answer, your money will be returned to you. What have you to lose, when you have so much to gain?’
 
‘Count me in,’ cried the fellow who had lost both his Marys. ‘I will trust to the words of this eminent fellow. Here, take my penny that I might take a place to the fore of the auditorium before the crowd of hundreds marches in.’
 
And with that he tossed his penny to the barker and vanished into the tent.
 
George Fox did rootings in his pockets. It was probably all nonsense, he knew. Macmoyster Farl was most likely an impostor, claiming gifts he did not possess. But something was drawing George Fox in, into the tent. Something saying, ‘Come.’
 
‘Come, young master,’ called the barker to George. ‘My senses tell me that you are a young man seeking something. A young man with an itch he cannot scratch. Although not from lice, as I spy you as a clean ’un.’
 
George did further rootings in his pockets. He brought to light a piece of string, a hunk of sealing wax, a half-eaten toffee that he really should have finished.
 
And a bright and shiny, fine large copper penny.
 
George turned this coin upon his palm and, ‘Count me in,’ he said.
 
7
 
A
s George entered the show tent auditorium of Mr Macmoyster Farl, ‘The Apocalyptical Examiner’, he became immediately aware of a number of things. That it was a large tent, easily capable of housing an audience of at least one hundred people. That it was a clean and freshly smelling tent and a cool one too. George blew breath from his mouth and saw it steam as on a winter’s day. Now how was
that
done? George asked himself. And another thing, too – George viewed the quality of the seating. Not your usual benches or bleachers here, but individual chairs and of excellent quality.

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