The Palace of Laughter (2 page)

M
iles Wednesday, barrel-dwelling, unwashed and tiger-visited, made his way through the narrow streets of Larde until he reached the warm smelly butcher's shop in Sausage Lane. Haunch the butcher was chopping ribs with a shiny cleaver, flipping them over on his worn wooden block behind the marble counter and grumbling to his customers as he chopped. He saw Miles in the doorway and scowled.

“You again,” he said in his big bassoon voice. “It's no good scrounging off me. I've got nothing for you.”

“I'm not scrounging,” said Miles. “I'm looking for
work. You must have something you need doing.”

The butcher grunted and went back to his chopping and complaining, while the women queuing for his paper parcels of meat clucked sympathetically. Miles waited patiently, his arms folded and his feet planted wide in the doorway, making it difficult for the butcher to ignore him.

“Well don't just stand there,” he growled eventually, as he handed a packet of sausages to a big square woman with a head scarf knotted under her chin. “Out the back with you and get scrubbing. And mind you make a good job of it or you'll feel the toe of my boot.”

Miles slipped through the forest of women in their scratchy woolen coats, out into the butcher's yard, where halved carcasses swung from steel hooks, and the smell of old blood made it hard to breathe. He filled the wooden pail with soapy water and began to scrub the cracked tiles with a worn brush. The water was cold and his hands were soon red and raw, but he scrubbed and dunked and scrubbed again. The last time he had cleaned out Haunch's yard he had been paid with a dozen leftover sausages. He could almost smell them now, sizzling plumply on the end of a stick, the drops of fat hissing on his little campfire under the pine tree on the side of the hill.

As he scrubbed the smelly yard he thought about the tiger. Its steady gaze burned so clear in his memory that a couple of times he glanced over his shoulder, half expecting to see the huge beast stretched out in the corner, watching him. His head buzzed with the strange sounds of the circus, and when his hunger made him dizzy, the patterns in front of his eyes were spiky and tangled like the decorations on the wagons. He could not wait for nightfall, when he would sneak into the circus and look for the tiger's cage, just to see if he was real. Darkness seemed a long time away, and he scrubbed even harder, as though it would make time pass more quickly.

A burst of laughter came from the butcher's crowded shop, the cackling of the customers like a flock of geese startled by the distant thunder of the big man's guffaw. Miles edged toward the back door to see what was happening. Laughter had been strictly banned in Pinchbucket House, and it always made him curious. The butcher was wiping his eye with the corner of his apron. “There's not enough laughter in this world,” he said, and he brought his chopper down hard on a chunk of meat. His customers nodded and sighed, their shoulders sagging and the tiredness returning to their faces. Miles went back to work.

By the time he had finished, the floor tiles were gleaming, and the pail had been emptied of water and filled with the big blue-knuckled bones that had littered the yard. Haunch came to the door and scowled at the scrubbed floor, as though it were knee-deep in rotting meat.

“Hmff,” he grunted.

“I'd like my sausages please,” said Miles. His stomach was rumbling at the thought.

“No sausages,” grunted the butcher. “Sold out of sausages. Sold out of everything. You can have some bones.”

“Bones?” said Miles “I can't eat bones!”

“Boil 'em up. Make soup,” said the butcher. “Bones is all I got.” He shook open a paper bag and scooped a few handfuls of bones from the wooden pail, rolling the top of the bag shut and thrusting it into Miles's arms. “Hold it underneath,” growled the butcher, “else them bones will fall out the bottom.”

As Miles left the butcher's shop, his bag of bones clutched in his numb fingers, the butcher called after him. “Shouldn't of never left that orphanage. You'd've got properly fed there.”

“I'd have got properly poisoned there,” Miles shouted back over his shoulder, “if I'd stayed much longer.”

A pale sun hung low in the afternoon sky, and the sound of barking dogs carried on the breeze from the city pound. The smell of the butcher's bones seeped from the soggy brown bag, making Miles turn his head to the side just to breathe clean air. “I can't make soup from these,” he thought. “Even Mrs. Pinchbucket's gruel would be better than that.” He stopped for a moment, shifting the weight of the bag in his aching arms.

A smile crept over the boy's face. If you knew Miles well (which few people did) you would have recognized that smile as the one that always appeared on his face when a plan was hatching in the back of his mind. The smile grew wider, and he turned to head for the pound, following the noisy barking of the mongrels of Larde.

 

The city pound was a narrow yard beside the police station, surrounded by a high red-bricked wall. Right now it was full of shaggy, limping, drooling dogs, the result of Mayor Doggett's annual roundup of the town's stray mongrels. The order had been telephoned to Sergeant Bramley, who had listened with his little raisin eyes screwed up in his porridgy face. Sergeant Bramley and his two trusty constables had dropped their official duties (searching
the newspapers for evidence of crimes, especially in the crossword clues, and making hot sweet tea in a battered tin pot in case of emergencies), and had marched out purposefully into the street with a large net on a pole, and two big cloth sacks.

The sergeant and his constables, who worked in a crack team of three, had rounded up the dogs of Larde and taken them into custody for the Good of Public Health. They knew the mayor's fickle attention would soon turn elsewhere, and the dogs could be quietly released “back into the wild,” as Constable Wigge put it, and in any case it made a change from the crossword.

The barking grew louder as Miles approached the pound. Thirty mongrels and more were in full throat at the sound of his footsteps and the reek of tasty bones carried on the breeze. Miles laid the bag carefully outside the pound, leaving the smell to creep over the high wall, and climbed the worn stone steps of the police station next door.

The police station was small and cluttered and stuffy. It contained two old wooden desks, an ancient typewriter with several keys missing, a cast-iron potbellied stove, three very unhappy policemen and a little old woman with a green umbrella. The end of the umbrella was a dangerous metal
spike, and its owner was waving this under Sergeant Bramley's shapeless nose. She was yelling at him angrily, but what she could be yelling about it was impossible to tell. The pokey office was so full of the din of barking dogs that there was no room for any other sound. Indeed the old woman might have been barking herself and no one would have been any the wiser.

Sergeant Bramley had his hand cupped behind his good ear. He was trying to lean close to hear the old woman's words without getting the point of her umbrella up his nose at the same time. He turned and bawled something at Constable Wigge, but Constable Wigge could hear nothing, as his ears were plugged with soft wax from the candle on his desk. He was frowning at the crossword, trying to think of a seven-letter word beginning with “B” and meaning “dog speech.”

Constable Flap, who had once done a short course in lipreading in
Modern Constable
magazine and could read the sergeant's flabby lips like a large-print book, leaped from his seat instead, and opened the side door that led into the pound. The noise of the dogs was deafening. Constable Flap opened his mouth and yelled “QUI-ET!” but his mouth was small and his voice was reedy, and the
dogs ignored him completely. He shut the door again and flopped back, defeated, into his chair.

Miles climbed onto a stool beside the high counter, where he found a yellow pencil stub and some squares of paper. He thought for a moment, then wrote carefully with the neat letters that his friend Lady Partridge—who lived up a tree—had taught him:

I CAN STUP THE DOGGS BARKENG

He slid the note over to the sergeant. The old lady was still shouting at the top of her voice, despite the barking of the dogs, and the sergeant's glasses were flecked with old-lady spit. He removed them from his nose and wiped them with his handkerchief. He read the note twice, then turned it over to see if there was more.

He squinted at Miles for a moment, then he reached into his pocket and held up a silver coin. Miles nodded and left the police station, being careful to close the door behind him. He picked up the bag of bones and selected the biggest one. This he wrapped in paper torn from the bag and wedged it into his pocket. Then he began to toss the rest of the bones, as quickly as he could, over the wall. The barking turned to snarling and yelping as the dogs fought and nipped and shoved, then one by one
they fell silent, until the only sound was the crunching and cracking of dog teeth on butcher bones, and the occasional growl as a dog warned his bone not to try any funny business.

Back inside the police station the silence seemed almost as deafening as the barking had been. Constable Wigge had removed the candle wax from his ears and was writing in his crossword, his tongue sticking out with the effort:
B-A-R-K-I-N-G
. The sergeant stood and stared, his pudgy fingers still holding the coin in the air. Miles climbed onto the stool, plucked the money from his fingers, said thank you, and jumped down again. The old lady jabbed Sergeant Bramley in the chest with the point of her umbrella.

“Well?” she shrieked. “What are you going to do about it?”

“About what?” asked Sergeant Bramley.

M
iles Wednesday, wind-swayed, bread and cheese in hand, sat in the fork of a tall tree outside Pinchbucket House. He had bought his dinner with the sergeant's shilling, but it was not yet dark enough to sneak into the circus. With time to kill, his feet had found their way through the familiar lanes to the grimy building that had once been his home.

Pinchbucket House was a squat gray building with row upon row of small, mean windows. Steam belched from basement-level gratings, creating a permanent fog around the lower floors. Any children of Larde or the surrounding area who had the
misfortune to lose their parents would sooner or later find themselves hauled to the doorstep of Pinchbucket House. Once inside those gray metal doors, they would have their hair shaved off (Mrs. Pinchbucket sold it to the wigmaker in Calvo Lane), and their nice clothes (if they had any) exchanged for a set of worn and faded pajamas. Anything of value in their pockets would end up in the locked tin box under Mrs. Pinchbucket's rickety iron bed.

In return the child would be given a name taken from the day on which he arrived, and set to work in the sweltering laundry that steamed and rumbled all day long in the basement of Pinchbucket House. The only child in the whole building who was not named after a day of the week was Hettie November. She had been found, half frozen in a cardboard box on the orphanage steps, while Mrs. Pinchbucket was in the hospital having a stubborn trace of generosity removed. Her husband, Fowler Pinchbucket, who could not tell one day from another, had put the child in the boiler room to thaw out and forgotten all about her, until one of the older girls heard her whimpering and rescued her from the sooty basement. Miles himself had been brought there as a baby, and could remember no other home.

From his perch in the tree Miles had a clear view through the lit windows at all the little Fridays, Mondays, Saturdays and Tuesdays who sat in shaven-headed rows at the two long tables that stretched the length of the dining hall. Mrs. Pinchbucket, as thin and dry as a pencil, stalked between the tables, rapping her knuckles on the skull of any child who was not spooning gruel into his or her mouth as fast as possible. Miles imagined he had a powerful catapult and a smooth stone in his hand, and squinted through one eye. Mrs. Pinchbucket's nose, like a pink shark's fin dividing her sour face, made a tempting target.

Fowler Pinchbucket was kneeling by a square hole in the wall, a screwdriver between his crooked teeth. A tangle of brown and black wires stuck out of the hole, and Fowler frowned stupidly as he looked at them. Fowler fixed everything in Pinchbucket House to save money, and once something had been fixed by Fowler the Growler it was never the same again.

Miles had finished his bread and cheese and was about to climb down from the tree, when Fowler Pinchbucket reached a decision on his electrical problem. He grabbed a thick black wire and a crumbling brown one with his hard square fingers and
twisted them together. There was a loud bang and all the lights in the orphanage went out. The lumpish silhouette of Fowler Pinchbucket flew backward through the dining hall in a shower of sparks.

As the lights flickered back on, a singed figure could be seen rising unsteadily to his feet. His hair stood out from his head like blackened corkscrews, and wisps of blue smoke escaped from the collar and cuffs of his shredded shirt. One of his shoes had landed upside down in Ruben Monday's soup bowl, the other was steaming in the mop bucket. He swayed on his stockinged feet for a moment or two, squinting at Mrs. Pinchbucket as though trying to remember who she was.

At the sight of the singed Fowler Pinchbucket the children burst into laughter, and the sound seemed to fill the drab dining room with warmth. Now you might remember that laughter was strictly forbidden in Pinchbucket House, and at the sight of the laughing orphans Fowler's face turned even blacker. He took a wild swipe at the nearest table, knocking a small child clean off the wooden bench and smashing a couple of plates. At the other end of the table Mrs. Pinchbucket boxed a few ears for good measure. The laughter died at once, leaving only the ceaseless clanking and belching from the
laundry below, and the scraping of benches as the children scrambled to their feet, ready to be marched to their dormitory.

Miles sat in the fork of the tree a moment longer, feeling the same knot in his stomach that had awoken him every cold morning in Pinchbucket House. He pictured himself now, bursting in through the gray doors on the back of a magnificent tiger, leaping the stairs in a couple of bounds and prowling into the dining hall, where the tiger would swallow the Pinchbuckets whole, to the cheers and whoops of the orphans.

He thought of his barrel on the side of the hill, where he would curl up later that night with only a stuffed bear and the hooting of the owls for company, and quickly turned his mind to the circus instead. Dusk was falling, and he had an appointment to keep. He scrambled down the tree, and his feet skipped on the worn paving stones as he trotted down the hill toward Beggar's Gate, feeling the weight of the bone that he had kept for the tiger swinging in his jacket as he ran.

 

The strange smells of animals from foreign lands drifted through the narrow streets at the edge of town. The townspeople were making their way in a
steady stream toward the circus, which was dressed in a million red and yellow lights. They pushed and jostled, and their children pulled eagerly on their hands as they followed the jangly music and the rolling of drums. Brightly colored posters were tied to every lamppost. Some showed daring trapeze artists flying through painted air; from others the proud face of a tiger snarled, his great paws raised in menace. Miles joined the crowds, hoping to slip in unnoticed among them, but at the circus entrance he spotted Constable Flap standing on tiptoes to shout in the ear of the tattooed giantess, who loomed over the policeman as she collected the tickets at the turnstile. Miles remembered Constable Flap's Special Ear Pinch Arrest Method, which he had also learned from a short course in
Modern Constable
magazine, and decided to find another way into the circus.

He made his way around the edge of the moonlit field, where the outer trailers squatted silently in pools of darkness. Miles slipped in among the wagons, looking for anything that might betray the presence of a tiger. As he darted between the shadows he saw two men walking toward him, deep in conversation. One was a dwarf wearing a shiny round helmet decorated with flames. The other was
a big square man with a high old-fashioned collar and a bowler hat. His huge bloated belly hung out between his suspenders, and the ends of his trousers stopped several inches short of his ankles, as though he were expecting a flood.

“Now look here, Mr. Genghis,” the dwarf was saying. “I need a proper flying suit for this stunt.”

The big-bellied man gave a wheezy laugh. “A flying suit, is it? We ain't shooting you to the moon, you pocket-sized prima donna.”

“You can laugh,” said the dwarf testily, “but last show I was blown clean out of my trousers by the gunpowder, and it's no fun sailing over five 'undred people in your second-best underwear.”

Miles ducked down just in time and slipped under the canvas of the circus tent where a missing rope left it flapping loosely in the breeze. He found himself under banked rows of wooden seats, his boots squelching slightly in the trampled mud. The orchestra had struck up for the start of the show, and Miles moved forward quietly, crouching down as he came to the lower benches nearest the ring.

Looking for a clear view through a forest of ankles, he caught a glimpse of the elephants that he had seen the night before. They wore ornate blankets with swinging tassles now, and a man in shiny
knee-length boots was cracking a whip and shouting commands at them in an unfamiliar tongue. Miles could only see the bottom half of the elephants, their wrinkled knees bending as they performed some trick that he could not see. The crowd applauded, and the shiny-booted man bellowed something more at the elephants. Their big round feet began to trot around the ring. A clown's baggy trousers and battered boots appeared, the feet leaping high as he ran in front of the elephants. The townspeople laughed and clapped some more.

As Miles hunkered down to watch, a generous scoop of ice cream dropped through a gap between the benches and fell straight down the back of his shirt collar. His gasp was drowned out by a child's wail from the seat above him. The upside-down, ice cream–smeared face of a small girl appeared below the bench. Her eyes widened when she saw Miles. “Give me back my ice cream,” she yelled at him. Several voices shushed her. She shouted louder.

“Mum—a mucky boy has my ice cream! Dad! There's an escaped ice cream thief under the seats!” As Miles scrambled away in the gloom a few more heads appeared below the level of the seats and peered about, like ducks foraging for river weeds.

If you've ever had to crawl through cold mud with
half a pound of strawberry-vanilla ice cream creeping down your spine, you will know why Miles felt that his first visit to a circus was not going according to plan. As soon as he had put a safe distance between himself and the scene of the crime, he sat down in the muddy grass below the banked backsides of the people of Larde, and removed his shirt and jacket. He rolled the sodden shirt into a ball and crammed it into his remaining jacket pocket, then put his jacket back on and buttoned it up tight.

He turned back to face the ring, and found himself a gap between a pair of pin-striped trousers and some very tall high heels, which gave him a clearer view of the performance.

The elephants and the clown had gone, and in the center of the sawdust-carpeted ring sat a large frosted white ball. Balancing on the ball was a colored pyramid, and on top of the pyramid wobbled a cube, and on top of the cube another frosted ball, and on this ball a steel table was balanced on its side, and as Miles craned forward, he could see more and more shapes piled up in a teetering tower that stretched up almost to the pointed roof of the circus tent.

At the very top of this precarious tower stood a tiny girl in a sparkling white outfit. Thirty feet
from the ground she balanced on tiny feet, with her arms outstretched and her head held high. No one watching dared to draw a breath. Every eye in the tent was fixed on the little girl, who looked no more than six years old. Her short blond hair was tucked behind her ears, and though she was lit by a spotlight she seemed to give off a soft glow of her own. To Miles she looked like a magical creature, more like a dream than the tiger he had dreamed of the night before. As he watched, transfixed, he saw her glance down at the crowd far below her, and Miles was sure that she looked straight at him, hidden in the gloom between the ankles of the people of Larde.

And then it happened—the tower began to fall. A ball halfway up began to wobble off the pyramid that supported it; the cylinder on top of the ball tipped the other way, and the whole fabulous balancing act came undone in slow motion and began to cascade to the ground. The crowd gasped in horror as the tiny girl began to fall to earth, her eyes wide with fright, and neither net nor cushion to catch her.