Yellowcake (21 page)

‘So Ashman could not boss the ghosts away, and Frogget could not shoot them. So what did you do then?’ I did not mind what she said, so long as she kept on talking, so long as Mrs Em stayed away, with her
Come Nonny-girl, there is some public waiting.
Some days, some nights, I could bear the work, if it could be called work, being exhibited; others I felt as if people’s eyes left slug trails wherever they looked, and their remarks bruises, and their whispers to each other little smuts and smudges all over us. The earth-men and the Fwaygians and the Eskimoos were too foreign and dark to notice, and Billy was too much a personality to ever take offence, but I, just a girl, and pale, and so much smaller than them all … All I wanted was to go back to my quarters, lock my door and wash myself of the public’s leavings, and then hurry away, under cover of carriage or train-blind or only night’s darkness from anywhere I would be spotted as one of Ashman’s Museum-pieces.

‘There was nothing we
could
do,’ said Dulcie, ‘so we just put up with it, most that winter. I went and asked them, you know? I told them how tiresome they were, how he was never going to get his money out of her, that they were dead, didn’t they realise? That they were going to die from this cart coming along in a minute. It was like talking to myself, as if I were mad or drunk myself. You just had to wait, you know? The terrible noise—I cannot describe, somehow, how awful it was. There was more to it than noise. It shook you to your bones, and then to something else; it was hard to keep the fear off you. And sometimes four or five times a night, you know?, and Ashman and me clutching each other like babes in the wood with a big
owl
flying over, or a
bat
, or a
crow
carking.’

‘It is hard to imagine Ashman fearful—’

Dulcie sat up, finger raised, eyes sliding. We listened to the bootsteps outside, that paused, that passed. ‘Him again,’ she whispered.

‘Whom again?’

‘Mister Twitchy.’ She tapped the side of her head.

‘How can you
know
, from just that?’

She put a finger to her lips, and he passed again, back down towards the merry-go-round. That was where I would go, too, were I a free woman, a customer, alone and uncomfortable. There was nothing like that pootle-y music, that coloured cave, those gliding swan-coaches and those rising-and-falling ponies, the gloss of their paint, the haughtiness of their heads, the scenes of all the world— Paris! Edinburgh Castle! The Italian Alps! You could stand there and warm your heart at the sight, the way you warm your hands at a brazier. You could pretend you were anywhere and anyone—tall, slender, of royal birth, with a face like The Lovely Zalumna, pale, mysterious, beautiful at the centre of her big round frizz of Circassian hair.

‘Ashman. Fearful.’ Dulcie brought us both back from our listening. ‘Yes, I know, he is so commanding in his manner. But he was sickening for something, you see, all that while. I don’t know whether the ghosts were the cause or just an aggravation. But it came to midwinter and he were confined to his bed, and we hardly needed to light the fire, his own heat kept the room so warm. The great stomach of him, you know? I swear some nights I saw it glowing without benefit of the lamp! And the delirium! It was all I could do some nights to keep him abed. And one night, I had shooed him back to his bed so many times—I had
wrestled
him back, if you can imagine! Well, up he stands, throws off his nightshirt, which is so wet you could wring it out and fill a teacup easy with the drippings. Up he stands, runs to the window, tears the curtains aside, and there’s the moon out there hits him like a spotlight. And he says—oh, Non, I cannot tell you for laughing now, but at the time, I tell you, he raised gooseflesh on me!
I am Circus,
he says— to the moon, to the lane, to the ghosts, to me? I don’t know. To himself!
I am Circus,
he announces, in his ringmaster voice.
I am all acts, all persons, all creatures, all curiosities, rolled into one.
And I says—it was cruel, but I had been up all night with him—I says,
‘Roll’ is right, you great dough-lump of a man. Get back into bed.
And he turns around and says to me,
Dulce, I have seen a great truth; it will change everything. I need hire no one; I need pay nothing; I can do it all myself, with no squabbles nor mutinies nor making ends meet!

‘What is that?
I say, pushing him away from the window, for should anyone come down the lane, hearing his shouts and wondering who needs help down there, who needs taking to the madhouse, they will see him all moonlit there, naked as a baby and with his hair all over the place. He’d be mortified, I’m thinking, if he were in his right sense. Let alone they might
take
him to the madhouse! Anyway, on he goes. He can ride a horse as well as any equestrian, he says, now that he knows how the horse feels, what it thinks. He can
be
the horse. He can multiply himself into
many
horses, he says, as many as we need—’

I love it when Dulcie gets to such a stage in a story, her face all open and lively, her eyes full of the sights she’s uttering, as if none of this were here, the tent or the gypsytat or the cold night and strange town outside. She goes right away from it all, and she takes me with her, the way she describes everything.

‘And he’s just about to show me what he can do on the trapeze—
I will have a suit
, he says,
all baubles and bugle-beads like The Great Fantango and I will
swing
and I will
fly
!

‘And he’s going for the window and I’m fighting him and wondering should I scream for help if he gets it open? Will he push
me
out if I’m in his way? And how much do I care for him anyway? Am I willing to have my brains dashed out in an alleyway on the chance it will give him pause and save his life?

‘And up goes the window and the wind comes in,
smack!
, straight from the South Pole I tell you, Nonny, and a little thing like Tasmania was never going to get in its way! It took the breath out of me, and the room was an icebox like
that
.’ She snaps her dry fingers. ‘But you would think it was a … a zephyr, a tropical breeze, for all it stops Ashman.
I will fly!
he says,
I will fly!
And he pushes the sash right up and he’s hands either side the window and his foot up on the sill.
With the greatest of ease!
he shouts.’

Here Dulce stopped and looked crafty. ‘And now I must fill my pipe,’ she said calmly.

‘Dulcie Pepper, I hate you!’ I slid off the stool and ran around and pummelled her while she laughed. ‘You
always
— You
torture
a girl so!’

‘How can it matter?’ she said airily, elbowing my fists away. ‘’Tis all long over now, and you
know
he lives!’

‘If I could reach, I would strangle you.’ I waved my tiny paws at her and snarled, rattling my throat the way I had learned from the Dog Man.

‘And then you would never hear the end, would you?’ she says smugly. ‘Unless you ran and asked Ashman himself.’

Gloomily I went back to my stool and watched her preparations. Faintly bored, I tried to seem, and protest no more, for the more I minded the longer she would hold off.

At first she moved with a slowness calculated to irritate me further, but when I kept my lips closed she tired of the game and gathered and tamped the leaf-shreds into the black pipe. Before she even lit it she went on. ‘And right at that minute, as if they were sent to save his life, that drunken ghost starts below:
Where’s me dashed money, you flaming dash-dash?
And his woman starts to her crying.
What do you mean you haven’t got it?
he says. ’Cetra, cetra. It was funny, I could
see
the gooseflesh on Ashman. It ran all over and around him like rain running over a puddle, you know, little gusts of it. And back he steps, and takes my hands and makes me sit down on the bed.
Dulce,
he says,
I see it so clearly.
And it ought to have made me laugh, it were so daft, but the way he said it, suddenly it seemed so true, you know? Because he believed it so, he almost
made
it true. And also, the ghosts in the lane, they will turn things serious; it was very hard to laugh and be light with those things performing below.’

‘What did he say, though?’

She struck her pipe alight, delaying herself at this sign of my eagerness. ‘He says’—and she narrowed her eyes at me through the first thick-curling smoke—‘
Inside every Thin Man,
he says,
there is a Fat Lady trying to be seen, and to live as that Fat Lady, and fetch that applause. Inside every Giant there is a Dwarf, inside every Dwarf a Giant. Inside every trapeze artist a lion tamer lives, or a girl equestrian with a bow in her hair, and inside every cowboy is a Wild Man of Borneo, or a Siam Twin missing his other half.’

Sometimes I was sure Dulcie Pepper had magic, the things she did with her voice, the force of her eyes, her smokes and scents and fabrics, and the crystal ball sitting there like another great eye in the room, or the moon, or a lamp, and the way my scalp crept, some of the things she said.
Inside every Dwarf a Giant—
and there she had drawn me; Mister Ashman had seen me in his delirium and here was Dulcie to tell me, that all of us freaks and ethnologicals felt the same, and Chan the Chinee Giant was the mirror of me, both sizes yearning towards the middle, towards what seemed long-limbed and languid to me, miniature and delicate to Chan.

‘A Fat Lady inside every Thin Man?’ I said doubtfully, but when I thought about it, it was very like what Chan and I wanted, the opposite of what we were.

Dulcie shrugged. ‘So he said.
But inside me,
he said,
because I am a businessman and a white man and a civilised man and a worker with my mind and not my hands, inside me is the lot of them, blackamoor and savage, rigger and cook and dancing girl on a horseback. And now that I know the trick
, he says,
now that I have the key, I can open the door; I can bring them all out! I am a circus in my own self. Do you see how convenient this is?

‘Which of course I
could
… ’ She laughs, and examines the state of the burning tobacco. ‘And it would, certainly, have saved a lot of bother, just the two of us tripping around the place.’

‘But it wasn’t
true
!’ I said. ‘It wasn’t
possible
!’

‘Exactly. And then I could hear the cart coming, the horses and the rumbling wheels, and I thought, Good, this will put an end to this nonsense. And—’

A man shouted outside, and boys, and in a moment feet ran up the hill towards us, boys’ anxious voices, excited. Dulcie started up, swept to the tent door and snatched it aside as the last of Hoppy Mack’s sons passed by. ‘What’s up, you lads?’ she called out.

‘Dunno. Something has happened in Frogget’s.’

Instantly I was locked still on my seat, a dwarf-girl of ice. Nothing functioned of me but my ears.

‘
He’s
not shot, is he?’ Thank God for Dulcie, who could ask my question for me!

‘No, he’s all fine,’ said the boy, farther away now. ‘’Twas him told us to go for Ashman.’

That unlocked me. I hurried out past Dulcie, and she followed me down the slope of grass flattened into the mud by Sunday’s crowd and still not recovered two days later.

John Frogget had doused the lamps around his sign and was prowling outside the booth door, all but barking at people who came near. ‘No!’ he said to Ugly Tom. ‘Give the man some dignity. He is not one of your pickles, to be gawped at for money.’ Which as there were a number of ethnologicals coming from the Museum tent—as there was
me
, but could he see me yet?—was a mite insensitive of him. But he was upset.

‘What has happened, John?’ said Dulcie sensibly. I retreated a-flutter to her elbow, looking John up and down for blood.

‘A man has shot himself with my pistol.’

‘Shot himself dead?’

‘Through the eye,’ said John, nodding.

‘Through the
eye
!’ breathed Dulcie, as John turned from us to the others gabbling at him. She grasped my shoulder. ‘Nonny, do you think? Could it possibly?’

‘What?’ I said, rather crossly because she hurt me with her big hand, so tight, and her weight. But her face up there was like the beam from the top of a lighthouse, cutting through my irritations.

‘No,’ I said.

Uncomfortable in his skin, that one.

‘
No.’ I liked a good ghost story, but I did not want to have looked upon a man living his last hour. ‘He was
rich
! He had the best-cut coat! And new boots!’ I pled up to Dulcie, grasping her skirt like an infant its mother’s.

‘Here he comes!’ said Sammy Mack, and down the hill strode Ashman in his shirtsleeves, but with his hat on. I could not imagine him naked and raving and covered in gooseflesh, as Dulcie had described him.

‘What’s up, Frogget?’ He pushed through the onlookers—he didn’t have to push very hard, for people leaped aside to allow in his part of the drama, his authority.

John Frogget ushered him into the shooting gallery. Sammy Mack peered in after, holding the cloth aside. There was the partition with the cowboys painted on it, and a slot of the yellow light beyond, at the bottom of which a booted foot projected into view.

‘Oh!’ Dulcie crouched to my level and clutched me, and I clutched her around the neck in my fright. ‘’Tis him, ’tis him!’

I had admired that boot in the Museum tent, to avoid looking further at his face as he took in the sight of us. ‘Hungry,’ I said, ‘that was the way he looked at us. I don’t like to think what is going through their minds when they look like that. But he was young, and not bad looking, and dressed so fine!’