Singing My Sister Down and other stories

  Jelly hawked and spat. ‘Oh, how very à la mode. Cultural referencing. Like, what a contribution to the evolution of clowning. Puke-erama. Blow ’em. I hate ’em. And if they’re Yellow, they’ll only be trouble later.’

  ‘I never heard of them. They must be just jumped up from hobbies. I seen them before, though. Maybe in a troupe or something.’

  ‘They clear yet?’

  ‘They will be soon. Heading for the park. Swilling drink. Hang on, one of ’em’s choking on it.’

  ‘Make him die of that choking fit.’

  ‘If I could make it look natural. But you don’t jump two metres sideways in the middle of coughing. He’s okay now, anyway. That’s it, Tat, give him a good thump on the back. Oh, perfect sound effects, Jell – right in sync.’

  ‘Whassat?’ Despite that monstrous gob, Jelly’s voice still had major rattles.

  ‘Tif just hoiked and gobbed in perfect time with you. Nearly as much, too.’

  ‘So they’re in the park? What are you waiting for?’

  ‘They’re in full view of the street.’

  ‘Blow ’em anyway. Let’s finish here and get some dinner. Couldn’t you go a schnitzel sandwich?’

  ‘They’re heading for that little glade, with the fountain. I’ll pop ’em there.’

  ‘You better. I’ve already written ’em down.’ He got up and shrugged on his backpack, slapped his pockets.

  ‘Okay, okay, give me a sec.’

  I flang Tat over the fountain, tumbled Tif as he fled towards the trees. Then I lovingly dismantled the Fioreschiacciare and its tripod and put them in the case, and we left.

  I always hated to stop, to find myself back on some rooftop stacked with age-old rubbish bags, or in some empty office strewn with files, dead clerks’ jackets over the backs of all the chairs. Plus the eating and networking part of the game didn’t grab me. Although, I’ll give you, it was better than not eating.

  I followed Jelly down the corridor, pushing through the dusty crimson interval-curtains, glimpsing rooms that were hardly trashed at all, the flocked gold paper still on the walls, the corners still fitted with honeywood prie-dieux, which one bad winter would turn into someone’s firewood. The troupes had been through just after the torch, defacing the place. Now, instead of the nuns’ Holy Man, the biggest bouffon of all, the Weeping Yay-Zou, mawked down on us from frame after curly-gilt frame, his red nose sometimes a plastic blister, sometimes lovingly painted red with a white dot of shine, sometimes a big cabochon ruby, almost worth pinching. Nah, hot rubies didn’t fetch as much as they used to – besides, what was I thinking? My thieving days were over; I was on the greener side of the fence now, eh?

  We went to the Puffin. It was pricier than the Spectacled Eider – we were paying for all the mirrors and chandeliers and plaster dolphins on the walls – but the food was better and we reckoned we deserved it. We had good soup and cod, and fine glasses of fizz, toasting our morning’s work and the days ahead of us. All around us were the people who keep the world running: riggers and sweepers, ticket-sellers and physiotherapists, with a sprinkling of top hats and tailcoats.

  ‘How about you, then?’ said Jelly. ‘Dogleg said you were a lone ranger.’

  ‘I’m no party-man.’ I toyed with a flake of cod. ‘Always wanted to be a Hectic, and do it with a knife, and say something. But I couldn’t stomach being so close. Couldn’t put on the pancake, even pretending.’

  I put down my fork. Jelly saw me do my twitch, which is everything pressed tight, lips and fists and toes in boots, to get the feeling of white-muck off my skin. A twitch like that could come from several kinds of pasts, and he waited, until I could pick up my fork again.

  ‘I got brought up in homes,’ I said, starting on the potted version I could tell without too much trouble. ‘State ones, not nuns’. The stars, they could walk in after a show and have their pick of us.’

  I could read him like a matinee poster. There was some sympathy in his shudder, but his look said, And they picked you? Pull the other one.

  ‘I never got properly done over,’ I assured him. ‘It came close once, that’s all.’ That’s all you need. You don’t needmore than that. ‘But other kids did. Every Thursday and Saturday night, for years. All those buffoons, the Grand Old Men of the Ring, they’d be dead now – Barley Charlie and the like. Jiminy Grinshine. Too late to go whacking them. But all my life the kids they buggered up have been dropping off roofs and throwing themselves under elephants’ feet. And you’ve gotta do something.’

  He sipped his fizz. ‘Ah, yes. You do, too.’ His conviction was there, as intense as mine, though it came from quite some other place. Well, he could keep that place to himself; I wasn’t curious.

  We were just umming and ahhing between the passionfruit mousse and the chocolate salami when a woman called out, ‘Gerald! Darling!’ in a true Big Top voice.

  Jelly looked past me and wilted. ‘It’s my mum,’ he muttered. ‘Act classy.’ He put on a weak smile and stood up. ‘Mother! You shouldn’t come into a place like the Puffin.’ Ew, the accent on him.

  ‘Saw you through the win-dow!’ She kissed Jelly on both cheeks. She was quite a sight in her stage-pancake and tutu and her auburnised croquembouche hair. And she smelled, too – one of the clean, old, bottled scents, magnolia or something. Jelly stood in the cloud of it, very much the shaggy son.

  ‘I just heard, and I had to tell you, darling: Freddy and Felix won the Blouson d’Or at the Jeux this morning!’

  ‘The what?’ said Jelly.

  All eyes in the Puffin were on the mother now. Except Jelly’s – he looked at me.

  ‘You know,’ said his mum. ‘The prize! The Yellow Jersey! For the day’s best bouffons! Don’t be thick, darling. You know what I’m talking about.’

  ‘My brothers,’ Jelly said to me. ‘Twins. Very talented.’

  I tried to show nothing. A dreadful burp of cod and fizz rose in my throat. Now I know what you’d look like, Jelly, with a big white beard strapped to your face, sans the hair, sans the bags under the eyes. Young. Hopeful. Full of juice and ghastly fun. Show nothing. Hold still until Jelly shows how much he minds. Then just echo that, on my own face. That’s the safest.

  ‘But . . . Hobbies can’t win a Blouson,’ Jelly said. ‘They can’t even go in the—’

  She tutted and sighed. ‘I told you they’d been jumped up.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘Yes, at the Mask Ball, remember?’

  ‘I didn’t go,’ said Jelly hollowly, lifting his gaze from me to his mum. ‘I didn’t go to the Mask Ball.’

  She stamped her slipper. ‘Well, anyway. Tit for Tat, they call themselves, and they’re very good. I mean, clearly! The premier Blouson at their very first games! Isn’t it marvellous?’

  In my mind’s eye, Tat draped himself over the fountain. Even without the bullet, that crack to the head would’ve—And Tif ran for the trees, his real mouth square with terror. He tripped on his billowing silks, he tumbled like a popped balloon— Nope, there was no going back.

  ‘Marvellous,’ Jelly said. ‘Will there be a party?’

  His stagy curiosity made her face light up. ‘Oh, darling, will there! Bring all your friends!’ She gave me a three-quarter back view of the croquembouche – she’d be doing something with her face to say, Not this friend, though.

  ‘I will! I’ll be there!’ Jelly brayed.

  ‘Tonight!’ And she swept out of the Puffin, touching a petitchou of her hair, her tutu wagging above her jewelled hosiery. All she needed was a white pony and a circle of sawdust to ride around.

  The burp came out through my nose – it was soundless but it fouled the magnolia air. Jelly watched me watch him, his face mask after mask, each the tiniest bit different, but the eyes always dark, almost smoking.

  ‘That will be a fun do,’ I ventured, when he looked down at the dessert menu.

  He winced. ‘What can they expect!’ he spat.

  ‘It’s only fair,’ I said evenly. I laid
my hand on the Fiore case, thinking of the slow squeeze and thunk of firing her, so smooth and leisurely. And the way it lifts them, all slow-motionly, their silks flapping, the mouth inside the painted mouth opening, the nose drawing a red curve on the sight-screen—

  ‘Made up your minds, gentlemen?’

  I came out of my twitch and blinked at the waiter, standing there with his pencil cocked, kiss-curls painted across his forehead.

  ‘I can recommend the mousse,’ he said. ‘Light as a feather, but intense flavour.’

  Jelly dug for money and folded it into the waiter’s hand. The man backed off bowing when he felt the quantity. My mouth hungered after passionfruit, but was I going to insist? Jelly picked up the Fiore.

  I concentrated hard, following him through the markets, dodging loaf-stalls, iced-bun stands, sproutings of glazed-dough kewpie dolls on candy-sticks. Night was closing in. Was I going to lose him, and the Fiore along with him? Would he go all funny, turn on me? These rich kids, how much could you rely on them?

  He led me through the safety fence around the church tower, in through the shot-away door, up the stairs, out onto the balcony-thing. He sat himself between two winged gargoyles with their heads knocked off, and I parked nearby. There was a chilly wind, and the rain was coming on again. Below, the market glittered pink like a rosette-firework, but the rest of the city was a wet freight of stonework, stacked all the way to the horizons. Jelly sat hunched as a gargoyle himself, smoking and coughing and smoking, his rollies sheltered under his hand.

  I tried out several sentences in my head. See, I haven’t got brothers . . . But of course I did. Lobby Boyd, Frik-knuckles Weinstein, Tooley Kochinski – all those kids I grew up with. If they weren’t brothers what were they? If they weren’t brothers, why was I doing this with my life? It’s all good deeds. But it wasn’t, was it? It was one bad deed piled on another like camp-corpses, like gar-bags in an abandoned bunker . . . Could I try one of those smokes? But he might decide to hit me, and I wasn’t large, and there wasn’t room here for my kind of fighting.

  One more coughing fit, one more rollie, and Jelly seemed to come awake – well, in a blind sort of way. He opened the Fiore case and took the baby out, and all her kit, piece by piece. He set her up, as if for the first time and learning as he went. Off to one side, I closed the case so the rain wouldn’t ruin her blue crushed-velvet bedding.

  Jelly pointed her at the rainclouds through a gap in the stone balusters. I was quite happy to admire her. I could see why he’d – what, console himself? – with the sight of her all solid and beautiful, with the thought of Benato drawing her forth out of nothing, into metal and usefulness. It was enough to look at her, without sullying her with actual work. Jelly was right.

  But then.

  Jelly brought a foil out of his jacket. He unwrapped it too carelessly for it to be drugs. Worse than drugs, a white nub of something glowed in the gloom. My whole body pulled back from it against the tower wall.

  He didn’t need a mirror. He drew a perfect white oval around his face from hairline to chin-dimple, and filled it in. The stuff clagged on his eyebrows and stubble; it waxed his fingertips; it brought his every wrinkle and pore into relief. My twitch came on and turned my body to rock.

  Next, Jelly produced a red-lead crayon. He drew himself a mouth, as if in his sleep; a million times before, he’d done this. It was as smooth and shiny as a rubber stick-on. As it always does, the lipless, puckery real mouth gave the lie to the big-happy drawn one; if he looked at me, I would wet myself. The old terrors were frothing the fizz I’d had, kicking up the cod. All this time and running I’d spent, and here I was, plastered on the church-stone like a splatted paint-ball, trapped with one of the things hardly an arm’s reach away, in full muck—

  It got worse. He put the nose on. It made him move differently; it gave him that terrible pretend-childlikeness they have. The face dipped and floated as he stood, ooh!, surprised to find himself, why, here! A breath honked into me, the first for a while.

  He shook his khaki jacket inside out, off his hands, then tweaked it again somehow, so that it burst open into layered orange furbelows. He stepped into it and stretched, becoming the familiar, dreaded star-shape, his feet orange-bootee’d on the pocked stone, his fingers gloved in tight orange kid. A practised zip and he was gone, leapt up the ladder to the class he belonged in. He unclipped the backpack; it was brimming with clown-gear, packed special so he could ‘discover’ it in a certain order.

  As soon as he started, I could tell he was good. Why hadn’t they taken him at the auditions? He must’ve choked badly on the day. He juggled as if the knives, the firesticks, the golden coshes weighed nothing, as if they were making their own crescents and circles, with his hands just patting them for reassurance. He tumbled like a squirrel, running up wall and down balustrade, flipping along the stone coping as if nothing yawned beyond, as if the city were a safety net he’d never think of needing. He mimed all the mimes: the full three-course meal, the stint in the mini-car, the case-of-mistaken-identity; he slipped from pose to ritual pose through the rolls and shocks and blanches I remembered, in my bones and muscles, from my own classes in the homes – except perfect, never wondering what the point was. Not a fumble, not a wobble, not a pause.

  The only thing that saved me was, he didn’t once look my way. He played to some other audience. I heard them laugh as he pratfalled and pretended pain; they cried and blew their noses as he sat alone in the sawdust-moted spotlight with the solo fiddle curling its tendrils among the tentpoles; they screamed with love of him when he recovered at the sight of the Pretty Girl and exploded in feathers. I knew that crowd; they’d watched me, too, as I rose and rose; they’d applauded and delighted and shouted, ‘Yes!’ They weren’t real – a crowd like that can only exist in your head. The loudest voices in my crowd, for example, were the dead ones. Which didn’t stop me always trying to show them, to fix things up with them once and for all.

  Jelly stood spread-eagled the final time. The hiss of rain on stone was like distant cheers, and he bathed in them. His hair was all bedraggled, but his orange frills were of such stuff that the rain balled up and rolled off him, in sprays like beads wired to his costume.

  He must have heard me not clapping, my absence of delight. ‘What was your name again?’ he said, his face pushed into the light-bruised rainclouds.

  If it’s got a red nose, never tell it your true name, said Frik-knuckles before he went off to the tram-station to lay his head on the rail. Or he’ll call you it, and call you it, until the sound of it in anyone’s mouth will just about make you chunder. Call yourself Billy or Tommy or anything that’s not your name. That way it can be happening to that other kid, and you can keep your own name for yourself.

  I peeled my arm off the stonework. It was a travesty of movement after Jelly’s act; it wonked and groped towards the Fiore. But, thunk, she said anyway – she was certain, even if I was wobbly.

  Did Jelly spring as well? I don’t know how much of that last back-somersault he intended. Or whether he did actually stop a moment, out past the broken lip of the balcony, and catch my eye, through the rain, before he dropped.

  The rain hissed. The merry-go-round jingled and groaned below. Slowly my body came out of the twitch. The bouffon would fall in the churchyard mud, inside the safety fence. No one would see him; no one would have seen him go down, if I was lucky.

  And I was lucky. I was always lucky. I put the Fiore to bed, and my hands weren’t even shaking. Not now, with that thing out of sight.

  I stepped over the strewn bunting, the grouped sticks and coshes. I was balanced, even with the case; I could glide its weight down the stairs with my speediest tippy-toeing. All the way down, I took care not to think of that bouffon struggling bloodied round the tower, to meet me at the shot-away door with another spurt of ghastly tumbling.

  And of course he didn’t. I was lucky.

  I ducked through the fence into the markets, the Fiore like a tiny heavy co
ffin in my arms. No alarms were sounding; nobody was running; nobody paid me any mind at all. I walked through the markets, sober and dark as a shoeblack or an electricity man, as a man carrying his work case, going about his business.

  HE HURRIED AHEAD TO the queen-chamber, his jaws aching from the fight. The colony was still reeling from the attack; cousins boiled past and over him with only a quick trace, a chirp or a slight hiss. But he had mission and message; they gave way to his shoving, even those larger than he.

  The chamber’s air was steamy with young. Servers ran about, collecting the ripe young-beads for the compost-chamber. The queen gnawed fresh sweetbulb as the young fought and fixed themselves to her teats. The scent here was absolutely true; it cleared his head of anything but loyalty, and he abased himself. The queen lifted her face from the bulb and sniffed, and gave a trill.

  He was dazzled for a moment – then his fellow-fighters jostled from behind, and he remembered his mission. ‘It was the sun-start mob,’ he panted. ‘They came in several ways at once.’

  ‘Dybbol,’ came her slow voice. ‘I know you.’

  ‘They are gone, sweet queen. You and the young are safe. We blocked all five tunnels that way, and none penetrated.’

  ‘That red-snake last summer. You were the one, weren’t you, who turned that back?’

  ‘Among others. We always serve our queen. We always keep the colony.’

  ‘Ha,’ she said, and there was more gnawing.

  Hunger surfaced in Dybbol’s stomach, now that he was no longer saviour. Behind him, some fellow’s insides gave a muffled skirl. They were ready to leave.

  But the great queen stirred. The young protested, falling off and lolling on the chamber floor. ‘Come here, Dybbol,’ she said. ‘I am all weighed down by our future.’

  He pushed the sweetbulb aside and there was her face, warm and curious, her smell piercing his skull like incisors of pure sunlight. Confused, he abased himself and retreated.