‘Hup!’ said the boy behind him. ‘Back here.’
‘I don’t need his luck,’ said Doppo over his shoulder.
The boy went after him and brought him back. ‘You want to kill us all?’ he said, banging Doppo’s stiffened hand onto Sheegeh’s curls and rubbing hard. ‘You want to be the hole in our defence?’
He let go and Doppo snatched back his hand. The other boy’s eyes rolled and he rubbed Sheegeh’s curls more gently. ‘Some people think they’re indestructible, don’t they, Angel-face?’
When they’d gone, Fat Owen said, ‘Triangles? Nah, too late for triangles. Look at you.’ But he sat up himself with Maths Challenge, writing his workings on pieces of foreign newspaper where the advertising pictures left good stretches of the page blank.
Sheegeh woke to see Owen lift his head from his arms on the table. The candle was dead, but there was first light outside. There was a stumbling sound, a rattle of rubble, a wounded moan. Owen heaved up and hurried to open the door.
‘Mother Mary!’ He came back to the table and fumbled to light a fresh candle.
The new boy filled the doorway, with someone else— Brisk, one of their biggest—around his shoulders. ‘They’re all gone,’ said the new boy. ‘Every one. Except us.’ He lowered Brisk to stand, propped him there.
‘What! Come in!’ said Owen. ‘Get him onto the bunk there. Let us look at him.’
‘No, no,’ said Brisk. ‘It’s too bad. Don’t touch me. Just lay me down.’ His vinyl jacket was buttoned all up and down. A row of blood-drips was gathering at the bottom edge, running along, dripping from the corner.
They helped him across the floor and sagged him onto the lower bunk, which was Michael’s, with Gayorg’s above.
Owen went for the buttons. ‘Now, let’s—’
Brisk pushed him away. Both Brisk’s hands were washed and washed again with dried blood. ‘I just wanted to die at home,’ he said, ‘’stead of out there, on the ground.’ Something inside the jacket made a soggy sound. ‘It won’t take long,’ he said.
Owen caught one of the hands wandering on the chest of the jacket. ‘You take as long as you like, Brisk,’ he said. ‘We’ll try and make you comfortable.’ He brought the big hand up to his teeth and cried on it, silently.
The new boy swayed, holding himself up by the bunk-frame, staring down at Brisk.
‘Cobbla brought me home,’ said Brisk, but his lungs were seriously disturbed now, groaning and bubbling blood up onto his lips.
Sheegeh remembered Michael saying once, It’s a home. It’s got kids in.
Yeah, Doppo had said, looking pleased.
Not you. Gayorg had given him a push. Innocent kids. Angel.
And Doppo had looked at Sheegeh with open dislike.
‘Cobbla’s a good man.’ Brisk coughed up a last gout of blood. It spread its red shine down his chin and his noisy breathing stopped.
Owen closed Brisk’s eyes, and positioned his hands on his chest. Then he heaved himself up, his wet face grave.
‘No one else?’ he said to Cobbla.
‘They all got—they all—’
‘Show us,’ said Owen. ‘Take us there. Sheegeh?’
Sheegeh was already dressing. Owen never called me Sheegeh before, he thought. Owen never called me anything— not Angel, or Angel-hair, or Angel-face or anything.
Owen was going through everything in the hut. ‘Can you use this? Do you want this?’ he said to Cobbla. ‘Here, you can swap these for something useful, maybe.’ He put together a pack full of foodstuffs, and pots and utensils. ‘Here.’ He passed Sheegeh Michael’s pack. ‘Put a layer of mixed tins in the bottom of that, like mine, and fill up the rest with the good blankets.’
They covered Brisk with a couple of the thinner, more holed blankets, and went out laden into the silent city. Cobbla led them. Owen couldn’t move fast, couldn’t climb over things, so Cobbla took them the way he’d brought Brisk. It was still not fully light, and Sheegeh fancied that every dark mark on the ground was Brisk’s blood, dripped from his coat edge on the way home.
He had thought Cobbla was lying—Cobbla just had a lying way about him. Then he saw them, and thought, Now they’re dead, this time they’re dead. They were scattered across the mound just like the first time he’d seen them, but motionless, with their heads downwards, as if the black wraps had made their heads so heavy, they had dragged them down the slope.
‘Up there in the arch,’ said Cobbla, pointing up at the one remaining wall of the stadium. ‘Someone had a machine gun up there. They just waited and picked their moment and swept and swept. They all got mown down. I was just lucky. I just saw it happening up the other end, and I just got down in a lucky place—down there, see?—and I could get away bit by bit in between sweeps. I seen them. They was soldiers, or someone pretending to be soldiers.’
He went on, as if his voice had got unblocked somehow and now couldn’t be stopped. He described how Brisk had fallen and where, how he’d fetched Brisk and got Brisk out.
Sheegeh shrugged off his pack and went up the slope. The stadium wall shaded the whole rubble mound cold blue-grey from the dawning sky.
He started a new page, ‘Duwazza’. He had to unwrap every head; once he had measured, he covered the face with the black-flowered cloth. Christos and Melon had thick hair. Chechin’s skull was broken left side where he’d fallen on a corner of brick with some force. After Doppo, when the tape was soft and delicate and stained from Doppo’s head-ooze, Sheegeh felt his face contracted into a pig-face against the tears. He breathed in the tear-snot through his nose, held it there and breathed out through his mouth, going ‘Uh’ each time, moving from boy to boy, from head to head up the slope.
The tape didn’t come apart until he was oh-so-carefully rolling it up to put away in his pocket. He’d thought, It’ll dry there from the warmth of me, and probably be as good as new. Now he stood with the rolled piece on his fingers with its soggy red end, and the loose piece in his other hand, and he didn’t know what he thought. He didn’t know how much use it was now; in the old days he might have sticky-taped it together and used it again—but in the old days he wouldn’t be doing this, would he, measuring dead heads? He could use the longer part, perhaps, and then do the sum, adding— He checked: twelve-point-eight. Adding twelve-point-eight— No, you’d start at thirteen. Adding thirteen—
He put both pieces in his pocket. You never know, he might find himself in the kind of place that had sticky tape. He came back down to Owen and Cobbla, who were sitting on the packs at the foot of the mound.
‘They all there?’ said Owen.
Sheegeh sat on his own pack, and handed Owen the open notebook. The page was a little messy with blood-smudges.
Owen read the name column aloud from top to bottom, slowly. Even for Michael, his voice didn’t shake; Sheegeh admired him greatly. It was almost like a proper funeral.
While he read, Cobbla was leaning in to see the page. When Owen had finished, Cobbla touched the other column with his little finger. ‘What’s these?’
‘Their head measurements. The circumference,’ said Owen.
‘Head measurements? That’s what he was doing up there all that time? Measuring their heads? What’s the point of—’
‘He measures. Their heads,’ said Owen loudly and soberly. ‘That’s. What he does,’ said Owen. ‘You want to go through their pockets, be my guest. Bring me any papers you find.’
Cobbla was already up the slope. ‘Head measurements!’ floated down to them as he bent to the first body.
Owen handed back Sheegeh’s notebook. ‘I thought I might look out one of those camps,’ he said, ‘seeing I’ve got no one to raid for me any more. The one close to us, by Pontoon Bridge, I’ve heard they will take you if you wait long enough outside, even though they say they are turning people away. And I can wait.’ He patted the pack underneath him, patted his own belly, sending out ripples.
Sheegeh gave a stiff little nod. He looked at the ground and then
up at Owen’s round, harmless face and down again.
‘Hey, I’m not mad about this Cobbla,’ Owen said low. ‘Reckon you could come along with me and keep an eye on him?’
‘As if I could do anything, my size,’ Sheegeh said to his lap.
‘I could sit on him, and you could knock him out with—I don’t know, half a brick? A tin o’ beans?’
Sheegeh’s whole chest was full of sharp hardnesses. He didn’t want to disappoint Owen.
‘What? You’ve another plan?’ Owen sounded amused. ‘Skip off to Paree? Open a little beestro?’
‘Go up to Grandview,’ said Sheegeh.
Owen stopped chuckling. ‘Grandview? There’s no pickings up there any more—you will starve once you’re through your tins, if you’re not robbed of them on the way.’
‘I want to find that dog man, that you told us about,’ Sheegeh apologised. ‘See what he’s up to.’
Owen stared at him and blinked.
‘Hoo-hoo!’ Cobbla stood over Michael’s body, waving a banded roll of currency.
‘He might not even be there any more,’ said Owen. ‘That dog man. It was a while ago I heard that.’
Sheegeh shrugged. ‘I’ll see if he is. If he’s not, I’ll come back down and try a camp like you.’ He stood up.
Owen watched him unfasten the pack. ‘Pontoon Bridge is good. I hear they’ve a school there, even, for your-age kids.’
Sheegeh took out a good blanket and put it on Cobbla’s pack. He took out another and gave it to Owen, who took it, looking stricken, and hugged it. ‘You be careful going across town,’ he said. ‘Go now, go early. And hide when things start to wake up.’
‘Don’t worry.’ Sheegeh tied up the pack and shouldered it and shook Owen’s hand. His face was cold and tight with the drying tears, his eyelashes clumped with them.
He had to watch his feet as he walked away, stepping over the scattered concrete chunks and brick bits.
‘Keep up with your triangles, eh,’ said Owen.
Sheegeh turned and smiled to show he’d heard. From here Cobbla seemed to float above Owen, bent over and rummaging in a sprawled shadow.
‘I will,’ Sheegeh said, and walked on.
{ Living Curiosities
I went to Dulcie Pepper’s tent and slapped my hand onto her table, palm up.
‘I’m sorry, Nonny-girl. Looking at that, you’ll not grow another inch.’ She reached for her pipe. ‘Clawed your way through that queue, did you?’
‘Have you had anyone tonight?’
‘One strange young man. How about you Ooga-Boogas?’
‘A family or two, and a man—oh, probably the same man as you. Very clean clothes, and uncomfortable in them.’
‘Uncomfortable in his skin, that one. He gave me the shivers, he did.’
‘Spent a long time in with the pickle jars, then came out and stood well back from us, did not try to speak. Even Billy could not get so much as a good-evening out of him, though he did nod when greeted. Mostly just stared, though, from one to another of us and back again. Twice around, he went, as if he did not want to miss a thing.’
‘Hmm.’ Dulcie leaned back in her shawl-draped chair and put her humdrum boots up next to the crystal ball. She is not so much a crystal gazer; the ball is mostly for atmosphere. She does complicated things with her own set of cards that she will not say where they came from, and mainly and bestly she reads hands. Not just palms, but hands, for there is as much to be read from fingertips as from the palm’s creases, she says. ‘Where was I, then, last time?’
‘You had just told Mister Ashman as much as you could, about them ghosts.’
‘Oh yes, which was not very much, and all confused, as is always the case when you come to a moment of choice and possibilities. It’s as bad as not seeing anything sometimes; really, you could gain as much direction consulting a person of only common sense. But perhaps those are rarer than I’m thinking, rarer even than fortune-tellers. Anyway, John Frogget comes by.’
‘John Frogget? What was he doing there?’ I tried to disguise that his name had spilled a little of my tea.
‘Well, he must quarter somewhere too, no, for the winter? That was the year his pa died. He said he would not go to Queensland and duke it out with his brothers for the land. He waited closer to spring and then went up a month or two and rabbited for them. Made a tidy pot, too. All put away in the savings bank nicely—there’s not many lads would be so forethoughtful.’
I tried to nod like one of those commonsense people. I nearly always knew whereabouts John Frogget was, and if I didn’t know where, I imagined. Right now I could hear the pop-pop of someone in his shooting gallery, alongside the merry-go-round music. So he would be standing there in the bright-lit room, all legs and folded arms and level gaze, admiring if the man was a good shot, and careful not to show scorn or amusement if he was not. ‘So what did Frogget do, then, about your ghosts?’
‘Well, he tried to shoot them, of course—we asked him. At first he was too frightened. Such a steady boy, you would not credit how he shook. He could not believe it himself. So at first his shots went wide. But then he calmed himself, but blow me if it made any difference. Look, he says, I am aimed direct in the back of the man’s head or at his heart, but the shot goes straight through the air of him. He made us watch, and ping!, and zing!, and bdoing! It all bounced off the walls and the two of them just kept up their carry-on, the ghost-man cursing and the woman a-mewling same as ever. And then rowr-rowr-chunka-chunka the thing come down the alley like always, and poor Frogget—we had not warned him about that part!’ Laughter and smoke puffed out of her, and she coughed. ‘We had to just about scrape him off the bricks with a butter knife, he was pressed so flat! Oh!’
‘Poor lad,’ I said. ‘You and Mister Ashman at least were used to it.’
‘I know. We knew we would come to no harm. Ashman had stood on that exact spot many times and been run down by the ghost-horses and the ghost-cart, like I told you. It might have whitened his hair a little more, the sensations of it, but he were never crushed, by any means. Standing there in the racket with his hands up and, Stand to! Begone, now! As if he were still right centre of the ring, and master of everything.’ She watched the memory and laughed to herself.
‘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!