Yellowcake

  ‘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!’

  ‘He was doomed.’ Dulcie shivered. ‘I saw it. It was all over his palms, this possibility. It was all through his cards like a stain. When I see an outlay like that, I lie. Sometimes that averts it. I told him he would find love soon, and prosper in his business concerns, find peace in himself, all of that and more. Perhaps I babbled, and he saw the falsity in it. But I was only trying to help—oh!’ She covered her mouth with her hand to stop more words falling out, doing their damage.

  ‘Did you know the man, Dulcie?’ Ugly Tom had seen our fright and come to us.

  ‘You would have seen him too, Tom,’ I said. ‘He spent an age among your babies and your three-headed lambs.’

  He looked startled, then disbelieving. ‘Oh, was he a young gentleman? Thin tie? Well dressed? Little goatee?’ He put up his hand to show how tall, and Dulcie and I nodded as if our heads were on the same string. ‘Well, I never!’ He turned towards the shooting gallery, astonished. ‘You’re right,’ he said to me, as if he had not noticed it himself, ‘he did spend a time with my exhibits. An inordinate amount of time.’

  ‘And with us outside, too, an ordinate amount,’ I said, holding Dulcie’s neck tighter. ‘Back and forth, back and forth, staring. Which is why we are there, of course, so that people may stare. Did he say anything to you, Dulcie, that made you think he might—?’

  She shook her head. ‘He gave me no clue. He didn’t need to; it was all over his hands. I should have told him. You’re in terrible danger. Perhaps if he knew that I saw—’

  It was then that she walked by, towards the tent. It was not someone understandable, like The Lovely Zalumna. It was perfectly ordinary Fay Shipley, daughter of Cap Shipley the head rigger.

  I saw it as I’d seen the boot, when Sammy Mack opened the tent-flap, and held it open longer than he needed. The world, the fates, whatever dooming powers there were, that Dulcie sometimes saw the workings of before they acted, they conspired to show me, through the shiftings of the people in front of us, through the tent-flap Sammy was gawking through, beside the partition, in the narrow slice of gallery, of world-in-itself, its sounds blotted out by the closer whispers and mutterings of bone-in-his-nose Billy and Chan and Mrs Em and the Wild Man and—

  She hurried in, plain Fay Shipley. She stood beside the partition, her hands to her mouth. Then she lifted her head, as someone approached her from inside, and—later I hated her for this—her arms loosened and lifted out to receive him, and as Sammy Mack dropped the canvas I saw John Frogget’s forehead come to rest on her shoulder, John Frogget’s arms encircle her waist, John Frogget’s boot block my view of that other boot.

  Then they both were gone. ‘Did you see that?’ I said dazedly, in the cold, in the dark outside. ‘Fay and John Frogget?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Dulcie. ‘Did you not know they were sweet-hearts?’

  ‘Just freshly, just recent?’

  ‘Oh no, months, at least. Where have your eyes been?’

  She stood, then, away from me, and folded her arms up there. And Mrs Em came running up to busybody, so it was all what-a-dreadful-thing and poor-John-Frogget awhile there, with every now and then a pause to allow me to exclaim to myself, But I am prettier than Fay Shipley!

  And, Look at my hair! When hers is so flat, as if she glued it down!

  And, Why, I’ve never seen the girl laugh, to improve her looks that way!

  ‘What a thing to do on your last night, eh?’ said Mrs Em, with something of a giggle. ‘Come to the deadest night o’ the circus, and look at freaks and specimens.’

  Oh, I was being so frivolous and vain, with the young gent dead in there, and why, ever? ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Is it so odd? What would you do, if you had killing yourself in mind?’

  ‘Would you have your fortune told?’ said Dulcie wretchedly from on high. ‘To see whether you had the courage?’

  ‘I think I am too ordinary,’ I said surprised, staring at the tent-flap.

  Mrs Em laughed. ‘That’s no sin, child!’

  ‘Oh, but I’m used to thinking how different I am from most people, how unusual. Yet this gentleman, and shooting himself in the eye … I don’t know that I’d ever take my life in my own hands so. I wouldn’t feel I had the right, you know? To such grand feelings, or even, to make such a mess, you know? Of someone else’s floor, that would have to mop it up—’

  ‘Ooh, he’s more of a freak than you or I, dear,’ said Mrs Em, right by my ear. Her stubby hand patted mine.

  I folded mine away from her. I didn’t want her cosiness, her comforting me. I wanted to be grand and tragic; I wanted people to be awed by me as we were by the dead gentleman, not to say How sweet! and But they are like little dolls! Flossie could pick one up, couldn’t you, Floss? I wanted to be tall, to have dignity, to shoot myself in the eye without it taking my whole arm’s stretch to reach the trigger. I wanted to be all but invisible, too, until I did so, and to leave people wondering why I might have done it, instead of having them nod and say, Well, of course, she could expect no kind of normal life, as I lay freakish in my own blood on the floor, with my child-boot sticking out my skirts.

  ‘I’m going to ask Arthur, may I sit aboard his merry-go-round,’ I said.

  ‘What, when a man has just died?’ said Mrs Em.

  ‘I will not ask him to spin it,’ I said. ‘It will be safer. I will be out from underfoot, and it will cheer me up, and I will have a better view when they bring the body out.’

  ‘What a caution!’ said Mrs Em as I went.

  I thrust myself in among skirts and trousers, painted legs and pantaloons, grass-dresses and robe-drapes. There is a privacy to being so small, a privacy and a permission—all children know it, and use it, and are forgiven. And ‘Oops!’, and ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Non’, and ‘I say—oh, it’s one of you!’ people said as I forged a way through them, pushing aside their thighs and cloths and shadows.

  And finally I forced through to the golden light of the merry-go-round. The animals were stiff on their posts, and empty-saddled, that ought to glide and spin, and lift and lower their riders; the pootling, piping music was stilled.

  ‘Arthur,’ I commanded the ticket-man nearby, a rag hanging from his pocket smudged with the grease of the roundabout’s workings. ‘Lift me up onto a pony, before someone treads me into the mud!’

  Which he did with a will, for people enjoy to be ordered by dwarves as they like to be ordered by children, up to a point. And there in the golden glow I sat high-headed, above the hats and feathers and turbans of the ghoulish crowd turned away from me. I wished the light were as warm as it looked; I wished the music were filling my ears. I dreamed—hard, as if the vehemence of my dreaming would make it happen—that my shiny black horse would surge forward beneath me, and that I would be spun away from this place and this night, lifted and lowered instead past Lake Geneva, past Constantinople, past Windermere and Tokyo Palace and Gay Paree, past Geneva again, and the Lake, again and again around the whole picturesque, gilt-framed world, for as long as ever I needed.

  { Eyelids of the Dawn

  Itchy. That was the thought tha
t woke me, woke my hearing, woke my skins and mind. Threw a strong light, constant as if electric powered, back down my memory.

  Louse-itch, mite-itch. They have been at me all day. For many days and evenings, certainly, but this day is freshest to me. All my terrazzo and my faux-parquetry is tapped and scuffed by their shoes, streaked with their dropped food, rolled on by their children’s tantrums and strollers. This is what happens when the doors of your face are opened: the lice crowd in. When the light goes, their business is finished, and they crowd out again, and leave only their itch behind.

  It is all through my pipes and columns, this itch. The lice are the source of it, but it grows in places where they have not been, away from the thoroughfares, shop rooms and rest rooms and work rooms, escalators and lifts: in drains with other vermin, in germ-scummed sewer pipes; evaporating from my roofs’ trays and gutters. All along my steel, between the steel and the concrete it strengthens, gnawing here, making me twitch there.

  I have so many seams where it can gather. Impervious to air, I am, a sealed unit with my own climate, but inside and out I am all corners, all niches and crevices, false walls and cavities. I have my glossy rooms and my disinfected, but parts of me are never seen and never polished, never swept or wiped or flicked with rag or feather duster. Much of me is only ever rinsed by rain; much of me goes untouched, and some of me is buried in dirt. Worms weave around my feet, rats run about my ankles, some small thing putrefies in a back corner of me.

  And all around me in the night, they are still there, the lice, crawling in the other blocks, roosting, feeding, squabbling, ceaseless. Dogs trot the streets and cattle wander; rats run; more lice live there, the sort that wait in the day at the doors of my face and importune the others entering and leaving. And on their skins and the dogs’ and the rats’ and cattle’s, lice-vermin crawl and bite and bother, so that the lice twitch an ear, or scratch a leg, or rub themselves against a post or building, to relieve their own minuscule itches.