India Dark (17 page)

Iris giggled and I gave her an evil look so she shut her eyes again, though I was trying not to laugh myself.

‘You will do what I say. You want to do what I say. You cannot keep your eyes open. They are too heavy. They must stay closed and allow you to concentrate entirely on the sound of my voice. There is nothing else. Drowsy. Sleepy. My voice. Heavy. You are growing sleepy.'

I kept my voice monotonously low and soothing, describing how everyone's limbs were growing leaden as I willed them to sleep. Actually, I think I might have made a very fine mesmerist. Instinctively, I understood how to hold an audience in my thrall. Poesy opened one eye and shut it again quickly when she realised I was looking straight at her. Without stopping my monotonous drone, I tiptoed over to her and gripped her chin in my hand. Her eyes flew open in alarm but I held them in my gaze, firm and steady. I pinched her chin so hard that tears sprang to her eyes. But she didn't cry out. I had to admire her for that.

I tiptoed around the circle of girls, checking to see which ones were peeking and which were in thrall to my voice. Some of them seemed to be nodding off. Ruby sat upright with her eyes shut. There was something odd about her face. Her mouth was slack and her hands hung limply by her side. She looked like a sleepwalker. I realised I might have cracked it. I had mesmerised Ruby Kelly.

I focused all my attention on her. I felt a little shiver run up my spine. I'm not sure if it was fear or the thrill of success.

As the other girls slept on or opened their eyes to watch, I asked Ruby to raise one hand in the air. And she obeyed me. I focused all my attention on her now, the blue cloth-covered book in my hand. The first thing it described was autosuggestion, so I tried it. I didn't mean any harm.

‘Now, when I say the word “duck”, I want you to say “quack”.'

When I said ‘duck', Ruby obediently replied with a ‘quack'.

‘She's faking this,' whispered Iris. But I knew I'd done something extraordinary and I was determined to prove it to Iris and all the others.

‘Now, Ruby, you are going to go back in time. I have the power to take you back, back, back to other times in your life. I want to take you back to when you were a little girl. Let's say your seventh birthday. You are seven years old again, Ruby. It is your birthday today. What presents did you get?'

Ruby's eyes rolled back beneath their lids. Her face twitched. For a moment she said nothing, and then she spoke in a different voice. A younger voice.

‘Oh, a doll. A pretty doll. Thank you, Mama. No, I don't want to share it with Beryl. It's my doll.'

Everyone snickered behind their hands. I grinned at the others, triumphant.

‘Now let's take you forward again. Through the years, past all your birthdays. Don't stop at any one event. We are taking you to last week. To Georgetown. You remember when you were in Georgetown, don't you, Ruby? In Georgetown on the island of Penang?'

I saw Poesy's hands flit at me as if to signal me to stop, but it was too late. Ruby was there, back at our last day on the island of Penang. Slowly, gently I prompted her through each hour of the evening. It seemed to be going swimmingly until she began to whimper.

‘And then, you walked down to the harbour,' I said, keeping my voice smooth and steady, so as not to break the spell.

Ruby whimpered again. ‘He promised . . .' She stopped and a fat tear rolled down her cheek from behind her closed eyes. ‘I only wanted to go home. He said he'd help me. That he'd help me for free. I didn't know . . .'

Her voice grew more staccato, more urgent. She looked terrified and she lay back on the bed and started to writhe.

‘Tell me, tell us what is happening, Ruby,' I said.

Poesy jumped up and stood behind Ruby, resting one hand on her shoulder. ‘We don't need to know this,' she hissed. Then she took Ruby's face in her hands. ‘Wake up, Ruby.'

It had said in the book not to wake people suddenly. I tried to push Poesy away from Ruby. ‘Leave her. You'll ruin it.'

But Ruby didn't seem to hear either of us or even notice we were there. Her face grew clouded with confusion.

‘It's all right, Ruby,' I said, kneeling in front of her. ‘It's all right. You're safe.'

But Ruby wasn't listening. She started pushing away some imaginary person and crying out, ‘Stop, please, stop. You're hurting me.' Her face turned a peculiar colour and she began to moan and cry.

‘Wake her, Tilly,' shrilled Poesy. ‘You have to wake her.'

I didn't need Poesy to tell me what to do. I could see things had turned sour. I snapped my fingers. ‘Ruby, I command you, wake.' But Ruby kept writhing and her cries grew to screams. It was as if an evil spirit had possessed her.

I grabbed the book and riffled through the pages. ‘It says she should wake up when I say that.'

‘Keep saying it, then,' said Poesy.

‘Wake up, Ruby. I command you, come back to the present.' I was almost shouting but still she wasn't listening. I even tried to shake her awake, but as soon as I laid hands on her, the screams grew ear-piercing.

‘She's gone insane,' said Iris.

‘What should we do?' squeaked May.

The other girls stood in a huddle, as far from Ruby as they could. Some of them pressed their hands against their ears. They backed away and stood staring at Ruby as she fought off the invisible man while I kept searching for a solution in the pages of the blue book.

And then Poesy took charge. She had such cheek to talk to me like that. ‘Go and get Miss Thrupp, Tilly, quickly,' she said. I was going to do that anyway but now it looked as if I couldn't think for myself.

I dropped the book and ran from the room.

By the time I returned with Miss Thrupp, Ruby was sitting up, her head in her hands. Beryl and Pearl sat on either side of her rubbing her back. Something had shifted.

‘We could hear her cries all over the hotel,' said Miss Thrupp. ‘What will the servants make of it? They'll think you're a pack of savages.'

What could
she
have been thinking, to not have come running until I fetched her myself?

‘It was only a game,' I said, ‘but it went wrong.'

‘Indeed it did,' said Miss Thrupp. ‘The games you girls play. Not girls at all. Savages . . .' I heard her voice trailing off as she led Ruby from the room. Suddenly, I was shivering. I lay down on my bed and hugged myself. It hadn't been a kids' game. We were playing with the grown-ups now.

32

A MOMENT IN TIME

Poesy Swift

The morning after Tilly's awful mesmerism fiasco, we were bundled out the hotel door and into carriages. It was a relief to be doing something other than lying on our beds in our underclothes. We'd been in Calcutta nearly a week but we hadn't done a single show. Something had gone wrong with our booking at the Opera House. Mr Arthur reassured us that any moment we'd be on stage again. In the meantime, we were all going to have photographic portraits made of each of us. I'd never had my picture taken. Once a man came to the door of Willow Lane and offered to take a photograph of us and our house but we had nothing to pay him with except the milkman's money. Now I was to have fifty photos of myself.

All the Lilliputians who had come on the last tour had a bundle of portraits. After every show they would wander through the audience, selling them to anyone who would part with a coin. Daisy and Flora had sold all their pictures in Singapore and some of the other children had run out as well. Only Lionel and a couple of the older girls still had any left. It was terrible when people didn't want your picture. I was torn about whether I wanted to sell my portrait to strangers. But sometimes the children were allowed to keep the money and I did like the idea of having a few coins. It was almost too much to believe that anyone would give me a whole rupee in exchange for my picture.

An oxen cart followed our carriages through the streets of Calcutta and then coolies carted our costume trunks up narrow flights of stairs to the photographer's studio.

‘He shouldn't have brought us down here,' said Tilly, glancing nervously along the laneway. ‘We're practically
in
the heart of Blacktown. It's bad enough that our hotel is so close. Surely he could have found someone other than this
babu
to do the pictures.'

‘What's a
babu
?'

‘Don't listen to her,' said Charlie. ‘A
babu
is an Indian gentleman, a perfectly respectable gentleman.'

Tilly rolled her eyes. ‘Charlie's turning into a right little
sahib
, aren't you, Chaz?'

Charlie shrugged and pushed past us, taking the creaky stairs two at a time. He never paid attention when Tilly tried to bait him.

The photographer's studio was made up of two rooms on the second floor of an old building. It was very plain, almost shabby, and the hallway where we waited our turn had a funny, oily smell. I don't know what I expected but I'd always thought that having my picture taken would be a little more glamorous. When I was finally allowed inside, I found there was a fake curtain hanging at one end of the room and a chaise longue with a small marble table beside it. As I drew closer, I realised the flowers that stood on the table were all made of paper and covered in a fine layer of dust.

Mr Arthur said Lionel and Lizzie should be in a photo together to try to help Lionel sell more pictures. Lionel had to wear a three-quarter-length coat, a cap with a red band and a pair of military trousers with a red stripe down the leg. He knelt in front of Lizzie as if he were her beau. She wore a pale blue dress with lamb-chop sleeves and a striped underskirt. On her lovely dark curls was a wide-brimmed bonnet with ostrich feathers that fell forward as she offered her white hand to Lionel.

I wished I could look like Lizzie, so full and soft and deliciously plump. But did I really want a boy to look at me the way Lionel mooned over Lizzie? I suppose he was only acting but it made me feel itchy to think of him looking at me like that. Then I imagined Charlie on bended knee and smiled. Perhaps it depended on the boy.

When it came to my turn, I looked in the mirror and knew it would be hard for me to sell my pictures too. I was dressed as a gypsy girl, dancing with a tambourine above my head, and my elbows looked horribly sharp as they stuck out from the puffy short sleeves. The full skirt billowed out when I twirled in a circle and the little bells along the hem rang merrily, but when the photographer made me stand with my hands stretched high, it only made me look skinnier than ever.

After me, the Kreutz brothers had their picture taken together, each in silly costume as Tweedledee and Tweedledum in battle. ‘Ours sell like nobody's business,' they said as they whacked each other over the head with rubber batons.

Then, as I was changing out of my gypsy costume, Flora stepped in front of the camera. She was dressed in a miniature full-length gown with shoestring shoulder straps and jewel-encrusted dropped straps as well. She had a silver belt around her waist and a crown of stars on her head – stars so big she almost looked like a tiny Statue of Liberty. She held a handful of the skirt fabric in her fat little fist to stop it dragging along the floor. When she raised one small hand in a regal wave everyone laughed, but you knew why Mr Arthur would order at least a hundred copies of the image.

Everything seemed to be going smoothly until Lizzie stepped forward for her solo photo as a geisha girl. She wore a heavily embroidered kimono and flowers and pearls in her hair, and her eyebrows were elaborately pencilled in a faux oriental style. She raised an ivory fan and fluttered it gracefully beneath her chin. Lionel stood beside me and stared, slack-jawed. Mr Arthur was watching too. His face changed.

‘Who chose that costume, Eliza?'

‘I did. I thought you'd like it,' she said. ‘I'm a geisha, like Madame Butterfly.'

Mr Arthur blanched.

‘Don't be ridiculous! You are not and never will be a geisha. Go and change. I'll not have you selling images of yourself dressed like that.'

He mopped his brow with his handkerchief and whispered something to the photographer and then barked rudely at Lizzie to hurry up and change her outfit. She lowered her fan and sighed with disappointment but did as she was told.

Later, as we sat waiting on the stairs for the others to finish, I asked Lizzie, ‘Did you mind Mr Arthur snapping at you like that? Even Lionel thought he was rude.'

Lizzie sighed and tucked one of her curls behind her ear. ‘It's not his fault,' she said.

‘You never think anything is his fault. Why do you always take his side? He was mean to you, Lizzie.'

‘It's not easy being in charge. And Calcutta is full of sad memories for poor Mr Arthur. He came here after his brother died in Rangoon and his father fell ill and died not long after when he was still only a tiny boy. He's had such a hard life.'

‘Lizzie, do you have a crush on Mr Arthur? Is that why you always take his side? I know you say he's your friend as well as your employer, but you're simply friends, aren't you, nothing else?' I held my breath. I almost didn't want to hear the answer.

Lizzie took my face in her hands and stroked my cheeks with her thumbs. Her hands were smooth and silky soft. ‘Poesy, you are a funny little creature. Of course I don't have a “crush” on Mr Arthur.'

I shut my eyes and took a deep breath, inhaling the lovely scent of Lizzie. She smelt of lavender and rosewater and soft powder. A sweet relief washed over me. I took Lizzie's hand and kissed the back of it.

‘That's the truth, isn't it?' I asked, needing to be sure.

‘Why would I lie to you, Poesy Swift?'

33

SWADESHI

Tilly Sweetrick

When we finally began our season at the Minerva Theatre, the stalls were only half full and there was no one in the galleries. The Butcher tried to blame Mr Shrouts for not doing his job properly but it wasn't Mr Shrouts who was in charge. There was only one person to blame.