The Mermaid's Child (2 page)

So it couldn't be the goats. It didn't even sound like it anymore. There was a fiddle in there, I could tell that now, and something else that sounded rich and sharp, like blackcurrants; like wine, I would've thought, if I'd ever tasted wine. It was nothing like the music we had in church, Gran's cold hand clamped around mine as we held the small black hymn book and droned on out-of-tune to the wheezing organ. This music brought water to your mouth; it tugged at you.

By now I could also hear other distinct sounds: creaks of strained rope, shouted warnings, a dog's excited bark. The slate now lay flat on my lap, my eyes had climbed towards the window. Dark against the glare, Miss Woodend creaked, stood up. The Metcalfe boys clambered over each other to get out of the settle. The Clay twins bobbed up, knocking their heads against my feet.

The snort of heavy, burdened horses, the jingle of brasses, the smell of something I'd never smelt before, but know so well now that I can smell it again as I think of it, as if it's permeated the membranes, stuck onto the hairs inside my nose, so that time and nose-blowing and probing fingers can't dislodge it. The smell of cheap perfume and sweat on old
sequins; the smell of camel dung, hair dye, sawdust, straw and sex. The smell of the circus.

We stood in Miss Woodend's porch, gaping. Tumblers rolled across the green. A leggy sand-coloured creature loped after them, two wobbling humps on its back, followed by painted caravans and wagons drawn by heavy horses, their tack alive with bells and brasses. I saw a white-haired man with a top hat at the reins of the first, at the second a hugely fat and smiling woman, and at the third a pair of identical redheaded men who at the same moment reached up to scratch an ear. Then came a huge grey beast with a nose that moved like a blind man's hand; above it white birds fluttered. I heard fiddle-music, pipes, and that dark sweet sound that I still could not identify. And, last, came a closed crate on wheels. There were words painted on the side panel of the crate, each line smaller and more faint than the one before. At the time I couldn't make much of them, just picked out a word here or there. Most of the letters just swam around in front of me and wouldn't settle into any familiar pattern. Of course I know it now, know it as well as I know the totemic pattern of my own name:

ALDOBRANDI'S
CIRCUS OF DELIGHTS

Specialists in Freaks, Fantasms, Ypotams
and
Other Zoological Oddities
*

We'll make you laugh, we'll make you cry
We guarantee we'll Change your Life
*

Warts charmed, teeth pulled, futures told
*

(no refunds)

My sandal squelched. I was standing in something warm and wet. The youngest Metcalfe boy squirmed, shook his leg and tugged at a dark patch on his shorts.

The tumblers were now hoisting each other up into houses of cards that held, teetered, scattered, slid back into a pack and then dealt themselves out again. Unnoticed at first, fabric flowed through their hands, red unfurling out of nowhere, pooling out over the grass. Ropes snaked across, attached themselves to the silk as the tumblers backflipped, cartwheeled, catapulted and caught. Pegs were struck into the earth, ropes knotted, cords tightened. The fabric stretched and bellied. Before any of us had quite worked out what was going on, the structure had gathered itself, heaved up, and locked joints. A vast red circular tent. Right there in front of us. On our muddy old boring old green.

A tumbler drew back a fold of cloth, a doorway into dim red space, and the troupe cartwheeled in. The horses, caravans, camel, elephant, doves and the sealed crate all wheeled about, half-circle, and followed the tumblers inside. The flap dropped back.

Silence.

We crept out onto the green; Miss Woodend, the Clay
twins, the Metcalfe boys, including the musty-smelling one with the damp shorts, and me. We held our breath. Old Aggie Newhouse, stick-supported, came shuffling over from her doorway. Uncle George from the Public, Mr. Metcalfe from the stores. They clustered together, began to talk.

Wetfoot dryfoot, I circumnavigated the tent.

Not a peep. Not a whinny, not a coo or whistle or trumpet or harrumph.

I ran my fingers over the silky, thick material. I couldn't find the join.

No more school that day, that was clear. Miss Woodend was in no mood for it. Her hand had settled on Mr. Metcalfe's arm; she was leaning up against his apron for support.

“Just like the last time,” she breathed.

“Always trouble.”

“Yes,” she murmured.

“Must be ten years.”

“Twelve.”

She looked round at me and saw that I was listening:

“You. You filthy little beast. Earwigging.” She reached into her pocket, fingers searching for a stump of chalk.

I turned tail and ran. A scrap of chalk sang past my ear.

“You can stick your chalk up your arse,” I shouted back at her.

I scrambled up a wall, hoisted myself over, dropped down on the other side. The Robinsons' goats turned their heads and stared. I crouched there, breathing, listening, smelling the piss on my foot. Something very strange was happening, I realized. Something utterly unheard of. She had never missed before.

I didn't go home that day. I couldn't go back to the green in case Miss Woodend saw me, but I couldn't quite let the circus out of my sight. I kept the red glow of the big top always in the corner of my eye, waiting for something to happen. Nothing happened.

Wading waist-deep in grass through nearby fields, I thought in vast distances, pictured muscled tracts of sand, thick ceaseless canopies of leaves, gentle shambling creatures. I hitched myself up onto an underhedge bank, chewed on hawthorn leaves and wood sorrel, found a few wild strawberries. The sun was warm and I began to feel tired. I closed my eyes for just a moment, and the red was the red of rippling silk, and the sweet breathy noise in my ear was my own companionable sand-coloured creature and not, of course, a couple of nosy heifers snuffing at me through the hedge.

When I woke, it was dark and I was cold, and there was something happening on the green.

For one thing, it wasn't dark down there anymore. A reddish golden glow lit up the sky like on bonfire night. A trumpeting, barrelling, swaggering tune, quite unlike the sounds I'd heard earlier, was bowling out like pace eggs through the night. I didn't stop to notice this, of course: I was up and in an instant blundering through the long (and now wet) grass, socks slumped around my ankles, knees bare and arms goosepimpling. I felt a little unsteady on my feet, a little feverish, but it didn't seem important at the time. I clambered up the wall, hitched myself up onto the capstone.

On the green, the tent glowed; it throbbed. I scrambled down the wall and ran across the grass towards it. I breathed in perfumed air, placed my hands on the fabric. It was warm.
I dug my fingers in to grab a handful, to hitch it up and slip under, but the stuff was thick, resistant. As I held it in my hands, it seemed to pulse. I let go, stepped back. I watched the creases from my grip melt away, as if it were skin I had pinched, not cloth. I watched the redness swell, retreat, swell, retreat.

I felt warmer now, almost hot. It seemed as if the tent's glow had wrapped itself around me. I reached out again and touched it. Fingertips brushing the warm softness, I drifted round the belly of the tent.

Into what seemed to be a riot. A jostling crowd, loud voices, coloured light cascading over faces. Mechanical music was jangling out from everywhere. Someone had looped back folds of the red fabric, and rosy light and sawdust spilled out through the entrance. I tried to push my way through the crowd towards it: rough clothing scraped against me, my stomach heaved with the reek of tobacco, dung and damp. Boots, thick and muddied, scuffed my shins and crushed my toes. I was pressed between corduroy and tweed, between an old arse and a young crotch. Dizzied and sick, I stumbled.

And was caught. And not just caught. Caught, lifted, held aloft. Blurred and nauseous, I saw that it was the Reverend Carr holding me up. His parboiled face went blue then green then yellow in the coloured lights. My stomach churned. I couldn't speak.

“Malin Reed,” he said. “I might have known.”

He hoisted me higher, dumped me down beyond the margin of the crowd.

“When all good children have been in bed for hours.”

Scarlet-purple-blue-green. The music shook and slurred. His features shifted, seemed to melt.

“I don't know what your grandmother ever did to deserve
you. You're nothing but a nuisance and a bother to her,” he said. “Now go home.”

His hand was pressing on my shoulder, trying to steer me out of the coloured lights towards the darkness of the village street.

“Go on, get off home, before you get into worse trouble.”

I looked up at him, at his rainbowing skin, and he looked down at me for a moment as I stood sandal-deep in the mud, feverish, with sick now rising in my throat. A keen sense of injustice was rising with it. I wasn't going to be kept out of this so easily. I lifted his hand from off my shoulder, raised it to my mouth, and bit.

“Why you little—” he jerked his hand away, cradled it to his chest.

I turned and ran, pushing my way through the crowd, shoving past legs and skirts and backsides without looking up. Someone cuffed me round the head. My ear stung with the blow. I kept on running, shot out from the crowd and into the dark beyond. Crouched down on the grass, I tried to listen for footsteps, for someone coming after me, but all I could hear was my own breath, my heart pounding in my chest, and the music from the tent, distorting, stretching, reeling in my head. I leaned over, on all fours. I puked like a dog.

When I'd sicked up the last of the hawthorn, sorrel and wild strawberries, wiped my mouth and straightened up, the music had stopped and the rainbow lights had gone. A shaft of golden light streamed through the entrance to the tent. Sick-streaked and blinking, I staggered towards it. The earth was trodden into mire and there was a shiver in the wind. The last villager, his shoulders bullish in a Sunday coat, was
pushing through the opening. Looking past him, I glimpsed a golden circle, a haze of faces, and a man in a red jacket who stood with his arm raised, a top hat in his hand:

Ladies and Gentlemen!

And the cloth dropped back. I rushed forward and tugged at it. It wouldn't budge. Alone, in the dark, on the trodden turf of the green, I opened my mouth again. I howled at the sky.

I didn't stay like that for long. I was pretty well used to not being wanted. And despite the fact that my skull now seemed to be squeezing my brain like a sponge, and my skin was rough as cows' tongues in the cold, and there was bile in my mouth, I wouldn't consider myself defeated. There was no way I was going home. I put my ear to the side of the tent. Voices came muted, words undifferentiated. All I could hear were inflections. I caught the polished rhythms of annunciation, soft rumblings of excitement, the bullet shots of command and confirmation. I was boiling with frustration. I was outraged. Because, let's face it, even first-cousin-marriages for four generations hadn't produced, in that place, something quite as unusual as me. Sure, there were six-toed feet, webbed fingers and tucked-away tails enough among the audience—it's a small village, you can't help knowing that kind of thing—but whatever the inherited distinction, none, I felt, matched me for sheer difference. Birthdayless, born to a fishwoman and a ferryman, I was, I always had been, different. That fact had been made abundantly clear to me every day of my short life. I was a freak.
I
was a zoological oddity. If I belonged anywhere at all, it was inside that tent. I had to find my way in.

In the darkness round the back, an untidy village had sprung up. Caravans and wagons described a street, courtyards, alleyways. Embers glowed inside circled rocks. A red pinprick picked out a cigarette: someone smoking on the steps of their caravan. If I wasn't careful I would be out on my ear before I'd even got in. I edged over to the nearest conveyance, ducked down underneath it, shuffled backwards into the dark. So this was their world. Pack-up-able, wheeled, off-in-a-minute. For them, home could be anywhere; home was, perhaps, in the space between places, in the journey itself.

A roar of applause and I jumped, hit my head on the underside of the caravan floor. A sudden corridor of light streamed past my nose and half-a-dozen pairs of silky legs flashed by, bringing with them warm scents of overworn footwear and perfume. Counter-current came a torrent of yellow longjohns. From the tent, another happy roar as the tumblers cartwheeled out across the ring. Close by, young female voices, a giggle, then feet on wooden steps and a door slammed. Overhead, the boards creaked and shifted. I caught my breath. They were just above me. Someone lit a lamp and light slipped through the gaps between the boards, blinked out here and there as they moved around. Peeling off stockings, loosening laces, smoothing out hair. I'd just turned my head and was looking for a gap or knothole that I could look through, when I heard the music. Not the swaggering come-and-get-it barrel-organ stuff, but the earlier sound, the dark sweet music that was not quite a tune, but which made me think of the way in springtime the rocks on the riverbed look golden through the peaty water. I turned, crawled towards it underneath the caravan. I scraped my toes on something sharp, dragged my leg over a thistle, put my palm in what could only be goat shit. On the far side, I peered out between the cartwheel's wooden spokes
into stark moonlight and shadows. By now, my head was singing in sympathy, my jaw was clamped tight, my cheeks were burning hot.

Wordless or filled with unknown words, the song spun loops out into air like spiders' webs, like the travelling-lines that sweep across your face in autumn, invisible till sun-caught. Crouched underneath the caravan, I looked up, looked round.