The Mermaid's Child (29 page)

We came across little settlements, usually just a few low cottages built of logs, a church, a barn. Too cold to perform outdoors, too deep in snow, we'd sling wires and trapezes from the rafters of the barn. Marguerite would begin with a show of strength. She'd lift a goat, its yellow eyes rolling wildly, above her head. Knees buckling, she'd grip one of our horses underneath her belly, lift her four hooves from off the ground. Puffing and blowing, she'd challenge the village men to do the same. They were usually laughing too much to even try.

I'd walk the high wire; Andre and Bill would fly on the trapezes. I did the fancy stuff now, no bother: cartwheels, balances, dance steps, falls. I'd learned quickly. At the end of the show I would just step off the wire into thin air. Andre would catch me as he flew past, his hands strong and safe around my wrists; as we swung across the space he'd release one hand and I would leap to catch a rope, slide down. The gasp the audience gave every time I stepped off into the empty space seemed to be no more than the lurch I felt inside me rendered audible, the moment's unacknowledged fear. And when Andre and Bill slid to the ground after me, and Marguerite joined us to take our bow, the applause and laughter made me glow hot and confused. I would glance along our line, at Marguerite and Andre and Bill. It felt right to be there with them. At the time, it felt completely right. But everything always changes.

We were paid mostly in produce; cheeses, dried meats, the cherry liqueur peculiar to the region; but when we made a little money, Marguerite would count my share into my palm as she did with Bill and Andre. Some copper, some silver. It made me feel at once proud and uneasy. I kept the coins in my pocket, wrapped up in a handkerchief, with the compass Cunningham had given me.

One of these nights, after a performance, we were sitting in Marguerite's caravan, the three of them sharing a bottle of the local drink. I wasn't keen on the stuff: the smell of it made my sickness worse. I'd been drinking tea instead, cup after cup of sour tea, and now it was apparent that I needed, quite urgently, to piss. I pulled on my boots and jacket, went outside. Cold, a clear sky, moonlight. I tucked my hands into my armpits and slipped round the side of the caravan, into shadow. I was just unbuttoning my britches when there was a flurry of movement, a scream, and someone, a woman, dashed past me, skirts flapping. A man was following fast behind.

It was none of my business, I thought. It wouldn't be the first time someone got hurt. And no one had ever stood up for me when I'd been in trouble. Not until I'd met Marguerite. I stood there a moment, hands on my flies. Then I turned and ran after them.

They were heading away from the village, out across open ground, the woman's shape clear against the moonlit blue of the snow, her skirts tangling round her legs as she ran, and it occurred to me how stupid it was of her to run away from the settlement, from any chance of help. The man's dark bulk moved between us, sometimes off to one side, sometimes obscuring her entirely. I stumbled through the dark scars left by their feet, my lungs already sore. I found myself wondering what I would do when I caught up with them, wished I'd thought of calling Marguerite, Bill and Andre before I'd set off. Alone, I wasn't that much of a threat.

The woman stopped. She turned back to face the man, and I opened my mouth to call out to her, to tell her I was coming, but I couldn't catch my breath. She dodged left, and he mirrored the movement. She feinted right. The man moved in front of her, screening her from sight, and I stumbled on
towards them. And then she laughed. No mistaking it: she laughed, rich and soft and real, stopping me dead in my tracks. I watched as the man crouched, moved closer to her. I watched as he made a sudden lunge and caught her, and I heard her laugh again. A slow blush spread across my face. They wouldn't have seen me, I told myself as I turned and walked away. They were far too preoccupied to notice I was there.

It would be quicker to turn back towards the village and walk down the street to our camp than to go back the way I'd come. The street was cleared of snow and wood-cobbled; much easier going than the open ground. I ploughed back towards the nearest house, trying to ignore the sounds coming from behind me: giggles, rustling, the creak of snow compressing under weight. I passed a gable wall in shadow; low voices were coming from beneath the overhanging eaves. Male voices. In the darkness I caught the outline of two close-clipped heads, the shape of two entangled bodies. I lengthened my stride, came out onto the village street. Up against a woodpile, soutane hooked up around his thighs, I could have sworn I saw the priest, but I didn't look long enough to see who he was with.

It was quiet when I got back to the camp, the light low from our curtained window. Everyone had gone to bed. I went round the side of the caravan, into the shadow, and at last undid my britches. I closed my eyes, sighed, and pissed onto the snow.

Inside, Marguerite was a hump beneath the covers.

“You'll never guess,” I said, pulling off my boots, “what's going on out there.”

“At it like rabbits, are they?”

I paused, jacket half off. She rolled over, looked up at me.

“Are you frozen?”

I looked at her a moment. The soft loose skin of her jowls gave her a vaguely canine air. “How did you know?” I asked.

She shrugged.

“They just get that way sometimes. Just go a wee bit wild. It's as if, when we're around, it somehow turns their whole world on its head.”

She rolled back over on her side, bringing the blankets up to her ear, and was still speaking, but I could no longer hear what she was saying. I was caught up in a memory that had risen, sudden and stark to the surface of my mind, like a corpse. Miss Woodend had leaned up against Mr. Metcalfe, was blushing beneath her walnut skin.
Just like the last time
, she'd said.
Always trouble
. And then,
Must be ten years. Twelve
.

Ten years, twelve. How old would I have been?

It had come up on me so slowly that at first I'd barely noticed, but there was something different in me; I couldn't ignore it any longer. There was the sickness, of course, I was almost used to that. But now there was also something else. It didn't feel like a change in my constitution, not a new weakness or the attainment of some new strength. It was just a slight adjustment, a shift: my centre of gravity seemed to have moved forward and down. It was just because I'd become more aware of such things, I told myself. Practice and performances on the highwire had made me more conscious of my body and my balance. It didn't seem particularly important: I didn't mention it to anyone.

We travelled on, out of the mountains. The valleys were terraced with vines, wintry and bare. Men walked beside their donkeys in dark jackets and broad-brimmed hats, breath
clouding the air. We came upon a town, small, tight-buttoned and unwelcoming, and when we trooped through the narrow cobbled streets, cartwheeling and tumbling, the dog capering on hind legs, Delilah loping along beside us, shutters were slapped tight over windows and children scooped in off doorsteps. Our audience that night was half-a-dozen men, all of them drunk, and a young clergyman who scowled at us from the shadows and refused to pay his fee. Up aloft, on the highwire, my head went into a sudden spin, and for a moment I was lost, my balance gone, swaying from side to side thirty feet above the hard ground. The men gave out a drunken hoot, and I caught my balance, flick-flacked back to the wire's end.

“Neat trick,” Andre said to me later when he caught my wrists. Hanging upside down, his face was puffy, the creases all falling the wrong way. “I almost fell for it myself.” He smiled at me, but from where I was it looked more like a frown.

“So did I,” I said, and smiled back at him.

Afterwards, in the fire's glow, I sat slumped forward, a hand pressed into the small of my back: it was aching, it always seemed to be aching now. When the bottle was passed around it seemed to rest even longer with Bill than usual. He didn't speak a word, wouldn't even look at me. When the bottle came my way, I passed it on as quickly as possible: the slightest smell of it made my stomach heave.

As I lay down beside Marguerite that night, I could feel the vertebrae creak and shift in my back, feel the ache begin to fade.

“It's not my fault the crowd was shite,” I said into the dark.

“No,” said Marguerite, already half asleep.

“So what's the problem then?”

She rolled her head round to look round at me. I felt her breath on my cheek.

“Mnh?”

“What've I done to annoy Bill this time?”

She sighed. “It's always the same thing with him,” she said. “Times are hard, we're not making any money, and he's worried that with another mouth to feed—and then when we get to the coast, there's the passage to pay—”

“What do you mean another mouth to feed?” I hitched myself up onto an elbow, looked round at her in the darkness. “Haven't I proved myself? Don't I pay my way?”

“It's not you I mean, honey,” she said, and rolled her head away again. “You're extraordinary, you know that; you're a natural. And you know I'm proud of you.”

I hadn't. I opened my mouth, closed it again without speaking.

“But you can't keep on going forever,” she said.

She'd noticed. That headspin on the highwire, the aches, the nausea: she'd realized I was ill.

“I'm fine,” I said. “Honestly, I'll be fine. I'm just a bit under the weather, that's all; I'll soon be back on form. And I promise you I won't slack off. You can tell him that. I'll be fine.”

“Of course you'll be fine,” she said, reaching out to turn down the lamp. “But you're going to have to slack off whether you like it or not. You can't keep on taking those risks. Not now there's the baby to think of.”

Marguerite had fallen asleep. I could see her in the moonlight. Her lips were parted, her breath whistling slightly through her teeth. I could not sleep.

He had lain there on the tumbled blankets of his camp bed, his eyes wet and wide. I'd stroked the hair back off his forehead, kissed him, and tried not to laugh.

“I'm sorry—” he'd said. I'd felt a kind of tenderness for him; I'd held a gun to his head. Then I'd walked away into the desert and left him behind. That was when it had begun to tick, this clock inside my belly, though I hadn't realized what the ticking was, till now.

I was not the kind of person who had babies. It was not the kind of thing that happened to me. I placed a hand on my belly, but felt nothing but the muscled curve of my own flesh. A little distended, though. I had to admit it. I thought of the medical books I'd come across in Jebb's library, the difficult script of black scimitars and slashes, and the coloured ink drawings of people with their skins off, the intimacy of nerve and muscle on display. I remembered one of them in which a child was curled up inside the mother's body, his hands grasped around his knees, looking out with old man's eyes. It made me shiver.

“Marguerite,” I whispered. She rolled her lips together, muttered something, but did not wake.

I drew back the covers, slid myself down to the end of the bed. I pulled on my clothes. The shirt that Jebb had given me, patched and laundered by Marguerite, its stain now faded to faint rust. Cunningham's jacket, far too big, and his second best hat. A pair of britches which might have once been Andre's or Bill's. My clutch of coins and compass heavy in a pocket. I opened the half-door, went down the steps, then sat on the middle tread and watched for a moment the way my toes fanned out across the bottom one. Then I pulled on the socks that Marguerite had knitted for me, laced up the boots that she had given me. I reached into my pocket, drew out
the compass, watched the finger quiver, settle towards north. There was only one route left open to me.

I took a half-burned stick from the sleeping fire, and in the dirt, at the bottom of Marguerite's caravan steps, I wrote, “Goodbye,” and “Thank you.” And then I walked away.

At the time, it was the hardest thing I'd ever done. I didn't even know if she could read.

SIXTEEN
 

It was a cold night; the moon set early, and soon the darkness was complete. I couldn't see the road, could only feel the cartwheel ruts beneath my feet. A bramble brushed my cheek and made me jump, leaving behind a faint hot trail on the skin. Something small rustled in the hedgerow. Far off, I heard a fox bark.

Dawn broke, cold and blue, with birdsong. Beside me sparrows fluttered through the hedge, scuffling over the last of the hips and haws. The broad fields were rimed with frost. I walked on through the half-light hours, my arms wrapped around myself to keep in the warmth. When it became fully light I kept off the road and walked parallel to it, behind the screen of the hedge, scrambling over field-boundaries and across ditches, wading through heavy ploughed clay or stepping over the dried stalks of last year's crops. It wasn't that I expected them to come looking for me, but we were all heading
the same way down the same road, and sooner or later they would catch up with me.