The Illustrated Child

by Polly Crosby

  The early morning bus was empty but for an old woman sitting near the front. As I stepped on, my stomach prickled with nerves. I shot a last glance back at Braër, half hoping Dad would see me getting on and come running, yelling at me to get off.

  As I went past the old woman, she pulled her handbag closer to her, eyeing me suspiciously. I sat down near the back, my chest tight, and pulled out the flyer for the circus, trying to focus on what I was going to do. The picture on it was a mixture of red and gold, striped and colourful as a stick of rock. The circus was due to perform in Terringstead. I knew the name: there was a poster pasted onto a telephone pole near my house advertising a car boot sale there. I looked out of the window, watching the hedges and fields rush by.

  The pale morning light was beginning to trickle into the bus as we pulled up by a bank of grass in the middle of nowhere. I got up unsteadily and made my way to the front, the woman with the handbag resolutely ignoring me now.

  ‘Is this Terringstead?’ I said to the bus driver.

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Is the circus here?’

  ‘Lord knows, dear. Why, you running away to join it?’

  I ignored him and got off the bus. What was I doing here? Maybe I should join the circus. What was the point of going home now? And then I thought of Dad, wasting away alone, and guilt surged through me.

  The bus pulled away, leaving me in the deserted lane. I stood on the little square of grass between a cross section of country roads, a war memorial in the middle. Past the church to the west was a hill, rising up like an island. I thought I could see the red-and-white stripes of a tent on the very top. It was a long way away. I pulled my rucksack onto my back and began to walk.

  The field at the bottom of the hill was empty of cars. No tyres had yet spoilt the smooth green of the grass. As I reached the brow of the hill a village of caravans came into view behind the circus tent. They loomed closer as I walked the circumference of the tent’s huge red-and-white walls.

  The ground here was churned up and muddy. I inhaled an animal smell from somewhere nearby and turned my head, trying to locate its source. Here and there piles of horse manure lay amidst the mud, clouds of yellow flies sitting like lazy kings on the plump brown balls.

  It was eerily quiet all around. A light shone from the window of the nearest caravan. I knocked on the door, gently at first, and then louder when nobody came.

  The occupant took a long time to get to the door, I could hear them stomping heavily across the floor. The door swung open. A huge man with a bull neck stood there, looking down, his eyes bloodshot and bleary.

  ‘Yes?’ he said.

  ‘I’m… I’m looking for the lady who rides the horses. I think she might be called Lidiya? She’s foreign, she’s…’ I came to a stop, realising I had hardly anything to go on. The last time I’d been to this circus was six years ago, if it even was this circus. I looked around me, a swooping sensation in my stomach, and I felt suddenly foolish: my memories of that night were almost nothing, all I was basing this search on was Dad’s books. What if this wasn’t the right circus? I cleared my throat and began again. The man was looking at me with an amused expression.

  ‘She’s very pretty. Lots of sequins. She’s got pink feathers in her hair. Like this one.’ I swung my rucksack round and pulled the feather out to show the man. He squeezed his eyes so that they looked like little holes in his face.

  ‘This way,’ he grunted, and I let out a sigh of relief.

  He stifled a yawn as he stepped down onto the grass, swearing as the dew coated his bare feet. ‘It’s too early for this,’ he said. ‘What do you want with Lidiya anyway? Another treasure hunter, I s’pose. She won’t like you asking for her autograph this early in the morning, I promise ya. You can have mine though if you want it.’ He grinned lasciviously as we wound our way through the caravans. When I didn’t answer, he said, ‘Quiet, ain’t ya? You haven’t come to join the circus, have you? We could call you the Mysterious Mute.’ He laughed at his own joke.

  ‘My dad knew her, a few years ago,’ I said instead.

  ‘Lots of people’s dads know Lidiya, she’s that kind of lady.’ He sniggered.

  We had arrived at a large, old caravan. It was much prettier than his, with a great curved roof and a floral chrome pattern round the windows. It felt familiar, but then, there was a caravan just like this in Romilly and the Circus. How often had Dad been here, I wondered?

  The man knocked on the door, surprisingly lightly for someone with such huge hands, and my stomach churned unpleasantly.

  ‘Someone to see ya, Lidiya,’ he called.

  The door opened quickly, and a waft of scented air billowed out, momentarily stunning the man so that he blinked and walked off without another word. The woman standing in the doorway looked familiar. She was wearing a thin oriental silk robe, wrapped tight around her body. Her make-up was heavy and smudged in the pale morning light, but beneath it, her skin was white as if she were looking at a ghost.

  ‘Romilly Kemp,’ she said, beckoning me in without smiling.

  I sat down nervously at a small table attached to the floor. Lidiya sat opposite me. She poured me a cup of tea from a teapot. The scented steam billowed from the spout, making me drowsy. In a corner of the caravan a wardrobe stood open, and I glimpsed a fragment of pink sequined fabric. Its sparkle threw out a spool of memory, connecting me to my day at the circus with Dad, and I turned to her again, remembering.

  She had the same slim face and high cheekbones, but the skin was somehow thinner and the bones so much more prominent. Without her headdress, she looked small, like a child or an old, old woman.

  ‘How did you know it was me, at the door just now?’ I asked.

  ‘I have been waiting for you,’ she said with a shrug, the hint of an accent collecting in her throat along with the smoke from a thousand cigarettes. ‘You still look like your pictures, even now.’

  She reached for my hand on the table. It felt weird to be touching a stranger, but I kept it there, trying to be polite. We sat in the quiet caravan and looked at our hands joined together, mine with bitten nails and freckles, hers long-fingered and stained with nicotine.

  ‘So, Romilly Kemp, why are you here?’

  I wanted to explain about the pink feather appearing in my wooden box, about my hunch that the circus – that Lidiya – was important somehow, but I didn’t know where to begin, or if it made any sense at all.

  ‘I don’t know exactly,’ I said. ‘In every book there’s something to do with the circus. I remember Dad was painting pictures of you way before he made the circus book. I feel like everyone in the world has tried searching for Dad’s treasure except me, and now I want to have a turn. I know he’ll never tell me the truth, and you were the only person I could think of who might be able to help me.’

  ‘You are determined, like your papa,’ she said, ‘you will find it, Romilly, I am sure.’

  ‘I used to dream of being famous, like you,’ I said shyly. ‘When Dad started writing the books, he asked me if I wanted to be famous, and I thought of you in the ring in your sparkling costume, and everyone watching you. I didn’t really know what fame meant back then. What it can do. I didn’t believe you were real when I met you.’ I trailed off, thinking back to all those years ago, her glittering silhouette in the dark after the performance, long eyelashes blinking luxuriously like the wings of a rare insect.

  She dropped my hand and swept her hair from her face. I noticed bluish hollows under her eyes, picked out by the glare of the caravan’s overhead light.

  ‘Oh, I am real all right,’ she said, ‘but you were never like me, dorogaya moya. You had a father who loved you. And besides, my small fame is incomparable to yours.’

  ‘Dad says he and I followed the circus for a while, when I was about four.’

  ‘That is correct, but you came to see us first when you were two or three. All of you.’

  ‘All of us? Mum too?’

  Something about he
r smile changed. It dropped from the edges of her mouth. ‘The whole family,’ she said, sipping her tea thoughtfully. When she lowered her cup, her smile was back in place, flickering in the steam from her cup.

  ‘You were young, you probably do not remember. And then you came many times, just you and your papa. You followed us round the country – you spent many evenings in this caravan.’

  I looked around the small space, feeling through my memories, trying to locate the caravan in the tangle of past that I had long forgotten. Lidiya gazed out of the window. Her face had a hard prettiness about it. I watched her forearm flexing as she placed the cup on the table, the muscle born of years of manual work.

  ‘My dad’s ill,’ I said, watching her expression, the lack of surprise on her face confirming what I suspected: she already knew.

  ‘I am sorry.’

  ‘He’s… not himself very often anymore. Sometimes he thinks I’m you.’

  Lidiya didn’t answer straight away. She pulled a pack of cigarettes from a pocket in her silk gown and offered me one. I shook my head. She put one to her lips.

  ‘He is a good man, your Tobias,’ she said at last, lighting the cigarette and inhaling, gazing out at the colourful bulbs on strings that hung between the caravans. ‘What will you do?’ she said, pulling her eyes away.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You should not look after him on your own. Where is your mother?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Surely you cannot be expected to care for someone at your age? How old are you, fifteen, sixteen?’

  ‘I’m fifteen.’

  ‘The same age as I was when I came to this country.’

  ‘Were you alone?’

  Lidiya nodded. ‘I thought I had left all the bad men behind in Russia, but there are a few in this country too, it turns out. Be careful, Romilly.’

  ‘But you’re safe now,’ I said.

  She shrugged her shoulders imperceptibly. ‘This life is probably better than the one I left behind, so I don’t complain.’ She exhaled in a sigh and gazed at me through the smoke. ‘You are very lucky: your father loves you very much. Besides,’ she picked a bit of tobacco from her teeth, ‘everything happens for a reason: without torture, no science.’

  Her words flowed over me with the smoke, their sound like poetry or song. There was a knock on the caravan’s door, an insistent tapping

  ‘It is like Kings Cross station round here this morning,’ Lidiya said irritably, getting up and opening the door.

  A sheepish-looking middle-aged couple stood outside. The woman was wearing a thick fleece with a picture of a wolf on the front.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘It’s her, Don!’ the woman said, nudging the man next to her, her voice loud in the hush outside. ‘It’s you, isn’t it? You’re the circus lady.’

  ‘O’ course it’s her,’ the man said, smiling up at Lidiya and throwing out his hand. ‘Don and Patty Mason of Missouri, USA. Nice to meet you.’

  The couple hadn’t seen me yet, dazzled as they were by Lidiya in her silk robe. I quickly slipped through a door into the bedroom. From here I could still hear Patty’s loud voice booming through the caravan.

  ‘I told Don, it must be the right circus. We’re members of the Kemp Treasure Hunters US division. We’ve set up a website on the World Wide Web and everything! Don here is a whizz with technology. But I bet you don’t even know what that is, do you dear? Why, you can’t even have a computer out here in this mobile home, can you?’

  Don began speaking now, his voice softer than his wife’s but just as enthusiastic. ‘We have a message board forum so that we can all keep abreast of any developments. I can’t wait to tell them we’ve met the circus lady.’

  I wondered how they would react if they knew Romilly Kemp was sitting metres away. I prayed Lidiya wouldn’t let on.

  ‘Would you like an autograph?’ Lidiya’s voice was resigned.

  ‘Oh yes please!’ I could hear the delight in Patty’s voice. Don seemed so starstruck he had stopped talking.

  There was a pause while Lidiya signed something, and then Patty spoke again.

  ‘It’s real nice to speak with you today. Thank you for being so accommodating.’

  ‘It is my pleasure.’

  I heard the door click shut, and I came out of the bedroom and slipped into a seat at the table, sitting low to avoid the windows. Lidiya sat down, laughing quietly through her nose.

  ‘I am plagued by treasure hunters,’ she said, ‘always, people asking for autographs, trying to break into my sleeping car to find the gold. What gold, I ask you? Your father has no idea of the effects his books have had on the lives of others.’ She looked out of the window, at the sky that had lightened so much in the time I had been there. ‘They are harmless, mostly, the treasure-hunting people, but they are tiresome.’

  ‘Do you know anything about the treasure hunt?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘You must know something.’ I heard the desperation in my voice, but I was unable to stop. ‘You knew my dad so well. Did he tell you anything? Anything at all? However insignificant?’

  ‘All I know is that this treasure hunt does not contain gold or jewels. It is not something that just anyone can solve. Your papa said he was going to give you the clues, and when you have them all, you will be able to solve it.’

  With mounting excitement, I reached for my rucksack and pulled the pink feather from the buckle.

  ‘Do you mean this?’ I said, handing her the feather. ‘Is this one of the clues?’

  Lidiya’s eyes lit up at the sight of it. She took it, twisting it in her bony hands, her breath stirring its strands.

  ‘I remember this,’ she said, ‘I told you you were a pretty girl. And I was right. You have grown into a beautiful young woman.’

  I blushed and ducked my head behind my hair. Nobody had ever called me beautiful before.

  ‘Dad made me a box for my birthday. It’s mechanical – clockwork – and each year it delivers another gift. So far it’s given me a bell, and your feather.’

  ‘Then these must be the clues he was talking about. This is the start of the treasure hunt.’

  A shiver licked at the back of my neck. ‘Do you know what the other things are? The other objects he’s hidden?’

  Lidiya shook her head, ‘He told me nothing else.’

  I pushed the feather across the table. ‘Here, it’s yours.’

  ‘What? No, I…’

  ‘I think Dad would have liked you to keep it. I know how much you meant to him, and I think he meant a lot to you as well.’

  Lidiya’s cheeks flushed slightly. She took the feather, twisting it round her slim fingers. ‘If you are sure?’

  I nodded.

  Lidiya cleared her throat and stubbed out her cigarette, tucking the feather away in a pocket of her robe. For a moment I wanted to grab it back, but then it was out of sight. Abruptly, she stood, motioning for me to follow.

  We walked across the damp grass, Lidiya incongruous in wellies with her silk robe. People were stirring in their caravans. I could smell bacon frying somewhere close by.

  ‘What are your plans now? Does your father know you are here?’

  I shook my head. ‘But I’m not going back, not yet.’

  ‘Where will you stay tonight?’

  I shrugged. I hadn’t thought that far ahead.

  ‘OK, I will help, but will you promise me something? If I let you stay tonight with us, will you go home, back to your father tomorrow?’

  Reluctantly, I nodded.

  ‘Good. You will watch the show later? For old times’ sake?’

  ‘Yes please.’

  ‘Excellent, let’s find some breakfast. Are you hungry?’

  Twenty-Five

  As the day grew dark, we sat again in Lidiya’s caravan. The customers had left, satisfied with their brief glimpse into the circus’ world. Outside the caravan, toffee apple sticks and sweet wrappers attempte
d acrobatics in the mounting breeze.

  Lidiya was coaxing an old metal urn into life. It creaked as it began to boil. Circus folk came and went, stopping briefly to chat in the doorway. A woman dressed head to foot in bells leant in to shake my hand.

  ‘They all know you from your books,’ Lidiya said, pouring a splash of tea into two glass cups. ‘You made this circus very famous for a while. Even now we still get many fans: you saw how many autographs I gave after the performance.’

  The urn was making a quiet whooshing noise, rather like a boiling kettle with too little water in. Lidiya ignored it.

  ‘Sometimes people snatch feathers from my headdress; from my horse’s headdress even. My horse, he is head-shy now. He hates the ring. And yet, if I get another horse, the same thing will happen. It has been a blessing and a curse, this fame. I cannot imagine what it has done to you. At least I am able to move on every few days. You are trapped in that house.’

  The tea’s smell, acrid and strong, surged into my nostrils. I thought about Braër. Was I trapped? It felt safe, and yet sometimes I felt so isolated, with the world going on, untouchable outside my window. This was my first real taste of a treasure hunt. If I had made the connection with the circus sooner, I thought crossly, I might have gone looking earlier. Why did all of Dad’s clues have to be so cryptic? I lifted the cup to my lips, my thoughts twisting and knotting.

  ‘Not yet,’ Lidiya said, putting her hand out and laughing softly. She took the cup from my hands and placed it under the urn’s spout.

  ‘This thing takes time.’ She filled the cup to the brim with boiling water. Droplets of it splashed onto my hand, little pinpricks of pain. Noticing, she said, ‘And waiting is painful too, no?’ She pushed the cup to me, repeating the process with her own.

  The urn wheezed again as the boiling water poured from the tap, little clouds of steam puffing from the edge of its lid. I found I couldn’t stop looking at it.

  ‘Lidiya,’ I said, ‘there’s an urn like this in Romilly and the Picnic.’

  ‘Yes, it is my samovar in the picture.’ She reached up and pulled the book down from a shelf above us, flicking through until she found the page. ‘Here,’ she said, sliding it across to me.