by John Marsden
To become their funeral bier.
And their bodies lay fatally shattered
On the rocks at the foot of the fall.
But the girl so true and so faithful,
She was not broken at all.
No, the girl so true and so faithful,
She was not broken at all.
Demy finished the song with a sad chord and sat looking into the fire, his head bowed. Since the mention of Random and the name Sunday Argus had been frozen with fear and horror. But Mayon turned to him and said, ‘You’re from Random aren’t you? Does the story ring a bell with you?’ Then he saw from the tears on Argus’ face that it did indeed.
‘No-one knows,’ said Argus, his voice breaking with long-suppressed sobs, ‘no-one knows if that’s the way it really happened. But we think that’s probably right.’ He wiped his face and stood up. ‘How did you come to hear of her?’ he asked Demy.
‘I was in the valley at the time’ the man answered, embarrassed at the grief he had caused the boy. ‘Everyone was talking about it. The people were devastated. She seemed to be such a loved child. I wrote the song a few weeks later, after I’d moved on to other parts. I was a wandering balladeer at the time, travelling on my own.’
‘Everyone did love her,’ Argus sobbed, tears running down his face again. ‘When you’re a kid, you don’t think that you love your sister exactly, but you know that you care about her and you’d rather die yourself than have any harm come to her. But it’s not enough to want to save someone. Now I know I love her but I can’t tell her that, and I miss her. I miss her all the time.’ He stumbled away into the darkness, out into the empty expanse of the common, but Mayon came after him and led him gently to a rock where they could both sit. ‘I’m sorry about crying back there,’ the boy said, ‘in front of everyone.’
‘Tears are part of the healing,’ Mayon answered. ‘They’re one of the ways your soul heals itself after a wound. Just like when you’re hot your body sweats, to bring your temperature down.’
‘But I still don’t understand why people have to die,’ Argus said. ‘I guess that’s one of the things I’m meant to have worked out before I go home again, but some of the questions just seem too hard sometimes.’
‘Nothing dies,’ Mayon answered him. ‘There is no death. Just change. Nature understands that. It’s only Man who doesn’t. Death is an invention of Man. Your sister’s body is metamorphosing back into the rich earth in which she is buried. Her atoms are rearranging into new and wonderful patterns. A flower gets eaten by an insect; it changes into part of the body of that insect. The insect is eaten by a trout; it becomes part of that trout. The trout gets old and stops breathing; its poor body disintegrates and gets washed away until it reintegrates with the soil and humus, along the fertile river flats. And from that soil grows a flower once more. That’s what happens to our physical bodies in the process called death.
Your sister was more than just a body. A head and a trunk and four limbs. Do you think that’s all you are? No. That’s not you. There’s much more to you. Inside that arrangement of flesh and bones there’s an abstract, indefinable something that is the real you and is a collage of your past and present, all the experiences and feelings and thoughts that you’ve ever had. And when the time comes for that essential you to leave its physical body, then away it goes, on fresh adventures, into a state of being that we can be sure will provide us with more new and wonderful experiences, even if we can be sure of nothing else about it.’
The man and the boy were silent, looking out into the mysterious darkness. ‘I can never understand why people get buried in those big solid coffins,’ Mayon said at last. ‘It just interferes with the process of change. Makes it hard for the physical body to move on to its next stage.’ The two stood and walked slowly back to the bonfire, whose flames had now become coals and would soon be ashes.
‘I’m glad Demy wrote the song,’ Argus said. ‘It’s nice to know she’s remembered like that.’ Presently they retired to the caravan, for the healing process called sleep. Argus had not shared a bed with anyone since, as a little boy afraid of storms, he had snuggled in with his sister, but this night he climbed in under Mayon’s eiderdown and, comforted by the gentle storyteller’s warmth, he spent the night at peace.
Chapter Seven
Two days later, knowing that the show was about to pack its tents and vans and move to a new town, Argus resolved to explore Ifeka while he still had a chance. For all the time he had spent there he had only seen the outer suburbs. He received permission from Jud to take a day off and go into the centre of town.
He went with a light heart and high expectations. It took him just forty minutes walking before he found himself, for the first time in his life, in busy market streets where he had to wend his way through masses of people and where it was hard to see more than a few yards ahead. Argus was excited by the pressing crowds, the smells, the constant noise, the frenetic hurry that seemed to infect the very paving stones of the roads. No-one seemed to notice anyone else; everyone was absorbed in his or her own affairs. There were a few exceptions though: a merry woman with laughing eyes helped Argus pick up some coins that he dropped as he fumbled for change; and an old woman suddenly remarked to the boy, as they stood waiting for a break in the traffic, ‘You know, I saw a daffodil growing through the cracks in the pavement here once’. Argus was too surprised to be able to think of an answer; before he could do anything more than smile politely the lady had seized her opportunity to join the throng, and was gone.
In a slightly quieter street on the edge of the main market area Argus settled himself into an aperture between two stone buildings, to watch the panorama of life in Ifeka. His main interest was the stall-holders, rather than the customers, as they, absorbed in their shopping, were a less colourful lot. The merchants seemed casually in control of the pavement. They chattered and laughed and visited each other, and enjoyed shared jokes.
As Argus watched, their personalities became more apparent. A huge man selling cheese dominated the street. Flushed and jovial, he was more involved in conversation than in business, and seemed almost to resent interruptions from customers wishing to buy. He was constantly laughing and rubbing his hands with pleasure, the gregarious centre of attention in the alley-way. Although Argus enjoyed his larger-than-life egotism, it occurred to him that the other stall-holders might dislike the man’s power, under which thin men chafed and muttered. Argus was reminded of Hammond, a young farmer from his own valley, who similarly dominated others by the sheer strength of his personality. He was popular, but resented.
The boy looked at the other traders, seeking proof of his theory about the cheese-seller. Occasionally they responded to the big man’s cannoning comments, but they turned away from him at the end of their terse responses, sometimes grinning in complicity at a neighbour. Argus was starting to feel satisfied that he was right when suddenly his theory was thrown off-balance, and he was forced to wonder if the man was not a genial buffoon instead.
A woman from an adjoining stall called out, ‘Come on Grobian, business is too slack. Get a few customers for us.’ Her good-humoured cry was echoed by others, and Grobian, after a little show of reluctance, took off his apron and came out into the middle of the lane, where he placed his hat on the ground and began a comic dance, strutting around the hat and singing:
I’m a big brown teddy bear,
Stuffed with cotton wool and air.
I’ve got eyes, left and right,
Peeping from my skin so tight.
My claws are big and sharp and strong,
They take me where I don’t belong.
If you want a new bear rug
I’ll give you a big BEAR HUG.
On the last two words Grobian rushed at a woman in the crowd. As she shrieked and laughed he picked her up in a huge embrace. Then, putting her down and taking a handful of eggs from his stall, he began juggling the eggs and singing a song about cheese. Argus could only wonder at t
he many dimensions of this man and, he supposed, of all men and women. He recalled the warning in his father’s old leather book that he had read, so long ago it seemed now: the warning that nothing was simple, that all things were complex, including people.
By the end of his show Grobian had gathered quite a crowd into the street. The big man was flushed with the success and exhilaration that can only come from public performance. He lingered in the middle of the alley, talking to a few onlookers who had not strayed away again to look at the merchandise. He even ignored two customers who were waiting to buy cheese.
Argus came out of his niche, wandered down the street and turned the corner into a broader thoroughfare. Here a vendor was selling ice cream. Argus watched as people bought the cones and walked away licking them with every evidence of pleasure. Though he had never tasted this food before, the boy purchased a cone and gingerly applied his tongue to the white mound. The coldness startled him and numbed his tongue. He jerked his head back and held the ice cream at a distance, studying it with amused perplexity; then, realising that some children were giggling at him, he turned away and continued down the street, taking experimental licks as he went. Once he had become accustomed to the shock of the coldness, he decided that he liked the taste very much indeed. But he chose, with typical conservatism, to make the pleasure last as long as possible. Having eaten half the ice cream, he put the rest in his pocket to enjoy later, and tried to ignore the coldness that seeped through his clothing to the skin of his leg.
As Argus came to the next corner, a woman, walking quickly, drew level with him; then, after a slight pause, she turned left and hurried down a narrow lane. A moment later a man also overtook him and followed the route that the woman had taken. Argus instinctively sensed tension in the speed of the two walkers and in the rapidly shrinking distance between them. He followed, as the woman came to the end of the lane and hesitated at the stream of traffic passing in front of her. At that moment the man caught up and placed his hand on her shoulder. The woman started like a half-wild horse at the contact, and said something to the man that Argus could not hear. He heard the man’s rejoinder though: ‘You’re coming back’, and he understood the tone of the message.
Forgetting courtesy, he watched open-mouthed as the man grabbed at the woman’s arm and pulled her roughly. Argus thought he should intervene, but the man looked much too big and strong for him; and besides, he wondered if this was perhaps the normal way of things in the city. Then an old woman arrived huffing and creaking.
‘What are you doing, Tira?’ she said crossly to the girl. ‘Causing such a scene. You ought to be ashamed.’
‘You don’t know what he’s like,’ the younger woman answered angrily.
‘As bad as you, that’s what he’s like. You’re well suited.’ The three of them started walking back along the alley, accusations and counter-accusations flying between them. Argus watched spellbound till they were out of sight.
Just as they turned the corner and disappeared from his view the boy became aware of a trickle down his leg. He looked, and saw a white runnel of forgotten ice cream; at the same time he felt again the chilled wet patch from his pocket. Not knowing the ways of ice cream, the boy was astounded. But his attempts to remove the half-melted mess from his pocket were a disaster. He hated to throw any away, so he tried licking it off his hands, which quickly became a sticky embarrassment. And no matter how much he tried to clean out his pocket it seemed impossible — a cold Augean dip. It was not until he found a drinking-fountain, twenty minutes later, that he was able to clean himself properly and bid farewell to his first ice cream.
For the rest of the afternoon Argus roamed the streets and enjoyed the sights of the town. He saw a dog being wheeled along on a large red trolley by an old man who was apparently its owner. He saw a stall full of enormous orchids and was as staggered by their blatant beauty as he was frightened by their fierce mouths. He saw a caged bird singing a song that Argus knew was one of despair. And he saw other sights that he did not understand: a clock with numbers in the wrong sequence, a woman walking quickly along the street talking to herself, a man dressed in wedding clothes standing alone on a street corner.
As he passed one building Argus was accosted by a middle-aged woman with dark hair and a golden collar around her neck. ‘I know what you’re doing,’ she said to the boy. ‘And you’ll find part of it in here. There are a lot of answers in this house.’ She put her arm on his shoulder, in a familiar but over-intimate gesture. ‘Come on in,’ she said. ‘Have you got some money? It won’t cost much. And you’ll have a good time. Don’t you want to be a man?’
Argus instinctively shied away from her touch. ‘No, no,’ he stammered, unsure of what he was being offered but unable to trust the woman. ‘I’m in a hurry.’ He started to move away but the woman tried to detain him.
‘Oh, come on,’ she said. ‘Don’t be frightened. It’ll be the best afternoon of your life.’
When the boy kept backing away the woman lost interest in him and he was able to make good his departure. Yet he felt humiliated by the encounter: it made him feel smaller and younger than he believed himself to be.
A few blocks further on Argus came to a high wire fence which seemed to separate one part of the town from the other. Try as he might, he could find no break in this fence, and eventually he was forced to abandon his search. He stood for quite a time looking through the mesh. In the distance he could see figures moving, people going about their business in, apparently, much the same way as the people on his side. Yet none of them came close enough to the fence for him to speak to them; so the function of the barrier remained a mystery.
It was getting late in the afternoon and Argus realised it was time to start back for the fair. Suddenly he felt such a rush of weariness that he doubted whether he had the strength to walk all that way. Yet he knew he had no choice, and he forced himself to call up reserves from the bottomless pit of energy that had never failed him in the past. With a determined lifting of the head he began walking.
The stalls were closing as he passed through the market areas once more. From one that was still open he purchased some food; it appeared to be a mixture of cheese and fruit, wrapped in unleavened bread. It was delicious and he ate it hungrily. It freshened his body somehow, and after that he found the walk easier.
On the edge of the market area he recognised a House of the Past. He had not been in one since Random but he entered it with gratitude, and sat in its peace for half an hour or so, before resuming the journey to the common in the quickening dark of twilight.
The event of the day that gave him the greatest pleasure, however, was the warm welcome he received from Mayon and Jud and Demy and Parara and others who were cooking around the main fire when he returned.
‘Here’s the farm boy, back from the big city,’ gurgled Ruth, the friendly fat woman. ‘Find any cows to milk dear? Seen all the sights? Here, sit down next to me and have a bowl of soup and tell me about all the temptations you gave in to.’ Argus knew he was back among friends and his heart warmed to them. When the fair moved, the day after next, he went with them.
Chapter Eight
On the first night after the company left Ifeka they camped on a low windswept plain near a small lake. There was a strange tang in the air, a taste on the wind, that Mayon told Argus was the first sharp bite of the ocean. Argus was excited and enchanted. He sat late that night at the big fire, enjoying the cold salt ruffles of air on his face, until the only people left around the coals were Ruth, Mayon, the male-female Tiresias, the storytellers Delta and Cassim, the spidery Titius and a dark, attractive young girl named Temora, who had been employed as a stringer just before the convoy left Ifeka.
Argus was only half listening to the conversation, which was about the town of Wintle, where they were headed. With zest and good humour, Ruth was recounting the story of her last trip to Wintle, when she had apparently married a man who had deserted her a week later. Argus did not know how muc
h, if any, of the story was true, but it did not seem to matter to anyone else. ‘A good story is a good story’ was the creed of the professional storytellers of the fair, and Argus was inclined to agree with them.
‘It was a wonderful honeymoon,’ Ruth sighed romantically, ‘until we had an argument one night over who should put the cat out. Well, you know how hard it is for me to get up at nights. Every other night he put it out, but this night he dug his little heels in and nothing would shift him. Maybe I’d worn him out.’ She gave a throaty chuckle. ‘So there was nothing else for it but for me to get up and do it myself. Oh, I wasn’t half mad. So after I’d put the cat out I came back and put him out too. He kicked and struggled but I wasn’t having any. I threw him out the door, down the steps, and that was it. After I’d closed the door on him I never saw him again.’
‘Yes, I remember,’ said Cassim. ‘He was only wearing a pair of shorts. Jud took pity on him and gave him a bed for the night but he went early the next morning, taking Jud’s only good set of clothes. And that was the last any of us ever saw of him.’
‘Well, he could have been worse off,’ Ruth sighed. ‘Remember Marma, the fat lady who used to work on the east coast years ago? Did you ever hear what became of her and her man?’
‘No, what happened?’ Mayon asked.
‘Well, she passed out as they were going up a set of stairs one day in the house that they’d bought for their old age. And she fell back on top of the little fellow and crushed him to death. She came to an hour later and found him dead underneath her.’
None of the company seemed to be much moved by this sad tale, except the new girl, Temora. ‘It must be hard being a fat lady,’ she said quietly.
‘Well,’ said Ruth, delighted at finding a sympathetic ear, ‘it’s hard when you have to walk any distance, especially if it’s uphill. There’s no gainsaying that. And it’s not nice when people make unkind remarks to you, like they do in the tent sometimes. But most people just enjoy a chat. I’d have to say, all things considered, that it’s been a good life. You see, I’ve been especially blessed.’