“I think I do,” the Boy crossed his arms. “And you’re going to tell me or I’m taking my cat and we’re making our own way to London.”
“It’s not right that we have deceived you, I grant you that,” Johan looked genuinely troubled. “Brom’s not a bad man. Not really. He’s only a demon on the outside.” He laughed but the Boy didn’t join in.
I was feeling all kinds of uneasy. I didn’t want to be hearing about the dark past of subsidiary characters. I trotted over to the Boy and pressed my head against his legs as though I could push him towards the road. He reached down and stroked me absently and ineffectually. I lifted my back to meet his hand but he took it away and I almost fell over. Charming.
“Tell me,” the Boy persisted.
“Tell him what?”
It was Brom. Bleary-eyed and dishevelled from his drunken slumber, he jumped down from the waggon and stood between the two of them, eyeing first the Boy and then the actor.
“Oh, the boy just wanted to hear about the Passion,” Johan wrung his hands. “He’s never seen one! Imagine that!”
Brom looked them both in the eye again. “I very much doubt,” he spoke slowly, “that you were having a symposium on dramatic form.”
“It’s true!” said the Boy and Johan shot him a grateful look. “But frankly, I must depart the company before we get any further from the city. So, if you don’t mind, come first light, I’ll take my cut of the takings and my cat and I will be on our way.”
Brom snickered.
“Oh, you will, will you?” His hand shot out and grabbed the Boy by the throat. “Listen, Dicky; that cat of yours is the best thing that’s happened to this sorry troupe in a long time. He’s staying with us. Which means you’re staying with us, given the nature of your act and all. You should be grateful to him. It’s him what’s keeping you alive.”
The Boy, trying to pull the brute’s arm away, swallowed and struggled for breath. His eyes rolled and found mine. I was about to spring into action and award that bully so many scratches the demon mask would be an improvement when I found myself being seized from behind and thrust unceremoniously into a birdcage.
“Nice one, Carac,” Brom grunted. He shoved the Boy to the ground. The Boy watched helplessly as the dwarf slung the cage into the back of the waggon.
I heard him bark admonishments and instructions to Johan, and Johan muttering apologies in return. A bottle was uncorked. Demon and imp congratulated each other on their finer qualities, as they saw them.
The canvas lifted and the Boy’s face appeared in shadow.
“Don’t worry, Puss. I won’t leave you!”
I shook my head as though to clear it. I had some serious thinking ahead of me if I was to get us out of this fix.
***
Dawn came, and despite their late-night imbibing, Brom and Carac were keen to get moving. They forced the Boy to ride up front with Johan while they took turns in having naps in the back. This way one of them was always out front to keep an eye on the Boy and the other was in the back with me. Should the Boy try anything foolish, I would be sure to cop whatever retribution they might devise.
It was explained to the Boy, largely by Johan who was the most talkative of the bunch that he - the Boy - was to pay a bigger part in the performance. The hell mouth was out. It was to be decommissioned and refurbished as a new set. By the time the waggon rolled into Coventry, the new show had to be ready.
I heard the Boy gasp and could easily imagine his shocked expression when he was told, due to his fresh face and skinny frame, he was to take on a female role. He was to portray the daughter of Herodias, that vain and foolish seductress, Salome.
The Boy needed reminding who she was. All I can say is literature has treated her unfairly - she was the loving wife to two husbands and bore them several children. But why let facts get in the way of a good story?
The Boy raised objections as any young man of his age might, fearing that the donning of feminine attire might open his own character to misinterpretation. He was not of a performing bent, you see. It didn’t come natural to him but, as Johan patiently explained, it was not seemly for ladies to appear in plays. Indeed, male members of the profession were barely tolerated as it was; too many parishes up and down the country considered them worse than vagabonds and gypsies and would not permit them to play any role other than “criminal in pillory”.
A quick rattle of the cage that confined me countered the Boy’s misgivings. Bless his soft heart! Too many folk in his day and age (and in yours too, I have no doubt) treat animals with less than kindness.
And so, later that day, while Johan and Brom set about dismantling and reconstructing the hell mouth (the former in little more than a supervisory capacity, the latter with taciturn heavy-handedness) Carac the dwarf set about teaching the Boy Salome’s celebrated dance.
I was positioned within sight of the Boy as incentive, no doubt.
It would have been amusing were it not for the coercion and ever-present threat of violence.
At first the Boy was reluctant and made only half-hearted attempts to reproduce the dwarf’s choreography. Carac, whose temper was the shortest thing about him, fetched his imp’s trident from the waggon and used it t prod and tap the Boy’s limbs into the required position and attitude. The problem was the Boy was trying to copy moves in the style of the dwarf’s squat body, producing a Salome that was more of a clown with dyspraxia than a sultry seductress. Before long, the dwarf gave up demonstrating the routine and tried to perfect the Boy’s movements through word and trident alone.
“Be more graceful, damn you!” Carac barked. “Lither! More lissom!”
The Boy frowned; the words were new to him.
Carac drew his little hands down his careworn face. “Again!” he roared. “From the top!”
The Boy resumed his starting position and the dwarf sounded out a rhythm by beating his trident against an upturned bucket, muttering and swearing, his little hand barely able to hold his weary and frustrated head.
***
We were taking the old Roman road known as Icknield Street through the Midlands towards Coventry and giving performances to earn our keep along the way. So that I didn’t run off into the crowd I was tethered like a naughty dog, my leash passing from Carac to Brom and back again. The Boy was never allowed to hold me without someone else on the end of the cord. It made the unfolding drama even more nonsensical and with the hell-mouth out of action, the performances were lacking in impact - until I opened my mouth, of course. An apparently talking cat always gives rise to a sense of wonder in a crowd. When they realise it’s a trick, their marvelling is transmuted into appreciation of the Boy’s ventriloquial skill.
And so the collection was always generous - remember these people had precious little in the way of wealth themselves. Some would pay with turnips and other items of food. Johan always accepted these with good grace; the other two were less enthusiastic.
All the while the rehearsals continued. The Boy’s dance was to be the high point of the drama, topped only by the reveal of the unfortunate John’s head, an effect achieved by Carac standing under a table with a hole in it, his upturned face covered by the domed lid of a serving dish.
As we neared the cathedral city, the road became busier with people all heading to Coventry for the same purpose - except, by and large, they were going to see the shows rather than appear in them.
It had become the practice for the city’s guilds to take it upon themselves to stage every four years or so, dramatic scenes from the holy book that was in vogue at the time. The mostly illiterate audience would all be familiar with the tales from their church-going but to experience them played out before their very eyes gave the stories an impact and a dimension lacking in the pulpit. People became so absorbed in the unfolding drama, they would cry out and try to intervene. Woe
betide anyone unfortunate enough to portray the traitor Judas if anyone recognised him around the town!
With the audience so enrapt, the cycle of plays provided heaven on Earth for pickpockets and cutpurses, but the greatest crime, if Johan was to be believed, was the stifling effect of the oft-repeated plays on the creative impulse. Where was the new drama? He would wail. Surely there must be new stories to tell.
He also objected to what he called the ‘rank amateurism’ of the guild players. They were working men who spent most of their time making cloth or cutlery or whatever-it-was they got up to. They viewed the plays as a bit of a laugh and a chance to dress up and to wave to their wives and children from the platforms. What knew they of Art? Johan was prone to spouting off about the distinction between artisan and artist, sometimes adding a pretentious ‘e’ to render it ‘artiste’. Brom and Carac ignored this but to the Boy’s ears it was all new.
The plan was to set up their waggon near to the Crucifixion. Playgoers would see the fate of John before the biggest show-off in the Guild of Carpenters was hoisted aloft on a huge wooden cross, from where he could suffer and emote - and no doubt wave to his mum in the adoring crowd below.
“We shall show them how it’s done,” Johan enthused, his eyes twinkling. For once, the other two caught his mood and I got a sense there were old scores to settle. Upstaging the most famous death in human history is not an easy undertaking but they were going to give it their damnedest.
Three pairs of eyes (not including my own) rolled around to the Boy, the weakest link in the chain. Brom grumbled inarticulately but the threat was clear enough. Carac, his trident not to hand, prodded the Boy with a finger and Johan sent him a wet-eyed smile of encouragement.
The Boy looked pained, from more than the prodding, but he nodded in response. He would do his best. He glanced to me and our eyes met. I felt a dart of pain and a tugging at my heart.
Damn it. It felt like I really cared for him.
***
“Most becoming!” Johan clapped his hands when the Boy emerged from the waggon in his Salome costume, a flimsy conglomeration of transparent fabrics. The lower half of his face was hidden behind a veil but his midriff and arms were bare. A heavy wig of complicated plaits and tresses balanced precariously on his head and slippers with toes as curly as rams’ horns impeded his progress down the ladder.
“Heh-heh,” Carac enthused with a somewhat lecherous glint in his eye. Brom barely cast a glance. He jerked his head towards the crowd that was gathering around a production of The Great Flood. Carac returned the nod and the two of them insinuated themselves into the throng.
“Oh dear.” Johan looked pained.
“Don’t you like it?” The Boy essayed a full turn and only just managed to catch the wig before it dropped in the muck.
“Um,” Johan seemed distracted. “A few more pins will sort that out. Come here.”
“I’m nervous,” the Boy admitted while the bald man fixed his wig.
“Don’t be,” Johan patted his shoulder. “As soon as you go on, you’ll be fine.”
“But what if I forget my lines? What if I stumble?”
“You will be fine,” Johan assured him. I would have done the same had we been alone. Thing was, we were never alone. There was always at least one of the three with us at all times, lest we run away. I hadn’t spoken a word that wasn’t part of our act for days.
I caught the Boy’s eye. He looked about to say something but the wig slipped again and covered his face.
“Oh dear,” Johan repeated and set to applying more pins.
***
As if being in a birdcage wasn’t bad enough, I also had to suffer a blanket over the bars, as I was carried through the crowd. Unlike our feathered friends I wasn’t fooled into thinking night had suddenly fallen and did not go to sleep. Instead it made me more alert and tense. My ears pricked and twitched as I tried to visualise what was around us. I caught lines from the Slaughter of the Innocents - a rather sensationalist episode but a crowd-pleaser. I heard snatches from David and Goliath, and from Jezebel - humans certainly venerate stories of sex and violence. Humans never change.
Loudest and clearest was the sparse dialogue that passed between the Boy and Johan - the other two had gone on ahead.
“Get off me!” the Boy squirmed, causing the cage to swing. “I can walk by myself.”
The bald man was no doubt steering the Boy along, perhaps by the shoulder or the elbow. “Wouldn’t want you to get lost now, would we?” the actor admonished, sounding sinister for the first time. “Pretty thing like you.”
The Boy was in costume - the idea being he might draw members of the crowd along with him, attracted by the colourful and exotic outfit. Salome’s dance was a particular highlight for the men folk, able to look beyond the fact that the dancer was a male himself and enjoy the sensuality and suggestiveness of the routine. Of all humans, I think males are the weirdest.
“Why have you got that wig on?” the Boy asked after a couple of minutes of silence. “There’s no angel in this story.”
“Hush, Boy,” the actor snapped. “Mind your own damned business.”
The Boy’s question seemed a reasonable one and the actor’s response aroused my suspicions. Johan didn’t appear on stage in this one. His role was to remain behind a curtain and provide the music for Salome’s dance, bedecked with instruments: cymbals between his knees, a drum in front of him, and a reedy woodwind in his mouth. Why was he wearing the wig? Why not go bald and proud among the multitude? Why not put up his hood?
It seemed to me that it wasn’t vanity that prompted Johan to sport that rather fetching golden hair. Nor was it the wish to advertise the show.
He was in disguise.
Just as my brother was disguised as a rat, this man was up to no good. I was sure of it.
Damn it. Had I access to my full capacity of world knowledge, I could look him up and see what he had been, was, and would be up to. Oh, it’s infuriating, this loss of omniscience. So limiting.
I cursed my tiny cat brain, envying the humans their enormous one that goes for the most part unused. Humans are such wastrels.
I felt the cage hit a hard surface. The blanket was whisked away and I had to narrow my eyes against the sudden influx of sunlight. I turned around - not an easy manoeuvre in that confined space. I was backstage.
Brom and Carac had commandeered one of the purpose-built rostra and transformed it into a crude representation of a palace. I might have told them there was little in the way of accuracy in their design but of course I couldn’t. Historical and artistic faithfulness meant nothing to them. At that time, people played fast and loose with set and costume design. A cloak and a crown were enough to signify a king with no attention paid to the shape of the crown or the cut of the cloak. It was unlikely that Salome herself ever sported a get-up anything like the Boy’s current outfit but at least some effort had gone into its creation to make it appear exotic or at least a bit ‘foreign’.
Carac was engaged in a heated discussion with an official. With the dwarf on the stage and the official on the ground they were able to see eye-to-eye but only in the physical sense.
“And I’m telling you my business partner has taken care of it.” I recognised the strain in Carac’s voice from the Boy’s dance rehearsals. Lucky for the official, the trident was not to hand or else he’d be facing an irritated prod or two.
“And I’m telling you,” the official said, through bushy facial hair that resembled one of the troupe’s false beards (I take back what I said about the lack of authenticity!) “The fees have not been paid. You want to use one of our stages you pay the fee. Or else clear your junk off of it. There’s the guild of pin makers ready and waiting to do their Consumption of the Virgin, or whatever they calls it.”
“I’m sure it’s just an oversight.” Car
ac bared his teeth but his eyes weren’t smiling.
“You must get a lot of those,” laughed the official.
“What do you mean?”
“Oversight - with your - um -” The official realised his gaffe. “Look, if you can’t pay, you must take it down.”
“A little patience is all I ask. After the performance, our little cash flow problem will be no more.”
The official shook his head. “No can do, friend,” he sighed. “It’s payment up front or off you pop.”
Carac looked ready to throw himself at the man’s bushy head or at least spit out something viscous and nasty in that hairy face but the sudden appearance of Brom, sweaty and out of breath, changed the mood entirely.
“There you go, squire,” Brom panted. He dropped a small purse of coins onto the official’s tablet. “Enough for three shows there and a jug of ale, if that’s your tipple.” He tapped the side of his nose and closed his eye in a conspiratorial wink.
The official was both surprised and affronted but, I noted, did not return the excess.
“Gentlemen,” he nodded, saluting with a couple of fingers to his forehead. He moved along to the next rostrum, whistling.
Carac took advantage of his borrowed height and gave Brom a swift kick on the breastbone.
“You took your time. Look at you. Not even in costume yet.”
“Well, obviously,” countered Brom. “I couldn’t - could I - and be recognised? Ooh, look, King Herod’s just nicked my money!”
“Ssh!” Carac waved frantically. “Go and get ready. We’ve a show to do.”
The Boy was more surprised than I to realise we were among thieves. Brom’s revelation of himself as a cutpurse and/or pickpocket made me look to one-man band Johan again. Brom would now disguise himself in costume and would not be recognised, should anyone have seen him acquire that purse. Johan was already in disguise and continued to wear that angel wig even though he was backstage and hidden from view.
I AM THE CAT Page 7