by Gary Crew
Donny spotted the aberration standing before him and sat up, alert. ‘What is this? A new attraction?’
‘This is Augustus Trump,’ Rosa announced, all smiles and falsehood. ‘He has come to visit. His mother was kind enough to loan him to Moira and French Betty who she met at a pub – although that pair being what they are, he will be my responsibility.’ (She added the latter with a degree of martyred pride.) ‘But he’s come without any spare clothes and I can’t let him get around in these, can I?’
‘He’s not getting one of my coats,’ the dwarf protested. ‘They cost a fortune.’
‘No, no.’ Rosa feigned a laugh, barely hiding her disappointment. She would have loved to dress her treasure in one of those red coats, the better to bring out the roses in his cheeks, but dared not suggest. ‘I can find him a singlet, but it’s trousers he wants, to get him out of these awful baby things.’
‘Ah, now I see,’ Donny grunted, staring. ‘He’s one of us.’
‘Eh?’ Augustus piped.
‘You’re a …’ Here Donny stumbled. Despising his own puny physique as he did, he was loath to tell another that he suffered the same misfortune, especially when that other might not have arrived at that understanding for himself. ‘You’re …’ he looked to Rosa for inspiration. ‘You’re outstanding!’, the statement concluded with an emphatic nod.
‘Yes,’ Augustus agreed, and added disconcertingly, ‘but how did you know that I could sing?’
Silence hung in the air until Rosa suggested with a wink, ‘Perhaps you heard Augustus singing in the big top, just half an hour ago? Isn’t that right, Donny?’
‘Indeed,’ the confused Donny lied. ‘Indeed …’
Augustus beamed. ‘I will sing for you now if you want. That is what I do. Fill a space with my voice.’
‘Is he any good?’ the dwarf whispered aside.
‘He is better than good,’ Rosa said. ‘Together, we will be great.’
Little Donny flinched, catching the hint of threat in Rosa’s tone. But he persisted, out of pity. ‘And what would you sing?’ he asked, expectantly setting his hookah aside.
‘Whatever you like,’ came the reply.
‘I am not one for fanfare,’ Donny admitted, nestling into his pillow. ‘Sing me something soothing. Something to make me happy. Here, Rosa, lean against Bonzer. He makes an excellent armchair.’
The girl did as she was asked and, seeing his audience settled, Augustus stepped forward. He spread his tiny legs, planted his tiny feet, and throwing back his pretty head, fixed his soft eyes on that canopy of cobalt above. This was not done to pose or to posture. As he had said, it was done with the desire to fill the space with his voice, the innocent spirit of himself, since he understood nothing else. And so he sang, the eerie blue light falling pale on his upturned face:
I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls
With vassals and serfs at my side,
And of all those assembled within in those walls,
That I was their hope and pride.
But I also dreamt which charmed me most
That you loved me still the same,
That you loved me still the same,
That you loved me, you loved me, still the same.
‘That was my mother’s song,’ Little Donny wept.
‘How could he know that?’
Rosa shrugged, saying nothing.
Hairy Moira’s wagon was much nicer than Rosa’s; more like one a gypsy would live in: yellow and blue with a red roof and green shutters and golden scrolls and finials and a pair of white wooden doves (their beaks touching in a kiss), above the indigo door.
Rosa’s wagon was little more than a stubby box, weathered and drab and dribbly with bird droppings ‘from the time we did a week on the Scarborough Esplanade’, as she informed Augustus when he asked.
‘The ceiling is lower than Moira’s too,’ he said, staring up at the fly spots on the pressed metal. Rosa grunted, chucking the pile of clothing scabbed from Little Donny onto her narrow bunk. ‘This reminds me of the space beneath my mother’s piano,’ the boy continued. ‘While I like high ceilings to extend my voice – and Moira’s ceiling was higher – I actually prefer low ones … They add a certain resonance.’
‘You don’t say,’ Rosa snarled. ‘And how old are you really?’
‘I am four years old,’ Augustus shot back. ‘I will be five in a month. I already told you that. Why do you keep asking me?’
Rosa held up a pair of Donny’s discarded trousers and shrugged. ‘Because you talk like you’re fifty, not five. And what about those songs you sing? They’re grown-up songs. Old people’s songs. Not little kids’ songs. Why’s that?’
‘Why’s what? Why do I talk like I’m fifty or why do I sing grown-up songs?’
‘Either. Surprise me.’ Her only concern was to get him out of those rompers.
‘Well,’ he said, inspecting the posters of her acrobatic brothers lining the walls, ‘the answer is most likely the same. My mother’s house is always filled with adults who sing adult songs – opera mostly, though not always – and talk adult talk. I have no brothers or sisters and rarely meet other children. My mother considers them vulgar and they usually cry when they meet me, which is a pity, I suppose.’
Rosa cared little, and sat, sorting the clothes.
‘Nobody takes me to kindergarten,’ Augustus rattled on. ‘My mother says she has no time and I don’t know anything about my father. I don’t even know if I have seen him, although I have always hoped that he might be a sea captain. A big, broad man in a white uniform did come a few times. He always stood close behind my mother at the piano, leaning down to kiss her neck, his gold-braided cap tucked under his arm. I hoped that he was my father but nobody said so, though I wanted him to be. I sometimes think that I would like to be him, or even …’ he paused, comparing himself to the images of full-grown men lining the wall, ‘or even make myself into him …’
‘You what?’ Rosa demanded.
‘Nothing,’ he giggled.
‘Didn’t you just say that you could make yourself into him? Eh?’
‘I was being silly,’ he hedged. ‘I was remembering how I learnt the Puccini that I sang for you. My mother sang it for him.’
‘Who?’
‘Some man in a white uniform. Nobody, really …’ and, eager to change the subject, he said, ‘My mother is an outstanding soprano, you know, but never could make a career of it. “Not fit for the stage, she isn’t”, as somebody once said when she had left the room,’ and he brought his hand to his mouth several times, to simulate drinking.
‘Is that right?’
‘Yes.’
‘But she sings for you, eh?’
‘Not really. She just sings.’
‘But not for you?’
‘Hardly ever for me, but I hear. I sit beneath the keyboard.’
‘Oh?’
‘She doesn’t like me to be seen, my mother.’
‘Oh?’
‘Never has. So that’s how I learn, sitting there, unnoticed …’ He gave this statement some thought, finally adding, ‘Not that it matters, either way, since that is the space I prefer, being intimate, you understand. Unless I want to project my voice, which I do sometimes, to prove that I can, that I’m alive – for her – as I did for you in the big top. As a result of such experiences – confined or otherwise – I am convinced that it is the nature of the space about me – the architecture, you might say – that obliges me to extend myself. To grow, so to speak.’
‘Augustus,’ she said, taking his hand, ‘your intelligence and personal insight amaze me. And you speak so well – and sing so well, too – but irrespective of how smart you are, and how well you express yourself, or where you perform – the architecture, I mean –you’re the size of a doll. Do you understand that?’
‘I lived many lives beneath that piano,’ he said. ‘I heard ten thousand stories in that space. There I was privileged to observe, to gather – and not only gather, to con
centrate within myself – so much that is usually denied a child of my age. As a result, I have, you might say, already grown.’
He had silenced her, but determined not to lose her advantage, she slipped from the bunk to kneel before him. ‘We will never speak of size again,’ she whispered, squeezing his tiny hands.
‘I would like that,’ he said. ‘But we will, hopefully, speak of those greater spaces that my voice will fill.’
‘We will,’ she agreed, eager to convince. ‘And how your voice will caress such spaces. Pervade such spaces. Enhance such spaces. Now there’s a grand word!’
‘I might even create such spaces,’ he suggested, ‘if my voice was pure enough …’
‘Yeah sure,’ she grunted, and considering him to have lapsed into that grotesque masculine ego so common among her brothers, she got to her feet, declaring, ‘but if you’re going to get anywhere, the first thing we have to do is get you out of those awful pants. Where the hell did your mother turn them up?’
Finding clothes to fit her diminutive charge consumed Rosa’s energies for some time. ‘What will I do?’ she moaned as she sat having a beer with Moira and Donny. ‘They don’t make male dolls, so there’s no dolls’ clothes to fit him.’
‘You could always ask Needly Phyllis,’ Moira suggested, adding a frothy frieze to her moustache. ‘She can make anything.’
‘Needly Phyllis? That skinny cow? I’ve hated her ever since she made that fluffy white tutu my brothers expected me to wear in their act.’
‘It’s not Needly’s fault that you looked like a meringue. You’re not exactly Tinker Bell, you know,’ Donny assured her. Moira guffawed, slopping her hops.
‘Ha bloody ha,’ Rosa spat. ‘What have you two got to laugh about? You’re both freaks.’ So saying, she took a generous swig herself.
‘Oh!’ Moira shrieked. ‘Oh! At least we get paid to look queer, Ginger!’
Given that the circus was full of odd bods, not a great deal was said about Rosa’s fuzzy red hair, although the terms ‘Flame Brain’ and ‘Bushfire’ had all had their day until Rosa rigorously stamped them out.
‘Listen, love,’ Donny soothed, reaching out to pat the girl’s ample knee, ‘nasty piece of work that she is, with our screwed-up bodies we all need Needly sooner or later. Who do you think makes those red coats that I like? Trouble is, she charges like a wounded bull.’
Little Donny spoke the truth. Needly Phyllis was the official costume-maker for the circus – who else but a crazy would want the job? – and knowing she had the weird rag trade sewn up, she exploited her clients to the hilt. So thin that she cast no shadow, Needly was aptly named for her scrawny physique, the particularity of her stitchcraft and her sharp tongue. She would never be invited over for a pot, although word had it that she enjoyed a drop of claret on the sly. Very dry.
‘You know …’ Moira said, taking another swig on the gravity of the information she was about to share, ‘you know, even after Stan Platten’s chimp Hogarth got done in,’ (Rosa attempted a sympathetic face) ‘that Needly dame still sent Stan the bill for the little darlin’s new show outfit. And Hogie never even got to wear it. How awful is that?’
‘Top hat and tails, it was,’ Donny confirmed. ‘In black satin. Stan paid up too. Nice bloke, that Stan.’
‘Shame about Hogie, eh?’ Rosa purred, rolling the empty schooner between her palms. ‘What happened to the outfit?’
‘Dunno,’ Moira shrugged. ‘You’d have to ask Needly. Or Stan.’
Funny thing, Rosa thought, wandering off. I knock off the ape, and it leaves me a legacy.
Having worked at the circus for twenty years, Stan Platten was a sort of permanent roustabout, insofar as anything about the place was permanent. In his mid-thirties, of average height, Stan wore khaki overalls, parted his straight, brown hair on the left and used a drop of brilliantine to slick it down. His face was lean, his smile open, his false teeth glaringly evident. He did not drink or smoke or spit.
A jack of all trades who helped hoist the big top, repaired the generator when it went on the blink, serviced the fire extinguishers and made sure the dunny cans were emptied at the end of the day, Stan Platten was so nice, so reliable, he might have worked as a milkman. But Stan felt most at home with the circus, especially among the monkeys, of whom he was the unofficial keeper.
Rosa had always hated Hogie. She hated the fact that, after finishing its act with its owner, Zena the Ape Woman (born Bertha Bath in Ulladulla), the much-feted chimp invariably perched ringside and proceeded to make a disgusting display of itself in full view of the big payers in Gallery A. Not that the crowd minded. Delightfully scandalised, they oohed and aahed, looking away (and back again), until reliable Stan came to retrieve the little brute, wagging an admonishing finger in its grinning face. Zena stood to one side, looking suitably coy. But once Stan had Hogie out of the tent, it was Zena who took the chimp back to its cage and rewarded it with a banana. That’s the part that stuck in Rosa’s neck: the beast was encouraged to be revolting.
But it was not until the previous Easter when selfish Zena had denied the girl a bite of her marshmallow rabbit that Rosa decided enough was enough. Ignorant of Stan’s feelings (being virtually oblivious of his existence), Rosa waited for the opportunity then opened Hogarth’s cage, enticing the eager animal with a banana. Once Hogie began stuffing himself, she whipped a blade from her pocket and did the deed then stuffed his oozing body into Zena’s costume, found discarded in her lean-to. No one was any the wiser.
Oh, the hullabaloo when the deed was discovered.
Oh, the disgust exhibited by Zena.
Oh, the change in Stan Platten.
No longer was his hair brilliantined and straight parted. No longer were the monkey cages cleaned. No longer did the generator reassure with its ceaseless chugalugging. And the dunny cans overflowed something awful.
Only then was Stan’s love realised.
Only then was it made known (Zena feeling obliged to own up), that Stan had been after a chimp of his own for years. And for the past twelve months he’d been buying Hogarth from her (week by tireless week, shilling by hard-earned shilling), and the very day the debt was paid (that he finally owned his treasure and life’s delight), some bastard did the ape in.
Only then did Needly Phyllis go to Stan in his sorrow and penury demanding reimbursement for what he owed on the chimp’s black satin tails, personally commissioned. And the top hat wheedled out of an undertaker in Ipswich.
‘Five quid, in all,’ Needly demanded, ‘and I want it next Mundy.’
Stan paid, getting an advance on six weeks’ wages.
Though his loss had been months before, when the Colleano girl came to him, wanting to sit and talk outside his lonely wagon, Stan was grateful for the company.
‘I’m Rosa,’ she said, all smiles.
‘Stan,’ he said.
‘Rosa Colleano.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘How could I miss that hair?’
She shot him a green-eyed look, wondering.
‘Lovely,’ he said. ‘Coppery. Wiry, like monkey hair.’
‘Oh?’
‘My favourite,’ he grinned. ‘Since I was a kid.’
‘You like monkeys?’ she asked, playing the dumb card, as killers often do.
‘Like monkeys?’ he snorted. ‘I love ’em! Hogarth was mine, you know.’
‘Hogie?’ she giggled. ‘That naughty chimp. He’s yours?’
‘Was mine. Paid for him too. But he’s dead, you know. Done in. Somethin’ awful it was.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she lied. ‘I didn’t know.’
Stan shrugged, one brace of his overalls falling from his shoulder. ‘We all gotta die sooner or later. Just that he went too soon.’
‘Oh?’ she grunted, concealing her blood-guilty hands beneath her fat thighs.
‘Left him to bleed to death, the bastard did. Wouldn’t do it to a dog, I wouldn’t. I had plans for him. Livin’ here with me.’ He cast his head back at t
he wagon behind. ‘Had a costume made for him, I did. Nice little dress suit. Real happy, he woulda been. And famous. All he did was make people laugh. Never hurt a fly …’
Talking to this bloke is a big mistake, Rosa thought. I should have gone straight to Needly. She would have got the costume for me. Damn. ‘Awful,’ she said, and shook her head.
‘Anyway,’ Stan said, slapping his knees, ‘you don’t want to hear some stupid old bugger whingein’. So what you been up to? Practisin’ your acrobatics, have you? Your brothers are terrific, I reckon.’
Ignoring his final statement, and desperate to turn the conversation to her advantage, Rosa said, ‘Actually, I’ve been occupied with a new friend. Would you like to meet him?’
‘He a monkey?’ Stan attempted a laugh.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Better.’
‘Couldn’t be.’
‘Will you wait a minute? Here? I can get him. You won’t be disappointed, I promise.’
‘I’ll wait,’ Stan sighed.
When the girl reappeared, Stan’s interest was aroused immediately. Like everybody else, he had never seen anything like the thing she brought with her.
‘I sing, you know,’ Augustus said when the awkward introductions were over.
‘Yeah?’ Stan gaped.
‘Certainly,’ Augustus replied, cocky as hell. ‘What would you like to hear?’
‘Um,’ Stan wondered, finger to mouth. ‘Somethin’ happy. I’m feeling down, you know.’
‘Well, we can’t have that, can we?’ Augustus chirped. ‘Rosa, can you help me onto this box?’
So Rosa whooshed Augustus up, as she would for years to come.
Now Stan took a better look. Before him stood the strangest little boy – a doll, was it? – blond, with lips like rosebuds, wearing a holey Chesty Bond singlet miles too big, a pair of enormous yellow trousers held up with a narrow red belt wrapped round and round, and all this on a body no more than twenty-eight inches high. But he was cute. Cute as any monkey. Cute as poor dead Hogie even. So Stan’s heart warmed to him, whatever he was.
‘I’ll sing “The Happy Wanderer”,’ Augustus declared, planting his feet and lifting his eyes to a distant cloud. ‘Ready?’