My eyelids flutter and I return from my drowse. They have gone, of course. I sigh. Another dream: but as usual I am not sleeping. Another troubling thought surfaces through the sludge of my understanding: my memories are of people dressed outlandishly in the costume of many years ago. I yearn to return to Alfred, to talk to him. Beg him to be my friend again. Ask him to help.
I do not notice the old man stagger out of his patched booth until he tumbles over my feet, belching beer. He clutches at my coat, steadying himself, and peers up at me. The booth’s sign reads ‘Arturo the Astonishing, Fortune-Teller to Royalty’. He points at it, hiccoughing.
‘That’s me, kind sir!’
‘You are not astonishing,’ I say, trying to shake him off. ‘Let go of me. I don’t like fortune-tellers and they don’t like me. And you stink like the dancing bear.’
‘Oh, it’s all in the smell, isn’t it!’ he cackles. ‘Everything in the smell!’
He shoves his face into my sleeve and inhales a lungful of air; then he leans back, smacking his lips.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Oh, I can smell you out, sir! Your scent betrays all your hopes and dreams!’ he leers.
He fumbles in my pocket, but it is empty, my small store of money being tucked into my boot.
‘Are you a fortune-teller or a thief?’ I ask, pushing his hand away.
‘Both, I suppose,’ he shrugs, and takes a slower sniff of me. ‘Now, you are a curious one. I’ll not let you go just yet. You smell lucky for me. It’s all aromatics, sir: a man gives away his secrets through his sweat.’ He snuffles at my elbow, grasping a piece of my shirt in his fist. ‘Will you give me a few coins for what I can discover?’
His eyes scuttle over me; he blinks, suddenly confused.
‘You smell deep. You’re a special one and no mistake, are you not? Will you let me read you like a book, sir? Open you up? Watch you heal back up again?’
He affects a mime of unbuttoning his belly and spilling his innards on to the ground. I grab his shirt and shove him back through the tent-flap.
‘How do you know?’ I growl. ‘How can you see this?’ I tighten my grip on his throat, watch his pupils bloom into soot. ‘Tell me now.’
I squeeze, feeling the flex of his windpipe under my fingers. He splutters, breath rattling in his gullet, nodding his head wildly. I let go of him and he bends over, coughing mightily.
‘I am sorry,’ I say. ‘I was angry. It is spent.’
He rubs his neck tenderly, tips his head on one side and shows an uneven hedge of teeth.
‘Of course. I shouldn’t have surprised you. Skittish as a foal. Still, you can’t hide from this nose.’
He taps the organ in question, leans close once more and flares his nostrils. I lick my lips, for they are suddenly dry.
‘Sir,’ he says kindly. ‘I shall not insult you with my old schmatter. No lies about bags of gold at the end of rainbows. In faith, I shall not fleece you. Come now. I believe I can help you.’
He coughs, spits phlegm on to the floor and kicks dirt over it with the side of his foot.
‘Help me?’
‘Yes. It is what you most desire, is it not?’ He grins through battered teeth. ‘Someone who will listen to you? Someone who’ll understand?’
It is suddenly the hardest thing in the world for my legs to hold me up; I collapse on to a spindly chair. It creaks a little, but holds.
‘You have me, Signor Arturo,’ I sigh. ‘I shall not hurt you again. I don’t believe anyone can help me, for all you say you can. But I have no one else.’
‘Not even Alfred?’
‘What do you mean?’ I demand. My stomach leaps. I grasp his tattered neckcloth again to pull him close once more.
‘Enough. Let me go, please!’
I release him. It seems my anger is itching to be set free.
‘How do you know his name?’ I demand.
‘Sir, listen. I can smell him on you.’
‘Alfred was my friend.’
‘I know. And you have had so many.’
‘I have not. Alfred was my only friend.’
As I speak the words, I know them for a lie. But I do not know what the truth is.
‘Don’t you remember?’
‘Remember what?’
‘Don’t you know where you have been?’
‘I don’t remember anything,’ I grumble, crossing my arms across my chest.
‘You must. It is not possible. You see nothing?’
‘I see – things,’ I mutter. ‘I do not wish to.’
‘What things?’
I dip my fingers into my shirt and extract my paper, clear my throat and recite its secrets.
‘I was a clock-mender, in Holland,’ I say. ‘I can speak Dutch, and Italian. I see myself at the top of a tower. I – fall. When I cut, I heal.’
I fold my document and replace it. The old man’s mouth hangs open.
‘Is that all?’
‘What else can there be? Isn’t that enough for one man?’
He breathes me in again, as though I am the finest array of dishes ever laid before him.
‘It is not possible. One like yourself, to be so blind. Sir, do you truly not know who you are?’
‘Who am I?’ I cry. ‘Tell me now!’
‘You are …’ He pauses and takes a deeper inhalation, fanning his hand to scoop my scent deeper into his nostrils. ‘… unplumbable. A well I could never drain dry. A mine whose gems I could never exhaust. Ah!’
He takes my hand and kisses it, snuffling as he does so. His eyes glow, and for an instant he is glamoured with youth.
‘Oh! If I began merely with the list of your names – the names men have given you – I should be here a hundred nights! You are perfumed with so many pasts. I have never dined upon such a banquet as you! I could take years, tasting your delicacies.’
He stoops, taking sniffs of air around my body with little cries of pleasure.
‘Here is a fine dance, with music and ladies dressed for the carnival! And here, a horse galloping across a broad plain and you upon it, spear in hand. Here, a swift ship creaking beneath your feet. Here, the hand of desire upon your breast – and a kiss! Such sweetness! So many loves!’
‘You see all these pleasures?’
‘Of course.’ Arturo opens his eyes very wide. ‘Do you not see them? Their fragrance is so deeply grained into you. Ah! To glimpse into your unbounded soul, to be lifted into your great expanse of lives.’ He sweeps his hand so that it brushes the canvas sky of the tent. ‘You are the Morning Star: a bright comet fallen from Heaven, carrying light into the darkness and illuminating all around you. Who would not fall in love when touched by your spirit?’
His cheeks are wet.
‘If I glimpse happiness, it lasts but a moment. The only constant is pain,’ I say, my voice snapping like dry twigs underfoot.
‘Pain?’
‘Whatever injury I do to myself, I heal straightway.’
‘Is this not a source of joy to you?’
‘I ache to die. I cannot.’
‘You want to die? You think that is possible?’
‘You are not listening,’ I cry. ‘I drown myself, yet do not drown. I cut myself, and do not bleed. Over and over I climb to the top of a building – a tower, a house, a church – and I jump. I fall. I feel my bones break. They mend themselves. Is that not terrifying? Maybe I want to stay broken.’ I lower my head for shame of hearing my voice speak such words of despair.
The old man pats my shoulder. ‘Dear boy,’ he murmurs. ‘So inconsolable.’
‘I am not a boy.’
I make an attempt to shake him off, but the warmth of his hand pierces the fabric of my coat and I cannot bear the thought of losing this small comfort.
‘I am sorry,’ he says. ‘I do not mean to sound cruel. But, surely—’
‘I am lost: lost in the forest of my thoughts. I close my eyes and am swept into bloody nightmares of falling, breaking and healing.’
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br /> ‘You think them nightmares?’
‘No,’ I whisper. ‘They are memories.’
I have spoken the truth I did not wish to admit. It is a relief. I take a strengthening breath. ‘I want to understand what they mean; why they plague me so.’
He clasps my hand. ‘Listen, Abel, if that is your name now. I can tell you everything; it comes to me through the sweat on your palms. I can scent out your entire history and where it has led you.’
A strange sensation possesses me: I stand on the step of a great house, grasping the door handle. All I need do is turn it and open the gateway to myself. The old man bounces from foot to foot, as though the earth is burning the soles of his shoes. He rubs his palms together, eyes sparkling.
‘So. You will scoop out my stories.’
‘Yes, yes!’ he cries, cracking his fingers.
‘Will they not fill this tent, this fairground, this city? If I am as full as you say, will it not be so?’
‘Of course,’ he gasps. He scratches at my sleeve and pulls me close, trembling, his palms clammy. ‘Give yourself to me.’
‘And when you have taken everything out and laid it before me, what then?’ I ask.
He blinks. ‘All will be well. Come now.’
‘Wait. How will I put them back in? How will they all fit?’
‘Do not worry about that.’ His eyes are famished. ‘Let me have your stories.’
‘No!’ I shove him away but he hangs on, greedy as a leech.
‘Please. Just one good sniff. That’s all I ask; nothing more,’ he whines.
It comes to me that I have heard lies such as this before.
‘How can I trust your words? You wish to open me up, gawp at my insides and then leave me spread in pieces like a broken watch.’
‘But I can tell you what you are,’ he wheedles. ‘Stay with me. We shall have such adventures.’
‘Get away from me!’ I cry. ‘No more lies!’
All he wants is to satisfy his own need; slake his thirst on my soul, feeding and feeding. I thrust out my hand and he falls; I do not look where. I shall pretend I have not met this man. I will not write it on my document. I will forget him. I plunge out of the tent and run into the noise of the fair, grateful for the screech of peddlers, the sour puddles of beer, the pattering hands of whores.
At last I am far enough away to stop. My breath returns to me slowly. My mind spools in circles. At my feet are scraps of paper, trodden into the churned earth. I pick one up and see the picture of a girl entirely covered in hair, and straight away recall her strange image from the previous night.
I recognise her with an eye that is not one of common sight. It is an odd sense of communion: we are both different. Hers is the first thing people remark upon: she is never free of her distinguishing strangeness. Mine is less easy to find out, so that I can pass as a man amongst men. Yet both of us are shackled. I wonder if we have met before. I forget these things.
I try to smooth out the creases, but the paper is dirty, the words smudged. What if the same should happen to my document? I pat my breast and feel it rustle against the skin. I breathe in relief.
A man comes barrelling up to my side.
‘No need to pick up the leavings! Here’s a fresh bill of fare. The most astonishing aggregation of human curiosities gathered together in one place!’ he yells.
I take one without thinking overmuch. As he pushes it into my hand I see a scrawl of dark paint on his hand: a tiny indigo bird in the V between thumb and forefinger. A memory stirs. He notices my hesitation and peers at me more closely.
‘I know you.’
He stares a long moment, and then lets out a long whistle.
‘Well, well. It’s you. Mr Lazarus himself, risen from the mud. Wondered if I might run into you again sooner or later. Fuck me and no mistake. You’ve had a bit of a wash and brush-up, haven’t you?’
I blink at him, trying to make sense of his words. The memory is very close: he said mud. Yes, I am lying in mud … He wiggles his thumb in front of my eyes and the inky bird flutters.
‘It is flying!’ I cry, and the attempt at recollection flutters away.
‘Ha! Given you a taster, have I?’ He tugs back his cuff to reveal a tangle of flowers. ‘That’s not all,’ he whispers. ‘I’m covered, here to here.’
He indicates neck and ankle.
‘Why?’ I ask.
He lays a lazy arm across my shoulder, hugging me to his breast in a sudden friendliness that serves only to remind me how friendless I am.
‘It is a passion. After the first I had, I could not rest until I had a second. Then a third. My skin hungered for them. Of course, I look at the old ones and find I grow dissatisfied with them for they bleed and blur. But I can have their lines redrawn, have them turned into something else. But I keep this first one untouched.’
He points to the swallow soaring in its sky of naked skin, as though the surrounding ink is pushed back from its minute power.
‘I will not cover it.’
He rolls his sleeve up further to a banner unfurling around the blooms, etched with the word ‘Mother’. Above, a scarlet heart drips blood on to the scroll.
‘Why do you have Mother tattooed on to your skin?’ I ask. ‘Are you afraid that you will forget her?’
He smiles and twists his arm so he can see the riband. With the tip of his finger he traces the outline of the letter M. He notices me observing him, and shakes off the softness with a burst of angry laughter.
‘Do all your tattoos bring such an excess of feeling?’
‘Feeling? I don’t know what you’re on about! Her? Clouted me if I so much as begged a crust.’
He crooks his elbow, swelling the muscle of his upper arm, and the heart starts to beat in a steady rhythm.
‘When my mother died, she left me her heart,’ he sneers. ‘It is a joke; a bit of patter,’ he adds in a whisper. ‘Keeps the paying customers happy. Got to keep them happy, eh?’
I think once more of my document fraying and softening against the rub of my skin, ink blurring when I sleep on it. How fragile it seems of a sudden. What if I were to lose it? I think of the word ‘slaughter-man’ inked on to my arm, where it would draw no attention to itself. I could record only what I wish and not a word more. I think of the fortune-teller and shudder.
‘Can a man have anything tattooed?’ I ask.
‘Here’s your answer,’ he says, and removes his shirt.
The flowers at his wrist bloom into an abundance of stems and branches weaving up his right arm and across his breast, green-leaved and hung with swollen orange fruit, succulent and enticing me to bite into them. A striped cat roars, leaping across his stomach, and on the other side a warrior brandishes a silver sword before the great yellow fangs.
‘You’ve seen nothing like it before, have you?’
I begin to say no, but as the word forms and falls from my mouth my mind sparkles with pictures, each small as a pin-prick and as long-lasting: I see an ochre-skinned fellow, face swirled with dark waves; a woman with swollen indigo lips; an old man inked with furrows of dots punctuating the body’s meridians. I blink them away.
‘No,’ I say firmly. ‘I have never seen anything like this. Ever.’
‘Of course you have not.’
He wraps his arm around my shoulder.
‘Now. You come along with George. I’ll not be letting you out of my sight so fast this time.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘To be entertained!’
He speaks this last very loudly, and heads turn. He stands, twisting himself in a way that makes his back appear broader. He winks at me and swoops his shirt in the air.
‘Watch this,’ he hisses. ‘Yes!’ he cries. ‘You have before you the Encyclopaedic Man! The Wonder of the Taboo! Every forbidden enquiry satisfied! With illustrations,’ he croons.
Soon, he has an audience of eager listeners.
‘Here I stand, chief wonder of Professor Arroner’s Astonishing
Marvels! Inked with every story from the Arabian Nights, illustrations both saucy and satirical!’
He grins and twirls about some more.
‘For you, gentlemen, and fine ladies of distinction, I think something salty shall suffice. I shall tell the “Tale of the Mermaid”.’
He contorts his body into various postures, swelling first the muscles of his arms, then his thighs, then his shoulders. As he does, the pictures step forward for attention, or stand back to let another take prime position. The small crowd oohs and aahs. He bends his left arm at the elbow and a woman jiggles bright pink breasts and flicks an emerald tail.
‘I caught her in the South Seas, when I was fishing for turtles. The native sailors would have gutted and pickled her – but not me! She was the greatest prize a sailor could ask for. They told me she was cursed! That I was a fool! But did I listen? Do you think I listened?’
‘No!’ sings out the little gathering.
‘No, indeed. Think of it: at sea for six long months without a woman’s touch.’ He winks again. ‘Ah! She was fishy!’
He sniffs loudly and the men snigger; I am not quick enough to accompany them.
‘Fishier than a dockside trollop!’ he cackles, to an answering chorus from the women, and this time I am faster.
‘But, oh, she had skills that would put the most seasoned whore to shame. She was flexible as a flounder! Lascivious as a lamprey! Tight as a turbot! She’d take it any way I wanted.’
The snickering grows in intensity.
‘A woman’s touch! When your only companions are cannibals! Demons in human form!’
He turns about and shoves down the waistband of his britches, baring his left buttock to reveal a devil’s face, all teeth and long scarlet tongue.
‘A portrait,’ he whispers. ‘Your actual portrait, taken from life, of one of my companions!’
There are exclamations of disbelief. He stops his narrative.
The Palace of Curiosities Page 13