After her resurrection, St Christina had always liked to say her prayers balancing on top of a farm gate, or curled up in a ball like a hedgehog. Since she was obviously as mad as a hatter, people had kept clapping her in leg-irons, but she was not only capable of defying gravity, she was an accomplished escapologist. She had lived to be a very old woman and even the king had come to pay her homage, as a very holy person.
‘Oh, my,’ Joe said, and he put the book down. ‘I never knew that. Did you know that? She was an agile and resourceful woman.’
‘Joe,’ Alice said, ‘don’t tease her.’
‘She doesn’t mind,’ Joe said. ‘Isn’t that right, Chrissie? You don’t mind when I tease you?’
‘Joe,’ Alice said, ‘she’s just a baby.’
Christina had paused to gather her dignity. ‘I don’t pray in a ball,’ she said. ‘And I don’t pray on a gate. And I’m not having that saint. I hate her.’
Joe loved it. ‘But you can’t hate a saint,’ he said.
‘I can,’ Christina said. ‘I can hate anyone. I can hate everybody if I like.’
Their teacher was Mrs Alfieri. While Alice and Joe considered her to be an incomparable first-grade teacher, Christina had found her something of a provocation from the start. She spent much of each morning before milk and cookies personifying the numbers and the letters.
‘Our friend Mr Five cuts a very fine figure,’ she said, her voice affecting jovial, baritone strut. ‘His back is nice and straight and his tummy is b-i-i-i-g and round.’ Here she paused to draw, first a near-vertical straight line on the chalk board and then a clockwise, circular appendage dangling from it, that made the whole figure into an upside-down cup hook.
‘Finally,’ she said, with quite unnecessary enthusiasm, ‘he has the neatest little hat on top.’
‘But he has no head,’ Christina said out loud.
The class was then required to draw rows of fine, fat-bellied Mr Fives marching identically from left to right. Sometimes Christina’s fives marched unaccountably about-turn and faced their neighbours eye to eye, bellies touching. And when one of her own neighbours at the table joggled her by mistake, causing her pencil to slide in an arc across the page from the nether half of our friend Mr Five’s spherical belly, Christina immediately made capital of it, playing to her youthful audience.
‘My Mr Five has been to the bathroom in his pants,’ she said. It caused a titter among her admirers.
Christina had acquired many admirers among her peers, where Pam had markedly few. In this respect going to school had altered the balance between them. At school Christina could pull in the crowd. She fell naturally into the role of rule-maker. Unless your shoes had buckles on them, you could not play in the sand. Unless you were wearing blue about your person, the easels were not for you. Great numbers of admiring little girls anxiously searched for blue flecks on their clothing, or they whined at home for new shoes. They jumped to meet her requirements and jostled to sit beside her at story-time.
None the less, it seemed that Mrs Alfieri was not altogether satisfied, since Christina had overheard her one afternoon in conference with Joe.
‘She’s a dear little girl,’ the pedagogue ventured astutely. ‘But I have always detected an edge. Christina has an edge, my dear sir. Is there anything at all about her background that you feel you would like to tell me?’ They were seated, both of them, on little upright grade-one chairs. Joe found the question invasive. His response was to deflect it. And when Christina heard him, it gave her a certain thrill; a thrill to be in league with him against this homely promoter of fat-bellied Mr Five, this pedlar of blunt-ended paper-cutting scissors.
‘I have an edge myself, Mrs Alfieri,’ he said. ‘I guess Christina takes after me.’
Pam was not a child’s idea of heaven. That perception of her belonged to the adults. Indeed, she was so much favoured by adults that this worked, sometimes, to disadvantage her in the eyes of her peers.
‘A remarkable child,’ the school staff murmured each to each. ‘An exceptional child. So poised. So gifted.’ And it was left to the elder Sister Antony, a rare survivor from the old school in more ways than one, to cause the most distress.
‘The child is full of God,’ she said. ‘She would make a beautiful nun.’ It was a comment made to Mrs Alfieri, but it was none the less perfectly audible to at least one-third of the class.
That night, after dark, alone in the bedroom which the girls still chose to share, Christina was astonished to hear the sound of her sister’s weeping.
‘I don’t want to be nun,’ Pam said. ‘I want to be mommy.’ Christina got into bed with her. ‘Well, I want to be a juggler,’ she said.
For Christina, the image of the juggler was one that recurred, always with clarity, but always with a clarity more luminous than real. In Christina’s mind the juggler had grown glamorous with the passing of those summers now gone. He had grown taller than the distance between his naked feet and the pinnacle of his Hallowe’en hat. Taller and stranger, more deft and more radiant. He was perpendicular as a cathedral; as a castle in a dream.
He had been standing on the steps of the war memorial in Granny P’s home town. Christina, at the time, was within weeks of turning four. He was making balls turn circles in the air so that they seemed to surround his head like the stars around the head of the Queen of Heaven.
‘How does he do that?’ Christina asked, but her grandmother merely tugged her on towards the car.
‘But how does he do that?’ Christina said again. ‘What does he do with those balls?’
‘Oh, he’s a poor daft thing,’ her grandmother said. She kissed Christina’s cheek and buckled her into her seat-belt. ‘Well, my lady. Who’s got some fine new shoes, then?’ she said.
Christina tapped together the toes of her new patent leather shoes. English Start-Rites with petal cut-outs and T-bars looped into ankle-straps.
‘Thank you, Granny. I love my shoes,’ she said.
Granny P kissed her again. She fastened her seat-belt. Then she took a bag of Devon toffees from the cubby-hole.
‘Munchies, darling?’ she said, and she tweaked Christina’s cheek.
Christina began to suck and chew. It was not that Granny P was exciting company, as she realized even then, but it was fun to be so fawned on and so favoured. Her maternal grandmother was the only adult person, she thought, who blatantly preferred her to her sister; who invited her on outings while Alice and Pam stayed at home. Admittedly, Christina and Granny P shared a taste for consumerism which Pam and Alice did not, but her preference appeared to go deeper.
Granny P made a half-circle round the war memorial and stopped at the traffic lights. Then she headed on up the hill. At the top of the hill were some roadworks which caused her to take a brief detour through the suburbs.
‘Now, there’s a little house that your Grampy built,’ she said, suddenly and unexpectedly. ‘Before he passed away.’ Old Grampy P, Alice’s father, had been a builder before he died. ‘Mummy had a nice young man at that time,’ Granny P continued. ‘He lived in that little house. Your Grampy let him live in it because we were all so fond of him.’
Christina’s mind, being engaged with the juggler, had little opportunity for involvement with the Nice Young Man of whom she had never previously heard.
‘Of course, he lives in a much grander house nowadays,’ Granny P said with approval. ‘He’s done very well for himself.’ She pulled out the bag of toffees once more and offered it to her grand-daughter. Christina took not one, but two, since Granny P was so clearly in fond mood.
‘Mummy nearly married him,’ Granny P said. ‘They were close as close for a while. Ah, well, it’s a funny old life.’
Christina sank her teeth into the flesh of the toffees. She had put both of them into her mouth at once and had arranged them to left and right, like succulent lintels across her lower molars. She was in no position quite to appreciate what Granny P was telling her, and she allowed herself, instead, to
imagine that it was the juggler whom her mother had nearly married. It thrilled her to reflect upon her closeness to the juggler’s stunning talent.
Granny P shifted gear with a scarcely audible sigh. She was musing inwardly upon her own unreconciled regret. If only Alice had stayed in England, she thought. If only Alice had married her nice, familiar young man. If only that child’s wretched mother had not so inconveniently seen fit to die and thereby precipitate Alice’s rushing to the deathbed, there to embroil herself with an extravagant stranger. Granny P had never liked the child’s mother, had never quite trusted her. And now, ever since, there had been ‘that man’. He had risen up like the woman’s spiritual heir. He was cast in much the same mould. Over the top, the pair of them. Neither of them ever quite straight. Both too full of fancy and fiction. Casting spells with words.
It was not altogether reasonable; it was not altogether kind, but Granny P could not quite forgive the dead woman’s child – that dark-eyed orphaned child who had been so effective in cementing Alice’s union. She turned for consolation to smile at dear little Chrissie who, in her appearance, so dimpled, so small, so blonde, was reassuringly like Alice. There were moments when it gave her considerable satisfaction to dwell on the fact that Christina had been born within seven months of Alice’s meeting with ‘that man’. It had always been patently obvious to her that Christina had not been premature. That was how Alice had explained it to her, but it was surely a funny sort of premature, she thought, that came weighing nearly seven pounds.
Later that day, when Christina walked back into town, she was surprised that it took her so long. She had never made the journey on foot before and in the car it took no time at all. Since she had not anticipated so epic a journey, she had simply slipped out through her grandmother’s front door and had made her way beyond it, via the small front garden where, for both that summer and the previous one, she had so delighted in helping her grandmother to plant out beds of lupins and delphiniums.
Now, as she proceeded beyond the gate, she walked through streets of houses similar to her grandmother’s and then through streets of closer-packed terraces that fronted on to the pavement.
When she got to the traffic lights, she stopped and waited for the bleeper. A red bus drew up and waited courteously for her to cross. Then she reached the widest street that led to the war memorial.
It was getting towards tea-time when she approached the juggler. He had just decided to call it a day and had begun to count his money. Having done so, he shovelled all the coins into his coat pocket and he stuffed the balls in on top. They made a fat bulge, like a cheek, Christina thought, too greedily stuffed with cake.
‘Excuse me,’ she said, ‘but how do you do that with all those balls?’
The juggler was extremely amiable. There was something unusual about his demeanour that brought to mind the inside of an old wind-up clock. He almost ticked and whirred.
‘I’m just off to have a cup of tea now,’ he said. ‘I’ve got all this money, you see.’
‘I’ll come with you,’ Christina said. ‘If I am allowed.’ She scampered alongside him as he strode along, so lofty perpendicular, in his tall Hallowe’en hat. Now and then he stopped to look in the litter bins along the way and then Christina stopped too.
The café was in a side street. It was tiny, like a chapel, with high-backed seats like pews built out in rows at right angles to the central aisle. Its windows ran with steam.
At the counter, the juggler ordered two cups of tea and two plates of sausages, eggs and fries.
‘But I don’t like sausages,’ Christina said. ‘See, I don’t like to eat meat.’
‘All right,’ said the juggler. ‘We’ll make it egg and fries twice. Help yourself to sugar. Have as much as you like. Go on.’
‘Thank you,’ Christina said. The sugar was in a large tin at the counter and the spoon was fixed to a string.
‘I like it very sweet,’ Christina said.
‘Me too,’ said the juggler. ‘One, two, three and four for luck.’
They sat down and drank their tea. On the table there was a red plastic tomato and a brown plastic tomato, both rather sticky to the touch. In the next pew along was an old man with no teeth who was gnawing on the rim of his tea-cup. There were two wooden notices on the wall above the counter that Christina could not read, but she could see that both were made out of slices cut from tree trunks with the bark still on the outside.
‘What do they say,’ she said, ‘those two notices?’
The juggler read them for her, one by one.
‘ “Patrons are requested not to consume their own food on the premises”,’ he said. ‘That’s what the first one says.’
‘Who are the patrons?’ Christina said.
‘Well, that’s us,’ he said.
‘Then why can’t we eat our own food?’ Christina said. ‘Have we got to eat somebody else’s food?’
‘I’ll tell you what,’ said the juggler, ‘when our food comes, we can swap plates.’
Christina giggled with pleasure at the idea, since they were both going to have the same. Egg and fries twice.
‘Egg and fries twice,’ called out the woman at the counter, and the juggler went to fetch the plates.
‘Shall I tell you what the other notice says?’ he said. He had paused to spread red and brown sauce with the back of his knife. ‘It says, “Do not ask for credit as a refusal might offend”.’
‘That doesn’t make any sense,’ Christina said.
‘No,’ said the juggler. ‘It doesn’t.’
‘But you didn’t ask for credit, did you?’ Christina said admiringly. ‘I’m glad.’ She envisaged that ‘credit’ was probably the local English for crudités, a thing that her father was wont to serve up occasionally, along with his homemade mayonnaise – the latter always so lamentably deficient in vinegar. The juggler, she considered, had excellent taste in food and had sensibly not asked for such a thing.
‘You asked for egg and fries,’ Christina said.
‘Twice,’ the juggler said proudly.
‘Yes,’ Christina said. ‘Twice. You can be my Nearly Father if you like.’ The juggler smiled his broad amiable smile. ‘Pam has nearly two fathers,’ she confided expansively, ‘but she doesn’t know who one of them is. That’s because her mother died and she didn’t really know either.’
The juggler pointed his knife hospitably at the plastic tomato. ‘Have some more ketchup if you like,’ he said. ‘Go on, there’s plenty of it.’
‘Thank you,’ Christina said. ‘But can I please have some of those balls?’
‘I’m sorry,’ said the juggler, ‘but I’ve lost some of them already. That’s why I’m juggling with my socks.’ He pulled out one of the balls and unravelled it, demonstrating that it was nothing but an artfully rolled-up sock and none too clean, come to that.
‘But how do you do that?’ Christina said. ‘With all those balls?’
The juggler exhumed two of his balls and he placed them in her left hand. Then he balled up the sock once more and he placed it in the palm of her right. ‘Always start with the hand with two,’ he said. ‘And always pass with the right.’ He ran through the routine with her twice, moving her hands with the balls like a puppeteer. Then he took back the two balls and put them into his pocket.
‘You can keep my sock,’ he said. ‘And I can roll both your socks into balls. How’s that to be getting on with?’
Christina undid the buckles of her new shoes. She pulled off her socks and put them on the table. After that she did up her shoes again while the juggler made her socks into balls. Then she slipped off her seat and she kissed the juggler on the cheek.
‘I think I have to go now,’ she said. She walked down the aisle towards the door of the café. Then she turned.
‘I’ll come and see you tomorrow,’ she said.
The last she saw of the juggler was the jaunty wave of his fork. She felt it was in her honour that he held it so high in the air.
When Christina walked in, weary and barefoot, all hell was breaking loose. Joe had just come in off his train from London and had found his wife and his mother-in-law beside themselves with worry. The women had explored all possible avenues but their efforts had come to nothing and dear little Chrissie was lost.
Joe was instantly suffused with terror. ‘So call the police, in God’s name,’ he said angrily. ‘What is the matter with you guys?’
And then, as Granny P turned to do so, the front door quietly opened and shut and the three of them breathed relief.
‘Oh, my dearest darling,’ Alice said. ‘My baby. Oh, Chrissie, my sweet one!’ She folded Christina in her comforting arms and dampened her head with a few unobtrusive tears.
‘I had my tea with the juggler,’ Christina said. ‘So I don’t need any supper.’
‘Oh, my sainted aunt!’ said Granny P in a shadowy, weak sort of voice. ‘She means that half-wit by the memorial. She must have walked all the way back into town.’ Granny P paused tenderly to survey the embracing figures before her. ‘And where are your shoes, my little love?’ she said, her voice all gentle solicitation.
‘I took them off,’ Christina said. ‘But I couldn’t carry them because I had to juggle. They hurt me because I couldn’t wear my socks and I had to walk all the way home.’
‘No socks?’ Granny said.
‘I had to juggle with my socks,’ Christina said. ‘But then it was too hard for me.’
‘And where are your socks now, my angel-pie?’ Granny P asked her. ‘And weren’t those your prettiest little lacy socks?’
Christina glanced up just in time to see that her father was staring at her intently.
‘Valerie,’ he said, ‘if I might interrupt this affecting display of concern for my daughter’s footwear –’ He spoke in a tone just this side of rudeness. ‘Chrissie, come here,’ he said.
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