by Liz Jensen
‘I believe that time will show you, Dr Baldicoot, that it is Mr Darwin – and certain sections of society – who have a malfunction of the brain,’ I said. ‘Five years hence, I do assure you, this ridiculous craze will have died away, and the crisis we are living through will appear as nothing more than a season of ill-judgement and fashionable whimsy.’
Dr Baldicoot shrugged and poked at his abominable pipe, and said we would see what we would see, and I smiled to myself, proud of my father’s stand. For the controversy over the Origin of Species united our small family of two most happily, and some of my fondest memories of him, before madness struck, date from that year, when together we spent many hours poring over Darwin’s profane tome, by the light of the candle in the kitchen, the flag-stoned floor twinkling with salt. And as we read, our concern about his heresies grew.
For was Mr Darwin not making three uniquely dangerous propositions?
1. God’s word in the Book of Genesis was a lie.
2. All life – including human life – developed by a gradual and haphazard process of evolution, from basic, humble life-forms such as the sardine, and that man himself was by implication but a glorified baboon.
3. That – quod erat demonstrandum – our faith and my father’s life’s work was as nought.
It was the third item on this list that was soon to plant the seed of madness in Parson Phelps’ poor brain. Had I only heeded the words of Dr Baldicoot, and pulled my father back from the edge of the abyss! But I had not known he was standing there, and I with him. I had thought we were safe.
But the world had begun to tilt.
There is a fallacy among city dwellers that goes as follows: there are four seasons in a year. Yet as anyone who lives outside a city knows, there are not four seasons in the year, but twelve. Each of the main seasons, spring, summer, autumn and winter, is divided into three distinct sections: the beginning, the middle, and the end, stretches of time in which certain preordained natural miracles occur, such as the forsythia blooms, the razorbill mates, the beech-leaf falls, or the bat hibernates. I explain this to demonstrate how regulated our lives were in Thunder Spit; how governed by the wheel of the calendar. It was early autumn, for example, when my mother died. It was mid-autumn the following year, when the Flood came and I experienced my disturbing visions and the gourd plant sprouted. And it was early winter – November – when the first frosts were biting, that the Travelling Fair of Danger and Delight came to Judlow. And it was there, in a single minute of a single hour of a single day, that a portcullis slammed down behind me, marking the close of that season of my life called childhood.
My age: fifteen. It is a Sunday afternoon, and for my own subversive reasons, I have just told my unsuspecting father a triple untruth: that despite the winter chill, I wish to go to the schoolhouse to meditate, and conjugate Latin verbs, and read the Bible. Far from arousing his suspicions, Parson Phelps’ reaction to my elaborate lie is one of surprise and pleasure. He ruffles my coarse thatch of hair with his hand.
‘I admire your dedication, Tobias,’ he says. He is gutting sardines to make a pie. ‘It does a credit to the upbringing your mother gave you.’
I bite my lip at his mention of my mother. ‘We do not know where you came from, Tobias,’ she had whispered to me on her deathbed, ravaged by the cough, eaten alive by the Thing, and clasping her precious gourd to her breast. ‘But promise me that you will never visit the Travelling Fair of Danger and Delight.’
Which was precisely what I was about to do. For why would a mother make a child swear to such a thing, if the Fair did not house a secret? Conscious of my imminent betrayal of her deathbed wishes, I hang my head. But Parson Phelps misinterprets the gesture.
‘And modest, too,’ he says fondly, making the sign of the cross first over me, and then the sardines. Yet as I gulp back my shame, my spine tingles with the anticipation of the illicit.
It is only natural, is it not, for a child to be curious about his origins?
It was only this morning that my father had delivered his annual sermon – to a crowded congregation – about the evils of triviality, to coincide with the arrival of the Fair, an event which came a close second to the great enemy, science, as a target for his personal wrath. The church-going families of Thunder Spit – the Tobashes, the Peat-Hoves, the Balls, the Mulveys, the Barks, the Hayters, the Harcourts, the Cleggs and Mrs Sequin had all listened attentively, as my father, preaching at full volume, his breath leaving him in chilled puffs and mingling with the sunlight that streamed through the stained glass, held forth with passion. Tommy and I, somewhat less attentive than the others, sat crushed in a back pew; we had been to the far end of the Spit to collect conkers from the gnarled little horse-chestnut tree, which had produced a bumper crop, and our pockets were full to bursting.
A certain Godless event was taking place in Judlow, my father was telling his flock. An event which marked – in God’s eyes – a low point to an otherwise wholesome year of toil. An event which should be avoided in much the same way as one might avoid a venomous snake.
The congregation nodded sagely.
‘The magic is here, in Nature and in our hearts,’ Parson Phelps had warned solemnly. ‘We have no need for man-made entertainment; it is all around us, God-given, for which we thank Him.’
I had heard it all before: about how birdsong is God’s way of making music for us, and lobsters are for our nourishment but also for our entertainment because of the way they change colour in boiling water, and wave their claws at us. About how God thought of Man first, when He created the animals, sending camels to live in the desert where they can function with precious little water and so be of use to the desiccated bedouin, and keeping lions in the jungle, well out of our way. Why, my father argued, should anybody need to look at a painting, when he can gaze at the wing of a butterfly? Et cetera: he never mentioned the Fair by name, but he took care to damn it with his every word.
‘He has never been to it,’ Tommy muttered to me, as we shuffled about under our pew, retrieving the rolling conkers that had spilled from our bulging pockets. ‘So how does he know?’
For my own part, to house such a thought in my own bosom would have been heretical; I was only just now beginning to question my father’s omniscience, and every time I did so, I felt guilty and ashamed. But as I returned to my hard seat and polished my largest conker with my handkerchief and listened to the continuation and climax of Parson Phelps’ righteous drone, I realised that my father’s sermonising only increased my desire to venture into the forbidden land of the Travelling Fair, whose very toffee apples spelt moral depravity.
And so it came to pass that on that same afternoon, despite God’s most specific wishes on the subject, Tommy and I set out for Judlow, a town that boasted nine shops, a pub, a mayor, a Sir Eustace and Lady Antonia Yarble living at the Big House, a slaughterhouse, and a newfangled closed sewer system, that sent the town’s waste trickling into the sea. I had not visited Judlow more than ten times in my life, and on each occasion it had felt like venturing abroad. (The thought of going to Hunchburgh, where my father had studied theology, was even more daring, like voyaging through Parson Phelps’ vision of space to the constellations. From Hunchburgh, I imagined, one could look down on the world like the Man in the Moon.) But although the excitement of our adventure gave me additional energy, my gait hindered me, and it soon became abundantly apparent that I could never keep pace with Tommy for the full three miles of our journey.
‘Hop on my shoulders,’ he suggested, when we had left the village behind us. ‘Else we’ll never make it before dusk.’
How I loved this! My unorthodox transport, coupled with the guilty pleasure of transgression, charged the atmosphere of the day with a tingling light. Swaying up there on Tommy’s shoulders, I could see for miles: the sparkling sea, the whirling ridges of cloud, the distant hum of the town – all filled my blood with the sharp, unrivalled thrill of freedom. At the edge of the promontory, the hawthorn and the
bracken stopped, and other shrubs began. Mainland shrubs.
‘I can smell it!’ I yelled. ‘I can smell the Fair!’
Here Tommy set me down, and we sniffed the air. Sure enough, we caught the scent of animals and rotting straw and burnt sugar. As the wind gusted towards us, it bore with it, too, the faint sounds of screaming and laughter.
Ten minutes later, we entered the swirling, chattering crowds, and I immediately lost sight of Tommy. I began to panic, leaping up to catch a glimpse of my friend over the heads of the milling strangers, but the next thing I knew, there he was, back at my side, thrusting a famous Danger and Delight toffee apple under my nose. He had stolen two. The toffee apple contained real sugar, he told me, harvested by manacled slaves in cruel overseas plantations. It was the best thing I had ever tasted. The Ten-Foot Woman swung past us, smoking a clay pipe and showering everybody with confetti, and I giggled with joy. Walking arm in arm with Tommy, licking my toffee apple and surveying the scene, I soon realised that there were faces here from my father’s congregation. Tommy spotted them, too.
‘Look! There’s Johnny Clegg at the coconut shy!’
‘And Ron Tobash! Over there! He’s guessing the weight of that pumpkin!’
We saw others, too: Mr Mulvey scolding his son Johnny, and Farmer Harcourt and his family braying with laughter as they descended the helter-skelter, and Mrs Sequin arguing with an urchin who she claimed had stolen her purse. Seeing all these citizens of Thunder Spit enjoying themselves thus, it seemed that my father’s sermon had had the opposite effect to that intended. I felt ashamed on his behalf, and, conscious of my own betrayal, pulled my hat low over my brow.
‘Let’s look at the Two-Headed Snake,’ I suggested to Tommy, eager to remain incognito. We paid a farthing each, and the one-eyed man in charge of the Snake whipped back a curtain to reveal a glass case with a tangled rope-like creature coiled within.
‘It’s two snakes bound together,’ Tommy pronounced, after inspecting the reptile closely, ‘with some kind of glue.’
‘Time’s up,’ snapped the man, and whipped the curtain back. Disappointed in the fraud, we headed for the world-famous Mechanical Millipede, an iron and wood construction which was so big that, had it been transported into the church at Thunder Spit, it would have obliterated the altar and spilled out into the nave and the vestry. We rode on this contraption three times, so that Tommy could understand its engineering, which, he informed me, wriggling out from underneath it later, involved a system of interlocking cog-wheels and a steam-powered piston accelerator mechanism, designed by a genius.
‘Oi, Tobias, come here!’
Tommy was now hopping about at the edge of a big crowd standing around a pen that contained a piebald horse. I joined him: I stood on tiptoe, and Tommy peered through the elbow of the man in front of him. A red-faced gent was yelling questions at the horse, and the creature was answering by stamping its front hooves on the earth.
It was fed sugar lumps as reward for its intelligence.
‘It’s incredible!’ said Tommy, commenting on its arithmetic abilities.
But I wasn’t so sure. ‘It’s a trick,’ I told him. ‘No animal is that clever.’
We wandered off.
According to my recollection of that day, it was when we visited the Man-Eating Wart-hog that the nervousness began to engulf me – a nervousness so strong and so sudden as to have an odour all its own. There was a high enclosure of sticks, which we entered. And there the creature was, slumped in a filthy cage, licking its hairy accoutrements next to a pile of fetid meat-chunks. He looked up, and although I had the time to note, in a rational manner, that he resembled in many ways the illustration I had previously seen of such an animal in Hanker’s World, its eyes unnerved me immediately. They were a colour midway between orange and ochre, with vertical irises, like narrow doors into another world. The smell that emanated from him made me shudder. It was the raucous odour of captivity and rotting meat, which though hitherto alien, seemed suddenly as familiar to me as the scent of wax candles in the church. As Tommy and I approached, toffee apples still in our hands, the creature, a pig-like animal covered with hideous carbuncles, stared at me, sniffed, and gave a sudden, low grunt of hatred.
I was by now well accustomed to animals reacting disfavourably to my presence, but the reaction of the Wart-hog – perhaps because I knew him to be a man-eating beast – unnerved me. My nervousness deepened, and I felt faint, as though at the periphery of my vision, beyond my control and my comprehension, something invisible and dangerous swarmed. I caught my breath, and grabbed Tommy’s arm.
‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘He’s only a big piggy-wig. Eh, porky?’ And he laughed.
My head spun. As the Wart-hog’s ugly bristle-covered snout and tusks rammed up close to my face, and his unblinking orange-ochre eyes stared me out, I shuddered. Then, as the creature grunted ominously again, I felt my hackles rise in a sudden, unaccountable fear. Why did this hideous, grunting creature seem suddenly familiar to me in a way I could neither fathom nor describe?
Puzzled and shamed by my now raging sense of anxiety, I tugged my eyes away from the Wart-hog’s gaze, and turned to leave. Tommy was already walking out, oblivious to my discomfort. ‘Come along,’ he said. ‘There’s a show starting in the Tent of Miracles.’
We do not know where you came from, she had said. I regretted coming here, and I wanted nothing more than to go home, but I dared not tell Tommy this. As we turned our backs on the creature in his cage, and headed towards the tent, the nervousness came with me, and I could not shake it off.
By the time we arrived at the Tent of Miracles we had no money left, of the shilling Tommy had stolen from his father, risking the metal bottom-whisk. When the guard’s back was turned, we slipped inside; Tommy out of curiosity, and I out of the feeling that here, away from the Wart-hog’s orange-ochre eyes, I might find shelter.
Foolish hope.
Inside the darkened tent, a crowd stood around a small podium, staring at the creature upon it. It was her face that you saw first: it was alarmingly beautiful, and ageless, and wild. Her hair shot upwards, scraped into a tight knot that sat balanced upon her head like a ball. At first, her head seemed simply to float there, in boxed suspension, white against the darkness of the sheeted backdrop, but as our eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, I realised that the dark frame that housed her face in fact consisted of her own black-clad legs and feet. From her neck, an oval locket hung down, trembling and catching the light, flashing it around the room. Tommy and I drew a breath and looked at one another. No wonder Parson Phelps had preached against this place from the safety of his pulpit. There was an aura of disgrace about the little ballerina, but pride, too, and a feral quality which increased my nervousness enormously. Tommy, too, was jiggling at his conkers in a disturbed fashion. We stared at the spectacle of the little figure, her legs arched up from behind her, her back bent like a scorpion’s. We stared at her for a long time. Then slowly, as the tent filled up, she began to loosen the grip of her shins and feet, and move slowly, slowly, and with great precision, to unwind herself. It was absurd, and frightening, but also gracious and miraculous, like watching a camel successfully passing itself through the eye of a needle.
As she emerged slowly from her scorpion position, we saw that she was of diminutive stature. Her whole torso, like her legs and feet, was clad in the tight-fitting black of an unbroken silhouette, except for the stiff little skirt which stuck out horizontally from the waist. Something physical and visceral stirred within me, twisting my guts.
‘Mildred is punishing me,’ I told Tommy. ‘Let’s go.’
‘No. I’m staying,’ said Tommy firmly. ‘Look, she’s tying herself in another knot!’
And sure enough, she is on her belly again, balancing a tray on each foot. On the trays are tiny glasses of Madeira sherry. It seems you can pay twopence to come and take a glass, and drink it, then put it back on the tray. ‘Sherry comes from Spain,’ whispers Tommy. ‘It ma
kes you drunk just to sniff it.’ I try to refrain from breathing at all; God forbid that Parson Phelps should discover me intoxicated! Now, still balancing her tray and a dozen little glasses, and still bunched in her uncomfortable knot, the woman has launched into song. I strain to listen over the babble of voices. There is a tune to it, of sorts, but no words, and for some reason I find her singing unspeakably unsettling and poignant. She has a small, cracked voice, and the clatter of notes that emerges sounds oddly familiar, though I cannot place them.
Maybe it was that lonely, wordless singing. Or maybe it was what happened afterwards. Either way, unaccountably, I found myself suddenly in tears, a curious, nagging sensation of sorrow mixed with happiness tugging at my innards and infuriating Mildred.
She had stopped, suddenly, mid-note. At first I thought she had merely missed a beat, and would resume her song, but it was as though she had lost interest in her own performance, and simply switched herself off, for there was a jagged hush. A few murmurs began to swell among the small crowd, and Tommy shifted from foot to foot.
‘Get on with it then,’ he muttered.
I drew in a sudden breath, and swayed on my feet. She was looking at me! Staring into my eyes! I could swear it!
It was when she flung her tray to the ground that I began to shake uncontrollably. It felt as though I were drowning all over again. I wasn’t alone in my fear, for I heard several women scream as she hurled the tray. It flew high into the air as though slowed down by an invisible hand. Then it reached the height of its arc and with a brutal suddenness, went crashing to the floor. There were more screams and gasps as the sherry glasses smashed, tinkling and sending up a spray of golden droplets that smelt sweet and harsh and forbidden.
‘Oh dear God!’ I murmur.
Now she is unwinding herself, but in a hurried fashion, pulling at the knot of her own body with impatience. Her limbs free, she’s sniffing the air, ignoring the crowd who are beginning to shuffle about nervously, and to hurl little balls of paper and gumdrops in her direction.