Later, in the drawing room of our modest Gasthof, the Señor pressed me on the issue of my withdrawn state. I found I could not dissemble; even though I had sought the perfect time and place for my revelation I stammered out my intention to him, and his joyous reply shocked me, given his own proclaimed Godlessness.
“Fabelhaft!” he said. “My dear Violet, I am delighted that you have reached the same decision as I. You are far too delectable to belong to any man on Earth, and so we must dedicate you to God. Luckily, I am in the position to help you in your calling. There is a wonderful abbey in the hill surrounding Salzburg itself and the Abbess is a long-standing personal friend of mine. Allow me to introduce you to her.”
I didn’t ask how he had come by such an acquaintance, although the question did cross my mind. Instead, I thanked him, and before I knew it I was wearing a black robe and sneaking off before matins to sing in the hills, throwing out my arms in my uncontained joy of the glory of life. The Abbess tolerated my behaviour – being the wise, benevolent sort – but eventually she confessed to me that she thought my calling might lie in a different direction after all. That was when she packed me off to look after the seventeen wayward children of a local Air Commodore.
It was all downhill from there.
Being a nun is always better in principle than reality, I think. My time in Salzburg taught me that. Get out there and grab life. But grab it with the right man. Don’t fall into the clutches of men like the good-looking shorts-wearing man at thirty-one. He’s nice to look at but I’m betting he can’t be trusted.
I wish I was young enough to find out.
There he goes again, off to the park. Past my window without once looking around. Without once seeing me.
I really did want to be a nun. I’d read a book about a nun who went to the colonies and helped lepers. I wasn’t so keen on the leper bit, but generally helping people and looking serene seemed to be the best thing a girl could do with her life. But not being Catholic put a spanner in the works. I still remember my mum explaining to me that nobody really became nuns anymore, particularly when they were Church of England to start with. Still, I thought that I could be a nun in spirit rather than in body, and I worked hard towards that. I never went near the local boys and scowled at any who came near me. This was back when girls went to school not to learn, but to meet. They were meant to meet their husbands. I didn’t, of course, and so I was packed off to secretarial college and, in between typing up to eighty words per minute and studying shorthand, I met Ivan.
He was the son of my teacher. He used to wait for his mother outside the building by the bike shed, and he made a comment about my bike. Nice saddle, he said. I was getting a bit fed up of the nun act. Nobody seemed to notice my shining inner goodness. So I thought I’d find out how the other half lived.
I didn’t know it back then – boys like thirty-one and Ivan like to give bicycles a test drive, but they’re not interested in making the down payment. By the time I found out he’d got me pregnant he’d already moved on to a newer model.
Right, time for Tom’s elevenses. Apparently things will really start to go downhill fast in a few weeks or so, so the doctor said I should get as much rest as possible before then. But between providing round-the-clock care and writing a memoir, I can’t see that happening.
* * *
Of course, things turned ugly in Austria.
I don’t want to go into the details, but I managed to escape by disguising myself as a ticket inspector and taking the Munich Express out of Salzburg. It was an ill-fated decision; we never did reach Munich. The train was diverted before we’d crossed the German border and it gained speed until it seemed that the mountains, pastures and triangular roofs of the farms were blurring together into brown-green streaks, and all the charm of the Grossglockner Pass was lost.
The other travellers began to get nervous. A few asked me questions, demanding to know what was happening, and I lied as well as I could, describing snowstorms in Munich, but it did not persuade them for long. Then the real ticket inspector came into the compartment and my disguise was blown. I was marched to the baggage cart and locked in, for the authorities to deal with when we reached… where? Some unknown destination. Meanwhile, the train sped on.
When it finally shuddered to a standstill, the voices of the passengers rose, and rose, and then the screaming started. I found all my reserves of courage and tenacity had been exhausted. The largest suitcase in the baggage cart – an enormous maroon portmanteau – was the only refuge I could find. Upon opening it, frothy confections of dancing costumes spewed forth, frills and feathers and lace lining galore; I pushed them back in and made a nest for myself like a mouse in a shoebox. I pulled the lid down, and waited, and waited. Eventually, somehow, I fell asleep.
The jarring of my spine through the layers of tulle and tinsel awoke me – the case was being lifted. There was the sensation of movement; was I being carried? The feathers tickled my face and the sequins scratched my hands. I realised I had grasped fistfuls of the material and was squeezing it, squeezing it tightly, trying to release the agony of fear from my body.
A shock, like a slap in face – the case must have been dropped. I felt pain in my neck and back, and thanked God for the costumes that padded my hiding place. I waited until the ache subsided, listening intently, and the sensation of claustrophobia began to creep up over my brain, crowding out all other fears. What if the lid had been locked? What if I was trapped, forever, in this case? The air was thick in my lungs; I couldn’t wait a moment longer. I pushed against the lid and it popped open, offering no resistance. Bright light burned my eyes and I curled up in the case once more as a reflex. After a time, I began to make out shapes rotating above me – a triangle, a circle, a square – all pieces of coloured glass spinning on an elaborate series of wires that covered the ceiling. The tall windows at the end of the grandiose hall let in glorious sunlight, illuminating the glass to provide me with one of the most beautiful sights of my life – the show of colour and movement of those ever-swaying mobiles.
And then I looked around me.
I was surrounded by cases, unopened; the rest of the contents of the train’s baggage cart were spread out over the floor of the hall, in random order, and every piece of it was spattered in blood. Blood had soaked into the fabric holdalls and turned the material black. It had dried onto the leather suit-holders in crusted patterns and it had caked the plastic luggage sets in gouts.
The smell hit me. It was the fresh tang of the butcher’s block, multiplied a hundredfold, so that I gagged and pulled free one of the petticoats from the portmanteau to cover my face. This was an atrocity that had only just happened, around me, while I slept. Whoever committed such a terrible act, to leave this gory evidence, had to be nearby.
How could I escape? The double doors opposite me and the tall windows were too obvious; who could guess what would await me there? I turned around and spied a small grille that had to lead to an air duct against the back wall. There was a chance that I could squeeze inside.
I climbed to it, over the soaking, stinking cases, feeling the gore form a slick on my hands and ooze through the material of my trousers. Within moments I was sodden and barely able to restrain myself from screaming, but I crawled on. The grille was loose, thank God, and I was able to prise it off the wall. Yes, it would admit me; the blood on my clothes slicked the passage and facilitated my entrance. A long metal duct led away from that room of horror and I started to wriggle as fast as I could, praying that it would not narrow and leave me trapped forever.
I crawled onwards and onwards. Time had no meaning. Nor did my exhaustion. I had to succeed.
I have no idea how much ground I actually covered before I popped out of a small hole in the centre of a giant polished sculpture outside King’s Cross Railway Station.
I never did find out who – or what – killed those passengers, or to where they were taken.
There’s no way to end this part of the memoir
nicely. I’m really disappointed with myself. I didn’t want to write about blood, or death, or fear. I’m getting enough of all that at home. But the thing I’ve found about writing a memoir is that the past is always at the mercy of the present. It can’t be viewed objectively. I make Tom’s hospital appointments, and I take care of him, and I hate it all. I despise him for his weakness and his inability to defeat his own illness. I am filled with hate for him as he suffers, and I am a bad wife and a bad person. And so out it comes in the memoir, this stupid book that will go on and on until I discover where the end lies. I drag the worst of myself into it, and I permeate every page.
It’s getting dark outside. Soon Coronation Street will finish and I’ll take Tom upstairs for his wash. It’ll beat sitting in front of the telly and pretending I was once involved in an unexplained bloodbath.
The closest I ever got to a bloodbath was when I miscarried. That was a lot of blood and matter. I don’t want to get into describing it, but there was solid matter there. It would have been a baby. Of course, it’s a good thing that it wasn’t. I’d been too afraid to tell my parents that I was pregnant, so all I thought when I felt the blood running down my legs at the bus stop was thank God. It was only a couple of months later that I started crying and couldn’t stop.
Nobody knew what was wrong with me. There was a good doctor in Bourne End back then and he had a clue about it, but he was good enough not to make me tell. He packed me off to a decent clinic in London for women suffering with their nerves. I say it was a decent one because it charged a lot and it looked after you, not like some of the other ones around where there was screaming and being tied to a bed and things like that. Or is that only my imaginative side at work, thinking things like that happened? I asked my mother once, when she came to visit. She said that kind of thing only happened in romantic novels and I had far too much imagination. I don’t think I’d want to read a romantic novel that had such things in it. It makes me wonder what kind of books she read.
No, it was restful. It had a garden and a piano, but even so I just kept seeing the blood on my legs. I had been so happy about it at first.
It must have cost my parents a fortune to keep me in that clinic for two years; I still don’t know how they managed it. They paid up and we all waited for me to get well again, having no idea what would happen next. But then, who does?
* * *
It was safe to say my faith in humanity was lost. I trusted nobody. I could get no answers to the questions endlessly running through my head and I couldn’t face returning to my own parents to face their questions in turn.
Had all those passengers died on that fateful train journey from Salzburg? Or had I imagined the whole horrible sight of the white room, glittering glass overhead, gore soaking through my shoes? I slept rough in London for a time; the expression is misleading because I can’t remember sleeping. I stared at brick walls wondering if they would disappear or if blood would pour through the cement cracks. I shivered my way through my insanity, feeling hunger, thirst, cold as mere distractions from my madness. I was unreachable, or so I thought. But then the travelling circus found me.
Or, I suppose one could say I found them. I was stumbling along the South Bank – no doubt drawing looks of disgust from the tourists who mistook me for drunk rather than deranged – when I fell into a display of dancing dogs in leaf-green tutus, accidentally kicking the Rottweiler who barrelled into the tap-dancing Shitzu and knocked the Chihuahua pyramid flying.
The assembled crowd laughed heartily, and so did the dogs’ owner, to my relief. She was an enormous-bosomed lady called Etheline, and she sported the most impressive blond beard and handlebar moustache I had ever laid eyes on; it was worthy of a Viking. “You should be a clown,” she said to me as she scooped me back onto my feet. “You have a gift for comedy, and yet the scent of tragedy is upon you, like all the greatest circus performers. The most terrible of events feed the urge within us all to find a smile.” She must have seen in my wild eyes that I did not believe her. “So, this is a lesson you have yet to learn – you have seen the worst in life and have yet to turn it to your advantage, am I correct? Maybe I can be of assistance. Come back to my caravan and let me help you. My life has hardly been free of strife but I’ve made the weight of my beard work hard for me. Maybe we can do the same for you. What’s your name?”
“Violet,” I told her, and she laughed.
“An appropriate moniker for a clown, given that you stink of the gutter. You’re a walking contradiction, Violet.”
My timing could not have been better if I had rehearsed it; I fainted in my exhaustion, and became not a walking contradiction but a prone one, and could not be roused for all the prancing dogs in London.
When I came to, the first sensation I experienced was a tickling on my chest. The next was an aroma: the smell of soap. The third was the sight, when I managed to open my lids, of Etheline smiling upon me, her beard hanging over me like a curtain. For the first time since returning from Salzburg, I smiled. I smiled back at her, and I felt safe.
Etheline saved me. She was the kindest of people, giving up the one bed in her caravan for me and devoting her time to my recovery, yet never asking for anything in return but an audience for the story of her own life, which in many surprising ways paralleled my own, with the addition of facial hair. She too had been found by circus folk at her lowest ebb, when she was unemployed in Greenland, and she was determined to perform the same good turn for me now. When I was rested and strong in my mind and body once more, Etheline provided morning coffee and ginger nut biscuits for the meeting she set up in her own caravan with the all-powerful head of the Clown Division.
This meeting did not take place without preamble.
“He’s called Mikachu,” she had said, the night before, as she tucked me into bed with the firm fondness of a mother, “and he’s a demanding taskmaster. Expect to work hard, but to gain great rewards under his tutelage, if he’ll have you. He’s trained all the greats: Yogi Wan, Trubblington Gravy and Poopie-Pants the Purple Passionfruit of Bromwich all started with him.” These names meant nothing to me, but I nodded, and promised to make my funniest faces in the morning for his perusal.
“No,” she said, “don’t do any such thing, Violet. Don’t try to entertain him. Only try to show him that you have the potential to learn what entertainment is.”
This seemed somewhat cryptic to me, so under his gaze I found I had no idea what to do and fell back on not doing anything at all. He was a tall, thin man with jet black hair and a severe set to his mouth that gave him an intimidating air. There was nothing of the clown that I could see about him, apart from the oily white sheen on his skin that I imagined was a permanent residue from his make-up. Etheline did all of the talking at that first meeting, relating my history and assuring him that I would be a great clown given the opportunity. He looked dubious. I could well understand it. The whole thing seemed so utterly ridiculous that I couldn’t help but giggle into my morning coffee mug.
His sharp eyes met mine for the first time. I saw a hint of curiosity in his gaze; it softened that mouth, made it appealing.
“Etheline.” He had a rough voice, with a broad accent one might expect to hear from a turnip farmer. “Might you leave us for a moment?”
She fluttered out of the caravan. I think she had rather a crush on Mikachu. As soon as the caravan stopped rocking he began to speak, and it was clear that I was not expected to reply.
“I do not think you have it in you to be a great clown, Violet. I’m sorry to say it. Etheline has always been this way, picking up strays and imagining she sees more in them than what they are. Last time it was Budi, the Indonesian orphan whom she thought would make a world-class plate spinner even though he had never handled crockery in his life. But I would like to humour her, being that she is such an excellent attraction and such a benevolent soul to boot, and so I will take you and train you if you wish it. You must promise to work hard and not run away or steal what I�
�d prefer to give freely, but my instinct tells me that all the hard labour in the world is not going to lift you to the esteemed heights of comedy. You’ll be good for a pie in the face or improbably large boots, I’m sure, but no more than that. Still, you are welcome to try to prove me wrong. What do you say?”
I felt the truth in his words. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll do my best and I’m pretty certain I won’t prove you wrong. There’s no joy in my soul and there never will be again, so how could I ever bring joy to others? But you can hit me with as many pies as you like. I don’t mind at all.”
“No joy,” he mused, “none at all. But you’re still so young. Are you sure that joy may not find you again when you least expect it?”
I smiled. “I’m certain. But you’re welcome to try and prove me wrong too, if you like.”
We made a deal, sealed with a handshake, and by the end of the first week of training I already knew he had won. I adored him and he made me happier than I could ever have imagined. Since I have quite an imagination that, in itself, was an impressive accomplishment. Yes, he fell in love with me and I with him. I never made a good clown; I was mediocre at my best, but I made him a better wife. At least, I tried to, although it was another role that didn’t come naturally to me. Still, I persevered. And I persevere still, believing in the phrase ‘till death do us part’, although now that the death part is coming up, for him at least, I have days where I wish I’d stuck with Etheline the bearded lady instead.
But no, I opted to become a wife. Violet, married to Mikachu alias Tom, with no laughter left in either of us now he’s suffering from skin cancer – perhaps from that thick white make-up he wore for so many years – leaving him with half a face and no time at all.
Fuck him. Fuck watching death crawl up over his face and laying its eggs under his skin. Fuck him for letting it, for making me be part of this slow degradation and then leaving me alone at the end. What a joke this marriage has turned out to be. The greatest joke of his career.
From the Neck Up and Other Stories Page 20