by Peter Carey
She could feel her smile lying easy on her face. She looked him in the eye, asking him to show his own, and when he was shy and combed his hair back from his forehead she was pleased.
A week ago she had a new washing machine, a new gas drier. Now she was walking side by side with this frere, bumping shoulders. She knew exactly what she planned to do eight days from now, but she had no idea what she would do in the next minute. They walked down into some little dungeon then up some steps and into a little sweet-smelling courtyard where an old Efican oak was dropping its sappy petals on the damp green bricks. She felt fantastic, for a moment, free, young.
Then he stopped again, and looked at her. When he opened his mouth she thought, I don’t know what he is going to say. It hit her with a jolt. She saw the pale lips parting and was scared.
‘You ever hear of Ducrow?’ he asked.
‘Look.’ She hardly heard him. ‘I didn’t say I was going to be your friend, OK?’
‘All I asked was – did you ever hear of Ducrow’s Circus?’
‘Ducrow’s Circus, of course.’
‘You ever hear of Ducrow’s lion? Ducrow’s lion/sadly sighing/ate his nose and foot …’
‘He died and his own lion ate him,’ she said. ‘Everyone knows that.’
‘This is where it happened, on this spot, under this very tree. This was Ducrow’s Circus School where he had the romance with the prime minister’s wife,’ Wally said.
‘Solveig Mappin was her name.’
‘Solveig Mappin, yes.’
‘So,’ she said, ‘dot dot dot.’
‘I worked with Ducrow. I never knew him here. He was here when he was an old man.’
‘Everyone knows about Ducrow.’
‘I knew him when he was trying to have a real Sirkus. Not just the horses and bears and the birds. He bought a laser projector. Our pay cheques always bounced.’
‘He had a bird rode a bicycle,’ Roxanna said. ‘I saw that.’
‘He had an eastern parrot ride a bicycle, and the toucan jumped through hoops. I trained those birds myself.’
‘I saw those birds.’
‘Get out with you. You’re too young.’
‘It was in 372. In Chemin Rouge, at Gaynor’s Paddock at Goat Marshes.’
‘They were my birds in ‘seventy-two,’ Wally said. ‘I caught that parrot myself in a wicker trap not two miles from here. Its name was Linda.’
‘Get on with you.’
‘The show Ducrow did that year. Remember? He had the Royal Hussars. He had the Moroccans.’
‘Of course I remember.’ She had just run away from the convent. She was fourteen years old and her picture was in every Gardiacivil office in the southern islands. She sat alone, her hair dyed red, jealous of the families around her.
‘He had the idol in the middle. Like a god. This is Ducrow, this is how he tells them what to do.’ Wally started placing wicker baskets around the courtyard and began to talk to them. He got a wild sort of energy, his hair rising and falling, his eyes flashing, his arms thrashing. She started laughing, watching him. ‘He says, now look here, you chaps, you see that lump of smoking tow, that’s the idol, and you, Mohammed, stand here with the knife between your teeth. Now when Hussars come in here you chop chop chop, and that is how he spoke to them, the Great Ducrow. He was better with horses.’
‘You taught that bird to ride a bicycle?’
He shrugged, and began to stack the wicker baskets. ‘You could have done it.’
‘I really liked that bird,’ she said. ‘I don’t like birds, if you want to know. I don’t like pigeons. I’m very pleased to have them out of my life.’
‘You can make money with pigeons.’
Roxanna chose to say nothing.
‘You can,’ he insisted.
‘Listen,’ she said, ‘if you got them for the boy, that’s really sweet, that’s very nice of you. And even if he’s not too excited now, he’ll come around.’
‘He’ll come around.’
‘He’ll come around. He doesn’t look too interested right now.’
‘You got any kids?’
‘Do I look like I have a kid?’
‘You have a good figure.’
‘You’re full of shit, you know that. You don’t really think …’
‘Have I lied to you yet?’
‘I don’t know whether you lie or don’t lie. I can’t imagine getting into the situation of wanting to know. I don’t have kids, OK. I don’t know what kids do, least of all this one. Let me tell you who I am, Monsieur Pigeonnaire: I am someone who is going to make money. It is the only thing I am interested in: money. I don’t like this place here. I don’t like how it smells, or looks, or feels.’
‘Then go,’ he said.
‘You haven’t paid me.’
‘I’ll pay you.’
‘OK,’ she said, ‘when you pay me, then I’ll go.’
She brushed the fallen flowers off the bench under the tree and sat and watched him as he stacked the pigeons into the old stables. It was too dark in there, and damp. She did not say anything. What was it to her?
When he had finished he came out and washed his hands under an old wide-mouthed tap. ‘Take some advice,’ he said, as he flicked the water off his hands. ‘Don’t say things with double meanings unless you want the second meaning took.’
But she was not listening to him. She was thinking of toy soldiers, a group of them, turbaned, moustached, a marching musical corps of the French Zouaves, one of eighty lots to be auctioned in Chemin Rouge on 11 January, eight days from now.
This thought made her feel so good, she reached out her hand and took his. It was wet and cool with tap-water.
32
My mother, in real life, was always neat. Her white blouses were always white and spotless. She was as ordered as her desk top, graceful, clean. But on the evening when the actors walked, she filled the paper cups carelessly, sending sticky bubbles cascading over her friends’ hands, forcing Roxanna (whom she had hitherto referred to as that little spin drier) to retract her red shoes quickly into the shelter of her dress.
‘Cheer up,’ she said to Wally, ‘you’ve just got yourself a pigeon loft.’
Wally shook his head and mumbled.
‘What?’ my mother said.
Wally looked down at the silver foil ashtray he had placed on the floor, between his feet.
‘I’d rather kill the birds,’ he said.
Roxanna murmured. My mother ran her wine-wet hands through her hair and shook her curls. Vincent held out a handkerchief. ‘No thanks,’ she told him. She then wiped her hands on her red velvet dress.
‘I’d rather kill the actors,’ she said, and laughed uproariously. ‘Not you,’ she said to Sparrow – the only person standing in the tower – tall, thin, bug-eyed. ‘Not you.’ She laughed until her face was red and her eyes running. Vincent took her pale white hands and she watched him while he wiped them as though her fingers belonged to someone else.
‘That’s enough,’ she said, and tugged them out of his grasp.
Wally said, ‘I don’t want to be remembered for closing the Feu Follet.’
My mother smiled at him vaguely.
‘You haven’t closed down anything,’ Sparrow Glashan said. ‘They’ll be back. No way they won’t be back.’ He winked at me.
‘Take it from me,’ my mother said, all humour suddenly leached from her voice, ‘they won’t come back.’
There was a longish silence which ended only when she picked the dripping magnum from the red plastic ice bucket and overfilled Vincent’s paper cup. ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘drink up. It’s not every day I change my life.’
She turned to me and ruffled my hair. I looked her right in the eyes but she would not accept the heavy weight of remorse I tried to press on her.
She patted my legs with her sticky hands.
‘Cheer up, buster.’
But all I wanted was to undo what I had done, to never have crawled under the seats in the theatre, t
o never have spoken to Sparrow Glashan, to never have destroyed our lives.
She tousled my head. She stood and wrapped the magnum in a black and white checked tea towel. She poured champagne into Roxanna’s paper cup, filled it right to the top like a waiter in a Chinese restaurant.
‘So will you hire new actors now?’ Roxanna asked.
‘I’ll have pigeons instead,’ my mother said. ‘Much, much nicer.’
‘I don’t even like the birds,’ Wally said. ‘I’m just so sorry I ever bought them.’
Roxanna pulled her dark glasses down from her hair to her eyes.
‘You’ll get another company.’ Sparrowgrass held out his empty cup towards my mother and watched her fill it up. ‘It’s not as if there aren’t good actors looking for work.’ He looked for my mother’s response but she had moved on and was trying to find a Pow-pow station on the short wave. While she did this, everybody else talked, but they were aware of making conversation. There are elections coming up,’ Sparrow Glashan told Roxanna.
Roxanna slitted her eyes. ‘I know that,’ she said. ‘I’m not from Mars.’
‘I meant – people really want to work in political theatre right now. There’s nowhere else but the Feu Follet. It’s an institution. The Blue Party should do something.’ He looked at Vincent.
‘Claire Chen never worked on that voice,’ Vincent said. ‘It was always tight.’
‘Claire’s voice is not great,’ Sparrow agreed, ‘but she can use her body well. She’s very physical.’
‘It wasn’t their acting.’ My mother had found her Pow-pow station. She turned the music up, then down so low I wondered why she’d bothered. ‘It wasn’t even yours,’ she told Sparrow. ‘You got to be an actor, but you weren’t one when you came.’
Sparrow made a show of being offended, but my mother was not playing games. ‘When we were on the road at Melcarth,’ she said, ‘what did you think of our work? Really.’
‘It was good,’ Sparrow said. ‘It was great.’
‘But compared to something really good.’
‘People laughed and cried, and now it’s gone.’
My mother dropped her eyes. When she looked up her face had become the colour of her arms.
‘Didn’t it ever look second-rate to you?’ she asked.
Sparrow looked so stung I felt sorry for him. ‘No, why? I’m sure not.’
‘But what would be first-rate?’ my mother insisted. She had come temporarily to rest and was now leaning against an open window, her arms folded across her chest, a paper cup in her hand.
‘She means Brecht directed by Alice Brodsky,’ Vincent said, ‘at the Saarlim Volkhaus, something like that.’
‘We’ve lived by our principles,’ Sparrow said. ‘I think that’s first-rate. We’ve played towns like Melcarth and Dyer’s Creek where people never took a show before. That’s first-rate. We’ve got something to say. We make people think, and laugh, and cry.’
‘But what did we change?’ my mother said. ‘At the end of the day?’
‘That’s a different question,’ Vincent said.
‘Did we even begin to define a national identity?’ Felicity said. ‘No one can even tell me what an Efican national identity might be. We’re northern hemisphere people who have been abandoned in the south. All we know is what we’re not. We’re not like those snobbish French or those barbaric English. We don’t think rats have souls like the Voorstanders. But what are we? We’re just sort of “here”. We’re a flea circus.’
‘You mean, you wish we were more famous.’
‘No,’ Felicity said, passionately. ‘No, you know I don’t mean that. I mean, I don’t know what we are. Or maybe it’s just me, still a Voorstander after all.’
The bright nimbus of saline across her eyes did not break into tears, but it was perfectly clear to me then that, for whatever reason, my mother was now finished with the theatre.
She sat down on the bed again and snuggled into Vincent. He put his arm around her and she closed her eyes. She was shivering. Wally took off his sweater and draped it on her shoulders. Vincent slipped off his jacket and arranged it round her.
I put my arms around her too, as far as I could reach. I was very frightened.
33
Roxanna had this flash – it came to her that night, marooned in the draughty tower in Chemin Rouge drinking warm champagne. She saw the blood, like in a horror film, a wall of it, wet, liquid, with a sheen of blue licking around its edges. She should kill the shitty pigeons now.
The moment passed, like a clear frame in a film, like the brief mad moments when you think you will throw yourself off the bridge or swing the wheel into the oncoming traffic – a tic, a shudder, not real life but something parallel, something that could only happen if the thin muscled walls between the worlds of thoughts and things got frayed or ruptured. She was not, Deo volante, the woman with the knife, chopper, axe. But she was the person who innocently carries the plague, like that woman Rebecca (whoever she was really) they named Rebecca’s Curse after – just a pretty red and yellow flower, and now it raged through the pasture of half of Efica and every schoolkid, even the little rag-mouth here, knew it was called Rebecca’s Curse.
The pigeons were like that: like dog-shit sticking to her name.
They had been in Chemin Rouge for only thirty-six hours but already the famous Apple Pie and his twenty-six fellow pigeons had brought down this theatre company. The pigeons were like some spore, some sexually transmitted disease, and when she thought of the night Reade brought them home she knew that her first sense about them (before her bending, obliging, smiling, head-nodding personality got in the way) had been the right one.
It was not just that he was mistaken about their money-making possibilities. She had not liked the way he touched them, with his big horny hands around their chest and neck. She damn well made herself think she liked it but it was bullshit. It made her jealous – that was her true feeling. She wanted him to act like that to her, not to a bird. She told herself how nice it was to see a man acting gentle, but that was shit, she knew it even then.
She did not like those pigeons’ eyes, not that pair, nor any other. She never did see a pigeon’s eye that did not frighten her a little. She told Reade that. He was patient with her at first – he said it was because they had an eye each side of the head which made them sort of stare, and she tried to buy that, except it wasn’t true. It was something in the eyes themselves she did not like – stupid, nervous, demanding – and it did not matter whether they were speckled or plain, the condition was the same. They scared her.
As for money – forget it. It was the pigeons caused the rift with Reade. It was the pigeons ipso facto lost her the joint bank account, the $105,023.56. They lost her shelter, protection. She should have killed them in Melcarth when she BBQ’d the house. Now she was in Chemin Rouge, they were still with her. She could chop their heads off with a tomahawk, have them run around Gazette Street with the blood squirting in the air like a poulet. She could see it, she really could. She could see the blood pooling in the bluestone gutters. It was most realistic.
She blinked and drank champagne. It was perfectly clear that Madame here would now lease or sell the building and then Wally would have lost his home, all thanks to pigeons. She did not care. She refused to care. She should BBQ them before they did the next thing.
Don’t even think it, Roxanna.
She held her breath but the lack of air made the flames burn brighter. They were carbon-hemmed, orange-skirted. There was soot, kerosene, a sweet hot singeing smell. She grinned at Wally. He smiled back at her. She went to the bathroom and splashed her face, then she turned and walked down into the street, hoping the air would make this feeling go away.
The air in the street smelt cold and damp. The wind was from the east and it carried, not the salt of the port, but a sweet mouldy smell, the smell of gullies and rotting leaves from twenty miles away. She stayed out there, just leaning against a car, looking up at the moon, li
stening to the sarcastic voice of the dispatcher coming out over the taxi radios. She saw Vincent Theroux open the door and stand at the top of the steps. He raised his arm. A car engine started and then a low expensive car – she did not know the make – pulled up in front, and Vincent, having checked his jacket and trouser pockets, carefully descended the stairs, got into the back seat, and was driven away. My God, she thought. It was as if she had splashed cold water on her face.
Around ten o’clock she saw Sparrow Glashan, made hunchbacked by the rucksack under his poncho, slip quietly out of the door, and walk down to the dark end of the street, away from the taxi base. A moment later Wally sauntered across the street with his hands in his pockets.
‘You OK?’
‘The patapoof, what’s his name?’
‘That’s Vincent … did you see his car?’
He stood in front of her grinning, as if he knew that she was excited by a wealthy man.
She shrugged. ‘What of it?’
She turned back towards the theatre. Now the actors were gone she would have, she hoped, a better place to sleep than a mattress in the corner of Claire Chen’s room.
The pigeons were no longer in the foyer although, imagining she could still see their bloom hanging in the air, she held her nose as she passed through. It was only eight more nights. She would buy a padlock for her door.
It was a rabbit warren, a flop-house. She went looking for a room she could make lockable. The doors were ply. Most of the locks and many of the knobs were missing. The rooms themselves were dead, curtainless, creepy. The floors were covered with litter created by the actors’ flight, the sort of things rag-pickers might have fought over and left behind when alcohol or thunderstorms changed what they thought important – empty vid cases, print-outs, T-shirts, bras, single socks.
In eight days’ time she would turn up at the Chemin Rouge Antiquities Fair, a butterfly emerging from a shit-heap – no one who looked at her would ever imagine the chain and padlock on the door, the ice-cream container for peeing in at night.
She went from room to room, looking at the doors. Wally accompanied her, but hung back, did not enter the rooms, occupied their doorways.