The Mermaid's Child (28 page)

“Nice job,” she said.

I shrugged at her.

“I saw some sage bushes and wild carrot near the road,” she said. “We'll make a stew.”

The fire burned hot and without much smoke. Steam rose from the cooking pot, fragrant with herbs. From time to time, Marguerite would lean forward to stir the stew, would throw in a sprig of something, or raise the spoon to her lips to taste. Although I was sitting next to her, arms wrapped around my knees, I was transported elsewhere, was absorbed. I was watching the brothers practise.

I had to keep on reminding myself that there were only two of them. The seamless flow of leaps, tumbles, throws, catches and falls, some of which would only be stopped a foot from the ground, with just a hand caught in a rope's curl or on the rung of a cross-bar, transformed the two men into a dozen, a score, a whole troupe of acrobats. As the light faded, they seemed to multiply into infinity, like reflections in paired mirrors. When a seemingly hopeless fall was stopped dead, when a hold seemed to be a hair's breadth missed, I would gasp, and find that I was curled up in a rictus of concentration,
my fingers tangled in the hem of my shirt, or my hand clasped around Marguerite's soft-fleshed forearm. She would already be laughing, the loose skin round her face and neck wrinkling and tucking, so that when I glanced at her, her face had taken on the appearance of long-used wood, the grain raised into ridges as the pith between is worn away. The brothers flew among the stars, multiplicitous, indistinguishable, and it caught me with a sudden thrill that I was inside the circle, seeing this.

“You didn't tell me they were acrobats,” I said.

Marguerite shrugged.

“We're all something,” she said. “Or we were. You have to be.”

The two men were coming over to us, breathless and a little unsteady on their feet. They sat down at the fire's rim, exchanged wordless happy looks.

“You haven't lost it, lads,” Marguerite said, passing them the bottle. Bill took a swig, handed the bottle over to his brother. Marguerite began dishing up the food. She handed Bill a bowl and he took it in his palm, raised it close to his face, and began to spoon the stew into his mouth. She served Andre, then held out a dish towards me, and as I reached out for it, my eyes strayed over to Bill's and caught there. He had stopped eating, his expression had narrowed and hardened. He was watching me. I looked away and just sat there a moment, holding the bowl cupped in my hand, my thumb pressing down on the rim. The food now seemed irrelevant, faintly ridiculous; my hunger had turned into queasiness.

“Good,” he said, and I didn't know if he meant the food, or was noticing my discomfort, or was just replying to Marguerite. She began filling another bowl for herself.

A moment passed. There were no sounds but those of the
flames and eating. I picked up my spoon, looked down at the stew. Next to me, I was aware of Marguerite raising her spoon to her mouth, then hesitating.

“I barely had to lift a finger tonight, you know,” she said. Through a mouthful, Andre made an enquiring sound. “Everything was done by the time I came back.” Out of the corner of my eye I watched her unfurl a smile, try to catch Bill's attention with it. “Handy wee thing to have about the place,” she said.

I let my gaze stray upwards. Andre caught my eye and smiled at me, but Bill didn't look up from his food.

I lifted my spoon, took some of the stew into my mouth. I chewed, swallowed. The bottle was passed around again; I shook my head. Marguerite offered me a pipe, but again I shook my head. I pushed the stew around my dish, took another spoonful, looked at it.

“But it's nothing,” I heard Bill say, “on its own. It's not enough.”

Sitting hunched beside Marguerite, I was aware of her warm softness, of her breath as it came and went. I caught the warm yeasty smell of her skin, the sharp overtang of perspiration, and the musty taint of her clothes. She put an arm around me, but I sat there stiffly and did not lean in against her. Andre lifted his violin, coaxed the strings into trembling with the bow, and the music drifted out into the dark. Bill drank from the bottle, watching the flames. I chewed on the crumbs of flesh, slivers of herb, fragments of vegetable, but they stuck in my throat, like grief.

I lay that night next to Marguerite's warmth, still and straight so that nothing might touch her; not a toe, not a knuckle.
Lying looking up at the dark, I imagined myself slipping down to the end of the bunk, sliding out from underneath the covers and into the night and just walking away, anywhere. But fatigue and misery overcame me and I drifted into a troubled sleep, dreaming of winter, and rutted roads, and time an urgent ticking clock inside my belly.

When I woke, I found I'd kicked away the blankets and was lying curled up and goosepimpled in nothing but my shirt. I pulled on some clothes, came out blinking into the daylight. It was late, and there was something different about the place. Nothing tangible, nothing specific, just something somehow knowable about the air, something definite about the quality of the light, as if this was a place that might become familiar. The bare wooden structure they had assembled the previous evening was still standing there; its bones and sinews seemed to root it to the earth.

Marguerite, as usual, was boiling tea over last night's fire. I came up to the hearthstones, squatted down beside her. She poured me a cup.

“Bad night,” she said.

“I was dreaming.”

“Must've been something you ate.”

I glanced round at her. She lifted a plate and held it out to me. A few flat cakes of oatmeal and seeds. She must have baked them in the morning embers of the fire.

“Go on,” she said, “have one. Do you good.”

“I don't think—I don't want to be any—”

“Go on,” she said again, so I reached out and took the nearest one. I was just raising it to my lips when Bill came round the side of the caravan, buttoning up his fly. I saw the moment that he saw me, watched his expression harden in that instant. As he came up towards us, I just sat there, beside Marguerite,
a cup in one hand, the seedcake in the other, motionless and numb. He stood there, doing up his final flybutton, looking down at us.

“Right,” he said, and it was, I realized, the first time he'd ever spoken directly to me. “Right. I've had just about enough of this. We've brought you all this way and you're a bloody useless, worthless cunt and I've had enough.”

I put down the cake, placed the mug back on a hearthstone.

“Get your stuff together,” he said, “and go.”

“Bill,” Marguerite said. “Bill, that's not how it works—”

“No, it's all right,” I said, and straightened up.

“It's not for you to say who stays and who goes—” Marguerite continued.

“No,” I said, “he's right.”

The memory of last night's dream was a shiver down my back. It had been easy, so easy just to sit there in the haze of Marguerite's warmth, to let myself be carried along, to do nothing. But it could not go on like that forever.

“This is not,” Marguerite was saying, “how you treat a guest.” She had stood up beside me, her arm was slipping round my waist, encircling me. I watched, cheeks burning, as Andre came over to the fire, picked up the cup, glanced from Bill to Marguerite to me and back again, then took a mouthful of tea and swallowed.

“Guest!” Bill was saying. “There's no such thing as guests. We can't afford guests.”

A moment passed. Marguerite's arm was still there, round my waist.

“Andre,” she said, “say something to your brother.”

Andre inclined his head a little to the left, twisted his lips together, did not speak.

“Just a mouth, eating, all the time,” Bill said. “Just a great big bloody mouth.”

“That's not true. She's doing all she can. She's not been well,” Marguerite said, and it seemed odd, for a moment, to hear myself interpreted like this, to hear myself described by her. “But she's getting better now, and I'm sure—” She turned and smiled a thin, uneasy smile at me, “when she's fully recovered, she'll prove herself to be a real asset.”

“And when will that be?”

Marguerite looked round at me. I watched the soft flesh on her neck ripple as she moved. I glanced back at Bill.

I could just walk away, I thought. I could leave the circus, leave Marguerite. After all, I was good at leaving. Hadn't I left everyone I ever cared about, one way or another? Everyone, that is, who hadn't left me first.

I looked back at Marguerite. I smiled at her.

“Now,” I said. “I'll do it now.”

From the highwire I could see two pale ovals as Marguerite and Andre tilted their heads back to gaze up at me, their bodies tapering like tadpoles underneath. Bill was standing a little apart from them, nearer to the fire, not looking up. I considered, for a moment, coughing up a fine gob of spit, launching it out into the air in Bill's direction. I'd have a fair chance of landing it on his thinning crown.

“What's the point of me doing this,” I called down at him instead, “if you're not going to watch?”

I caught the flash of Andre's grin, Marguerite's slow anxious shake of the head. My heart was beating unevenly. The wire pressed into my feet. Not markedly thinner than anything on board ship, I told myself; and here there was no wind
to speak of, and I wasn't nearly as high as I was used to. I was good at this, of course I was. Hadn't I walked the ropewalks with the best? Hadn't I re-rigged the
Spendlove
singlehandedly and steered her past the ice? But that now seemed an age ago, and there had always been a handhold, a brace or yard to steady me. And I'd never had an audience before: there had always been a job to do, something to occupy my mind, to keep me from looking down, from the thought of falling.

I set off along the wire.

Don't try any fancy stuff, Marguerite had said as I'd begun the climb, but I didn't have a notion of what would count as fancy, let alone how I would go about trying it. So I just walked, fast, setting down one foot in front of the other at a diagonal to the rope, looking straight ahead at the empty blue sky. I was halfway out across the wire and just beginning to think that I was doing well, that all I had to do was keep my pace steady and my gaze straight, when my foot slipped, the wire thrummed beneath me, and I was back on board the
Sally Ann
, and someone was falling, arms and legs spread, mouth a wide dark O, and John Doyle's hand was on my arm. But she was not here now, and there was nothing, no one to steady me, and the sky swam like a heat haze in front of me and the grass spun up to meet me, and I ran. The wire bounced and lashed, my feet landed anyhow, slipped, skidded; three paces, two, to the end. I leapt for the post and clung there, my chest heaving, eyes closed.

So that was it. I'd failed. Of course I'd failed. I'd be forever what I'd always been, a child left outside in the darkness, desperate to get in. A moment passed. My breath began to calm. I'd go down there, gather my stuff together, and just walk away. It didn't matter. I'd always known I'd have to some day, and at least this way I could still walk. No bones broken. I let
go of the post with one hand, wiped the dampness from my eyes. I'd say thank you to Marguerite. She might pull me close for a moment, might just kiss me. I grasped the descending rope, twisted my foot in it and began lowering myself to the ground. When my feet touched the earth, my knees buckled beneath me. And then, suddenly, like an unexpected shower of rain, I heard applause.

“Never seen anything like it.” Marguerite was coming up towards me. She was smiling, shaking her head.

“Not from a first timer,” Andre said.

And everything shifted sideways, was slightly, wonderfully different. I felt a slow grin begin to spread across my face.

“Well, Bill?” Marguerite asked, and turned towards him. “What do you say now?”

Bill hesitated a moment, half-shrugged. “Decent balance,” he said. “Head for heights.”

“That,” I said, nodding back up at the wire, my voice sounding full and strange to me, “is not a height.”

He didn't look at me. I glanced back at Andre, at Marguerite, my cheeks burning, my chest heaving.

“I want to learn,” I said. “Teach me everything there is to know.”

The land grew rich. The horses put on flesh, their coats becoming glossy and thick. In the evening, when they were unharnessed, they would roll on their backs, legs kicking in the air, like foals. Delilah would dip her head to pull up close-growing plants by the roots.

The evenings began to creep in upon themselves, the twilight lingering on the western rim of the sky. Between us,
we would have the structure up in quarter of an hour, would practise until it grew almost too dark to see. Then, in the last of the evening light, we'd strike the frame, unhitching guylines, easing down uprights and pulling them apart, setting the gear out on the grass: lengths of pole, coiled rope and wire, pegs, running blocks. I found myself taking pleasure in the precision of it all; a satisfaction in the way the joints slotted together and came apart so perfectly, in the neat loops of a well-coiled rope, in the orderly stowing of the gear. While the brothers and I would sometimes struggle with the larger pieces, no weight, no bulk seemed to bother Marguerite.

“You're the Strong Woman now,” I told her one evening, and that made her smile.

“I think you might be right,” she said.

The land grew mountainous, the air cold and dry and difficult to breathe. Marguerite gave me an old pair of boots, unravelled a vast sweater and sat knitting pair after pair of woollen socks for us as we travelled. Her breath rose in clouds and her fingers were pink and pinched, twisted up into the wool. Hunched into my jacket, I held the reins with my hands tucked up inside my sleeves. At night the horses crowded close, were buckled tight with blankets. Only Delilah seemed impervious to the cold, loping along all day with the same abstracted calm. And all the time I carried with me a faint sense of nausea, a thread of sickness that was there first thing when I woke and lingered on throughout the day. Just the altitude, the cold, I told myself, and swallowed down the rising bile. But even as I thought it, I knew it wasn't true. It had been hanging round me all this time: something I'd picked up in the desert and never quite managed to shake off.