Elephant Man - Christine Sparks [100]
The days became one day; the weeks ran together. He lived in an old wagon that Bytes had managed to buy from one of the circus families. Here he slept, ate, and exhibited. His days were an endless round of “performances,” his nights a torment of memory. He prayed constantly for death.
The comforts that had made his life bearable before were lost to him now. The picture of his mother, his Bible, his prayer book, all these had been left behind in London. These days he had but one solace, a small visiting card on which were printed the names of Frederick Treves and the London Hospital. It was the card he had taken in Treves’ room one day, long ago. He had kept it ever since in the pocket of his cloak, and there it still was. In his moments alone he would take it out and draw what little comfort he could from it. It had now the sense of a message signaled from a distant star that had spun off into space and left him stranded. It spoke to him of a life that increasingly he felt he must have imagined.
He was kept a semi-prisoner. Bytes never allowed him to go far from the wagon, but he placed little restriction on who came to see him there. And Merrick had a surprising number of visitors.
They were not spectators, for they lived in the circus and they came between shows. They were the other freaks, interested to see the new addition to their numbers. They too backed away a little when they first saw him, so that Merrick discovered that he was a freak even among freaks. The knowledge would have hurt him if he had not been beyond hurt by now.
But they recovered themselves quickly. Their eyes were not blinded by what was “normal.” To them the abnormal was normal, and within a short time they had accepted Merrick into the fellowship of the deformed. For the first time in his life he was one among equals. It was something even Treves had not been able to give him.
Few of them spoke much English. They were French, German, Belgian and some Slavs. They had crossed Europe to find this little refuge in a place where freaks could band together and find the solace of companionship. They communicated with Merrick in pidgin English and signs, but mostly they offered him their silent sympathy.
They became his friends, insofar as the life permitted him to have friends. He discovered in them deformities and mutations so strange that for once it was he who looked in wonder.
There were the pinheads, a brother and sister called Tip and Top, whose heads were cone-shaped and elongated. To emphasize their oddity they shaved their heads and left just a small tuft growing out of the tops. There was a hermaphrodite called Sammy, who had the shape of a woman, the genitals of a man, and one well-developed breast. As long as the genitals were hidden the overall impression was female, but Sammy was known to have the strength of a man, and to be prepared to use it on any unwary male spectators who showed too much interest in his female half.
George and Bert were among Merrick’s most frequent visitors. Two men down to the waist, and one man beneath that, they were the first creatures he had ever met who struck him as possibly worse off than himself.
Then there was “the lion-faced man,” a man with a large growth of yellow hair on his face, who had decided to make the most of it. He constantly combed it to produce the right effect, and had been known to express the opinion that exhibiting for money was better than working for a living. He had struck up a close friendship with another of the same mind, Fred, who appeared entirely normal until he pulled at the skin of his face and demonstrated the incredible distance to which it would stretch.
His new friends did much to make Merrick’s life slightly more bearable, but there was one difference between himself and them that no bridge could cross. They were their own masters. Not one of them had been bought and sold as