The Bookman - Lavie Tidhar [36]
"Oi!" one of the girls – Orphan had decided, in his dazed state, that she must be Ariel, if only for the sake of convenience – said. "You said there was naught as good as Britannia's girls last night!"
"Oh, Ariel," Tom Thumb said (and Orphan was relieved to find he was right), "the world is full of mysteries and beauties too numerous to ever fully explore, but all are enthralling and captivating in equal measure!" He grinned, then said, "It was Barnum's favourite line, that was."
Orphan held the bulbous glass in his hands. It had two straws sticking out of it, and he took a careful sip. The drink was sweet and yet refreshing, and he felt for a moment as if he had indeed swallowed a little bit of sunshine. He smiled sleepily and said, "You are all too kind. Too kind." Then he closed his eyes and, without even realising, fell asleep.
In his sleep, he didn't see Tom extract the drink carefully from his hands and lay it on the counter of the bar, nor did he feel it when the two girls helped Tom carry him to the large bed and laid him there, as peaceful as a child. No dreams came to him, just a deep, deep blackness that soothed his aching, fevered mind, and calmed him, and a hush filled him until it overflowed.
When he woke the Nell Gwynne was quiet and empty. A small fire still burned in the fireplace, a new, slender log being consumed, and he sat still for a long moment in the unfamiliar bed, and watched the flames dance like sprites across the burning wood. Haltingly, he reached out for a pen and paper, finding some on the table by the bed (an old pub table, scarred with countless cigarette burns and the acidity of spilled drinks), and having done so, began writing a poem.
like air rushing into a bone-white vessel (Orphan wrote)
silence fills you;
it wraps in your hair and turns it mute
and courses through your blood vessels
breathing your inner skin, and sighs
residing in the hollows of your throat
it fills you to the rim and lashes of your eyes: silence bursts out of you, a rupture of ears and touch – I stopper you with my mouth and you sigh,
and turn over in your sleep.
He thought of Lucy, then, and of all the things he never got to say to her, and all the futures, all the possibilities that were now gone, like a road that once branched into hundreds of unexplored paths but now lay blocked and abandoned, all its promises gone. If I can, he thought, I will get her back: even if it means going to the Bookman himself.
He left the poem on the side of the bed. More mundane things made him shake his head, then rise. He made the short, dangerous trip to the bathroom, walking down the narrow stairs on unsteady feet (ducking just in time before his head could hit the low ceiling) until he reached the water-closet at the bottom. He returned to the bed then, and sat in silence, watching the flames, thinking of nothing in particular. He didn't know if it was night or day. Outside was the same twilight that always lingered in Bull Inn Court, and Tom kept no clocks. "Clocks are the enemies of time," his diminutive friend liked to say, "they are the gaolers of day and the turnkeys of night." Perhaps it was his friend's own attempt at poetry, or perhaps, Orphan thought, it was another Barnum saying – and he wished, then, that he had witnessed the spectacle of the P.T. Barnum Grand Travelling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan, and Circus that Tom always referred to, simply and with an utter conviction, as The Greatest Show on Earth.
Tom was a Vespuccian, born to English parents in the lands of the Mohegan tribe in Quinnehtukqut, which meant – so Tom had once told him – Long River Place, and which the immigrants had called Connecticut. Born small, he was discovered by Barnum and joined the circus at a young