Yellowcake - Margo Lanagan [52]
‘So Ashman could not boss the ghosts away, and Frogget could not shoot them. So what did you do then?’ I did not mind what she said, so long as she kept on talking, so long as Mrs Em stayed away, with her Come Nonny-girl, there is some public waiting. Some days, some nights, I could bear the work, if it could be called work, being exhibited; others I felt as if people’s eyes left slug trails wherever they looked, and their remarks bruises, and their whispers to each other little smuts and smudges all over us. The earth-men and the Fwaygians and the Eskimoos were too foreign and dark to notice, and Billy was too much a personality to ever take offence, but I, just a girl, and pale, and so much smaller than them all … All I wanted was to go back to my quarters, lock my door and wash myself of the public’s leavings, and then hurry away, under cover of carriage or train-blind or only night’s darkness from anywhere I would be spotted as one of Ashman’s Museum-pieces.
‘There was nothing we could do,’ said Dulcie, ‘so we just put up with it, most that winter. I went and asked them, you know? I told them how tiresome they were, how he was never going to get his money out of her, that they were dead, didn’t they realise? That they were going to die from this cart coming along in a minute. It was like talking to myself, as if I were mad or drunk myself. You just had to wait, you know? The terrible noise—I cannot describe, somehow, how awful it was. There was more to it than noise. It shook you to your bones, and then to something else; it was hard to keep the fear off you. And sometimes four or five times a night, you know?, and Ashman and me clutching each other like babes in the wood with a big owl flying over, or a bat, or a crow carking.’
‘It is hard to imagine Ashman fearful—’
Dulcie sat up, finger raised, eyes sliding. We listened to the bootsteps outside, that paused, that passed. ‘Him again,’ she whispered.
‘Whom again?’
‘Mister Twitchy.’ She tapped the side of her head.
‘How can you know, from just that?’
She put a finger to her lips, and he passed again, back down towards the merry-go-round. That was where I would go, too, were I a free woman, a customer, alone and uncomfortable. There was nothing like that pootle-y music, that coloured cave, those gliding swan-coaches and those rising-and-falling ponies, the gloss of their paint, the haughtiness of their heads, the scenes of all the world— Paris! Edinburgh Castle! The Italian Alps! You could stand there and warm your heart at the sight, the way you warm your hands at a brazier. You could pretend you were anywhere and anyone—tall, slender, of royal birth, with a face like The Lovely Zalumna, pale, mysterious, beautiful at the centre of her big round frizz of Circassian hair.
‘Ashman. Fearful.’ Dulcie brought us both back from our listening. ‘Yes, I know, he is so commanding in his manner. But he was sickening for something, you see, all that while. I don’t know whether the ghosts were the cause or just an aggravation. But it came to midwinter and he were confined to his bed, and we hardly needed to light the fire, his own heat kept the room so warm. The great stomach of him, you know? I swear some nights I saw it glowing without benefit of the lamp! And the delirium! It was all I could do some nights to keep him abed. And one night, I had shooed him back to his bed so many times—I had wrestled him back, if you can imagine! Well, up he stands, throws off his nightshirt, which is so wet you could wring it out and fill a teacup easy with the drippings. Up he stands, runs to the window, tears the curtains aside, and there’s the moon out there hits him like a spotlight. And he says—oh, Non, I cannot tell you for laughing now, but at the time, I tell you, he raised gooseflesh on me! I am Circus, he says— to the moon, to the lane, to the ghosts, to me? I don’t know. To himself! I am Circus, he announces, in his