Yellowcake - Margo Lanagan [54]
‘What did he say, though?’
She struck her pipe alight, delaying herself at this sign of my eagerness. ‘He says’—and she narrowed her eyes at me through the first thick-curling smoke—‘Inside every Thin Man, he says, there is a Fat Lady trying to be seen, and to live as that Fat Lady, and fetch that applause. Inside every Giant there is a Dwarf, inside every Dwarf a Giant. Inside every trapeze artist a lion tamer lives, or a girl equestrian with a bow in her hair, and inside every cowboy is a Wild Man of Borneo, or a Siam Twin missing his other half.’
Sometimes I was sure Dulcie Pepper had magic, the things she did with her voice, the force of her eyes, her smokes and scents and fabrics, and the crystal ball sitting there like another great eye in the room, or the moon, or a lamp, and the way my scalp crept, some of the things she said. Inside every Dwarf a Giant—and there she had drawn me; Mister Ashman had seen me in his delirium and here was Dulcie to tell me, that all of us freaks and ethnologicals felt the same, and Chan the Chinee Giant was the mirror of me, both sizes yearning towards the middle, towards what seemed long-limbed and languid to me, miniature and delicate to Chan.
‘A Fat Lady inside every Thin Man?’ I said doubtfully, but when I thought about it, it was very like what Chan and I wanted, the opposite of what we were.
Dulcie shrugged. ‘So he said. But inside me, he said, because I am a businessman and a white man and a civilised man and a worker with my mind and not my hands, inside me is the lot of them, blackamoor and savage, rigger and cook and dancing girl on a horseback. And now that I know the trick, he says, now that I have the key, I can open the door; I can bring them all out! I am a circus in my own self. Do you see how convenient this is?
‘Which of course I could … ’ She laughs, and examines the state of the burning tobacco. ‘And it would, certainly, have saved a lot of bother, just the two of us tripping around the place.’
‘But it wasn’t true!’ I said. ‘It wasn’t possible!’
‘Exactly. And then I could hear the cart coming, the horses and the rumbling wheels, and I thought, Good, this will put an end to this nonsense. And—’
A man shouted outside, and boys, and in a moment feet ran up the hill towards us, boys’ anxious voices, excited. Dulcie started up, swept to the tent door and snatched it aside as the last of Hoppy Mack’s sons passed by. ‘What’s up, you lads?’ she called out.
‘Dunno. Something has happened in Frogget’s.’
Instantly I was locked still on my seat, a dwarf-girl of ice. Nothing functioned of me but my ears.
‘He’s not shot, is he?’ Thank God for Dulcie, who could ask my question for me!
‘No, he’s all fine,’ said the boy, farther away now. ‘’Twas him told us to go for Ashman.’
That unlocked me. I hurried out past Dulcie, and she followed me down the slope of grass flattened into the mud by Sunday’s crowd and still not recovered two days later.
John Frogget had doused the lamps around his sign and was prowling outside the booth door, all but barking at people who came near. ‘No!’ he said to Ugly Tom. ‘Give the man some dignity. He is not one of your pickles, to be gawped at for money.’ Which as there were a number of ethnologicals coming from the Museum tent—as there was me, but could he see me yet?—was a mite insensitive of him. But he was upset.
‘What has happened, John?’ said Dulcie sensibly. I retreated a-flutter to her elbow, looking John up and down for blood.
‘A man has shot himself with my pistol.’
‘Shot himself dead?’
‘Through the eye,’ said John, nodding.
‘Through the eye!’ breathed Dulcie, as John turned from us to the others gabbling at him. She grasped my shoulder. ‘Nonny, do you think? Could it possibly?’
‘What?’ I said, rather crossly because she hurt me with her big hand, so tight, and her weight. But her face up there was like the beam from the top of a lighthouse, cutting through my irritations.
‘No,’ I said.
Uncomfortable in his skin, that one.
‘No.’ I liked