Yellowcake - Margo Lanagan [56]
‘Oh,’ said Dulcie. ‘Did you not know they were sweet-hearts?’
‘Just freshly, just recent?’
‘Oh no, months, at least. Where have your eyes been?’
She stood, then, away from me, and folded her arms up there. And Mrs Em came running up to busybody, so it was all what-a-dreadful-thing and poor-John-Frogget awhile there, with every now and then a pause to allow me to exclaim to myself, But I am prettier than Fay Shipley!
And, Look at my hair! When hers is so flat, as if she glued it down!
And, Why, I’ve never seen the girl laugh, to improve her looks that way!
‘What a thing to do on your last night, eh?’ said Mrs Em, with something of a giggle. ‘Come to the deadest night o’ the circus, and look at freaks and specimens.’
Oh, I was being so frivolous and vain, with the young gent dead in there, and why, ever? ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Is it so odd? What would you do, if you had killing yourself in mind?’
‘Would you have your fortune told?’ said Dulcie wretchedly from on high. ‘To see whether you had the courage?’
‘I think I am too ordinary,’ I said surprised, staring at the tent-flap.
Mrs Em laughed. ‘That’s no sin, child!’
‘Oh, but I’m used to thinking how different I am from most people, how unusual. Yet this gentleman, and shooting himself in the eye … I don’t know that I’d ever take my life in my own hands so. I wouldn’t feel I had the right, you know? To such grand feelings, or even, to make such a mess, you know? Of someone else’s floor, that would have to mop it up—’
‘Ooh, he’s more of a freak than you or I, dear,’ said Mrs Em, right by my ear. Her stubby hand patted mine.
I folded mine away from her. I didn’t want her cosiness, her comforting me. I wanted to be grand and tragic; I wanted people to be awed by me as we were by the dead gentleman, not to say How sweet! and But they are like little dolls! Flossie could pick one up, couldn’t you, Floss? I wanted to be tall, to have dignity, to shoot myself in the eye without it taking my whole arm’s stretch to reach the trigger. I wanted to be all but invisible, too, until I did so, and to leave people wondering why I might have done it, instead of having them nod and say, Well, of course, she could expect no kind of normal life, as I lay freakish in my own blood on the floor, with my child-boot sticking out my skirts.
‘I’m going to ask Arthur, may I sit aboard his merry-go-round,’ I said.
‘What, when a man has just died?’ said Mrs Em.
‘I will not ask him to spin it,’ I said. ‘It will be safer. I will be out from underfoot, and it will cheer me up, and I will have a better view when they bring the body out.’
‘What a caution!’ said Mrs Em as I went.
I thrust myself in among skirts and trousers, painted legs and pantaloons, grass-dresses and robe-drapes. There is a privacy to being so small, a privacy and a permission—all children know it, and use it, and are forgiven. And ‘Oops!’, and ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Non’, and ‘I say—oh, it’s one of you!’ people said as I forged a way through them, pushing aside their thighs and cloths and shadows.
And finally I forced through to the golden light of the merry-go-round. The animals were stiff on their posts, and empty-saddled, that ought to glide and spin, and lift and lower their riders; the pootling, piping music was stilled.
‘Arthur,’ I commanded the ticket-man nearby, a rag hanging from his pocket smudged with the grease of the roundabout’s workings. ‘Lift me up onto a pony, before someone treads me into the mud!’
Which he did with a will, for people enjoy to be ordered by dwarves as they like to be ordered by children, up to a point. And there in the golden glow I sat high-headed, above the hats and feathers and turbans of the ghoulish crowd turned away from me. I wished the light were as warm as it looked; I wished the music were filling my ears. I dreamed—hard, as if the vehemence of my dreaming would make it happen—that my shiny black horse would surge forward beneath me, and that I would be spun away from this place and this night, lifted and lowered instead past Lake Geneva, past Constantinople, past Windermere