Orphans of the Carnival

~ ~ ~

This is where your lost toys went, the one the dog chewed, the one your mother threw out without asking when you left home, the ones you always wondered about.

The island says: bring me your lost, your scorned, forgotten masses, bring me your maimed and ridiculous, bring me so much as a finger or a toe and I’ll take you in. Be you ever so grotesque or beauty sublime, it’s all the same to me. Everyone’s allowed in. Doesn’t matter who you were or what your story, doesn’t matter what state you’re in. You could’ve been smashed to smithereens, even your broken bits are welcome here.

There’s nothing to the island. The Aztecs made it, many moons ago, long before the white men came. Trees, a stream, a few shacks, an old wooden landing stage. White butterflies hover over red flowers. From time to time a bird whistles, high and thin and querulous. A stream of water makes no sound. The dolls are legion. Strange fruit, they hang on every tree, and the trees crowd close. They hang like bunting on rusty wires running between the trees. They have covered all the walls, inside and out, filled every crack and cranny. The oldest has been here for more than fifty years; the youngest just arrived. The filth is proud.

In the centre of the island, at the centre of a shrine in the middle of a mouldy old shack with the word ‘Museo’ over the door, a solemn black-haired, blue-eyed girl doll sits like Buddha under a framed colour photograph of the hermit of the island, now dead. She is decked with beads and thin curled ribbons, some faded, some less so, surrounded by the gifts people bring to her, a strange trove of jewellery and holy pictures, sweets and candles, coins and finger puppets, small toys, a Rubik’s Cube, a troll, a worn set of Pokemon cards and a pink-haired white pony with large mascaraed eyes. This little girl will want for nothing. She is the little girl who drowned here so long ago, whoever she was. No one knows. It doesn’t matter. Little girls are loved and they drown, and there must be comfort for what can’t be cured. There must be dolls and shrines and remembrance in the company of a host of faces. Under the corrugated roof, dolls and their parts dangle from the rafters. From ceiling to dirt floor they hang on the flaking whitewashed walls. Spiders have woven furry grey curtains between them, veiling the faces of a few. There is a blunt-faced boy, made by the cobwebs into a strange smudged apparition. Flies hum. Silky eyes, whitened as if by cataracts, peer through trailing grey lianas. Baby dolls, sexy dolls, rag dolls, teen queens, ugly dolls, demon dolls, elvish dolls, dolls in the national costumes of various countries, naked and clothed, suspended, flying like angels. A strung up baby in a blue romper suit hangs broken-necked, half-faced, dirt-encrusted. A gangster’s moll in a silk dress is losing her hectic red curls. A tiny face sleeps in the rafters, the underlip tucked in. The closed eyes have the authentic, ancient look of the newborn.

The smell of long-established mould was thick and warm on the air.

Outside, a slight breeze scarcely moved the long leaves and whip-like branches. You could walk round the island in a couple of minutes, but no one did. The endless diversity of decay slowed you down, variations on dollskin: poxed, blistered, burned black, bleached white, patterned elaborately, sometimes geometrically, by weather and the passage of time. Flies crawled on the dolls, gathering like mud in the creases of their clothes. Their eyes spewed bugs. Crazed with a million cracks, mud-splattered, twined with leaves, they grinned with filth-clotted mouths, reached out for a hug, beseeched, pondered, smiled serenely. Most of them were babies.

An obscene pink knob poked out of a headless torso. A girl with mud-bedraggled hair and the left leg of another leaned down in greeting, her face a moving black mask of bugs. An old lamp lay in a thicket, a head with black-rimmed eyes poking out of it. A single strand of hair hung down to its chin, and its large blue eyes were innocent and interested. It seemed about to speak. A fat white leg hung on a line. In the root of a tree, a tangle of limbs clung to each other. A clown wore a bonnet. Naked Barbies with hair gone wild had colonised a thin tree, one of them sensibly wearing her sunglasses.

It was a sky burial in slow motion.

1854

The train shook, her brain shook. She flew into the future, dreaming she was lost in a big white house that went on forever, the windows dusty like the windows of the diligence taking her on the first stretch of her journey, from Culiacán to Los Mochis, to get over the mountains and out of Mexico. She saw glimpses of far mountains and miles of scrub, and occasionally a poor peon tramping in rags. Then she was back in her bunk, listening to the sound that had woken her up: a baby crying, far along the train towards New Orleans, a lost thin bleating like a lamb.

Needing privacy, she’d paid a few extra dollars to get a berth for the night. The sleeper was dark and cramped, the passage very narrow, people walking up and down it constantly, brushing against the thick hessian curtain she’d pulled across in front of her bed. A man in the bunk across the passage snored and snorted and tossed, so close it was indecent, and the clanking and screeching, the jolting and swaying, the dusty coal smell kept her awake. At least she had sheets and they were clean. She huddled down into them with old Yatzi, thinking about the great city, every great promised city, New York, Chicago, Boston, and the people she’d meet tomorrow in New Orleans. Yatzi’s bald wooden head was tucked under her chin.

The whistle was a soul in distress. God but this land was flat and endless. Miles and miles of spreading green, some trees, occasionally a crossroads. The flatness had become a dream verging on nightmare. No one lived here. That there were flat places in the world she’d known, but the enormity of it scared her even more than crossing the mountains. She’d been afraid all the way from Culiacán. The first couple of days she kept thinking she’d get off at the next stop and go back home. She thought she’d be discovered. They’d be attacked by bandits, robbed. Killed. Two more weeks, slogging higher and higher into her mother’s mountains in a smelly wagon she couldn’t even get out of to stretch her legs, not till everyone else was asleep, and then only for a brief interlude of wide cool darkness, a quick look up at the frosty stars. The driver and all the passengers thought she was a young girl travelling alone to meet her guardian, veiled because of a vow she’d made to Our Lady. Respecting her silence, they left her alone and were kind and helpful whenever they made a stop. Up the mountains, down the mountains, going mad with boredom, sleeping and drifting, jerking awake a hundred times, and with every mile that jolted by feeling more and more unreal, losing all sense of distance, the world a giant carpet unfolding endlessly.

In the morning they pulled into a depot. She was up and dressed and veiled, sitting by one of the small windows. The porter came with bread and coffee. New Orleans was no more than a couple of hours away, he said. The coffee was appalling. She was sick to death of this veil. She’d never had to wear it so much at home. It didn’t matter. All these new people she’d have to meet, she’d be famous, Rates said. She would perform. They’d flock in their millions. And they’d pay. After New Orleans, New York. Let them goggle. You show them, you show them what you can do, how proud you are, you go out there and let them see you. Can’t do it, she thought. Scared. Scared. Have to. Come this far. Who is this Rates anyway? Mama, I’m lost. She sipped the bitter muck. He could be a crook or a madman for all she knew. All she remembered was a suave podgy little man, well-spoken. In New Orleans, Mr Rates said, there’d be a big rehearsal room where she could practise on a real stage. What if he wasn’t there? Alone in New Orleans. Never get back home.

The conductor was calling all aboard. The place filled up. She watched the country roll by again, flat as ever still, but broken up now with vast stretches of water and acres of sugar cane, and people sprinkled out like black corn, working the flatness. The long car was packed, boys passed up and down the aisle selling candy and papers, and the heat was terrible. Off in the distance from time to time a cluster of slave cabins would appear, and sometimes a great white house. The windows didn’t open. The air was ripe with sweaty people. A stove at one end leaked smoke.

At the station she stood with her grip on the ground beside her. The place swarmed, the same as all the other waystations they’d stopped at along the road, only bigger and noisier. She didn’t see Mr Rates and didn’t know what to do, where to wait. Everyone was shouting, shunting luggage around, She tried to get out of the way, close to tears. And then he loomed in front of her, the portly man from the night of Marta’s wedding, with his thin-lipped smile and small pale eyes. At the wedding he’d been dressed like a gentleman, but here he wore a loud check jacket and carried a black cane with a silver tip.

‘My dear Miss Julia,’ he said in an oily way.

‘Mr Rates,’ she said, ‘I was just wondering what to do if you hadn’t been here.’

‘Of course I’m here.’

A thin pock-marked boy whose nose turned up extremely appeared at Mr Rates’s side. He looked straight at her veiled face then away.

‘And on time, you see,’ Rates said. ‘Is this all you have?’

She looked down. Her stuff looked paltry. ‘This is all,’ she said.

‘Excellent. Michael!’

The boy picked up her grip and her guitar and set off briskly, weaving through the crowd. Mr Rates offered Julia his arm and led her after. ‘You must be tired,’ he said. ‘Terrible journey, terrible, I’ve done it myself. All went well, I take it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Excellent.’

Outside, the horses hung down their long brown heads, nostrils steaming. Their carriage smelled of dung and lemons. All the books she’d read in Don Pedro’s house had not prepared her for the excitement of New Orleans. ‘But it’s too big!’ she said with a nervous laugh. ‘It goes on and on.’ It was a city of long streets and tall terraces, big houses with gardens, Spanish courtyards that put her in mind of Culiacán, and everywhere people teeming, loitering, meeting and parting, more people than she’d ever seen. Music flashed by, the high whistling peal of a street organ. Trying to see, she carefully lifted her veil, and was aware of a tightening in Rates’s attention. But she held it slantwise, cleverly, so that it was like looking out of a tunnel. No one could see her.

‘Careful,’ Rates said very softly by her ear.

She had never felt so buried yet so alive, and she dropped the veil.

‘I’m scared about meeting all the new people,’ she said too quickly.

Rates leaned back. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘it’s only natural. But there’s nothing to be afraid of.’ He smiled, and putting on his grand stage voice declaimed, ‘You were born to entertain!’

‘I’m sick, sick of this veil!’

‘Not long now,’ he said. ‘You can take it off soon,’ patting her gloved hand and leaning close so that she could smell a slight odour from his breath. ‘You’re not shy, Julia,’ he said. ‘It’s what I noticed first about you. How calmly you faced the world with that stupendous, utterly unnatural face of yours, and of course — you know the spirit in which I say that, it’s merely a stated fact — I knew then you were a natural. No no, there’s no doubt in my mind, no doubt at all, but that you’ll thrive.’

The carriage swerved to get by a crowd spilling into the road.

‘Tell her about the Saint Charles Theatre, Mikey,’ he said.

‘It’s grand,’ Michael said, bored, looking out of the window on the other side, where a horse pulling a big dray was blocked by a lop-sided cart. The man driving the dray started shouting in an accent she couldn’t make out.

‘Wait until you see New York,’ said Rates.

‘I can’t believe I will.’

‘Oh, you will,’ he said, ‘you will.’

‘Wish I could go to New York,’ said Michael grumpily.

‘It’s not as pretty as New Orleans,’ said Rates, and the boy gave a crude snort as if prettiness was over-rated. ‘It’s like an old whore,’ he said, ‘all paint and dirty underneath.’

Mr Rates’s sister-in-law ran a rooming place in one of the faubourgs, an area where shuttered cottages mingled with low terraces and overhanging roofs. On shady wrought iron balconies, on steps, porches, people, people everywhere, all kinds, Spanish, black, white, every mixture. They pulled up beside a high fence in a busy street, not far from a corner where women hovered seriously over baskets of fruit outside an oddly shaped store. A tall middle-aged woman in a dark blue dress opened the gate immediately as if she’d been watching for them, and peered into the carriage eagerly before they’d even had a chance to get out. ‘Well, the new girl,’ she said and giggled like a giddy girl. Her face, vivacious and fleshily wrinkled, was heavily powdered white and wafted a scent of flowers into the airless carriage. ‘Can’t wait to see what you got under there,’ she said cheerfully.

‘Julia, this is Madame Soulie,’ Rates said, ‘my sister-in-law.’

‘Terrible journey, I dare say.’ Madame Soulie stood down so the driver could open the carriage door. Rates descended heavily, turned and gave his hand to Julia. ‘It was such a long journey,’ she said breathlessly, stepping down.

‘Hellish, I’m sure.’ Madame Soulie aimed a kick at a wiry grey dog rooting in the trash that bloomed along the bottom of the fence, snarling and unleashing a stream of furious French at it before snapping back startlingly into her practised smile.

‘Please,’ she said, ‘this way. What a tiny little thing you are!’

They followed her through the yard to the house, while Michael came along behind with her luggage. Pink azaleas bloomed along the sides of the path. On either side of the cottage a shingle roof hung down low, and a pomegranate tree shaded the walkway to the back. Somewhere inside a piano plink-plonked lazily.

Madame Soulie jumped up the step with a girlish bob unsuited to her bulk and called, ‘Charlotte!’ She held her hand out behind her to Julia, who took it and stepped into a wide yellow-walled room with a door on either side and a gallery above. She got an impression of faded, leaf-patterned divans. ‘Charlotte,’ Madame Soulie called again. ‘Where are you? Oh there you are.’

A bony mulatto girl of about twelve appeared silently.

‘Charlotte, take Miss Julia across.’ Madame Soulie wore five or six very long strings of beads that she fiddled with constantly. ‘Are you hungry, dear?’

‘Not at all,’ said Julia, ‘only very thirsty.’

‘Rest a while,’ Rates said genially, flinging himself down in an extravagantly exhausted way on one of the divans as if he himself had just come all that way. His belly was a dome of worn white linen. ‘The girl will bring you hot chocolate. Time enough to meet the others.’

Michael shuffled in, dumped Julia’s grip and guitar in the middle of the floor and stood looking down at them, breathing heavily.

‘Well, don’t just leave them there,’ said Madame Soulie, ‘take them across.’ She clapped her hands, and as Michael picked up the grip and Charlotte the guitar, turned the clapping into a Spanish dance in their wake, urging Julia after them.

‘We are all one big happy family here, Madame!’ she called after them as they emerged into the back yard. It was large, with three two-room shacks opening onto it. Curtains hung over the windows. A table and benches were pushed against the side of a brick kitchen, and half a dozen chickens pecked between weed-grown stones in front of it. A swing had been fixed to the bough of a very old apple tree. She was aware of figures, one in a doorway, one peering out of a tiny criss-cross window, but she felt scared and didn’t look at them. Half way across the yard a little stooping goblin came running out from the kitchen, sudden and utterly impossible. She screamed.

‘It’s only Cato,’ Michael said.

He was all face and not enough head. What there was of his head was dark brown and exaggeratedly egg-shaped, bald and tapering to a point like a dunce’s cap.

Seizing her hand in his little stick fingers, he spoke urgently in a high voice that broke and stuck and skidded nasally, drowning any words.

‘So tiny,’ she said.

His fingers were hot and squirmy. His face pushed itself avidly at her with a massive width of smile. A fat black woman in a guinea-blue skirt and white blouse appeared in the doorway of the kitchen, a wooden spoon steaming in her hand. ‘Come on now, Cato,’ she said patiently, ‘you get back now.’

‘He likes people,’ Michael said, looking back over his shoulder. ‘You never saw a pinhead before?’

‘Never.’

She stared into the shiny crinkling eyes, wanting unaccountably to unveil.

‘He’s just a big baby,’ Michael said.

‘Cato!’ the cook called.

Mewing excitedly, Cato ran back to the kitchen. His breeches were cut off at the knee. His legs were thin, bent sticks and his feet were too big. He put his head very far back and smiled up at the cook as if he was trying to break his face.

‘Here we are.’ Michael was lugging her grip through an open door. Charlotte, a frail thin-faced girl, stood back and waved her on in, staring at the veil as if trying to see through.

‘Thank you,’ Julia said. Wouldn’t you just love to know what’s under here? She looked around. It was plain but comfortable. Someone had tried to make it nice with blue flowers in a jug and a clean yellow tablecloth. A game of patience was abandoned on a side table. Two narrow beds were neatly turned down, and a pink curtain was half drawn back on a rail of wide, brightly coloured skirts. Michael put her grip down. Charlotte drew back another curtain, heavy grey linen. ‘You in here,’ she said. ‘You sleep here and put your things in there. You want chocolate?’

‘I’d love some,’ said Julia.

‘Look,’ the girl said. ‘You got a window.’

It was open for the air but covered with a net. Another net was round her bed. Veil on veil on veil.

‘I’ll bring you some chocolate,’ said Charlotte, staring blatantly. ‘You’ll want hot water too, I guess.’

The boy didn’t look at her at all.

When they’d gone, she tore off the veil and tossed it onto the bed. She was dazed. Three weeks and she’d be on a real stage in a theatre. What have I done? She got under the net and lay down on the narrow bed with her hands over her face, moaning softly. I should have gone back to the mountains, she thought. When she was little she thought the mountains were full of people like her, that there was a place up there where all the women were hairy and had more teeth. And it had occurred to her to just set off, take that path she clearly remembered, along which her mother had walked away. The path rose first gently and then, in the distance where everything turned blue, very steeply.

Where was the girl with the chocolate and the hot water? She jumped up again and stood at the window listening to the sounds beyond the end of the street, a muffled hum, a whistle, a rumble and a call. The Mississippi, how far away she didn’t know, not far, she’d seen it from the train, the big steamboats paddling up and down with people on the upper decks with hats and parasols. I am a woman who’s been on a train, she told herself. I’m in a great city. I’m going to New York. I could go anywhere.

A baby cried somewhere, out along the back alley.

She’d met Rates the day of the wedding. She’d been called from the kitchen to sing and play her guitar. All the doors and shutters were thrown open to the patio. Everyone was there, all the bright sparkling crowd of them, the boys, the young men and their wives, Doña Inés, her mouth held in the tight way she had when she was pretending not to be drunk, all the young bucks and flowery girls, and the children, some of whom had not seen her before. This was a particular treat for them. But it was nothing. She’d been stared at since she’d come into the world. She wore her red dress, a red flower in her hair, stood before the bank of paper flowers and strummed on her guitar, the same old thing she’d learned on, red and scratched. She sang ‘Llorona’ and ‘La Chapparita’, then laid the guitar aside, took up her harmonica and played for Doña Inés, ‘A La Nanita Nana’, and everyone sang along. Afterwards Don Pedro came forward, kissed her hand and held it and stood smiling before the crowd. ‘My dear friends, Señorita Julia Pastrana!’ he said, and they cheered and laughed and some gave her sweets and little gifts. Listen to her! That voice coming out of that face! One lady gave her a necklace made of blue stones. ‘I think you’re miraculous,’ the lady said. The mamas brought their babies in their arms to look at her, and she smiled and smiled. One child was afraid and screamed and was carried away by his scolding sister, saying ‘Oh, Enzo, making such a fuss. Señorita Pastrana will think you’re very rude.’

‘Not at all,’ said Julia, but the girl did not hear. Poor little boy, she thought, will he wake screaming, with a great jerk, seeing me in the dark?

‘Who taught her to sing?’ someone asked.

Will he try and try to put my face from his mind and be unable, and wish he’d never seen me? Will I have him waking in a sweat still when he’s a man grown up with his own babies?

‘I did,’ said Marta, who’d changed out of her wedding gown and put on a green-and-white dress over several layers of frothy lilac petticoat. She had not taught Julia to sing. Julia had always sung. She’d sung around the Palace as a child, sung as she worked, sung as she fixed a hem. She never showed herself unless she was called, and these days she was not called upon so much, usually only when Don Pedro had a visit from some important somebody with silk lining in his cuffs. And if that important somebody or that important somebody’s wife had heard of her and wanted to see her, she’d come out when they were sitting with their cigars and brandy, all ready and waiting and agog, in her red dress with a red flower in her hair. That had been Don Pedro’s idea, but she liked it. Red flower, black hair. Or purple bougainvillea from the vine growing along the boys’ balcony. Hoolya! Hoolya! Calling her to the patio. Hoolya! Hoolya! Summoning her to entertain them.

Rates had appeared in front of her, a round-faced man in late middle age with a prissy little mouth and the plump chin of a great baby. He was in company with an intense boy, one she remembered, one of those who got the pull, whose eyes got stuck on her in a troubled way.

‘Señorita Julia,’ the boy said, ‘you did not dance.’

She wasn’t at her best; she was tired. She’d been up long before light with the other servants. It had been a horrible day. She’d been crying because of the blue dress. If she was very careful, she could cry without anyone knowing, letting the tears hide one by one, strictly controlled, in the hair beneath her eyes. This was useful.

‘Not tonight,’ she replied.

‘I saw you dance once before.’

She smiled politely.

‘I wish you would have danced,’ he said stubbornly, his eyes steady.

‘Shall I dance for you now?’ She smiled, picked up her skirts and did a couple of swirls, backwards and forwards, side to side, stamping her feet and finishing with arms akimbo. A cheer went up from those close by who saw. The older man applauded.

‘You have talent,’ he said with a slight bow of the head. A Yank, by his accent.

‘Thank you, Señor.’

‘Didn’t I tell you?’ The boy spoke with an air of great seriousness. ‘She’s remarkable. She speaks English, Uncle. And you ought to see her dance. The way she points the toe.’

‘Indeed.’ The man held her gaze. ‘Miss Pastrana,’ he said in English, ‘you really ought to go on the stage.’

Julia smiled, looked down.

‘She exceeded all expectations,’ Don Pedro said jovially, appearing at her side and putting one arm about her shoulders. ‘I taught her to read myself. She can make a good fist of French as well if it’s called for. Can’t you, Julia?’

‘Mais bien sûr, Monsieur,’ said Julia, raising a laugh.

‘Miss Pastrana,’ the man said, as the band struck up once more and Don Pedro was dragged away to the dance floor by one of his daughters-in-law, ‘have you ever been in New Orleans?’

‘I have never been anywhere, Señor.’

In English he replied, ‘Should you decide to make your fortune, Señorita, come and see me in New Orleans. My card, Señorita.’ Which he presented with another small bow.

‘My uncle is in the entertainment business in New Orleans,’ said the boy importantly.

The name on the card was Matthew Rates.

‘New Orleans,’ he said, ‘New York.’

The outer door opened, Charlotte coming in with the chocolate.

‘Charlotte,’ she called, ‘I’ve taken my veil off. You can bring the chocolate in here if you like, or leave it on the table and I’ll get it when you’ve gone.’

Julia set about unpacking her grip, putting things in the small cupboard next to the window. A moment later a voice said, ‘Miss Julia, there’s some pecans too’, and when she turned Charlotte was standing by the curtain with a bowl of hot chocolate and a dish of pecans on a tray. For a long moment she held Julia’s eyes, devoid of expression, then she set down the tray. ‘Mr Rates say he’ll come by for you when you’re rested,’ she said.

‘Thank you, Charlotte.’

Then she was gone. To tell. She was used to freaks of course, but still. The chocolate was dark and wonderfully rich, and Julia drank it by the window, eating pecans and looking out at the twining plant on the back wall of the yard, thinking about Cato. He doesn’t know he’s a pinhead, she thought. He lives in that face like I do, but it’s different because he doesn’t think about it.

I do.

And there were more to meet. She’d be a difference among differences. It was a peculiar feeling.

Later Mr Rates came across with Madame Soulie. ‘At last!’ she said, walking straight over to Julia and peering down eagerly into her face, ‘I can see you! Oh my, oh my, you really are the strangest person I have ever seen.’ Her eyes bugged out. ‘And believe me, I’ve seen a few.’ She reached down and touched the hair on Julia’s cheek with one finger. ‘You are quite unique.’

‘So I’m told,’ Julia said. There were no freaks among freaks, but it was dawning that she really did surpass the lot.

‘You didn’t exaggerate, Matt,’ Madame Soulie said.

‘What did you expect?’ Rates looked smug. ‘When have I ever exaggerated? She’ll slay them in New York.’

‘Ooh, it’s lovely and soft!’

Madame Soulie’s hand was light and cautious. She stepped back. ‘You are so like an ape it’s scarcely credible,’ she said. ‘You just don’t look human. And yet you do. And you speak so nicely.’

‘I can’t be an ape because they don’t talk,’ Julia said in French, smiling, ‘but I know how I look.’

‘Absolutely!’ Madame Soulie laughed. ‘An ape doesn’t talk!’

‘I talk,’ said Julia. ‘I speak French and English and Spanish. An ape doesn’t speak French and English and Spanish.’

Madame Soulie goggled with delight.

‘Mr Rates,’ said Julia, ‘Who am I sharing with?’

‘Myrtle and Delia,’ Madame Soulie said. ‘You’ll get along fine.’

‘Of course you will,’ said Rates. ‘Come and meet them.’

They were in the next-door shack, which had big shutters opening out onto the yard and served as a communal parlour. The room smelled heavily of citrus and was crowded with fraying armchairs. Rates led her in by the hand through the open door. They’d been told about her and knew what to expect. There was a White Negro, a Rubber-Skinned Man, a Girl With No Arms and a Girl With No Legs. Michael sat scratching his pockmarked face on a piano stool. Seeing her for the first time, he smiled slowly.

‘Jonsy,’ Mr Rates said, gesturing at the yellow-haired paint-white Negro, whose cochineal-coloured suit matched his pink eyes. He stared at her, aghast. ‘And this—’ indicating a dark, heavy-jawed girl in a calico dress, who ended at the waist and appeared to be growing out of the florid roses on the rug ‘—this is Delia.’ Delia twitched a corner of her mouth and one eyebrow. ‘And Myrtle.’ A plump blonde woman in an orange kimono and red shawl half reclined in an uncomfortable-looking, over-stuffed green armchair, drinking from a tin cup.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ she said.

‘And this is Ted.’ Ted sat beside a small card table knitting a black stocking very nimbly. The Rubber-Skinned Man, she assumed, but he just looked ordinary.

‘And here,’ said Rates, grandly, ‘is Julia.’

She smiled. She was terrified.

‘Sit here, Julia, next to me,’ said Myrtle. ‘Want a drink?’ She flourished an opened bottle of brandy.

The chair was scratchy, the smell of perfume overpowering. Myrtle handed her a tin cup with brandy in the bottom. It warmed her and went straight to her head. So this is how it’s to be, she thought. No return.

After that, though she remembered talking to Myrtle about the journey, and realising that the hand raising the cup to Myrtle’s reddened lips was actually a very supple, long-toed foot rising gracefully from layers of skirt, she was so tired it all became dreamlike, and she said she really must go to bed or she’d fall asleep where she was.

*

In bed with a swimmy head from the brandy, she thought of old Solana back home. Her voice calling, high and thready. Lying there bedridden now, peevish thing worn out from nursing them all, the young men and boys, Marta, Julia too when they brought her in from the orphanage. Julia was the one in and out all day dealing with the dribble and phlegm, the smell of piss, the feeding and washing and wiping of mess. The night of the wedding she’d shown Solana the man’s card. ‘Look.’ In the process of emptying the old woman’s bedpan. ‘This man thinks I could make a lot of money on the stage.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ Solana had just finished a coughing fit. Her eyes streamed and her nose ran clear water. Her face was like the picture of a brain in a book in Don Pedro’s study.

‘Why is it so ridiculous?’

Solana’s breath came in long icy shards. ‘What man anyway?’

‘I don’t know. Just a man. Sit up.’ Wiping the old woman’s nose.

Solana squinting knowingly. ‘What’s the matter with you? Someone upset you?’

‘No.’

‘I don’t know why you still let things upset you, Julia,’ she said, irritated, ‘I’ve told you enough: God loves you, that’s all you need to remember.’

‘I know.’

‘Do you know?’ — cough cough — ‘Do you? I don’t think so.’

‘I’ll fetch your broth,’ said Julia.

And later, in spite of the tiredness pinching her bones, she hadn’t been able to sleep. You have talent. She’d got up and gone down to the inner patio, drunk water from the pump and sat on the steps with her head leaning against the dusty pink wall. Indeed. You really ought to go on the stage. Her feet ached and she wanted to cry for no good reason. They were still at it in the salon, but it was peaceful here. Yes, I am a very lucky girl. I know.

And you, Julia— Solana’s voice when she was younger. You’ve done well. This lovely house. You started off in a cave and now look! You can read! That day he came for you, that day was your lucky day.

Solana came from Zacatecas and had two lost sons, one killed by Santy Ana’s soldiers, the other gone away with them to Texas and never come back. Died at the Alamo because he’d have returned if not, God knows he surely would have returned. Santy Ana was a fat little devil, Solana said. That good man Don Pedro, a great man, a kind man, took me in, and was fair from the first day. While Julia scoured pots and cleaned the sink, Solana told her how it was.

‘He took you in too with your curse, and he wouldn’t have any of us say a thing against it. Got you from the orphanage. And all I know is your mother went out walking in the dark of the moon, and that’s not your fault, and there’s no more to it than that.’

‘Why?’

‘Only God knows.’

‘There may be more people like me.’

‘Not where you came from. They wouldn’t have put you out if you’d been the same as them. You’re from the Diggers, way up there,’ pointing a finger up as if to Heaven. ‘It’s a terrible hard life up there, poor as dirt, but they’re not like you. There’s no more. You’re one of a kind, my love. Your mother wasn’t like you, no one was. Doesn’t make you worse than anyone else. You’re what you are. You’ve still got a soul. Now wash those radishes.’

The courtyard was softly shaded. There was that old iguana Federico on the vine watching her, a wily old beast who’d lived with the family for as long as anyone could remember. It had all been so pretty, the carretelas departing, the padrino escorting the bride, the horses’ manes white, threaded with scarlet. And all the lovely dresses, the orange, the pink, the blue one Marta screamed over. She should have given it to me, Julia thought. She’s got so many, she’d never have missed it. I could have altered it, it would have fitted. She stood up, the blue dress falling around her in imagination, Rates’s words in her head as she climbed to the gallery: Should you decide to make your fortune, Señorita, come and see me in New Orleans. She leaned out, pretending she was behind the footlights in a theatre. A cheering crowd threw roses. The men tossed their hats in the air. Such tiny fine feet, they said.

Yo soy como el chile verde, Llorona, picante pero sabraso…

Still. Not a single one of them would ever love her. Solana had made that clear. ‘I’ll be honest with you,’ she’d said, a long time ago, ‘you can be as good as anyone, and you can be proud and always stick up for yourself and get respect, but there’s one thing you won’t get, nena, and that’s a man. Not with your face so far gone. Don’t expect it.’

‘I know.’

Hadn’t she always?

‘The world’s a cruel place, and there’s nothing fair about it.’

Julia had been about nine or ten, and even then Solana had been very old. She’d taken Julia’s face between her hands and looked fiercely into her eyes and said, ‘Listen, you. It’s not your fault. None of it’s your fault. And you won’t get a man but it doesn’t matter. What’s a man? Same as a woman. Nothing. It all goes anyway. God loves you, and Solana loves you, and your mother loved you, and that’s all that matters. She did it for the best, your mama. Of course she didn’t look back. That would have made it harder for you. She gave you to the vaqueros because she wanted you to have a good life.’

She remembered the vaqueros, big men with wide sunburnt faces, high on their soft-eyed brown horses. They drove three black-spotted cows with twisted horns before them. She’d never seen horses and cattle and men before. They put her on a horse, wrapped up like a bundle, strapped safe to the ripe poncho of a fat vaquero, and her mother walked away. She could say ‘Mama’ by the time she reached the orphanage, that much she knew because they told her so. Mama was in the big mountains. Mama was a kind, surrounding feeling that could bring tears to her eyes if she let it. And Mama was a sharp clear picture, the first memory, her mother’s back walking away from her, with resolution. She’d cried out, ‘Mama!’ But her mother never turned around. Mother’s shawl was sad and frayed. Her pigtail curled at the end under a battered straw hat. Water ran nearby, and the mountains glowed with a light that seemed to flicker faintly at the edge of vision.

Julia had ancient dreams. From the very beginning they were there, before any articulation — dreams that had little of substance, but friendly oceans of feeling. In the dreams Julia was full and warm, and darkness was above and all around, safe. And there were places of great light, where the ground fell away and birds with forked tails flew below her. But it had all gone, whatever it was. The Sanchez household had its own little chapel. When the priest told them about the Garden of Eden, she thought that was it, those mountains into which her first clear memory, the memory of her mother’s back, retreated. The fat vaquero made kind clucking noises at Julia as they rode down into Culiacán, speaking a language she’d yet to learn. The men stared at her, big brown bloodshot eyes all over her face. One of them dabbed himself here and there, thick fingers to the shoulders, the forehead, again and again as they babbled and jabbered, she as strange to them as they to her. She looked back with her thumb in her mouth, clutching her doll and crying. You, Yatzi. They took her away to a place where a woman looked at her and screamed. They tried to give her a proper doll with a painted face, but she didn’t want it, she wanted Yatzi that had come with her out of the mountains, and she screamed when they tried to take him away. They said her mother said she wasn’t her mother. Then again, said the nun, the man said she wept as she handed the child over, and kissed her, and prayed over her. Julia didn’t remember that. Only the pigtail. Then the shadows in the orphanage, the smell of beans and garlic, a wide white staircase rising up to a shady corridor in the Palace, arcaded and tiled in blue and white, and two boys playing a game of cards in their Sunday suits. Their iguana, the one there on the vine, sitting patiently watching from the top of a balustrade. These things were so far away they inhabited a space from which also rose dreams and fairy stories and the things you saw half way between waking and sleeping.

Ay de mí,

Llorona, Llorona — Llorona –

llévame al río –

tápame con tu rebozo, Llorona

porque me muero de frió.

I could get paid for this, she thought.

That’s when she’d known she was going away. But not yet.

Oh Saint Jude, she’d prayed, holy apostle, worker of miracles, close kinsman to Jesus Christ, hear me again, dear Jude, come now to my aid in my great need, bring the consolation and succour of heaven in all my necessities, tribulations and sufferings, and let me be loved like other girls, let me be loved like a human, and I promise to forever remember your great favour and always love and honour you as my special patron and do my best forever to increase devotion to you wherever I go. Thank you, Saint Jude. Amen.

Solana died six months later, and then she was free. She left early one morning, before it was light. Federico the iguana was sitting on the fountain with his face pointing at the moon. No one else was about. The old patio, there it was as it had always been. They were all sleeping. She’d said no real goodbyes, just slipped away. She didn’t think anyone else would miss her very much. Maybe a little. After all, what was she? A servant, moving on. She took a small grip, her harmonica, her guitar, a half round of white cheese, Solana’s old rosary beads and her doll Yatzi.

You and me, Yatzi. You and me.

She heard the lonesome baby cry again, out there somewhere toward the Mississippi. Julia opened her eyes. Myrtle and Delia must have woken her, coming in with whispers and a smothered giggle. They bumped about in the dark, trying not to disturb her. How strange. Far away under this sky it’s all still there. The patio, the stone bench, the fig tree, the shadow of the fountain. She saw it in moonlight, full of broken paper flowers, as it was that night.

~ ~ ~

Hot night, summer 1983. These were not nights for sleep, too febrile, too sweaty. Rose, walking home from some eternal flop-out, some smoky mustering in Camberwell, twoish, threeish, singing sotto voce the Heart Sutra to lighten the road (still the length of Coldharbour Lane to go) stopped still when the sky growled. A cosmic dog, big one with teeth. She was drunk enough to look up and laugh out loud. What the hell, there was no one around. A change of pressure, a flicker of lightning, then the first high murmur of rain.

Rose had sad brown eyes with tired hollows beneath, a wide big-lipped mouth and hair that stood out all around her head, thick, black and wiry. A scar sliced through her right eyebrow, giving that eye a slight droop at the outer corner. The years had rolled her into her thirties, thin and rakish, somewhat tousled and rough around the edges, and it was OK. The fear was at bay. As the rain set in, she turned her face up. It was good to be drunk. Simply wonderful sometimes to fray the edges, crank up the contrast. All she had on was a loose silky top and some old jeans, and she was getting soaked, but it was nice. She walked on, savouring the dark empty street and the way the soft hissing of late night traffic from Denmark Hill, and the lights shining on the wet pavement, made everything romantic.

Ahead of her, half way down Love Walk, was a skip piled high with rubbish. She never could resist a skip, particularly one full of the dregs and leavings of a house clearance. Whenever she came upon one, and London was awash with them, she stopped and had a good rummage and rescued anything that moved her. Many things did. When she was small, she’d bestowed consciousness on the things around her. Not just dolls and soft toys, but books, clothes, crockery, chairs, teapots and hairbrushes, rugs and pencils, even the corners of rooms and the turns of staircases, the gentle purring sound her bedroom window made when a car’s engine idled in the street outside, or the feathery stroking sensation in her chest when she was nervous with someone. All these things she’d named and given personalities.

She didn’t do it now, of course. But still—

Oh! Poor piece of paper, she’d think, passing a torn scrap in the street. Poor grape, last on the stalk, missing its friends and wondering why no one wants it.

This skip was nothing special, a pile of rags and rubble. She walked round it. A drop of rain hung on one eyelash, quivering in the edge of sight. Askew on the heap was a scattering of debris, shadowy nothings, in their very nothingness as heart-wrenching as anything, she thought, but you couldn’t stop for everything. The doll’s remains lay half in, half out of a doorless microwave oven near the top of the mound. She had to clamber aboard and scramble a bit to reach him. He was naked and limbless, with brown leathery skin, and a big head so damaged that his face resembled an untreated burns victim, the mouth a raised gash, the nose and ears pock-marked craters. One eye, made of glass, was sunk deep in his skull. The other was a black hollow.

‘Poor baby,’ she said, picking him up, cradling him sentimentally in her arms for a long moment before shifting him to her shoulder and patting his back. ‘Poor, poor baby,’ swaying happily in the rain.

She took him back to the ridiculous rambling old tip of a house on Coldharbour Lane where she lived, four enormous floors filled with escapees from small crap towns the length and breadth of the land. The air was an essence of all the people who’d ever passed through, and even though it was the middle of the night, the house had a faint hum of people doing things behind closed doors.

Rose went up to her flat at the top of the house. A waft of incense and dope greeted her when she opened the door. Inside was like an Arabian souk, all coloured hangings and cushions, mirrors, embroidery, long-fingered plants tumbling down deep purple walls. The room was full of stuff she’d brought home from skips and gutters and pavements, shelves full of things she felt sorry for. Old match-boxes and broken jewellery, bits of paper, sticks, fragments, remnants, residues, boxes, knick-knacks, broken things, the teeming leavings of the world.

‘Poor thing,’ she said, putting the maimed doll among her Indian cushions as if it were a cuddly toy, sitting back on her heels and looking into its round black face. The empty holes of the eyes and mouth conveyed an impression of sweetness.

‘Tattoo,’ she said.

~ ~ ~

Next morning Julia dressed quickly, drew back the curtain and crept silently through the room where the two girls were still asleep. A cockerel crowed in the dark, not too near. Another, closer, answered. Finding the latch, she lifted it silently and went out into the yard. Voices passed on the street. A light burned in the house. There was a movement over by the vegetable patch, and when she looked she saw the tall thin figure of a man walking backwards. With no hesitation, he passed along the side wall, turned and crossed the back of the house, momentarily dimming the light from the window, then disappeared round the corner into the leaf-hung walkway that led to the front. Though the light was coming, nothing but his shape and peculiar swift locomotion was clear. Diablo. There was no sound. He’s come for wicked children who won’t go to sleep. You don’t have to worry about that, Julia, the Sanchez boys used to joke, one look at you and he’ll run! Like the devil! When she was sure he wasn’t coming back, she walked down and used the privy, and by the time she was back Delia was up, sitting on her bed smoking a small cigar.

‘So,’ she said in a blunt throaty way, ‘your big show.’ Thick black pigtails hung either side of her face, and a red shawl was wrapped round her shoulders. Emerging from it, her forearms were tawny and muscled, thick-veined as a fighter’s.

‘The first,’ Julia said.

‘How long’s it been? Since you went on the road?’

‘I’m losing track. Two or three months.’

‘Ooh! So new. So how’s it all getting along with you?’ She waved one brown arm. ‘All this.’

‘Sometimes wonderful,’ said Julia, ‘sometimes frightening.’

‘Rates said you lived in a palace. Down in Mexico.’

‘A long time ago. My guardian was governor in Sinaloa, but I hardly remember it. Then we moved to the house I grew up in.’

‘He decent? Your guardian? Why you wanna leave?’

‘I was looking after an old lady,’ said Julia, ‘but then she died.’

‘An old lady?’

‘Old nurse lady.’

‘So was he decent?’

Don Pedro had always been fond of her in a distant way, as if she were a good old dog that had been with the family a long time. Sixteen years. ‘He was decent,’ Julia said.

Delia blew out a cloud of thick blue smoke, put her head back and gazed pensively at her. ‘Has Rates given you any money yet?’ she asked.

‘I have some money,’ said Julia, ‘a little. My guardian gave me some before I left. But Mr Rates has been buying everything, I haven’t had to…’

‘You made a deal?’

‘Of course. There’ll be money when we’ve done the shows.’

‘No, I mean a deal,’ said Delia impatiently, ‘a deal in writing.’

‘I haven’t signed anything.’

‘Oh but you must, you must.’ Delia jumped down from the bed onto her hands, cigar in mouth. ‘Don’t go a step further till you’ve got something in writing,’ she said, loping across the floor with strong arms and poking Myrtle in the backside. ‘Wake up, Myrt.’ Sinking down, the cigar wagging on her lip. ‘Listen to this, she hasn’t got a contract.’

Julia hated thinking about money. There’d always been enough. Other people provided, but she had to work. She could sweep and wash and light fires, or she could sing and dance and let them look. Singing and dancing won all hands down. Money made her head ache.

‘Myrt!’

Myrtle mumbled then turned over. When her eyes opened they were glazed for a while, unfocused, but suddenly they registered Julia and shot open. A brief hysterical indrawing of breath, quickly controlled, and she jerked up. ‘Sorry, sorry,’ she said, laughing awkwardly at herself.

‘She hasn’t got a contract!’

Myrtle closed her eyes again. ‘You should have had a lie-in,’ she said to Julia, ‘you’re supposed to.’

‘I always wake early.’

‘It can be a curse.’ Myrtle opened her eyes again but closed them immediately. Last night’s eye paint had bruised her pillow and lay encrusted across the top part of her cheeks. She looked both older and younger than the night before.

‘You have to get a contract.’ Delia sprang back onto the bed. ‘No word of mouth. Today. Before you sing another note. Tell him.’

Myrtle clenched her eyes and yawned till she shook. The sound of Cato’s swerving stumbling voice came in from the yard along with a faint, drainy smell of sewage.

‘Who is that?’ Julia asked. ‘That Cato. Where’s he from?’

‘He come from Alabama,’ said Delia.

‘With a banjo on his knee,’ said Myrtle, and they laughed.

‘True enough,’ Myrtle said, ‘he comes from Alabama. Off of a big plantation.’

‘Does he live here all the time?’

‘No one lives here all the time.’

‘He’s not with us,’ said Delia. ‘He’s with this kid Ezra.’

What does he do?’

‘Cato? Oh, people just like to see Cato. He don’t do much.’

‘He dances,’ Myrtle said. ‘Kind of.’

‘Yeah. Kind of. But mostly he just runs around.’

Myrtle burst out of bed in a flurry of white and went behind the screen. The sound of peeing trickled through the room.

‘Myrt, have you got my comb?’ Delia raised her voice. ‘The one with the fans?’

‘I saw it,’ came Myrtle’s voice from behind the screen, ‘but I can’t remember where.’

‘What about you,’ said Julia, ‘how long have you been doing this?’

‘For always,’ said Delia, re-lighting her cigar, which had gone out. ‘We used to be with a showman. Separate acts, this was, a long time ago, and we got along so we figured we’d try and make a go of it together and cut him out. He was slippery. Nothing written down. Got to get it written down. We get good rates now. We negotiate. This man Rates now.’ She lounged back against the pillow. ‘We all started out on the right foot.’

‘So you remember,’ Myrtle called from behind the screen, ‘you tell him, you want a contract, numbers, security.’

‘I will.’

‘Don’t underestimate it, Julia,’ Delia said. ‘All this. It’s hard work. Always on the move, God, you can die of boredom. You got to get paid. You make sure.’

‘I will. I’ll talk to him.’

Charlotte was sweeping the yard outside the back door. A fat white cat with a smug expression watched from the step. Ted and Jonsy were eating pancakes and eggs on a bench outside the kitchen, and Cato was on the swing, thin legs kicking, head thrown back.

‘Sit down, Julia,’ Myrtle said, ‘you want some eggs?’ She sauntered towards the kitchen door. ‘Morning Cass,’ she said, leaning in, ‘any coffee?’

Julia sat down at the table nervously, nodding at Ted and Jonsy. Ted nodded back. ‘Sleep well?’ he asked, shovelling egg with his fork. By daylight, he was cadaverous.

‘Not so well,’ she replied, ‘I kept waking up and wondering where I was. But I’ve been doing that ever since I left home.’

Jonsy was still wearing the pink suit.

‘That’s a nice colour,’ she said, nodding at it.

Jonsy’s mouth and eyes widened at her.

‘He doesn’t speak,’ Myrtle said.

Ted ate food like a man filling a hole in a hurry. ‘You’ve come a long way,’ he said, emptying his plate and sitting back with a satisfied shifting of the shoulders.

‘I have,’ she said, ‘and I’m going a long way more.’ The strangest feeling, sitting out here with strangers, bare-faced. What do you want? — she asked herself. Just this, out in the world, free, unafraid. Don’t spoil it by being afraid, fool. Pretend. Shake inside but never let it show.

Ted put his plate down next to him on the bench, picked up his can of coffee and slurped loudly. ‘I can tell fortunes,’ he said dryly.

‘Can you really?’ Julia leaned forward eagerly. ‘Is that what you do? I’d love to have my fortune told.’

He drew the makings of a pipe from a pocket. ‘Anyone can tell your fortune,’ he said with a dolorous air. ‘Your face. I been doing the rounds these fifteen, sixteen years, and I never in all that time seen nothing like your face. Oh, they’ll pay to see you. They’ll pay all right.’

Myrtle sat down across the table. She’d cleaned herself up and was puffy round the eyes. ‘You’re no fortune-teller,’ she told Ted.

‘Aren’t you?’ asked Julia, disappointed.

‘No.’ Ted looked mildly amused but didn’t bother to smile.

All this time her eyes had been straying to Cato, trying to take him in.

‘Do you want to see what I do?’ asked Ted.

‘Of course I do.’

‘This.’

He gripped the skin at the side of his neck and pulled it away from his body about four or five inches till it stretched into a thin membrane. Julia screamed, then laughed. Hearing her, Cato jumped down from the swing and came running. Ted let go of the great flap of skin and let it slap back into place.

‘How do you do that?’ she asked, delighted and appalled. ‘It looks as if it hurts.’

‘Doesn’t hurt at all.’ Ted swilled the coffee grounds round in his can. Cato crouched next to him on the bench and set about picking fingerfuls of his neck and face, pulling them out as far as they’d go and letting them snap back. Unperturbed, Ted puffed away. When the cook brought coffee and eggs and more pancakes, Cato let go of Ted’s skin and lurched towards her along the bench babbling excitedly, but he was so gangly and badly co-ordinated that he knocked Jonsy’s cold coffee flying. ‘You bad Cato!’ she yelled, striking the table with the flat of her palm. ‘I’ll tell your master on you.’

Cato wheedled up to her, stroking her apron. She put her hand on the slope of his head and her eyes connected with Julia’s, snagged and stared. Julia smiled. The cook nodded.

‘Cato, you have to be careful,’ said Myrtle. ‘You know you’re clumsy so you have to be careful.’

‘Anyhow,’ Myrtle said, ‘where’s Ezra? How come we always get to do the babysitting? Ezra!’ She threw her voice clear to the other side of the yard. ‘Ezra!’

‘Why is everyone always shouting around here?’ said Delia, swinging herself onto the table. ‘Is this pancake anyone’s?’

‘Hoo-hah.’ Cato pointed at Julia. ‘Hoo-hah.’

‘Yes!’ she said, ‘Hoo-oo-lya!’ Rates and everyone else called her Julia with a J, and it was nice to hear the old pronunciation, even if it was unintentional. ‘That’s how they say my name in Mexico.’

Cato came round to her side of the table and put a child’s hand up to stroke the hair on her cheek. ‘Yes, Cato,’ she said, smiling, ‘I’m hairy.’

‘Cato,’ said a high man’s voice. ‘You behave yourself.’

A big round-shouldered boy with curly black hair was coming slowly across the yard, giving himself plenty of time to get used to Julia before speaking. ‘You should ask,’ he said nasally, ‘don’t bother the lady.’

‘I don’t mind him,’ Julia said.

‘Ezra Porter, Ma’am.’ He offered a large fleshy hand. ‘Just you tell him if he’s in the way, he won’t mind. Come on now, Cato, you leave the lady alone.’

‘But I really don’t mind.’

Fascinated, she and Cato stared at each other.

‘Listen,’ Ezra Porter said, ‘if you’re sure you don’t mind…’

Breakfast was over and people were dispersing. The girls went off to the rehearsal room and everyone else drifted away, till there was just Julia and Cato smiling at each other, and Ezra Porter shuffling about with the look of a giant well-fed toddler, saying nervously in his irritating voice, ‘You know I–I have one or two things I really need to do. If you really don’t mind watching him for a while I’d be obliged… But don’t let him go out in the street.’

‘We’ll play on the swing,’ she said, ‘won’t we, Cato?’

Cato dashed for the swing, and Ezra Porter nipped smartly away.

‘Ready?’ she said. ‘How high do you like to go?’

But of course she couldn’t understand a word he said.

The back of his head was like a coconut, and his hands on the ropes were clenched and eager. She started pushing him, but as soon as his feet lifted from the ground he shrieked so loudly she had to stop.

‘Ssh! It’s all right. You’re on the ground.’

He wouldn’t get off the swing and started shaking the ropes.

‘I’m not pushing you if you’re going to scream,’ she said.

She tried again but it was hopeless.

‘Come, you can play my guitar,’ she said, but as she led him across the yard he became distracted by the white cat, and followed it round to the front of the house, hooting excitedly. She ran after him. The front yard was cool and shady and Madame Soulie was bending over watering her azaleas.

‘Why are you up front, Cato?’ she said, getting up. ‘You go back now. Go on. Good boy.’

‘He’s after the cat,’ Julia said.

Madame Soulie put down her can. The cat leapt up the fence and dropped down into the street. ‘Go back now, Cato. Are you looking after him?’

‘Yes.’

‘What? He’s left you in charge, has he?’

‘Yes.’

‘Don’t let Ezra take advantage.’

‘I don’t mind,’ she said.

‘Well, perhaps you should. Anyway, keep him back there. Gate’s closed but they look through the fence. Go on, boy. Best you stay back there too, Julia.’

‘Yes.’

‘He was taken for the devil baby once,’ Madame Soulie said, ‘and it could’ve turned nasty.’

‘The devil baby?’

‘The devil baby.’ Madame Soulie brushed her apron down, advancing on them with her bulky height, sweeping them back down the walkway and following after. ‘Did you never hear about that?’

‘I never did.’

‘It was this woman across the lake who had too many girl babies and she wanted a boy. She got so sick of all these girls she said, goddamn I’d rather the devil than another girl. Well, she got what she asked for. A big bouncing boy with horns and a tail and hoofs and teeth, standing upright and talking straight away.’

She made sure they were well shepherded as far as the benches outside the kitchen. Cato ran back to the swing.

‘Poor mother died of fear when she saw him,’ said Madame Soulie, ‘and he ran away down into the street and up over the roofs. They tried to kill him, but he won’t be killed. ‘

‘I heard a baby crying last night,’ Julia said.

‘Oh, you’d know it if you’d heard him. I heard him once. Never saw him, wouldn’t want to, but I heard him.’ She shuddered. ‘Dreadful sound. Never leaves you.’

‘What was it like?’

‘Not like any ordinary baby. Not even like a cat.’ She shuddered again, more visibly this time. ‘Anyway, this boy here gets out one day and walks down the street and someone screams: The Devil Baby! Look! Ezra had to run out, good job he’s so big, Ezra. You’ve got to be careful, believe me. Look, you want me to go get Ezra?’

‘Oh no. We’ll stay in back,’ said Julia, ‘won’t we, Cato?’

Madame Soulie returned to her watering, and they went back to Julia’s cabin. He was hopeless trying to play the guitar and soon lost interest. ‘You dance then,’ she said, ‘I know you can dance.’

She played her guitar and he danced, with knees cracking and no vestige of grace, his smile eerily oversized, till he grew tired very suddenly and fell asleep on Myrtle’s bed with a look of surprise on his face. Strangest face she’d ever seen.

Poor devil baby, she thought, playing on. Crying for mama. Because mama took one look at him, screamed her head off and died.

Brady Childer’s grocery and coal yard stood on the corner past a shoemaker’s and a couple more cottages. Upstairs was a room, oddly shaped because of the way the store had been built at an oblique angle on the corner, with a piano and a couple of old sofas pushed up against the walls, and a balcony running along two sides. Long windows were open for the air, but they were always covered by several gauzy layers of drapes. Couldn’t have the people across the way getting a free show. When Julia arrived with Mr Rates, Michael was playing a jaunty ‘Rose of Alabamy’ at the piano while the girls danced. What a sight! Delia danced on her hands, strong square shoulders and lean hips wiggling in time. She wore a plain grey dress and a red tignon, and her eyes were closed. Myrtle hoofed it energetically by her side, the frills of her sleeves flapping up and down and occasionally revealing smooth pink stumps. Perfectly in time, the girls sidestepped each other, changing places. Julia threw back her veil. When they finished, she clapped her hands and shouted ‘Bravo!’

‘Water!’ Myrtle said, ‘I’m dying.’

‘You’re so clever!’ Julia took off her shawl and threw it on one of the sofas.

‘Merci,’ said Delia, swinging herself across the floor and jumping up onto the sofa. She lay back in one corner with her arms thrown over her head.

‘We’ve been doing it a long time,’ said Myrtle, swigging from a bottle. A fine sheen of sweat shone on her forehead.

‘Has Michael got my music?’ Julia asked.

‘I should hope so.’ Rates was fanning himself in the heavy air seeping in through a gap in the gauze.

‘I’m out of practice,’ Julia said, nervous, stepping into the centre of the room.

‘Poor old Michael,’ said Michael, ‘he doesn’t get a break.’

‘Soon enough,’ Rates said.

Michael bent low over the keyboard.

‘So much space to dance,’ she said. The girls sat side by side waiting for her to begin. She wanted to run. Fool. Nowhere to practise on the journey. You’ve come this far, she told herself sternly.

‘You ready?’ he asked.

You’ve done it a million times. She nodded.

It was horrible at first. He played her Spanish tunes clumsily but with gusto, too fast, and she lost the rhythm a couple of times. But then she did what she always did at home, danced as if no one was there. It was the only way. Once she got into her stride and he’d slowed down a bit, they were fine. In fact it began to be fun, and she sensed appreciation but didn’t dare look at anyone in case the luck broke. She’d been doing this from childhood. The story went that Don Pedro had noticed her sitting still as a stone to listen in the doorway as he played the piano one day. ‘Hello, little Julia,’ he’d said. ‘Do you like the music? Is it pretty?’

Doña Inés happened to be passing at that moment.

‘She should learn the violin,’ she’d said, ‘I should like that.’

The violin didn’t work, but the old red guitar that was lying out on the stone bench on the gallery had become hers, and someone must have given her the green harmonica, she couldn’t remember, and the boys’ music teacher showed her how to sing scales and tap out rhythms. She’d learned the schottische, the polka and the highland fling. Songs came in with Solana, in her old cloak coming in from the marketplace, in her good cloak coming back from mass. Most of them were desperately sad because sadness made better songs. These days she danced more ballet. It was hard but she was getting better, and when she was tired she could slip back so easily into the old Spanish steps, turning, stamping, clapping her hands. In the lovely wide space of the room above Brady Childer’s, she began to whirl.

‘Olé!’ cried the girls, jumping to their two hands and two feet, and when it was over, everyone cheered. I did the right thing, she thought.

Everything was exactly as it should be.

Madame Soulie was in the yard when they got back. ‘Marvellous, aren’t they?’ she said, emptying the contents of a box of handbills fresh from the printer onto the wooden table and spreading them out in a fan shape. Human Curiosities, they cried, the words elaborately leaf-twined. The most remarkable and unimaginable abnormalities known to man, living testimony to the infinite variety of nature. There they all were, Jonsy the White Negro, Edward Pitcairn the Elastic Man, Myrtle Dexter and Delia Mounier, Armless and Legless Dancing Wonders. And there at the top of the bill — Julia Pastrana, The Marvellous Hybrid Bear Woman.

The only one whose humanity was in doubt.

‘Is that your name?’ asked Charlotte. ‘That big one there?’

‘It is,’ said Julia.

‘You’re at the top!’ said Charlotte.

Mr Rates came out of the house. ‘We’ve been mentioned in the Picayune,’ he said, waving a newspaper in one hand and a playbill in the other. ‘Look. I don’t think the words “Bear Woman” are big enough. What do you think, Ede? And don’t you think they should be a fraction higher?’

Madame Soulie put her head on one side and frowned.

‘I think we should seize the current,’ he said, ‘strike while the iron’s hot. What we need for you, Julia, is a good picture.’

‘A photograph?’ Julia sounded amazed.

‘No no. Get someone in to draw you. Pen and ink perhaps.’ Rates smiled. ‘You’d better get used to this, Julia. They’ll be standing in line to draw you, you know. We need a new pamphlet, a separate one, The Life of Miss Julia Pastrana. Same nice ivy design round the letters.’

‘Acanthus, Matt,’ said Madame Soulie, ‘they’re acanthus.’

‘Mr Rates,’ said Julia, ‘I need my costume for the show.’

‘Of course you do. I’ve been thinking about that,’ he said.

He’d promised to buy her a new dress. She’d never worn a dress from a shop before. Solana had made all her clothes till she was old enough to do it for herself.

‘Would it not make sense for me to wear it when I sit for the picture?’ she asked.

‘Very good idea.’ Rates looked surprised. ‘One second.’ He held up one finger, turned and went back into the house.

‘Let’s get out of this heat.’ Myrtle moved away towards the shack. ‘Come on, Julia.’ Inside was scarcely cooler than the yard. Myrtle picked up a palm fan and got onto her bed, settling cross-legged in front of her toilet box.

‘Don’t let him tell you what to wear,’ Delia said, coming in behind. ‘He will if you let him.’

‘He wanted to put me in this downright vulgar thing,’ said Myrtle. ‘Skirt up to here like a whore.’

‘And have you asked about your contract?’

‘Oh no,’ said Julia, ‘I forgot.’

‘No good,’ said Delia, ‘no good at all. You have to look after yourself.’

‘She’s right,’ said Myrtle. ‘You can’t afford to be silly about money. That’s the only thing I learned from my mother.’

‘I remember your mother,’ Delia said. ‘She didn’t know the first thing about money.’ She unwrapped her tignon and her long hair fell down.

‘That’s what I mean.’ Myrtle opened her box and looked at her face in the mirror. ‘She was about as stupid with money as it’s possible to be, my mother, so I said, I’m never going to be like that and I never have.’ She looked at Julia and smiled. ‘She drank, my mother.’ She took out her tweezers, leaned forward and curled her white-bloomered leg up easily to pluck one raised eyebrow. Rates knocked sharply and came in with a red dress lying over his arms. ‘Try this on for size,’ he said to Julia, ‘We can get it cut down a bit.’

Julia took it and held it at arm’s length. Low-cut and short-sleeved, it had a cheap look about it. ‘It’s wrong,’ she said.

‘What do you mean, wrong?’

‘It wouldn’t suit me,’ she said.

Rates laughed, an impatient whicker down his nose.

‘It’s better if I choose my own clothes,’ Julia said.

‘What’s wrong with it?’ said Rates, looking huffy. ‘It’s a nice dress.’

‘Well you know a woman usually knows best what suits her,’ Myrtle said, licking her toe and stroking her eyebrow. She picked up a jar from her box of pastes and powders with her foot, passed it to the other foot and started unscrewing the lid carefully. Her toes had the deftness of fingers.

‘It should be in your contract,’ Delia said, head on one side, combing out her hair.

‘What would you like to wear?’ asked Rates.

She knew exactly. ‘I’ll write down the measurements,’ she said. ‘We could have it made up. But I’d need to see some cloth.’

‘Hm.’ Rates looked puzzled. ‘I thought we could just go into town and…’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I’ve been making clothes all my life. It’s much cheaper. The dress must be right or the dance won’t work, and I know how it should be.’

Rates stuck out his chest and looked sideways, making chewing motions with his thin line of a mouth. ‘Well, I suppose I can get some samples sent over,’ he said, ‘l’ll ask Madame Soulie to arrange it.’

‘I’d rather go shopping,’ said Julia. ‘I don’t want the cloth brought here, I want to go out and see the shops and the market.’

‘She’ll know what to buy,’ said Myrtle, rubbing Creme Celeste into her face.

Charlotte stuck her head round the door. ‘Aunt Soulie wants Julia,’ she said.

‘Julia’s tired.’ Delia threw down the comb and began plaiting her hair down one side.

‘That’s all right,’ said Julia, ‘I’ll come.’

~ ~ ~

Could have been a doll that got burned, hard to tell. Sitting against an elephant-embroidered cushion, Tattoo, Rose thought, was like a stray dog brought in from the cold. She heard the messy banging of a piano downstairs, went out onto the landing and called down. ‘Adam!’ Her deep voice echoed in the stairwell. When she called again, the piano stopped and he came out on the landing below, covered in paint, a pinch-faced twitchy kind of a person with spiky hair and a crooked jaw that he held in a stiff, unnatural way. ‘What?’ he said irritably.

‘You know exactly what.’

‘Oh, Rose!’

Rose sat down on the top step, imperturbable, smoking a cigarette. ‘No skin off my nose,’ she said, ‘but he’s not going to let you live here rent-free forever.’

Adam hunched his shoulders and kicked the wall sulkily as if he was twenty years younger. ‘End of the month,’ he said. ‘You know that.’

‘End of which month, Ad?’ She smiled. ‘You know Laurie. He’s getting cranky.’

‘Ah but you, Rose, you can always get round him.’ He looked up, a sour twist to his mouth. ‘Use your influence.’

‘Ha.’ She picked a fleck of tobacco from the tip of her tongue. ‘It only goes so far, my dear.’

She’d been an artist’s model, sold pizzas, tried to get by making embroidered skirts, but now she was here, collecting rent for Laurie and passing on messages about leaky taps and blocked toilets, living a whole year now rent-free herself in return for that and her haphazard cleaning services. Fallen on my feet, she sometimes told herself, with a sense of having found a safe berth on a heaving sea.

‘Make a brew, Rosie,’ Adam said, continuing to kick the wall.

She got up, flicking ash into her hand. A shapeless garment the colour of wet sand hung loosely down past her knees, and her legs were bare and brown. ‘Come on then,’ she said.

He followed her up and stood frowning on the rug in front of the fireplace watching her make tea. A door stood open to her bedroom, through which could be seen her unmade bed trailing a thin Indian coverlet, bare boards painted blue, long shelves jumbled with beads and glass and spools of coloured threads. She made frames, ornate creations. Now and again she sold one or two through some craft shop or other.

‘What the hell is that?’

Adam was staring at Tattoo with an affronted, almost angry intensity.

‘That’s Tattoo,’ she said, pouring boiling water into the teapot and frowning at the steam billowing up in her face.

Adam picked up the doll and turned it round in his hands. His top lip rose at one side like a nervous dog’s.

‘Don’t you like him?’ she asked, stirring the pot. She put the tea cosy on it, turned and stood with folded arms looking over at Adam. God love him, she thought. Sweet. Not the type to get involved with though. Tough front, inside all mush. They smother you, those kind. Mind you, I suppose they all do in the end. Unless they’re married like Laurie, and even he—

‘That’s horrible,’ he said.

‘It’s just an old burnt doll,’ she said, pushing her hair back, pushing it about with her hands. ‘I was coming home and there he was on top of a skip. How could you resist that little face?’

‘It’s horrible,’ he said again. ‘Looks like a hoodoo doll.’

‘No no no.’ Closing her bedroom door on the mess within as she passed — too intimate a display for him — she came and plucked the doll from his hands. ‘You leave him alone,’ she said, ‘I have to find him a home’, and bore the thing, like a great treasure, to the mantelpiece above the blocked up fireplace. The mantelpiece was already crammed, but she moved things about with deft precision. Three-legged brown plastic horse with a hole in its back. Torn Chinese fan. Pink candle with teeth marks. Disgruntled Moomin, lacking an arm. ‘There!’ she said, propping Tattoo against the wall in the middle and standing back. ‘He’s happy there. Don’t you think he looks good?’

‘Good?’ Adam shoved his fists deep in his pockets and the skin between his eyebrows turned square. ‘It’s just a trunk,’ he said. ‘It’s got no arms and legs.’ But in a way, he thought, it did look good, hacked out, primal. Kind of an artwork. ‘Why d’you call it Tattoo?’ he asked.

Rose shrugged. ‘You pour the tea,’ she said, crossed the room and stretched out on the sofa, closing her eyes. She heard the rattle of cups, the clink of a spoon. She remembered the original Tattoo, could see him now with his smudgy grey eyes and thin smile of a mouth, his face young and friendly and shy, standing with his arms down by his sides on his scuffed blue shoe base, blue trousers, red coat, tall black hat. The paint was rubbing thin all over him, specially his hat. He was six inches high and lived in her pocket and she’d always had him.

Adam plonked a mug of tea down next to her head.

She opened her eyes. ‘I named him after a wooden soldier I had when I was little,’ she said, sitting up. ‘My grandmother got him from a jumble sale. He was very old. Home-made.’

‘The way you remember these things,’ said Adam, taking a seat at a respectful distance and blowing on his tea.

‘He was lovely,’ she said. ‘Had the face of a holy fool. My mother threw him out when we moved house when I was nine. I called her a murdering bastard.’

‘Did you? When you were nine?’

‘Probably not,’ said Rose, putting her mug down and lazily plaiting her hair. ‘Should have done though.’

It began to rain unexpectedly, hot rain from a heavy summer sky, wildly drumming on the windowpane.

‘Names are important,’ she said. ‘When a thing has a name, that’s when it really counts.’

~ ~ ~

Madame Soulie was in the parlour with three ugly dresses laid out on one of the divans. ‘Oh Julia,’ she said, ‘I thought some of these might suit you. Much too big, of course, but we can make adjustments.’

She was sick of cast-offs. ‘Mr Rates is taking me shopping,’ she said.

‘Julia,’ said Madame Soulie, coming briskly towards her with something lilac and old-fashioned held out in front of her as if she were dancing with it, ‘never look a gift horse in the mouth. Of course he will still take you shopping. But these are gifts from me.’

‘Of course. Thank you so much, Madame Soulie.’

Always the dull ones. Old, unworn, unwanted. Never again. This time she’d get a dress better than the blue dress, just for her.

‘You’re very kind, Madame Soulie.’

‘See,’ she said, ‘it fits you very well about the shoulders. Why don’t you try it on?’

’Now?’

‘Why not? In there, see, you can put it on in there and I’ll pin it for you.’

‘Oh no, really…’

Madame Soulie was not the sort to argue. Julia went into a dark musky room almost filled by a vast bed. It had a vague redness about it and a slightly mouldy smell, and the curtains were closed. The lilac dress fell around her like a sack, smelling of stale perfume. She remembered the way the blue dress had felt on the day of the wedding, settling onto her as she shook herself into it. Madness to try it on. Those wicked boys. Oh, play up, Julia. Say we made you do it. We did, didn’t we, Clem? We did, we made you. Look, we’ll go out and you put the nice dress on and the shawl over your arms, and we find you a veil. The veiled lady! Lady of mystery! Dress up as Marta, go stand on the balcony, fool the guests, whip off the veil at the last second, revealing all. Of course she’d had no intention of showing herself out there. She just wanted a chance to wear the dress for five minutes. It was much too long, of course — she was child-sized — and tight across the bosom, but so perfect, peacock-blue with lighter blue flowers round the low neckline, short puffed sleeves and three layers of skirt. But then Marta had come running in and screamed that her wedding day was ruined and she hated everyone, everyone, and you’ve used my tortoiseshell comb too, oh that’s just too much, bursting into tears and hitting Elisio hard on the side of his head. Get out! Get out, all of you! Get out get out get out! You’ll have to wash it. The comb too.

Nothing would ever change.

Julia drew back the curtain in Madame Soulie’s room and observed her face in a large oval mirror. There’d been a day, it must have been before her fifth birthday, when she looked into the cradle at a chubby brown baby with lips like a flower and a cheek as ripe as a peach. She saw her own dark hand moving towards the round bald head, startling against the white cloths. Elisio. Doña Inés somewhere high above her and smelling faintly of flowers drew in her breath with a high sharp sound, the air changed, and some knowledge of profound difference was finally born. Solana, then still strong and quick, had grabbed her arm quite roughly and said, No! — as if she’d done something wrong. She’d cried. Later Solana gave her a pear. Don’t touch baby.

If I could just — would it be possible, she wondered habitually, if I could just shave — but no, she’d tried and it was not possible, she’d have to shave fifty times a day for it to work. And there’d still be everything else. She remembered a moment, looking into her own eyes in another mirror, razor in hand. The horrible pale flap of skin suddenly nude above her upper lip showed all the more clearly the jut and thrust of it. She’d burst into tears. She never bothered now. Best just keep her hair nice, comb it gracefully towards the temples, down into her beard, keep it nice as she could. You couldn’t hold back the sea. Her face in the mirror was calm, the hair a bit of a mess. A pain burned in her chest. Am I human? Am I actually human? And if I’m not, what does it mean? Ape-woman, bear-woman, human. Thing. Still me, still the Julia creature. Hush, silly girl, said Solana’s voice. The good Lord made you, that’s all that matters. And she followed the thought till it billowed and swooped into a mighty chasm where she was afraid to go.

Madame Soulie opened the door and caught her crying, looking at herself in the mirror. Julia dropped the curtain.

‘What’s this?’ said Madame Soulie, striding into the room. ‘Crying? Oh no no, we mustn’t cry.’

‘If it’s the mothers that have done wrong,’ said Julia, pulling herself together, ‘why does the curse fall on the children?’

Madame Soulie took her by the arm and led her back to the parlour. ‘I’ve often wondered about that,’ she said, ‘and I’m afraid to say I have no idea. The dress is wonderful on you. Stand here in the light and let me pin the hem. And—’ She darted away, rummaged behind a pile of clothes that completely obliterated one of the armchairs. ‘—I’ve got some lovely little boots that might fit. Where are they? Much too small for me.’

Julia wiped her nose and gazed at the pomegranate leaves hanging down outside the window. Wouldn’t make any difference what she wore.

‘Now!’ said Madame Soulie in a tone dripping promise.

‘Should I stand here?’ asked Julia. A bird landed among the leaves and stared at her with tiny black bead eyes.

‘Julia.’

She turned. The boots were dark red with black trim and pointed toes, old but well cared for, the leather soft and clean.

‘They’re beautiful,’ Julia said. ‘Whose were they?’

‘A child.’ Madame Soulie held them at arms’ length. ‘Grew out of them. Her mother was in a show at the Charles. Try them on.’

Julia sat down and put them on. Her feet slipped into them as if they’d always belonged to her.

‘Walk up and down,’ said Madame Soulie. ‘Oh, look at your tiny foot! It’s like a child’s foot.’

‘They’re perfect. Thank you!’

‘And they fit?’

‘Perfectly. Can I keep them on?’

‘Of course you can. Now stand still.’ Madame Soulie knelt to gather up the hem of the lilac dress. ‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘a curse can be lifted.’

‘Someone tried once,’ Julia said sadly. Remembering Solana burning something smelly, bathing her in salt.

Madame Soulie stuck three or four pins into her mouth. ‘It has to be someone with the power,’ she said through narrowed lips, ‘not just anyone.’ She shook the material. ‘There’s a man I know.’

Julia looked down on the crown of Madame Soulie’s head. She’d put something on it for the colour but the grey was coming through. ‘He couldn’t help me,’ Julia said.

‘Probably not, chéri.’ Madame Soulie looked up, drawing a pin out of her mouth.

‘This man,’ said Julia a little later. ‘What else can he do?’

‘Gris-gris, fortunes. You know.’

‘He tells fortunes?’

‘He does.’ Madame Soulie rose heavily to her feet. ‘Would you like to go and see him? I can take you.’

‘Really?’

Madame Soulie smiled. ‘Leave it to me.’

Rates took her to the French market, then to a big store on the Rue des Grands Hommes. They went next morning early, she in her new red boots, walking with her gloved hand resting on his arm, watching the streets through the mesh of her veil. Women with baskets on their heads walked ahead of them. They passed an oyster stand and she wanted to stop, a man was playing a harp, another an accordion. Rates hurried her on nervously to the market on the levee, but when they got there her nerve faltered. It was the noise, a clicking of bones, a plucking of strings, the yelling of wares and cackling of hens, the grumbling of wheels on stone. A massive press of people jostled in the aisles, slaves and sailors, rough men and ladies of quality. Someone knocked into her and she tightened her grip on Rates’s arm. ‘The colours!’ she said, sticking close. ‘The flowers!’

‘Yes, of course.’ He hurried her on. ‘We’ll buy some flowers later if there’s time.’

But it was all such a rush so of course they didn’t. In the clothes market she chose ribbons, then it was on to the Rue des Grands Hommes without a break, where Rates told the woman in the shop she was his grand-daughter who’d been ill and was sensitive to light. She picked out a yellow and white corset and some rose-pink fabric and they were back in no time. It was as if someone had opened a door and she’d got just one glimpse of something wild and exotic before it closed again. Sitting at the table in the yard, she drew a plan of how she would have her costume. Pearl buttons. Six tucks on the skirt. For her hair, feathers and a single white gardenia. She wrote it all down, listing every measurement.

It wasn’t ready in time for the portrait. For that she borrowed a plain cream-coloured gown from Myrtle. Delia helped her pin it into place. ‘Lord Almighty,’ she said, doing up the buttons down the back, ‘look at you. Never seen nothing like this in my life. You could be at the American Museum. Do you mind?’ She stroked her hands across Julia’s shoulders then down her back, following the hairy downward-pointing arrow.

‘I don’t mind,’ said Julia. Solana used to stroke her when she was small, but stopped when she got bigger.

‘It’s like stroking a bear,’ said Delia.

The portrait was to be done in the front parlour of the house.

The artist was no more than a boy, frail and smooth-faced. ‘Oh my saints,’ he whispered, gazing, ‘Oh my saints and angels,’ as Julia settled herself in the over-stuffed button-back armchair. After this, the boy remained silent, working diligently away with his pencils and pens and inks. The clock ticked loudly. She went into a trance, gazing straight ahead. From here she could see the side-board, with its bowl of jasmine and the framed daguerreotype of a dignified militiaman with sad eyes. That must be Monsieur Soulie, she thought. I wonder what happened to him. She wondered what the precise state of things was between Mr Rates and Madame Soulie. Rates was too smug and bloated, and he had no lips. I wouldn’t have him, she thought, and couldn’t help smiling. Poor man, rejected by the bear woman. The bear woman’s choosy.

‘Don’t smile please,’ the boy said softly.

‘Sorry.’ For the rest of the sitting she contemplated the darting eyes of the young artist, whose gaze was now fierce but remote. She scared him and it couldn’t be helped. Some never got through it, some did. And more to meet. Soon, rehearsal at the New Saint Charles, onstage, with a band. People at the theatre. You chose this, girl, she told herself. You could have stayed home. She worked herself up for the rest of that sitting, and the one after, with so much time to do nothing but sit still and think. She’d fail, she’d fall over, be sick. But the time came closer and she didn’t run, and suddenly she was there in the peculiar backstage land of stairs and doors and voices, and soon there was the stage, and the band below her, all staring up. And it was all right. These musicians had seen everything and adjusted quickly. Even so, they were quietly shocked in those first moments. No escape. They struck up a polka. She danced, forgetting all about them and pretending she was alone. She was dancing in the patio after everyone else had gone to bed. Like before, they cheered when she finished. Relief flooded her, and she smiled and ran to the front of the stage. I’ll give them a good look, she thought, leaning down, saying, ‘Thank you! I’ve never sung with a band before.’

The musicians beamed and gawked, knowing they were getting a treat.

Then the violin played the sighing first notes of ‘I Dreamt I Dwelt In Marble Halls’, and she sang. It poured like cream, perfect.

‘Take a bow,’ said the leader.

Madame Soulie, big bust heaving contentedly, played on the air with her fingers. ‘He’s got power. You look in that man’s eyes and he sees you.’

‘But to turn me,’ said Julia, ‘would be a miracle.’

‘Well, of course, one mustn’t expect too much.’ The carriage rumbled into Bayou Road. ‘But I don’t see the harm in trying. We only live once.’

‘I agree.’ Julia looked out of the window.

‘He knows about you anyway,’ Madame Soulie said. ‘I’ve told him some. Oh, here we are!’ She was jolly, as if they were on a jaunt.

There were some fine big houses on Bayou Road. Dr John Montanee’s was low and set back a little. A muted red glow came from the windows. There was a lantern on the porch and red dust on the threshold.

‘We’re lucky he could fit us in at such short notice,’ Madame Soulie whispered, rapping on the door and adjusting Julia’s collar as if she was a child, ‘he’s so busy. They all go to him, everybody. I’ve seen it when they’re standing in line a mile away.’

A woman with tired eyes and a long oval face opened the door and motioned them in, placing one hand on Madame Soulie’s sleeve in a familiar way as she did so. ‘Bonsoir, chérie,’ she said, her eyes sliding towards Julia. ‘Bonsoir, Madame.’

‘Here we are.’ Madame Soulie swept grandly into the room, ‘and here is she. Julia dear, come in, come in. Marie, how are you?’

‘Seen many a better day,’ said the woman wearily, ‘and a few worse.’

The room was warm and dim and cluttered with furniture. Lizards sat about on the backs of sofas and arms of chairs, and the walls were hung with desiccated things, toads, scorpions, chickens’ feet. Skulls grinned from the top of a high cupboard. A fire burned low. Two girls lounged almost vertically in easy chairs, drinking wine and looking at Julia with no apparent interest. Deep in the room, standing in front of a red curtain was the Doctor himself, a tall grey-bearded African man in an expensive black suit with a frilly white shirt front. She’d never seen a rich black man before. His cheeks were slashed, three big gashes each side. A python coiled around his waist and neck, its face hovering peacefully in front of his chest. ‘Miss Julia,’ he said, his voice deep and heavily accented, ‘come on in’, indicating that she should follow him behind the curtain.

‘Go with the Doctor,’ said Madame Soulie. ‘I’ll be right here. Go on.’

The Doctor adjusted his snake as if it was a scarf. ‘Come on in here,’ he said. ‘Come on now, nothing here to be scared of.’

Behind the curtain was a short passage, another door, a small dark room with a picture of the Virgin Mary on the wall and an elephant’s tusk in the corner. Bunches of herbs hung from the ceiling, white candles burned tall and straight on an altar, and the air was smoky and rich, heavy with a dark soporific perfume she could not place. He motioned for her to sit in one of two chairs drawn up close beside a small table spread with shells and straws, sat down himself in the other, took the snake’s thin head gently between the fingers of his right hand and settled its brown and yellow coils more comfortably. It turned its face to look up at him. Behind him on the shelf was the skull of something small and delicate.

‘He’s beautiful,’ Julia said.

‘This here’s a lady,’ said the Doctor, smiling.

The snake’s round black eye was still.

‘What do you want?’ the Doctor asked.

‘Madame Soulie said she told you about me.’

He nodded.

‘I might be cursed,’ she said.

He nodded again.

‘My nurse said it was because my mother walked out in the dark of the moon. My guardian said that was nonsense. But no one has ever told me what I am.’

He sat rubbing his beard for a long time.

‘How old are you?’ he asked.

‘I’m twenty-one,’ she said.

‘Let me see you.’

She took off her veil, and he sat looking at her without any movement for so long she wondered if he was trancing her. His eyes were soft and bloodshot but very penetrating. He winked suddenly, and she smiled. ‘Answer my question,’ he said. ‘What do you want from me?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You want me to make you like everybody else?’

‘Yes.’

‘No,’ he said, leaning forward and speaking sharply, ‘that’s not what you want. Think again.’

She thought he was scolding her and spoke too loudly in self-defence, ‘Can you lift the curse?’

‘Ha.’ His smile was sudden and brilliant. ‘Can’t do a thing for you.’ He reached across and took her hand. ‘That’s no curse. I can give you some gris-gris though. What you want? A man?’

She was shocked.

‘I pray to Saint Jude,’ she said.

‘What’s he say?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Take off your glove.’

She did. His two big hands closed around her cold hand. ‘Close your eyes,’ he said.

They sat in the dark, which darkened more, as if the candles were going out one by one. It was like falling half asleep. He took his hands away. He was burning herbs, moving around, shaking something that whispered, saying softly: Papa Legba, Papa Legba, Papa Legba, over and over again. She thought she could hear someone else nearby singing along, a woman’s voice or maybe more than one, but it seemed unlikely and she didn’t want to think about where it was coming from.

‘Will I ever be loved?’ she asked.

The Doctor gave her a drink, straight into her mouth, his big warm hand on top of her head. ‘You’ll be loved,’ he said, ‘Within a year.’

He moved away. Through her eyelids she could see the flickering of candlelight and heard the rattle of shells and bones falling.

‘Open your eyes,’ he said.

Two bowls, white powder and dust.

‘Someone’s watching out for you,’ he said, sitting across from her, studying the bones. ‘Your mama’s watching.’

‘She gave me away,’ said Julia. Her voice came out double, vibrating. Her eyes fell upon the small neat skull on the shelf. A cat, she decided, and her eyes filled up. Poor puss.

‘She’s watching over you anyway,’ he said. ‘And she’s not the only one.’

‘You said I wasn’t cursed.’ He wasn’t going to help her, it was obvious. How could she ever have thought it? ‘Can’t you tell me anything?’ she said. ‘I wanted you to tell me what I am. I don’t know.’

‘No curse to lift,’ he said. ‘And what you are? You’re a strange girl, that’s all. Hush.’ He closed his eyes and sat silent for a while. ‘You’re going across the sea,’ he said, ‘you’ll keep moving.’

‘Me?’

‘Just moving, always.’ He opened his eyes and looked at her. ‘Something’s coming,’ he said, ‘big something.’

‘Bad or good?’

‘Both.’

She laughed. ‘That means nothing.’

‘No,’ he said seriously, ‘that means everything.’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘No matter.’

What did you expect, she thought. Wave his arms? Say the right words? Lo! A miracle. ‘But there are curses,’ she said, pulling on one of her gloves.

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I can fix a curse. I can lift a curse. Whole lot I can do, but I can’t lift a curse that isn’t there. Can make you feel better though.’

‘What about what my nurse said? How my mother walked out in the dark of the moon and that’s why I’m like I am.’

‘Your nurse don’t know what she’s talking about,’ he said. ‘Your mama can walk out any old moon she likes long as she’s careful.’

He was back there in the chair opposite her, leaning on one elbow, frowning, his snake advancing from his left shoulder into the air before him.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said, ‘it just seemed wrong. Why the baby gets the curse for what the mother did. And maybe she didn’t even know she was doing it.’ She looked down at her hands, one gloved, one hairy. ‘Madame Soulie says there’s a devil baby running about on the roofs. I was so scared. I couldn’t get to sleep that night for thinking about him.’ She pulled on the other glove. ‘Poor thing. Running about all night across the roofs and down the alleys all on his own and everybody running away from him and all because of something his mother did.’

The Doctor’s face was serious. He looked at her for a long time without blinking or saying anything, putting his hand beneath the head of his snake. His eyes were full, as if he’d seen a whole world of sorrow. She couldn’t tell how old he was. Old. Poor eyes seen it all. ‘You know I knew that devil baby,’ he said, and a chill ran through her.

‘For sure.’

‘Is he real?’ she whispered. ‘Is it true?’

‘True as anything.’

‘And he cries in the alleys?’

‘I never heard him.’

‘What was he?’

‘Born red. Scales, like this.’ He ran a finger along the snake’s body. ‘Born screaming. Nothing anyone could do. Mama couldn’t look at him. Friend of mine tried to raise him but he ran away. Don’t know where he went.’

‘Ran away? A baby?’

‘Six months old, up and ran. Little bumps here,’ he touched his brow, ‘little horns. No hoofs, never had hoofs.’

‘But what was he?’

‘A baby.’

‘A baby what?

‘Who knows? I knew his father. And he said his wife never said that thing about the devil anyway, people just made that up.’

‘And you saw him? The baby? What was he like?’

‘Oh a very bad thing. Couldn’t get near him. Terrible thing. Woman I knew tried with him but he grew too quick.’

‘But what was he?’

‘A bad baby. And when people started seeing him here and there his whole family took off. He’s around, they say.’

He took from under the table a small bottle and a tiny red bag and slid them across the table to her, and she understood that their time was up. ‘What is this big thing that’s coming?’ she asked.

‘Love,’ he said, ‘up the road.’

‘Within a year, you said.’

‘Within a year. For sure.’

They stood.

‘Did he have a name?’ she asked as he held the door for her, ‘The baby?’

‘Valentine,’ the Doctor said. ‘His name was Valentine.’

She paid one of the women $15 on the way out.

‘He’s marvellous, isn’t he?’ Madame Soulie said as they got into the carriage. She was tipsy from drinking wine in the front room.

‘Is he not a slave?’ Julia turned the red gris-gris bag in her fingers. It was sewn shut. She had no idea what was in it, only that it felt like tiny chips of bark and would draw fortune. The love potion was in her pocket. ‘What is he? How can he have so much money? That good house.’

‘A free man,’ said Madame Soulie and laughed. ‘Came as a slave from Africa and now look. Free, rich and black. He must have power.’

The night of the show, Julia dusted herself with orris root and combed herself very carefully, arms, breasts, shoulders. Her head hair, adorned with gardenias and feathers, was done up in curls. Rose-pink silk flounced about her short full figure on a froth of white petticoats. From the carriage she saw the posters all along St Charles Avenue for the show, her name at the top and bigger than all the rest. She saw the crowds on the steps and all along the block, the flowers above the great doors in front of the theatre, and all the lights from the chandeliers shining out from the foyer. The carriage took them round the back. Rates, in a frilly white shirt, his sparse grey hair pomaded, handed her down and led her in through a warren of scurrying forms only dimly seen through the veil to a small room with mirrors and chairs, a table with glasses and a bottle of brandy.

There was some time. The walls were flimsy. Next door, Ted and Jonsy and Michael were laughing about something. Myrtle, brush between her toes, painted Indian ink around her eyes. Delia blew a kiss to her reflection. Julia fiddled with her gardenias, flicking an imaginary speck of dust from her rose-coloured stocking, inspecting the pearl buttons on her tight white shoes.

Her nerves were jiggling.

She felt better sitting in the wings, watching, waiting her turn drinking water and wine. Funny how different people were when they performed. Jonsy, the stone-faced and silent, laughed and grinned, cakewalking across the stage, the whiteness of his skin and hair against the pinkness of his eyes and suit. Ted curled his hands into claws when he picked at his flesh, his face turned into something unearthly and slightly wicked. He pulled the skin under his chin up over his face till it covered his nose completely and his eyes glaring out above looked mad. Then it was Myrtle and Delia’s turn. They played a Jew’s harp. Myrtle’s lips were waxed and carmined round the frame. Delia, balancing on a pedestal by her side, plucked the reed.

The world stopped at the footlights.

Rates came and stood at her shoulder. ‘What a marvellous place this is,’ he murmured suavely. ‘Think of this, Julia. Only three years ago the great Jenny Lind, the Swedish Nightingale, was up on that very stage. And now here you are. Julia Pastrana. Top of the bill!’

Till the last minute she thought she’d turn and run, just turn and run, think later.

It was time. No different from singing at home at a party, lowering the veil across her face, blood beating in her ears. She took her place in the centre of the stage and breathed deeply behind the shiny purple curtain. My God, but the stage was wider than she remembered. The others, who’d all gone before and could now rest, were watching from the wings. The auditorium rustled. She heard Rates walk out in front of the curtain.

He spoke in a voice she’d never heard before, basso profundo, declaiming, ‘Ladies and gentlemen! Mesdames! Messieurs! I am proud to announce! The world debut! Of the most remarkable woman in the world! The greatest wonder of nature! From the wild mountains of Mexico! Perhaps — even — the Missing Link!’

A long breathless pause.

‘I give you! The only one of her kind, the truly incomparable — Julia! Pastrana!’

The curtain rose.

The theatre was a great gold cavern with a thrilling echo. The lights lit up faces, row after row after row, every one fixed on her. She smiled beneath her veil. Her lips had dried up so she tried to lick them but her tongue, too big at the best of times, had dried up too and seemed to have doubled in size. She swallowed. Sing to the people at the back, Rates had told her. The back was miles away. But first the band struck up the Minute Waltz. A little run on the tips of her toes then into the dance, keeping time with all the changes, twirl, pirouette, pique, turn. Slow down. Glissade, then into the Hungarian Dance, and from there to flamenco, swishing her skirts and stamping. The crowd cheered. When she stopped and curtseyed, they cheered more. Then Rates walked out and took her hand, holding it high to his lips and bowing to her as if she was a great lady.

‘Wonderful, Julia,’ he said quietly to her, then turned to face the audience. ‘And now it is time!’ he cried, ‘to reveal to you — one of the great wonders of our time, the only one of her kind — the nonpareil — the most remarkable being known to mankind — la-dees and gentlemen — Mesdames — Messieurs — I give you—’

They had rehearsed it time after time above Brady Childer’s grocery shop. She held herself ready, arranging her face into an easy yet dignified smile that would become more animated as the audience relaxed — and after all, as Delia had said, what more was this than what she’d been doing all her life one way or another?

‘—the one and only!—’

She stepped away from him and lifted one elegant white-gloved hand to the end of her veil.

‘—Miss JULIA PASTRANA!’

She unveiled.

There was a moment of absolute silence, a second or two at most, then a collective sucking like a hurricane drawing in its breath to blow. A few people shrieked. Julia walked towards the front of the stage. She heard a wag in the audience say, ‘It’s a chimpanzee in a dress!’

Someone shouted, ‘LOUP GAROU’. She laughed. Her eyes twinkled, her smile was genuine. Now that she was on, she didn’t feel so bad. I’m looking at you, she thought. You are looking at me. And you’re paying. The band played ‘La Llorona’. She’d sung it hundreds of times, it’s what she’d always done, and she sang it tonight with a certain lightness and spring that somehow accentuated its tragedy, walking up and down the front of the stage and peeling off her long white gloves, discarding them as she looked out into the sea of faces, meeting eyes boldly, as fascinated by them as they were by her. The crowd roared and waved its handkerchiefs, and it was such a glorious moment she thought she might faint.

The night before they left for New York there was cold ham and figs and a jug of wine, laid out on the table in the yard. Cato and Ezra Porter were heading for Knoxville in two more days, and other people were coming to stay in the shacks around the yard.

‘Going on a big train, Cato,’ Delia said, wafting the air with a palm fan.

Cato was sitting on the henhouse.

‘You and Cato,’ Julia asked Ezra, sipping her wine, ‘How did you come by each other?’

‘Found him near Pittsville, Alabama,’ Ezra said. ‘In a bar. Was with a man called Flynn who had fleas he used to feed on a big special vein he had running down the inside of his arm.‘

Cato’s bare heels drummed the side of the henhouse.

‘Cato, get down from there,’ said Ezra. ‘Poor stuff, it all was — you know — not even the midway, back of the midway, out of the midway, box on the sidewalk, tent thrown over three sticks, you know?’ He got up and traipsed over to the henhouse. ‘Someone brought Cato in the bar. This kid kind of pushed him in. Was scared, not like he is now. Me and Flynn sitting there and the bartender just staring, says, Jesus Christ, it’s some fucking freak. What the hell, get it out of here. And Flynn just about filling his pants. Didn’t bother me. They used to bring the freaks through every year where I grew up. I knew what he was.’

He took Cato’s hand. Cato pulled it away and walked along the ridge of the henhouse, arms outstretched.

‘Kid said he‘d been following him about like a lost dog and he didn’t know what to do. He’s been walking up and down all day just up the road, they shooed him away, and now he’s following me, he says, and I don’t know what to do. Look, he’s giving me the creeps. From the plantation most like, Bartender says. Better take him to the Sheriff. They don’t want him up there, the boy says. They put him out.’

Julia took her drink over to the swing, sat down and swung gently.

‘And I said, no,’ Ezra said, ‘people’d pay money to see him. And Flynn says I ain’t going anywhere with that thing.’

Loose-jointed, Cato jumped down and moved with his peculiar bent-kneed gait over to where Julia swayed under the apple tree.

‘So after that,’ said Ezra, ‘it was just me and Cato.’

‘Hoo-hah!’ Cato said, holding up his arms as if wanting to be picked up.

‘You want to swing?’ she said. ‘Shall I push you? You won’t scream, will you?’

He shook his head.

‘Come on then.’ She got down and put her drink on the ground and he clambered on with sounds of gobbled delight. As she pushed, he howled with joy and his thin bare feet kicked wildly.

‘Cato!’ she said, ‘You promised!’

Madame Soulie came out of the house carrying a banjo and sat down with the rest. ‘It’ll be very quiet around here tomorrow when you’re all gone,’ she said.

‘The new batch’ll be here before you know it,’ Rates said, peeling a fig.

Madame Soulie played ‘Rose of Alabamy’, slow at first.

‘I’m not pushing you, you’re too noisy.’ Julia said.

Cato got down.

‘I could play this once.’ Madame Soulie said, playing a little faster.

Cato lifted up his long skinny arms and swayed.

‘I will miss you, Cato,’ Julia said.

Duende, she thought. Goblin. I’m the loup garou. Jonsy’s a ghost. Arm in arm against a full moon sky, walking with the devil baby. ‘Dear little duende,’ she said, and was struck with a momentary sense of belonging.

~ ~ ~

Rose was reading about an island in Mexico, the last resting place of hundreds of dolls.

‘Trouble is,’ said Laurie, ‘for you it’d be like going to Battersea Dogs Home. You’d want to bring them all home with you.’

Adam, hovering uneasily about with a slightly sneery look on his face, was wondering if he should leave. He’d been drinking tea and talking to her about M.R. James when Laurie just walked in and slobbed down with her on the sofa, taking over. Laurie wore an emerald-green velvet waistcoat over a naked brown torso, and his shoulders and arms, packed with veiny muscle, were tattooed to the wrist with swirly vines and plants and birds. There was an unsavoury reek about him, a whiff of the lower echelons of the entertainment industry, of amusement arcade back rooms.

‘No,’ said Rose, ‘I’d leave them there. They’re happy.’

‘Rose,’ said Laurie, ‘believes a lost sock misses its partner and weeps bitter tears for it.’

‘I do not.’

‘Yes you do.’

‘Of course I don’t believe it literally,’ she said. ‘Don’t try and make me look like an idiot.’

‘Don’t try and make her look like an idiot, Laurie,’ Adam repeated. He didn’t know why. It came out sounding nasty.

‘Will you all stop taking the piss?’ she said, sitting up and throwing the magazine down onto the rug. ‘Anyone wants to take the piss has to get out of my room.’

‘It’s OK, Rose,’ Laurie said, ‘we all know you’re mad, but we forgive you.’

Adam picked up the magazine. ‘Obviously this is where Tattoo should be,’ he said, looking at the pictures. The dolls were weirdly beautiful. Rose lay back against Laurie, whose large gnarly-knuckled hand slid round under her waist and began lazily kneading her stomach under her crumpled blue shirt.

‘Catch you later,’ Adam mumbled, went downstairs and grabbed his ancient Nikon, wandered out into the street and roamed about in the direction of the park. Every now and then he’d stop to take a moody shot of a pigeon or an empty bench. It was a sunny day, dust from the traffic got in his throat. He ambled along, going nowhere in particular, got bored and went back home, lay down with closed eyes listening to the radio still playing the same random pop music it had been playing to his empty room all afternoon. He lived in a tip of squashed paint tubes and discarded rags. Some days he’d get up and dressed and lie back down on his bed, doing nothing fiercely and tremulously till it was time to go to sleep again. After a while he drifted to sleep, drifted out again, drifted back upstairs. Laurie had gone. She was sitting in the middle of all her things. It was getting worse; the stuff was making the room too small.

‘Grab yourself a glass,’ she said. She’d opened a bottle of wine. He lay down on the floor. She fiddled about with some embroidery for one of her frames. A J.J. Cale album played softly. For a long time he stared at the ceiling.

‘You don’t really like him, do you?’ he said.

‘Let it go, Ad.’

‘His breath stinks.’

‘No it doesn’t.’

‘He’s an ugly fucker.’

‘Yeah yeah.’ Rose put down the embroidery, picked up her glass, took a long drink and poured herself another. Closed her eyes. God, it was tiring. Living. Knocking about the world alone, Bloody men, always wanting more. She didn’t want an us. Family stuff. Her own was far-flung and had never been demonstrative. She’d spent her teens and twenties falling in and out of love with a series of boys and men. Sometimes she counted them off in her head. They all ended. Feelings changed, nothing was certain, everything was threatened.

‘He’s got lumps on his face,’ said Adam.

‘Shut up,’ she said.

‘OK OK OK.’ Long-suffering, he got up and walked around the room looking at stuff. The whole of the fireplace wall was now covered half way to the ceiling with shelves she’d made out of bricks and breezeblocks and planks of wood. You could imagine a little lift man going up and down. First floor: shells, plectrums, combs with missing teeth. Second floor: twigs and branches, random bits of wood. Third floor: odd playing cards, buckles, matchboxes, bobbins of coloured cotton. Fourth: things babies throw out of buggies and prams — a little cloth star, a rattle, a mouse with a baby-gnawed nose. Fifth, top: bottles — Tiger Sauce, La Fée Absinthe, Stone’s Ginger Wine, blue, green and brown bottles all standing together, a Manhattan of differing heights. Everything had been touched a million times.

‘Sit down, Ad,’ she said. ‘You’re like a kid with worms.’

He sat down, picked up the magazine and looked at the pictures of the island. ‘Look at us, we’re wasting time,’ he said. ‘Me and you, Rosie. Let’s go mad. Let’s go to Mexico. Let’s go to your weird island.’

She looked up and smiled. ‘One day,’ she said, ‘if you’re very, very good.’

~ ~ ~

Is This the Ugliest Woman in the World?

Miss Julia Pastrana is surely the most remarkable creature ever to have graced a stage in this city of excess, far surpassing any of the attractions currently on show at Mr Barnum’s American Museum just a couple of blocks away. She has the appearance of an ape but dances like Lola Montez and sings pretty Spanish folk songs in a very pleasant mezzo-soprano while sometimes accompanying herself on the guitar.

The newspaper lay open on a pouffe by her feet. It’s not that I have a particularly beautiful voice, she thought. It’s that they’re surprised I have any voice at all that isn’t a grunt or a howl.

Wearing scarlet boots, a tight-fitting skirt, and silk panty hose, Pastrana sang an Irish melody — ‘The Last Rose of Summer’ — and danced a bolero, looking every bit like the famed ballerina Fanny Elssler and displaying ‘a symmetry’ that would make the most successful ballet dancers envious.

Three nights on Broadway at the Gothic Hall, a big old palace covered in tarpaulin, the canvas a riotous mish-mash of colour. Sea monsters, a man with two heads, a boy pierced with pins, serpents and Cyclops and a scorpion with a woman’s face. In the corners, scenes from cannibal life. And now her picture was up there too, the head wild and fierce, the body a ballerina.

The front stoop of the rooming house was full all day with people waiting, hoping for a glimpse. She heard them, laughing and fooling around, crossing the road to the coffee booth, but she didn’t dare look out. ‘Think about it, Julia,’ Rates said. ‘Who’s fool enough to pay good money if he can just schlep down here and take a look for nothing? Guard your mystery.’

When this was over, they were for Philadelphia.

‘Or we are for Philadelphia,’ Myrtle said, laying out the cards for Patience. ‘I don’t know about you, Julia. You know he’s had an offer?’

‘Delia told me.’

They were in the pink parlour on the third floor, a room full of faded brocade and walls crammed with pictures and playbills of all the show people who’d ever stayed there. Julia was at the window, behind the curtain so she couldn’t be seen, looking down at the coffee booth across the street. A young man leaned against it with a bored air. Myrtle tossed one of her endless thin cigars into the air with her foot and caught it between her lips. ‘Look out for yourself,’ she said.

‘I’m not a slave,’ said Julia. ‘He can’t sell me.’

Myrtle looked thoughtfully at her, the cigar drooping on her lip. ‘Can’t he?’

‘Not unless I want to be sold.’ Julia turned from the window and sat down opposite Myrtle. ‘Can I have one of those?’ she said.

‘Sure.’ Myrtle gave her a cigar. ‘Mine’s gone out. Pass me a spill.’

‘I want to travel,’ Julia said, plucking a spill from a pot on the mantelpiece and lighting it at the fire.

‘Well, you’ll surely do that. They’re all out there, waving their big bucks, you could have your pick of them.’

‘I don’t want to stay with Rates,’ Julia said. ‘Do you?’ She lit both their cigars.

‘For a time, I suppose.’ Myrtle drew on the cigar, opened her lips and held the smoke in the bowl of her mouth. ‘He’s not too bad,’ she said, letting it out slowly, ‘wears thin, travel, believe me. I’ve been on the road since I was nine,’ leaning down, passing the cigar to her toes. ‘Been all over the west, up to Alaska, up in the snows, all over the place.’

‘I want to go everywhere,’ Julia said. ‘I want to go all over the world.’ She shivered. ‘I’m cold. I’m getting a shawl. Do you want yours?’

‘No.’

‘I’ve been in one place,’ said Julia, ‘all my life.’

‘Just look out for yourself, that’s all I’m saying.’ Myrtle shifted a card from one line to the next.

‘I’m going to get my shawl.’ Julia ran down quickly. Coming back with the shawl around her shoulders she saw Rates’s door at the end of the passage and thought, I’ll go there now and talk to him, no more of this drifting, put her hand in the pocket of her dress and closed it on the gris-gris bag. Courage and luck, the Doctor said. Be brave.

‘Julia!’ said Rates, as if delighted, ‘I was just about to…’

‘Mr Rates,’ she said, with no idea what to say, ‘what are your plans?’

‘My plans, Julia?’

‘Someone wants to buy me.’

‘Everyone wants you!’ Rates laughed, came out into the passage and pulled his door to behind him. ‘Barnum! Barnum sent someone! Soon sent him packing. Didn’t come himself, you note. Sent someone.’

‘So,’ she said, ‘am I to come to Philadelphia with the others?’

‘Don’t you want to?’

‘To tell you the truth, Mr Rates,’ she said, ‘I haven’t really thought any further ahead than this moment. And now suddenly, I don’t know why, but I’m feeling nervous.’

‘No need for that!’ Rates smiled down at her. ‘No need to rush into anything. Have the girls been talking?’ His face took on concern. ‘I’m sorry, Julia, perhaps I should have mentioned it, but I didn’t want to bother you with the details.’

‘But Mr Rates,’ she said, ‘I need to know what’s happening.’

‘The truth is,’ said Rates, all business, ‘I’ve had three or four offers and I’m weighing them up, settling in my mind which is the best for everybody all round. But, more to the point…’

‘I don’t want to go with just anyone,’ she said.

‘Of course not!’ Rates was shocked. ‘What are you worrying about, Julia?’

‘Who are they?’ she asked.

‘Associates. I don’t deal with anyone shady, as you know.’

‘I’d like to know.’

‘I promise,’ Rates said firmly. ‘I’ll tell you everything from now on. The truth is there’s nothing to tell right now, at least not as far as that’s concerned. But,’ and he bounced eagerly on the balls of his feet, ‘there is something very interesting, very interesting indeed. I’ve had a request from one of the most distinguished medical men of the age.’

Julia’s eyes went blank.

‘Desperate to see you. Desperate.’

She’d seen a few medical men as a child. They’d studied her teeth, peered down her throat and down her ears, made her lie down and close her eyes and sing a little song to try and make her forget where they were poking their fingers. But that had been a long time ago. ‘I suppose I’ll have to see him,’ she said, dully resigned, ‘him or someone else. I know. They’ll say I’m a fake otherwise, won’t they?’

‘You must realise, Julia,’ he said. ‘Oh, it’s a bore, I know, but the medical establishment will inevitably take an interest.’

‘I know.’

‘Anyway, I’ve spoken to this Dr Mott. He’s the best. Very top of the tree. Extremely hard to get to see him normally but he’s made a space for us. Tomorrow, three sharp.’

She must have looked worried because he patted her on the shoulder encouragingly. ‘Sooner the better!’ he said briskly. ‘Get it over with.’

When she returned to the pink parlour, Delia was there, doing Myrtle’s hair. ‘How much is he paying Rates?’ she asked when Julia told them about the doctor.

‘I’ve told her,’ said Myrtle, ‘time and again. You get something out of it for yourself. You ask how much he’s getting for it. You want your cut.’

‘He’s not getting anything,’ said Julia.

‘Ha!’ Delia gave a little shriek. ‘He says!’

Myrtle just snorted.

They drove from the Bowery to Madison Avenue, where Dr Mott lived and had his practice. Through the veil, through the coach window, she watched the great show of the streets. New York made New Orleans seem quaint. It was like an ant’s nest nudged by a foot, the clanging of the omnibuses endless and deafening, the noise of children, beggars, hawkers. This was really The World, whatever that was. Slap centre of the Big Adventure. By night, coming and going between the theatre and the rooming house, the city had seemed smaller, enclosed by darkness. Daytime revealed its colours, sombre for the most part, slashed with brightness here and there. The further they travelled, the grander it got. Great buildings rose up like mammoths

‘Shall we walk a little coming back?’ she suggested.

Rates raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips. ‘Oh, I don’t think so, Julia.’

‘It was fine in New Orleans. With my veil.’

‘This is a rough city,’ Rates said. ‘Now, if my memory serves me — yes — it’s just along here…’

She kept her veil on till she was in the inner room, which was almost filled by the doctor’s enormous desk. Dr Mott, still holding a white towel, emerged from a side room where he’d been washing his hands. ‘Miss Pastrana,’ he said, tossing it aside onto a windowsill and coming toward her with his hand outstretched. ‘I am delighted.’ He showed no surprise, having seen her twice already on the stage.

‘How do you do,’ said Julia, taking his hand and smiling. Rates returned to the waiting room to read the newspaper he’d brought with him, and Julia took off her coat. She’d rather have seen someone older and plainer. Mott was handsome, young but already distinguished. On his desk was a framed picture of himself with his wife and little boy.

‘Come,’ he said, ushering her deferentially before him into the room next door. There was a high narrow bed, a chair, a screen, and a sideboard laid out neatly with medical implements she didn’t dare look at.

‘You’ll find a gown behind the screen,’ he said.

He was thorough. He got the nasty bits out of the way first. She closed her eyes and did what she always did, what Solana had told her to do. Said a prayer. Sang a song in her head. After that he paid particular attention to her teeth and ears, turned her eyelids inside out, lifted her tongue and looked under it, measured every part of her meticulously from her toes to the circumference of her head, inspected the palms of her hands and the soles of her feet closely, rang bells behind her head and asked if she could hear them.

‘I’m told you know your letters,’ he said.

‘I do.’

‘That’s excellent.’ His eyebrows went up. ‘Mr Rates tells me you enjoy reading novels?’

‘I do,’ she said, ‘very much so.’

‘Good, very good. Now — starting with the top line, if you please—’

She could read all but the bottom line.

‘Very good indeed,’ Dr Mott said. ‘And tell me — what do you like to read?’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘whatever I can get hold of. I like The Linwoods, The Wide, Wide World. And The Curse of…’

The doctor smiled and scratched his whiskers. ‘Very very good indeed,’ he said, more to himself than her.

Then it was over and they were back in the carriage, and it was only when she saw the next show pamphlet that she read what Dr Mott had said about her: ‘She is a Semi-Human Indian, a perfect woman, a rational creature endowed with speech which no monster has ever possessed, yet she is Hybrid, wherein the nature of woman predominates over the brute — the Ourang Outang.’

Ourang-outang? In Mexico?

A long time ago, the big boys talking over her head as if she couldn’t understand:

‘Jonas Ochoa said she isn’t human.’

‘What does Jonas Ochoa know? Did you tell him?’

‘Of course I did. She’s Indian, I said. She’s a Digger. He says he’s never seen a Digger like that before.’

‘You tell him what Papa says. She’s just like us only with hair.’

‘Then he says that’s what I mean, the hair, he says, human beings don’t have hair. Not like that, they don’t. Monkeys do. Bears do. Wolves do, dogs do. But not human beings. Not like that.’

‘He has a point.’

Rates read aloud from a newspaper article to the man sitting across from him in the pink parlour.

‘This mysterious animal is one of the most extraordinary beings of the present day… — you see, he knows what he’s about, the man’s a giant in his field,’ gesturing towards a large folder that lay on the low table between them, ‘and his examination was completely thorough. I have it here, in writing—’ Rates peered down short-sightedly at the newspaper. ‘His medical opinion is that she is the result of the pairing of a human being with a simian. See! She has features in common with the orang-utan…’

‘Better make your mind up,’ the other man said, a big-boned, yellow-haired showman with a broken-nose. ‘You’re calling her the Bear Woman, and he’s saying she’s a monkey. She can’t be both.’

‘Let’s keep it just this side of credibility, shall we?’ said Rates with a lofty smile. ‘There are bears in those mountains but I never heard of an ape in Mexico.’

‘Of course there are,’ said the blond man. ‘There’s monkeys.’

‘But no large apes.’

‘Not as far as we know.’

‘I’ve had interest from other quarters, you know, Beach,’ Rates said. ‘Barnum’s after her. Did you know?’ He glanced up. ‘And here — yes, here it is.’ Rates slapped the paper. ‘And don’t forget this Mott’s at the very top of his — here, says he’s never seen anything like her — see, see, something absolutely new, he says, absolutely new, unknown to science.’ He put the paper aside. ‘Science!’ He turned his pale steady gaze onto Beach. ‘You see my dilemma.’

‘Not at all,’ said Beach. ‘Mine’s the better offer, and it’s that simple.’

Rates pursed his lips and tried to look thoughtful. ‘Yours may be the better offer, but Mott’s working in the interests of knowledge. Science,’ he said reverently. ‘Of course I have to take that into account.’

‘No, you don’t.’ Beach laughed and stood up. ‘Who cares about science? She doesn’t. The girl wants a good time.’ He laughed again. ‘The girl bit does, who knows about that other thing? Ask her. What’s she want?’

‘She doesn’t know what she wants.’ Rates drained his glass. ‘She wants to get around a bit and see the world.’

‘She’ll do that with me. Least she’ll see Milwaukee,’ Beach said.

Rates sighed. ‘She’s a good girl,’ he said. ‘Does the very best she can, you know, nice nature. Open to suggestion, you know, very helpful. You say try this, she tries it. No nonsense about the girl. I want her treated right.’

‘No question about it. Shake then.’ They stood and shook hands. Beach towered over Rates. ‘Time of her life’s coming,’ he said. ‘This time next month she’ll be drinking champagne.’

They went down to see her straight away. She was alone. She knew what they’d been talking about. Twice Beach had visited her backstage after the show, filling the dressing room with his bulky self-made air.

‘My dear Julia,’ Rates said, taking small steps towards her and clasping both her hands in his, ‘I can’t tell you how privileged I feel to have been a party to your great success.’

Beach smiled over Rates’s shoulder, his eyes an eerie pale blue.

‘And now,’ said Rates, ‘I feel a parting of the ways is nigh.’

She looked Beach in the eye.

‘Mr Beach has a proposition,’ said Rates.

‘I thought so,’ she said.

Her eyes made Beach shiver, she could tell, but he showed no sign of disquiet. What to make of him? Caramel-coloured coat. Gold cravat. Carrying his hat. Only thing she could do was trust instinct. He came forward. His cheekbones were shiny ridges, his grin made him look like Punch. ‘Cleveland,’ he said. ‘Buffalo. Chicago. Lenox, Massachusetts. Milwaukee. Cincinnati. I have these lined up for you already.’

She laughed nervously. ‘I don’t know where they are.’

‘Want me to show you a map?’ He patted his pockets comically. ‘Don’t have one on me right now, but I sure will next time I see you.’

‘And the contract?’ she said.

The girls would have been proud of her.

On the steps Beach lit a cigar, shaking his head in wonder. A light rain began falling on the steaming pavement, and a breeze blew up from the river. ‘The strangest thing,’ he said, gazing down the street to the carriages waiting in line. ‘The face, the face…’

‘The face indeed,’ Rates echoed, scratching his smooth bulby chin.

‘Impossible to comprehend.’ Beach put his collar up and hunched his shoulders. ‘There’s a kind of — no, the word wonder isn’t right — she is so — completely—’ He shook his head again.

Rates completed the sentence. ‘Inhuman.’ The rain was turning to sleet. ‘Went down a charm in New Orleans,’ he said, ‘thought she was the rougarou.’

‘As if the head of a wolf or a boar—’ said Beach.

‘I know.’

For a moment they stood in silence.

‘Beggars belief,’ said Beach. ‘I tell you, gives you the shivers. Puts the fear in people. And then she opens her mouth — the mouth of Cerberus! — and this sweet little voice comes out!’

Rates gave a short laugh. ‘And her English is perfect. She’s not at all bad, is she?’

‘She’s a sensation,’ said Beach, ‘that’s what she is. She’s a good girl, I can work with her.’

~ ~ ~

All gone on the night train. The goodbyes said. Good luck, sweetheart, we’ll no doubt see you again, that’s the way of it.

New place, new people. They were going to Cleveland on the train, and after that a long tour. They’d ride in wagons. She’d have one of her own, Beach said. He paid better than Rates. The contract ran till Christmas when they would return to New York, and after that, well…

‘I plan on making you a famous lady,’ Beach said, ‘yes I do. I will get the best deal going for you every single time, nothing more, nothing less.’

And all in writing.

‘Before we leave New York,’ she told Beach, ‘I want to ride the streetcar. And I want to go to church.’

‘I don’t think there’s time, Julia,’ he said. He was dashing off somewhere.

‘Why not? I’m not doing anything.’

‘Yes, you are,’ he said. ‘You’re guarding your mystery.’ He’d picked the phrase up from Rates. ‘If you go out just any old time people get used to seeing you. They stop paying. Simple as that. Think about it. It’s your livelihood, Julia. You’ll never want for anything as long as you live, but there’s this one over-riding rule. Keep ’em hungry.’

‘I’ll wear my veil and gloves,’ she said.

‘You can’t go out on your own, Julia.’ His big red face was worried. ‘You’ll get lost.’

‘I know where the streetcar stops,’ she said. ‘Why would I get lost?’

His face was pained. ‘It’s not that simple. Anything could happen. This is a dangerous city, Julia.’

Pointless to talk. That’s how it was. Delia and Jonsy had never gone out. Some people just couldn’t do as other people did. Even in Culiacán she couldn’t.

Only one day more in New York. She sat behind the curtain looking out of the window, thinking of home, wondering if she should send a letter. Who would she send it to? Solana was dead. She couldn’t have read it anyway. And the others? What could she say? Perhaps write to Don Pedro. Doing fine. Hope all well. But then after all — after all, she thought, what am I? A servant who moved on. Dear Don Pedro, you were wrong. You said I’d fall flat. My dresses are prettier than Marta’s. When she’d told him she was leaving he’d frowned, steepling his fingers and looking at her steadily over the top of them as if deeply disappointed in her, and she’d gabbled about being grateful for all he’d done for her. Then he’d got up and walked about the room, staring at the floor. ‘What do you think it will be like,’ he’d said, ‘out there in the world? I am your guardian, you are my responsibility. I mean to continue in that role. Tell me, have you any idea quite how your Mr Rates intends to present you? Hm?’

‘Señor,’ she’d said, ‘you know that I can sing and dance, you yourself made sure of it.’

‘Indeed! That does not answer my question. You’re not a fool. Have we kept you prisoner here? There are no bars on the doors or the windows. Why don’t you go out then, freely, brazenly? Why?’

She said nothing, because her eyes were filling up and she was realising that Don Pedro was the one she’d miss the most, even though he hardly ever spoke to her.

‘You know why.’

Nothing.

‘Do you think you’ll see any more of the world out there than in this safe home we gave you? Here, where you’re known? However far you go, do you think you’ll ever be able to walk down the street like any other young woman?’

‘Señor,’ she said, ‘I can’t tell you how grateful I will always be to you.’

‘You’ll sing and you’ll dance and you’ll play your guitar, and they’ll applaud, of course they will. Do you think they care about your talent? Such as it is.’

Such as it is, she repeated in her mind. Such as it is. Something about the phrase and the way he said it, as if he was throwing it away, hardened her resolve.

‘They don’t care about your talent, Julia,’ he’d said, stopping in front of her and speaking gently, ‘they only want to see the freak.’

‘Señor,’ she said, ‘I know. I want to be independent. Mr Rates has sent me my fare.’

And then of course he’d become sentimental, as was his way, sat down in his chair and gazed at her with moist aching eyes and told her once more how he’d first seen her in the orphanage. ‘In you came with that old lump of wood in a dress, a little ape but not quite an ape, and it was the most curious thing.’ Shaking his head. Impossible. ‘You were so hideous but you were just like a puppy. You were sucking your fingers. So unaware of what you were. And I tickled you under the chin and scratched behind your ears. I asked you what you liked to eat and you said “Porridge, Señor”, in the most ordinary little voice. I was surprised you could talk.’

‘And then the old nun said, “Oh, she has a voice, Señor. Would you like to hear her sing?” And you sang that silly little song, “Sana Sana Colita de Rana”.’

Your talent. Such as it is.

It all flooded in, Don Pedro, Solana and her room and the young men coming and going with their friends, calling her out to sing in the patio, and the fig tree and the stone seat and the steps going up to the gallery. Don Pedro the last time she saw him, his sad farewell to the family dog.

The future was as far away as the past. She was frightened, as if time dispersed in all directions, but there was something intoxicating about the moment too. Where was everyone? Beach had gone out. It was half past three in the afternoon. She was on the third floor and could see below a young man holding his head beneath the pump, people walking up and down, flashy long-haired boys in wide trousers, girls strolling about on their own as if it was the most natural thing in the world to do. The window was open and she heard the sound of traffic from the wharves. She went to the mirror, a mottled ailing thing in a tarnished gilt frame, looked at her face and wished that at least her neck could have been a bit longer. Just that. ‘I’m not a prisoner,’ she said aloud. He couldn’t tell her what to do. ‘He’s a manager,’ she said, ‘not a jailer.’

She still had some of the money she’d left home with, as well as a fair bit from her earnings.

She put on her cloak and bonnet, her veil and gloves, picked up her purse and went out onto the landing. The house was quiet. She ran lightly down to the front door and out. It was cold, but her cloak was a good one and she huddled down in it. The brownstones all looked the same. Wouldn’t do to forget the number. She knew where to go, she’d watched from the carriage window on the way to the theatre and seen it all, people clambering on and off the streetcars, carriages in a line waiting for passengers. She kept to the edge of the sidewalk, walking quickly past the row houses and stores to the corner. Down side streets, high tenements went on forever. Kids were everywhere, oblivious to the cold, gangs of them on the roam.

At the corner she stopped and looked about. Nobody took any notice of her. People rushed up and down the street. Two flashy young men were waiting for the streetcar, so she went and stood a little way from them, observing through her veil.

‘So I says to him,’ said one in a high-pitched whine that reminded her of Ezra Porter’s voice, ‘I says, what you wanna do dat for, huh? Looks like you wanna get mowed, dat what you mean, huh?’

At least she thought that’s what he said. His hair was brilliant with oil and swept up high on his head.

‘Lillian says so,’ the other replied in a darker voice, ‘she says he do it all the time, no matter what.’

She couldn’t take her eyes off them. The cigars wagged up and down on their lips as they spoke, and they wore gold chains across their waistcoats. She felt like a ghost. When the streetcar came she followed them on and offered the driver a handful of money. She had no idea what it cost.

‘Broadway,’ she said. The driver looked at her hand and laughed.

‘Lady,’ he said, ‘for that you can ride around all day if you want to.’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘that’s very nice.’

He looked at her strangely, then scooped up the cash and gave her some change. The streetcar was crowded but she found a seat half way down. No one else wore a veil. A fat man in wide trousers stared at her. She sat very still. A squash of girls in black shawls and brightly coloured bonnets babbled and laughed as if no one could hear or see them. The streetcar was too close-packed and getting more so, and the noise was crazy. A woman with a kind, worn face stooped to smile at her. She thinks I’m a little girl, thought Julia. A little girl in a veil alone on the streetcar. She coughed genteelly into her gloved hand and nodded, and the woman passed on. Her heart thumped. There were other glances. When the girls swirled down the aisle to get off, she followed.

She stood in the street and trembled, feeling too small. Which way? Which way? This way, that way, nothing she remembered. A fine white sleet began and she pulled her cloak tight. If I didn’t have to wear this, she thought, they’d see my figure and know I wasn’t a child. She’d never seen so many people up close. A bell chimed from the tower of a church and she looked up. The spire soared above the buildings. A carriage clipped past with a footman in blue livery on the back. Here I am, Julia Pastrana on Broadway, alone. All the swells, she never saw anything like it, strolling along in their shiny shoes. Swaggery men and girls with done-up hair, the women’s dresses taking up half the sidewalk. She got a sudden urge to pull off her veil and just walk along and see what happened. Shame. Shame, but so it was and so it always had been. The air was full of a hot peanut smell. Julia felt light-headed and stood still for a moment with the people sweeping past in both directions. The buildings were grand and high, and a few had flags flying on the tops. There was nowhere to sit down, just some wide steps in front of a bank, already taken up by half a dozen or so raggedy little kids holding out their caps for money. Poor little faces. The sleet turned to fine rain, and she walked on and on and after a while the dizziness passed. No one was looking. She must stay hidden, not just for safety, not just to guard the mystery and make them pay, but so as not to frighten the children. You couldn’t go around frightening children in the street, it would be too cruel.

She had to keep moving, it was too cold to stop. All the stores were open. A great crush of carriages had tangled up at the crossroads and everyone was shouting and swearing. So this is it, she thought. Here we are, the big life. People playing music on the sidewalk, selling you soda water, hot corn and roasted peanuts. She bought a comb from a booth, one that would build her hair up beautifully at the front, with a clasp made like a treble clef. The woman said it was made of shell. Further on she came to a long stretch of pavement where men in tights were calling people in to see the freaks: the giants, the midgets, the mermaids and savages and pinheads. Not one of them was like her. One of a kind, Mr Beach had said. Bearded ladies by the score, he said, oh yes, but no one like you. Madame Clofullia has a fine beard but you—

A drunk reeled from a saloon and nearly knocked her over.

‘Molly dear!’ he boomed, big red beaming face in hers, ‘I beg your pardon.’

She flinched and hurried on.

‘Wait a while,’ he called after her, ‘I meant nothing…’

But she didn’t look back. She walked on and on. The stores were bright and the streetcars rattled along, the poor scrawny horses clip-clopping in time. There seemed always to be music coming from somewhere, from windows and doors, and the sounds of singing and glass against glass, the plinking of a pianola. A crowd was surging over the next crossing so she went with them, turned and started walking back down the other side. A child selling papers, a boy no more than nine, bawled loud enough to deafen her. Such a fright he’d get if she drew back the veil. Go on, Julia. Just because you can. But she didn’t. Sleet again, small specks falling against a dark grey light.

She must start back. She knew the name of her stop, the name of her street. When she reached the jammed-up crossing again, she slowed down and walked carefully, studying the carriages intently. Why not? She had enough. A well-heeled lady and gent were getting down from one just in front of her, and she ran a few steps in her eagerness. Her boot heel skidded in the wet and she nearly fell, her heart thumping up into her mouth, and for a terrible moment she thought she was going to burst into tears, so strange and dangerous everything seemed. Supposing she knocked her head, and they picked her up and lifted the veil and — it didn’t bear thinking about. She righted herself. Ignoring his slightly wary look, she gave the man her address and climbed up into the welcome sanctuary of the musty carriage, still bearing a trace of the musky perfume the well-heeled woman had worn.

~ ~ ~

‘For Christ’s sake, Rose, you’re gonna have to chuck some of this stuff away.’

‘Says who?’

‘Says me. And I’m the landlord.’

She laughed.

At either end of the top shelf, she’d piled books of the same size on top of each other. She laid a plank on top. The stuff underneath was getting kind of squashed, so she’d been moving things up, carefully selecting.

‘Seriously though,’ said Laurie, ‘it’s getting ridiculous. You’re turning weird. It’s not attractive.’

She looked sharply at him. ‘So I’m not attractive,’ she said.

‘You are,’ he said, ‘you’re lovely.’ He was by the door, tying his hair back into a black ponytail that resembled an old frazzled mop. ‘But you must be able to see that this isn’t normal.’

‘What’s normal?’

‘Not this.’

She sat down on the sofa, saying nothing.

‘Now don’t get all funny about it. I’m only trying to help you. I’m beginning to think you’ve got a problem.’

‘Not my problem,’ she said.

Laurie shrugged on a leather jacket that looked a hundred years old. ‘You know you can get treatment for this sort of thing,’ he said.

‘But I want all my things.’

‘Don’t raise your voice.’

‘I will if I want to.’

‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘it’s just old crap off the streets. Where does it end? You’ll be bringing home snotty hankies next. Used condoms.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous!’

‘It’s no different! You bring home bits of paper and empty lighters, it’s just a matter of degree. Haven’t you ever thought there might be something just a tad unhealthy about all this?’

He checked his pockets. When he looked round, he saw that she was crying.

‘What’s the matter?’ She cried too easily and it got on his nerves. ‘Oh for heaven’s sake, I’m only saying what any normal person would say.’

But she stopped as quickly as she’d started, got up and went to the window. ‘You get it or you don’t get it,’ she said, looking out into the back garden. ‘And you don’t.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t.’

She rubbed absently at a mark on the glass. ‘Some people just know what I mean,’ she said. ‘Some people think I’m mad. What? You know, just total misunderstanding? The other day I put on an old jacket and I put my hand in the pocket and there was this old earring I hadn’t seen for years. I don’t even know where the other one is. It’s like — like their little family was scattered far and wide, like it says in that old Irish song, you wouldn’t know it. I just feel for it.’

‘An old earring in your pocket,’ he said.

She turned and looked at him. ‘It’s not even a particularly nice one,’ she said.

‘Poor Rose.’ He smiled. ‘It must be awful to be you.’

She laughed and walked towards him, fluffing out her hair with her hands. ‘You haven’t got the faintest idea what I’m going on about, have you?’ she said.

‘None whatsoever.’

She came close and looked unblinking into his eyes. ‘Really?’ she said regretfully, ‘Really? You have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about’

‘None at all.’

Her kind of eyes gave away nothing at all. ‘Does that mean I’m mad?’ she said.

‘Of course, Rose.’

‘Oh well!’ She laughed and moved away. ‘Off you go,’ she said imperiously.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘it would do you a massive amount of good if you could just let all this go.’

‘At least it’s all clean,’ she said.

She made a cup of tea when he’d gone. One of her eyes kept watering and she gave it a rub. She liked her place. Who cares, she thought, stirring the pot with one hand and rubbing and rubbing at one eye with the other. Something had got in it, probably an eyelash. So what? Everything belonged. Above the fireplace, the wall was covered with pictures of the dolls of Doll’s Island. She heard Adam clomping up the stairs and stuck her head out. ‘I’ve just made tea,’ she called.

He looked up. His face was thin-nostrilled and birdlike. ‘Hang on,’ he said.

‘I put a shelf up.’

‘Another?’ He went into his flat and came up a few minutes later. She was looking in the mirror, holding her bloodshot eye open with two fingers. The thin black crescent of an eyelash was stuck tight in one corner, and tears ran down her cheek. ‘I’ve poured you one,’ she said. ‘It’s on the table.’

‘What’s up with your eye?’ he asked.

‘I’ve got an eyelash in it,’ she said, poking about in the inflamed corner.

Adam, sitting down and picking up his mug of tea, snickered down his nose.

‘Brief Encounter,’ he said.

‘Ah, I’ve got it. Did I ever show you my eyelash collection?’ She turned from the mirror, wiping her face and holding one hand poised as if a butterfly had landed on it.

‘Your what?’

‘My eyelash collection. I’ll show you.’ The black eyelash was balanced on the tip of her finger. Holding it up carefully in front of her, she went into the other room and returned with a small silver pill box in the other hand. ‘There,’ she said, flipping up the lid. An angel was engraved on the inside of it.

‘What the hell,’ he said.

It was a bed of eyelashes.

‘What the hell,’ he said again, putting the tip of his finger in. A smile came onto his face.

‘These,’ she said, ‘are all the eyelashes I’ve ever got out of my eyes or that have fallen out ever in all my whole life.’

He sifted. ‘That’s impressive.’

‘Isn’t it?’

‘How come your eyelashes fall out?’ he said. ‘Mine don’t.’

‘They don’t?’

‘No.’

‘I thought everyone’s did.’

‘Well, I suppose I get the odd eyelash in my eye like everybody else,’ he said. ‘But I wouldn’t say they were falling like leaves.’

‘I started collecting them when I was ten,’ she said. ‘I remember the moment. I was in a maths class and it was really boring and I looked down and saw an eyelash on my hand. ‘

‘This is the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen,’ he said.

‘I used to keep them in a matchbox,’ she said, ‘but now I’ve got them in this nice little pillbox.’

‘I wonder how many there are.’

‘Hundreds.’

He laughed. ‘You could get into the Guinness Book of Records with these,’ he said. ‘Hundreds of eyelashes. A great pile of — of — eyelashes! Crazy!’

Eyelashes from when she was 10, when she was 13, 15, 19, 22, 36.

‘In a way,’ she said, ‘this is me.’

She flicked the newest lash into the box with the rest.

‘You get it, don’t you?’ she said.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I get it.’

~ ~ ~

Life ran along to the various rhythms of trains and wagons and carriages. She travelled with a sad contortionist and a fat lady, and the world became a series of windows, with dark streets below where people walked, dime museums, sideshows, the sound of a barker’s spiel descending into nonsense, and sheds thrown up fast, with pock-marked mirrors and jugs of cold water and the lingering smell of pomade. She was getting better, playing all the time, practising in rooms and halls, in warehouses, in backstage lots.

In Cleveland she saw another doctor, who asked about her monthlies. Since she’d been on the road she’d met three very distinguished men, who were all very, very clever, much cleverer than anyone else she’d ever met, but they’d all said different things. One said she was ourang-outang, one that she was neither negro nor human, another that she was her own species, a species of one. She was HYBRID, SEMI-HUMAN, MUJER OSA, TROGLODYTE OF ANCIENT DAYS, UGLIEST WOMAN IN THE WORLD. The news ran before, everywhere they went, the papers carried it, the newsboys cried it on the corners. Canada sold out before they reached Cincinnati.

She was good with the audiences by now, knew which eyes to meet and which to let go. She didn’t blame them for looking. How could they not? Might as well ask the moon not to rise. Occasionally, to one particular pair of eyes in a sea of them, her returning stare had said think about it, just consider, and they had blushed like maidens. When she came down and walked among them, the bold ones stepped forward to shake her hand and stroke her wonderingly, as if she was an exotic animal. The questions were always the same. Are you happy? Have you ever had a beau? Would you like to get married? Sometimes a young buck flirted with her. On their part, it felt like a perversion, she saw that well enough. No one ever made a real pass but there was intimacy in all that staring, and when Beach put out the news that desperate suitors, all refused, vied for her hand, she smiled and went along with it. She was saving. When I’m rich, she thought, I’ll go back home and show them my new clothes. I’ll arrive in a carriage. Walk in, equal, independent. How could it be? What was there in that house but the scrubbing of steps and the hauling of water? Where would she be, where would she live, when she was rich and independent? Surely it would be revealed to her. A house where she was not a servant. Something, someone, a friend. Fresh flowers.

They played Chicago, Detroit, Toronto, Montreal. In some small town in Quebec, she met a bearded lady travelling with her husband, a lean frog-mouthed man who hovered watchfully and silently about her at all times. She’s got a husband. The great Clofullia has a husband. Dr John Montanee’s love potion was in her pocket. Every now and then she took it out, pulled out the bung and sniffed it. It smelled of cinnamon and lemon. Now and again she rubbed a little on her arms, saying: oh Saint Jude, I’m still waiting.

All the way down to Boston they played sideshows. After a show in Burlington one night, the contortionist, a worried girl called Zelda, started crying and wouldn’t stop. They were in a field outside town, sitting in the fat lady’s wagon. Maud Sparrow was like seven or eight people rolled into one. No one chair could accommodate her, so she always sat on a large and splendidly bedecked sofa, a kind of throne. ‘What’s the matter, noodle?’ she asked brightly. She was working her way through a dish of marshmallows. Eating was part of the job.

‘Just feeling sick for my home,’ said Zelda.

‘Have a good cry,’ said Maud. ‘Best thing. Get it out of you then it’s done.’ Her face was supported by an overlapping progression of four or five rolls of chin. Her features in the middle were pretty, but diminished by the sheer quantity of surrounding flesh.

‘I want to eat my aunt’s soup,’ said Zelda. Her eyes were huge, blue and bulgy.

‘I know what you mean!’ Julia said. ‘I really miss the food at home.’

Zelda glanced at her and looked quickly away, smiling faintly. She didn’t know how to act with Julia. She was trying, you could see, but her eyes couldn’t get a hold and slid off whenever she tried to look her in the eye. ‘She put everything in,’ Zelda said, ‘beans and peas. Bread.’

‘It tastes of nothing, the food here,’ said Julia.

‘Too hot for me,’ said Maud. ‘Your kinda food.’

Zelda blew her nose. ‘I don’t really want to go home, I suppose,’ she said, sighing. She had a face that neither knew nor cared what it looked like, though it was beautiful. Her eyes were soulful and her dark hair, prematurely greying, curled in tendrils on her wide white forehead. ‘It’s not very nice there. I just miss my aunt’s soup.’

‘It’ll still be there when you get back,’ said Maud, tearing a lump of marshmallow in two with smooth pink fingers.

‘I know.’ But tears kept on leaking out of Zelda’s eyes.

Maud sighed, looked at Julia and made a face as if to say, well — we all have our troubles. Nowhere near as much fun as Myrtle and Delia, these two. ‘You’re so clever,’ Julia told Zelda. ‘I wish I could do what you do.’

‘Thanks.’ Zelda smiled sadly, not meeting her eyes.

‘Cheer up, noodle.’ Maud stuck her legs out from under a thick yellow dressing gown. She was famous for her legs. Her ankles came down in descending layers like thick whipped cream, almost entirely obscuring the tiny feet that carried her about. Permanent lines had been etched into her flesh where her shoes cut. ‘You’ll be through with this little show before you know it,’ she said.

Beach stuck his head round the door. ‘Hello, girls,’ he said, ‘everything all right?’ His head had a swollen pink look like cured ham.

‘Yes, Mr Beach,’ said Julia.

‘Good show tonight,’ he said, looking as he always did, worried and friendly at the same time. ‘Maud, I’ve got your pictures.’ He came in, nudging the door shut behind him with his foot.

‘Any good?’ Maud reached out a hand.

‘Fine.’

She took the envelope. ‘Beach,’ she said, ‘this girl’s full of misery.’

Beach turned a long-suffering face on the contortionist. ‘What is it, Zelda?’ he said. ‘What is there to cry about?’

‘Nothing,’ she said.

‘Didn’t you hear them tonight? You’re doing great.’

‘I know I am.’

‘Get her some bean porridge, Beach,’ said Maud, licking the ends of her fingers. ‘Get her some good thick soup.’

‘She hungry?’ Beach’s pale blue eyes drooped down at the corners, giving him a look of permanent bewilderment. ‘Didn’t you eat tonight?’

‘Of course I did,’ said Zelda impatiently, strangely twisting her hands together. ‘I’m not hungry, not at all.’

‘What’s wrong with the food?’

‘There’s nothing wrong with the food, I’m just… oh, never mind.’

‘She’s just homesick is all,’ said Maud.

‘Girls,’ said Beach, raising his eyes to the roof of the wagon as if to the hills for deliverance, ‘girls girls girls, you’ll be the death of me. If you’re not happy, what’s keeping you?’

‘The money, honey,’ said Maud.

Beach stared at each of them in turn as if they’d wounded his feelings. ‘Get a hold of yourself, Zelda,’ he said. Drops of sweat glistened on his red, contorted forehead. ‘You make up your mind. Are you doing this or aren’t you? If you are, you got to pull yourself together.’

‘I know.’ One of her eyes began to blink nervously. She sniffed and dried her eyes. She was leaving them soon, joining up with a circus and travelling west. Julia didn’t think she’d miss her.

‘Hm,’ said Maud, spilling pictures out on the table. Variations on a theme: Maud smiling, skipping, left leg bent, right knee raised, dainty toe pointing. Holding out the huge skirt of her short white dress to show off her pins. She picked one up. ‘Not bad,’ she said without enthusiasm.

‘Christ,’ he said, ‘you girls are hard to please.’

‘Too much dark round the edges,’ Maud said, passing the picture to Julia. ‘It’s a shame to have to write on that nice white lace.’

‘There’s a space at the top,’ said Julia, ‘by the curtain. You could sign there.’

‘I guess.’

Beach hulked around for a while looking disgruntled, told them not to stay up late and left without closing the door. A faint grassy smell crept in with the cold night air.

‘Here, you two.’ Maud stood up, parting her legs and letting her stomach fall down between them to hang momentarily visible under the yellow dressing gown, before putting her arms down and with a practised flounce manually hauling it along with her as she shuffled sideways to take a cake box out of a corner cupboard. ‘Take a few with you,’ she said, sidling back into place and opening the box on her lap. ‘Spice and lime. Go on, help yourselves.’

As Julia and Zelda walked back to their wagons in the dark, Zelda said, ‘She’s meeting her fiancé in Cleveland. Did you know?’

‘No.’

Five or six other wagons hunched in the dark like beasts and a small campfire crackled in the field.

‘Sometimes I just don’t understand this world,’ Zelda said, cupping her hand around a disintegrating crumble of cake. ‘She’s got a fiancé and here’s me all on my own.’ Zelda licked her palm clean and brushed her hands.

Julia looked at her in disbelief. ‘Oh, you’ll be all right,’ she said.

There was an awkward moment.

‘What about me?’ said Julia. ‘I’ll always be on my own.’

Zelda said nothing. The awkwardness rose higher between them like a wall, and they walked the rest of the way in silence till Julia turned aside at her door.

It was cold in the wagon, and she shivered. The cold was in her bones. Stupid girl, she thought, surprised at the tears she felt. Stupid girl can walk down the street, no one looks twice. She lit a candle then got under the covers just as she was, pulled a blanket into a sort of tent over her head, and ate the last two cakes, one lime, one spice. The lime cake had an exploding centre of sweet curd, and by the time she’d swallowed the last mouthful she was crying. Even Maud Sparrow was going to have a husband. All the others, the plain girls, the not-so-pretty, the squinty, the flabby, the downright ugly, not one was as ugly as her. I am ugly, ugly, ugly, she said, and reached for bald, blurred, worn away Yatzi. It got her like this sometimes. Some old song would get her. I’ll never have that, she’d think. Love. Never even have it to lose. They love it when I sing those songs, a face like that, like mine, singing a love song. She felt as if a lump in her throat had sprung a leak, and it was draining from her eyes. Tears made long streaks in the hair on her cheeks. She got up, undressed and put on her nightie, got back into bed and blew out the candle.

She could get no sleep. The wind began to blow, and the wagon creaked. They moved on in the morning, and the wind howled all next day and all the day after as they travelled. Loneliness settled in, sure and steady as snow.

A few days later, Zelda knocked on her door and walked in without waiting for an answer. ‘So,’ she said bluntly, as if she’d been building up to it, ‘how’s this kind of life treating you then?’

Julia was sewing ribbons onto one of her stage dresses. ‘Oh!’ she said, surprised. ‘I’m getting along very well, thank you.’

Zelda sat down and leaned forward, staring into Julia’s eyes with something like defiance. ‘I can’t imagine what it must be like to be you,’ she said too quickly.

Julia showed her teeth in what she knew to be a disturbing smile. ‘Of course you can,’ she said. ‘It’s easy. But you don’t try.’

Zelda looked away. Her mouth drooped open and her eyes were dreamy. ‘You know, I’ve always thought I had a good imagination,’ she said. ‘I do, that’s the trouble. I imagine all the terrible things that might happen and all the places I could be that are better than this.’

‘There’s no use at all in that,’ said Julia, bending her head back to her sewing.

‘I know. But I do it anyway. What are you making?’

‘Just sewing some ribbons on.’

‘I’m moving on,’ Zelda said. ‘I’ve come to say goodbye.’

‘Oh! It’s today, is it?’

‘Couple of hours. Indianapolis, Louisville—’

‘Will you be happier with the circus?’

‘I think so. At least I’m heading in the right direction. When we get to Saint Louis, I’ll see my family.’

‘That’s nice.’

‘Not really.’ She smiled faintly. ‘They’re not really very nice.’

Now she comes talking, Julia thought, now she comes making friends. This is what it’s like. People coming, going.

‘You’re right,’ said Zelda, licking her dry lips and looking uneasily away, ‘I don’t try. To imagine what it’s like to be you. My thoughts run away from it.’

‘Just do it,’ Julia said. ‘I know.’ She put down her sewing. ‘We’ll change places. Go on. I can easily imagine what it’s like to be you. It’s easy. Go on, close your eyes.’

‘Close my eyes?’

‘Yes. And I’ll close mine.’

They did. ‘Now,’ said Julia. ‘I’m a lady with a nice face. I can bend like a snake. You’ve got hair all over you. Like the dogs and the burros.’

They sat for a few moments then both opened their eyes at the same time and laughed, not knowing what to say.

‘You’re good with a needle,’ Zelda said.

‘I’ve always made all my own clothes.’

Zelda rose with a long sigh. Catching sight of herself in the small square of mirror by the door, she put a finger to the outer corner of either eye and pulled the skin up listlessly. ‘At least you don’t have to worry about getting old,’ she said.

‘Why? Do you?’

Zelda turned from her reflection. ‘See you again somewhere,’ she said.

‘You take care now, Zelda.’

When she’d gone, Julia sat up late sewing by candlelight till her eyes were tired. I’m a lady with a nice face, she was thinking. I’m a baboon. A hog, a dog, a wolf. I’m from a deep hole in the mountains where the duendes come out.

Long after dark they passed through a little place in Vermont with a billiard hall and a big clock hanging over the town square. There was some kind of trouble with Maud’s wagon so they had to stop in the main street while the drivers fixed a wheel. Julia had been dozing on her bed, but she sat up when the wagons stopped and drew back the curtain. She saw a tidy moonlit street, all closed up, and a dozen or so hogsheads standing outside the store. There was a big barn of a place with a sign that said BILLIARDS, and the clock read quarter to eleven. The forest pressed in all around the town. No one was around, but a candle burned in a window high up in a house on the right, and Julia imagined that there was a child up there, a girl who’d got out of bed to look down. She was standing there now, wondering about all the freaks down there. She’d love to see the freaks. That could be me, she thought, up there looking down at me. I’m living in that house, sleeping in that room, this is my town. I live with my parents. And someone else is down here. But no matter how much she tried, when she tried to picture the parents, all she could see was her mother’s pigtail.

The wheel was fixed, and the wagons lurched on through the woods a couple more miles out of town, pulled up in an open space in the back of a circus midway.

In the morning, up and dressed, opening her tiny window and looking out as she combed her hair, she saw the big circus tent in the distance, and the bright coloured signs along the midway: LOBSTER GIRL. STRONG MAN. ZEO THE WILD HUMAN.

The air smelled of impending rain. Maud was sitting on the steps of her wagon nearby, eating elegantly with her fingers from a plate of fried bread and bacon while an old man in a long blue jacket, a peddler of some kind, laid out his wares before her on the bottom step. Maud’s fiancé, a tall man in a rumpled white shirt, loafed around in the doorway behind her, swigging from a bowl of coffee. Shivering a little, Julia closed the window, pulled a shawl round her shoulders and sat down to pull on her boots. Good old boots, she thought. Never had any that fitted so well.

She heard Maud’s voice:

‘Well, look at you. No one ever teach you it’s rude to look up a lady’s skirt?’

And the fiancé, mildly, ‘What the hell, kid, run away.’

A laugh, chuckleheaded. A throaty gurgling.

Cato. Surely. She looked out. There was Maud like an empress indulging minions, the old peddler bowed over on one side, Cato on the other, grinning and lolloping from foot to foot in a grass skirt that came down to his knees. Oh, quick. Of course it took ages doing up her boot laces because she was hurrying too much, and by the time she’d got her veil on and opened the door, there was Ezra Porter, all togged up in a fancy suit with a high white collar that looked as if it was strangling him, coming across the field with a skinny girl trailing after him.

That same nasal voice, ‘Cato, what are you doing?’

They hadn’t seen her.

‘He being a nuisance?’ Ezra said to Maud. ‘Sorry, Ma’am!’

The skinny girl went up to Cato and took his hand. ‘What’d ’e do?’ she asked in a hard voice.

‘Tried to lift up Maud’s skirt,’ said the fiancé, smoothing back his oiled hair till it was as flat as a ploughed field.

‘Oh hell, I don’t mind.’ Maud set aside her plate.

‘No, no, it isn’t right,’ said Ezra, ‘you don’t do that, Cato! You know you don’t do that!’

Cato grinned behind his fingers, swinging back behind the girl.

‘Oh let him look if he wants to.’ Maud raised her skirt. She was proud of her legs. ‘There you are, noodle,’ she said. Maud’s thighs were like mottled pink slush. Held together, her legs appeared to run into one another like liquid and it was impossible to see where they met. She parted them and pointed her toes, and they firmed up, bulging like mushrooms. Cato peered over his fingers, crooning in fascination. The old man, arranging to perfection his rings and chains and lockets and bangles on the lid of his basket, looked as if he’d seen it all before.

‘That’s it,’ said Maud, dropping her skirt, smoothing it down and picking up her plate once again. ‘Now you’ve seen them. Let me eat my breakfast. Any brooches?’ To the old man, ‘You know damn well I’d never get one of those things over my fist.’

‘These here,’ he said in a frail but gravelly voice. His bald head was brown and mottled, wispy white strands of hair still straggling out of it around the ears. Too old to be on the road, thought Julia. His long toothless mouth sank a deep ridge across the lower part of his face, as if a knife had scored it across from side to side.

‘Cato!’ she called.

He remembered her at once, pulled away from the girl and came bobbing over, shoving up Julia’s veil unceremoniously and throwing himself at her chest with an excited burbling.

‘Damnation!’ said the peddler. The girl stared.

‘No cussing,’ the fiancé said.

The man’s composure returned immediately and he turned his shoulder against her.

‘How much for the yellow one?’ asked Maud.

‘Miss Pastrana! Julia! Great to see you.’

‘Hello, Ezra.’

‘How you doing? We knew you were on the way. It’s all anyone around here ever talks about.’

‘I’m fine, Ezra. And you?’

‘Never better.’ He grinned. His face was fatter than before. ‘I got married. Berniece?’

The girl had lank brown hair and a serious face. ‘Hello,’ she said, unsmiling, holding out a hand. Julia struggled free from Cato’s embrace, reaching out. ‘Pleased to meet you,’ she said.

‘Stop it, Cato,’ said the girl, ‘you’ll strangle her.’

The old man, chomping on his mouth, was stealing sly glances.

‘Well, this is nice,’ said Ezra. ‘Seems like we’ll be keeping company as far as Boston.’

‘You seem older,’ Julia said, sitting with Cato on her top step, ‘more like a businessman.’

He laughed. ‘Ah well. Sober married man now, you see,’ he said. ‘Cato, come talk to Julia later, we have a lot to do.’

‘Oh, go on then,’ said Maud, swallowing coffee. ‘I’ll take the yellow one. Give him the money, Harv.’

‘Up, Cato, come on now.’

‘Julia now,’ said Maud, fixing the brooch on the slope of her breast, ‘she’s got tiny little wrists. She’ll take a look.’

The peddler, rising, stiff-backed, took up his walking stick, turned but did not look at Julia. ‘Buy the girl a ring,’ he said to Ezra.

‘She’s got rings,’ said Ezra.

‘Skinflint.’

Berniece took Cato’s hand and hauled him up. The old man dropped coins into his can, closed the lid and started hauling his wares across.

‘We’re right there,’ Berniece said, leaning in close for a good look, her eyes moving rapidly backwards and forwards over Julia’s face, ‘on the midway. Half way along. Zeo. Come see the show.’ She looked very young, and her voice came out in garbled bursts.

Ezra grabbed Cato’s other hand, and he and the girl began hauling him away.

‘Nice boots,’ said the peddler, looking at her feet. ‘A tiny foot means small wrists and fingers. I have just the thing for you.’

‘No thank you,’ she said.

‘Quality.’ He bent forward, leaning on his stick, taking her left foot in his hand and handling it in an over familiar way, as if it was something in a shop he was thinking of buying. His eyes were like pebbles, his blue coat just a rag. ‘Fine leather.’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘they’re nice old boots,’ trying to withdraw from his hand, but he held on.

‘I know quality.’

‘I’m sure you do.’

He let go, delved into his trove and came up with a horrible bracelet.

‘It looks cheap,’ she said.

He shot her a look of dislike.

‘There’s nothing I want. Really.’

‘Fair prices. Better than most. Quality.’

‘These aren’t quality.’

The man packed up his basket and stood straight. ‘Good day to you,’ he said, walking away.

‘Pinheads,’ Maud said, looking down at her new brooch, ‘I never get used to them.’

It rained and worms came up in the field. Covered well, under an umbrella, Julia picked her way carefully across the grass and joined the public meandering up and down the midway. She wasn’t on till the evening. The talkers were yelling, the tang of hot cotton candy mingled with the wet green smell of surrounding woodland. She passed by the sword-swallower, the skeleton and the frog-eyed girl, stopping at Zeo The Wild Human’s banner. Lions and tigers snarled through the giant leaves of a jungle. From Darkest Africa, it said. Last of his tribe. Cannibal. Zeo himself, painted in his grass skirt, ran on all fours with a bone in his nose. More hung round his neck. It was a good likeness but it didn’t do him justice. Pictures never did. Ezra was up on the bally, tapping his cane on the ticket box. His high voice carried far. ‘Presenting! The amazing Zeo! Only surviving member of a lost human race, all the way from deep, deep, deep in the Congo jungle, the very darkest of darkest Africa! Zeo! Alive! Alive right this way! Show’s about to begin, folks!’

The crowd shoved forward.

‘See it now!’ shouted Ezra. ‘Hurry along! Let the people through.’

Julia let herself be carried by the crowd.

‘You may never get the chance again! Don’t wait, you’re just in time! Right — this — way!’

She arrived at the booth and Berniece, who must have recognised the veil, waved her through. Inside it was crowded, green and dim, with rain drumming softly on the canvas. Sometimes being small was an advantage. By degrees, she was able to insinuate herself up near the front of the stage. A green and blue curtain, threadbare in patches, hung over it.

‘That’s it, folks,’ Ezra yelled. ‘All for now. Next show in half an hour.’

The show began.

‘Move in close now, ladies, gentlemen. Move in close. Any second now, I will draw back this curtain and I will reveal — The most incredible, the most important scientific and anthro-pol-ogical wonder of the world! But first let me tell you a little about how this remarkable specimen came to be here in this country. Thank you, thank you, come in at the back there. Move across now please—’

Ezra certainly had the talker’s gift. She’d never have thought it.

‘Zeo! The Wild Human! Remnant! Of a lost tribe of early humans, a precursor of Man as we know him today. He was found naked, ladies and gentlemen, scuttling, on all fours like a beast! By intrepid explorers into the many secrets of the Dark Continent.’

‘Let’s see him,’ someone yelled.

‘Patience,’ said Ezra. ‘At the time of Zeo’s capture, the nails of his hand measured seven inches in length. Can you imagine that? And they were capable of disembowelling a chicken in one movement. The courage of these brave men as they brought to bay this most rare of wild creatures, this lost hominid, this — words fail — Ladies. Gentlemen. I give you—’

The curtain was drawn back. Cato sat against a painted jungle in his grass skirt. He didn’t have a bone through his nose but he wore a long necklace of claws. Cato grinned at the audience and a great throaty sigh rose from their throats. ‘Oh my God!’ someone said. He jumped up and darted to the front of the stage, beaming wildly. A few people backed away. A girl reached up to touch him.

‘He fought tooth and claw when they threw the net over him, ladies and gentlemen,’ Ezra said, as Cato capered up and down the front of the stage, throwing his knees high and laughing. ‘Six months before he could be approached without risk to life. You can see how very well-behaved he is now, ladies, gentlemen. ‘Oh yes, Zeo is harmless now but believe me when I say this did not happen overnight.’ Cato was walking along bending over to shake the hands of the people at the front. ‘It required endless patience, months and months of careful training. Believe me, ladies, gentlemen—’

After that, they all wanted to shake his hand.

‘—only the most humane and enlightened means were used in the taming of Zeo. At first he would eat nothing but raw meat.’

Cato giggled.

‘Which he tore with his long sharp teeth, ripping it from the bone.’

‘Let him eat some raw meat!’ a boy shouted.

‘But no!’ Ezra cried. ‘As I shall very soon demonstrate, he has learned to eat exactly the same things as we do! You love cake, don’t you, Zeo?’

Cato nodded sharply, up, down, up, down, laughing hysterically. The audience surged towards him, enraptured, their senses struggling with him. The great V of his smile stretched itself beyond comprehension.

‘How can a brain fit in there?’ someone asked. ‘There’s no room.’

‘That’s interesting, ladies and gentlemen,’ Ezra said. ‘Notice the shape of the head. Notice how similar to the head of the ourang-outang. Zeo lived with the monkeys in the jungle. No one knows how long ago his particular type of the human race branched off. Even the foremost men of science are wonderstruck! What a chance!’ Ezra’s eyes gleamed fanatically. ‘To fathom the mystery of these creatures — for there — still — deep in the deepest and darkest of jungles, they live on, these ancient races. Is Zeo a human being? Is that what a human being looks like? No! Human beings don’t look like that. Is he an ape then? Some kind of a bald ape? No! He is something older still, ladies and gentlemen.’ Cato, knowing his cue, stood still, smiling mysteriously up and over their heads. ‘Older, and far, far stranger — a race as yet unknown to science — notice, as I say, the shape of the head. So close to the monkey! You see how this is perfect for a creature of the wild, a beast suited to swinging from branch to branch, a hunter of prey — Who would like to shake his hand? Come up, lady! You see, he has excellent manners!‘

Oh God, the time! Julia had no idea of it. She slipped away as quietly as she could, but when she got out it was strangely dark. She thought for a second that night had come, but it was just the sky that had fallen in a great black roll of cloud to just above the tree line. The gate to the field where the show wagons were was blocked. A cart lay on its side, a man and a woman screaming at one another beside it. She was late. The crowd, which had doubled since she’d gone into the tent, heaved nauseously. Turning down an alley between two tents, she hurried along the midway’s back, shuddering as the mud sucked at her red boots. There was another gate. Her heart hammered. She lost herself in a jumble of small tents and tethered horses and emerged somewhere beyond the midway at the far corner of the field. There weren’t too many people here, just a bunch of children by the gate, and one or two families heading home from the fair. The old peddler was sitting on the ground by the hedge with his pack and stick by his side, eating a stump of bread.

‘That’s her I was telling you about,’ he said. ‘That’s the ape woman.’

Everyone looked at her.

‘I recognise the boots.’

‘You’re kidding me,’ a boy said.

‘That’s her. She’s an ape under all that. God’s truth.’

Rain again, softly pattering down.

‘You’re not, are you?’ The boy stepped towards her. He was ten or eleven, short and round with a pale bulbous face. ‘You’re not the ape woman.’

‘No, I’m not.’ Her hands shook as she put up the umbrella.

‘God’s truth,’ the old man said, ‘that’s her.’

‘God’s truth?’

‘God’s truth.’

‘Go on then,’ said the boy, ‘give us a look.’

‘Yeah, let’s have a look,’ said a cheerful gawky girl, dragging by the hand a whiny toddler.

‘Excuse me,’ said Julia, slanting the umbrella to shield herself from them, ‘I really am late.’

It rained harder.

‘You are the ape woman,’ the boy said, ‘or you wouldn’t be wearing that veil.’

A boy appeared in front of her, smiling. Black hair, long face, buck teeth worn with pride. Her height exactly, probably about ten. A knife jumped in and out of its sheath at his belt, hopped from hand to hand.

‘Excuse me,’ she said. Her voice was firm. Inside she shook.

‘Why?’ he said. ‘What have you done?’

The girl with the infant laughed.

They’re only children, thought Julia. Walk past. She looked round. What, eight, nine of them, boys, a girl on the gate, the baby with its long red curls and swollen red cheeks. Still, some of them are big. Rain thundering now on the umbrella. They moved stealthily apart from one another, surrounding her more entirely.

‘Can you tell them to let me pass?’ she called to the peddler, but all he did was look at her with hard eyes, mashing the bread with his old wreck of a mouth. There were others too, just watching from a distance.

‘Can I get past, please?’

A boy with a snub-nosed baby face stepped in from the side, ripped her veil off and tipped the umbrella from her grip so that it landed upside down in the mud. They all ran back.

She went cold. No. Please no.

‘Give it back!’ she shouted.

‘Oh God, that’s horrible!’

‘Jesus Christ!’

‘What is it?’

All aghast, delighted. She was more than anything they’d imagined or dreamed of. The baby screamed in baby terror, wild and pure, and the girl scooped him up into her arms, hugging him to her. He threw back his head and shrieked himself into a fit. The girl ran backwards, picking up his fear and shouting, ‘Get away! Get away!’

The cry was taken up.

‘Get away! Get away!’

Julia was stricken by the baby. Always hated that, upsetting some child that doesn’t know anything and means no harm, just scared. Can’t help it. Just is.

‘Get away!’

She shrank. Her great naked head was all wrong.

‘Get it away!’

‘Horrible thing!’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said to the infant, ‘I won’t hurt you. I’m so sorry.’ She started to cry, distorting her face. She could no more control it than the rain could stop itself falling. It made things worse, and the rain came harder, bedraggling her hair. ‘Go back!’ ordered the pale puffy-cheeked boy as if she was the devil, and the boy with the knife stepped towards her with his arms made into a cross. ‘Back!’ he said.

‘I just want to get past,’ she said, mustering what she could of her dignity, trying to look the boy in the eye, say, me to you, please, just let me through. His eyes were grey and perplexed. Something sharp bit her cheek. A stone.

‘Go back!’ he said.

‘Let me through.’

He uncrossed his arm and made a kind of calligraphy in the air with the tip of his knife, then sheathed and unsheathed it very quickly several times. It was a good sturdy hunting knife about six inches long, and he handled it like a pet ferret.

‘It’s got tits,’ someone said.

They giggled. The child was still screaming, choking on himself. His big sister or whatever she was slapped his back.

‘Tits!’

They circled slowly, cracking up with laughter.

‘You are horrible,’ said the boy with the bulbous face. ‘Did you know that? You are the most horrible thing in the whole wide world.’

‘Stop it,’ she said.

‘Filthy!’

She was faint. The tops of the trees swooped down towards her.

‘Stop it,’ she said.

Another stone hit her shoulder.

The round boy, his face bobbing in front of her, strutting with his old man’s pot belly thrust before him; faces, manlike boys, the screaming baby, the girl on the gate, the knife draining the world into its thin shine. The boy with big teeth came close, his lips thick and winsome. She met his eyes, tried to say, boy, please boy, be good, but his eyes were cold and angry. Fear of the knife stopped her throat.

‘Get back, filth,’ he said.

She turned to run back but everything looked different, just dark leaves and shadows in her way. Something hit the middle of her back. They were on all sides. Faintness came up in a big white cloud and covered her head, dragging her down on her knees in the mud. No one was coming to her rescue. The wet grass in front of her was flecked with drowned fragments of something feathery and pollenish.

She got up, turned and faced them, dirt on her dress. ‘I have to go into the field,’ she said.

‘Why?’ asked a boy with elf ears and a hungry face.

‘I have a show.’

‘A show!’ said the round boy. ‘You’re disgusting.’

‘It’s crying,’ said someone.

The scrawny girl began to laugh uncontrollably.

‘Shouldn’t be out scaring people,’ said the baby face boy seriously.

‘I just want to pass,’ she said. ‘I’m not hurting anyone.’

‘Can’t you shut that brat up?’ The boy with the knife turned his head and Julia tried to go round him.

‘Shut up, John,’ said the gawky girl, still laughing.

Then they were all at it, cackling away like jackals.

The baby screamed louder than ever.

‘Take him home, Alice,’ said a red-headed boy at the back, ‘Take him home.’

The girl shushed the baby, never taking her eyes off Julia. ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ she said.

Now they were stooping, scooping up dirt and stones.

‘Let her go past, Bo.’ A voice, daring himself to speak, she couldn’t tell who.

‘Shall I?’ said Bo, sheathing the knife and standing with his hands on his hips. He wasn’t that big. ‘Shall I let you pass?’ He terrified her. He was mad, he might do anything.

‘Yes please, let me pass.’ Her voice was shaky.

A stone, badly lobbed, hit her just below the knee. The biggest yet, almost a rock.

‘Stop it!’

It throbbed. She wouldn’t be able to dance. She felt sick. Her eyes overflowed. They were behind her now too, circling, staring, daring one another closer and closer with their movements.

‘Don’t hurt me,’ she said, putting her hands over her face.

More stones, a shower.

She took her hands from her face. ‘Stop it!’ she yelled.

‘You stop it!’ they shouted.

‘Stop it!’

‘Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!’ they chanted back.

She ran through them to the gate. The gate wouldn’t budge. She shook it.

‘Look, it’s mad!’ someone shouted, and someone else screamed loudly. Then someone else. Then they were all at it, trying to outdo each other, and she turned and the knife was in front of her face. She screamed one pure scream of absolute horror and went down on her knees with her back in the corner of the gate, throwing her arms over her head and waiting for them to kill her.

The power of that scream from that face silenced everything but the baby, whose screams soared to new heights.

‘Get him out of here!’ snarled Bo.

‘Let it go,’ someone said.

‘No!’

Then a man’s voice, stern. ‘Bring that child over here!’

A gathering crowd.

‘What’s going on?’

Mud on her skirt.

‘What is it?’

‘One of the freaks.’

‘Escaped.’

‘Where?’

Then Beach, his face red to bursting. ‘For God’s sake! You! There! I see you!’ Gripping her elbow, pulling her up. He draped a shawl over her head, putting one arm around her and guiding her through the crowd. ‘Out of the way, please! Nothing to see, ladies and gentlemen!’ She trembled as he pulled her along, couldn’t stop it. ‘Just a few young hooligans of the locality preparing themselves for their criminal careers,’ he announced. ‘And I know every one of their names.’ She kept her eyes closed under the blanket and sobbed.

Back in her wagon, she sat down on the bank, covered her face with her hands and rocked. Beach stood gaping.

‘What the hell, Julia! What have I told you? If some old peddler hadn’t come and found me…’

‘Not now, not now,’ she said, ‘I have to lie down.’

‘I’ve been up and down the midway three times, I thought you’d run away.’

‘I went to see Cato,’ she said.

‘Who?’

‘Zeo the Wild Man.’

‘For God’s sake! You’re bleeding.’

‘Where?’

‘Can’t you feel it? There on your cheek.’ He gave her his handkerchief. ‘Thank Christ, it’ll hardly show under the hair. You can black it up a bit.’

‘I thought they were going to kill me,’ she said.

Blood on the handkerchief.

‘How many times have I told you?’

‘I know.’

‘Don’t go off on your own. You know that. Anything could happen. What did I say?’

‘I know.’

‘There have to be certain rules.’ He leaned towards her, scowling, the skin across the bridge of his nose tight and shiny. ‘There has to be trust.’

‘I thought I’d die,’ she said.

She was trembling. He looked at his watch. ‘Lucky it didn’t get nasty,’ he said, patting her shoulder roughly. ‘Get yourself rested up. Get yourself clean. You won’t be so silly again.’

‘I hurt my knee,’ she said.

‘Can you dance?’

‘I’m not sure.’

She walked a few paces. ‘I think so. I feel terrible.’

‘Rest.’

‘I don’t want to go on. What if they’re out front?’

‘You kidding? They won’t get anywhere near the place.’

‘I’m not sure I can,’ she said.

‘Of course you can. You don’t let those savages stop you.’ He turned at the door. ‘You have an hour and a half,’ he said.

The rain was really coming down now, hammering on the roof. She took off the red boots and flung them away from her, lay down and cried for half an hour. I was careful, she thought. I wore my veil and gloves. I’ll go home, should never have left. Horrible. Deceived myself. Why bother? All that hate. To just walk down a street one time. Be the same. Not look up, look up all the time, saying why?

The faces of the children appeared and re-appeared.

I’ll be honest with you, Solana said. You can be as good as anyone, and you can be proud and always stick up for yourself and get respect, but there’s one thing you won’t get, nena, and that’s a man. Not with your face so far gone. Don’t expect it. Love? With a face that frightens children? What a joke!

Horrible thing! Filth! Back! She didn’t hate them, that was the truly terrible thing. She wanted to, she tried, but instead of hate there was just depthless sadness and a great hurting.

Crying? That’s not the way, Solana would have said, with a slap to the back of the head. That’s never the way! Santy Ana took my boys. Do you see me crying?

She sat up.

‘No,’ she said out loud, and her heart sank at the enormity of carrying on. I can’t do it, said her head. You can, said that other that always pushed her on. Go home, go home, admit defeat. There was nothing out here, never had been. She stood up, dried her eyes, walked to the mirror, cleaned herself up briskly. Nothing’s safe. Not even life. Santy Ana takes boys. Mothers have pigtails. Knives cut, and children are cruel. And I’ll go my own way and make my own money and no one’ll ever stop me.

A small flap of skin had come loose in the middle of her cheek. It wasn’t bleeding much any more, but the whole area around it was thickening up and darkening. They will not stop me. Her eyes watered again but she stopped them, pressing the displaced skin back into place. She remembered that stone. It hadn’t hurt that much at the time, but now the wound throbbed and ached. ‘As if I wasn’t ugly enough,’ she said and laughed. God loves you, Solana said, her conviction firm. And that’s all that matters. And don’t you forget it.

‘Here’s why you will never be free,’ said her face in the mirror.

Back!

No.

Let them try.

She set about camouflaging the fierce little wound.

That night when she stepped out in front of the crowd, she couldn’t shake a funny feeling that she was also out there in the audience, staring at herself. There was a little girl at the front, holding on to her mother’s hand. She stared very gravely and thoughtfully at Julia and her eyes never wavered. Some people said you shouldn’t bring a child to a show like this. She might be the little girl at the window last night, the light in the square. Last night when everything was peaceful. Maybe she’d come with her mother and that was her out there, looking at the monster.

The monster, smiling, stared straight back at her.

Maud Sparrow and her fiancé jumped ship at Boston. Zeo the Wild Human headed out for Albany with Ezra and Berniece, who were talking of going to Europe, and after that, she was on her own again. She thought about giving it all up, going home, but then — suppose she did and they said oh no, we replaced you, Julia. You were ungrateful. So much of the past had been tied up with Solana, so much that she’d balked at, the old woman moaning and groaning all the time, propped high on her pillows, pillow-like herself, breathing loudly and dribbling chucaca tea, smelling of piss, dying far from home and talking constantly of her little house with the pictures on the wall, and the arroyo out back where the gazelle came down to drink. No. No going back, not now. Not for Solana, not for her.

In Providence one night, Beach said they were through with the circus. Enough of these sideshows. From now on she would only play solo performances. ‘We’ll sell you as a cut above,’ he explained, ‘not for the hoi polloi. Quality performer. Soirée. You know? These little folk songs, they’re nice enough, but what about these classical things you do? Say we get you some pearls for the front of that dress you’ve been working on for so long? How’s that coming along, by the way?’

‘Nearly finished,’ she said. ‘Pearls would be nice.’

‘Pearls it is.’

‘And I can sing arias,’ she said. ‘I like singing arias.’

‘That sort of thing.’

‘I can still sing my old songs too though, can’t I?’

‘If it seems to be the thing. But I think you should go for a kind of — you know. Go like a lady.’

Going like a lady was a game that kept away the spectral children who came and laughed at her sometimes when she was trying to get to sleep. So she went like a lady in Philadelphia and Atlantic City, and after a while realised how greatly things had changed since those first days, little more than two years ago and already becoming rose-tinted. Sitting about watching Myrtle painting her eyes with her feet. She got the best quarters now, the best dressing room. Beach made sure of it. He had other artistes, other commitments, but till Christmas he’d build her up. Next, New York, he said. The Stuyvesant. By then the whole place would be agog. And then — who knows? We’ll come to that, he said, and a chill of excitement went through her. Change was constant. She saw that she would not stay with Beach. He grew bossier by the day. He wanted to tell her what to sing and how to do her hair, when to come and when to go. So she waited for Christmas and New York, when there would be change. She knew he was getting offers. If he’s getting money, I am too, she thought. I’ll make him put it in the contract like Myrtle and Delia said. The thought of those two gave her a homesick feeling. Almost like a family she’d never had. Funny, running into Cato like that. When she closed her eyes, she saw Cato in his grass skirt, grinning at the crowd. That’s how it was: bumping into people, bumping off them randomly.

This Eastern seaboard tour was cold and lonely, a jittery meandering filled with rooms where she hid, bored. She kept running out of things to read. He kept saying he’d bring her more and forgetting. The weather out there was foul and those children would creep into her head, evil gargoyles, fallen cherubs picking at her. A phantom knife would slit her skin, a phantom self cringe. She’d swallow hard, banishing them like demons. Begone! Away! She couldn’t go out because of them. And even if she could, what point in wandering about alone in every strange place you came to?

It was a long stretch of tedium punctuated with shows, from which she bounced one to the other as if jumping from tussock to tussock over uneven ground. And in the middle of all this a special invitation came.

‘This is it!’ Beach crowed, shaking it in the air, his great crooked-toothed grin ramping over his face. ‘Listen. Ha ha! We are cordially invited to attend the annual Grand Military Ball. In Baltimore. This is it, Julia. Recognition!’

The dress was ready. It had pearl buttons on the bodice to match the pearl cross at her throat, a low sweep of silver lace across arms and breasts, ribbons at the waist. She wore it with long white kid gloves, black satin slippers and a tiny silk reticule. In her hair she wore the shell comb she’d bought on Broadway. Best of all, she was not veiled. One whole night without it, from the moment she entered the building.

The portico was stabbingly bright, full of smiling, glaring faces that swam in front of her like great balloons. A silver chandelier flew swan-like overhead. A staircase rose, wrought ironwork painted gold. She ascended on the arm of Beach, who’d had a stiff two or three for his nerves and was breathing out an air of sweaty perfume and brandy, smiling wildly.

Double doors opened inwards. A smart man in black called out their names to the assembled terrifying throng of glorious dresses and bright-buttoned and heavily medalled chests. Nothing in her life had prepared her for this. The beautiful dresses, the shine of the chandeliers, the sparkle of drinks through faceted glass. Flowers hung in garlands and swags around the columns. Every eye was on her.

The band played ‘Hail Columbia’.

She was led along a line of important men and gorgeously gowned ladies, all so clean and scrubbed, so powdered. She felt like a small child hanging on a big man’s arm. It wouldn’t do, so she let go and pretended she was tall and sophisticated. She met brigadier generals, major generals, this and that officer, and all their ladies so delighted, delighted, delighted, one after the other, so that she had to keep saying the same thing over and over again. How do you do? How do you do? I am very well, thank you. I am so pleased to be here. Delighted. Yes, this is my first time in Baltimore. And they were all eating up her face with their eyes. A smart man with slicked back hair ushered her courteously along, and she floated away from the end of the line with Beach in her wake and was led to a table where they were to sit with a gaunt old Major and his kindly rodenty little wife. The Major bowed. The wife clutched Julia’s hand in her cold white paws and stared hard, mouth clenched in a smile that was both genuine and strained.

‘I’m so glad you could come,’ she said. Her plucked, eager face was overwhelmed by the tremendous froth of her costume.

‘Thank you,’ Julia said. ‘It’s lovely to be here.’

When everyone sat, the band struck up something jolly, and the waiters poured champagne. The table was beautifully adorned with flowers and silver and starched white linen. Julia was very careful, sipping slowly. The music calmed her down. She didn’t know the tune, but it was so spirited that her head began to sway and her ankle to jog, and the Major leaned down towards her.

‘You like the music?’ he asked.

‘It’s wonderful,’ she said.

The Major’s eyes were sad and wet and drooped down at the outer corners. He smiled. Leaning across her, he struck up a conversation with Beach about the antiquity of the band and all the great occasions it had graced. Julia drank. The bubbles went up her nose, half stung, half tickled. How terrible if she sneezed. But her control was perfect. Since that horrible time with the children she’d been practising dignity every day, diligently and persistently as if it was a musical instrument she was learning. The little wife, still eagerly smiling, was nodding at her very quickly like an inquisitive parrot. Tight-corseted, erect, Julia smiled back. The dancers lined up.

‘My dear, this Charlotte Russe is simply delicious,’ said a hawk-nosed officer, ‘may I help you to some?’

She declined politely. She was too excited to eat.

‘I’ve never seen such beautiful dresses,’ she blurted out.

‘And your own, Miss Pastrana.’ The Major’s wife reached across and laid her hand on Julia’s arm. ‘It’s very charming. A little bird told me you made it yourself. Is that so?’

‘I’ve always made my own clothes,’ Julia said.

‘Very skilful! Such lovely embroidery.’

‘Thank you.’

She felt like laughing. It just all seemed so funny, these polished people wanting her as their guest of honour, all wanting to touch her, say they’ve met her, yes, she actually spoke to them. And all because of her face. But inside her face she felt ordinary, and there was nothing she could tell any of them. She drank. Careful. Not too much. The second cotillion was announced. A young officer with silky hair and smooth face approached the table, saluted smartly and bowed low.

‘Miss Pastrana,’ he said, blushing deeply, ‘Will you honour me with your hand for this dance?’

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, ‘I’m afraid I don’t know this dance at all. I really must decline.’ She wasn’t going to make a fool of herself getting it wrong. When she danced it would be something she was sure of. The officer bowed and departed. One more glass of champagne, she thought, and she’d be ready. She wouldn’t drink after that. She politely refused three more dances, waiting for the waltz, but when it came the old Major got in first, rising gallantly, taking her hand and leading her on to the floor, right out into the centre. From the corners of her eyes she was aware of the other couples, so much taller and surer than she was. The band played ‘Wild Roses’, and they swept into the dance. Of course, once they started, she was fine. This she could do as well as any, better than most. So around the floor they swirled and swirled, her dress one more petal among the rest, to the dignified sweep of the waltz. The old boy was a good dancer. He looked into her eyes as they danced, smiling. He was close to death, she thought. Already his eyes were far away, fading out as if they’d been left too long in a window and the sun had bleached them.

‘Are you enjoying this evening?’ he asked.

‘Very much,’ she replied. And she was.

‘You are very graceful, my dear,’ he said when the dance ended, and he led her back to her seat.

They were queuing up after that. First she danced the schottische with a bright young lieutenant with red hair and a cock-eyed grin. When they got on the dance floor she saw him lose his nerve for a second, saw him truly see her for the first time up close, face to face. His own face changed from pink to white to red in the space of a few seconds. Poor boy, she thought. If I smile now so close to his face it’ll scare him witless. So she tried to keep the smile to the eyes only, and said gently, ‘Don’t worry. It’s not for very long.’

‘Oh no. No no no no no, Miss Pastrana,’ he stammered, ‘you are mistaken—’

The music began.

‘It’s perfectly all right,’ she said. ‘I won’t bite you.’

He plastered a smile across his face, took a deep breath and steeled himself. But as they danced his smile became real, and soon he was laughing as they hopped about. ‘You can certainly dance!’ he called above the noise. ‘You never miss!’

‘Of course not!’ She laughed too. It was like being at home dancing with one of the boys on the patio after everyone had had one drink too many.

He brought his face close to hers as they turned. He’ll tell this story over and over, she thought. ‘This is a real schottische,’ he said. ‘One two three jump, one two…’

‘Yes!’ she said, keeping time perfectly.

‘I enjoyed that so much,’ he said when it was over, and kissed her hand before he led her back to the table. Bowing, he backed away with a besotted smile as if she was royalty. Another came at once. Another waited. Beach was grinning like a fool.

‘I’m having such a good time,’ she said, and everyone laughed as if she’d said something hilarious and very clever.

Another came. Another. She danced over and over again. Some of the men were young; some were handsome. And there was one, serious and pale, unsure of his feet, who counted under his breath and shot quick awkward smiles at her when he wasn’t looking down at the floor. His lips were childish, his hair long, and the touch of his palm against hers was unlike anything she’d known or imagined. The strangest thing, a sensation in her skin and bones, a sweet tearfulness in the breast, the kind she got from the songs she sang. The feeling lingered when the incident had flown.

As they were leaving, a beautiful young girl in a lavender gown ran up to her. ‘Oh, Miss Pastrana!’ she cried, bouncing on the balls of her feet, ‘I’m so happy you could come — may I kiss you?’

‘Of course.’

The girl gave a smothered little shriek of delight, stooped and placed a kiss on Julia’s cheek. ‘Oh my my!’ she said, ‘I am so happy,’ and danced away back to her admiring friends while the onlookers chuckled and tinkled applause, though for whom was unclear.

Back at the hotel she lay with her head spinning, the memories already taking form. She imagined them old and precious, finding words for the story she’d tell herself again and again the further away they got. The Ball. The Night of the Ball. When she danced again and again, and some of the men were young, and some handsome. And everyone loved her because she made them so glad they were themselves and not her. She held onto Yatzi and smiled in the dark. And that boy, she thought. That boy. When I’m old I’ll remember him. In another place he thinks of me. She sees his face clear, not special but somehow wonderful. He waits in the entrance to the hotel, in the shadows, and, when she comes down, steps forward. He sees her soul. That’s when her imagination gives way.

~ ~ ~

Rose liked to sleep in the afternoon when it rained, stretched full out on the red sofa, head on the cushion, whisper of wet leaves just beyond the window, gurgle of a drain. In one hand she clutched a plastic horse, in the other a dirty leopard Beanie Baby. Tattoo was cradled in the nook of her arm under the thin Indian bedspread. She was not really asleep but not awake either. The gas fire hummed.

She was wandering about in that place she went to on rainy afternoons. Under the trees, trying to sustain it till she could reach the castle with the drawbridge, which she knew was there because she’d glimpsed it a couple of times but never got close enough to take a good look. If you pushed on too far, the whole thing just faded away. It was like trying to see seven separate stars in the Pleiades and ending up with just a smudge on the sky. She could, however, stay as long as she wanted in the wood. She always entered by the southern fence, approached across a yellowing field. For a long time she’d had to crawl under the barbed wire, but she’d put a gate in a few years ago, and now just lifted the latch. There were logs lying about on the edge of the wood, fallen branches, usually a few bluebells and some wild garlic. The weather was always still and mild. The trees were not that dense here, and there were two paths, one to the left, the one she always took. The path to the right didn’t look any different, but for some reason she never went that way. It wasn’t something she gave any thought to, apart from a vague unhurried sense that she’d take it one day. If you followed the usual path the wood soon grew hushed and holy, high-roofed like a cathedral. It was never so wild as to be impenetrable but always lush. Wild flowers scented the air; ivy stormed over trees and rambling roots. The undergrowth was low and moist. As the wood deepened, there was no sense of a world beyond. There were people somewhere in here, she thought, but she’d never met any. She’d glimpsed creatures. Off in a pollen-dusty glade, a fallow deer, poised. She heard birds, a serene echoing, murmurous as water far away. A stag beetle crossed the path. At last she came to the place where she always stopped and rested. Ancient trees stood at respectful distances from one another. Between them, sinuous green clearings rolled out as if shaken, and the roots of the trees were gigantic, cushioned with starry green moss you could lie down on and fall asleep. She usually fell asleep in the end. Only occasionally did she keep her eyes open and later maybe, move on to the place where the land opened up, and the little bridge crossed to the moated castle, the drawbridge down, welcoming.

Someone banged on the door.

Damn them.

When she opened her eyes the room was unrecognisable, resolved into its shapes with all dimensions removed. Rap rap rap. Then the shapes re-angled themselves into a different perspective, and for a moment a great high-edificed city with thoroughfares and byways spread out in front of her. But it was gone in a moment, leaving only stuff.

Rap rap. ‘Rose!’

I’m not in, she thought.

‘Rose!’

Bloody Laurie. If you knock on someone’s door three times and they don’t answer, they’re either out or they don’t want to open the door. You don’t go on banging and shouting.

Rap rap.

Sod off. She sat up, leaning forward with a frown, slipping her feet into a pair of patchwork slippers. A couple of minutes later she heard him turn and go back downstairs. She had sharp ears and knew all the sounds of this house, the creakings of particular stairs, the sighings of particular doors. When she was sure he was out of the house, she got up and shuffled over to the mantelpiece for her tobacco. Bang goes sleep. Her big toe, the long nail pointed and purple, stuck out of a hole in one of the slippers.

Laurie could go jump. Too many rows lately. If you could call them that, him nagging on about her stuff as if it had anything to do with him, and she endlessly telling him to give her peace. Anyway, whatever happened to that nice casual no-strings thing?

Her face in the mirror was scarily plain and blank, all the makeup rubbed off her eyes. She looked like no one she knew. Once, in madness, she’d thought it could work but of course it couldn’t. It was lust only, never meant to last. Touching him used to be an electric thrill, now it was a shudder. Now her flesh now crept apologetically when his clumsy great hand brushed the side of her breast. Oh here we go again, she’d think, and he sensed it. She was glad he was married. He couldn’t blame her for backing off now, could he? She’d let him in tomorrow, or tonight if he came back maybe, so long as he didn’t moan. But she wasn’t giving up this sleepy rainy afternoon.

She opened a cupboard. Halva. Absinthe. Sugar. Some Dunkaroos from her brother in America. Absinthe. Yes. She turned up the gas fire. Listen to it teeming down. Outside the window was a green garden washed with rain.

~ ~ ~

She’d shaken thousands of hands and spoken to hundreds of people over the past couple of years, since leaving home; most just wanted to stare and ask the same old things. How are you? Are you happy? Unhappy? Do you wish you were like other people? They looked so closely, they didn’t really hear what she replied. I’m like others, she’d say. Sometimes happy, sometimes not. What’s the point of wishing? Things are as they are. My life is more interesting now. I travel. Meet people. Her real feelings, too hard to describe, were that life was not back there at home but somewhere ahead, so there was no other way, she’d keep moving. Let them look, yes yes, I’m real and so are you, let’s look at each other. Off they’d go, amazed she could talk, having gazed so much they hadn’t really seen her at all. And she’d cry at nights, remembering young men she’d danced with and the faces of children throwing stones, quake at her insecurity, the vagueness of time, but still sing and dance and carry on.

When Theo Lent called, she had no idea at first that he was anything other than a regular rube, though one rich enough to afford a private audience. Beach just said it was a gentleman to see her, showed him in, introduced them and withdrew. They were in the upstairs parlour of a house on Broome Street in New York, a place used entirely by show people. Christmas was past. Snow fell softly, drifting past the window, and a good fire billowed in the grate.

‘Miss Pastrana,’ he said, holding her eyes very firmly, smiling in a businesslike yet disarmingly boyish way, ‘I’ve been wanting to meet you for a very long time.’ She wasn’t wearing her veil, but he obviously knew what to expect and showed no sign at all of being unsettled.

‘Surely not so long,’ she replied as they sat down. Her first impression was of a smug overgrown schoolboy, twinkly-eyed and dressed like a swell but a little shabby.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘so long.’

He leaned towards her, bringing his face so close to hers she could smell his clean eager breath. His neat round face was cheerful, black hair combed high above his forehead. ‘I saw you at the Stuyvesant last night,’ he said, ‘a remarkable performance! Wonderful!’

‘I’m glad you enjoyed it,’ Julia said.

‘Miss Pastrana,’ he said, coming closer still, ‘Oh, look at you, Miss Pastrana.’ His intensity was ridiculous.

She looked away, excited and slightly alarmed, almost thinking he was going to kiss her. There’s some madness in him, she thought.

‘Outrageous,’ he said. ‘Completely outrageous.’

‘What is?’

‘The things they say.’

‘What things?’

‘I can quote.’ He sat back. So did she, thankfully, a faint quivery sensation growing inside. ‘Eyes like the owl. Gifted with speech. The link between mankind and the ourang-outang.’

‘That was Dr Mott.’

‘I know.’

‘But they all say different things. The one in Boston said I was human.’

‘Your eyes are nothing like the owl,’ he said. He never stopped smiling. ‘How many wise men have you seen?’

‘Wise men?’

‘Doctors. Fellows with fancy education and tripe for brains.’

‘I lost count.’

‘I’m a showman, Miss Pastrana.’ Mr Lent leaned forward again but this time more casually, swinging one arm over his knee in a movement of practised ease that managed to be all wrong. ‘Let’s not beat about the bush,’ he said. ‘Have you considered Europe?’

She drew back, surprised. ‘Europe?’

‘London. Paris. Rome.’ He tossed the words like winning cards. ‘Did you know Tom Thumb played for the Queen of England? The Emperor Napoleon turned out for Maximo and Bartola. They’ve dined with every duke and duchess from Saint Petersburg to Madrid.’ He stared fanatically into her eyes. ‘Why not you, Miss Pastrana?’

‘I haven’t thought about it,’ she said.

‘Then do, Miss Pastrana. Do.’

She looked into the fire. He talked as if he was acting. ‘Europe,’ she said softly. Far away, grand, sophisticated, old. Where Cato was going. Where they all came from, the Poles, the Italians, the Irish, the Germans, all the different accents and faces of the cities she dipped in and out of.

‘Five times now I’ve watched you perform,’ he said. ‘Five times I’ve been amazed. You have great talent. Great talent.’

‘I don’t,’ she said. ‘I do have some talent, it’s true, but I wouldn’t call it great.’

‘I would.’

She glanced at him. ‘You’re very kind, Mr Lent.’

‘No,’ he said, leaning towards her again, ‘I’m not a particularly kind man. But I do know my business. Miss Pastrana—’

The future had seemed as far away as the past till now, but somewhere deep in her mind it began to take shape.

‘Don’t you know how rare you are?’ He laughed, a sudden boyish undisciplined giggle. ‘How wonderful?’

Julia turned away and smiled. She wasn’t usually the one who looked away first, but now she’d done it twice. His zeal was embarrassing.

‘I was born into this business,’ he said. ‘I cut my teeth on it. I promise you, I will make you rich and famous. I promise you.’

She looked back at him seriously. ‘Have you spoken to Mr Beach?’ she asked.

‘I have.’ He had the tone of a man for whom everything is simple, worked out like a tricky equation. ‘I’ll pay him whatever he wants.’

She looked away.

‘I have money, Julia,’ he said quietly. She was a little taken aback by his easy use of her first name. She’d been saving a bit. She hadn’t thought about making more. ‘Money is no object,’ he said. ‘Whatever you’re getting now, I’ll double it in a year. I’ll triple it. The future’s not here, it’s over there. And I have contacts.’

Yes, she thought. This is it. The future. It’s over there.

‘Julia,’ he said. ‘You’ll dine with kings.’

In a flash, it came back again: home, Solana, her room, the stone seat, the steps. Glow-worms hovering in the dark outside the gate, the fig tree dropping fruit on the cobbles. But this time she knew beyond doubt that she’d never go back. Oh Saint Jude, is this your doing? I promise to forever remember your great favour, forever increase devotion to you…

‘Kings,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘I wonder if they’re nice?’

Mr Lent laughed.