PART THREE. Next World

~ ~ ~

‘You know she’s fucked up, don’t you?’

Laurie was half way up a ladder on the landing, a paint-brush in his hand. His black hair, grown longer and wilder, tumbled in dusty waves half way down his back and there were flecks of green paint in it here and there. He was wearing a pink tee-shirt so old and limp and torn it formed a kind of mesh on his torso.

‘Yeah, I suppose,’ said Adam.

‘Those things,’ said Laurie. ‘That room. That horrible thing there.’ He indicated Tattoo, dangling head-down from Adam’s hand. Adam looked down at it, bashed it lightly against his knee.

‘What you doing with that anyway?’

‘Said I’d fix this hole for her,’ said Adam.

Laurie looked down from the ladder as one wiser, an old soldier dispensing hard-won knowledge. He rested the paintbrush on the rim of the tin and it sat there looking precarious. ‘Chuck it away!’ he said passionately.

Adam was watching the paintbrush, wondering if it would fall. If it did, it would make a right old mess. ‘I might just,’ he said.

Serve her right.

‘I mean, what does it all really mean to her?’ Laurie, upright on the ladder, somehow gave the impression he was sitting back on his heels. He dragged bits from his jeans pocket and started rolling a cigarette. ‘It’s infantile. Arrested development. Like a kid with a dummy. Those things are a security blanket.’

‘Yeah.’ The brush wasn’t going to fall. Boring. Too stuck there in its wallow of sticky gunk.

‘Stuck up there with all that shit because she can’t face reality. Reality. Know what I think? She’s trying to stave off death. That’s all it is, attachment to the physical world.’ Laurie put the roll-up between his lips, clicked his lighter. ‘I say go with the Buddhists. You know, no attachment, face death every day, every minute, and all that. Every second. Look it in the face. She can’t do that.’

‘No, she can’t.’

True. Like a child.

‘It’s all crap.’ Laurie rubbed his nose with the back of his hand and sucked. She did it with him, thought Adam. A year or more. Longer than me. I know. They were at it all the time. God, that ugly fucker, I used to say. How can you, Rose? I think he’s beautiful, she’d say. Laurie up there on the ladder, ageing crags, rough, tough-eyed.

‘So anyway,’ said Laurie, ‘has she chucked you out?’

‘Pretty much.’

Laurie, the roll-up stuck to his lower lip, picked up the paintbrush and wiped it on the rim of the tin. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘That’s what she does. She chucks people away but she can’t chuck out a pile of old crap.’ He slapped paint on the wall. A fine spray jumped back in his face but he didn’t take any notice

Adam went back to his room.

Poor old room had been neglected all that time he was up there making believe. Got cold and unloved, the air unused. Hello Room, back again. That first night, two months ago, first night in six months he’d slept alone. Like sleeping in a hotel. Waking up wondering where you were. Give me a couple of days, she’d said. Couple of days indeed. The second night he’d gone up and tried the door, but she’d locked it. Well, of course. Third, he knocked and she got up eventually, and he walked in as if everything was normal and he was just late coming home, and started getting into bed. It was warm, full of her shape. Oh, Ad, she’d said sadly, and got in beside him but only wanted to go straight to sleep again. Well OK. He could cope with that. A week or so of just that, sleeping like buddies, no sex. Then: really, Adam, you’ve got to start getting used to your own room, as if he was an infant she was weaning from her bed. I don’t know what people make such a fuss about, she’d said one day when they were having a terrible row — sex, what’s the big deal? We can still be the same, you in your place, me in mine, it’s not as if we have to break up or stop seeing each other any more, Jesus Ad, we’ve lived alongside each other long enough. Nothing’s changed. OK, we had sex for a while.

So that’s the big deal, he’d said, and she’d said: not for me.

He’d been sitting there for half an hour doing nothing, gawping into space. There in his hands was Tattoo. He looked where the eyes had been. ‘Hello, old thing,’ he said.

Chuck it away.

Go back, say: ha ha I couldn’t be bothered faffing around with tape and stuff. He’s only going to fall to pieces somewhere else next week. Chucked him in the bin. It was bin day, they took him away. In a landfill by now.

She’d go mad.

You did what? Oh, how could you be so cruel!

And he’d say, yeah, see, that’s exactly what you did to me. You took away my Tattoo.

Now two months had gone by. Next week was Christmas. He lived in his room, she lived in hers, and she acted as if everything was fine and they were just old friends, and it was killing him. It wasn’t as if he could stop it. Her face swimming up in his mind all the time, these snapshots. These feelings, illusion or not, that when he looked at her there was something there of himself, a thing he recognised as if from old old days, days so far back they didn’t even exist in any known reality. Made no sense. Didn’t matter what you called it. And last night she’d come swanning in and said, ‘I don’t like turkey. Shall I get us a big chicken for Christmas?’ What the fuck? Like they’d be together. Like he didn’t even get consulted, it was taken for granted. What was he supposed to do?

Laurie was right. She was fucked up, missing some normality gene that makes people do what they do, sleep with the same person for years, all that, live together, kids.

‘Can you fix that hole in Tattoo for me?’ she’d said. ‘You said you had some duct tape.’

‘Not now. Tomorrow.’

‘OK.’ And she’d swanned out again.

She’d been sleeping on the red sofa when he knocked on her door at four o’clock. The room was stifling and perfumed. She’d made it Christmassy, with holly and paper chains. All her crap was clean and tidy, a dozen or so Christmas cards lined the mantelpiece. In the centre she’d put a very small tree she’d made out of twisted wood and pipe-cleaners covered in gold foil. Tiny silver baubles hung from its branches and on top was a star. Through the branches peered the cracked, crazed and sightless faces of the dolls of Doll’s Island.

‘Oh thank you,’ she said, handing him Tattoo. ‘Thank you, thank you, you good, good boy.’

My best friend.

Right, he thought, shaking himself back, here, now. Get started on this thing. Where’s the duct tape?

~ ~ ~

The two bodies were embalmed (I have used the word ‘embalmed’ because it is one which is usually employed in such cases; but it does not convey a correct impression of the nature of the substances which I used in order to arrest the progress of decomposition, and to preserve the body in its entirety) by me with a view to their being permanently preserved in the Anatomical Museum of the University of Moscow. Both of the bodies were embalmed in the space of six months. During that time — from the beginning of April to the end of September — they were exposed to different atmospheric influences and different temperatures — to 15 degrees, 18 degrees, 20 degrees, 25 degrees, and even 30 degrees (centigrade) of heat. The body of the mother is now quite free from smell. The parts which had already begun to decompose exhibit a grey colour, deepening into a bronze hue. The lower part of the forearm, the hands, and the feet, have become mummified and of a whitish colour. The breasts have diminished, and are wrinkled in some parts; they have also assumed a bronzed appearance. The shoulders, the back, and the sides preserve their dusky-yellow hue. It is wonderful to see how little change the face has undergone, having remained all but unaltered; the only difference is, that the eyes have sunk in, the lips are slightly thinner than they were, and there is a trifling diminution in the morbid process of the gum, which has grown hard and white. The body of the child exhibited very slight traces of decay at the period of embalming, and has undergone little perceptible change up to the present time; it has shrunk very little. The colour of the skin remains what it was during its lifetime, and the pliancy of its limbs is still preserved. The fingers and toes, however, have become mummified.

The bodies of these two individuals — one of whom has been the subject of general curiosity — well deserved a place amongst the rarities in this museum, and wherever they may be they have a claim upon the scientific world.

(Sokolov, The Lancet, 3 May 1862)

‘Do you want to know what he did? You won’t believe it. He’s had her stuffed, her and the baby.’

‘What kind of a man would do that? Puts them in a glass case and carts them around in a big box and charges a nice price to look at them. They’re flocking in. Got it made, he has. Not one embalmed freak but two. Mother and child.’

‘Good God! — I saw her. It was her, Julia Pastrana, it really was. Standing there like a tart with her hands on her hips in a red dress. Can you believe?’

‘You know, I saw her in Munich once. Good little singer, and she had some lovely dance steps. But the face though! Meet that in a back alley of a dark night and you’d know it—’

‘Buckland saw him in London. Cool as a cucumber, the man walks up to him and says, d’you want a private view? Costs him, of course. Well, it would. Said he never saw anything like it. Had this cove from the museum with him, one that stuffs the animals, says he couldn’t work out how they’d done it. Stupendous job! But what kind of a man does that? Got to ask yourself.’

‘Kind of man that marries someone like that in the first place, I s’pose.’

‘Still. Not her fault, is it?’

‘No, but you can’t say it’s natural, can you? I mean, would you? — Thought not.’

‘Nice girl, by all accounts.’

‘I knew her—’

‘Poor Julia—’

‘There’s something totally abhorrent about the man. There was always something suspect, looking back, but we gave him the benefit of the doubt. More fool us for being fooled, and she was charming. Really. Liliya took to her tremendously. You know Liliya, ever the romantic. Why can’t they be truly in love? That’s what she said. But when he did that — well, she couldn’t see how he could do it, I think it made us all uneasy. She wouldn’t go and see them when they were here. None of us did. Oh yes, my girl Polina went. Didn’t say much. That he could do a thing like that—’

‘He’s made.’

‘A rich man.’

‘She signed my picture. She was quite shy—’

‘But that’s just gruesome, that is! Having that poor baby nailed up there on its perch like a bloody monkey on a stick. Such a funny little face. You expect it to turn its head.’

‘The embalmed Female Nondescript—’

‘You can see the handouts blowing up and down Piccadilly. The most life-like embalming anyone’s ever seen. A Moscow doctor, some sort of secret formula, you’d think she was alive — to be honest, it’s scary. I don’t like it.’

‘I don’t suppose any normal woman would look at him.’

‘No fool actually. Got himself covered. Sells the bodies then gets them back. Sees how good a job they’d done on them so wants them back — oh sure, knows a mother lode when he sees it. All of a sudden he’s asserting his rights. Goes down to the American consul, crafty beggar, shows them the marriage certificate and all. My wife and son. Didn’t think of that first time, when the money changed hands, did he? Made a loss, mind you, getting them back — but who cares? Makes it up in a week. All that work, thinking they’re getting two nice prime specimens for their museum, and up he comes and waltzes her off to somewhere, Vienna I think—’

‘But of course she’s from Mexico, isn’t she? They do all that sort of thing there, so I suppose it’s not as bad as if they did it to one of ours—’

‘You know, in a funny sort of way, she’s strangely beautiful. Something to do with her expression. I don’t know — she’s very hard to forget. I will say — you should go, go see her.’

‘I mean, she was something in life.’

‘That is not Julia,’ Theo explained to the reporter. ‘That is not the boy. That is mere matter. It doesn’t matter. There is no significance. It’s just words in the head, that’s all it is, words in the head.’

‘Mr Lent, I’m not quite sure what you mean.’

‘Why not? It’s absolutely clear.’

‘Perhaps not to our readers. Of course, they are all fascinated by the exhibition, but you must admit there’s a personal side to this story.’

‘Of course. What has that to do with anything?’

‘Some may find it strange that you travel with the embalmed bodies of your wife and son.’

‘Would you find it strange if I travelled with a portrait of them?’ Theo had practised all this. There was no flaw in the logic. ‘A keepsake? Perhaps a strand of hair in a locket. What’s the difference?’

‘The difference,’ said the man, who was smarmy and impish, a little like himself, ‘is that these are actual — corpses.’

‘Actually, no,’ said Theo smoothly. ‘They’re mummies. Just as I said — that is not Julia. That is not the boy. That is mere matter and it doesn’t matter. There is no significance.’ He leaned forward, eager to make his point. ‘Is it wrong for people to look at the mummies in the museum? Go to Italy. The churches are full of relics. Corpses, mummies, dead bodies, cadavers—’

Theo realised he was gesturing too extravagantly. ‘Just words in the head,’ he concluded. ‘That’s all it is, words in the head.’

‘Tell me, Mr Lent.’ The man addressed his notepad. His eyes were amused. ‘How long have you been touring with your wife and child?’

Theo sat back and smiled, scratched his ear. ‘Oh now, let me think. Seven years — let me think. Yes, getting on for eight possibly.’

‘Remarkable. And you’ve shown them all over Europe.’

‘Oh, all over. First in London, that must have been, yes, seven years ago, but we’ve been all over Europe and Scandinavia. The Swedes love her. And now here we are again.’

‘And they’re still pulling the crowds!’

‘They’re still pulling the crowds.’

‘And where to after this, Mr Lent? What does the future hold?’

‘We’re going back to Vienna,’ Theo said, ‘she always liked Vienna.’

Once more to the elegant white town.

Julia stood among the show-booths at Prauscher’s Volksmuseum, her baby in a sailor suit by her side. In life Theo Junior had never stood, but now he did, sturdy on two booted legs, nailed to the stand.

Before the doors opened, Theo Senior stood in front of his exhibit and gazed into its wide sightless eyes. Glass, of course, but so real. People said they followed you about the room. The doors opened and in came the floods. She was making as much as she ever had. He slipped behind a screen, walked down a dim passageway and pushed open the door of a room at the end. It had the look of an abandoned office that someone had shoved a pile of boxes into, along with an old broken-down piano with gaping teeth and a soft saggy chair covered in a brown blanket. A bottle of whisky, three empty glasses and his silver cigar box were neatly arranged on a small table next to the chair, which sank as he lowered himself into it so that he felt as if he was sitting on the floor.

‘Ridiculous,’ he muttered to himself, pulling himself forward and out of it, pouring himself a drink. He knocked it back, poured another, knocked that back, poured another, lit a cigar and lay back with his eyes closed. For a good ten minutes he lay perfectly still, stirring only to raise the cigar to his lips from time to time. The stiller he lay, the more his mind tumbled like an acrobat. The thoughts seemed not to be his own. It was as if inside his head was air as big as the air surrounding him, an echo chamber reaching as far in as the heavens reached out. In that air, the broken off and wandering fragments of the thoughts of millions twined and twined in and around each other in passage. Some meandered by. Others were comets or bright shooting stars. None of them lasted.

The door was open. Prauscher rapped on it and Theo’s eyes opened at once.

‘You’ve got a countess come a-calling,’ he said.

‘What?’ He stood awkwardly. The chair didn’t want him to go.

Prauscher was a florid man with a look of bursting about him. ‘A countess, no less,’ he said with the hint of a sneer. ‘The Countess Prokesch-Osten.’

‘A countess,’ said Theo. That was good. ‘Well, show her in, I suppose. Or is there somewhere more—’

But she appeared in the doorway. ‘You don’t remember me, do you?’ she said.

‘Friederike.’ He nodded.

She came in, Prauscher hovered, Theo closed the door on him. ‘I’m sorry,’ Theo said, ‘there’s only this thing here to sit on, but if you—’

‘How can you?’ she said.

Theo sighed, smiling his mild smile, a man wronged. ‘You too,’ he said softly. ‘I’m sorry, Countess, but I no longer feel the need to explain myself. I’ve already done that, many, many times.’

‘I know you have,’ she said.

The years had been kinder to her than to him. She had light crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes and her lips were thinner, but her hair and eyes shone and she was still in her prime and elegant. Theo still looked younger than his age, but these days he was beginning to notice an ageing look when he glanced at a mirror, the skin of his throat looser, his hair turning grey and receding. In a few weeks he’d be forty-five. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘I never will.’

‘Then I can’t make you.’

‘How can you smile? How can you stand there completely unmoved? I knew her for only a few weeks, and I hate to see her like that. And the baby! The poor baby!’ Her eyes filled with tears.

‘Friederike,’ he said, ‘please. If I may still call you Friederike. Or is it Countess Prokesch-Osten now?’

‘Call me whatever you like,’ she said. ‘I don’t understand. You have taken away every last shred of dignity she had.’

‘No.’ A flicker of anger, which he tried to hide. ‘Any dignity a person has exists while they’re alive. Once you’re dead it can’t be touched.’

‘Rubbish,’ she said, ‘you know that’s not true.’

‘Friederike! That is not Julia. That is an image of Julia.’

But she shook her head. ‘If you can’t see how grotesque this is, I’m sorry for you.’

‘Grotesque? Grotesque?’ Now he really was angry. ‘No. I will not have that. She got enough of that when she was alive.’

She listened, said nothing, just looked at him seriously for a long moment.

‘Why did you come, Friederike? You must have known it would upset you, and yet you came anyway. Of course you did, you had to. Because you can’t help yourself. No one can. She was unique, born for looking at. What’s so terrible about that?’

She blinked rapidly, licked her lips and shook her shoulders. ‘She should have had a decent burial, like everyone else,’ she said, turning to leave.

Theo smiled. ‘It’s only the body, Friederike,’ he said. ‘It’s not her.’

Countess Prokesch-Osten took a small handkerchief out of her glove and swiped it briskly over the end of her nose, then sniffed loudly. ‘Nevertheless,’ she said, ‘it produces the most — profound — sadness.’ She folded the handkerchief and put it back inside her glove. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it’s been many years. My memories of her are very fond.’

‘As are mine,’ said Theo quietly, then smiled brightly. ‘So!’ he said, ‘a countess!’

He knew she’d not appeared on a stage for years, but he’d had no idea she’d married so grandly.

She smiled coldly. ‘Yes,’ was all she said, then turned and walked out of the room without saying goodbye.

The road wound on for seven more years.

Sometimes, fresh from the dim room of a whore with its sad trappings of drapes and shades, he’d stumble along the midway into the wagon where he’d placed her in her case next to his bunk, and he’d lie in bed and talk to her.

‘You know,’ he’d say, ‘you’ll never believe what they said in the Figaro. Been talking to Buckland, I bet. You don’t think I’m a monster, do you? Of course you don’t.’

He never had truck with all these idiots who said he was mad. What were they moaning about? For God’s sake what are they, pagans who worship graven images? Insane. Whatever came after death, and he had no idea what that might be, though he wouldn’t rule out the possibility of there being something, it had nothing to do with that mummy. Julia was gone, fully and finally. What remained was no more than a portrait. Call it a keepsake. About the boy, he scarcely thought.

Sometimes the night would close in, become nothing less than the sum of everything. In the stillness, the pounding of his blood was an approaching army. Silence vibrated behind it. Her glass eyes looked away, past him. It had been a long time since that face had lived, but still, on nights like these, he would fall into a reverie of communication with it.

You know, don’t you,’ he’d say. ‘You understand.’

And the years marched on around him, hustling him along by the shoulders like a man in a crowd.

He was in Bremen when he got word of a hairy girl in Karlsbad. His pulse jumped. It reminded him of the first time he’d heard about Julia, and known, just known that this was something of importance in his life. Here was another, clearly signposted by circumstance. Things conspired. He was in certain places, certain times, to hear by chance a conversation, a mention, until one night he met a man in a sideshow who was running three pinheads and a skeleton woman who looked as if she was on death’s doorstep. ‘Heard about that girl in Karlsbad?’ the man said, a small weaselly Cockney who spoke as if he was offering stolen goods.

‘Yes,’ said Theo, ‘I have.’

‘Hairy as this one. Easy.’ He’d been hanging around Julia’s case all day, couldn’t get enough of her and her boy. Stood gazing and gazing. If he’d had the money he’d have offered, Theo could tell, but he knew she was way beyond him.

‘This girl,’ said Theo. ‘You seen her?’

‘You kiddin’?’ The man snorted. ‘Guards her like the crown jewels, the old man.’

‘So,’ Theo offered him a smoke, ‘how do you know what she’s like?’

‘I was down there.’ The man accepted a light. ‘Everyone knows about her. I was talking to this fella knows the family. Covered head to foot, he said. Old man’s filthy rich and keeps her in.’

‘Hm,’ said Theo. They stood smoking quietly for a while, looking at Julia and the boy. ‘Did you try?’

‘Oh yeah! Tried all right. Couldn’t get near.’

You couldn’t, Theo thought. I bet I could.

A couple of months later he made a nice deal with Prauscher, and left Julia and the boy with the museum while he went off to Bohemia. Strangely freeing to be away from her glass eyes, the boy’s vacant stare. He spent a few days hanging round getting the lie of the land, talking to people in taverns, discovering that the girl’s name was Marie, her father a linen merchant with a big house near the cathedral. He laughed when he saw it. The garden wall was ten foot high. ‘Rapunzel, Rapunzel,’ he said, ‘let down your hair.’

First he left his card. When that didn’t work, he sent round a crate of first-class port wine and two dozen red roses. Let them just think about how much that cost, he thought. Two days later, receiving a note of thanks and a brusque invitation to call at four o’clock on Friday, he celebrated by getting drunk. By Friday he’d recovered from the hangover and got himself shaved and spruced up by a barber, and by the time he stood on the steps of the big white house, on the dot of four, he’d persuaded himself to feel fettlesome and fine. The old man received him in a slightly shabby sitting room filled with things that looked costly but used: bowls, dishes, a glass-fronted bookcase and several tables bearing the scratch marks and stains of generations. The sound of children running through the house penetrated the walls, the voice of a woman; French, it sounded.

‘Let me get straight to the point,’ said Theo. ‘I know you must be sick of people taking a mercenary interest in your daughter, but I want to reassure you that my proposition is wholly different from any other you may have received.’

‘No,’ said the old man. ‘The answer is no.’

That’s what you think.

It took less than an hour and came down to money in the end. The old man wasn’t as bad as all that, just a businessman to the core who knew a good deal when he saw it. He’d just never had a good enough offer for her before. Prim-faced, worn-out, tragic-eyed, he sat there, talking about how dear his daughter was to him, what a good education he’d given her, how dignified, charming and refined she was. He couldn’t possibly consider anything but the very best for her.

‘Of course.’ Theo accepted a second glass of fine port wine. ‘And that is why, in spite of the fact that I intend to ameliorate your inevitable anguish at the loss of a daughter with a very considerable financial settlement, I come not as a businessman but as a suitor.’

It was the marriage proposal that clinched it, even though initially the old man objected to the age difference. Thirty years, but Theo knew he didn’t look his age and managed to trim a few years off without being specific. He spoke movingly of his first marriage and sad bereavement. The success of that union, he stressed, a bond so strong, so misunderstood by some of lesser sensitivity, must speak for him. He of all people could truly understand a woman like Marie. He of all people could give her wealth, security, respectability, marriage, children. He didn’t mention the mummies.

‘You are talking about public display,’ her father said.

‘Not at all. I am talking of artistry. She has a fine voice, I’m told.’

‘Who told you that?’

No one had, but it was a good stab.

‘Oh, it’s well known. I don’t remember where I heard it.’

‘She sings,’ her father said, as if stating the obvious. ‘And of course she plays the piano. I gave her a good musical education.’

‘Excellent.’

‘Singing and playing the piano at home for the family is one thing,’ said her father, ‘I’m sure she has no inclination for anything more.’

‘One step at a time,’ said Theo. ‘First the young lady must be consulted. Her happiness in the matter is the only thing that counts.’

The old man sat sucking his teeth thoughtfully for a while, but Theo could see he’d got him. ‘Come tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Let me talk to her.’ He smiled faintly but none of the tragedy lifted from his eyes, which strayed to the window, the garden. ‘She’s a very strong-willed girl,’ he said, ‘she won’t do anything she doesn’t want to.’

‘Oh, absolutely!’

Out in the sun, Theo strolled along by the garden wall, looking up. ‘Rapunzel, Rapunzel,’ he said. A man cleaning the windows of a house a little down the road had stopped for a break and was sitting in the shade of a side alley eating a hunk of bread. Theo couldn’t resist it.

‘Borrow your ladder for a minute,’ he said, taking it from where it leaned up against the house.

‘Hoy!’ the man cried as he bore it away, but Theo had already propped it against the high wall and was up there peering over into the garden. There she was. Nothing like Julia, that was his first thought. Thinner, paler, more nose, less mouth. Fine beard and moustache though, and her jet black eyebrows were gloriously bushy. She was lying on her stomach on a blanket on the lawn, twenty feet or so away, reading a book. A white dress. Trees and bushes billowed round the edges of the lawn, and he got an impression of small children by the back of the house.

‘Marie!’ he called. She looked up and met his eyes at once, seeming unsurprised. Perhaps strange men looked over her wall every day. ‘Marie,’ he said, ‘I’m Theo.’

She stared back at him, unperturbed. More mannish than Julia.

He smiled.

‘Hoy,’ said the man, standing at the foot of the ladder.

Marie looked back to her book as if he was of no interest to her whatsoever.

‘See you tomorrow, Rapunzel,’ he said, kissing his fingers to her, and climbed down.

‘Quite finished, have you?’ said the man.

She was in the garden when he called next day. A small table and two chairs had been placed in the shade of a lime tree, and she was sitting demurely in a pale blue dress with lace at the neck and elbows. Her book lay open face-down in front of her. Her father, who was giving nothing away, introduced them formally then left them alone, but Theo knew they were being watched. Two small girls looked out of a high window in the back of the house, and he sensed other eyes.

He opened his mouth to speak but she cut him off. ‘Well,’ she said, not smiling, though her eyes seemed amused, ‘you’re the desperate suitor.’ Her voice was edged with sarcasm.

He laughed. ‘I am.’

Close to, she was impressive, eyes piercing and intelligent, lips full and soft. Her nose spread wider than her mouth, wider than its own length, so flat it seemed to be melting, sinking back into her face.

‘Let’s be frank,’ she said. ‘I never saw you in my life till your head appeared above my garden wall yesterday. You never saw me. And yet you want to marry me. This is pure business.’

‘I wouldn’t put it like that but…’

‘I would. Certainly from my point of view. Just because I’m like your first wife in one respect doesn’t mean we could make a good marriage.’

‘Of course not.’

‘And you’re old enough to be my father.’

‘Just about,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry about that. Not a thing I can do about it.’

‘What would be expected of me? You want me to sing? Suppose I can’t?’

‘You can.’

‘Where would we live?’

‘Vienna. Saint Petersburg. Anywhere we fancy. Money’s not a problem.’

‘You’re talking about a nomad’s life,’ she said matter of factly.

‘To some extent.’

‘I won’t do that forever,’ she said. ‘For a while perhaps, but not forever.’

‘Of course. Thank you for your honesty,’ he said. ‘Let me try to explain something.’

She raised one of those magnificent eyebrows and quirked one side of her mouth.

‘I have hunches,’ he said.

‘Hunches?’

It wasn’t what he’d meant to say, but on the spur of the moment he was inspired to meet honesty with honesty. She’d like that.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it was a hunch. Don’t misunderstand. I’m nothing if not rational, but experience has taught me to respect certain apparently inexplicable reactions to circumstance. I don’t believe in precognition, obviously. But the mind responds to things picked up by the senses…’

‘Yes yes,’ she said. ‘You have hunches.’

‘Only very rarely.’ He shrugged, a considered gesture intended to be endearingly awkward. ‘If they were not rare, they’d be meaningless. And as soon as I heard your name, I knew.’

‘So you want to get married on a hunch?’

‘Yes. I am convinced this is the right thing to do.’

She drew in a long breath, put her head on one side and just looked at him. When he began to speak, she put her hand up. ‘Ssh,’ she said, ‘I’m thinking.’

It was a little unnerving. She didn’t take her eyes off him and hardly blinked for several long minutes.

‘The others just wanted to show me,’ she said finally. ‘Why do you have to bring marriage into it?’

‘To protect my assets.’ Suddenly the businessman, leaning forward. Then he smiled. ‘So you don’t go running off with the first smooth-talker who offers a better deal.’

‘I could do that anyway,’ she said. ‘Marriage wouldn’t stop me.’

‘Of course.’ A half shrug, less sure of itself.

They sat in mutual contemplation after that, till the moment had grown intimately peculiar. She was nowhere near as hairy as Julia, he realised. Her throat and chest, what he could see of it, were smooth and white but the back of the hand fiddling with a strand of her hair was covered in a dark down, as was the arm revealed by the falling back of her sleeve.

‘I’ll take you,’ she said suddenly. ‘Shall I tell you why?’

So easy!

‘Oh please, do.’ It starts again. Glory be. He felt a smile wrap itself across his face.

‘Because,’ she said, ‘I would stand on my head singing nursery rhymes if it got me out of here.’

Impulsively, he reached across and took her hand. It was tiny and hairy, like Julia’s, and the feel of it gave him a jolt in the chest. ‘I’ll take you away,’ he said earnestly. ‘You’ll travel. See things.’

‘I’d have gone with the others too,’ she said. ‘You’re not the first. But I never got the chance.’

She was dying of boredom, the old man never let her out.

‘Let me make one thing clear,’ she said. ‘I’m nobody’s monkey.’

The wedding took place discreetly in the large parlour of Marie’s father’s house. Her mother, a pale scrawny woman, wept silently throughout, glancing nervously at him from time to time as if he was death himself come to bear her child away. A gaggle of children smirked and nudged each other. The priest, hearty and florid, did his best to pretend this was a wedding like any other, while her father was positively elated. After all, thought Theo, noting the gleam in the old man’s rheumy eyes, he couldn’t wait to get rid of her. When it was all over and the carriage drew up in front of the house, her little brothers and sisters — there seemed to be many — finally realising that she was going away, burst into a caterwaul of grief, gathered round her and clung to her skirts. Her mother mournfully embraced her. Marie smiled indulgently, casting a quick shrewd sideways glance at Theo, returned the embrace briskly, kissed each child in turn then turned to her father.

‘Goodbye, Papi,’ she said.

‘Liebling,’ he said, hugging her closely but briefly then kissing her on both cheeks. ‘Be happy.’

‘I will.’

She smiled as she veiled, then ran down the steps and into the carriage.

‘I don’t want her put on display like an object,’ the old man said, following Theo down the steps.

‘Of course not,’ said Theo. The old man would be mad not to realise she’d end up on a stage. Of course he knew. You don’t marry your bearded daughter to a showman and expect her to live a normal life. ‘Anyway.’ Theo turned to shake the old man’s hand before joining her in the carriage. ‘Do you really imagine anyone could make Marie do anything she didn’t want to?’

The old man smiled. And when all the waving was done and they were on their way, Marie put back her veil and laughed. ‘I’m free!’ she said. After that she was glued to the window, a smile on her face, watching the new world roll by. They’d make easy stages from Stuttgart to Munich, from there on to Lake Mondsee for a month-long honeymoon. Then Vienna. You can have dance lessons there, he said. The first night in Pforzheim, he took the best room in the hotel and ordered a lavish meal to be sent up with two bottles of champagne. She ate steadily, calmly. If she was sad about leaving her family it didn’t show.

‘Do you like the chicken?’ he asked.

‘Very nice.’ She looked up. ‘The broth’s delicious.’

‘See how good life can be, Marie,’ he said, ‘how much you’ve been missing.’

She put down her spoon. ‘Do you think I didn’t eat well at home?’

‘Not at all. I’m not just talking about the food. You’re going to see the world. Meet people. Wait until Munich, we’ll go to the theatre. You’ll love it.’ He remembered saying all these things to Julia. ‘Have you ever been to the theatre?’

She laughed without humour. ‘Me? A prisoner?’

He felt sorry for her. ‘Didn’t he let you go out at all?’

She looked away. ‘Once or twice.’

God!

‘It must have been very dull for you — locked in your high tower.’

‘Oh, believe me,’ she said, ‘it was. Thank God you came along, that’s all I can say. My prince on horseback.’ She looked at him and laughed suddenly. ‘Not that you look it.’

He felt slightly insulted. Count yourself lucky, he wanted to say.

‘Our plans then?’ she said. ‘We sail on the lake. We walk in the hills. We go to Vienna, I learn to dance. And then?’

‘We taste liberty, Marie,’ he said, judging the moment ripe for a touch of romance, ‘we become as gypsies, not a care in the world. Oh, you have no idea! The music, the crowds, the call of the new, the magic of the next bend in the road. The rain on the roof of a wagon, the neighing of horses, the—’

‘And I sing and dance?’

‘Yes. But not till you’re ready. You’ll be wonderful.’

‘You haven’t heard me sing,’ she said. ‘Listen,’ and launched into a spirited soprano ‘Wanderlied’. Her voice was ragged round the edges but easily passable.

‘Oh you’ll do fine, didn’t I know it,’ he laughed, applauding. ‘Wonderful!’

She broke off. ‘Your hunch,’ she said.

‘My hunch.’

‘Look,’ she said, ‘I want to make a lot of money. Then I’ll quit. I’m only going to do it for a few years then I’m going to settle down and have a nice comfortable life.’

‘A perfect plan,’ he replied. ‘If you want to make a lot of money, there’s something you must do.’

She raised an eyebrow.

‘The name Pastrana is known all over Europe. All over Russia. No one knows Marie Bartel.’

‘And?’

‘The name is the draw. You are Marie Pastrana, sister of the renowned Julia.’

She frowned, then laughed. ‘I don’t care,’ she said. ‘They can call me anything they like, so long as they come.’

Theo stood, fetched the second bottle of champagne, his nerves fizzing up like the bubbles as he popped the cork. Oh, this was going to be easy! It was all coming back, that feeling, possibility, excitement, the sound of the wheels of his golden coach approaching over long hard roads.

‘Not Marie, she said. ‘Something more exotic.’

‘Yes!’ He poured. Her glass overflowed, and she held it away from herself.

‘Zenora,’ she said. ‘I’ll be Zenora.’

Two weeks by the lake had a soothing effect. Marie liked to linger on their balcony, half sitting, half lying, reading a book, or leaning forward with her arms on the rail and her head on her arms, a dreamy smile on her face, watching the people walk up and down by the lakeside far below. She was so pleased to be out in the world that she could be perfectly content to stay like this for hours, and the view was beautiful. Sometimes, veiled, she walked out with him, and it was like walking with a ghost, Theo thought, this small veiled thing on his arm, just like the good old days. Once, they hired a boat and he rowed out very far from shore, and she sang, old things he didn’t know. Not bad. Not bad at all. Give her six months, she’d be ready. It would be easy to pass her off to the rubes. She was covered with hair and that was all that mattered to them. But she was nothing like Julia. She didn’t have that same great maw. In bed, she was curious and frank and unnervingly preoccupied with herself, her body more feminine than Julia’s, her face more masculine. It was better with Julia.

‘There’s something I have to tell you,’ he said one night when they had just made love. She was lounging in bed; he was up, wandering about in his dressing gown smoking a cigar and stopping every now and then to look out of the window at a far mountain against the dark sky. How to tell?

‘Then tell,’ she said.

‘You need to understand. The show we’ll put together must consist of more than your performance.’ He swung round and looked at her. She was plaiting her long, straight hair. ‘It must have a historical dimension. You are the sister of Julia Pastrana, don’t forget.’

‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said, ‘if I’m her sister, won’t it seem funny that I don’t speak Spanish?’

‘Oh, you can learn a few words. Enough. The point is the show must tell a story. They need to see her. They need to see the real Julia, her child, they need a story. They see her and wonder, then see — you, the living breathing continuation of her presence and talent…’

‘I don’t quite see…’

‘Marie, when she died…’ He stopped, and she saw that he was struggling. His manner alarmed her.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘There was a doctor,’ he said. ‘Sokolov. At the university. A scientist. I’ll give you something to read about it, you’ll see how important it was. They were working on a new method of preservation, it was very important, a huge leap forward—’

He had crossed the room and was sitting on the bed staring at her. His eyes were uncertain, slightly beseeching, but as he continued to speak they toughened and steadied. ‘I really need you to understand this, Marie. She was embalmed. And the baby. It was some — some method — something incredible, and the university was so delighted to have them. It wasn’t…’

‘They were embalmed?’ she said flatly. She’d stopped playing with her hair and the plait, slowly loosening, looked as if it was exhaling.

‘Yes.’

There was a silence.

‘What are you saying?’

‘Marie,’ he said. ‘You’re going to hear people say bad things about me. Some people. Oh you know me, you know I’m not a monster, just read these—’

He jumped up, went to the drawer where he kept his papers, his correspondence with theatre people, agents, that sort of thing, and pulled out a handful of journals and playbills. ‘Here,’ he said, thrusting them at her, ‘just read them. I’m going for a walk.’

When he got back two hours later she was up, sitting on the balcony in her gown. The papers lay scattered on the bed, the Lancet, the reviews, the advertisements. Big blue letters. The Embalmed Female Nondescript. She came in when she heard him, closing the balcony door. ‘Give me one of your cigars,’ she said. He tried to read her face. ‘Here.’ He passed her one and she looked at it, frowning. ‘Mummies,’ she said.

‘Yes.’

She met his eyes with a strong intelligent look that never wavered. ‘Did you love her?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ he said it in a suave, clipped way.

She didn’t blink for a long time and looked at him with an unreadable expression.

‘Let us talk,’ she said.

‘Let us,’ he agreed, lighting their cigars.

‘Where are they?’

‘Vienna.’

‘Ah, I see.’

‘Marie,’ he said, ‘there’s nothing distasteful about it, I promise you. The mummies are displayed in a glass case very respectably. You wouldn’t have anything to do with them, they’ll really just be a backdrop to your show. The people will come to see them, then they’ll see you and your talent, and you’ll…’

Nothing fazed her.

‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘Why are we married?’

‘I told you. So you can’t go running off with any old fly-by-night that takes your fancy. This business is full of crooks. Secondly, because your old man would never have let you go otherwise. And thirdly, why do you think?’

She stepped back and said wryly, ‘Oh, my dear, don’t tell me. You peeped over my garden wall and fell in love with me at first sight.’

I have her. Another hurdle flown over, whoosh, there it goes.

‘I understand completely,’ he said, ‘if you find this disturbing. I realise I’m at fault for not telling you straight away, but I was a coward, I didn’t want to scare you away. You’re a free woman, Marie. If you want me to take you back home, I will.’

Of course she didn’t.

‘Oh, I’m not going back there,’ she said decisively. ‘I might visit sometimes, but I’m not going to live there ever again.’

Relief flooded him. He started babbling about how wonderful she was, how mature, enlightened, understanding, but she cut him off. ‘If you stuff me,’ she said, ‘I swear to God I’ll come back and haunt you.’

When she first saw the mummies, she was just like everyone else, transfixed. Round and round them she went, round and round, saying nothing, then stood still with her attention fixed on the baby.

‘He has the sweetest little chin,’ she said.

After that she took charge of them. First thing she did was demand new boots for Julia. Those ankle boots were all wrong apparently. ‘Look at her dumpy little legs,’ she said, ‘those boots make her look like a washerwoman.’ She veiled up and insisted on him accompanying her at once to Scheers, where she picked out a pair of knee-high lace-ups that he had to admit did look much better.

Of course a woman knew more about that sort of thing. He watched, oddly moved, as Marie brushed and combed Julia’s hair, rearranged the paper flowers, the pearls, the feathers.

‘There now,’ she said, standing back and admiring her handiwork. ‘You look lovely. Sister.’

‘And how does it feel to be back in Saint Petersburg, Mr Lent?’

‘Wonderful. Julia was very fond of Saint Petersburg.’

Theo had been out drinking with a bunch of hardened old circus cronies, and the reporter was drunk too, though neither would have admitted it. They were in a corner of the vast parlour of the hotel, beneath a pompous portrait of some bewigged nobleman, and the sound of revelry drifted in from the lobby whenever someone opened the door.

‘Twenty-one years,’ Theo said, ‘maybe a little more, since she last performed in this city. Hard to believe.’ To be honest, he was losing track. Years, years, many many many.

‘And yet the memory of those spectacular shows remains strong.’ The reporter squiggled in his book. He was a big bull of a man who looked as if he should be digging a road.

‘Of course,’ said Theo. ‘Who could ever forget Julia? Many of those coming through the doors now weren’t even born when we last played Saint Petersburg, but they grew up hearing stories from their parents about the time the most remarkable woman in the world sang and danced for them. She has become a legend.’

‘And your wife, Mr Lent?’ The reporter looked up, ‘The equally remarkable Zenora. One can’t help but wonder how she feels performing nightly alongside her predecessor. Particularly as that predecessor is her own sister.’

‘My wife and I are of one mind,’ Theo replied smoothly. ‘Five years we’ve been together as a family — the four of us — my wife and I, Julia and, of course, her son. And a very happy family at that. In a sense Julia is still with us. We feel that our show is a tribute to a wonderful woman.’

The reporter smiled. Sceptically, Theo thought. ‘I’m sure you realise — many women who marry a widower shy away from any mention of their husband’s previous spouse.’

‘That’s true.’ Theo nodded. ‘But my wife is a woman of sound good sense. Perhaps the fact that she is Julia’s sister makes a difference. They were very close.’

‘I’ve heard,’ said the reporter, ‘that some people think Zenora is Julia.’

Theo smiled. Let them think it. Never hurts to keep the rubes guessing.

‘It’s unusual,’ the reporter said, ‘for a man to marry his deceased wife’s sister.’

‘It is.’ Out with the spiel. ‘But as soon as she arrived in Europe to attend the commemoration service, I think we both realised it had to be. Our grief united us, and in time that feeling changed to something more profound. We feel that our arrangement, unusual as it may seem to other people, is a source of constant joy.’

The reporter didn’t look convinced. ‘It would be wonderful,’ he said, without hope, ‘if we could speak with your wife, Mr Lent.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Apologetic smile. ‘She never gives interviews.’

‘That’s a pity.’

‘Yes it is, but I’m afraid she’s adamant on that point.’ He stood up, brushed down his knees.

‘Thank you for your time, Mr Lent.’

‘It’s been a pleasure.’

Theo shook hands with the man, checked the front desk for messages and walked heavily back upstairs to their suite. He’d always been a thin man, a slight man, the years had never put any weight on him. There was no need to feel so heavy, yet he did.

Marie was sitting at the writing desk with a pile of playbills in front of her and a large sheet of paper on which she was scribbling rapidly.

‘No — no — no,’ she said as he came in, ‘this has all got to go. We really have got to update these, Theo, they’re terrible.’

She was always doing this. He was tired. ‘What’s the matter with them now?’

‘You know exactly what’s the matter with them. They’re old-fashioned.’ She was thirty years younger than him and was always telling him he had no idea what people wanted these days. Got to move with the times.

‘The way you write!’ she said. ‘It’s appalling. Listen to this — this uniquely singular wonder of the natural world — uniquely singular! Uniquely singular! That’s terrible.’

‘So change it.’

‘That’s what I’m doing.’

One side of his head felt funny. Another migraine.

‘I’m going for a lie-down,’ he said, stumbling slightly against the glass cabinet wedged in between the bedroom door and the writing desk. ‘Theo!’ said Marie. ‘Careful!’

‘Stupid place to put them,’ he mumbled.

Julia and Theo Junior had just got back from another stint in Vienna. Good. It was always nice when they came home. He went into the bedroom and got under the purple silk coverlet with all his clothes on, closed his eyes and tried to shut down his brain, but it wouldn’t stop. The door was slightly ajar, and he could hear Marie in the other room talking to herself in a semi-whisper as she crossed things out and jotted down phrases.

Deep down in his bones was an ache. Marie came bustling into the room. ‘I’ve got it all worked out,’ she said, ignoring the fact that he was trying to sleep.

He pretended he’d already nodded off.

‘Doesn’t do you any good lying about in bed all day,’ she said. ‘Best to get up. You’d feel better.’

He opened his eyes. ‘Marie. I’m getting a migraine.’ He closed them again. ‘I’m just going to lie here for a while.’

‘Suit yourself,’ she said, but carried on irritatingly doing things in the room, opening drawers and re-arranging things, messing about with her hair.

‘Marie!’ he said. ‘I’m trying to sleep.’

‘Won’t be a moment.’

He flounced over petulantly in the bed and pounded the pillow.

‘Misery guts,’ she said without malice, walking out of the room and closing the door behind her. Pain stabbed him in one eye. He could still hear her, singing to herself as she pottered about next door.

When he eventually emerged from the bedroom later that day in search of tea, the migraine having settled slightly, Marie had the cabinet open and was hauling out Theo Junior on his pole. ‘Look at the state of him,’ she said, ‘they’ve let moths get in. We’re not leaving them there again.’

‘Really? Moths?’

‘Look.’

‘They do pay well,’ Theo said, ‘Is there any tea?’

‘There’s a pot of coffee. There.’

Theo shambled over and started pouring. He’d got into his slippers and dressing-gown.

‘Good job we didn’t leave them there,’ Marie said. ‘Wish we could leave them there. You know the market’s slipping, don’t you?’

Here we go again.

‘Of course it isn’t.’

‘Of course it is.’

‘You’re always crying doom,’ he said.

‘I’m just realistic.’ She sat down, picking at the side of the small mummy with her dainty, long-nailed hands. He saw that the table was littered with pieces of old playbills and there were more in the bin. ‘Why are you tearing these up?’ he asked.

‘I’m throwing them away. I can’t stand them any longer.’

He put the fingers of one hand through the front of his hair and pushed it back, and was again surprised at how far it had receded. ‘They’re all right for now,’ he grumbled, ‘We don’t want to run out before the end of the season.’

‘Don’t worry,’ she said cheerfully, ‘it’s all under control. I’ve already sent a boy to the printer’s.’

‘Without showing me first?’

‘Oh for goodness sake, Theo, you know I’m better at this sort of thing than you.’

‘Marie,’ he said, ‘how do you think I managed all these years without you? I did all the playbills myself.’

‘Yes, and they were terrible. Mine are better.’

He stood drinking his coffee and sifting through the fragments on the table. He caught words and phrases, some of it in blue curly writing, some plain. Wonder of. Root-Digger. Culiacán where. Broadway and. Many an eminent.

‘We need to talk,’ she said.

‘Do we indeed?’ He flopped into a chair. ‘I’m rather tired, Marie.’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but you always are, so we might as well talk now. Give me those scraps.’ She held out her hand without looking up from her minute examination of the baby’s hide. Theo gathered up a few bits of paper and handed them to her. ‘There’s an actual hole here,’ she said.

He yawned, put down his coffee and searched about for his cigars.

‘You left them on the dressing table,’ she said.

When he returned from the bedroom with a lit cigar in his mouth she was stuffing the bits of torn up playbill into a hole in Theo Junior’s side. ‘So much for the wonderful new method of embalming,’ she said, ‘it’s just sawdust in there.’

‘Is it?’ He leaned over, squinting down at her repair.

‘Look.’ She sounded indignant.

‘That’s probably just the top layer,’ he said. ‘What’s underneath is the real stuff. Obviously it’s a complicated process.’

He watched her tamp the paper inside with the tip of her little finger. ‘Now you know what we have to talk about, don’t you?’

‘I suppose so.’ He flopped down again.

‘Look at you,’ she said. ‘You’re not a well man. You’ve been on the road for forty years; it takes its toll. Go and see that doctor again.’ Briskly, she set about closing the hole in Theo Junior’s side with rapid, tiny stitches that she drew ever more tightly together. ‘You’re pushing sixty, face reality. You’ve earned your retirement.’

‘Retirement!’ he said, as if it was a curse.

‘You know what I said, right back at the beginning.’ She sewed diligently, ‘I said I’d do it for a few years and then settle somewhere nice.’

‘I know. That was always the plan.’

‘You know,’ she said, ‘we could afford somewhere really nice.’

‘Well, yes, that’s always been our plan,’ he repeated, ‘but it’s a matter of timing. The time has to be right.’

‘It’s never right with you,’ she said. She got up and fetched a saucer, took it to the fireplace and scraped a little soot into it.

‘What are you doing?’ he said.

‘Aha!’ She poured a drop of water from the jug onto the soot and started mixing it with her finger.

‘To be truthful,’ Marie said, ‘the thought of living with these two for the rest of my life is weighing me down. I never thought it would be years like this, you know I didn’t. Theo, you can’t say I haven’t been patient living with them all these years. How many women do you think would do that? Waking up and seeing her standing there. I’ve grown used to them but…’ She started rubbing soot and water over the bundle of stitches with her finger, shading it all in carefully. He stopped listening.

‘And it’s not been easy,’ she was saying when her voice filtered back in again.

‘You want to get rid of them,’ he said.

‘Not completely.’ She propped the baby against the side of the cabinet. ‘But maybe a long-term hire. Nice returns. Not Vienna obviously, maybe Munich. They’d still be ours, of course, but we wouldn’t have to keep lugging them round with us. Think of how much lighter we could travel.’

‘Why do we need to travel lighter?’

‘Oh Theo, I wish you’d open your eyes. They’re not coming to see her any more. We’ve been all over the place and everybody’s seen her already. You can’t keep it going.’

‘I think you’re being terribly pessimistic,’ he said, sounding hurt.

‘It’s me they come for now,’ she said, ‘Zenora Pastrana, You know, the one that actually does all the hard work after all, all the singing and the dancing, all that silly stuff, you know. All she does, when all’s said and done, is stand there.’

‘If everyone here’s seen her,’ Theo said, ‘there are other places. We’ll take her to Scandinavia. We’ll go and see the Northern Lights.’

‘But Theo,’ she said, ‘what if I don’t want to go? It’s not fair. This is now. That was then.’ She pulled up Theo Junior’s white drawers. ‘There, that covers it pretty well,’ she said, and started putting him back in his place. ‘I know it’s hard to let them go,’ she said, ‘but I honestly don’t see myself staying on the road very much longer.’

‘You really do want to get rid of them, don’t you?’ he said listlessly.

‘His arm should keep it covered,’ she said, brushing Theo Junior down with her hands. ‘There you are, Baby, good as new. I don’t think anyone will notice. Theo, you check Julia.’

He went and sat in the cane chair in front of the open case, leaned back and crossed his legs, smoking his cigar. ‘Hello Julia,’ he said. Three or four times they’d hired out the mummies, once for a whole two months. Occasionally he thought about them, rattling on trains between cities. Whenever the mummies came home he’d get a certain feeling, as if an old friend had returned. Not that he’d ever really had an old friend to feel that way about. She’s been gone… she’s back. Things are in place. About the baby he didn’t think so much. Most of the time it was just a prop. He’d never got as far as thinking what his son might have been. But once, putting the mummies away late one night, he’d touched the boy’s cold hand, and a shaft of excruciating sadness had pierced him. It was nothing like the warm baby fist he remembered.

Funny. After all this time he could still get lost in looking, just looking at her. Marie didn’t have that. Her face, though hairy enough, was completely human. With Julia, you did wonder. Sometimes still, he wondered. But he didn’t care. These days he was sentimental in his mind, though not to outward appearance. After a few drinks, reminiscing, he allowed it, sinking into a reverie of the glory days when theatre fronts heaved with masses desperate for a glimpse, and she’d tiptoe into the spotlight and strike them dumb.

‘She looks all right to me,’ he said.

‘You don’t know,’ she said, ‘she could be all fleas under that dress.’

‘We’d know if she had fleas.’

He went to bed. Later she came in. ‘I know you think you can’t live in one place, Theo,’ she said, ‘but how about this?’

‘What?’ he said unenthusiastically.

‘What about a little fixed concern? Something in the business, then you wouldn’t be bored. What about something like a wax museum? Wax museums are very popular. And we could use Julia and Baby. That’s something no one else would have. We’d be unique.’

‘It’s an idea,’ he said with no interest whatsoever.

*

No fool, Marie.

Gets what she wants, he reflected, thinking back. First it’s oh yes, we’ll get a wax museum then we can keep the mummies at home and we’ll all be happy. Chip chip chip, every day, like a patient woodcarver. Then she’s pregnant. Oh well that’s it, I’m not performing when the baby’s born. Then it’s oh well I’m not taking any chances, look at poor Julia, working up to the last minute and look what happened to her. Face it, Theo. Be sensible. We need to look around. Then — what about this, Theo, a wax museum. Perfect! Prime location. We both like Petersburg. Poor old Theo, you deserve a rest. A lovely apartment upstairs. Plenty of room. A nursery. And all the exhibits included, to which we add — tada! — our Julia, our Baby. A home for them, downstairs with the waxworks, pride of place.

Oh, if it’s what you want.

He was ill. Sick stomachs, sore throats, splitting headaches, one thing after another. His sleeping had gone all to hell. Hip baths and purges didn’t help. He wondered if it was the pox. He still visited those girls in their rooms, more so since the pregnancy, she wasn’t interested any more. Could be, he thought distantly, could be. Then suddenly they were living above the museum and Oscar was all over the place, as fair and normal as a little Apollo, a squalling being that punched red fists in the air and tried out faces. Theo kept looking at Marie nursing the baby and wondering if she’d got the pox too. Probably not. Pox wouldn’t stand a chance with her. She’d just clap her hands and send it on its way. She was right, of course, she was always right. The museum was doing well. It was just off the Nevsky Prospect and pulled in a good mixed crowd. She loved it. Humming and smiling about the place while he wandered like a ghost from room to room feeling unreal, wandered like a visitor among his own exhibits, stopping every time in front of Julia’s cabinet. Till one day she said, ‘We’ve had an offer.’

Munich. Long-term.

‘Get her back any time you want,’ she said. ‘No trouble at all. Just think. Know what they’re paying? And we can get more if we push.’

‘Did you open my letter?’ he asked.

‘It was addressed to both of us.’

‘We need her here,’ he said. ‘She’s our pièce de résistance.’

‘No, she isn’t. Peter the First is.’

‘Peter the First!’ he said disgustedly. ‘He can’t hold a candle to her.’

‘Look Theo,’ she said, pushing him gently down into a chair, ‘I’m going to make you a nice hot tonic, and you’re going to drink it all down and then you’ll feel better. I wouldn’t send her anywhere else but they always look after her well in Munich.’

‘I still don’t see,’ he said grumpily. ‘It’s not as if we’re desperate for the money.’

‘Theo,’ she said, ‘you’ve got to let the past go. It’s not good for you.’

‘Well Marie,’ he said with a losing sense, ‘if we send them to Munich, I think you’ll notice a sudden decline in trade.’

‘Want a bet?’ She bustled about him, making him comfortable. ‘I don’t know when you’ll start to listen to me. Times have changed. People just aren’t as interested in that sort of thing any more. They find it distasteful. I don’t like people standing there in our museum whispering nasty things behind their hands about you.’

‘Oh, people are stupid,’ he said. ‘I don’t care what people say.’

‘Well, I do, Theo. We’ve got Oscar now.’

‘What’s that got to do with it?’

Oh, she’s right, she’s right, he thought now, loitering in the lobby of his wax museum, too tired to be bitter, too unsettled to be at ease. Trade was still brisk six months after the mummies left for Munich. Peter the First was the pièce de résistance. There he stood, dominating the foyer in all his glory. Retire! thought Theo. I’ll bring her back. Who’s going to stop me? If I could get my health back, know what I’d do? I’d be back on that road. It’s the only life. I’m not old, look at Otto, look at Van Hare, look at Barnum. Just get my health back.

Two women came up to him. ‘Are you the proprietor?’

‘I am.’ He bowed graciously.

‘Have you got Cleopatra?’

‘Room number three, ladies,’ he said, twinkling at them but turning it off as soon as they’d gone. He walked to the door and stood blinking out at the cold bright Saint Petersburg sunshine. The girl in the ticket booth was worrying her nails.

‘I wish you wouldn’t do that,’ he said tetchily.

‘Oh. Sorry, Sir,’ she said, turning bright red and looking as if she was going to cry.

‘It’s all right,’ he snapped. ‘Just don’t do it, that’s all. Puts people off. Don’t forget you’re in the public eye.’

‘Yes,’ she whispered, dropping her eyes.

He stepped out and strolled down Nevsky Prospect. She’s still mine, he thought, I can bring her back whenever I like. On the corner of Nevsky Prospect and Sadovaya Street he saw Liliya Grigorievka Levkova hurrying along on the other side of the street with her hands in a muff and her head down. Surely not. Can’t be her, she’d be — what? — surely getting on for fifty now. Is it her? What’s she doing in Petersburg? God, my eyes. Hardly looks a day older. Before he’d had a chance to think, he found himself attempting to jog in a sprightly manner across the road and intercept her. It made his legs ache. ‘Liliya Grigorievka,’ he said brightly, ‘what a surprise!’ She glanced up once, startled, saw him, appeared about to speak but immediately blanked her eyes and hurried past, drawing herself imperceptibly away from him as she did so as if he was something slimy. And then he wasn’t even sure that it was her. He went down to the river and walked along as far as Tuchkov Bridge. It was her. Danced with her once. Oh, Mr Lent. Wrinkling her nose. Well, that was nice, wasn’t it? Running away like that. Snob. Who does she think she is? Full of snobs this country. He stood shivering, looking down into the Neva’s melting ice. The river was choppy, a sharp breeze gusting from the Gulf of Finland. What was wrong with her? Listening to the things people said, that’s what. Monster. Vile. Easy to talk. He felt a quivering, a funny feeling in the nerve ends.

Sometimes, in the middle of an ordinary day, a dark flame of terror licked round his gut. The water was black but full of light. The sky was dirty. His head was about to burst.

He turned and walked back, needing a drink. The sounds in his head, the eternal inner babble swishing around like the flux of waves, mingled with the sounds in the street. He kept an eye out for Liliya Grigorievka Levkova but she was nowhere to be seen. If he saw her, he’d go up to her and say — he didn’t know what. It didn’t matter as long as it was honest. That was the trouble, no one was honest. From now on, he thought, what if I never said another word that was not the honest truth? They’d think he was mad, but he’d be sane for the first time. He smiled as he walked. When he reached the museum, he passed the same two women coming out.

‘I saw a much better Cleopatra than that,’ one of them said. ‘It moved. You saw the snake bite her.’

‘Yes, Madame,’ he said, ‘some displays are more vulgar than this one.’

He went upstairs and started getting undressed, caught sight of himself in the mirror: a small insignificant man with a double chin. He’d always been pleased with his looks, but not any more. He got into bed. Marie was out with the boy somewhere. She had friends he didn’t even know. He didn’t sleep but closed his eyes and pretended. After about half an hour, he realised he had no idea what time of the day it was. It could have been the middle of the afternoon, the dead of night or a fine spring morning. At that moment Marie came swanning into the room with Oscar in her arms. ‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘you’re not ill again, are you?’

Theo bolted upright and screamed, ‘Get out!’

She flinched. The baby started crying.

‘Don’t you dare speak to me like that!’ she said, shushing the baby.

‘Don’t you dare speak to me like that.’ He threw his head back down on the pillow so hard it bounced.

She’d had her hair done. All frizzed out. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ she said, jogging the child up and down. ‘Aren’t you well?’

‘I’m just very, very tired.’

‘Go back to that doctor,’ she said and walked out.

The doctor couldn’t be sure but gave him mercury and potassium iodide to be on the safe side. He got a twitch in his left eye, which started driving him mad. Oscar started imitating it. By the time he was eighteen months old, the child showed signs of being a brilliant mimic. He was a sturdy, smiley boy, not given to tantrums. Most of the time he ran about the place chuckling and chatting amiably to himself, and Theo, often in his chair by the fire, vaguely unwell, sulking but not sure why, felt a kinship with him he’d never known with Theo Junior on his perch. The way Marie bossed them about as if they were equal in status forged a bond between them, and sometimes when she walked out of the room they would smile conspiratorially at one another. Sometimes the boy would sit on the floor by his chair and lean against his legs. Once, he fell asleep there. Theo wondered why the feel of the boy against his legs caused a feeling of sadness to rise up inside him. Something to do with the picture that kept coming into his mind, Theo Junior’s stiff unnatural stance on his pole, a stance impossible for any real baby.

‘I’m bringing them back,’ he said, unsure whether Marie was in the room with him or not.

‘Yes,’ she said, proving her existence, ‘soon.’

Soon.

A rash came and went on Theo’s back and sides. For six months it raged and itched, and Oscar mimicked his scratching.

‘Stop it, you two,’ Marie would say. ‘You’re driving me mad.’

Sometimes he stayed in bed or mooched about at home in a foul mood for days on end, unable to see the point in doing anything else. Marie told him to make an effort. ‘Look at you,’ she said, ‘in your dressing gown. Do you know what time it is?’

‘No.’

‘Do you want some soup?’

‘I don’t know. Yes.’

She pulled a small table up to his knee, set down a bowl of soup and a spoon. ‘Do you good,’ she said. ‘Eat it.’

‘Any bread?’

‘Here, Precious One.’ Marie ripped off a hunk from the loaf and gave it to Oscar. ‘Give Daddy this bread.’

Oscar trotted over and solemnly handed it over. Theo took it listlessly and dipped it in his soup.

‘Say thank you!’ she ordered.

‘Thank you,’ Theo said.

‘Silly Daddy forgot to say thank you!’

‘For God’s sake,’ she said a little later, ‘at least go out for a walk or something. Clear your head.’

‘Can’t,’ he said, ‘my legs hurt.’

‘That’s because you don’t use them enough.’

‘Can’t.’

And this went on like fog, till one day he awoke at noon and felt different.

The sun slanted in across the rug. Pigeons purred on the windowsill. It was high summer. He lay for a while trying to place the feeling then realised it was vigour and excitement, a peculiar elation that felt like childhood, though it was no childhood he could ever remember having. He sat up. His head was clear. He knew from the quietness that the flat was empty. He couldn’t remember when he’d gone to sleep but he was wearing all his clothes, so he got up and walked straight out and down to the street. He put his hand in his pocket and found notes and coins. Plenty. He couldn’t remember putting it there. A drink, he thought, heading for the river.

The sunlight on the water hurt his eyes. It was incredibly beautiful, a million small ice-white fishes winking frantically in and out of existence. He tried fixing his eyes on one spot without blinking, but it was no use. Everything moved.

He crossed a couple of canals, rambled this way and that, slid into a tavern, ordered a beer and closed his eyes. His heart was beating hard and fast as if he’d just done something very brave and dangerous. The room was full of babble and laughter, and he began to feel afraid because his mind was full to bursting, not with thoughts or ideas so much as impressions and currents of sound. One hand was in his pocket, in amongst the notes and coins.

Someone jogged his elbow. A long-haired whiskery vagabond of a character, someone he’d drunk with. ‘You know what you look like, old man,’ this fellow said, ‘like you’ve reached that seen-better-days point in life. I know it well.’

‘There are no better days,’ Theo said, ‘they’re all one.’

‘All one, are they?’

‘And all mine.’

‘All yours?’

‘Mine.’

He downed his beer and ordered another.

‘All one and all mine.’

‘But look,’ said the man, ‘What about me? I have my moments too.’

‘The same. All the same.’

‘Ah well,’ the man said, ‘if you say so.’

‘I do.’

He wasn’t sure. This was curiously dream-like. The tavern glowed. The people, the eternal frightened kindergarten of mankind, trembled outside in the dark. His mind was quick and fluid.

‘I am an articulate man,’ he said.

‘What?’

He laughed.

‘You are what?’

Theo went on laughing.

‘If I were an articulated man,’ he said.

‘A what?’

‘Artic-articulate man.’

‘Oh.’

‘An articulated man!’ he shouted, clapping his hands loudly and suddenly bellowing with laughter. As one, the people on the other side of the room stopped what they were doing and looked at him. What’s the matter with them all? What are they looking at? ‘If I were an articulated man,’ he said, still laughing, ‘I would tell you what my bones know.’

He stood up, and felt as if he was on a stage. He was young again, the old Theo, with the charm and the quickness. Then he realised tears were dripping from the end of his chin and his nose was beginning to run. ‘Only what’s known in the bones is true,’ he almost shouted at the room in general.

‘Sit down, old man,’ said his vagabond friend. ‘No need to get so upset. It’s only life.’

Theo sat down, wiping his nose on his sleeve. The tears confused him. He had no idea where they’d come from, he wasn’t even feeling upset.

‘Give us a song,’ someone said.

‘I will,’ said Theo.

‘Go on then,’ his friend said.

He tried to sing ‘Lorena’, but it came out wrong.

‘What a miserable dirge,’ some old woman said. There was a piano over by the door, and she waddled over to it and sat down and started playing some jolly bawdy old rubbish that everyone joined in with. The tavern-keeper, expressionless, wiped a glass behind the bar. Theo felt like dancing, so he got up and set about the fandango, the one Julia used to do. There was a cheer and someone shouted, ‘Bravo!’ Then he went to the piano and sat next to the old woman and started hammering away alongside her, drowning her out and making a horrible racket.

They began to boo and he turned, laughing. The old lady gave him a push.

‘To hell with you all,’ he said.

Out in the bright sunshine, he forgot where he was. There was money in his pockets, he was drunk, his energy had returned and it was good to be alive.

Slowly, he meandered home, breaking into snatches of song every now and then, stopping here and there to buy things, sweets and pies, whatever he saw, for himself, Marie, Oscar. Some stupid friend of Marie’s was there when he got home, an awful woman called Marfa Nicolevnya who looked like an old witch and never stopped moaning, yak yak yak all the time. Marie gave him a strange look. This awful Marfa Nicolevnya didn’t even pause to say hello when he came in, not that he wanted to say hello to her, stupid woman, stupid stupid woman. She just raised her eyebrows as if he was a fly buzzing into the room, then on and on about nothing, while Marie walked about straightening things in the room, nodding patiently, saying yes yes I see, and oh really and oh dear, a charade of patience and sympathy he knew she didn’t really feel. Stupid woman kept saying she was going. ‘Ooh, I must be on my way in a minute,’ she says, then fills up her coffee cup and yak yak yak, on she goes. Theo wanted to kill her. Scream. Leap from his chair and hurl her out of the window or down the stairs.

He stood up. ‘Go away,’ he said.

Marfa Nicolevnya looked at him as if he was mad.

‘Stupid droning woman,’ he said. ‘Go. Just go.’

‘Theo!’

Marie stood holding the poker, about to prod the fire, a look of mortal embarrassment on her face.

‘Stupid woman,’ he said, hovering in a vaguely threatening way towards Marfa Nicolevnya. ‘Why aren’t you going away?’

‘Theo! Stop it!’ Marie advanced on him, still holding the poker as if she was about to bash his brains out with it.

‘I’m sorry, Marie,’ he said, ‘I just can’t stand to listen to that voice or look at her hideous face a second longer.’

Marfa Nicolevnya was gathering up her things, a look of stunned misery on her already miserable face. Marie threw the poker into the hearth and ran over to her. ‘Oh I’m so sorry, Marfa Nicolevnya, I’m so sorry, please don’t feel you have to go, he’s been drinking.’

‘Oh good good good,’ Theo said, rubbing his hands together. ‘She’s leaving, the old witch is leaving.’

Marie turned on him. ‘Are you mad?’ she yelled. ‘How dare you!’

‘I dare!’ He laughed.

‘No no, it’s not you, Marie,’ said the wronged woman quietly, at the door. ‘I don’t blame you.’ She stared at him mournfully, and he grinned back at her.

‘I told you the truth,’ he said, savouring the moment. It was full of gall, grim delight and bitter shame at the sight of the stupid woman’s pale, desolate face.

As her footsteps died away down the stairs, Marie advanced upon him. ‘How dare you!’ She was trembling with rage. ‘How dare you speak to my friend like that!’

‘She’s an idiot,’ he said. ‘And you’re an idiot for having her as a friend.’

His head was hurting. He tried to hug her.

‘Get off me!’ She pushed him away. ‘What’s got into you? If you wake Oscar, I’ll kill you. You can’t speak to people like that! Poor woman, nobody likes her. And you say a thing like that! You’ve got cruelty in you. Cruelty.’

He swaggered. ‘How can the truth be cruel?’

‘Don’t be stupid! The truth is cruel. Any fool knows that.’

‘I’ll show you truth,’ he said,’ and began hauling all the things he’d bought that afternoon out of the sack and spreading them about the room, a fancy parasol, spoons, a Mongolian cushion and a wooden Noah’s Ark with half the animals missing.

‘What’s all this?’ she said.

‘The stuff of life.’ He laughed, covering the table and the bureau with more and more things they didn’t need, china ornaments broken from their journey, cakes crumbling in his hands, drawing trails of fluff with them as he dragged them from his pockets.

Her face grew sharp. ‘How much have you spent?’

‘Oh, I don’t know.’

‘For God’s sake, Theo!’

‘Look,’ he said, swinging his arms, ‘I got you all this.’

‘I don’t want it.’

‘You have no gratitude,’ he said. ‘Whatever I do, it’s never right for you, is it?’

‘Calm down, Theo. Stop it.’

‘You don’t care. You don’t care. She cared about me. She loved me, she did. You don’t.’

‘Shut up, Theo. You’re making yourself ridiculous.’

She never thought I was ridiculous.’

‘Are you sure?’ she said, and walked away into the other room where the boy was sleeping. She closed the door.

He walked into the bedroom, got into bed and closed the curtains. His bones ached. He began to grin, then laugh into the pillow.

For the next three months, he drank in the taverns around the old Hay Market. He told people he owned the biggest circus in New York City and owned a troupe of pure-bred white Arabian horses. He described the red plush, the chandeliers, the gilt boxes, the bobbing plumes on the horses. Every time he lay down to sleep, the circus he owned played in front of his eyes in the dark. Other days he woke up feeling obscurely oppressed and walked about all day in a state of mortal fear. Marie made him sleep on the sofa because he muttered in his sleep. He let his beard grow. He stopped washing and started to smell. She nagged him to go to the doctor, shouted at him, jollied him along, pleaded with him to pull himself together. ‘You’re scaring me,’ she said.

Oscar still leaned against him and it still made him sad. Sometimes every little thing touched a nerve and he wanted to cry. Sometimes he wanted to kick things. Then a mood of defiant joy would burst up from somewhere, and he’d spend all his money and go down Nevsky Prospect singing out loud, a hundred months have passed, Lorena, not caring a monkey’s toss what anybody thought of him. At last he let her drag him to the doctor, and the doctor gave him morphine for the pains in his bones, along with some kind of pills he kept forgetting to take. He couldn’t follow a thought along its track for more than a few seconds without losing it. The lost thoughts writhed around each other like a mass of bisected worms looking for their other halves. And when that happened he was nothing, only the irrational beat of each moment passing.

Knowledge, he explained to his vagabond-faced friend in the tavern, resides with pain in the bones. Jesus knew that. Bones. Flesh. Pain. Beauty. Truth. Words in the head.

Just words in the head.

Then one night he came home in the early white night of a Petersburg summer, and Julia was waiting for him in the foyer of his wax museum. She was sitting on the bench in front of the magnificent figure of Peter the First, resplendent in his furs and finery. Her eyes gleamed at him. Theo Junior was asleep on her knee with his thumb in his mouth and his hand cupped over his nose. She was real. Both of them were real. His heart melted and he ran to her, but she vanished; there one minute, gone the next, she and her baby.

Marie came down in her nightgown to see what all the noise was about and found him dressed up in Peter the First’s clothes, carrying the naked emperor out into the street where snow was beginning to settle.

‘What the hell are you doing!’ she cried.

‘Taking him to the river to see if he can swim.’

‘Get back in here!’

Half out of the door, Theo looked over his shoulder at her with a grin.

‘You’ve got that twitch again,’ she said. ‘You’re not well. I’m calling the doctor first thing, you come in now and go to bed.’

‘I’m bringing them back,’ he said.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I need his space. I’m bringing Julia and the boy back, and I need that space.’

‘That’s the best spot in the whole place, Theo,’ she said. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘I can do what I like,’ he said, hoisting the emperor higher. ‘It’s my museum. I can throw them all out if I want to.’

‘Oh please, Theo, stop all this. You’re driving me mad.’

‘Am I? Am I really, Marie? Driving you mad, am I? Try this!’ He shrieked, a short ear-splitting yowl like a cat’s. It scared her, so she slapped his face.

‘Shut up!’ she hissed, grabbing his arm and dragging him back across the threshold with the dummy. When she turned from locking the door, he’d thrown the dummy aside and was crouching at the foot of the stairs with his arms over his head, weeping harshly.

‘What did you do that for?’ she said sternly. ‘Why did you scream like that? Horrible sound!’

‘Why not scream?’ He looked up, his face contorted.

She walked towards him. ‘Stop it! Stop it, Theo. Stop this right now. I can’t stand it.’

‘Scream then,’ he said and jumped up, grabbing her by the shoulders and staring intently into her eyes. ‘We should all scream.’ He looked terrible, ridiculous in Peter the Great’s clothes, wasted and wet-eyed, and the look of trouble in his eyes was painful.

Marie put her hands up and wiped his eyes. ‘Come on now,’ she said, ‘you come on upstairs and I’ll make you some tea. You need to lie down.’

He pulled away, rubbed his face and ran upstairs with his patchy ermine flowing behind him. Marie swore, gathering up the clothes he’d discarded for the emperor’s. As for the emperor, she got him to his feet and leaned him naked against the wall. He’d have to wait for tomorrow for his clothes.

When she went upstairs, he’d gone to bed on the sofa and lay with his back to her.

‘That’s not the way, Theo,’ she said quietly to his back. ‘Giving in to these mad kind of feelings. Resist them. Just stop. You don’t have to go mad.’

He said nothing.

‘I’m warning you, Theo. You’re getting too much for me to handle. If it carries on, I don’t think I can live with it.’

She returned to her own bed in the next room,

Next day the doctor gave him a powder, and left some more for him to take. He drooped nervily about the flat for a few days, till one night the sound of the people in one of the houses in the street tipped him over the edge. Snow fell lazily past the window. Marie was giving Oscar his supper, and there was peace in the air till those idiots started. It sounded to him as if a regiment of soldiers were getting very drunk.

‘What in God’s name are they doing in there?’ He started up and went to the window.

‘What?’ Marie asked, wiping off the spoon on the edge of Oscar’s dish.

‘That Godawful racket!’

She listened, poised. ‘What?’ she said again.

‘Are you deaf?’

‘I can’t hear anything.’

‘You can’t hear that?’ He threw open the window and stuck his head out. He could hear them, a couple of houses down, continual bursts of brash, deafening laughter.

‘Don’t shout,’ she said.

‘Me? What about them?’

She put down the spoon, went over and stood beside him. ‘What is it?’ she asked patiently.

‘Listen!’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it’s only those people with the dog. They’ve got some friends in.’

‘But that’s ridiculous! They can have their friends in but why should the whole street have to put up with them?’

‘It’s not that loud.’ She took him by the arm and closed the window firmly. ‘See. If we close the window you can’t hear it.’

‘Completely inconsiderate!’

He wouldn’t sit down. Backwards and forwards he went with a murderous look, to the window, in and out of the bedroom. He kicked the fender.

‘Now,’ said Marie to Oscar, whose full attention was on his pacing father, ‘just finish this last little bit and we’ll have a story.’

Theo cursed like a man being dragged to the gallows.

‘Theo!’

‘If you can’t hear that, you’re mad,’ he said.

‘Ssh! Voice down!’

‘Me? Voice down? Me?’ He laughed horribly, and she thought he might be about to burst into tears. ‘Why don’t you go and tell them! Voice down!’

‘Calm down, Theo, please.’

Another burst of laughter broke over his head, stupid, mocking and viciously indifferent. He screamed harshly, covering his ears and slamming his eyes closed.

‘Theo! Please!’

He wanted to storm over there and beat them all to death. He roared. Oscar laughed.

‘It’s not even that bad,’ she said, ‘I can just about hear it if I stand really still and…’

‘Are you deaf?’

‘No, Theo,’ she said, raising her eyes to heaven, ‘I am not deaf.’

He put his head down and ran towards the wall as if he was going to butt it, but stopped short and swept all the things off the writing table instead. Then he swung around and dashed the samovar across the floor. Oscar started to cry. Marie swept him up in her arms.

‘Get out!’ she shouted. ‘Get out if you can’t behave like a respectable person.’

He ran out, down through the museum and into the street. He started shouting up at the house next door but one, cursing and screaming and damning them all to death, then ran away.

‘Oh my God,’ Marie whispered, and went to call on a neighbour to watch the child.

The police were called because there was a madman on Tuchkov Bridge, pulling money out of his pockets, tearing it up into little pieces and throwing it into the black water of the Little Neva. After that, out came handfuls of copper. That went over too. Then he took off his clothes down to his socks and drawers and tossed each item separately out into the void, cheering and laughing as each one landed on the water and was carried away. A large crowd had gathered at the entrance to the bridge. Two policemen approached. ‘Enough now, old man,’ one of them said.

‘Shut your trap,’ said Theo.

He ran from them, and a chase began. He laughed and leapt in the air, shrieking his cat yowl, raving. ‘Hypocrites,’ he roared, as the first policeman gripped his arm. ‘I’m a bad man.’ They pulled him through the crowd. The cold was getting to him now. ‘You make such a fuss about all this,’ he said through chattering teeth, ‘but what about you? You wouldn’t want her, would you?’ He was slurring his words as if drunk, but curiously, for once, he wasn’t. ‘Marry her, would you? Give her proper love like a man should? No you wouldn’t, so you shut your trap.’

The crowd doubled and a carriage appeared on the far side of the bridge. Three men emerged from it.

‘Off to the mad-house,’ someone said.

They put him in a straitjacket and took him to the police station, where Marie waited, veiled, statuesque, forbidding. She had been waiting to see what state he was in, wondering what she should do. But when she heard the hysteria in his laugh as he looked at her, and saw the wild look in his eyes, she knew she couldn’t cope any more.

‘You may as well keep him in that,’ she said, ‘I’ve done all I can. It’s not fair on the child. He must be committed.’

~ ~ ~

The paperchains had come as several packs of red and gold paper strips half an inch wide. Licking the sticky ends to make links had made the insides of Rose’s cheeks feel sour, but it was worth it for the way they looked, hanging in U-shapes all round the tops of the walls, above the mirror, around the doors and windows. Tattoo, away being fixed, had given up his place in the centre of the mantelpiece to the tree. The crinkled gold paper of its pipe cleaners shone in the fire and candle light. High above the fireplace, red and gold links also shone. Half asleep, Rose was still in some way aware of a gentle festive peace enfolding the room.

Eyes closed, once more adrift in the magic wood, going deeper.

Deeper.

She was never more complete, more sane, than when she was here, every little dropped discarded thing around her also sleeping. The flickering of light from two half burned — down pink candles, one either side of the tree, played on her closed lids and she opened her eyes. Half seeing, they misted over with affection. Who cares for these lost things? Things once touched. The touch, still there. Someone was alive and loved them once. Somewhere. How they pull at the heart, and yet they tell me I have no heart. I’m not clever, the world runs rings round me. But I’m thickening out now, going somewhere bigger than the world and all its cleverness. Music afar, a thrill in the air.

Closed lids.

The woods. One day instead of falling asleep, she’d get there — the opening of the trees, the castle across the moat, the drawbridge. Welcome, long awaited. She’d walk across the bridge and go inside. Nothing was more sure. But first she’d fly to the island. No one else around, the waters stirring with the wading feet of a ghost girl, the moon throwing light on smiling mouths, pink and soft, on little feet, little hands, on the eyes of the dolls, some closed, some wide, some gone. And if in some imagining, some fever, the dolls, called by the moon, suddenly opened their mouths in unison and sang together, and she, wherever she may be — very very far away, glancing sideways — if she should hear even the smallest flicker on the edge of hearing, the edge of sleep, what would it sound like?

Fast asleep now, beyond the woods and the island, unaware that the rain had begun, that it gently flecked her window and set off a sweet sing-song in the gutters and drains.

With no sound at all a gold link gave way in one of the paperchains. The chain whispered as it dropped down the wall, bunching on top of the tree but also pulling at some Blu-Tack holding up the next drape, so that that fell too, and the gold link at its end touched the top of the straight gold flame of the candle on the right-hand end of the mantelpiece. The flame reached up, welcoming.

It was free, and ran all over the room, so ripe and lush and ready for the taking, carrying the whole thing and everything in it out of the world.

~ ~ ~

A few years later Hermann Otto ran into Julia in Munich. He’d been standing for a long time in front of the large glass cabinet, falling into a melancholy state as the rain teemed down on the canvas, remembering the living Julia while gazing at what remained.

The Anthropolical Exhibition had been set up under the awning of a big marquee, so that you had to pass it on the way into the circus. Gassner, the owner of the place and an old acquaintance, approached. ‘Marvellous, isn’t she?’ he said.

‘Indeed.’ Otto spoke gruffly. ‘And the poor little chap.’

‘No matter how much you look at her,’ Gassner said, ‘she never becomes more believable.’

Otto smiled. ‘She’d have made a good mother,’ he said.

‘Well,’ said Gassner, a short dapper man with an oiled goatee, ‘they’re mine now.’

‘You’ve bought them?’

‘Acquired,’ said Gassner. ‘You could say they’re donations. I think she just wants to be rid of them. Have you met La Nouvelle Pastrana?’

Otto hadn’t. Gassner conducted him through a red curtain, along a draped passageway, and through another curtain decorated with yellow moons on a deep blue ground. A small comfortable grass-floored area was laid out with sofas and easy chairs and low tables set with pastries and wine. Zenora Pastrana sat veiled on one of the sofas but rose to greet Otto.

‘I’ve heard about you,’ she said.

She was wearing a black straw hat, highly feathered. The voluminous veil of spotted lace, pulled tight round her throat, obscured but did not completely hide her features. When she loosened the ribbon and unveiled, the effect was so much less startling than with Julia. Her face, broad-featured and masculine, was immaculately groomed and very friendly. She shook his hand firmly, and they sat down and drank wine. She was in town to offload the mummies en route from Saint Petersburg to Karlsbad, she said.

‘Ah yes, to Karlsbad,’ said Otto. ‘And what do you intend to do there?’

‘Oh I’m not staying there.’ She straightened the veil above her thick black brows. ‘I’m just going to see the old place and then — well, I’ll take my son to Paris. It’s a place I’ve always wanted to see. I’d like to buy a house and retire.’ She reached for her wine. ‘My husband left me very comfortable, you know. We had a successful business in the centre of Petersburg. You knew him quite well, I believe?’

‘Reasonably. So very sorry to hear of his misfortune.’

‘His death, you mean,’ she said. ‘Yes, a tragedy. Five years now! My goodness. Time!’

A brain fever, he’d heard.

‘Will you miss them?’ he asked.

‘Julia? Baby?’ She looked down, considering. ‘I will,’ she said after a while, ‘but I won’t be sorry to see them go. It’s time.’ She smiled. ‘And I certainly won’t miss those long Petersburg winters.’

Otto wished her luck and went on his way. In the main display area the rain was a tattoo on the canvas. The flap was open. The grass shone, the lights were yellow. She’d thrive, he thought. Probably get another man. She could. Fine figure of a woman in her way. Poor old Lent. Always something fishy about the man. That simpering smile.

Marie sat on for half an hour making small talk with Gassner, picking with her long manicured nails at a pastry and nibbling delicately. Then she had a carriage brought to the side entrance. But first, she took a last farewell of Julia and the boy. She could hardly look at Baby, the sight of his pretty chin made her too sentimental. So she looked at Julia, grand old thing, still standing proud and defiant. They’re not keeping up very well with her hair, she thought, and was almost tempted to pop in and give it a quick brush-up, a little readjustment here and there. But no, all that was past.

‘Bye, Sister,’ she said and marched away straight-backed to where her cab was waiting.

The grinding of carriage wheels on a million roads. The man with the money, first one man then the next, and the next; the men who stand at the entrance and call in the crowds that jog by in a choppy ever-changing sea, all grinning and gazing and wondering, avid for mysteries, drifting from the glass cabinet to the two-headed baby floating in a jar, to the waxwork of Robespierre losing his head. Germany, Holland, Belgium, Vienna where life had been good, where one night when the show was just about over and everyone was getting ready to close up, three last-minute people came in through the open tent flap. A well-preserved woman of about fifty held the hand of an ageing pinhead in a long blue raincoat.

‘There,’ said the portly older man with a fine shock of curly grey hair. ‘Over there, Niece.’

‘Cato, don’t pull,’ said Berniece, dragged unceremoniously across the grass to stand in front of Julia’s cabinet. ‘God, Ezra,’ she said, ‘now I wish I hadn’t come.’

Ezra came to loom behind them, gazing solemnly, remembering seeing Julia for the first time across the yard in New Orleans, how he’d thought, God, God, impossible, even though he’d been warned.

‘Hoo-hah,’ said Cato in a soft, puzzled tone.

Berniece put her arm round his shoulder and pulled him close.

‘Yes,’ said Ezra, ‘it’s Julia.’

‘He remembers,’ said Berniece.

‘Of course he does.’

‘I liked her, you know,’ said Berniece.

‘Baby,’ said Cato, pointing.

They stood in silence.

‘Oh! He’s crying,’ said Berniece.

Tears were pouring down Cato’s old face. She got out her hankie and wiped his eyes. ‘Oh, those eyes of yours, Cato,’ she said.

Budapest.

Krakow.

East and east again to skirt the Russian border. Twenty years, and somewhere along the line Julia and Theo Junior acquired a grand Russian carriage, with velvet and ruching. Back and back and back it carried them, very far, though time of course no longer existed. Years, no more than circles in water. There were oceans and the roaring of waves and weather. Over and over, light, dark, high summer, bitter skies, snow, rain dripping on a puddle, circles, a dark rattling community of pickled curiosities, abnormalities, fakes, freaks, things of no provenance. More years, more roads. The shriek of a train. Ten years of Norwegian byways. Darkness moving on, progressing through something. Could have been a swamp, a birth canal, a long dream. Wars, rumours of wars. And the men and women, their faces changing like the faces on the closed canvas of a half-awake eye. A banner over the entrance to the tent read: Humanity, Know Thyself.

The business had been falling off for years. A couple of times they opened up and no one came. Blame it on the war. Her glass eyes stared at the wall in a loft in Sweden as the war passed.

Years, creeping slowly by, nibbled by moths, her hair straight and lank, the flowers and feathers long gone. The boy tipped sideways. Someone dusted her off, set the boy straight, rattled them back to Norway on a diesel train and hauled them round on tour again. In a garage in Oslo a spider made its home in the boy’s hair. Someone somewhere took Julia’s pearl cross and replaced it with a cheaper version, because it made no sense for such a pretty thing to languish on the neck of a corpse. Once in the far frozen north they were delayed for a few days by weather, and the young daughter of the woman who kept the showground came in every day and talked to the boy as if he were a doll. He did look like a doll. His eyes were always open, his face always surprised. In Malmo, the cabinet was dropped as it was being moved and a big crack appeared up the back of it. No one fixed it, and they were on the road again but the crowds were thin. A trickle.

Ten more years of fabric fading, of varnish chipping, seams fraying, fabric fading.

Ten more in storage.

There’s no call for it any more. Really, in this day and age.

Try America. But the ocean changed nothing, it was just the same there, roads, trains, midways, boardwalks. And back across the ocean, third time, to the north, the snow.

There was a warehouse in Oslo full of old fairground stuff. She ended up there with her baby and her Russian carriage, with half a dozen go-karts, a few tarnished bumper cars and all the crew: the phrenological heads, the Anatomical Venus, the piglet Cyclops, the pregnant hairless six-footed rat, and a dusty jar with two sleeping faces at peace, side by side, scarcely discernible these days through the yellowish glaze of grime.

One night, four boys came up to the old industrial estate from the high-rise flats nearby. They fooled about for a while, riding their bikes round the padlocked units, chucking cans of coke into the weeds growing thickly between them, till one of them, taking a piss in front of an old lock-up with boarded-up windows, saw that the corrugated metal that covered the door had rusted away at the bottom where it met the grass. He zipped up, hunkered down and pulled at it. Rust fell into the grass and the strip of metal started coming away from the rotting wood behind.

‘We can get in!’ he called out.

His friends leaned their bikes up against the concrete wall and gathered round. It only took a few minutes to rip the metal away and expose the old doors, which weren’t even locked but only tied together with a bit of wire. The darkness inside made them pause on the threshold, daring themselves silently to go in. One of them took a torch from his saddle-bag and bravely led the way in, the others keeping close. The light shone on boxes and closed crates, hulking shapes. Further in—

‘Go-karts!’

‘Must have been a fair. Look. Dodgems.’

The light wandered.

‘Let’s take them out.’

‘What? The karts?’

‘Yeah. Give’s a hand.’

They dragged two out. They were hauling another two when someone yelled (afterwards, no one could say who), and they gagged on fear, freezing in their tracks. The light shot up to the blank ceiling, bounced off shapes suddenly monstrous and unearthly, quavered about queasily till it came once more to rest on the ghastly face of an ape thing with big staring eyes.

After the shock, they laughed.

‘It’s a waxwork!’

Hearts still thumping, they approached.

‘Must be from the House of Horrors.’

It stood in front of a fancy carriage in a big glass case, an ape with a great jutting mouth, an ape in a dress. A baby one stood next to it.

‘Does it open?’

It did, with a long slow creak so classically scary it made them laugh some more.

‘Get her out.’

It wasn’t heavy. The little one came off its stand. It was rotten underneath and all its hair was gone.

‘Put her by the door! Scare the shit out of someone.’

‘This is falling to pieces.’

‘What is it?’

‘Look — if I put her arm up like this—’

It came off.

A great guffaw.

‘Woo-woo, it’s coming to get you!’

The arm, bent at the elbow, still wearing a gold bracelet, waving about, chasing faces.

Someone must have seen the light.

When the police car came winking up from Rommen, they fled on their bikes. The one with the torch still had the severed limb, tucked under his arm as he skimmed his bike one-handed down the hill. When he got home, he laid it down on the kitchen table and started examining it. His older brother came in to get something from the fridge.

‘What the hell’s that?’

‘Wood. Wool,’ said the boy, poking the gaping wound where it had ripped from the body. ‘It’s from a waxwork.’

‘Where d’you get that? Where’ve you been?’ His brother bent down, a look of concentration on his face.

‘Sorry, kid,’ he said when he looked up again, ‘this is no waxwork. I have to ring the police,’ and went out to make the call.

There was not too much of a fuss. The police put the big mummy along with its arm in their basement. The identity was established without much difficulty; after all, this thing had a history. No one claimed it and no one seemed to want it. And there was, of course, no crime to answer for so the police had no need to hang onto it. The university took it and put it in the vaults. The rats had been at the baby and he was in such bad shape they stuck him in a bin at the back of police headquarters. Sometime in the early hours a cat nosed the bin open. Later, a stray dog on the scavenge took him in her mouth and ran away. She chewed on him enthusiastically, tearing bits off, then dropped him in a stairwell, where a young man picked him up and, taking him for some sort of voodoo fetish, hung him over the door of his room, which was painted purple and black and decorated with animal skulls and esoteric symbols. A year later, one of his friends, drunk, removed it. It was thrown over the wall of an empty house and lay in the yard till the clearance people turned up and dumped it with a load of other bits and pieces into one of several boxes that ended up in the back room of a junk shop. A dealer, seeing that the wheat and chaff was hopelessly mixed, bought the boxes as a job lot, stuck them in the back of a van, drove them onto a ferry, crossed the North Sea, and hauled them down to London to his bric-a-brac shop in Camberwell. He cleaned up the good stuff. The rest he chucked in a big yellow skip down the road.

Theo Junior lay on top of a pile of rubble in the skip, legless, armless, one-eyed, till a woman called Rose came along, felt sorry for him and took him home.

~ ~ ~

Dreamlike, silent, the island drifted into view like an absurdist painting, a profusion of small faces, blind eyes, sweet lips, smiles, serenity, blight. The roots of the willows reached out, clutching the bank like dragon claws, seeming to anchor it in its place. Cane grew high. The soil was alive, growth was lush. Apart from oak and horse chestnut and silver birch, Adam knew nothing at all about trees, but there was an abundance of type and shade, a richness of sap and leaves and bark, and the water smelled of green darkness.

A man in a snow-white shirt and straw hat met them on the ramshackle landing stage, accepted their money and gave them a small talk in Spanish. Adam didn’t understand a word. Anyway, he knew the story. The quiet middle-aged Spanish couple who’d shared his trajinera on the long drift from the city listened intently, laughing once or twice when the guide made a joke. Adam laughed too to be polite, but his eyes, irresistibly drawn to the dolls, would not stay on the man. Faces emerged from the foliage wherever the eye rested, revealing themselves in greater and greater numbers. Even though he’d known exactly what to expect, the whole island disorientated him, and it had nothing to do with fear or superstition. It was the sheer defiance of the place. I am mad and pointless, it said. Here I am.

The guide led them to a scattering of wooden shacks and shelters with corrugated roofs, most of them broken-down and half open to the elements. One had the word ‘Museo’ in large coloured letters painted above the door. They went in. The shrine was tacky. The hermit’s smiling face beamed out from a framed colour photograph. The doll in the centre had the pretty bespectacled face of a plain schoolmarm in an old Hollywood film, the kind revealed to be a beauty by the time the credits roll. Her eyes looked down on the heap of gifts in front of her, the tat people leave, the sad appeasements and compassionate offerings. To comply with the custom, Adam had bought a couple of candy bars before getting on the boat, and these he added to the mix, wondering if the guide would take them home later for his kids. Walls, ceiling, beams crowded in, a fly-buzzing bazaar of mis-shapes and mutations. And oh, how time had feasted on the old ones, cobwebs rampant, dirt triumphant. Young shiny new ones hung side by side with their own future selves. He reached up to touch the face of a friendly little girl with plump sweet cheeks, missing an eye and a leg. The holes that had once held the knots of her hair made dotted lines that zigzagged back and forth across the greying pink of her bald skull. Small crossed pink feet nestled beside her ear. He looked up. A baby face smiled back.

The guide had gone outside to give them more room. Adam and the Spanish couple, quiet, almost reverential, stood, looked, walked about. He was glad he didn’t have to talk to anyone. When their eyes met, he and the Spanish couple smiled at one another. The husband, a small fat man with a handsome face and flat grey hair, said something to his wife in Spanish, half whispering, and she said something back, half irritated, half laughing. Adam went out and wandered in and out of the other shacks. All were doll-strung. One had an old bed with a rotten mattress. Was that where he’d slept, the hermit? Imagine the old guy, living here alone all those years, the dolls becoming more and more each year. Crazy. He played with them, she said. They didn’t scare him.

She’d have loved this.

The Spanish couple had wandered away, seeming uninclined to explore much further than the immediate area around the shacks and wooden shelters. The guide had gone down to the landing stage and was talking to the boatman. Adam wandered alone around the island, looking for a place to leave Tattoo. Wild flowers grew here and there. The high thin shriek of a bird cut the air. The sun was hot and high, and where the foliage thinned, it made the clear places almost blinding. Under the trees, the interplay of black shade and bleached-out white stung the eyes. Sun and rain had worked on the dolls, and worked still. Adam’s progress was slow and random, and he stopped constantly, compelled to study at length. Each hand, each limb, each face, ravaged as though with a terrible illness. But there were too many. Had anyone ever counted? Probably not. You could have a competition, like guessing the number of sweets in a jar.

Thousands, he thought.

By the stream he sat down on an old stump and took a bottle of water from the side pocket of his backpack. Duckweed quivered on the water. He looked up at the sky, tipped back his head and drank, then rolled a cigarette one-handed, sliding down to the ground to lean his back against the stump and contemplate the great display. So many hanging heads. A chubby baby in a blue romper suit, heavily inhabited with insect life, looked down at him. Who broke your neck? So hard not to humanise. It was an impulse, the brain just did it. They’ve got it wrong, those people who think this is a horror show, he thought. It has power, but it’s not that kind. It’s just dolls being creepy, because that’s what they do. Each once loved, now hanging broken. They belong here. They have company. The experience was strangely tranquil, like the feeling in an ancient graveyard when you’ve worked your way down to the forgotten overgrown heel of it and all the names have long disappeared from the tipsy old stones. The perfect place for old Tattoo. I said I’d do this. Adam lit up and sucked in hard. Rose is gone, and I’m here. She isn’t coming back. He stood up. Even if she touched him on the shoulder now, a touch so light it was scarcely there. Even if you believed in ghosts, she’d never be anything more than that, a shadow, a scent, even a fleeting glimpse perhaps. But she wasn’t coming back here, not to this life. Some other maybe, out there on another island, a planet not yet formed. Adam opened his backpack and drew from it the truncated mess that had lived for years on Rose’s windowsill. ‘Here we are, Tattoo,’ he said. He could hear the distant voices of the Spanish couple talking to the guide. Adam had been drinking on the trajinera, and the beauty and strangeness of the place increased a sense that had been creeping closer and closer since Rose died, more than two years ago now. It had made him humble in the face of the great singularity of her disappearance, yet playful also, and more willing to indulge the meanderings of his own thoughts or mind or whatever it was that yammered on. Yes she was a mess, but she’d known what it was to love the clay and there’d been some wisdom of a kind there, he thought, looking round at the eerie and companionable horde. Anyway everyone was a mess.

She’d love this, he thought. She’d get it completely, this letting go, this final ritual, as sacred in its own way as a full requiem mass or Viking ship burial. There was a bush near the stream, home to a doll in a long blue dress. She was big, maybe a foot and a half tall if she’d been standing upright, and she was wedged in a cleft between two branches, with her legs stretched out in front and her arms wide open. She was a bit of a hippy, with beads and a floppy hat, and shaggy red hair hanging in a wild tangle to her shoulders. Above her, thin spear-like leaves reached high.

Adam placed Tattoo against the doll’s chest and folded her arms in to keep him in place. A bell rang at the landing stage. ‘There you are,’ he said. ‘You’ll be fine here.’

He stood for a while, just looking, took a picture, and felt it would be something brilliant and beautiful, the little doll in the mother doll’s arms, and everything, every last soul whose name had rubbed away, everything unsung, unkept, unrecorded, all running together with them into the grandeur of their ineffable disappearance. He stood a while longer, head slightly bowed as if he was in a cathedral. The bell rang again.

‘Catch you later, Tattoo,’ said Adam.

It was two hours back to the city, the boatman plying his long wooden pole, the boat with its carnival colours and painted arches sliding smoothly over glassy water. The low wetlands were beautiful. Wading birds stalked among water lilies in the shallows, and the trees’ reflections rippled. When they found themselves passing other boats, he came out of his dream. Small craft selling cold drinks and burritos drew alongside and soon they were surrounded. After such strange peace, how fine and gaudy — the flower boats, the strident guitars of mariachi bands, the growing throngs of late afternoon.

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