Ever Dundas - Goblin

‘I need to find him.’

‘Why?’

‘I can’t let him go.’

‘You always skirt around the past, you always say, “Let the past stay in the past”, but you cling onto this. Why won’t you let him go?’

‘Because I’m his family. He’s my family. Because he was supposed to take me with him to the sea.’

‘We’re your family now.’

‘I know.’

‘Then why not let him be? Why are you chasing a different life, a future that didn’t happen? Maybe he doesn’t want the past – you – catching up with him. Maybe he has a new life and he’s happy. Even if he isn’t, who says he wants to be found? He disappeared for a reason.’

‘I’ve always searched for him.’

‘Maybe if you stop, he’ll come to you.’

Fish Boy put his arm around me.

‘Goblin, just let it go,’ he said. ‘The past be damned.’

‘The past be damned,’ I said, and drank my whisky.

I went to Horatiu’s trailer and knocked on the door. There was no answer. I walked in. I searched through his belongings until I found the photo he’d been holding. I sat on his bed and stared down at Horatiu and his boyfriend. I imagined him being shot, I imagined it and I thought, what’s the point? What’s the point in holding on to that? I threw the photo on the floor, stepping on it as I left. I changed towards Horatiu after that. I shot him down any chance I got and his look of confused hurt made things worse. I started to hate him. He should burn it, I thought. Burn it, bury it. Be rid of it.

We stopped in a small town in southern Austria where mum and dad were running auditions, trying to get some new blood after two of our acrobats had left to settle down. I was chatting with Matt when a scrawny teenage boy disappeared into the audition tent. Matt had been one of our star acrobats but there was an accident in one of the rehearsals and he’d broken his spine. He was in a wheelchair now; couldn’t feel his legs but could still use his upper body so he worked the wheelchair into the show. He was a spectacular showman. Matt would come over to my caravan in the evenings, bringing his guitar, and we’d drink whisky and sing with Fish Boy and Angelina.

We were chatting, about to head off to rehearsals when the scrawny teen stomped out of the audition tent. I looked up, squinting at him.

‘Another reject, I guess.’

‘Seems that way.’

The boy made to leave but he spotted us and headed over.

‘Who the fuck is this?’ he said, gesturing at Matt. ‘I get sent away, but this cripple-leech can stay? You belong in the gas chambers, you waste of fucking space.’

He stabbed his penknife into Matt’s leg. I hadn’t even seen it in his hand. Without thinking I flew at the boy, knocking the air out of him. Pinning him down, pushing on his lungs, I punched his face to a bloody mess before Matt had me by the neck and pulled me off him.

‘I can fight my own fights, Goblin, and that wasn’t worth it.’

‘He stabbed you. He just came right up to you and stabbed you.’

Matt looked down at the forgotten knife.

‘And I didn’t feel a thing.’

‘The things he said to you.’

‘I didn’t feel that either.’

‘I did. I fucking felt it.’

He pulled the knife out and grinned at me.

‘I could join Freaks and Wonders. The human pincushion.’

We both laughed, laughing so hard we cried as the boy rolled over, pushed himself up on his hands and knees and spat blood and teeth onto the ground. This is how mum and dad found us, laughing as this boy dribbled blood.

Mum and dad had Matt’s wound seen to, making sure it didn’t get infected. The boy reported me to the police and I spent the night in a cell. We paid a huge fine, all of it coming out of my wages. I explained what had happened but mum and dad still had me mucking out the animals for the next three months. No clowning, no Freaks and Wonders, just piss and shit.

London, 29 – 30 November 2011

I need an anchor. Queen Isabella, Scholler, Amelia and Monsta are keeping me safe but I need more than those old ghosts. I avoid Mac because all I can think of when we’re together is the last time I saw him when we were kids and I can’t be reminded of that all the time.

I’d kept in touch with Tim over the years; no real details about our lives, just sending each other postcards of art we liked, sending holiday greetings. I never thought I’d see him again, but here I am, going to see Tim, my Fish Boy.

It isn’t a shock to see him. He looks much the same. My imagination had exaggerated his age so much that the actual changes don’t matter. His scales have faded. They emerge from beneath the collar of his shirt, flow up his neck and disappear into his grey beard. It was all polite niceties all hello how are you can I take your coat would you like a cup of tea, weren’t the riots a blast.

‘I danced amongst the flames,’ I say.

He laughs and I laugh and I spill my tea I’m shaking so much.

‘You haven’t changed a bit,’ he says.

‘I’m old.’

‘We’re both old.’

‘We are.’

‘Did the rioters join you?’

‘They did,’ I say. ‘They danced too.’

‘Of course they did.’

‘What…’ I say, trailing off and looking down at my tea and back at him again, ‘What have you, I mean, all these years, what have you done with yourself?’

‘This and that,’ he says.

‘Me too. This and that.’

We both smile.

‘Is that your wife?’

I gesture to a photograph on the mantle.

‘We were never married.’

‘No?’

‘Together for forty-one years, though.’

I nod.

‘It’s strange being on your own after that,’ he says. ‘Almost ten years now and it’s still strange. What brings you here?’

‘The police. Dead animals.’

‘That right?’

‘You know me,’ I say, smiling.

‘Repeating patterns.’

‘It can’t go as badly as last time,’ I say. ‘The dead are already dead.’

I stare at his hand clasped around his mug and I look at the faded scales and half-smile before I notice what’s missing and I’m sure I’ll be sick. I put my mug down clumsily, spilling, shaking with grief. Grief for skin.

‘G? What is it?’

I find myself at his feet, kneeling, taking his mug away and holding his hands in mine, inspecting. I weep, his old scaled hands wet with my tears.

‘G, it’s okay. It was a long time ago, after the circus.’

Finally crying and it’s for missing skin. He wraps me in a blanket, like I’m some old lady, frail and pathetic. I wake up on the couch. I squint into the gloaming, unsure where I am. I open the curtains and I look round the room, taking in the strange objects illuminated by the orange light from the street. I find my way to his room and I climb in beside him. I put my arm around him and fall asleep to the sound of his breathing, the sound of his heart. In the morning I run my fingers over his scales and his wrinkles. We fuck away our loneliness; there is only us. The world disappears.

I tell him over breakfast that I don’t mind. ‘It was just a shock. I’d imagined all kinds of ways in which you’d changed but I never thought that.’

‘It was practical. After the circus I retrained in joinery and the webbing was an annoyance. It got in the way.’

‘It wasn’t even that,’ I say. ‘It wasn’t really about that.’

‘Tell me then, tell me why you’re here.’

‘I’m a witness. They’re dragging me all the way back to 1939. How am I supposed to remember that long ago? But I do. I’ve been holed up in my hotel, writing it all out.’