Carol Birch - Orphans of the Carnival

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

They hadn’t seen her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Cato!’ she called.

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

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

‘No cussing,’ the fiancé said.

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

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

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

‘Hello, Ezra.’

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

‘I’m fine, Ezra. And you?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Up, Cato, come on now.’

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

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

‘She’s got rings,’ said Ezra.

‘Skinflint.’

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

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

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

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

‘No thank you,’ she said.

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

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

‘I know quality.’

‘I’m sure you do.’

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

‘It looks cheap,’ she said.

He shot her a look of dislike.

‘There’s nothing I want. Really.’

‘Fair prices. Better than most. Quality.’

‘These aren’t quality.’

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

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

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

The crowd shoved forward.

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

Julia let herself be carried by the crowd.

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

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

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

The show began.

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

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

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