Carol Birch - Orphans of the Carnival

‘Theft,’ she said, ‘pure and simple. My things. My property.’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I suppose he thought…’

‘I don’t care what he thought.’ She rolled onto her side. ‘I said, no, you can’t do that. It’s only things, Rose, he said, the idiot. Only things. As if that meant anything. Oh, he can be a bastard, you know. Roll me a cigarette, lovey. Well, that was that. You will not, I said. And do you know? He refuses to carry them back up for me. Just dumps the box by the back door and the rain’s starting. Not even a lid on the box. I made about ten journeys up and down those stairs.’

‘Oh well,’ Adam said, ‘everything seems to be back to normal now.’

She sat up, propped Tattoo comfortably against a cushion and poured more wine. ‘I’ve been really sorting things out,’ she said.

‘Have you?’ He looked round. No sign of it. Things were just a bit re-arranged. It’s like playing with Lego or building bricks, I suppose, he thought, yet still somehow wonderful, like a seriously overcrowded junk shop. Dried flowers and feathers hung from the ceiling, and the draped and carpeted walls were now scarcely visible as the growth rioted upward and outward. You had to admit she kept it clean, but surely it was a full-time job.

‘Poor old Tattoo,’ she said. ‘After all he’s been through.’

‘Ah.’ He swigged his wine. ‘He was in the box, was he?’

‘He most certainly was. Right down at the bottom as well. Must have been the first thing he threw in. And he knows how I feel about that thing. And when I got up here, he’d been tidying up. Putting things away! I couldn’t find anything. So I’ve told him, I’ve said, look, you’re the landlord, you can evict me if you want to but you don’t touch my things. You don’t live here, Laurie. I do.’

Adam smiled and shook his head, crumbling tobacco. Couldn’t live with her, he thought. Not for long. Poor old Laurie, she’s gone right off him. She doesn’t care. He’d seen Laurie crying on the stairs one night. Just turned the corner and there he was, the big dripping mess, but he tried to hide it, blowing his nose as if he had a cold. She couldn’t care less. She was drunk and sentimental now, not for Laurie but because of her poor things so nearly lost.

‘Here,’ he said, twisting the end of the roll-up and handing it to her.

‘Ta.’

‘You know,’ he said, ‘we could open this place up as a museum. Charge admission. The Rose Museum.’

‘Only no one would come.’

‘They might.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘You have to be famous.’

Adam slid down and sat on the floor with his back against the sofa, and they lapsed into silence. After a few minutes he said, ‘When you think about it — every person’s like a museum of their life.’

She smiled. ‘That’s nice.’

‘Only most stay uncurated. Things fade away into old cupboards and drawers that never get opened. Junk stalls. Rubbish on its way to the dump. Then they just vanish.’

‘You’re a poet, Adam,’ she said.

Adam turned his head. ‘If ever you die, Rose,’ he said. ‘It’ll be a hell of a thing for whoever gets to go through all this lot.’

She laughed. ‘And who would that be, I wonder? Probably my mother.’

She hardly ever saw her family. She’d liked her father and didn’t like her mother, that’s all he really knew. Her father was dead, and there was a brother somewhere, and they came from somewhere quite posh that he could never picture, somewhere like Welwyn Garden City or East Grinstead, those places that just looked like nothing on the map.

‘She might get my brother to do it, I suppose,’ she said, reaching for the tobacco.

Adam picked up Tattoo. ‘Now this—’ he held it at arm’s length. ‘I doubt if you’d be able to give this away.’

‘Oh don’t,’ she said, ‘don’t make me feel sad.’

‘He’s in an awful state, Rose. Look. He’s got a hole in his shoulder. What’s that? Moths?’

‘I don’t have moths.’

He put his finger in the hole, wiggled it about and pulled it out. A tuft of dirty white stuffing came out with his finger. ‘You ought to patch this up,’ he said.

‘You know,’ she rolled a cigarette, one-handed, ‘it’s kind of like he makes me feel sick now. Laurie.’

Adam put his finger in the hole again. Inside was scratchy.

‘I don’t know what it is,’ she said. ‘He always seemed on the edge of being beautiful, but now he’s on the edge of repulsive.’

‘So how did that happen?’ He dug deeper. Straw. Fluffy stuff.

‘I really don’t know.’

‘So is that it then?’ he said. ‘You and him? What happens now? Will you still live here?’

‘Oh yes!’

‘And he doesn’t mind?’

‘He won’t have to, will he? It’s all right. He’s got his wife.’

‘I think he’s quite upset though,’ Adam said.

‘Well, I don’t see why. We’ll still be friends. There was never a commitment. That was supposed to be the good thing about it.’

‘Ha,’ he said, ‘if only things were that simple.’

Rose shrugged. ‘You have to face reality.’

He laughed. ‘That from you!’

She licked the edge of the cigarette paper, ‘What are you doing?’

‘Look. A big hole. There’s all sorts in here.’

‘Don’t rip him to pieces,’ she said, hitting him lightly on the head.

‘I’m not.’

‘Stop it. Give him to me.’

‘Here.’ He handed her Tattoo, and the matches.

‘You can be quite hard, can’t you?’ he said.

‘I’m not hard.’

‘Yes. You are. You get all sentimental over bits of old paper but you don’t give a toss about people. You’ve got more genuine feeling for that old doll than you have for any human being.’

‘What rot,’ she said, striking a match. ‘You don’t know anything about it.’

He put his hand on her hip, just to see what she’d do. She ignored it. He saw her frown as her long chipped nail examined the hole in Tattoo’s shoulder. ‘You’ve made this worse,’ she said.

‘You need to patch him up.’

She laid the just lit cigarette on the edge of an ashtray. ‘You know, I used to think this was wood,’ she said, ‘but it’s not.’

‘What is it?’

‘I’m not sure.’

He picked up the cigarette and took a drag. ‘There’s all sorts in there,’ he said.

‘Straw. Dust,’ she said. ‘Ticking. Paper. Something lumpy.’

‘You should get some foam and block it up.’

‘Look at this.’ Out came a clump of hardened straw. ‘That’s really old.’ She laid it on the sofa and dug a little further. ‘Paper,’ she said.

He took his hand from her hip, wondering if she’d even noticed.

‘Oh look!’ She sat up straight. Leaning forward, she set about smoothing a couple of scraps of screwed up fragments on the low table.

‘What is it?’

‘And there’s more—’ fishing about inside and drawing out another strip, longer, creased into powdery near-disintegration. ‘Wow! Look at this.’

‘Writing,’ he said.

‘It says—’

They put their heads together, poring over the words that survived, the rubbed-out extremities. An old-fashioned leaf pattern, any colour long faded, coiled up one torn edge. Three scraggy scraps, soft and wrinkled, the print rubbed to grey by many years. Here and there a few letters or a word or two made it through the grey.

‘Look,’ she said, ‘this piece fits with that.’

— of Provid—

— A feeling of—

— eeing some frig—

— NDESCRIPT, MI—

— he mos—

— and Mis—

— Sanfa—

— little prin—

‘It’s an old leaflet,’ she said, ‘a handbill, playbill, something. Look.’