Carol Birch - Orphans of the Carnival

‘Here, Theo,’ she said.

‘Listen to them,’ Berniece said, ‘listen out there.’ She’d thrown up the window and was leaning over, looking down into the alley. The sound of drunks singing their way home floated up. Suddenly she turned. ‘You can get out onto the roof,’ she said, looking at Julia. ‘Want to see?’

‘I’d love to.’ Julia had poured herself a hot drink too. She lifted the cup and let the sharp aroma swim about her nostrils.

‘My God,’ said Berniece in a low voice.

She’s looking at my nose, Julia thought. The way my nostrils move.

‘Come on.’ Berniece stood up, flounced across to the door. ‘This way, this way.’ She led along the passage and up to the attics, a long row of rooms with a long dormer window opposite looking out onto a wide flat space between the yard and the street. The tiles were warm, and they sat down side by side looking up at a sky full of stars. The moon was a wide crescent.

‘Well, said Berniece, ‘it’s nice to have someone new to talk to. You’ve been around a bit, hey?’

‘All over the place,’ said Julia.

‘Same with us. You think, oh here we go, the romance, the road, all the strange people… you been to Paris?’

‘No, not Paris. We were going to, but they wrote horrible things about me so we didn’t go.’

‘Me neither. I want to go there.’

‘I go to a lot of places,’ Julia said, ‘but I don’t really see them.

I can’t go out like other people, so it’s…’

‘I know! You think: oh! I’ve been to Amsterdam and Cologne and Berlin and what have I seen? Walls. Stuck in with Cato. It’s like having a baby. Not that I’d know.’

Berniece blew smoke at the sky.

‘Don’t you like it on the road?’ said Julia. ‘I do. I like all the new places. Everything new. Voices. Trees. Money.’

‘But you don’t see it,’ said Berniece.

‘Sometimes I go out with my veil on. But I have to be very careful.’ Julia smiled. ‘I went for a walk in New York once. I got on a trolleybus.’

‘I can’t even do that with Cato,’ said Berniece, closing her eyes and leaning her head back against the sloping tiles. ‘It’s really just too much trouble taking him out. Everyone at him all the time. Can’t leave him alone, trailing after him like the Pied Piper. He likes it at first, and then he gets upset and some of them are cruel. It’s not worth it.’ She yawned and opened her eyes. ‘God, it’s just so beautiful up here,’ she said. Down below, the neighbourhood cats cried viciously at one another.

‘Listen to them,’ Julia said, thinking of the devil baby. Poor poor thing.

‘I’m run off my feet,’ said Berniece, ‘and Ezra’s not really very good with him. Just lets him do what he wants. I’m just a nurse-maid really.’

‘I once knew this girl,’ said Julia. ‘I don’t know how old she was. Her hair was going grey but I don’t think she was very old. She was unhappy all the time. She kept wanting to go home, but then she didn’t really want to when it came to it. I don’t know why she was so unhappy. Always crying, all the time like a leaky faucet. She could sit on her own head and cross her feet under her head like a bow.’

Berniece laughed.

‘Zelda.’

The cats had shut up, and the sudden silence startled them.

‘People come and go,’ said Berniece.

Julia stood up and walked a little way along the tiles. ‘You don’t want to be like her,’ she said. ‘Always wanting to be somewhere else. Even if she got to wherever it was she was wanting to get to, she’d still want to be somewhere else.’

Across the low wall, Julia saw roofs, slope after slope, all silver.

‘You’re not stupid, are you?’ said Berniece.

‘I don’t think so.’ Julia turned her head. ‘Are you?’

Berniece laughed. ‘I’ll say one thing,’ she said. ‘You sure do meet some unusual people in this line of work.’

‘You should be glad you’ve got a nice man like Ezra,’ Julia said, sitting down again. ‘He’s nice, Ezra, don’t you think?’

‘Of course he’s nice.’ Berniece looked away, and that blank look came over her again. ‘Know what I liked most about him when I met him? Cato. The way he was with Cato. I thought, here’s this poor little freak and isn’t he lucky he landed with this kind man and not some other.’ She leaned her head back against the slope of the roof. ‘Some of them out there you know,’ she said, ‘they’re terrible. You’re all right though, aren’t you, with Theo? Funny thing, you and him.’

‘Well,’ said Julia, and could think of no more to say, wondering what it was that was pressing down on her, some feeling. She got up again and walked to the low wall.

‘Certainly wasn’t Ezra’s looks I went for,’ Berniece said. ‘Looked like a cross between a three-year-old and a bear.’

There was a clattering and a clumping, and the heads of the men poked through the window.

‘Come out,’ Berniece said, ‘See how pretty it is.’

‘Julia?’ Theo’s voice.

‘I’m over here.’

‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

‘Looking.’

‘Looking at what?’

Theo materialised behind her, smelling of liquor. She sensed him swaying slightly and closed her eyes wondering what was wrong with her. A mood of roaming sadness was on her, the kind she used to get, when Solana would flick her with a cloth and say, ‘Never mind, put it behind you, whatever it is, come on, there’s all this to be washed.’ The old kitchen. The tiles. The smell of pepper. The cats in the alley were yowling at the moon again. The devil baby darted among the chimneys. She felt sad for the moment she was in, as if it had already gone, this night, the four of them drunk on this Prague rooftop.

‘Julia,’ said Theo, ‘we’ll try you on a horse tomorrow. Shall we?’

‘Wonderful,’ she said.

‘You know, he’s not a real showman, Ezra isn’t,’ he said later, saying goodnight outside her door, ‘not from way way back like me, he just sort of drifted into it from meeting someone on the line between New Orleans and Saint Louis.’

Poor Theo, she thought later, lying in bed as the cats wailed, a sound like the devil baby breaking its heart in the alley. Her sadness coalesced around Theo, the pathos of his ridiculous knowing smile, which really wasn’t sure of very much. All the time building himself up, telling himself he matters, she thought. He knew a million people and none of them really liked him. She saw that now and it made her care all the more for him, because he wasn’t a bad man and it wasn’t fair.

It took less than a week for Julia to become Circus Ranielli’s main attraction. Every night she rode into the ring on a white horse called Sister, who performed so subtly and smoothly at the merest tightening of a knee that soon the spectacle of this wild black beast-woman on what might as well have been a unicorn was pulling in crowds the like of which Ranielli had never known. He upped the money.

Hermann Otto wrote, Vienna awaited, agog. Miss Gossmann sent her warmest regards, and begged Julia’s presence at a dinner party she intended to give upon their arrival.

‘Now that,’ said Theo, ‘is something. That, I have to say, is not nothing.’ He stood in her open doorway, leaning sideways, feet crossed. ‘Do you know how famous that woman is? She knows everyone. If she’s putting the word about—’

‘Friederike,’ Julia said. ‘She was nice.’

‘She loved you.’

‘She did, didn’t she?’

‘Mad about you.’

‘She was nice. She looked at me as if I was—’

‘The Cricket,’ he said. ‘Never saw it, myself. Wildly successful. Some romantic thing.’

‘A play?’