Carol Birch - Orphans of the Carnival

He dropped Yatzi into the fire. The old bit of dress was so faded and rotten that it just curled up and died. The wood beneath caught quickly and burned with a dark green flame. Just a piece of burning wood.

‘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.