Carol Birch - Orphans of the Carnival

‘Are you sure?’ she said, and walked away into the other room where the boy was sleeping. She closed the door.

He walked into the bedroom, got into bed and closed the curtains. His bones ached. He began to grin, then laugh into the pillow.

For the next three months, he drank in the taverns around the old Hay Market. He told people he owned the biggest circus in New York City and owned a troupe of pure-bred white Arabian horses. He described the red plush, the chandeliers, the gilt boxes, the bobbing plumes on the horses. Every time he lay down to sleep, the circus he owned played in front of his eyes in the dark. Other days he woke up feeling obscurely oppressed and walked about all day in a state of mortal fear. Marie made him sleep on the sofa because he muttered in his sleep. He let his beard grow. He stopped washing and started to smell. She nagged him to go to the doctor, shouted at him, jollied him along, pleaded with him to pull himself together. ‘You’re scaring me,’ she said.

Oscar still leaned against him and it still made him sad. Sometimes every little thing touched a nerve and he wanted to cry. Sometimes he wanted to kick things. Then a mood of defiant joy would burst up from somewhere, and he’d spend all his money and go down Nevsky Prospect singing out loud, a hundred months have passed, Lorena , not caring a monkey’s toss what anybody thought of him. At last he let her drag him to the doctor, and the doctor gave him morphine for the pains in his bones, along with some kind of pills he kept forgetting to take. He couldn’t follow a thought along its track for more than a few seconds without losing it. The lost thoughts writhed around each other like a mass of bisected worms looking for their other halves. And when that happened he was nothing, only the irrational beat of each moment passing.

Knowledge, he explained to his vagabond-faced friend in the tavern, resides with pain in the bones. Jesus knew that. Bones. Flesh. Pain. Beauty. Truth. Words in the head.

Just words in the head.

Then one night he came home in the early white night of a Petersburg summer, and Julia was waiting for him in the foyer of his wax museum. She was sitting on the bench in front of the magnificent figure of Peter the First, resplendent in his furs and finery. Her eyes gleamed at him. Theo Junior was asleep on her knee with his thumb in his mouth and his hand cupped over his nose. She was real. Both of them were real. His heart melted and he ran to her, but she vanished; there one minute, gone the next, she and her baby.

Marie came down in her nightgown to see what all the noise was about and found him dressed up in Peter the First’s clothes, carrying the naked emperor out into the street where snow was beginning to settle.

‘What the hell are you doing!’ she cried.

‘Taking him to the river to see if he can swim.’

‘Get back in here!’

Half out of the door, Theo looked over his shoulder at her with a grin.

‘You’ve got that twitch again,’ she said. ‘You’re not well. I’m calling the doctor first thing, you come in now and go to bed.’

‘I’m bringing them back,’ he said.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I need his space. I’m bringing Julia and the boy back, and I need that space.’

‘That’s the best spot in the whole place, Theo,’ she said. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘I can do what I like,’ he said, hoisting the emperor higher. ‘It’s my museum. I can throw them all out if I want to.’

‘Oh please, Theo, stop all this. You’re driving me mad.’

‘Am I? Am I really, Marie? Driving you mad, am I? Try this!’ He shrieked, a short ear-splitting yowl like a cat’s. It scared her, so she slapped his face.

‘Shut up!’ she hissed, grabbing his arm and dragging him back across the threshold with the dummy. When she turned from locking the door, he’d thrown the dummy aside and was crouching at the foot of the stairs with his arms over his head, weeping harshly.

‘What did you do that for?’ she said sternly. ‘Why did you scream like that? Horrible sound!’

‘Why not scream?’ He looked up, his face contorted.

She walked towards him. ‘Stop it! Stop it, Theo. Stop this right now. I can’t stand it.’

‘Scream then,’ he said and jumped up, grabbing her by the shoulders and staring intently into her eyes. ‘We should all scream.’ He looked terrible, ridiculous in Peter the Great’s clothes, wasted and wet-eyed, and the look of trouble in his eyes was painful.

Marie put her hands up and wiped his eyes. ‘Come on now,’ she said, ‘you come on upstairs and I’ll make you some tea. You need to lie down.’

He pulled away, rubbed his face and ran upstairs with his patchy ermine flowing behind him. Marie swore, gathering up the clothes he’d discarded for the emperor’s. As for the emperor, she got him to his feet and leaned him naked against the wall. He’d have to wait for tomorrow for his clothes.

When she went upstairs, he’d gone to bed on the sofa and lay with his back to her.

‘That’s not the way, Theo,’ she said quietly to his back. ‘Giving in to these mad kind of feelings. Resist them. Just stop. You don’t have to go mad.’

He said nothing.

‘I’m warning you, Theo. You’re getting too much for me to handle. If it carries on, I don’t think I can live with it.’

She returned to her own bed in the next room,

Next day the doctor gave him a powder, and left some more for him to take. He drooped nervily about the flat for a few days, till one night the sound of the people in one of the houses in the street tipped him over the edge. Snow fell lazily past the window. Marie was giving Oscar his supper, and there was peace in the air till those idiots started. It sounded to him as if a regiment of soldiers were getting very drunk.

‘What in God’s name are they doing in there?’ He started up and went to the window.

‘What?’ Marie asked, wiping off the spoon on the edge of Oscar’s dish.

‘That Godawful racket!’

She listened, poised. ‘What?’ she said again.

‘Are you deaf?’

‘I can’t hear anything.’

‘You can’t hear that?’ He threw open the window and stuck his head out. He could hear them, a couple of houses down, continual bursts of brash, deafening laughter.

‘Don’t shout,’ she said.

‘Me? What about them?’

She put down the spoon, went over and stood beside him. ‘What is it?’ she asked patiently.

‘Listen!’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it’s only those people with the dog. They’ve got some friends in.’

‘But that’s ridiculous! They can have their friends in but why should the whole street have to put up with them?’

‘It’s not that loud.’ She took him by the arm and closed the window firmly. ‘See. If we close the window you can’t hear it.’

‘Completely inconsiderate!’

He wouldn’t sit down. Backwards and forwards he went with a murderous look, to the window, in and out of the bedroom. He kicked the fender.

‘Now,’ said Marie to Oscar, whose full attention was on his pacing father, ‘just finish this last little bit and we’ll have a story.’

Theo cursed like a man being dragged to the gallows.

‘Theo!’

‘If you can’t hear that, you’re mad,’ he said.

‘Ssh! Voice down!’

‘Me? Voice down? Me ?’ He laughed horribly, and she thought he might be about to burst into tears. ‘Why don’t you go and tell them ! Voice down!’

‘Calm down, Theo, please.’

Another burst of laughter broke over his head, stupid, mocking and viciously indifferent. He screamed harshly, covering his ears and slamming his eyes closed.

‘Theo! Please!’