Carol Birch - Orphans of the Carnival

‘Olé!’ cried the girls, jumping to their two hands and two feet, and when it was over, everyone cheered. I did the right thing, she thought.

Everything was exactly as it should be.

Madame Soulie was in the yard when they got back. ‘Marvellous, aren’t they?’ she said, emptying the contents of a box of handbills fresh from the printer onto the wooden table and spreading them out in a fan shape. Human Curiosities, they cried, the words elaborately leaf-twined. The most remarkable and unimaginable abnormalities known to man, living testimony to the infinite variety of nature. There they all were, Jonsy the White Negro, Edward Pitcairn the Elastic Man, Myrtle Dexter and Delia Mounier, Armless and Legless Dancing Wonders. And there at the top of the bill — Julia Pastrana, The Marvellous Hybrid Bear Woman.

The only one whose humanity was in doubt.

‘Is that your name?’ asked Charlotte. ‘That big one there?’

‘It is,’ said Julia.

‘You’re at the top!’ said Charlotte.

Mr Rates came out of the house. ‘We’ve been mentioned in the Picayune ,’ he said, waving a newspaper in one hand and a playbill in the other. ‘Look. I don’t think the words “Bear Woman” are big enough. What do you think, Ede? And don’t you think they should be a fraction higher?’

Madame Soulie put her head on one side and frowned.

‘I think we should seize the current,’ he said, ‘strike while the iron’s hot. What we need for you, Julia, is a good picture.’

‘A photograph?’ Julia sounded amazed.

‘No no. Get someone in to draw you. Pen and ink perhaps.’ Rates smiled. ‘You’d better get used to this, Julia. They’ll be standing in line to draw you, you know. We need a new pamphlet, a separate one, The Life of Miss Julia Pastrana. Same nice ivy design round the letters.’

‘Acanthus, Matt,’ said Madame Soulie, ‘they’re acanthus.’

‘Mr Rates,’ said Julia, ‘I need my costume for the show.’

‘Of course you do. I’ve been thinking about that,’ he said.

He’d promised to buy her a new dress. She’d never worn a dress from a shop before. Solana had made all her clothes till she was old enough to do it for herself.

‘Would it not make sense for me to wear it when I sit for the picture?’ she asked.

‘Very good idea.’ Rates looked surprised. ‘One second.’ He held up one finger, turned and went back into the house.

‘Let’s get out of this heat.’ Myrtle moved away towards the shack. ‘Come on, Julia.’ Inside was scarcely cooler than the yard. Myrtle picked up a palm fan and got onto her bed, settling cross-legged in front of her toilet box.

‘Don’t let him tell you what to wear,’ Delia said, coming in behind. ‘He will if you let him.’

‘He wanted to put me in this downright vulgar thing,’ said Myrtle. ‘Skirt up to here like a whore.’

‘And have you asked about your contract?’

‘Oh no,’ said Julia, ‘I forgot.’

‘No good,’ said Delia, ‘no good at all. You have to look after yourself.’

‘She’s right,’ said Myrtle. ‘You can’t afford to be silly about money. That’s the only thing I learned from my mother.’

‘I remember your mother,’ Delia said. ‘She didn’t know the first thing about money.’ She unwrapped her tignon and her long hair fell down.

‘That’s what I mean.’ Myrtle opened her box and looked at her face in the mirror. ‘She was about as stupid with money as it’s possible to be, my mother, so I said, I’m never going to be like that and I never have.’ She looked at Julia and smiled. ‘She drank, my mother.’ She took out her tweezers, leaned forward and curled her white-bloomered leg up easily to pluck one raised eyebrow. Rates knocked sharply and came in with a red dress lying over his arms. ‘Try this on for size,’ he said to Julia, ‘We can get it cut down a bit.’

Julia took it and held it at arm’s length. Low-cut and short-sleeved, it had a cheap look about it. ‘It’s wrong,’ she said.

‘What do you mean, wrong?’

‘It wouldn’t suit me,’ she said.

Rates laughed, an impatient whicker down his nose.

‘It’s better if I choose my own clothes,’ Julia said.

‘What’s wrong with it?’ said Rates, looking huffy. ‘It’s a nice dress.’

‘Well you know a woman usually knows best what suits her,’ Myrtle said, licking her toe and stroking her eyebrow. She picked up a jar from her box of pastes and powders with her foot, passed it to the other foot and started unscrewing the lid carefully. Her toes had the deftness of fingers.

‘It should be in your contract,’ Delia said, head on one side, combing out her hair.

‘What would you like to wear?’ asked Rates.

She knew exactly. ‘I’ll write down the measurements,’ she said. ‘We could have it made up. But I’d need to see some cloth.’

‘Hm.’ Rates looked puzzled. ‘I thought we could just go into town and…’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I’ve been making clothes all my life. It’s much cheaper. The dress must be right or the dance won’t work, and I know how it should be.’

Rates stuck out his chest and looked sideways, making chewing motions with his thin line of a mouth. ‘Well, I suppose I can get some samples sent over,’ he said, ‘l’ll ask Madame Soulie to arrange it.’

‘I’d rather go shopping,’ said Julia. ‘I don’t want the cloth brought here, I want to go out and see the shops and the market.’

‘She’ll know what to buy,’ said Myrtle, rubbing Creme Celeste into her face.

Charlotte stuck her head round the door. ‘Aunt Soulie wants Julia,’ she said.

‘Julia’s tired.’ Delia threw down the comb and began plaiting her hair down one side.

‘That’s all right,’ said Julia, ‘I’ll come.’

Could have been a doll that got burned, hard to tell. Sitting against an elephant-embroidered cushion, Tattoo, Rose thought, was like a stray dog brought in from the cold. She heard the messy banging of a piano downstairs, went out onto the landing and called down. ‘Adam!’ Her deep voice echoed in the stairwell. When she called again, the piano stopped and he came out on the landing below, covered in paint, a pinch-faced twitchy kind of a person with spiky hair and a crooked jaw that he held in a stiff, unnatural way. ‘What?’ he said irritably.

‘You know exactly what.’

‘Oh, Rose!’

Rose sat down on the top step, imperturbable, smoking a cigarette. ‘No skin off my nose,’ she said, ‘but he’s not going to let you live here rent-free forever.’

Adam hunched his shoulders and kicked the wall sulkily as if he was twenty years younger. ‘End of the month,’ he said. ‘You know that.’

‘End of which month, Ad?’ She smiled. ‘You know Laurie. He’s getting cranky.’

‘Ah but you, Rose, you can always get round him.’ He looked up, a sour twist to his mouth. ‘Use your influence.’

‘Ha.’ She picked a fleck of tobacco from the tip of her tongue. ‘It only goes so far, my dear.’

She’d been an artist’s model, sold pizzas, tried to get by making embroidered skirts, but now she was here, collecting rent for Laurie and passing on messages about leaky taps and blocked toilets, living a whole year now rent-free herself in return for that and her haphazard cleaning services. Fallen on my feet, she sometimes told herself, with a sense of having found a safe berth on a heaving sea.

‘Make a brew, Rosie,’ Adam said, continuing to kick the wall.

She got up, flicking ash into her hand. A shapeless garment the colour of wet sand hung loosely down past her knees, and her legs were bare and brown. ‘Come on then,’ she said.