A Small Free Kiss in the Dark (12 page)
The dancing girl wasn’t really the enemy. I was glad she’d come again even though she was so pale and quiet and teenage. That was before I saw her dance. I didn’t know that she was a bit like me on the inside except she had her dancing and I had my pictures.
Max and me covered up our ancient symbols with our jumpers when we saw her, and we went and told Billy she was back. He was screwing something to the coffee trolley.
‘Is she?’ he said. He didn’t look at us but I got an idea in my head that the girl in the red coat was the visitor Billy had been expecting. ‘Leave her be, she mightn’t want company, yet.’
We looked at what Billy had made and I thought maybe there really was such a thing as a wigwam for a goose’s bridle.
‘What is it, really?’ asked Max.
Billy thought a bit before he answered. ‘It’s a multipurpose kitchen appliance. See, you put your water in the sink bit and then you put your metal cover over the top of it and light your fire down here on the bottom shelf.’
Billy was like the handyman on Sam Kebab’s television, showing us how everything worked. ‘So you can warm things up on the top bit or cook over the coals down the bottom and, bingo! you’ve got your hot water for free! I thought I might take a sheet of plywood off the tunnel wall so we can use it from inside when it’s raining.’
Billy’s invention was brilliant, but it seemed like he was going to a lot of trouble if we weren’t staying long.
‘We’ll leave it here for now, though,’ he said, and I knew he was being careful because of the girl, even though by then she must have guessed we were staying somewhere close by.
‘Is it lunchtime?’ asked Max.
‘If you can wait till I get a fire going, I’ll warm your soup. There’s a plastic bucket in the shed, Max, run and get it for me. You come with me, Skip.’
We crept under the platform at the back of the House of Horrors and went inside. Billy took another piece of mending wire from one of the carriages and then he passed me the big can of fruit salad and some alphabet soup and we went outside again. Inside the handle of Billy’s pocketknife there was a nail file, a tiny pair of scissors, a screwdriver and an opener for tins that didn’t have rings on them. He took the lid off the tins we’d brought outside.
‘Pass me the bucket, Max,’ he said, and he emptied the fruit salad into it. Then he poked a small hole in each side of the empty can, near the top, and threaded the wire through the holes to make a handle. ‘There, now we’ve got a decent-sized saucepan to cook in.’
‘Can I have some fruit salad while we’re waiting?’ asked Max.
‘There’s no rule against having seconds first,’ said Billy. He always called dessert ‘seconds’.
‘Do babies like fruit salad?’
‘Only when they’ve got teeth, Max,’ said Billy.
‘Don’t they have any teeth when they’re born?’
‘No, they have to grow them.’
‘Huh! What do they eat, then?’
‘Milk. They just drink milk.’
‘Boring!’ said Max.
Billy lit the fire and Max got a takeaway coffee cup and a plastic spoon and helped himself to some fruit salad.
‘Are these real cherries, Skip?’ he asked.
‘It says so on the tin.’
We emptied the alphabet soup into the fruit-salad-tin saucepan and then put in some water. When it was warm we sat in the sun behind the tunnel and ate it out of foam coffee cups. Max tried to get all the Ms out first, but it was hard to catch them. We had two cups of soup each, and there was still some left over.
‘Want a bit more, Skip?’ Billy asked.
I shook my head. ‘I’m full.’
Max was full too, and so was Billy. He tipped the rest of the soup into a cup and put the lid on.
‘See if the girl wants it,’ he said and gave it to me. ‘Better wash that war paint off your face first; might scare the baby.’
Max came with me.
‘We’ve brought you some soup.’ I held the cup out.
‘It’s alphabet,’ said Max.
The girl slid down from the pinto, took the baby out from underneath her coat and laid it on the seat in the Roman Carriage of War. Then she took the cup from my hands and sat down next to the baby. It was wrapped up in a blanket with blue dinosaurs on it, so you couldn’t see its starfish hands, only its face. It looked like one of the cherubs carved on the carousel, except it was sleeping. I wondered if babies dreamt and what they dreamt about. Max got into the carriage and sat opposite the baby, then I got in and sat next to Max. The girl sipped her soup and didn’t look at us. She said, ‘Where’s the old man?’
‘He’s around,’ I said.
‘You live here?’
‘No.’ Max looked at me and I felt my face get hot, even though it wasn’t really a lie.
‘Are you the baby’s mother?’ said Max.
The girl didn’t answer. She took another sip of her alphabet soup and then another one until it was all gone. Then she leant back against the chariot and folded herself and the baby into her coat, closed her dark eyes and shut us out.
We went inside. Max and me drew on butchers’ paper and then I showed him how to fold it to make cranes, which are birds, not machines, and they’re supposed to bring good luck. When I looked out of the skeleton’s eyes again, the girl and the baby were gone, so Max and me helped Billy take a panel off the back of the House of Horrors and put his new invention in place. Then he lit the fire, and that night we washed ourselves with hot water and soap and dried ourselves by the coals. When Max and me went to bed, Billy blew into his harmonica. He played all the places he’d ever been, all the sights he’d ever seen, the people he’d loved and the ones he hadn’t. He played the blue times, the red, the yellow and the black.
You might think what I tell you next is all a dream, or that I’ve imagined it. I can’t help it if that’s what you think, but I swear it’s true. Sometimes the truest things are the hardest to believe.
Maybe it was the moonlight leaking through the holes in the roof that woke me, or perhaps it was the music. In the part of me where memories are kept there’s a small black box. I don’t know how it got in there. It’s just a plain, ordinary box and its corners are worn smooth. But when I look inside I see that it’s lined with crumpled silk, I hear music that makes my heart ache, and a china ballerina in a pure white dress dances around and around and around. The music was playing in my head when I woke up.
I took Dad’s overcoat off the nail and put it on. I felt in the pocket for my chalks, and stepped outside. Mist swirled between the deserted rides like tired old ghosts. I didn’t hear the sounds of war, just sea sighs and the music that made my heart ache.
I was almost past the refreshment pavilion when I saw a movement from the corner of my eye. I stepped inside, into the shadows. Moonlight poured in through the broken roof and I saw the girl in the far corner of the room. She had her back to me and was taking her clothes off, layer after layer of the rags and tatters she carried around on her back like Billy and me did, because we had no place to leave them. Underneath everything else she wore something that looked like nothing, and fitted like her skin. She looked soft and newborn like a butterfly escaping its cocoon. I watched as she tied her cobweb hair away from her face and stepped up on a small wooden stage where she bowed herself down under the moonlight and raised herself up to the stars and stilled herself to listen to the music that only we could hear. Then she let the dance come out of her.
I’d never seen a person dance before, not in real life, not this kind of dancing. I didn’t know how to look at it or what I was supposed to see. I searched for all the things I looked for in a painting: line, colour and movement, light and shade. This girl danced like light on water. After I’d watched for a while I looked with all of me, not just my eyes, and then I saw the meaning of the dance. I wanted to stop looking because it was so sad, but I couldn’t because it was so beautiful.
Then the baby cried and the ballerina stopped and picked it up. I wasn’t scared any longer. I came close and the girl looked at me and she must have known I’d seen the meaning of her dance because it was still shining in my eyes. I touched the baby’s starfish hands and they were as cold as a merchild’s. I drew flowers on the stage for the ballerina while she fed her baby something from a bottle. When I’d finished I reached out and touched her wrist and she let me wrap my fingers around her scars.
Sometimes words come out of me and I don’t know where they come from or why. They’re like falling stars tumbling through the universe; bright, burning things that can’t be stopped. That’s what happened when I looked into the ballerina’s pansy eyes.
‘Billy won’t hurt you,’ I said. I’d seen his fists and I’d heard his sharp words, but I’d felt his gentle hand around mine and I’d seen him cry for poor Bradley Clark. Now I understood that Billy was like my dad: that the only person he fought with was himself. ‘He gets mad sometimes,’ I told the girl, ‘but he’s like the mother and the father of Max and me and he’s our best friend.’
I knew she’d been waiting for those words because afterwards she let me take her and the baby to Billy and to Max.
A sixpence is a small and silver coin from the olden days. It’s worth less than a shilling but more than a penny; it’s worth six pennies. It was called ‘sixpence’ because ‘pence’ is short for ‘pennies’.
Billy says an old sixpence is worth about the same as five new cents. He also says, ‘No man is poor who has sixpence in his pocket.’ That’s a wise saying he made up all by himself. I know it’s true, because now we’ve got Sixpence.
There’s a song about a sixpence. It’s a nursery rhyme that we learnt from Billy. He used to sing it to the baby who belonged to the dancing girl whose name was Tia. This is the way the song goes:
‘I love sixpence, pretty little sixpence,
I love sixpence better than my life.
I spent a penny of it, I lent another of it,
I carried four pence home to my wife.’
Max knew another nursery rhyme about sixpence, but this was the one Billy liked best. We called Tia’s baby Sixpence, because Billy used to sing the song to her all the time.
Tia said it was a stupid name, but she wouldn’t tell us the baby’s real name. In the beginning, I never heard her call the baby anything. She didn’t talk to any of us much and sometimes she went away by herself and left Sixpence with us. To begin with I was scared we’d make a mistake, because we didn’t know much about babies; Billy was an old man, Max was just a kid and I was somewhere in between.
Even though they can’t talk, babies have a sort of secret language. You’ve got to figure out what their different kinds of crying mean. It seemed like Sixpence was always crying until we got better at telling what she wanted. We had to learn fast because of the sandbag wall.
In the mornings or late at night, when Max and me were sleeping, Billy would go down to the boardwalk. He’d meet travellers from the city on their way to someplace else and they’d swap information and share cigarettes. Billy sometimes told us things he’d found out from the travellers and sometimes he’d say nothing. One morning someone explained why the sandbag wall was being built.
‘They’re sending in peacekeepers,’ he said.
‘Does that mean the war’s over?’ I asked Billy. A thousand thoughts about what this would mean for us waited for me to pay them attention.
‘No, they just come to make sure no one breaks the rules.’
‘What rules?’
‘Rules of war.’
I didn’t know there were any rules of war. ‘But it’ll be good when they get here, won’t it?’
‘They’re soldiers and they’ll be armed. Keep well away from them. Don’t go anywhere near them sandbags, do you hear?’
Billy’s eyes got a wild look in them and his lips clammed up. I knew better than to ask any more questions. I wondered if we were already breaking one of the rules: the one about trespassing in No-Man’s-Land.
The peacekeepers were why we started paying special attention to Sixpence. We couldn’t let her cry too much. Usually she wanted one of two things: milk or a nappy change. I didn’t mind feeding her, but the nappy part was disgusting. I tried to get out of it, but Billy said we had to take turns.
Babies need a lot of things we didn’t have, so Billy, Max and me went looking for a charity bin. Tia didn’t want to come. The first bin we found was so full I couldn’t get inside the slot. The next one was a lot further away, but it was only half full. I stood on Billy’s back and pulled myself in. It was a soft landing but it was difficult to sort through all the clothes while I was in there.
‘Just chuck things out,’ Billy shouted. ‘We’ll look at them out here.’
We got a few thin towels and baby clothes, but Billy pounced on some old sheets. ‘That’s what we need!’ he said. ‘We’ll rip them up and make nappies. Now let’s see if we can find some milk powder.’
We walked to the supermarket we’d been to last time, but there’d been a fire. The shop was an empty shell, except for the melted metal shelves and burnt-out fridges. Billy didn’t say anything; there was no need to – anyone could see it would be useless going in. We walked for a long time till at last there were shops ahead: a chemist, a post office, and a fish-and-chip shop with clouds of thick black smoke pouring from the footpath outside. A bunch of guys were setting plastic chairs on fire and hurling them across the road like fireballs.