The Lion Tamer’s Daughter (15 page)

“I can't hear you, you know.”

A different shrug. A different gesture.
Doesn't matter
.

“The question is, are you going to stay around when they stop giving me the medicine. I suppose I could go on being ill, but the runs are going to be tricky to fake.”

Sorry, you've lost me
.

“Forget it, I was just talking.”

And even that much talk had been an effort. He closed his eyes and lay still, enjoying the feel of his own body slowly righting itself, of the goodness in the soup starting to seep its way through his digestion toward his bloodstream.

Giovanni stayed with him all afternoon while he dozed and woke and chatted for a minute or two at random and lay silent until he dropped off to sleep again. Finally he woke and found Giovanni gone, and a minute later heard the footsteps, followed by the roaring of the stove. This time, though, the man fed him a new kind of medicine, a sweet yucky cream, and left him with two soft-boiled eggs and some bread and a bottle of some sort of commercial drink, fizzy and sweet. Peering at the tiny print on the label, barely legible in the dim light, Dave worked out that it must be something like Gatorade, with glucose in it. They were looking after their sick animal pretty well, he thought. They'd got the vet in, and now they were following instructions, so it had better be worth their while. He peeled the eggs, put them in the bowl, and mopped them up with the bread, enjoying every mouthful. Giovanni did not return, and in an hour or so it was dark. He slept all night as peacefully as if he had been in his own bed.

Next morning Dave was already dressed by the time he heard the footsteps, so he rose and stood facing the wall and wearing the hood as he had done before his illness. He had debated whether to do this or to go on being an invalid, and had decided that he would rather choose himself to do it than wait to be told to. The man didn't call out, and grunted to himself when he came in and saw Dave standing there, but this gave Dave no satisfaction because by then the old dread had descended. The man removed the hood and blindfolded him so as to feed him more of the new medicine. When he'd gone Dave found that as well as breakfast—bread and cold chicken—he'd left a plastic bag with clean clothes, used but fresh-smelling and about the right size.

Dave changed, folding the old clothes into the bag, and ate his breakfast. Next, falling back without thought into the old routine, he prized his nail from the crack and knelt by the calendar stone to record a fresh day. He'd decided to leave a gap for his illness, but as he started to scratch the first mark he was aware of Giovanni standing by his shoulder, though he had neither heard nor seen him come. He looked up.

“Hi,” he said. “How many days is it, do you know? I lost count.”

Giovanni held his hand up with fingers and thumb spread.

“Thanks,” said Dave, and carefully scratched the five marks in, and then dimmed them with dirt. After the first two, which had overlapped with what he thought of as Giovanni's old calendar, he had allowed his line to dip so that it ran along the gap between Giovanni's first and second lines, matching the one above it day for day. It was part of the whole business of keeping himself human, deciding on the right way to do the few small things he could do of his own will, and then doing them right. That was how Giovanni had kept himself human too. It was important not to cover up his older record, so that both of them would still be there to find long after Dave, too, was gone.

When he had finished he went back and lightly touched in Giovanni's first nineteen marks, just enough so that they shouldn't be lost.

“OK?” he said.

Giovanni smiled and raised a thumb.

“Right,” said Dave. “I don't know whether I'm up to checkers, but shall we give it a go? I sort of remember someone mucking around with the straw when I was ill. Let's hope they didn't find them.”

In fact the checkers were where he had left them, under the bedding close in against the wall, but by the time he had drawn the board and laid them out he was exhausted and had to lie down. Giovanni settled cross-legged by the bed and waited patiently. It didn't seem to make any difference to him whether he sat on the hard flagstones or the straw. Of course if your body's not really there, Dave thought, it probably can't feel things. It doesn't ache or get cramp or pins and needles from staying too long in one position. But to look at, Giovanni seemed just as “there” as he had yesterday—still somehow not quite solid, but opaque and definite. The change of medicine didn't seem to have made any difference. That was something.

“OK,” he said after a while, “let's give it a go.”

He scooped a couple of armfuls of straw nearer the board, spread one of the blankets onto it, and lay down on his side, propping himself on his elbow. Giovanni settled opposite him.

“This is great,” said Dave. “You can just point to me what you want. You start.”

They played a slow game. Dave needed to rest a couple of times more but he kept his end up and they finished in a draw. His next rest drifted into a doze, and when he woke he realized that several hours must have passed. What's more, he was now actually hungry. He didn't feel like another game, so he simply lay and talked, or else just lay, barely thinking.

“Another thing about my dad,” he said at one point, “he's got a pretty good voice. He says he wanted to be a professional singer—folk, like Pete Seeger or someone—but his dad made him go into Doggony Ribs instead. I don't think that's true. I think it's just one of the things he tells himself. He just loves being rich, you see, and having his own airplane and stuff, but that doesn't mean he can't sing really nicely. He's got a banjo he takes camping, and he likes to sit on a rock by the fire and sing when we've finished eating. Songs like ‘El Paso' and ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky' and ‘Tom Dooley.' I mean, how phoney can you get? Here's this fifty-year-old guy who makes his living selling junk food, and he's sitting out on a piece of prairie which he owns far as you can see, every direction, and he's got his over-the-top cowboy outfit and his forty-thousand-dollar horse and he's singing these corny old songs … and it's great! There's stars and night smells and stuff, and the fire dying, and maybe a moon getting up so you can see a bit of snow along the tops of the mountains, and you sing your heart out. Me too. I can't sing like Dad, but that doesn't matter—I can follow. And they're terrific to sing, whatever anyone says. You know ‘Tom Dooley'?”

Giovanni shook his head.

“I don't suppose you would,” said Dave. “It's very American. I'd never heard it till Dad sang it. The story's a bit hard to get, but I think it's about this guy called Tom Dooley who killed some woman and went on the run. And he was hiding out in Tennessee when another guy called Grayson tracked him down and brought him back to face trial. And now he's been tried and he's waiting to be executed. Right? It starts straight in on the chorus:

“
Hang down your head, Tom Dooley
.

Hang down your head and cry
.

Hang down your head, Tom Dooley
.

Poor boy, you're going to die
.

“Give it a go?

“
Hang down your head
…

“What's up?”

Giovanni wasn't singing. Or smiling. Instead he was looking at Dave, who was lying half propped on the straw. He shook his head and gave one of his small shrugs, not getting it, bothered.

“Oh, come on, Giovanni. It's only a song! It doesn't mean anything. Anyway, I'm not. Not yet. If your calendar's anything to go by—supposing it was yours—it'll be three months, minimum, before they decide to cut their losses and pack it in. Anything can happen in three months. And I'm not going to stop singing my favorite songs because of these bastards!

“
Hang down your head, Tom Dooley
.

Hang down your head and cry
…”

He watched Giovanni's lips start to move, and they sang all four lines together.

“
I met her on the mountain
…”

sang Dave, and at the end of the verse conducted Giovanni into the chorus again. He sang with more than enjoyment, with a kind of exhilaration, discovering as he did so that what he'd just said without thinking was in fact true. He was not going to stop singing his favorite songs because of these bastards. That was another thing they couldn't take away from him, even if he had to sing them under his breath.

This mood was still on him when, a little later, Giovanni got up and slipped off into his corner. Dave heard the sound of a hard shoe on the stair, so he knew it was the man with the voice, but as he stood by the wall with the hood over his head and his arms above his shoulders and listened to the man moving about, he realized that for the first time he wasn't being crushed and made stupid by fear. Not that he had any impulse to demonstrate this by rebelling in some small way. He would go on being the model prisoner, but because he chose to—it was the only sensible thing—and not because he was paralyzed into obedience by fear. Right to the end he never lost that certainty.

Day followed day and then week followed week, almost without variation, until Dave's marks reached the end of the calendar stone and he started a second line. He wasn't ill again, but he didn't really get better either. He stayed weak and tired, and slept off and on through the day, sometimes even going into a doze halfway through a game of checkers. Then he would wake and find Giovanni sitting waiting the other side of the board, and he'd apologize and Giovanni would make his forget-it gesture, as if he had all the time in the universe. Which he had, of course.

Occasionally Dave still reminded himself that Giovanni wasn't real, not even a real ghost—that he was Dave's own hallucination which he kept up to stop himself from going mad. But mostly he didn't think about it. Giovanni was there all right, and he was probably the ghost of someone who'd been held for ransom here by the goons' fathers, or grandfathers, even, until either he'd died of some illness or they'd killed him. It was sad, but it had happened so long ago that the sadness didn't seem to matter much anymore, even to Giovanni.

Being a ghost didn't make Giovanni seem much more different than being an Italian, but Dave couldn't quite forget it. Not being able to hear anything he said was one thing. Another was that he didn't like to be touched. Dave from the first had felt that it would have been a sort of bad manners to force his own solidity and reality onto Giovanni's vagueness, his hardly-thereness, by coming into contact with it, and after a while he noticed that Giovanni too was careful to keep his distance. Neither of them wanted to be reminded, more than they could help, of the immense difference between them, the difference between being alive and being dead.

Giovanni would show up while Dave was marking the calendar stone after breakfast, standing behind Dave's shoulder, watching. They'd exchange greetings and Dave would finish making the mark and rub a bit of dirt into it, and then he'd use the nail to draw out the checkerboard and fetch the pieces and they'd play a first game. They didn't play endlessly, starting another game as soon as they'd finished the first, but spaced them out, playing two or three in the morning and again in the afternoon. They took it seriously, thinking about their moves sometimes for several minutes at a time. And Dave thought they were getting better, learning about it from practice, though they still played about level.

Toward the end of the day they had a singsong, all Dad's songs Dave could remember, though he'd had to make up lines to fit the tunes for some of them. They always finished with “Tom Dooley.” As far as Dave was concerned it was a sort of talisman. He could sing it because it wasn't about him. It meant he was going to live tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that … He kept his voice down, of course. The goons would punish him if they heard him making any kind of noise you could hear out on the hillside. But, singing quietly, he still gave it all he'd got.

One thing did change, but so gradually that for a long time Dave didn't realize it was happening. He started to hear Giovanni's voice, not the actual words, but the sound of the words, like the sound of a radio turned so low that you can only just hear that somebody's speaking, but not what they're saying. Because of the cicadas shrilling in the bushes outside it was never really silent in the cell. Dave was so used to them that he didn't normally notice them, but they were there and at first they drowned out the faint whisper of Giovanni's voice. Then either it grew slowly stronger or Dave learnt to listen through the noise of the cicadas, but still without noticing he started to hear it. Not that Giovanni spoke much—there wasn't any point—but once Dave had registered that it was happening he realized that he'd been taking it for granted for a long while.

It must have been a foul day outside. Inside the cell it was almost too dark to play checkers. It was cold, too. Dave wore one of the blankets over his clothes, keeping it on by clutching it round his neck. The man who had brought his food had squelched as he moved, and now Dave could hear the hiss of rain into the bushes outside. The wind threshed to and fro. The cicadas were silent.

Dave was staring at the board, concentrating on a chain of possible moves, when Giovanni spoke.

“Hey! I heard that!” said Dave.

Giovanni smiled and pointed at the airholes. His lips moved. It seemed lighter outside and the rain seemed to have stopped and the wind for the moment had died away, almost into silence.

“Yeah, I know,” said Dave. “It's going to turn out fine, after all, and a fat lot of good it'll do either of us. But listen, I heard you! Don't you get it? You said something loud enough for me to hear.”

Giovanni looked surprised, frowned, and spoke slowly with a lot of lip movement. Dave caught the faint whisper—three syllables, and the upward lilt of a question.