The Lion Tamer’s Daughter (18 page)

We got to the edge of a big open place, playing fields and such, when this other dog came lolloping across. It was a large, bony thing, yellowy brown. It didn't seem to have an owner. It probably just wanted a sniff, the way dogs do, but Karen's mum got all anxious and started trying to shoo it off.

It didn't like that. It stopped in its tracks and looked at her. It put its head down and the fur on its shoulders stood straight up and it began stalking slowly toward us, growling in its throat as it came. All of a sudden it looked really scary.

Karen's mum started to back off, gabbling to Karen to pick the puppy up and telling the rest of us to get behind her. Then Melly walked past her and faced the dog.

“Beat it,” she said. “Go on. Beat it.”

The dog stopped and looked at her. It was still growling and the hair was still up on its shoulders, but you could see it was making up its stupid mind.

“Beat it,” said Melly again, not yelling or anything, just talking like a tough teacher who knows you're going to do what he tells you, so you might as well. She was still walking slowly toward the dog.

It looked away, still growling, and then it swung round and lolloped off.

Karen's mum didn't say thank you. In fact she began rabbiting on at Melly about being stupid, and dogs like that are dangerous, but Melly smiled at her and said, “It's all right. My dad's a lion tamer.”

That shut her up for a moment, so we said “See you” to Karen and the others and went off our way, but we could hear Karen's mum telling them about dangerous dogs for quite a distance.

“Is he really?” I asked her. “How come you never told me?”

“Yes, but Mum doesn't like me talking about him,” she said. “If any of the others ask you, tell them I said that just to stop Karen's mum from going on at me.”

A bit before I was fourteen, Dad died. He was sitting in his chair, talking about this rugby match we'd been watching on TV, when he stopped with his mouth wide open. For a moment he just stuck there, but before we could do anything his arms jerked up—you could see he couldn't help it, it was as if they were being yanked around from outside him—and then he was jerked to his feet with his face gone all sort of sideways and his tongue sticking out, and then he gave a couple of shudders and keeled over half across the chair. Mum was screaming. I got to the phone and rang for the ambulance.

The men did all the things you see on TV, but I knew it wasn't any use. He was dead already. There hadn't been any warning. He'd never had a heart attack before, not even a twinge. It just happened like that. Bang, you're dead.

Mum didn't know what to do. That's not just a way of talking, it's what I mean. I'd never caught on before how much Dad mattered to her. He was what she was for. Take him away, and she wasn't for anything. (Except me, I suppose, but I'm not sure it wasn't because I was
his
son, mainly.) Sailing, for instance. I said they were both crazy about it, but the fact is she was crazy about it because he was. If he'd been crazy about gardening or something, she'd have been crazy about that too. It wasn't that he was selfish and made her go sailing—she really loved it because he'd shown her how to love it, and neither of them could understand why that didn't work with me.

Anyway, she wasn't going sailing without him, so she sold the boat and the cottage. And they'd lived in our house in Coventry ever since they were married, and she didn't want to be reminded of him every time she opened the door, so she sold that too. Her job was helping with the costumes for the Royal Shakespeare over at Stratford. Theater people all know each other and I think she must be pretty good because she got herself a new job almost at once, working for the Scottish Opera in Glasgow. So we left Coventry and went to live up there.

One other thing before I go on. My dad was a good careful guy who liked to do things right. He was pushing forty when he married Mum, and she was only nineteen, so he'd taken out proper insurance for her. Not that he'd expected to die that young—he was only fifty-five—but it meant that she had a bit of money to help us get by.

Glasgow wasn't that bad, in fact I found the change easier than Mum did. She'd got her work, but she didn't seem to want to go out or make friends or anything. Some of the kids at school tried to give me a hard time about being English and not Scottish, but nothing I couldn't handle, and I soon found a crowd to hang around with. Our new house was nice, not in the rough bits you hear about but out on the edge, a place called Bearsden, with little farms and steep hills and a golf course close behind. I hit it off with a boy called Ken who lived fairly near. He was nuts on bird-watching and summer was coming on, so we did a lot of that.

But it was amazing how much I missed Melly. There wasn't anything special about her I missed, it was having someone like that around, someone just there. I'd get home from school, evenings, and put the kettle on and without thinking I'd get two mugs out of the cupboard.… The one Melly used had an elephant on it. I put it right at the back of the shelf, but I still found myself looking for it.

This is going to sound silly, because we weren't in love or anything, Melly and me, let alone being married seventeen years, but missing her like that gave me a bit of an idea how my mum must be feeling. We wrote to each other sometimes, and we tried telephoning, but it wasn't the same. We didn't want to chat, we just wanted to have each other around. I'm guessing about her. She didn't say and neither did I. It's not the sort of thing you
can
say.

Scottish Opera doesn't stay in Glasgow all the time. They go on tours all around Britain, and abroad sometimes. The costumes are all made by then, but they have to take a couple of people from the wardrobe department along to do last-minute fixings. Mum doesn't usually do that, but that first year, just as they were starting off to do a fortnight in Edinburgh at the beginning of the tour, one of the people got hit by a van and had her leg broken, and the other one got stranded on holiday somewhere, so Mum agreed to do the Edinburgh fortnight. I stayed over at Ken's and stopped in at home every evening to feed the cats and check the post and the phone messages.

At the weekend Ken fed the cats for me while I went up to Edinburgh on the bus. She'd said to pick her up at the theater, but when I found her they'd got a crisis on, with a stand-in soprano who was a good bit shorter and fatter than the one the costumes were for. I said OK, I'd go out and bum around Edinburgh for a bit and be back at lunch-time. Someone said to go and look at the castle, which seemed a good idea, but I took a wrong turn and found myself moseying up Princes Street. If you don't know Edinburgh I'd better describe it. There's this sort of canyon running into the middle of the city. It's laid out as a park, with the castle along the top on one side and this famous street on the other, so that you can walk along looking out over the park at the battlements and stuff up on the skyline. There's steps and paths going down and up the other side. There's a lot of stuff for tourists, buskers with bagpipes, tartan souvenirs, that sort of thing, and classy shops the other side. It's worth seeing.

I walked along as far as the last lot of steps and started down them. They zigzagged to and fro. Turning one of the corners about halfway down, I saw a couple of girls coming up. One of them was Melly. She was chattering away like she used to, with all the body language going. I stopped dead in my tracks and stared. Then I saw her hair was all wrong and she was wearing a mass of makeup and smoking a fag, so I stared some more. I couldn't help it. She was staring back by now, but she'd have done that anyway, the way I was gawping at her. She said something to the other girl, who stayed where she was while the one I'd thought was Melly came stamping up the steps—she was wearing Doc Martens—straight at me. I was still thinking how to say sorry when she said in a low, furious voice, “Hey! You were in that effing boat when I was chucking up!”

She didn't say “effing,” of course. Most of the kids I know swear a bit, some of them every third word, like breathing. Melly was one of the ones who'd sorted out it was cooler not to. Anyway, I knew exactly what this girl was talking about. It was one of the weekends Melly had come to Penmaenan and it had been pretty good sailing weather and Dad had talked her into giving it a go and she'd been as seasick as hell.

“That's right,” I said. “That was at Penmaenan.”

“That was in an effing dream!” she said, still furious.

“It was real, Melly,” I said.

“Melanie,” she snapped. She did a double take and stopped being furious.

“How come you ken my name?” she said.

Yes,
ken
. But she had a funny accent. Edinburgh people talk different from other Scots, but this was something else.

“You're Melly—I mean Melanie—Perrault,” I said.

“Perrault,” she said, putting me right. It's a French name, because Melly's dad was French. This girl made it
sound
French.

“What's your name?” she said.

“Keith,” I told her.

“What more do you ken?” she said.

(Really she said something like “What mair dae ye ken?” but I'm not going to try and write like that. I hate reading dialect, and I wouldn't get it right, and anyway that would make her sound much too Scots. She had this other accent—French, I guessed, from the way she'd said her name. What I'll do is use some of her words, like “ken” for “know” and “aye” for “yes.” She sometimes said “wilna” and “dinna” instead of “won't” and “don't” and so on, but mostly she said them the English way, so I'll stick to that. I'm not going to try and do anything about her accent—it was too weird. What's more it shifted about. Sometimes it was much stronger than others, but it was always there a bit. While I'm at it, I'll leave out most of the swearing, but she didn't do that all the time either.)

So what else did I know? I didn't know where to begin.

“Your name's Melanie Perrault, and you live, you used to live, in Coventry, like I did, and you went to Ashley Junior with me and then Ashley High, and we'd walk home to my place after school because your mum—”

She grabbed my wrist so hard that her nails dug in. She'd been frowning and shaking her head about what I'd been telling her, but now she stared as if she was trying to look right into my head.

“Promise this isn't a put-on,” she said.

“Promise,” I said.

She thought.

“All right. When I'm at … your place, I get to have my own mug.”

“That's right,” I said. “The one with the elephant on it.”

“And yours is a green one with white spots,” she said.

“It got broke in the move,” I said.

“What's my ma's name, then?”

“Janice.”

“Janice,” she said, trying it out. I guessed she'd known about the elephant but not about Janice. She was pale now under the makeup, and trembling. She took a long suck at her fag and threw it away.

“Wait there,” she said, and went running down to the other girl. They talked for a bit. The body language was different. The other girl was obviously fascinated and wanted to join in, but Melanie wasn't having any. In the end the other girl came on up the steps, pretty sulky, staring at me as she went past. Melanie came up behind her, a bit calmer now.

“Probably thinks I've gone on the game,” she said.

“Funny kind of place to start,” I said.

She looked at me for the first time as if I was human, and smiled. The way she did it was so like my Melly when I'd said something to amuse her, my heart almost stopped.

“Got any money?” she said.

“A few quid.”

“Buy me a Coke?”

“OK.”

She took me to a place up another lot of steps, in a sort of shopping mall, with booths and big windows looking out at the castle. Soon as we were sitting down she lit up again. The pack was empty so she threw it away.

“It's got to be there's two of us,” she said. “Twins. When they split up they took one each and they never told us about the other one. What's she like, then?”

“Spitting image of you,” I said. “Except she doesn't smoke and she doesn't do makeup, much.”

“Right little pious snob, then? Bet she doesn't dress this way, neither.”

I haven't said that as well as the Doc Martens she was wearing fishnet stockings with tears in them and a fake leather mini and a shiny red jacket and she'd got her hair short and chopped-about.

“She would, too, if Janice let her,” I said. “Tell you what, a bit before we came north she was having one of her dopy fits and she was drawing in a dreamy kind of way and when she'd finished she showed me. ‘That's me looking at myself in the mirror,' she said. It could've been you, now. Lipstick and all. The fag, even.”

“Jesus!” she said. “Just after Christmas, this would be?”

“Around then. We came north in January.”

“I bought this lot with my Christmas money, and I remember what a kick it was trying it on in the shop, and feeling effing great looking at myself in the mirror until this cow of a woman came and told me it was no smoking in there. She tell you about that?”

“No. But … she made a sort of sour face and tore the drawing up.”

“Yeah.… You said dopy fits.”

“When she sort of goes away for a bit.”

“Me too. That's when I get these dreams. Not like night-dreams—they're something else—but … Jesus! She'll have been watching what I've been up to! Not just watching, neither—doing it along of me. Like me being sick in that effing boat!”

She looked a bit shaken by the thought, but then she laughed—Melly all over again.

“Well, she'll have learnt a thing or two,” she said, “and maybe she wouldn't have learnt them in … Coventry? Right? I knew it had to be England, someplace. OK, then—tell me about my ma. Skinny, with red hair—right?”