The Lion Tamer’s Daughter (31 page)

I felt myself blushing like a beetroot. She laughed and kissed me on the cheek but my hands were all covered with soapy water and I couldn't grab her, and then she was back to being Melly.

She came up to Bearsden for her half term. (Janice was working and stayed in Coventry.) Scottish half term wasn't the same as English, so the first two days we only got the evenings together, and the first of them Mum was there so we just sat around and talked. She was different in Bearsden, not just Melly or Melanie, but somewhere between, and older-seeming, very sure of herself without having to prove it to anybody, the way you felt Melanie had needed to.

The second evening Mum said she had to work late. Melly'd got tea ready by the time I was home and she put it on a tray and took it into the living room so that we could sit on the sofa and pretend to watch telly and have a really good cuddle. That was great. God, I was happy.

After a bit she said, “You remember that dream I told you?”

“The nightmare, you mean? About the man taking you across a big field toward a traveling cage with some kind of monster in it?”

“Aye. I had it again.”

“Oh … That sounds bad. Does it mean …?”

“No. It was just the once, and I won't have it anymore. I'll tell you. I was a bairn again, and watching Papa feed his lions, and I went wandering off but there was nobody with me. There was this big field, and over the far side one of the traveling cages, so I went to see. The door was open, so I climbed the step and looked inside, but there was nothing there except this old mirror with its glass all broken. I looked at it awhile, and then I said to myself, ‘I must go and find Papa and show him.' That's what I'll be doing tomorrow.”

“Going to Edinburgh?”

“Aye. It's a thing I must do, and I didn't need the dream to tell me. Do you ken how old I am?”

“Trick question. Not fourteen, anyway?”

“Twenty-eight years I've lived in my two bodies, and I'm not shutting any of them away, or it'll be like having a room in my house I'm scared to go into because there's a ghoulie in it.”

“Can I come too?” I said. Next day was Saturday, and Sunday she was off back to Coventry.

“I was hoping you'd say that,” she said. “We'll tell Trish we're going to Edinburgh, and she'll get the wrong idea, think it's for a sentimental visit to where we met up.”

“She doesn't know anything.”

“She does, too. Got eyes in her head, hasn't she? Bet you couldn't sit still, last few days before I showed up. Why do you think she stayed away tonight?”

“Anyway it isn't the wrong idea,” I said.

“Maybe not,” she said.

Then, later, I said, “Are you going to tell him what happened at the Orangerie? You still don't remember any of that?”

“Nothing. I'll just tell him what you told me.”

“I've worked out a bit more, if you're interested.”

We hadn't talked about this hardly at all since we'd left Arles. She hadn't wanted to know. But I'd been over and over it with Mum and I'd been down to the main library in Glasgow and read everything I could find about doppelgangers and magic mirrors and so on.

“All right,” she said.

“It isn't about what actually happened,” I said. “It's about what Monsieur Albert thought he was trying to do. You remember Eddie reading those bits out of the book while we were having breakfast? And then I interrupted him by asking about the envelope with the hair in it?”

“Yes—but I wasn't paying a lot of heed.”

“Well, one of them was ‘To make two from one.' That's what he did when you were a baby, and I bet there was something in it about how it only lasts for seven years, or fourteen, or whatever, and then the two have to come together again. And there were two others. One was about summoning the phantom—no, the phantasm—of someone who's trapped in the mirror, and one about making someone go into the mirror and bringing out the phantasm. That's what he was doing when I stopped him. You'd have been in the mirror and your phantasm would have been outside, and he'd have passed the phantasm over to us and we'd have thought it was you. It would have been just like you and talked like you, and it might have been a bit dopy but we were used to that, and it wouldn't remember anything, like you don't, and I wasn't supposed to have seen anything that mattered. And then Mum would have paid him the money and we'd all have gone home, and after a bit he'd have called your phantasm back. I don't think it would just have disappeared. I think it would have died, and we'd have buried it and all been very sad, but if we'd dug down and opened the coffin there wouldn't have been anything in it. I found a story like that in the library.”

She thought about it.

“Aye,” she said. “And that's why Papa took me away. And that's what Monsieur Albert would have been doing so late of a night in his caravan, calling his toys out of his mirror, and playing with them any way he wanted. Oh, Keith, it was lucky for me you were in the room with me!”

She was leaning against me, very cozy, but I took her by the shoulders and pushed her away and held her.

“Now, listen,” I said. “OK, it was lucky, and OK, you're grateful, but this isn't anything to do with that. I'd have done that for anybody, for Ken, for somebody I didn't know at all. It's over, and you're grateful, and that's OK. But this is because I really like you, and I'd feel the same if none of that stuff in Arles had ever happened. But if you're just doing it because you think you owe it to me, then I'm not interested.”

She grinned at me.

“Dinna fret yourself, Keith,” she said. “I like you fine. This evening.”

The coach was just getting into Edinburgh when she said, “If this goes right, I'll be coming back here.”

“Leaving Coventry? What will Janice …?”

“No, I get along fine with Mum,” she said. “In fact I was wrong when I told you she didn't feel like a ma—or maybe she always knew inside her there was something missing between us, and now we've found it. She's great, and I wouldn't change her for Trish, even. But still I'm not letting go of Edinburgh, and Annie's and all. I'll be having as much of that as I can fit in, maybe only a couple of weeks of waitressing in the holidays, but that will do fine.”

“What about your dad? Won't he still …?”

“Not if today goes right, he won't.”

I didn't try to tell her she was mad. I didn't even think that. If anybody could do it, she could. And maybe she'd arrange to come to Edinburgh by way of Bearsden. And maybe …

“Can Annie use an extra waiter?” I said. “OK, I'm way under age, but so are you.”

We got in in the middle of the morning and went straight to Annie's, so as to be there before it was busy with customers. It wasn't much of a day for tourists, anyway, in spite of it being Saturday—November, and a thick chill drizzle falling.

M. Perrault was the only person in the restaurant when we went in. He had his back to the door and was polishing his glasses and putting them on the shelf, but he turned to see who it was and stood there, staring. I stayed by the door while Melanie walked between the tables and waited in the middle of the room.

He finished the glass he was holding and put it carefully with the others, and then came out round the bar. His right hand was clenching and unclenching by his belt. His face was almost white. I could see a blue vein on the side of his head bumping in and out as he walked heavily toward her. She looked him in the eyes and took a pace to meet him. I heard her say something in a low voice.

His eyes widened. He stopped. His hand dropped to his side, but the blue vein went on pulsing.

He said something—a question. She answered, only two or three words.

He turned and put his arm on the bar and bent his head, shaking it slowly from side to side.

I must have been holding my breath all this while, because now I noticed I was letting it go. I should have known it was going to be all right, I thought. She is the lion tamer's daughter.

A Biography of Peter Dickinson

Peter Dickinson is a tall, elderly, bony, beaky, wrinkled sort of fellow, with a lot of untidy gray hair and a weird, hooting voice—in fact, he looks and sounds a bit like Gandalf's crazy twin, but he's just rather absentminded, thinking about something else, or daydreaming.

He was born in the middle of Africa, within earshot of the Victoria Falls. Baboons sometimes came into the school playground. When people went swimming in the Zambezi they did it in a big wooden cage let down into the water so that the crocs couldn't get at them. For the hot weather the family went south to his grandfather's sheep and ostrich farm in South Africa.

When Peter was seven the family came back to England so that he and his brothers could go to English schools, where they taught him mostly Latin and Greek. He didn't have an English lesson after he was twelve, and nobody ever told him to write a story. He was fairly good at games.

He's led an ordinary kind of life—not much by way of adventures, but some silly things. Such as? Well, when he had to join the army just after World War II, they managed to turn him into two people, so he was bashing away at infantry training at a camp in Northern Ireland when two seasick military policemen showed up and tried to arrest him for being a deserter from a different camp in the South of England, where his other self was supposed to be bashing away.

He was tutoring a boy in a huge old castle in Scotland when the butler (it was that sort of household) said to him at breakfast one day, “Ah, sir, it's a long time since we heard screams coming from the West Wing!” (Peter's screams, not the boy's.)

And he was knocked down by a tram on his way to the interview for his first job with the magazine
Punch
and arrived all covered with blood and dirt, but they gave him the job because he was the only candidate. He stayed there seventeen years.

He and his first wife had two daughters and two sons, and he now has six grandchildren. He and his second wife, the American writer Robin McKinley, live in an almost-too-pretty country town in the South of England.

Peter says he didn't
become
a writer. He just is one and always has been, ever since he can remember, the way a goldfish is a goldfish and can't be anything else. Go to a zoo and look at one of the big birds, a condor, say, a creature made to soar above the Andes. They've probably clipped one of its wings so that it can't hurt itself trying to fly around its cage, but it's still a creature made to soar above the Andes. If you somehow stopped Peter writing, he'd still be a writer.

But he was a poet and a journalist before he started on books. He tried a murder story first, but got stuck halfway through. Then he had a science fiction–y kind of nightmare and decided to turn it into a children's story, mainly to see if writing it would unstick the other book. (It did. That book won a prize for the best murder story of the year, and the children's book was made into a TV series.)

Since then Peter has written almost sixty books, most of them on a little old portable typewriter—one draft to see what he's got and what else he needs to know and so on, then a bit of research, then a complete rewrite, beginning to end, and then, if all's well, only a bit more tinkering. Sometimes it used to take a few months, sometimes a year or more. A few years back he moved over to a PC. It makes writing seem a very different kind of process—easier in some ways, harder in others.

The ideas come from all over the place—daydreams, sometimes, or a kid on a long car trip saying, “Tell us a new story, Dad.” Or something he's heard or read—a voice on the radio saying, “Even a hardened government soldier may hesitate a fatal half second before he guns down a child.” For the best of them it feels as if the book had knocked on the door of Peter's mind and said, “Write me.” Then he'll spend half a year or more letting the stranger in and finding out who or what it is.

Peter has written all sorts of books—crime mainly for adults, though some of these are almost straight literary novels. For children, he has written fantasies, historical fiction, modern adventure, science fiction, and so on. There won't be many more. They used to come gushing out of the hillside like a mountain stream. Then he had to lift them up bucket by bucket from deeper and deeper wells, but now the wells are empty. He says.

Peter Dickinson was the second of four sons of a British colonial civil servant and a South African farmer's daughter, born December 16, 1927, in the middle of Africa, in Livingstone, Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia).