Tidetown (10 page)

I will not move. I need not move
.

As the months passed by, standing in the sawdust of the circus ring, some part of me became the Harlequin, as if it were my duty, my calling. Though the food tasted strangely of nothing, what with my having no tongue to speak of, I grew tall and lean and they put me to work. The lights and the crowd and the circus. The dancing bear, muzzled and staggering around on its hind legs, like a demented drunk. The lions roaring at the indignity of not being allowed to bite off the hand that fed them. And shiny seals balancing brightly coloured balls on the tips of their noses. Acrobats defying gravity as they somersaulted and landed in a slow-motion roll. The horses clip-cloppetting around the ring, dainty maids in ballet frocks sitting side-saddle as they waved at the crowd that was beguiled by the colours and movement, wonder and majesty
.

And then our turn came. To bring on the clowns. I walked sedate, aloof, full of history, as the three others guffawed and tumbled, tripped and stumbled in their oversized costumes, red noses and clumsy antics. My black-and-white clothes, ageless chalk-white face and elegance. The lights, the laughter, the crowds, the applause. My captive audience. My circus life
.

The Old Harlequin stopped beating me. There was no need. I took to the role with ease. With each show my Harlequin self grew. We travelled among unknown men in lands beyond the sea, rarely stopping a week in one place. The Big Top would be hauled up in hail or shine, huge iron pegs hammered into icy fields or muddy showgrounds. I shared a battered and ancient caravan (bought from a dying gypsy) with my Clown Family: Big Foot, Tear Drop and Coco. The three would work through new routines of ridicule and pantomime. All the while I would listen, silent to the world, my Harlequin self detached and ephemeral. Years and towns rolled by. Familiar venues were revisited. Village greens and paddocks, racecourses, schoolyards and seafronts. Then one day we returned to Tidetown, a sleepy fishing port, lashed by the winter rains drifting in from the Northern Sea. It was night in the town square. I was walking with the three clowns, each older and worse for wear, returning from a night at The Sailor's Arms. I looked up and saw two sisters framed in an attic window. Up on the hill the huge tarpaulin was being lifted from its frame, the seats unscrewed from the stands, all to be packed away on the trailers for the next venue across the moors. The two girls, twins, I thought, seemed to dismiss us, barely noticed us. Was it the drunken antics of my worn-out and threadbare companions that bothered me? I watched the three bounce off each other like fools. I was a Harlequin. I had history. I had dignity. I had to run away from the circus
.

As he slows to a halt Brother Paul bows his head. When he looks up there is a single tear trickling down his cheek. Zakora stands up and embraces his dear friend. To hold him. To make him whole.

What Angelica wants, Angelica gets. Lying on her bed she re-reads the latest letter from Perch and Carp, the second to come in the same week. It commands her to follow up on the conversation they had during Angelica's visit. A squiggle above the word ‘command' is the only sign of a confused and uncertain prison censor. On the handmade writing paper, written with the gold-nibbed fountain pen (the gifts she had sent to the twins), their letter speaks of their ‘sisterhood', of their ‘future together'.

Angelica thinks hard, screwing up her face in concentration. She knows her father well and how she can sway him. He is at his most vulnerable, his most pliable, when she is in despair. She knows that he can hardly bear his only daughter's grief. For him, it's as if he is watching her crying for her dead mother all over again. She looks around her room, seeking a plan, a solution.
This will have to be big
, she thinks,
very big
. She lies back on her bed staring up at the Arabian Nights fresco painted onto her ceiling. Then she looks around the room for inspiration. Scanning the surfaces her eyes settle on the window ledge and a smile forms on her face, her cheeks dimple, as if butter wouldn't melt in her mouth. She claps her hands in glee as she climbs from her bed, walks to the bay window and picks up the fine crystal vase.

Next morning she is up early, dressed in her freshly pressed jodhpurs, crisp white shirt and beige riding jacket. She pulls on her shiny black leather boots, dons her riding cap, takes her whip in her hand and skips down the stairs, out the front door and across the courtyard to the stable.

True Beauty, her beloved horse, nuzzles into her neck as Angelica leads him down the lane to the meadow and the open country beyond. This morning is crisp and bright and the horse snorts and neighs as Angelica rides him hard through the forest and dale, urging him to jump gates and hedges. When they return to the stable he is covered in sweat, thirsty and ravenously hungry. He drinks long and lustily from the trough as Angelica prepares his food. She opens up his nosebag, mixing in the oats and hay. Then from a satchel she had left in the stable overnight, she takes the finely ground glass from the crystal vase and shakes it into the food mix as if it were a sugary treat. Tying the bag around the horse's neck she strokes his mane and bids him to eat. Leaving him to his feast she returns to the house, skipping along the gravel path from the stables.

She goes to her bedroom, changes out of her riding clothes and then joins her father for breakfast. It is not long before she hears the commotion outside.

‘Sir, please … come quick,' calls Hoppy, the stable boy, peering through the open window to the sitting room. ‘It's True Beauty.'

The mayor, having just finished his meal, burps loudly.

‘What is it?' screams Angelica. ‘My beauty, my True Beauty!'

She runs outside towards the stable with Hoppy trailing his club foot behind and the mayor lumbering along, the kippers and grapefruit sloshing around inside his bulging belly.

Uriah Jones, the stable master, is already there, restraining the prostrate horse, holding it down by the neck as it thrashes and convulses, a frothy bloody mess bubbling around its mouth. Angelica screams at the sight, startling her father to quicken his pace to as hot a pursuit as he can possibly muster. As the mayor arrives at the stall, puffing and blowing and close enough himself to expiring, Uriah Jones takes the stethoscope from his ears and solemnly shakes his head. The horse splutters and rattles and then sinks into death. Angelica explodes into hysteria as she throws herself upon her lifeless pet. She blubbers and hollers.

‘My Beauty, my one and only Beauty. The brother, the sister I never had. My mother dies, now you. What is left for me? Let me die with you!'

The stable boy cries, Uriah rubs his chin, the mayor kneels down by his inconsolable child. Angelica acts on, her screams and sobs masking the contentment of a plan well executed.

An hour later the mayor taps on Angelica's bedroom door and then opens it a chink, whispering into the room.

‘Princess, my darling, can I come in to see you?'

The room is dark, the curtains drawn against the wintry midday sun. As his eyes become accustomed to the gloom he makes out the head of his daughter propped up against a sea of pillows.

‘A wounded angel in a cloudy sky,' he says as he walks forward to kneel by her bedside.

‘What can I possibly do to make this terrible thing better for you?' he pleads.

Angelica sighs and then lets out a small, weak sob.

‘True Beauty, my dead brother. What can ever replace him?'

‘We can get you another horse,' says her father, holding the limp hand of his daughter to his chest, close to tears himself.

‘No,' comes the faintest of replies. ‘I couldn't bear another horse. Always to be a reminder.'

‘So what, my darling? What will help?' pleads the mayor.

She sobs and sighs again, feeling the grip of her father's love tighten around her fingers.

‘The twins,' she whispers, so quietly the mayor can barely make out the words. ‘The Fishcutter twins,' she says, as if reciting a prayer, ‘my sisters.'

In his hands he shakes it, his bounty from the beach: two shells, five small pebbles and a twig. He blows into the hollow between thumbs and forefingers and speaks the sacred words. He rattles the objects in his hands, feeling them move and rotate in his palms, gaining energy, forging meaning. Kneeling in his simple monk's cell, he chants. In this monastery of chanting and singing, ritual and mystery, cloaks and hoods, he chants the sounds the old
sangoma
taught him. To summon the ancestors; to reveal some truths. Then he lets them free, so much more than shell and stone and twig, to roll and rattle across the floor. He sees the pattern they make as they come to rest, twig first, stones last. He lets the shape and form settle into his mind, then he closes his eyes and sits back, gently breathing. In and out and in and out. Waiting. Words will come. Words will come, somewhere behind his eyes, from somewhere else: from the walls of the cell where the young boy once slept, a carved tiger on the window ledge, a white-sailed galleon in the bay. The words will come, from the ancestors who watch from the shadows, always just out of sight, about to be glimpsed. The image of the crab, living between land and sea, appears. ‘Across the ocean,' come the words, come the thoughts of Zakora. ‘The twig is a tree, ancient, tall.' Zakora drifts between here and there. ‘Stones are our people, to be freed, to be free.' He sees hundreds of dark-skinned men and women, breaking out from their shackles, chains and cuffs falling to the ground, metal on stone. ‘The shells will take you across the ocean to deliver the message, your gift, your strength, your purpose.' He sees a fleet of boats surging through the surf, headstrong, set on course, clear and true. Zakora sits still in the small bare room. He can feel the walls, sense movement in the air around him.

Some short time passes. Zakora opens his eyes; he is exhausted, spent. He is lying on the floor, the stones, the shells, the twig close by, the walls whispering then falling silent.

FOUR

‘They are my fears of him, too. But who can hinder that which will be?
– John Bunyan

Father, you can be proud of your son. Now you can call me Oscar the adventurer, like I know you always wanted to. I have grown tall and strong over these five years at sea. My hair is jet black like yours and my shoulders are broad. And I am fearless; for how can I fear anything after seeing my parents tear each other apart? I have taken to this seamanship as if born to it. From my first day on board, as I watched Tidetown recede into the distance, I resolved that this would be my life, a life of my own. As the vast ocean of water took over all the space between horizon and sky it was as if the past had dropped off the edge of the world, had slipped away. From that very first day I was eager to learn all there was to know of this life at sea. The older sailors laughed at the cabin boy who ran and smiled from the moment he woke, who constantly asked what there was to do and how could he help.

I have walked far from the comfort of the fireside, away from the familiar. I am here, in distant lands. I think sometimes, at night, when the sea cannot rock me to sleep, of those days in Tidetown. The images that come to my mind are of blood and the sounds are of sobs and slamming doors. Sometimes it's as if that was all there was to it. As if that is the only story to be told. I once thought the only answer was to be something I am not. To live out a life not mine, turning my back against what might unfold. As a child I longed to be a tiger, a blue one at that: the rarest, most mysterious and elusive of all.

Not long before I left Tidetown, Mrs April, the librarian who was more kind to me than I knew kindness to be, showed me a book by a traveller who had sighted a blue tiger in southern China. There had been talk for generations of blue tigers in the woodlands and valleys. The local people told the traveller of glimpses, of hearsay and rumour. But was it always just a fancy, the blue tiger, like their many legends and beliefs? Just another of the stories men had told of tigers ever since they first met them in the forest of the night? I sometimes think I wanted to be a tiger because I never knew where I began and where I ended. Who was I and who were you? I filled scrapbooks with facts and folklore about tigers, escaping into another world, another way of being, another existence. That sustained me. I could see the strength in the tiger's eye.