Birchwood (11 page)

THAT NIGHT
,
as the ramshackle dream of the Magic Circus unfolded, I sat with damp hands and dancing heart in the centre of the third bench from the front, from whence in a little while Silas would pluck me out into the glare and glitter of my new career. The packed audience vibrated, sweating with excitement, their faces lit by the flickering glow from the oil lamps on the stage, where Magnus of the big ears sat on a stool squeezing rollicking tunes out of a wheezy accordion. We did our best to sing along with him, but no one knew the words, and there rose from the benches a drone of moans and mumbles in the midst of which I feared my own stagefright was audible, a piercing hum. At last, with a last flourish on the squeezebox, Magnus withdrew, and to the accompaniment of a roll on an unseen bodhran Silas sauntered out of the wings with his arms hieratically lifted. He welcomed the patrons, he sketched the delights the evening held in store. His hat was as black as a raven's wing.

Exit Silas right, bowing low, and enter left Mario the juggler, his black eyebrows arched, who filled the stage with glittering wheels and flashing spokes of light. His splendid scowl never faltered though the whirling rings got tangled on his wrists and the indian clubs cracked together like skulls, and his hot eyes only burned more fiercely the more hopelessly his act went askew. Next came Rainl?ird in a wizard's cloak, and a pointed paper hat festooned with silver stars which provoked some hilarity among the young bucks at the back of the tent. He conjured billiard balls out of the air, transformed a cane into a silk scarf. A white mouse escaped from a hidden pocket in his cloak.

The pale twins, Ada and Ida, barefoot, swathed in veils, danced a solemn pavane to the accompaniment of a tune from Mario's tin whistle. The audience sat rapt, heedless of the incongruous bump of bare heels on the boards. The dance ended and the girls drooped sinuously into the wings, fluttering their pale fingers. A roar went up. The men whistled and stamped their feet, the women bravely smiled, but in a moment all were silent as Magnus tumbled head over heel across the stage and leapt to his feet before us, grinning. He wore huge checked trousers, sagging braces, outsize frock coat, false bald skull, a cherry nose.

‘I say I say I say…’

We had Mario again, in a new outfit, heaving Justin and Juliette about the stage in a display of acrobatics. They raised a storm of dust. Flamehaired Sybil, with Magnus and Mario disguised in hunting pink, played a scene from a popular melodrama. Eyes flashed, riding crops whistled.

‘Aubrey, that cad deserves a thrashing’

I had begun to think that my moment would never come, but at last the bodhran rolled again and Silas appeared in a dented top hat and white gloves, and a frock coat which still bore some dusty traces of its first appearance on the back of Magnus the clown. He was followed by Justin and Juliette carrying between them a mysterious something hidden under a black cloth. They set it down on a table in the centre of the stage. Silas doffed his hat, peeled off his gloves and laid them on the table. He adjusted the pin in his cravat. The audience shifted its backside restlessly.

‘Who knows,’
Silas cried, turning suddenly and glaring down upon us, ‘who knows the power of the will, ah, my friends, the strength and weakness of the mind?’

We pondered the question while he pulled on his gloves again, put on his hat. He advanced to the edge of the stage.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said quietly, ‘I am the keeper of dark powers, bestowed upon me by the gipsies of Persia. The druids of old knew nothing of which I do not know, the secrets of the alchemists are my secrets. I am Silas, to whom the world's will is as a twig, to be snapped—like that!’

He clicked his fingers, and behind him the golden children whipped away the black cloth and revealed Albert the monkey sitting in his cage with his arms folded and his black lips drawn back. The audience gasped. Albert scratched his belly. Silas smiled faintly.

‘My assistant,’ he said, and opened the door of the cage. Albert peered up at him inquiringly, shrugged, and clambered out and perched on a corner of the table. Silas closed his eyes and put his hand upon the creature's bald head, stood motionless for a moment and suddenly cried out, staggered, regained his balance, and roared,

‘Now his power is mine, will strengthen mine, his very soul has entered me. Look at him, he is empty.’ Albert indeed seemed drained, crouched there gaping. ‘Only when I have finished here will I give him back his substance, only then—’

Only then Albert's wicked sense of humour got the better of him. He roused himself out of his torpor and sprang on Silas's back and knocked his hat off, jumped down and scampered around the stage, shrieking and chattering, with Justin and Juliette after him. There was pandemonium. The audience was beside itself with glee.

‘Hooray
!’

‘A banana, give him a banana.’

‘Peg something at him.’

‘Aye, peg your man!’

‘Wait! He have him.’

‘Begob he have him right enough.’

Ahh…r

Justin lay on the boards and carefully drew out from under him the dazed monkey, and, clutching the brute between them, the children brought him before Silas.

‘Ah, wretched animal! Thought you could escape, did you? Thought you could break my power? Here, hold his head, hold him now.’ Again he clasped that grey skull in his fist, again he cried out. ‘Now! Now, take him away. Go!’

They thrust poor Albert into his cage and swept him off, and Silas turned to us again.

‘And now, ladies and gentlemen, I call on you for a volunteer.’ My cue! ‘Who will test his will against mine? Who among you will risk a journey into the unknown depths of his own soul?’ I leapt to my feet and waved my arms, speechless with excitement. Silas beamed at me. At the other side of the hall two or three strapping fellows stood up, grinning foolishly and scratching their heads. Silas adroitly ignored them, and they sat down again abruptly. ‘Come up, brave lad, come, this way. Look friends, a beardless youth. And your name?’

All was noise and light up here, another world. Silas prodded me and roared, so it seemed, into my face.

‘Name!’

‘Gab—’ I began, and was prodded again.

‘What's that? Speak up, boy, don't be afraid.’

‘Johann Livelb, sir,’ I said, but my voice did not work, and I had to repeat that outlandish alias which Silas had found for me god knows where.

‘Well well, a foreigner, eh? Tell me, Johann, would you say that you have a strong will, eh?’

‘I don't know, sir—I mean yes. Sir.’

‘Yes. Good. Stronger than a monkey's, would you say?’

‘Yes.’

Laughter.

‘Stronger than mine, would you say?’

I opened my mouth and closed it again. I could not remember the answer, and when I searched in my poor frantic conciousness for the other answers I realised that I could not remember them either. All those lines, so carefully rehearsed, gone! Silas saw that I was lost, and bared his teeth at me. Justin brought out a three-legged stool and I was thrust down upon it. Silas took out his watch, a gold repeater, and dangled it before me on its chain.

‘Attend me now, boy, put all your attention upon me, your very soul.’ He swung the watch slowly. ‘You begin to feel drowsy. Come, you cannot resist me. Ah, sleep comes…sleep…
sleep…’
He pocketed the watch and glanced at the audience. ‘See,’ he whispered, ‘see, he sleeps, he is mine. Boy! Speak!’

He watched me apprehensively as I stood up with my eyes half-closed, my arms hanging limp by my sides. One phrase from all that was lost came back to me.

‘Master, I am your slave, do with me what you could.’

He winked at me, and turned with a triumphant smile to face the surge of applause.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, what shall I have him do, my slave?’ He crooked a finger at me and brought me to his side, and for my ears only hissed,
‘Would
, not could, you clown.’ He was a hard master.

I was made to crow like a cock, crawl like a snake, swim on dry land, leap from the stool with my arms flapping. I sang a song. I danced. The audience roared. Never had I felt such freedom, I cannot explain. Silas snapped his fingers at last and I was sent back to my seat. A great sigh filled the tent. The cast came back on stage to take their bows. I had no regrets at not being in their midst, for there on the bench among the crowd I was a magic creature, a unicorn. Silas laid aside his hat and gloves.

‘Gentles, gentles, our revels now are ended…’

IT WAS STRANGE
,
that so easy deception of so many. I say deception, but that is not it, not exactly. They wished to be deceived, they conspired with us in our fantasies. Silas's act hardly varied all that week—except that Albert more or less behaved himself and I conquered my stagefright—yet those who returned night after night, and they formed more than half of every audience, gazed at his antics with happy enthusiasm as though for the first time. Indeed, toward the end, there appeared in some of those faces a smug proprietary look—
they
knew what was coming next. It was a game that we played, enchanters and enchanted, tossing a bright golden ball back and forth across the footlights, a game that meant nothing, was a wisp of smoke, and yet, and yet, on the tight steel cord of their carefiJ lives we struck a dark rapturous note that left their tidy town tingling behind us.

Tingling too were our players when the lights were doused, and the dreamers straggled home to their second sleep. We all crowded into the cramped dressing-room tent behind the stage, laughing, shouting, falling over each other, knocking over candles, our nerves aquiver, seized by a manic gaiety which sprang from we knew not where, bubbled up through our blood and pop! burst as the greasepaint fell like scales from our eyes. Then one by one, sober now, we crossed the dark field to the black caravan where Angel waited for us with potato soup and bread and huge pots of tea. Most of the night we spent there, conversing idly, while the solitary paraffin lamp burned down. The children dozed, the pale twins sang in soft reedy undertones, and Silas sat in his high rocking chair and smiled down on us all through wreaths of pipesmoke. That was the time I liked best, huddled with my arms around my knees in a dim corner of that smelly warm caravan, drowsy and at ease, the green scent of grass coming up through the floorboards, one trembling star hanging in a corner of the window, and the great night all around me, stretching away across fields and woods and shining marsh pools, all that darkness, that silence.

In those nights they spoke of old times, better times, told fabulous tales, dreamt up new dreams. They never mentioned Prospero. When I asked about him they fell silent, and examined their fingernails, and Magnus, his lugubrious lopsided grin hanging in the gloom, said softly,

‘That prosperous fellow!’

So Prospero became for me a mystery bound up with my quest. I liked to imagine him as a tiny withered old man with skin like wrinkled brown paper, sparrow hands, a big hat, a cloak, a crooked stick, pale piercing eyes, always before me, like a black spider, his bent back, the tapping stick, leading me ever on into a mysterious white landscape. I knew that picture was all wrong, but it sufficed. Like our audiences, I also wanted to dream. I knew too that my quest, mocked and laughed at, was fantasy, but I clung to it fiercely, unwilling to betray myself, for if I could not be a knight errant I would not be anything.

Sometimes I had the uncanny feeling that the circus had been expecting me. How else explain my calm reception, that eerie introduction, the silence and the silent laughter? This question I considered through many a long night, and went out in the morning determined to have an answer, only to be disappointed by their impenetrable diffidence. They were loath to speak of themselves, and it took me a long tedious time to assemble even the outlines of their stories. It is true that I was accepted at once into the life of the circus, but I never felt that I belonged completely in their midst, as though the covenant by which they were bound to care for me demanded nothing beyond essentials. Was the cruelty of the golden children a shade crueller when turned on me? Did Sybil's anger have a keener edge when I came under its cuts?

My first difficulty was to unravel the threads of their relationships. For instance I imagined from the start, when they first appeared beside me in the town, that Angel and Silas were husband and wife. I was wrong, I soon discovered that, but what I did not discover for a very long time, for weeks, was that Sybil was his mate. Sybil of the flaming hair, the icy green eyes, Sybil the austere! I was astonished, and at first repulsed. How could this proud patrician creature allow that old goat to share her bed, her secrets, to paw her gleaming limbs? Sybil, with her cold beauty, her impassioned rages, was a vibrant and untouchable mystery, whereas Silas was just old Tosspot, barrel-arsed, wheezy, a laughable codger. Later, when I recognised Sybil's true nature, a bitter brew of spite and pettiness, I had to wonder how Silas, not so simple after all, could tolerate
her.
The answer was that she was his odd notion of beauty made flesh, beauty which was an inexaustible source of both wonder and amusement. One day I found her in their caravan fighting with Angel, screaming, foaming at the mouth. It was no uncommon thing, for Angel took a sweet delight in baiting her. Silas sat by the table with his legs crossed, his thumbs in his waistcoat, beaming at them as if to say,
look, look, is she not exquisite, my Sybil?
—
and such a fool!

The pleasure he derived from his wife was intellectual in the main, while his baser longings were directed elsewhere. Once, merrily drunk on poteen, he confided to Rainbird and me his dream, which was to dwell in idyllic concupiscence, his word, with not one but both of the twins, Ada and her dark sister Ida. ‘To have them, one on each side of me, in the buff, their tits in my ears, ah, what a thing that would be!’ The girls were utterly indifferent to his attentions, but their indifference, he insisted, only goaded him into wilder transports of desire. I could never take seriously this farcical longing, partly for the reason that Silas himself regarded it as a perplexing but funny foible of his old age, and partly because, ironically, he was teaching me in his subtle way to take nothing seriously, or perhaps a better word is solemnly.

The most astonishing discovery of all that I made was that Justin and Juliette, those spiteful sprites, were the product of that union between Silas and Sybil. Yes! I confess I found it impossible to believe at first, and, when he told me, I searched Magnus's face for the twitch that would betray the joke, but it was no joke. I looked at the children with new eyes. They were an uncanny, disturbing couple. In spite of their difference in gender, which was minimal anyway, they were doubles in body and spirit, a beautiful two-headed monster, wicked, destructive, unfailingly gay. Magnus merged them into a single entity which he called Justinette. He had the right idea. I was afraid of them.

Magnus was a born clown. He had a long wedge-shaped head topped with a flat mat of furry fair hair. His thin blue-veined nose, with a knob at the tip, was almost painful to look at in its austerity, and his pale moist eyes, peering out through concentric circles of tired brownish flesh, seemed permanently on the point of overflowing with a flood of tears. That long sinewy frame, the mournful grin, provoked immediately in an audience the kind of laughter on which jesters thrive, that uproarious hee-haw with a seed of misgiving lodged at its root. He kept us entertained through all our trials except one, perched on his stool with his hands on his bony knees, spinning his elegant tales.

Our last night in the town was wet and wild. Sabres of black rain swept across the sodden field, the wind keened in the guy ropes of the tent. The show was a washout, and the audience, what there was of it, demanded its money back. We huddled in the caravan around the glowing stove, coughing as the smoke came billowing back down the chimney. Even Angel's stewed tea, strong enough to trot a mouse on, as Silas observed, could not revive our spirits, and we sat wrapped in a cocoon of melancholy until Magnus took out his harmonica and played a jig, always the prelude to a yarn.

‘Did I ever tell you,’ he began, smacking the harmonica on his palm and considering the ceiling with a frown, ‘about the Exploding Coffin?’

We snuggled closer to the stove and wrapped our hands around our teamugs. For all the smoke and the draughts, there is nothing on a stormy night so cosy as a caravan. Magnus's droll voice cast a spell about us and drew us out of our dejection, and when I think of him now I realise that of all the creatures I have lost I miss most his valiant and fastidious spirit. Ah Magnus, my friend.