Lionboy (7 page)

(Loosely, “You have a very bad hairdresser, your clothes look as if they have been out dancing on their own all night, your mother is a banana, your nose is too big, your stupidity is so famous, they have statues of it in the city squares . . .”) “Your nose is too big” sounded good, so he said it a few more times, rhythmically, getting louder and louder:

“Stop it!” shouted a big fat voice over the intercom.

“I’d be glad to,” said Aneba. “You know what you have to do.” And he lowered his lids again, and stared, and muttered, and stared, and muttered, and stared.

CHAPTER 7

A
bout an hour later Charlie heard noises at the top of the ladder, and realized that someone was climbing down. He had no time to think what to do—even to decide whether or not to hide—before the person was standing in the cockpit, staring at him out of big brown eyes and saying:
“François! Regardez! Il y a un garcon ici—un petit Africain!”

Charlie’s French was pretty good—Brother Jerome was very keen on languages—so he understood that she was saying: “François! Look! There’s a boy here—a little African!”

As for what she was, Charlie knew exactly. She was slender but muscular, wearing tights and a tight top with a short skirt, she had her dark hair pulled back in a bun so tight that it made her face look tight too—in fact, everything about her was tight, except her skirt, which flared out like the petals on a daisy. The tight hair even pulled all expression off her face, and she stood with her weight on one leg and her arms crossed. She was quite clearly a ballerina—except that she looked way too tough. And he didn’t know why she was going on about him being African. She obviously had African blood too.

François appeared behind her: a black-haired young man in fringed ponyskin chaps, a waistcoat, and a hat. He had a red-tooled holster, fancy Cuban-heeled boots to match, and two shiny little guns, one of which he had pulled out and was aiming at Charlie.

Charlie was not at all sure about being held up by a tough African ballerina talking French and a cowboy in red boots.

“Bonjour,”
he said bravely.

“Salut,”
said the ballerina. François nodded. They didn’t seem entirely unfriendly.

“Er—could you put the gun down?” asked Charlie politely in French.

The ballerina looked over her shoulder and rolled her eyes to heaven in exasperation. She berated François in a swift and complicated French that Charlie couldn’t follow, saying, it was obvious, “Put it away, don’t be such a nincompoop, it’s only a kid,” or words to that effect. Also, as Charlie looked more closely at the little gun, he suspected that it wasn’t real. It was so small and shiny, and looked somehow too light. In fact, nothing about the cowboy looked real. He wasn’t sunburned, for a start, and his clothes were too colorful. And there was a monkey on his shoulder. And the monkey was wearing fringed ponyskin chaps and a red gunbelt too. No, this was no ordinary cowboy.

François put the gun away and the ballerina said that she supposed they’d better take him up. Charlie, knowing that his only alternative was to try to jump overboard, be pulled out again, and taken up anyway, dripping wet and having annoyed everybody, pult his things into his bag and slung it over his shoulder.

“Come on,” said the ballerina, and poked him up the ladder to the ship. Charlie didn’t like being poked. She wasn’t that much older than he anyway, to be bossing him around.

It was amazing, thought Charlie, how something crimson could look so tough. Because this
was
a tough ship: the great flanks, the thick ropes coiled on the decks, huge fenders dripping salt water and weed over the side, the massive masts and great industrial smokestacks, the brawny sailors with their sunburns and squinty eyes. The ship made a music of her own: a creaking and rumbling, of engines and furnaces, of ropes in the wind, of beams and joists surging through the water. Charlie, nervous as he was, felt a huge thrill at being aboard this great ship as she headed out to sea.

“Go on,” said the ballerina. She prodded him along the deck until they came to a cabin door, carved with gold vines, which stood ajar.

“Maestro!” called the ballerina, knocking on the door.
“Y’a quelque chose.”
Charlie didn’t quite like being introduced as “Here is something,” but the ballerina prodded him again and he stumbled into the room, tripping over the little ledge that cabin doors always have at the bottom, to keep shallow floodwater out.

The chamber was small but magnificent, and standing in the middle, leaning on a small desk, was a most magnificent person. He must have been six and a half feet tall, broad-shouldered in white breeches and a green velvet tailcoat, and his fine blond hair, almost as pale as ice, hung down his back in a thick ponytail. His eyes were piercing blue, his skin pale and dry, and he looked as if he stayed up far too late and had done so all his life. In one pale hand he had a glass of what looked like brandy, and before him on the desk was a pile of papers and a large metal box absolutely full of money: masses of it.

Charlie stared. He had never seen a man who looked like this before.

“For Pete’s sake,” said the man, in French, but with an accent Charlie recognized to be southern Empire. “Now what?”

“I found this boy,” said the ballerina, “in the policeguy’s boat.”

“Throw him overboard then,” said the man.

“Okay,” she said, and turning around, made to prod Charlie out of the door again. Charlie’s heart leaped.

“No, wait a moment,” the maestro said. “Bring him back. You speak French?”

“Yes,” said Charlie in French. “My name’s Charlie and I’m looking for my mum and dad, who have disappeared. I hitched a lift with the polishing machine.” (He meant to say “policeguy” but he got the word wrong and said
“polisseur”
instead of
“policier”
—an easy mistake.)

“Really,” said the man, unimpressed with this brief history. He looked at Charlie a moment, sizing him up. He took hold of Charlie’s arm and squeezed it.

“Boy,” he said, “are you strong?”

“Quite, sir,” said Charlie. “But I’m more clever than strong.”

“How clever?” said the magnificent man.

“I can speak English, French, Twi, Arabic, Latin, Greek, and Italian,” he said. (He never told people that he could speak Cat. He had always known, without being told, that it was not something to brag about.) “And I can read and write, I’m quick at calculations, and I can play the piano and drive and I am an experienced sailor.” He was thinking quickly of things that might make this strange pale man want to keep him on the ship rather than throw him overboard. “And I can climb, and ride a bicycle.”

The man’s elegant dark eyebrows rose up his white forehead as Charlie spoke, but he said nothing. So Charlie continued: “And I can cook, omelettes, fufu and soup, and flapjacks, and I can do handstands and cartwheels, and climb ropes, and I can swim, of course, and dive, and tie knots, I can do a sheepshank and clove hitch, and I’m quite used to computers . . .” Charlie faltered to a halt. The man was saying nothing on purpose, just to see how long Charlie would keep on talking.

“Most impressive,” said the man, after a little gap just long enough to let Charlie know who was in charge—as if there were any doubt. “But you’re not strong.”

“Quite strong,” said Charlie.

The man took a sip from his glass of brandy, never taking his eyes off Charlie.

“Now tell me,” he said. “Of course all boys want to run away and join with us, but what precisely is your excuse?”

He thought Charlie had come to the ship on purpose. Oh, well. That didn’t matter. What mattered was—

A very important thought struck Charlie. All these people talking French. Were they going to France now?

“I intend to seek my fortune, sir,” said Charlie. “And my parents. Are you headed to France?”

The man put his glass down. He seemed to have made his mind up about something.

“What’s your name?” he said.

“Charlie Ashanti,” said Charlie. Even as he said it, he thought: Oh. It might have been a good idea to give a fake name. What with Rafi out there, wherever he is . . .

“Charlie. I am Major Maurice Thibaudet.” (He pronounced it
Tib-oh-day.
) “I am the Boss, the Leader, the Voice of All Authority around here. I am the ringmaster. You call me Major, Sir, or Maestro. You are Charlie, a little kid we’ve taken on. You’ll do as you’re told. Do me a handstand.”

Since he was tiny, Charlie had been playing around with the cats in the ruins and he was as agile as a little monkey. A handstand was nothing to him. Now, too taken aback to wonder why the major wanted him to do it, Charlie swiftly upended himself. There wasn’t much room, but he managed it without kicking anybody in the face. With his feet in the air and his head down by the floor he couldn’t see Major Maurice’s reaction, but he felt he shouldn’t come down until he was told, so he just stayed there while Major Maurice did his trick of doing nothing to see how long a person would carry on.

“Okay,” said Major Maurice eventually. “Come on down now. Could you do that on a lion’s back?”

Charlie nearly fell as he brought himself down. What kind of a question was that?

“Yes, sir,” he said, with a gulp at his own bravery. He had been doing some thinking, upside down. Ballerina. Cowboy. Music. Striped canvas. Ringmaster. And now lions. “Please, sir—are you a circus? And are you—” He was trying to ask again about France, but the major had started talking already.

“Are we a circus?” said Major Maurice. “Are we a
circus?
We are not
a
circus, boy—we are

He really did talk like that. His voice rose and rose and grew and grew, until the little cabin was full of it and it started to pour out onto the deck, and the blood suddenly came into his face, making him look pink and happy. Charlie could just imagine what he would be like in the ring, filling the big top with his rolling tones, crying out to the audience, shouting about how wonderful the show was, telling them to roll up, roll up for the Most Magnificent Show on Earth.

“We are Thibaudet’s Royal Floating Circus and Equestrian Philharmonic Academy,” he said, more calmly, “known to those who can’t pronounce the illustrious name of Thibaudet as Tib’s Gallimaufry, and to those who can’t pronounce Gallimaufry as the Show. Play your cards right, young man, and you too will be in the Show. We need a young fella. Work hard, stick around. You can start with the monkeys. Pirouette will take you down. Good day to you.”

The ballerina, Pirouette, gave Charlie a smile instead of a prod as she led him down a narrow companionway. It smelled of something Charlie could not identify. Something animal and dusty and musky—not a bad smell, but curious for a ship.

“You really want to be Circus, Charlie?” she said.

“Of course I do,” said Charlie. “Of course I do. But listen—are we going to France?”

“Of course,” she said, marching on ahead.

Charlie’s face broke out in a grin as big as Paris.

 

The monkeys lived in the depths of the boat, in a smelly little chamber between the zebras and the Hungarian with the troupe of trained bees.

An Indian man—his name was Bikabhai—lived with the monkeys, in a hammock. Charlie could go in with the monkeys too, or he could sling a hammock in the feed hold, even farther down in the depths of the ship, where the smell wasn’t quite so monkeyish but the air never changed, so it was still and thick and hard to breathe.

“Can’t I sleep on deck?” he asked Bikabhai.

Bikabhai stretched his eyes. “Very cold,” he said, slightly shocked. “And if sailorguys tread on you it might be unpleasant.”

Charlie’s duties were not too hard. He was to bring the monkeys’ food, watch Bikabhai as he fed them, clean their quarters, and mend their clothes. Carrying the buckets of water was the worst part, once you got used to the monkey poo smell.