Page 11 of The Show Woman

10

They move through the fair

It is a magical day, rich and endless. Threads of happiness spool through the hours like spun gold. They start, at Rosie’s behest, with the big dipper, a swing boat as huge, she imagines, as any that must surely cast off from the Clyde. When Carmen hears this she laughs and says she should see the size of some of the men who come off those hulking great boats. They sit on its prow as it swings back and forth with a rollicking force, as though a giant hand is pushing it each time, and with a thrill Rosie feels her heart bounce into her stomach.

They ride on two different carousels, Lena remarking on how strange they are compared to her father’s. One has a variety of farm animals: sheep, horses, cows, and improbably large chickens. The other has more traditional horses, bobbing up and down, and when Violet says they will look like silly wee bairns riding on them, Rosie knows that she doesn’t care, really.

They follow the sounds of the brass bands and the barrel organs, as the mid-morning throng starts to swell. They stop to admire some birds of paradise, small, vibrantly coloured birds the colour of jewels that will hop on to your hand for a nibble of seed if you stand still. Rosie spots a small canvas tent advertising ‘the world’s larg’st lady’. There is a painting outside of a woman who looks like a cross between a pig and a toad, and a man beside it shouting for all and sundry to ‘roll up and see them rolls’. Rosie is intrigued, takes off towards it, but Lena pulls her back. ‘Come away,’ she says quietly.

Down among the hawkers and the food stalls, the scent of chestnuts roasting over sputtering wooden fires, apples dipped in rich, hot toffee, is irresistible. Carmen buys a ha’penneth of round boiled sweets, vibrant red and rich grass green, and they suck them greedily as they alight upon another tent, its canvas an ancient, faded brown and torn in patches. Inside, a family – it must be; they all have the same thin lips and high, wide foreheads – are performing a melodrama. A young woman in a white nightgown flings herself to the floor of the tiny mounted stage while another, her hair standing up on end, weeps and cries, ‘Dead! All dead! And no one to call me mother!’ The audience roars approval while a man near the front with a cigarette sticking out of his mouth shouts, ‘We can see your maidenhood in that nightgown, hen,’ and the girl scuttles off the stage, her thin pale face turning bright puce.

But in among the coconut shies and the menageries, the whirling rides and the dark, mysterious tents, it is the crowd which fascinates Rosie the most. Gaggles of dirty-nosed children, some with no shoes on, who weave in and out playing elaborate games of chase. The young lad who shadows an elegant lady in a large hat, waiting for his opportunity to snatch her smart silk bag. She cries out as he does so, but he is so quick that by the time she turns round he is gone, swallowed up by the throng.

There are groups of farm girls, pink-cheeked with excitement at a day away from the constant grind of milking, washing and sweeping, and Rosie wonders idly why it was that her own parents never thought to bring her to the local fair; why there had instead been endless nights at home, her father seeking solace in the bottle, her mother sewing meek threads by the fire. There had just been that one trip to the circus, all those years ago. Linden’s, she thinks it was called, where her pa sneered at the horses and her ma whispered to Rosie that she thought the acrobats were beautiful.

Because there are families here, great hordes of them, wives cautiously taking their lead from their men while marshalling squadrons of bairns in knickerbockers and sailor suits, wearing good dresses probably meant for church, and soon turned filthy amid the churned-up ground beneath them. Groups of men too, wearing their best jackets and bunnets – handsome, she can see that, but with something wild about them too, as though an invisible leash has been snapped, just for one day, and they can let out their full gregarious selves. One man grabs the bottom of a particularly fulsome farm girl, and Rosie is gratified to see that she turns round and swiftly slaps him on the cheek.

Suddenly Violet is beside her, squeezing her arm, her face flushed with something that looks like excitement but has an urgency to it, as though there are a million things she needs to say to Rosie right now, this minute, but somehow cannot find the words.

Instead, Rosie simply asks, ‘Yes?’

Violet nods. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Yes to all of it. Yes.’