Page 14 of The Show Woman

13

Lioness

Vengeance is cold, and today is too hot for rage. Serena swats at the air with a delicate hand-painted fan, legs spread wide like the man she often wishes she could have been. Being a woman has rarely been to her benefit. From the aches and disappointments of motherhood to the sheer inconvenience of impudent youths who constantly disregard her, Serena’s sex has become a burden, heavy as the sagging breasts that give her back such gyp.

She is watching the new lion-tamer, a boy from Spain who has brought with him a young, miserable cub. He assures her it will grow as large and ferocious as its father, who was wide and heavy as a motor car. He dangles some meat and the cub leaps for it, a tiny pathetic jump, and the boy lowers his hand so it can tear off some of the bloody, rancid steak. The animal looks more like a mangy barn cat, although its jaws are reassuringly wide, the teeth inside comfortingly sharp. Serena likes the danger of these big animals. It is one of the trademarks of Linden’s Circus, her show, the one she moulded herself with these bare, calloused hands, which she made in her own image after she took it over from her long-dead pa.

She darts forward and smacks the lion cub sharply on its back with her fan. The animal yelps and looks up at her, its face a mixture of defiance and feral aggression. It is measuring her up, wondering if she is worth attacking. The cub’s weight shifts on to its hind legs, as though it might pounce, and she thwacks it again, this time on the nose. It rears back and rushes to its master.

‘Do you not know how to train these animals, boy?’ she asks.

The young Spaniard, with English that is negligible at best, retorts, ‘ Sí, sí, senora .’

‘More of this,’ she says, shaking her fan. ‘And less of that.’ She points at the meat.

‘ Sí, senora ,’ the boy repeats.

She walks away. Useless, she thinks. So many of her animal-tamers make the mistake of treating their charges like pets, like those pathetic dog-owners that coddle their animals, bring them into their homes, let them sit by the fire and sleep on their soft, downy beds. That is not what animals know, not what they need. You must treat them as though they are wild.

She recalls the large brown dog her father owned when she was a child, which followed him everywhere and was so slavishly devoted that it would have followed him towards certain death. That relationship fascinated her, even as a small girl. How the dog would listen only to his commands, push in front of her to get food at dinner, snap at her if she tried to give her father a hug. The dog was more than his shadow. It was as though it was a part of who he was, his core being.

And yet it was tied up outside their wagon on a chain, never fed more than scraps, thumped on the nose for the most minor of infractions. And that was the point. Her father treated it as a mean and nasty cur, because he knew all along that, given half a chance, that was exactly what it would be. It was a philosophy she followed as slavishly as that dog followed her father.

She plods slowly back to her wagon, wondering whether she needs to get rid of the Spaniard and look elsewhere. Lions are not easy to come by, even in this magical new age of steamships and international travel, the influx of Europeans who have landed recently on these shores, some of them with designs on the fairs with their fancy cinematographs. Then there are the Americans with their Wild West shows. She remembers still the huge stir when Buffalo Bill came to Glasgow twenty years before: how the crowds swelled to see the famous man with his guns in his holsters shoot a strawberry off a tin can with pin-sharp accuracy. Linden’s Circus was at Vinegarhill at the time and Serena had been delighted at the increase in business, at the sweaty Glasgow youths who came to see her shows riled up from the gunfights, many of them drunk, no doubt; even at the stupid boy who leapt up during the lion show, stuck his head in the beast’s mouth and wound up losing an eye. It had all been good for business, in the end.

There was something else Serena’s father had taught her, back in those sunlit days: the honeyed taste of revenge. If someone crossed you, you double-crossed them back. And if anyone was foolish enough to try putting one over on a Linden, they’d pay for it and then some. Old Saffo, a circus proprietor from England, had learnt this the hard way when he tried to steal one of Linden’s prime pitches in Edinburgh for the Christmas season. Late one night Serena’s pa had sent one of his lads to throw a brace of meat laced with arsenic into the lions’ cages. The next day he’d watched, triumphantly, as the entire cavalcade left the city, the lions’ carcasses dumped into the Water of Leith, where they rotted slowly in the late winter sun, pecked at by seagulls and oyster-catchers who had never encountered such bounty. ‘That’s how you deal with a rival,’ he had told her. ‘That’s how you keep us on top.’

Serena lights her pipe, feels the long-dead itch for revenge creep across her skin. Because Serena has heard of another show that is stirring the hearts of the flatties. A ladies’ circus no less, with rainbows and horses and, at the heart of it all, a copper-haired demon with berry-red lips.

She might have known Violet Weaver would be back on the bar. She did not understand Serena, her capacity to hold grudges. It was time to pull that lassie out of the sky once and for all.

She sucks on her pipe, looks out at the showground where her circus is packing up. It is time to move on. She will circle the wagons, and creep closer. A lioness, stalking her prey.