Page 2 of The Show Woman

Vinegarhill Showground, Glasgow March 1910

1

Carousel

It is past six o’clock when the old man finally dies. Outside the wagons women crouch over smouldering fires, prod hopefully at reluctant flames. Men are downing tools for the day, loud and brash, in need of hot tea and a plate of soup. Children are told to shush now and away to bed. Woodsmoke coils over the showground. High above, a lone gull circles a tender pink sky.

Lena has been sitting with him for three days now. Three days in which Joseph Loveridge has stubbornly refused to die. Three days of taking rags to his hot forehead, dribbling water and whisky on his dry, chapped lips, singing soft, childish lullabies in his ear. She looks down at the thin, papery hand in hers, fingers twisted like the worn roots of a tree.

‘Daddy,’ she says.

A slight fluttering of the eyelids. His lashes, long and dark, flare in the gloom, but the old man’s eyes remain closed. Through the caravan window a span of draught horses pull her father’s carousel to the far side of the ground, their wooden counterparts bobbing serenely. She wonders if the blood has dried.

It is early March, plump with cherry blossom and harebells, and they are on the cusp of a new season. In berths across the ground they have been painting up wagons and stalls, rehearsing acts, tinkering with their rides, preparing to get back on the road. There is a crackle of anticipation in the damp air. They do not like to be tethered, these acrobats and jugglers, boxers and tarot-readers, trapeze artists and cinematographers and menagerie-owners and horse-riders. They are show people, men and women of the road. They have no business with life on a hill at the edge of this vast, blackened city.

Everyone on Vinegarhill knows what is happening at the Loveridge wagon. They heard the shouts when Joe fell. Saw the bloody, mangled aftermath, a leg sliced clean open, like a ham. A doctor has been fetched, brought poultices and rubbing alcohol, and was sent swiftly away. There will only be one ending to this story. They leave hot ginger cakes on the steps of the caravan, kettles of strong tea, mutton stew, a bottle of cheap, watered-down whisky. She has left it all, except the whisky.

Lena marvels at their misfortune. There is a whole fair season ahead, so close she thought she could touch it. Through the barren city winter she has dreamt of spring mornings out on the road, watching the dawn canvas above soften from lilac to blue. There is a smell on the roads at that time of day, earthy and primal, as though the world has been washed clean. It rises up from the hedgerows and the fields, filters through the dense pine forests of the Highlands, fuses with the salty swell of the coast.

It was there, perched high above the road at the front of the caravan as they headed to the next town, the next fair, that Daddy taught her to train a horse from a foal so it would work steadily with the wagons. How to punt your stall at the shows, whether you were selling mouldy plums or rides on a Wurlitzer. Once, he told her of the time he had seen a real mermaid at a fair in faraway Cumbria, who had swished water at him with her shimmering tail and called him her darling. Sometimes he spoke of his own father, a long-dead bareknuckle boxer who could knock a man out with a single punch. In all those mornings, there was only one thing Lena was forbidden to talk about.

Then, the nights. The fairground lit up and sparkling like a jewel box, the heave of the crowds and the noise, the bold brass bands and the finicky barrel organs, pickpockets racing through the swell in search of a loose shilling or a stray button, sweetie wives touting their edible gems, cries of ‘birds of paradise!’ and ‘penny gaff!’ and ‘now, ladies and gentlemen’. There is a smell there too, deep in the heart of the fair. It reeks of sour bodies and piss, burnt sugar and lust, a dank redolence that seeps from the earth. To Lena, it smells like home.

‘Never forget,’ her father told her once, ‘that for the flatties this is a treat. This is the most exciting day of their summer. But this is our life. Our everyday. Aren’t we lucky, hen?’

A movement from the bed. Slowly her father’s eyes open, roll back into his head, exposing the yellowing whites. A showman to the end. One last, spectacular performance.

‘Maggie,’ he says. His voice is brittle.

‘Can you see her, Daddy?’

His hand scrabbles at the sheet. ‘Maggie,’ he repeats.

‘She’s not here,’ says Lena. ‘She’s gone. Don’t you remember?’

‘Find her,’ he says, and his voice cracks, as if his gullet has been stuffed with ashes from the fire. ‘Sell the carousel. And find your mother.’

Lena grips his hand. It is years since he has mentioned her mammy. That apple-cheeked face. Her sweet lavender smell. The way she smiled at Lena, swathed in her favourite blue shawl, as she vanished into the crowd that very last time.

‘How do I find her, Daddy? Where did she go?’

But her father shakes his head, gasping with the effort, falls still on the damp sheets.

‘Daddy? Where is she?’

His dry lips move, but no sound comes out. There is a soft pop, and her father’s face shutters like a seashell. The air in the caravan lightens. She smoothes out his hair, still thick and black, and opens the window. She wants to set his spirit free, into the air, the old tradition. He will sail across this rumbling city, over the darkening river and the shrouded houses, past clattering trams and the crumbling drinking dens, out into the wide, gaping night.

A dram of whisky now. There is not much left. It is probably for the best. She sits in her chair, hands folded, eyes dry as corn husks. Oh, Daddy, she thinks. Why have you done this to me?

‘Lena? Lena?’

The knocking at the door is sturdy and loud. Lena wakes with a start from distant dreams of wooden horses cantering over hills, her father being pulled behind in a rough coal merchant’s cart. Someone is tapping at the caravan door and she rises stiffly to open it.

‘Ach, Lena. When?’

‘Last night. I’m not sure what time. I should have come but . . .’

‘You did the right thing, hen. Have a bit of time to yourself with him.’

Mary Weaver climbs into the wagon, her stout frame filling the room. Lena’s father lies on the furthest berth, silent and impassive. Tenderly, Mary touches his cheek.

‘He was a good man, your da,’ she says, fussing with the sheet round his chin, pulling it up over his head. ‘Now come on over and I’ll make you a cup of tea.’

Outside one of the Weaver family wagons, an enormous tea kettle bubbles over a low fire. Exhaustion washes over Lena. She is twenty-one years old and an orphan. She rolls the word around in her mouth: orphan . It is a word that swells to fit the space, expands like the huge air balloon she had once seen at a fairground near Edinburgh. She remembers the thick flames that licked at the base of it, the basket where the people stood in wonderment as they were lifted high into the air. She starts to cry.

Mary drops the tin mugs she is carrying and wraps her thick arms around her. She is a large, comforting woman who smells of greasy scalps and warm milk.

‘It’s alright, lassie,’ she soothes. ‘It’s going to be alright.’

‘Is it?’ Lena asks her soft, bulky shoulder. ‘I’ve hardly any money. The season’s about to start. And Daddy told me to sell the carousel.’

The carousel had been her father’s pride and joy. He’d started out a boxer like his father, a face that was always blooming purple with bruises and knuckles worn down to the quick, but had always aspired to own a ride. When he’d married Lena’s mother, Maggie, they’d scrimped and saved to buy their own, a basic platform with a hidden mechanism inside that made it spin. He’d built the rest of it himself, carving the horses during the winter months and painting their glossy coats, adding gleaming jewels for eyes. Mr Loveridge’s Cantering Carousel, he’d called it. Pride of the Scottish fairs.

Lena had loved it as a child, was always proud that her father’s ride was one of the smartest on the showground, but as she got older she’d tired of its sameness. And it had become shabby over the years, particularly after her mother vanished and her father seemed to no longer care.

And now, it had become a killer.

‘Selling it is the right thing to do,’ Mary says, pulling back to pour the tea. ‘It’s too much work for one lassie like you. You’d need to hire a few hands, and if you’ve not got the money . . .’ She passes Lena a steaming cup. ‘I know it’s probably too soon to be thinking of these things, but, well, you could always join us. You’ve got a good voice on you, and we always need women to do some of the smaller parts in the theatre.’

‘Maybe,’ she says. ‘I’ll need to think on it. My daddy’s not even cold yet.’

Lena’s family had always known the Weavers – a brash, noisy tribe whose wagons followed the same roads they did, year after unpredictable year. William, the eldest of the four siblings, now running the family show with his own wife and bairns. Harry, who is trying to make it as a singer. Violet, away performing with the famous Linden’s Circus for the past few years. And Belle, the youngest, a pale, baleful-looking child whom Lena finds difficult to talk to. Their daddy, Billy senior, a jovial man who always looked as though he needed a good feeding up, had died several years before.

But it was Mary who ran the show, had done even when old Billy was alive. The Weavers had their own travelling theatre, performing the same three shows every year. As a child Lena had occasionally appeared alongside Violet playing the part of a flower or an angel. It was Mary who looked after the takings and hustled the punters in, who would take a drink afterwards with the rest of the showmen out on the ground while Billy saw to the horses. She was hard-headed, even harsh at times. She had a curious, unsentimental relationship with her children, more forewoman than mother, as though they were all performing bit parts not just in the theatre, but in her life, too.

Lena had a sneaking jealousy for their boisterous ways, for she should not have been an only child. Three times her mammy had given birth after her, and three times the cold, lifeless bairn had been wrapped in newspaper and buried in a far corner of a showground. Lena remembers her mammy’s hot, salty tears, her father’s face, grim and set. How each year when they returned to the grounds they would lay flowers the first night, and by the end of the second find them trampled into the ground by fairgoers.

‘If only I’d had a few brothers and sisters, eh?’ she says now, gazing wistfully at the Weaver wagons.

Mary is suddenly brisk. ‘Well, we’ve all got to be content with our lot. Now shall I ask some of the Codona boys to come and deal with your daddy? You don’t want flies.’

Later, after they’ve taken the old man’s body away and she’s eaten the remnants of the cold mutton stew, Lena sits on the steps of the caravan and considers her options. Mary is right. She does not have enough money to hire someone to operate the carousel for her, so if she keeps it she will have to run it herself. That means carting it across the country, from one town to the next, with no one to help her.

Or, she could sell it, and start her own show. Her mother always said that show women could do anything. They weren’t like the fancy, puffed-up ladies who came to the fairs in their frilled dresses, who seemed carved from porcelain, who might shatter into a thousand pieces at the slightest jolt. Show women were strong and hard. They were built like the steamships on the Clyde. They did not break.

And yet her mother had broken, hadn’t she? Or rather, she had disappeared, which amounted to the same thing. It was eleven years now, near enough. They had been at a fair at Galston, in Ayrshire. A funny wee town, her daddy always called it, with a coal mine nearby, men walking the streets still blackened with soot, falling about with the drink they’d already spent their pay packets on before the light drained from the sky.

A wind had been getting up that day. The carousel busy, whirling with excited children, and the scent of toffee apples on the air. Lena was playing hide and seek with Violet and another girl, Betsy, crouched behind a fortune-teller’s stall, hands gripping her knees, eyes shut tight. When she’d felt the hand on her shoulder she had assumed it was Violet, ahead of the game as always, but when she looked up it was her mammy standing there, gazing down with her familiar affectionate gaze. Lena had pressed her finger to her lips, mouthed ‘hide and seek’, and her mammy had smiled, touched Lena on the cheek, and whispered that she was just going to get some apples for her father. And then, wrapped in her beloved blue shawl, with its intricate pattern of white birds and flowers, a gift from her father one long-ago birthday, she disappeared into the crowd.

Lena had watched her go and felt nothing. She was absorbed in the game, fearful of discovery, thought only that she, too, would like an apple when her mother returned.

But her mother did not return. When Violet and Betsy found Lena, when they had played two more rounds of hide and seek, their hair sheened with sweat, heads drooping with tiredness, when she had returned, finally, to the carousel, thinking of the sweetness of that first bite of her apple – only then had she realised that her mother had vanished.

The carousel had stopped. Her father was standing on its platform, shouting her mother’s name. Lena had turned to run, her shoes sinking into the muddy ground, jostled and shoved by noisy fairgoers, plaintively calling out, ‘Mammy! Mammy!’ until her daddy grabbed her, lifted her bodily off the ground, and said roughly that he was not going to lose his wee girl today too, and she must stay put.

Before long, other men joined the search, the whole fairground echoing with the cries of ‘Maggie, Maggie’. But Maggie was gone. A policeman was fetched, a tall man in a stiff dark uniform and a worn, unsympathetic face. ‘Probably run off with a lad whose house isn’t on wheels, son,’ he told her father.

That first night without her was unbearable. Her father out searching most of the night, Lena shoved into a corner of the Weaver wagon, Violet’s pale, worried face telling her everything she needed to know but could not yet face.

Two days later, after the rest of the fair packed up and left, they had searched in coal sheds, down streams, even knocking on doors, and the policeman had returned and moved them on. They were causing a nuisance, he told them. And he couldn’t be responsible for what happened next if they stayed.

And so they had gone. To the next show, the next fairground. Her father always asking, always searching. But they never found her. Eventually, he just stopped asking, and Lena feared, deep within, that they might never see her mammy again.

Across the showground plumes of smoke spiral upwards from family fires. It is one of those mild March nights that signal the start of spring. Daffodils are blooming, their sunny heads nodding in the evening breeze. She falls into a deep, uneasy sleep, right there on the steps.

Over the next few days, grief clings to the world wherever Lena looks. It is as though everything is too bright, infused with a harsh white light. She sees her father’s face in the men at his funeral, distant Loveridge relatives from other Glasgow showgrounds in threadbare suits with similar noses and jowly, hangdog faces.

It is a hedge burial, in the portion of the showground quietly reserved for such matters, her daddy’s body dressed in his good suit, clutching a small spray of snowdrops Lena has gathered that morning, the dew on their drooping white petals still fresh. She is watching the earth being shovelled over his flimsy coffin, trying not to imagine how quickly the petals will wither, when a man approaches her, introduces himself as Uncle Jimmy, and says he will buy the carousel for eight guineas.

‘It’s a beat-up old thing but the towns we tour, they’ll never know the difference,’ he tells her. He has small, ferrety eyes and teeth as sharp as tacks. She wants to kick his heels. Instead she thanks him and pockets the money in her thick black mourning dress. She never wants to see the carousel again.

Around Vinegarhill Lena sometimes thinks she hears her daddy’s voice, the grunt he made when heaving himself up on to the carousel. She catches the scent of his cheap, tart tobacco. People are kind, respectful. They keep their distance, tip their hats. She cannot stand it. She wants to scream that this should never have happened, that life without her father is unimaginable, that she simply cannot go on. At nights she sits on the steps, holding the little ivory box her mother used to keep her precious things.

In there is a postcard. It is creased now, but when Lena holds it up to the fire she can see the faces clearly. There is her mother, young and bonny, a shawl wrapped round her shoulders and cradling a baby: Lena. Her face is a chubby round blur, in contrast to her mother’s, which looks severe, almost sad. Then there is her father, standing straight and tall, holding his horse and with a pipe in his mouth. A show family, 1890, Ayrshire read the words underneath. Her mother told her the story many times. The man with the strange box who appeared at the showground one day and stood, snuggled under a big black blanket, shouting at them to stay still. Weeks later when they were up in the Highlands he reappeared, holding postcards with their faces on them. They would be sent across the world, he said. They would be famous.

Her mother was so proud, kept the postcard propped up by the bedside for years. When she disappeared her father put it away, couldn’t bear seeing her young, shining face, full of promise and hope, every time he opened his eyes. Now, she realises, it is the only record of their faces left. Everything else is inside, tucked away in a memory.

There are other things in the box, too. She has made it her own since her mammy left, stored the few things in her life that remain precious, touchable and immediate. Things she can look at when all else feels as though it is lost.

And so there is a bunch of lavender, her mother’s favourite. If you lay them under your pillow , she often told Lena, they will give you the sweetest dreams . The buds are dry and dusty, so fragile now that Lena is scared that if she touches them they will crumble to dust.

She brings out a ticket stub for Linden’s Circus, crumpled, the lettering faded, and pictures the glitter of the big top, her mother’s hand clasped firmly in her own, the elephant that came trotting round the ring with a sparkly headdress, the largest beast she had ever seen in her life. Cowering, she had hidden her head under Mammy’s arm, but her mother told her not to be silly, elephants were friendly really, all you needed to do was give them a sugar lump and they’d be your friend forever. How clever her mammy was. How much she knew about the world.

Carefully, Lena reaches down to the bottom of the box. There is her mammy’s pendant, silver and cool to the touch. A pebble, kept safe for reasons long lost. And the letter she was given three years after her mother vanished, that told her exactly why she left.