Page 3 of The Show Woman

2

At Linden’s Circus

Serena Linden’s bones pop and crackle like firewood as she heaves herself out of the velvet day bed. She is fifty-seven years old and has carried eight children, six of whom had the audacity to leave her before taking their first breath. Her muscles ache as though they have been squeezed up like an accordion. And she does play the accordion sometimes, on warm nights when the circus performers linger outside after a show, with a drop of whisky to oil her stiff fingers, acrobats flinging themselves across the scorched grass like graceful, bony birds.

But Serena has troubles. That’s how it is when your husband ups and dies on you, leaving you with a circus to carry on your back. She leans heavily on a carved, ivory-handled cane as she rummages in the old teak cabinet at the back of the caravan. Brandy tonight. She needs it for the shock.

Serena was making her late rounds when she heard them, out by the small hay wagon kept for the animals. A deep groaning, thick and guttural, yet curiously and improbably feminine. She stopped, her cane sinking into the soft earth below, and listened.

‘Shh,’ came a voice, followed by soft, suppressed laughter. She rounded the corner and saw the glow of a lantern up ahead, two shadowy figures pressed up against each other by the side of the hay wagon.

‘You there!’ she shouted. The two sprang apart, and Serena saw that the figure against the wagon was little Elsie Donald, one of the new stilt-walkers. She took a step forward, and Violet Weaver emerged from the dark. Red hair loose and unruly, face slicked with sweat, a languid smile on her lips.

‘We were just out for a late walk, Miss Linden,’ she said. She picked up a strand of her hair, twirled it lazily round her finger.

Serena sits down on the day bed, her bulk causing the entire wagon to shake. Once again fury kindles as she recalls the girl’s insouciance, her damp-faced cheek. She feels an excitable rage that mingles with something deeper. An undefinable stirring she has not felt in many a long year. Humiliated, she swigs deeply from her brandy. It is rough on her parched gullet, burnishes her shame.

It’s disgusting, she thinks. Two lassies. Ungodly. Serena’s relationship with her God is tenuous at best. It is years since she has stepped inside a church, bowed her head in solemn prayer and dropped to her knees to praise her Lord. But O Father who art in heaven, she knowsthe difference between right and wrong. And the Weaver girl is wrong, through and through.

Violet Weaver was always going to be difficult. Serena knew it the moment she clapped eyes on her: that tangle of long copper hair, those fat, berry lips and green eyes. Far too sharp for a bairn’s. Violet was a wee skelf of a thing when she came to Linden’s, with a body that was soft and pliable, like oil. But the things she could do on a trapeze... Serena Linden has been in the circus her whole life. She knows talent. Exciting talent that can bring in the punters, slack-faced flatties who will pay to see her again and again, who will bring their friends and tell their families and shout from the rooftops about the girl in the silver costume with the mass of red hair who flies through the air.

It was her pa who taught her what to look for in a performer. How the trapeze artists should have a stretch in their body, like warm bread dough, ripe for the oven. How the equestrians and the lion-tamers and the elephant-handlers must show no fear, but look their charges straight in the eye. That it was the man at the centre of it all – or woman, he said once, dispensing a wink in her direction – who must control them all.

As a child Serena drank it all in; listened, eyes bright, as her father led her through every wagon and tent in their circus, reminding her that one day this would all be hers, that she had a legacy, a responsibility, that she could not let him down.

Serena sighs, takes another sip from the bottle. Sometimes she wonders if she has failed her father. Made bad decisions, hired the wrong acts. Because after five years at Linden’s, cosseted and admired, the star turn in every performance, Violet has become arrogant and smug. She thinks she is invincible. Serena has seen it again and again in the younger performers, the ones who supposed their bodies were made of rubber, that the ground was covered in feathers, that they really had sprouted wings. They believed they could do anything, even acts that went against God.

Violet needs to be taught that the ground is as hard for her as it is for the rest of the world. Serena sips her brandy, feels its amber warmth spread down to her toes. Perhaps the girl can work in the yard for a bit. Learn what it’s like to have her wings clipped. The other girl is dispensable. Serena will have one of the McCracken boys take her into town and leave her there the next morning. But Violet Weaver, well. That lassie needs to be taught a lesson.

Serena is in the big top. A bareback horse-rider trots dolefully around the ring on a plumed pony, balancing on one leg, watching nervously as Serena shrieks that he needs to stand up straighter. ‘You’re not riding a cart to the cattle market, lad,’ she shouts, and the boy does his best to straighten his leg before wobbling, flinging his arms out and finally toppling into a heap on the ground. Serena raps her cane on the thick sawdust. ‘Useless,’ she says.

She limps over to an upturned bale of hay, scrabbles in a pocket for her pipe. It is made of cherry wood, its bowl battered and worn, and as she puffs away at the stem like a lamprey the air fills with the cloying scent of her tobacco. Three Nuns. Her favourite.

The bareback rider scuttles out of the tent, muttering apologies and promising to try again in the afternoon. Serena grunts. Once upon a time she could have shown him herself. She was a dab hand on a pony as a girl, could do cartwheels and handstands, her body as bendable as an eel’s. She had what her pa called ‘the flourish’: that indefinable something that kept the audience watching, mouths open, caught in her spell. All in the past. The peaceful, painful past.

Violet enters the tent, that maddening smile still on her lips. ‘Good morning, Miss Linden,’ she says. Serena’s eyesight isn’t as good as it once was, but the girl appears tired, and impudent.

‘Come away over here,’ she says, and Violet approaches, her thin leotard emphasising her tiny ribcage. ‘Have you ever scrubbed a pot, lassie?’

Violet looks uncertain. ‘For my mammy, aye,’ she says.

‘Well, you’re going to do it here now. A wee bit of time off the bar.’

‘Scrub pots? But why? ’Cause I took a wee stroll with my pal?’

Serena sits back and regards the girl. She looks appalled. Furious.

‘I’m not a maid,’ says Violet. ‘I’m the best trapeze artist you’ve ever had.’

Serena laughs. ‘No, Violet, you think you’re the best trapeze artist I’ve ever had. Believe me, lassie, I’ve seen far better than you.’

Violet knows this is untrue. Gianni the Italian juggler told her Serena said it once, a few months after she’d joined Linden’s, one of those late nights out on the grass last summer when there had been whisky in the mugs and hope on the air. She’d even put it on a poster, brought a man in to sketch her, trace the lines of her body as she flung herself over the bar. They’d been slapped up all over the country. Violet Weaver. The Greatest Trapeze Artist Who Ever Lived.

Serena deposits a globule of spit on the ground and coughs. ‘You’ll wash pots and that’s the end of it. Nobody is better than Linden’s.’

For once, Violet is stunned into silence. Her usual nonchalance is gone. She looks, Serena notices with some satisfaction, like a frightened wee girl. And so she pushes it. Presses down on the bruise.

‘I should have known never to hire a Weaver,’ she says. ‘You’re a bad lot, always have been. The things I could tell you about your mammy would make your hair stand on end.’

But what exactly it is that would have made her hair stand on end Violet never finds out, because she knocks Serena out cold.