Page 31 of The Show Woman

30

No travellers

Lena pounds her way down Union Street, past the daytime drunks and the veering vagrants, caps in hand, faces leering. She has always been intimidated by this grimy city’s central maze of streets, its cobbled roads full of people and horses. She remembers her daddy bringing her here once, the year her mammy vanished. Despite it all, there had been a good season on the fairs and her daddy had pennies to spare, wanted to buy her a treat that might make up for it all, somehow.

And so they had walked out of the showground gates, something she had done rarely except for her sporadic visits to the local school, and down into the town, to a big toy shop with shiny tin soldiers in the window, ruby-red drums, running hoops with gaily coloured ribbons, and a collection of wooden farm animals arranged around a paddock of real grass. Lena was entranced.

The bell tinkled as they pushed their way in. A boy in a sky-blue sailor suit was holding a kite, swooshing it this way and that while his father, smart in a suit with a high collar, and the shopkeeper, who wore a clean brown apron and was sporting a trimmed moustache, watched on indulgently.

The shopkeeper’s eyes narrowed when they landed on Lena and her daddy.

‘Can’t you read?’ he said.

Her daddy, flustered, took his cap off, turned it round in his large, meaty hands. ‘Sorry, sir,’ he said, and Lena recognised the tone as one he used with non-show people, with flatties, when he was trying to be polite, deferential. ‘I didn’t see the sign. Just trying to get something for the wean here.’ And he gestured towards Lena, who smiled her best impress-the-flatties grin.

‘Well, I suggest you go back outside and read it,’ said the man. ‘Or get your wean ,’ and he sneered at the word, ‘to read it for you.’

They shuffled back out the door, the bell tinkling all the time, while the man apologised in hushed tones to his customers.

Lena squinted at the sign on the door. NO IRISH, NO TRAVELLERS.

They turned back towards Vinegarhill, her daddy stopping at a sweetie stall on the Gallowgate to buy her a poke of striped humbugs instead, but the experience had humiliated them both. She saw the look in her daddy’s eyes, felt his shame and his anger.

Yet here she is, flitting down Union Street as though the devil were on her back, because she wants to get something nice for Violet. Violet, her sort of sister, who lies immobile and miserable in a wagon in a showground, who might never walk again.

The guilt has made her heavy, borne down on her like a great sack of coal. She should never have kissed Harry. Should never have called Violet a bitch. Should never have started the circus. Should have checked the trapeze bar every day herself.

She knows now that Violet’s fall was no accident. When they took her away, Lena had rushed to the tent, climbed the rigging to the trapeze. Never good with heights, she had wobbled there, arms outstretched, until she could grab the bar. It immediately slid away from her. She let it swing, then reached out to grasp it again, this time grabbing the ropes that secured it. Pulling it to her, she saw the bar glisten.

It was covered in grease, slippery as an eel. Not even a trapeze artist of Violet’s calibre could have clung on to that. Lena had flung it away in fury. Violet’s fate had been set before she’d even climbed the rigging. She was descending to the floor when Harry appeared, eyes hooded, his face streaked with worry, to tell her that Violet was in hospital.

‘How is she?’ Lena wouldn’t look at him.

‘They think her back is broken.’

Lena exhaled slightly. It was the best, and worst news, she had ever received. Above them, the trapeze swung silently.

‘They won’t let anyone other than family in for now,’ Harry said, ‘so you won’t be able to see her. But I’ll keep you posted, I promise.’

‘You can talk to Rosie,’ said Lena. ‘I’ll hear all the news from her.’

Harry paced up and down the tent, his shoes kicking on the sawdust where Violet had fallen, the faintest outline of her body still visible.

‘Can we talk?’ he said.

‘Why?’ she replied coldly. ‘I’d have thought you’d be running off after Carmen by now.’

He looked like a puppy that had been kicked. ‘She told you, then,’ he said softly, his cap limp in his hands.

‘No, Violet told me. And I’m glad she did. I just don’t understand why you lied. Why Carmen lied either.’

‘It was a long time ago. I’m sorry. It’s not something I’m proud of, but I didn’t see the sense in bringing it up. Not when the circus was doing so well, and you women were all so close. Why rake up the past?’

‘That’s the problem with the past,’ said Lena. ‘It has a habit of turning up in the present.’

Harry was silent.

Lena looked at him briefly, saw regret and misery on his normally open, kind face, but could find nothing left in her heart for him. It was as though the sun had gone in. He turned to leave and she watched his retreating back, the sturdy shoulders, the way his hair curled over his shirt collar, vanish into the night.

She shakes away the thoughts that clatter into her head. The important thing now is to be there for Violet, to make her smile, help look after her. She thinks of Rosie, working hard now at Templeton’s carpet factory to bring in a few pennies to pay for Violet’s doctor, who comes to visit every three days with draughts for the pain. Lena worried that Rosie would blame her, direct her rage and fury at their ringmistress. Instead she has acquired a bleak, methodical calm.

Almost at the end of Union Street now, and she can see the dirty river ahead. It is running high after a long bout of rain, five days in a row, and the river bus heading in to moor bobs dangerously in the swell, tiny figures on deck holding on to precious hats, unsteady on their feet.

She stops outside the shopfront and checks for signs but sees none. She pushes the door, and enters a treasure trove of riotous colour. Bolts of fabric are piled up on every side, sheer organdie in pink and blush, opaque poplins in dove-grey and bold blue. There are silks, too, sheening in the late afternoon light, in ochre and emerald and palest lilac. Spindles of wool are stacked at the back of the shop, sensible navy and midnight black, with jaunty flashes of reds and sunshine-yellows.

‘Can I help you?’

A woman emerges from behind the wools, looking intently at Lena, but not unkindly.

‘Oh, yes, please,’ says Lena, in her usual placate-the-flatties voice. ‘I’d like to buy some wool. I’m knitting a friend a bedjacket.’

*

‘How are you today, then, hen?’ asks Lena.

The figure on the bed flicks her head from side to side.

‘Bloody glorious. I’ve pissed the bed three times, stuck so many pins into my legs to see if I can feel anything that I’ve made them bleed, and read exactly one page of Pride and Prejudice . Jane Austen is shite, I’ve concluded.’

‘Well,’ says Lena, settling down on the bed next to her, ‘at least you’ve still got your health.’

Violet emits a low, gravelly chuckle. The air in the wagon is thick, foetid, and Lena wonders if Mary Weaver has been in to see her daughter today, brought her food or changed her bedding.

‘You need clean sheets?’ asks Lena.

‘Nah,’ says Violet. ‘Belle came in earlier. Didn’t thank me for making her, but she did it after I threatened to box her ears.’

Violet’s little sister has shot up since they left Vinegarhill all those months ago, and is now taller than her mother. She is probably taller than Violet, too, not that they’d know. Lena’s heart sinks again.

‘I bought some wool,’ says Lena, ripping off the brown paper of the parcel she is carrying to show Violet the thick balls in various shades of purple. ‘I’m going to knit you a bedjacket for the cold nights. Violet for violet.’

Violet rolls her eyes. ‘Aye, well, it’ll keep you busy,’ she says.

‘There’s something else I wanted to talk to you about,’ says Lena.

‘If it’s Harry, then he wants to—’

‘It’s not Harry. It’ll never be Harry. We’ve agreed on that. No more now.’

Violet flicks a hand to her hair, scratches vigorously at a spot at her temple. ‘Go on, then,’ she says.

‘It’s Serena Linden.’

Violet’s eyes narrow dangerously.

‘I want to go and see her. I think it was her that greased the bar, I really do. And if it was, I want to get it out of her.’

Violet snorts. ‘Don’t go,’ she says. ‘Lena, I’m serious. She’s a vicious old crone. There’s no telling what she might do.’

‘But we might never know the truth if I don’t,’ says Lena.

Violet shrugs. ‘So? It won’t change anything. These legs won’t work whether Serena coughs to putting me in that chair or not.’ She gestures at the old wooden wheelchair that sits, malevolently, in the corner. ‘Promise me you won’t go,’ she says. ‘She’s nothing but an auld bitch.’

They both flinch at the word.

‘Actually, there’s something I wanted to talk to you about, too,’ says Violet. Her face has lost its previous animated quality. She looks serious, sad. But before she can say anything the door of the wagon swings open and Rosie walks in.

‘Hello, you two,’ she says, and she bustles around straightening Violet’s sheets, opening the window to clear the air, and taking off her hat, seemingly all in one fluid motion.

‘It’ll keep,’ says Violet. And she pats Lena’s hand.