Page 36 of The Show Woman

35

Carnival

December creeps on. Light retreats. The short days are blanketed by a thick, winter-white sky while the nights, long and interminable, stretch well outside the confines of the clock. Sometimes Lena is amazed when morning comes, as though the dark’s vice-like grip might never be relinquished.

Ten days before Christmas, the carnival starts. A Glasgow tradition, held here at Vinegarhill, it is the summer fair’s frosty cousin. Rides are sloughed of summer mud and cranked up, carousels whirl, the fortune-tellers and boxers and penny shies and menageries all set out their icy stalls. Gas lamps are erected for the occasion, giving the showground a pale, spectral glow, and the scent of roasted chestnuts and hot meat pies carries on the air.

One of the big attractions this year is the cinematographers, who are showing grainy, stop-start footage of the King’s funeral. It brings in the ladies from up west, bundled in good wool coats and fur hats, gentlemen in bowlers and trimmed moustaches, all wishing to pay their respects to their dear departed monarch, watch the grand procession, bow their heads in solemn reverence.

Lena had started making plans for the winter carnival during those last, jewel-like days on the road. Imagined costumes in red and green for Violet and Rosie, a crown of holly leaves for Tommy. She had been dabbling with the idea of learning a skill herself, perhaps the fire hoop, notoriously dangerous but back then, when she dreamt of it, when the summer still reigned over them and hope was on the air, anything had seemed possible.

Now, as the carnival clatters around her, she spends her days shut up in the wagon. She knits bedjackets and hats, Christmas gifts for Violet and Rosie, or patches her old, worn dresses. Her tailcoat and top hat hang silently at the back of the caravan. One particularly grey day just before Christmas Eve, she darts out to a food stall, buys a bag of hot, roasted apples sprinkled with brown sugar.

She taps softly at the door of Violet’s caravan but there is no answer. Inside she finds her friend asleep, her hair, the only part of her which has not dimmed since her fall, splayed out on the pillow like paint. Lena leaves the bag by her bed, but as she tiptoes out, Violet moves.

‘Stay,’ she says. ‘I was only dreaming about the trapeze. Talk to me. What have you been doing lately?’

So Lena tells her about her recent visit to the rat pit, her suspicion that Carmen is back on the streets, how thin she looks and how miserable – broken, somehow.

‘Like me,’ says Violet. ‘Except I’d rather be there than here.’

‘Oh, trust me, you wouldn’t,’ says Lena. ‘It was awful. You should have seen it. The noise. And the smell. Never mind what she does for money.’

‘What did she say about Harry?’

Lena hesitates. Wonders how much Violet really knows. Decides to tell her anyway.

‘Back in Stirling Carmen told me that an acrobat in her circus from Spain had got her pregnant while they were touring here, and that’s how she ended up on the streets the first time. Turns out she lied about the acrobat. It was Harry. They met when he was doing a show near their circus, then they moved on. He never knew she was pregnant.’

Violet sits up. ‘Really? She never told me that. Perhaps she thought I’d be cross because I’m his sister. She told me she’d been with him once a long time ago, and I just presumed they’d met when she was on the streets.’ She pauses, thoughtful. ‘Poor Harry. And poor Carmen. There could have been a wee bairn. Another Weaver. Instead she lost everything. You should give her another chance, you know.’

‘I tried,’ says Lena. ‘She wouldn’t have it. Insisted she was just saving up her pennies and going home to Spain.’

‘Spain,’ says Violet. ‘How I’d have loved to visit Spain.’

‘You never know,’ says Lena. ‘You might yet.’

But Violet shakes her head. ‘I’m not going anywhere. I never will. I’m doomed to a life in this wagon, waited on hand and foot by Rosie. I’m a millstone round her neck. And yours. And my mammy’s. Unless I can walk again.’

Lena remembers with a chill that Violet does not know of Mary’s decision, has not heard the doctor’s words. She does not yet know she is to be sent to the hospital, for life.

‘You don’t know what your future is yet, Vi,’ she says quietly.

‘Well, unless something happens with these rotten old legs soon, you might as well send me off to the rat pit too. Then at least I won’t be a burden on anyone.’ Her eyes are cold and bleak.

Lena takes her hand, traces her thumb over Violet’s thin, bony fingers.

‘I’ve been reading Alice in Wonderland ,’ says Violet. ‘Belle brought me a copy. It’s a damned sight better than Jane Austen, I can tell you. But there’s a line in it: “It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.” That’s me. A different person. I wish I could just disappear. Vanish. Like one of those magic acts.’ She realises what she has just said. ‘Not like your mammy. I mean, I wish I could just click my fingers whenever I wanted and be gone. For good.’

Lena holds her hand, says nothing. They sit like that in the faltering dusk for a long, long time.

Two nights later, a shooting star sails across Vinegarhill. Its tail sparkles with the fury of the sun, a burst of brightness across the inky black sky, before its shards explode, glitter, and scatter into nothingness. But it is only Violet, awake and in pain, her throbbing head resting against the bitter glass, who sees it.

Christmas is a muted affair. Lena visits Violet and Rosie, gives them the bedjacket and hat she has knitted them. Rosie in turn gives her a bracelet she has made from carpet wool in a deep vivid blue. Violet gives her a bag of sweets.

‘Rosie took me down to see the sweetie wives,’ she says. She has large purple shadows under her eyes, and Rosie says she has not been sleeping. Rosie looks worried, as though she can no longer reach Violet, as if something between them has snapped.

In the afternoon they go over to the Weaver wagon, where Mary has procured a cheap side of beef for the occasion. There are glasses of brandy, and potatoes roasted in the kettle over the fire, boiled carrots and a few neeps, which Belle refuses to eat, pronouncing them ‘disgusting’.

Morag the crow makes an appearance and Mary shoos her away, only for the bird to retire to the branch of a nearby tree, emitting the occasional angry caw. When Mary isn’t looking, Belle sneaks her a bit of potato.

Mary’s eldest son, William, has decided to stay with his family in Edinburgh for the winter. Harry, who is doing a winter tour of music halls – ‘He’s been getting some grand reviews,’ reports Mary proudly – stays away.

Violet says little, simply sits in her hard wooden chair in morose silence. Occasionally she holds Rosie’s hand, lets her mother fuss round her, but she barely touches her food.

‘She’ll be better once she’s in the hospital,’ Mary says quietly to Lena when they are dishing up the small plum pudding, its dark sponge giving off great gusts of steam. ‘They’ll look after her, keep her right. She’s got a place confirmed now. Third of January.’

‘When are you going to tell her?’

‘In a few days,’ says Mary, ‘as soon as I can get rid of the limpet for a few minutes.’

When Lena returns to her wagon that night, her belly full, she climbs into her bed and weeps. She imagines how Violet, her bright and beautiful friend, confined to her chair for life, will react when she is told that she must leave the place she loves, the world she has always inhabited. That she will be shut up in an airless hospital room, kept in her bed, all alone. She will never swing on the trapeze again, never run or cartwheel or soar through the air.

Deep down, though, she knows fine well what it will do. It will kill her.