Page 4 of The Show Woman

3

Walnut

A watery sun washes over the showground. It is early morning and wagons gleam with fresh, gaily coloured paint. On the far side of Vinegarhill Lena can make out the tinny sound of a barrel organ, its staccato notes comfortingly familiar. A boy flits past with a cage of yellow birds, shouting that the little one has got away and has anyone got a net?

Lena has dreamt again of the wooden horses carrying her father over the hill. Except this time they are headed for Galston, sweat on their manes like sea foam, and she is in the coal merchant’s cart with her daddy’s dead body. The corpse is a bright, bony white yet she is covered in soot, her blackened hands throbbing with a deep, crackling heat. And somewhere ahead of them her mother, her blue shawl in the distance like a fading beacon.

Lena pounds at sodden sheets in a tin bucket. She has been slack with the laundry and the wagon has taken on a sour, tainted smell. It is about time she got a hold of herself. Made things nice. Just like she did when Daddy was alive. Perhaps it is time to take off her black mourning dress, its hem ringed in mud, the cuffs frayed and ragged. It had been her mother’s once, although whom she had mourned, and for how long, Lena can no longer remember.

She never told the old man about the letter. It would have broken his thin, delicate heart, sliced it neatly in two. She was still a bairn herself back then, but she knew that hope had to be kindled in order for it to burn. That her father must believe that Mammy was trying to return to them, that she would find them again, somehow.

The boy who tapped her arm that day in Galston was young and wolfish. Black holes where his front teeth should be and a cap that sagged over his eyes like a bluebell. It had been one of those times when her daddy had been asking around for Maggie Loveridge, a show woman with yellow hair and a shawl the colour of cornflowers. Last seen in this town, at this very fairground, three years before. There had been shakings of heads, hands in pockets, rough shrugs of shoulders. And then this boy, creeping up to the carousel while her father was away seeing to the horses, tugging at her sleeves, thrusting the letter in her hand and then scuttling off without a single word. She opened it that night by the fire when Daddy was asleep, tears running down her face as she read the short, callous note again and again. Her mother had left them. Her words were crude, cruel, and final as a sunset. She knew she must carry this secret alone.

‘I’m sorry about your daddy.’

The voice, thin and high, is one she recognises. She turns around.

Violet stands before her, thinner and more bird-like than ever. Her sky-blue poplin dress hangs off her bony frame, her hair roped into a long and unruly plait. She is barefoot. Violet, whom she has known her whole life, who has always unsettled her with her high-cheeked temper, the drama she drags around like a sack of marbles. As children they were often flung together, in Weaver family plays, in wagons packed with bairns from different families, and during their itinerant and sporadic school days. Violet, her sort of sister. Whose tempestuousness, stubborn arrogance and, as they grew older, audacious beauty, rubbed Lena’s sturdiness up the wrong way.

‘Violet thinks she’s special,’ Lena had remarked to her father once.

‘Well, maybe she is,’ he’d replied, and Lena had seethed with quiet, jealous fury.

‘If you’re here for the funeral you’re too late,’ she says now, wringing out a final sheet. Her hands are red raw from the water and she clasps them together, embarrassed. She has never seen Violet wash as much as a rag.

‘I know,’ says Violet. ‘It’s you I came to see. Come and have a smoke.’

Lena wipes her hands on her dress and reluctantly follows Violet over to the Weaver wagons.

‘How long are you going to wear that?’ Violet says, gesturing at the dress as she brings out a box of tobacco, its lid covered in gold lettering so fine it looks like thread. Lena raises an eyebrow. ‘Turkish. Got it from a lion-tamer,’ Violet says.

Lena feels her hackles rise at her showy ways. ‘I’ll wear it as long as I wear it,’ she says. ‘And how was he? The lion-tamer, I mean. Worth the bother?’

Violet delicately rolls the tobacco in thin paper and lets out a dry laugh. ‘It wasnae like that,’ she says.

Lena smirks. ‘I’ve heard it never is.’

Violet ignores her and licks the paper, then hands her the roll-up and leans over to strike a match. Lena inhales deeply. She has always loved a smoke, but this last year money has been so tight she and her daddy had been ekeing out the cheap baccy, rough shag that tasted like toasted tar. Violet’s tobacco is sweet and soft, like inhaling a rich, musky cloud of toffee.

‘Good, isn’t it?’

‘Aye,’ Lena says. She blows a smoke ring, then slashes it through the air with her finger.

‘Quite the show woman, eh?’ says Violet.

‘What do you want?’

‘I was coming to that. It seems that you and I are in a similar situation. You’ve lost your daddy; I’ve lost the circus.’

Lena looks up. ‘What did you do?’

‘Never mind that. I’m well out of it. But here’s the thing. You and me, we’re more similar than you think.’

Lena opens her mouth to protest but Violet shushes her.

‘I’ve been thinking about it, and as I see it we’ve both got three choices. Join my mammy and my brother and spend the rest of our lives performing the same three plays until we die. Marry the first dafty that comes along and squeeze out a few noisy bairns. Or, we start our own show.’

Lena looks at her. ‘With you? Start a show with you?’

‘Aye,’ Violet says. ‘I’m the greatest trapeze artist who ever lived. Haven’t you heard?’

Despite herself, Lena smiles. Mary Weaver had been so proud when Serena Linden had put the line on her posters, edged in green and gold, with a drawing in full colour of Violet leaping from the bar, red hair trailing behind her, lips unnaturally red.

‘You might be, but you’re hardly the whole show by yourself,’ says Lena.

‘Well, I know that. But that’s where you come in. Get a few more acts. Something to take on the road. As I say, you’re more show woman than you think. I knew your mammy, don’t forget.’

Lena bristles at the mention of her mother. ‘Why don’t you just join another circus? I hear Pinders-Ord is coming to Glasgow in the summer.’

Violet blows out a cloud of smoke. ‘The Linden woman has turned my name into muck. Doubt I’d get a job shovelling their elephant shit. Besides, wouldn’t it be fun to do it ourselves?’

Lena is softening. Violet’s plan excites her. The thought of being back on the road, of having purpose in her life, bringing magic to people, makes her heart sing. But with Violet?

‘What makes you think it’s what I want?’ she asks.

‘Well, I know you can afford it. I heard you sold the carousel. And what else are you going to do? Get a job in a factory? I can’t see it, hen.’

Lena remembers a night, one summer season long ago and far away, up in the forests of the Highlands. Violet and Lena had been put to bed, a small box fitted with straw and blankets on the floor of a wagon. It was light out, too bright for sleep, the fair still clattering in the background, hen harriers noisily circling the sky. Violet had nudged her, produced something hard and mottled from her pocket.

‘What is it?’ Lena had asked, cupping it in her hands. It was brown and oval-shaped, the sides puckered like a scar. She enjoyed running her thumb over the ridges, and when she shook it she could hear something soft rattling inside.

‘My pa says it’s a walnut,’ Violet said.

‘Do you think we can crack it?’ Lena had picked it up, dug her nail into the hard seam that ran around the sides. It was hard, stiff, and she could feel her nail bend and weaken as she worked at the nut’s shell. Then Violet leant forward, cupped her hands and blew on it. The shell split miraculously in two, exposing the halves of nut inside, like opposing sides of a tiny brain.

‘One for you and one for me,’ Violet said. They had eaten slowly, savouring the bitter flavour, crunching the ridges in companionable silence.

‘Look, there’s another thing,’ Violet says now, as she flattens a cigarette paper and starts rolling Lena another smoke. Her face is calm. Impassive. ‘Don’t you want to get to Galston?’

Lena stares at her.

‘I read the letter. Years ago. I was rootling around in your daddy’s caravan for baccy, found your precious wee box. Couldnae help but read it. Don’t you want to go and find her?’

Lena cannot speak. She is outraged. Fizzing with fury. She has been sucked into the drama again, except this time it is her own personal business. Violet had no right.

‘I never told a soul. I promise.’

Lena looks at her. ‘Really?’

‘Really. But . . .’ She hands Lena another cigarette, waits while she sparks it up. ‘I did remember something.’

The blood pulsates through Lena’s ears. It is as though she is standing at a cliff edge, can hear nothing but the roll and crash of the waves.

‘My mammy said once that your mother couldnae read or write. Her people, they weren’t that type. She probably hid it from you but I always remember my mammy saying that, for Maggie, words all looked like dead spiders on the page.’

Lena is stunned. Her father was never good with writing, would ask her to help him sometimes, but now that she thinks about it, she never saw her mammy read a sign, or write a letter, or sign her name.

‘Whoever wrote that letter, Lena, it wasn’t your mammy,’ says Violet. ‘Don’t you want to find out who did?’