Page 7 of The Show Woman

6

Birthmarks

There is only one lamp left burning in the showground at Kirkcudbright. Its low flame lures moths to the window of the wagon, their wings crumbling as they crash against the grimy glass. Serena watches them impassively. At night she prefers to be alone. By then she has had enough of the circus and its hullabaloo, the deadened laughter of the crowds. Silence, and the inevitable bottle of brandy, are what she craves.

Here she can brood. Ruminate over her past mistakes, her triumphs, fulminate over those who have crossed her.

Tonight, though, is different.

‘Go on,’ she says, taking a swig from the bottle. The bruise on her cheek where the Weaver girl took a swing at her is still purple and angry, the furious eye half-closed. ‘I haven’t got all night.’

Benjamin hangs his head. He is twenty-nine, a tall man with large, meaty hands and a loose sprinkling of freckles across his nose. Serena has always told him he looks like his father, and this half-mocking, half-pitying remark has made him awkward, ungainly. Despite his size he prefers to fade into the background, fold himself up like a pen-knife. Serena despises him for it.

‘It’s Lucy—’ he starts, but she is already interrupting him.

‘Lucy? Who’s Lucy? I don’t know a Lucy.’

‘You do; she came on tour with us last year. She was one of the animal-handlers. She looked after the lion.’

Serena’s cross, confused face clears slightly. ‘That wee slip of a thing with the strawberry on her face?’

She is referring to Lucy’s birthmark, a small bloom under her right eye that Serena considers an unsightly blemish. She does not know that Benjamin is thinking of it now, how it felt when he laid his lips against it for the first time, its exquisite softness, like the skin of a ripe blaeberry. She does not know that he thinks it the most beautiful part of her.

He nods, runs his hands through his hair. ‘Aye, well. We’re married.’

Serena puts the bottle down and regards her eldest son. He has always been a disappointment. A puny boy, weak as watered-down milk, with too much of his father in him. Had she not tried her best? Taught him the trade, shown him the ropes, and smacked him hard in the gullet when he’d botched a job? And now he had gone and married a silly English lassie, and hadn’t even had the grace to tell his own mother.

She shakes her head and fumbles in her skirt pocket for her pipe.

‘You daft laddie.’ Her voice is almost a whisper.

‘I’m not a daft laddie, I’m a twenty-nine-year-old man. I’m married to a wonderful woman. And I love her.’

Serena reaches for the brandy again and then stops, hand in mid-air, like a moth which has suddenly sensed the deadly heat of a seductive flame. This is not over, she realises. There is more to come. She places her hand back in her lap. There will be time with the bottle later.

‘And?’ she says.

Benjamin takes a deep breath. ‘And we’re away. Lucy’s father has a circus down south, near Stafford. He says I can help with the general running of the show.’

Serena laughs coldly. ‘Oh, so you’ll be running the man’s show for him, will you? God help him.’

Benjamin shakes his head. ‘They’re good people,’ he says. ‘Which is a damned sight more than I can say about you.’

So there it is. He is leaving her. The ungrateful bastard is abandoning his mammy, just like all the rest. She lights her pipe and scrabbles at her wrist for the bracelet Davey made her, all those years ago. He had been a pearl-fisher when he met her, up on the Spey, made his living on the river bank prising open the mouths of coy, sodden mussels. A good-for-nothing, her pa said, and she should have listened to him, but oh, how she had liked the pearls. How smooth they were, hard as glass, the sheen of them, a strange coolness which warmed in your hand, like oil.

Davey made her a bracelet, a pearl for each baby, the moment her belly began to bloom, the string becoming longer, the pearls duller, as the bairns kept coming, tearing at her insides, ripping her flesh. Six had died inside her, or on their way out, their limp bodies spirited away before she could even take a look at their soft, senseless faces. Of the two who had made it, screaming and bloody, there had been nothing but disappointment. Simon, a quiet, moody boy who high-tailed it into the Navy the minute he turned sixteen, never to be heard from again. And Benjamin. Lumbering, gangly, a failure.

Who is to help her run Linden’s Circus now? There are the lads, of course, the rough McCracken boys whose father had been hired by Davey years ago, and who stayed with the circus through thick and thin, sorted out a few problems for her when the need arose. But the idea of handing the circus over to them? Good God, no. Dirty thieves, the lot of them. They’d sell off every last piece of the show before she was cold in her grave. It is unthinkable. Her pa is long dead, and she has no siblings to speak of. The wraiths who have threatened her circus over the years, slipped under the corners of the big top, wound their way round her gleaming trapeze bars and shiny animal cages, she has long since chased away.

A kernel of doubt sprouts in the back of her mind. Perhaps she was too hasty, too intent on having things her own way. She blots it out. It is too late for all that now.

‘Am I not good enough for you any more? Does being a Linden mean nothing to you? Surely you’d prefer to run your own show than work for some English fly-by-night?’

Benjamin shakes his head, and she can see in his refusal a hint of pride, a final defiance. It turns her stomach.

‘I’ve never wanted to inherit this place,’ he says. ‘Not even when I was a wee boy. You run it on fear. Your performers are terrified of you, and your henchmen. Everything in this place has been built on lies, on breaking the rules. You’ve turned us all into criminals. Lucy saw it the moment she came here. She’d have left if it wasn’t for me. The way you give backhanders to the McCrackens. The pickpockets you have running through the audience . . .’

Serena tries to interrupt but he talks over her.

‘Anything for a quick ha’penny, and bugger the poor souls who’ve paid their honest wages to see the show. You’re a fraud. My father would be turning in his grave.’

‘Don’t you bring that lazy, good-for-nothing old man into this!’ Serena is shouting now, hot with fury. She, Serena Linden, has built this place from the ground up. Davey would have wasted it all; he knew nothing about being a showman. After she plucked him from the riverbank he had been happy with his pathetic little show, his three clowns and his unicycle and that feeble wee stage act with the bowler hats. It was she who had taken her own father’s circus and brought it kicking and screaming into the twentieth century, made them money, real money that they could use for better wagons, decent horses, lions and elephants, and a wee nip of brandy whenever the mood takes her. How does he not realise that?

‘He was a good man, my father. And I’d rather be like him than you.’ Benjamin stands up. ‘I’ve to meet Lucy in Stafford at the end of the week. I’ll leave my caravan, and take my belongings. I want no part of it. Any of it.’

Serena raps her cane on the floor. ‘How dare you!’ she shouts. ‘Lazy. Useless. No backbone.’ Her head is fizzing with anger.

The door to the caravan opens. It is Dougie McCracken, the oldest and meanest of the brothers.

‘Everything alright, Miss Linden?’

Serena’s chest rises and falls wildly and she coughs, a deep, rasping wheeze. ‘My son here was just leaving,’ she says through ragged breaths. She looks past Benjamin at Dougie. She will not look her son in the eye again.

‘Aye,’ says Benjamin. He puts his cap on his head and pushes his way out of the wagon past Dougie, who regards him narrowly.

‘Thank you, Dougie,’ says Serena. ‘That will be all.’

‘Need me to deal with him?’ he asks.

She shakes her head. ‘No, thank you. Away to bed now.’

He pulls the wagon door shut and she hears his soft footsteps walking over the grass.

Serena slumps back on her day bed, cradling the bottle as though it were one of her tiny, lifeless bairns. They were never coming back, and neither was Benjamin. She battles the sting in her eyes with a long, gulping swig. She will not weep for her lost sons. She lights her pipe, unsteady hands striking the match. To hell with them all.