Mourning Ruby

by Helen Dunmore

  ‘I was almost fourteen and I had learned how to work safely when I was angry or tired or upset. I had learned how to get tension out of my body before I performed. But Bella was too young for that. She felt something and it was there in her body, instantly. I had plucked her off the ladder like a doll. I had humiliated her, and made her feel as if she and her plans were nothing. And maybe I had meant to do it. I have often asked myself if that is what I meant to do. I told myself I was trying to save her, but was that the truth of what happened? You know, Rebecca, you can ask yourself these questions many times, and you don’t find answers.

  “‘I wouldn’t have fallen! I never fall!” Bella said. Yes, she was stiff with anger. I can see it now. But did I see it then?

  ‘I should have told her to go and play. She spent too much time practising anyway. She didn’t need to practise. I had a little square of turrón in my pocket. I had been thinking of it all the morning, with part of my mind. Thinking of when I would give myself the pleasure of it. The taste of the turrón in my mouth.

  ‘I could have given that turrón to Bella. She would have curled up on my lap to suck the sweetness out of it. She would have known that I was sorry. She’d have been ready to begin again.

  ‘But I did not. Instead I said to Bella, “If you want to work so much, then we’ll work.”

  ‘I squatted down. She stood facing me, between my legs. I took hold of her waist and as she sprang I lifted her so she rose up onto my shoulders in a handstand. We had done it many times before. I must have felt the stiffness in her body but I don’t remember it. I’ll tell you what I was thinking of. I was thinking: How can I find out when I must say horse, and when I must say mount?

  ‘Slowly, I stood up, still supporting her by the waist. I walked to where the chalk mark was that my father made for us. I thought she was in position. I took my hands from her waist.

  “‘Point your feet, Bella,” I said. Maybe I said it too quickly. She needed more time to feel her balance, to get herself perfectly into position. Then she could make a line of her body, her feet together and pointing upwards so my father could catch her by the ankles as he swung forward.

  ‘Her feet tipped and her balance changed. She was going over. I felt it and my hands flew up to grab her. But she came right over my head, backwards, and I couldn’t catch her.

  ‘She fell on her back in the ring.

  ‘It wasn’t far. She didn’t cry. But I froze all over at once because she didn’t cry. I was down by her side and her eyes were open, looking at me. Begging me to help her. She was trying to breathe but the fall had knocked the breath out of her.

  ‘She was winded. That’s all it was. I raised her in my arms to help her. I moved her and she made a noise I shall always remember. The noise of a child trying to scream who has no breath to scream.

  ‘My mother came running. I must have called out for her without knowing it. She took Bella from me and laid her flat on the ground. She knelt beside Bella.

  “‘Move your feet, Bella. Show me how you move your feet.”

  ‘But Bella didn’t move anything. She just stared at us, pleading for us to help her as she struggled for breath.

  ‘She had fractured the top of her thigh bone, near the hip socket. There was a doctor in the town but he was attending a difficult labour at a farm in the hills. It was evening before he came back. My mother and father put a board under Bella and carried her into the house of the apothecary.

  ‘My parents had no money to send her to the city hospital. There was a little charitable hospital run by the Sisters of Mercy, in a convent ten miles away. They cared for Bella there. She lay in a high, narrow, white bed with a crucifix over it, in a row of beds with crucifixes over them. There were twenty tortured Christs in that room.

  ‘The sisters were good women but they knew little about Bella’s injuries. They did what the doctor told them to do. She lay perfectly still, with a board under the mattress, with her leg in a heavy cast. They fed her from a cup with a spout. They knew nothing of what we know now. Now Bella would have had an operation. The bone should have been pinned, but even so it would have been difficult. It was a bad break, too close to the hip joint. Nowadays they would be able to do a hip-joint replacement if the pinning didn’t work.

  ‘Bella lay still. Her muscles wasted. She had sores on her elbows, her heels, her buttocks. She developed a chest infection. If she had not been Bella she would have given up.

  ‘She recovered from her chest infection. My mother treated the sores with marigold cream, which she brought in each day and rubbed into Bella’s skin secretly. The sisters didn’t approve, because the doctor hadn’t prescribed it. If my mother had left the cream by the bedside, they would have thrown it away.

  ‘When the cast came off, Bella taught herself to walk again. She limped badly. No, it was more than a limp. She lurched as she transferred her weight. Already we could see that her injured leg was shorter than her healthy leg. My mother rubbed oil into Bella’s muscles and massaged them to try to build them up again. Day by day, Bella was in pain. Her hair was matted from lying so long, and the sisters had cut it short. Her face was yellow with pain and lack of sun. She looked terrible.

  “‘I’ll carry you, Bella,” I said when I saw her struggling across the stone floor.

  “‘No,” she said. “I can walk.”

  ‘For my father, life was over. That sounds like an exaggeration, but it was the truth. Bella came back from the convent and he had to watch her limping, lurching across the rough ground. My mother tried to go back into the ring, but it was no good. She was too old. What remained of our act was me and my father, a flyer and a catcher. But we never got the applause Bella had got, and nobody threw coins into the ring.

  ‘We were touring new towns where no one had seen Bella waving and blowing kisses. She was just a crippled child, and Spain was not a good country for crippled children. So you see, Rebecca, my mother really did have second sight. She saw Bella in the convent and we all laughed. She saw the pictures but she couldn’t interpret them. Maybe she was lucky.

  ‘This is how my mother’s vision of Bella in the convent came true.’

  ‘And then what?’ I asked.

  18

  Living Statues and the Dwarf Shakespeare Act

  ‘It was because of Bella that Damiano’s Dreamworld came to be,’ said Mr Damiano. ‘My future would not lie in libraries. I wasn’t going to be a student. I had to earn money for Bella. I had to create a place in the world for Bella. I was never going to be a great flyer but the circus had taught me the most important trick it possesses: to discover what people want, before they know it themselves, and before anyone else knows it. To discover it first, and act on it. It sounds very simple, doesn’t it? You wonder why everyone doesn’t find it out.

  ‘I discovered it through our failures. By the time I was sixteen my father was finished in the air. He had rheumatism in both knees and it was affecting his spine. My parents knew they couldn’t stay in the circus. When my father warmed up I could almost hear the grind of pain in his joints. He never complained, but as he swung his arms and flexed his knees he would make a strange sound, deep in his chest, like a steam engine. Heu, heu, heu. He made that sound to deal with the pain.

  ‘I told you that my mother had foresight. She’d become skilled in mending costumes, and making new ones. She reckoned that she could set up as a dressmaker, with the bit of money they had saved. But for that, they needed to be in a city where there would be plenty of clients. Every small town already had its own dressmaker and the clients were taken.

  ‘They rented a room in Valencia. It was cheap, as it deserved to be. It was small and dark and my mother had to go down three flights of stairs to the cold tap. But it would do for the time being. Until I make money, and then I’ll send you some every week. I kept telling them that and I think they believed me. They wanted to believe me. My father was heavy and weary. It was as much as he could do to get himself through the days. Now I know that he
was depressed, clinically depressed, but this wasn’t how things were thought about then. He would go to the same café every afternoon and sit over his wine. My mother encouraged him. It was good for him to be out, she thought, in a man’s world.

  ‘He sat in the café and drank his wine. You won’t know those leather bottles they used in Valencia then, to serve wine in the ordinary cafés. He would order a bottle, or half a bottle, never more. He would read the newspaper headlines, because he couldn’t get through close print. I think he liked to sit there. He was not part of the circus any more, not forcing himself out night after night with his joints burning, not needing to please anyone. He was away from the ring and from memories of Bella as she had been. He would go to the café about four o’clock, after his siesta, and settle there with his paper and his wine, and watch the people passing in the streets.

  ‘“He deserves his retirement,” my mother said. She was happy to work. She soon got clients, just as she believed she would. The hours were long but she had company. Clients were always coming in and out for fittings, or to talk over a new dress for a christening. They were ordinary people, small shopkeepers, the wives of policemen and minor officials. Nobody grand, nobody my mother wasn’t easy with. They were quite happy to climb the three flights of stairs. Her prices were good and everything was finished as it should be.

  ‘She never talked about the past. People assumed that she’d always been a dressmaker, but in another town.

  “‘Your father doesn’t need to worry any more,” said my mother.

  ‘I had changed a great deal. No more English language books, no dreaming, no imagining myself elsewhere. Even my body had changed. I was becoming solid, as I am now.

  ‘Bella would come with me. That was agreed without question. There was no life for her in that room.

  ‘We went north, to Madrid. The war in Europe was over. Everyone was moving, the whole of Europe washing from one side to the other. Like a stream after a flash-flood, when the water runs thick and dangerous and you can’t see the bottom of it. But in the middle of it all, people still wanted what they’d always wanted.

  ‘We started with a street-corner act. Tumbling, juggling, a low wire lashed between street lamps. We had to watch out for the police all the time. Bella juggled with eggs, with oranges, with knives. She told fortunes. She was eight years old and when you looked into her eyes you believed that she had the right to tell fortunes. She knew more than some of the grown women who laid their hand in Bella’s.

  ‘We lived on bread and olive oil and oranges. Sometimes, when we were in the money, we bought rabbit stew from a street vendor. At first we slept in church doorways and then we rented a room half the size of my parents’ room in Valencia. I buried a coin for every coin we spent, under the tiled floor of our room. We worked like demons, every day and twice as much on Sundays, when Bella would sit outside the richest churches with her crutches at her side and her beautiful eyes fixed on the fine ladies and she’d call out, “For the love of God, for the sake of holy charity, bless me with bread.”

  ‘Not that she wanted bread. She wanted money, and she certainly got it. Little girls in stiff dresses would mince across in their tight Sunday shoes to drop coins into Bella’s lap. Each time, Bella would make the sign of the cross.

  ‘I watched from a distance in case anyone hurt her or stole her money. When they had all gone, Bella would signal to me and I’d come over. She would show me the money, and she would spit on the ground. Each Sunday I bought her two soft white rolls from the baker, and the rest of the money went under the tile.

  ‘We saw through the people on the street as if they were glass. We knew who would give, who would linger to watch and who would rush onwards with barely a glance. We knew who would try to thieve our coins, and who would call the police. We knew from their eyes what they wanted. Late at night I would set two torches in the ground and the light would catch the passers-by and draw them into our show. Sometimes we would buy a box of oranges and cut them into quarters.

  “‘Refresh yourselves, ladies and gentlemen! With our compliments!”

  ‘They would suck and spit out the peel and they would give more generously when the time came.

  ‘They did not simply want pleasure. They wanted to be given pleasure. Once we had learned that, we used the knowledge in everything.

  ‘The first Dreamworld was very small. My mother made the tent for us by hand. It took her weeks, working when she had finished her work for the day. It was striped in blue and gold. My mother made it in stripes so that she could use odd pieces of material, which were cheaper to buy. You could barely see the seams.

  ‘Only a dozen people could be admitted at a time. We hired a boy called Jaime to keep the doorway while the show was on. He had to be fierce. The more they waited, the more they heard the pleasure inside the tent, the bigger the crowd grew.

  ‘Inside there were cushions which my mother had also made. As well as juggling and fortune-telling, there was a Moroccan storyteller, a Fado singer, a snake-charmer. There were sweet pastries, and wine. The light shone through the tent walls, blue and gold. We had spent all the money we had saved under the tile.

  ‘Every day, what happened inside the tent changed, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. One day there would be fruit, the next honeyed nuts. We hired a man who could do portraits in ten minutes. There was a gipsy girl who could make a fountain of silver coins spring from her ears.

  ‘What happened inside our tent was a dream, a story. You entered and while you were there, your pleasure was everything. And then you had to leave, while your pleasure was still rising towards its peak. We worked until late, late at night. One in the morning, or two in the morning. The hours we worked, you would scarcely believe. I didn’t think of Bella as a child any more, and nor did she. We were partners. We shared the same dream. It was those who came to us who became like children. Not childish, but like children.’

  ‘What happened to Bella?’ I asked.

  ‘She died in Vienna, when she was thirty,’ said Mr Damiano. ‘We were famous by then. The Viennese love shows, but they are very sophisticated. Not at all credulous. We had restored an exquisite merry-go-round. We had a medium who could speak to whole regiments of the dead. That was very popular. You would think you saw the rows of the dead standing there. We had a living statue team from Prague.

  ‘Bella had flu. She didn’t stop work. She wouldn’t stop. She was booking a dwarf Shakespeare act from England and they were appearing at a fair in Innsbruck. Bella had to see them. She took the train west, saw the act, negotiated, stood on the platform for a long time waiting for the train back. I was away in Graz, visiting a scrap merchant who had a horse which he said came from the Imperial Fair at Kreuzburg. It was cold.

  ‘Bella was half-poisoned with flu. When she got back, she found there was a quarrel between the living statues and the fire-eaters. Both acts were troublesome. I had already changed their accommodation, made sure their rehearsal times did not overlap, and negotiated new performance times. They should never have troubled Bella. Instead of going to bed she stood in the evening cold while one side argued at her and then the other. If she had been well she would not have let them behave like that. But she was too tired, for once, to assert her authority.

  ‘She developed pneumonia, she developed pleurisy, her lungs filled with fluid. Antibiotics didn’t touch it. Her chest was weak, we knew that. The only part of her that was.’

  19

  Our Business is Pleasure

  I thought of Bella, flat on her back, fighting for breath as she had fought all those years before, after her fall from Mr Damiano’s shoulders.

  ‘We hoisted her up on pillows,’ said Mr Damiano. ‘She was given oxygen. But we could see the darkness creeping up her face, from the lips. She died in the late evening. They all came to pay their respects, the fire-eaters and the living statues, all of them. When Sasha – our clairvoyant – came in, she covered her face with a white handkerchief and wept, so tha
t she would not have to meet my eyes. Her professional status was compromised, she thought, because she hadn’t predicted Bella’s death. It’s strange, what people consider important at such times.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So you’re going away, Rebecca. You’re leaving us.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You don’t know.’ Mr Damiano was silent for a while and then he said, ‘Not back to your husband.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s not yet time?’

  ‘No, I mean never, it will never be time. We’ve separated. It’s permanent.’

  ‘I doubt that,’ said Mr Damiano, ‘unless he’s found another woman.’

  ‘Of course he hasn’t,’ I rapped out without thinking.

  ‘Of course he hasn’t…’ Mr Damiano repeated. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because he’s –’

  ‘Because he’s a man in the prime of life? Because he’s easy to love? Because he has an excellent profession? All those reasons?’

  Mr Damiano had turned to face me. His creased dark eyes were trying to make me laugh.

  ‘He hasn’t stayed in a box since you left him.’

  He has, I wanted to say. He’s in our house now, fast asleep. The bedroom door’s open. Down in the hall there’s his case with his work for tomorrow in it. He works all the time. Sometimes he has colleagues round, sometimes he goes to see a film. He hasn’t abandoned the life we had together. He’s just…

  Waiting.

  Waiting. The word shocked me. I put it away in my mind to think of later.

  ‘But you don’t write to him? You don’t telephone him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then I think the chances are high that he’s found another woman,’ observed Mr Damiano. He spoke so surely that for a second I could see this woman, too, as if Mr Damiano had conjured her up. ‘If you went back to your house, Rebecca, I think the front door would be a different colour. Yes. The first thing she will want to do is to change the appearance of the house. She won’t want it to resemble the home where you and Adam lived together.’