The children formed a phalanx, well back in the gloaming, quite a distance from where their parents smooched and swayed. Black-nails’s voice was tremendous. As she let it blare out (Smiler weaving treble harmonies around it) Piper sidled offstage. His saxophone still sang softly, but no one could see where he’d got to. No one was really looking. There was a shuffling and a rustling and a quiet and swift evacuation.
The adult couples let their heads drop back and their eyes close as they chanted at the canvas roof. They were young again and high and totally irresponsible. They’d forgotten that once you’re a parent you must never ever forget the fact, not even for a second, not even for the winking of an eye or a shake of a mouse’s tail.
The bus went by along the riverside road towards the sea. All its interior lights were on. It was a mirage. It had to be. It wasn’t Piper’s beat-up old wreck, with all the seats out. It was a proper double-decker bus, with a powerful if air-polluting diesel engine, and a pair of animated children waving from each window – upstairs and down.
Humphrey Leach was standing by the gate into the gardens. He had come looking for Jennifer to remind her that he’d be leaving at 6 a.m. prompt for an executive-level brainstorming away-day and if she really wanted a lift to Ipswich, as she’d said, then she’d be better be home in bed spit-spot. He saw his daughter standing up in the brilliantly illuminated bus next to the copper-haired driver. She wore a gold-braided cap and leather cross-belts, a satchel on one hip, a ticket puncher on the other. She caught his eye and waved as the bus swept by. It never came back.
‘People-trafficking,’ said someone later that night. But the word didn’t quite seem to fit.
Abduction. Kidnapping. Those words weren’t right either. They jarred with the picture they all had in their heads, that of the children’s faces, lit up with happiness as they waved from the bus.
They’d jumped in their cars and raced after, of course they had. The police had been on to it right away. But the bus seemed to have dematerialised. There was not a trace of it, not a tyre track, not a broken twig. Several of the men went down to the Ness with torches, but the tide was high and there was nothing to be seen but smooth flowing water. ‘That bus is like fifteen feet tall,’ said Elsa’s father. His voice was muffled and cracked. ‘You can drown a rat here, but you can’t lose a London bus.’ They knew he was right, but they stayed with him until dawn. When one or other of them began to sob, awful wracking man-sobs – the others would pass him cigarettes, or sucky sweets. When the sea had drained right out, and the river dwindled back to a liquid snake writhing through its narrow channel, there was nothing to be seen there, not a jelly-shoe or a scrunchie or a flossy-maned pink plastic pony – just the long-legged birds poking around in the weeds and bubbles burping their way to the surface of the smooth grey mud.
Elsa’s mother stopped the treatment. She said she didn’t see the point of doing herself in for the sake of a few more months of life, not when life was so futile and sad. No one could blame her. Her husband got together with Sylvia after a while, and they took Billy away to a bigger place, where there were other children. He never really played with the others much, though. Eventually his mother gave in and let him have a pet rat. He called it Elsa, and every time he murmured to it his stepfather looked around sharply, and then looked away. They seldom had music in the house.
Humphrey Leach moved on too. He was promoted to senior area manager and had to give up the castle and move into the county town. He and his thin girlfriend lived on the eighth floor of a converted warehouse overlooking the old docks. There was a gym in the basement, and that was a plus, but neither of them slept well there, and neither ever told the other that all night long they heard scuffling and chattering as a hidden horde of creatures went about their business within the cavity wall. Humphrey’s career stalled. ‘You’re a safe pair of hands, Leach,’ said the CEO, ‘and we all value that, but we’re looking for more of a people-person.’ It was a woman who got the next promotion. ‘She’s kind, isn’t she?’ said one junior executive to another (they weren’t called secretaries any more). Humphrey, overhearing, was nonplussed. No one on his business diploma course had ever mentioned kindness as being a useful character trait.
After a few years rumours began to reach the town of a bus that turned up at festivals, or on Cornish beaches. There were a load of young people who lived on it. They dressed up and performed puppet shows and made wood-carvings of small animals. They cooked curries and paellas in enormous tureens and sold them to hungry dancers. Whatever was left over at the end of the night they gave away. They were musicians – folkies mainly, but there was an old jazzer with them. The bus was called Ratty – nobody knew why.
The Fables
These ancient fables have many variants and ramifications.
The summaries that follow include only those parts of them echoed in the stories in this book.
Orpheus
Orpheus was a musician whose singing was so beautiful it could shift rocks and tame wild beasts. His wife Eurydice died and was dragged down into the Underworld. Orpheus followed her there, gaining access to the realm of the dead by the power of his music. He pleaded with Hades, King of the Underworld, and his wife, Persephone. Moved by his singing, they agreed Eurydice could follow Orpheus back to life, but he was warned that he must not look back at her as they travelled towards the light. He turned. He looked. She died a second time, and for ever.
Actaeon
Diana was the virgin goddess of wild animals and of hunting. Out hunting in the woods, the hero Actaeon chanced upon Diana bathing, naked, surrounded by her nymphs. Angered by his intrusion, the goddess transformed him into a stag. In that form, he was torn apart by his own hounds.
Psyche
Psyche, whose name means ‘mind’, was a mortal woman so lovely and amiable that Venus, the goddess of love, grew envious of her and instructed her son Cupid to humiliate the girl by making her fall in love with a monster. On seeing Psyche, Cupid fell in love with her. Disregarding his mother’s orders, he bore Psyche off to an enchanted palace where he visited her each night, in pitch-darkness, telling her that they could be happy together so long as she never insisted on seeing him. One night, as Cupid slept, Psyche lit a lamp. When she saw his wings, and realised he was a god, she was so startled that she let a drop of hot oil fall from the lamp onto his shoulder. He woke and flew away.
Pasiphae
Pasiphae was the wife of Minos, the legendary king of Crete. When a mysterious bull appeared on the beach Pasiphae was seized with desire for it. She confided in Daedalus, the great architect and inventor, and he made a cow-like contraption for her. Climbing inside it, Pasiphae coupled with the bull. The resulting baby, the Minotaur, had the body of a man but the head of a bull. Daedalus constructed the labyrinth – a maze of underground tunnels – as a prison for it.
One of King Minos’s sons was killed in Athens: as compensation Minos demanded that twelve young Athenians should be sent to Crete each year and fed to the Minotaur.
For Ariadne, the daughter of Minos and Pasiphae, Daedalus made a dancing floor. For himself he made wings, and flew away to Egypt.
Joseph
Joseph was a native of Bethlehem but worked as a carpenter in Nazareth. When he found that the young woman whom he was to marry, Mary, was already pregnant, he considered rejecting her. She told him she was a virgin, and that her baby had been miraculously conceived by the agency of the Holy Ghost. The marriage went ahead.
About the time the baby was due the authorities decreed that all immigrants should return to their own birthplaces for registration. Joseph took Mary to Bethlehem. They were homeless there. The baby, Jesus, was born in the temporary accommodation of a stable.
Mary Magdalen
One of Jesus’s female followers, she has traditionally been identified with another unnamed biblical character – a ‘sinful woman’, a prostitute.
Once, when he was wear
y, she came to where Jesus was seated and washed his feet, and wept over them, and rubbed them with an expensive ointment, and dried them with her hair. When someone rebuked her for wasting money on such a luxury Jesus defended her, ‘And he said unto her, thy sins are forgiven.’
On the Friday of the crucifixion Mary Magdalen was among the women gathered at the foot of the cross.
Before sunrise on the following Sunday she went to the place where Jesus was laid. Looking into the tomb, she saw that his body was no longer there. Someone approached her. Initially she thought he was a gardener. Then she recognised him as the risen Christ.
She reached out. He said, ‘Noli me tangere’ – Touch me not.
John, in his gospel, repeatedly describes himself as ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved’.
Tristan
When King Mark of Cornwall was to marry the Irish princess Isolde he sent his nephew, Tristan, to escort her over the sea to his home. In the course of the journey Isolde’s attendant, Brangwyn, gave her a love-potion. Isolde shared it with Tristan and the two fell deeply, ecstatically, helplessly in love. Isolde married Mark, but she and Tristan were driven to seek each other out.
In some tellings of the story King Mark surprises them embracing, and he, or one of his knights, kills Tristan with a poisoned weapon. Isolde dies with him, of a broken heart, or more poison. In other versions Tristan wanders off, joins King Arthur’s court, and falls in love with another lady, Isolde of the White Hands.
Piper
When the Saxon town of Hamelin was infested with rats a stranger in particoloured clothing appeared and offered, for a fee, to rid the town of the creatures. The price was shockingly high but the mayor agreed. The stranger brought out a pipe and began to play. The rats, fascinated by the music, followed him out of town. He led them to a river, where they all drowned. The piper returned to Hamelin for his payment. The mayor began to quibble, offering a much smaller sum. The piper left in a rage.
One Sunday, when the adults of the town were all in church, the piper returned and began to play his pipe again. All the children of the town followed him, as the rats had done. He led them away, perhaps to drown in the river, perhaps to disappear into a cave in the side of a mountain. Only one boy, who was too lame to follow the others, or too deaf to hear the bewitching music, was left behind in Hamelin.
By the Same Author
Peculiar Ground
NON-FICTION
Cleopatra
Heroes
The Pike: Gabriele D’Annunzio
About the Author
Lucy Hughes-Hallett is the author of The Pike: Gabriele d’Annunzio, which won the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Duff Cooper Prize, the Costa Biography Award and the Political Book Awards Political Biography of the Year. Her previous books are the acclaimed cultural histories Cleopatra (1990) and Heroes (2004). Cleopatra won the Fawcett Prize and the Emily Toth Award. In 2016, she published her debut novel Peculiar Ground, which was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize. She lives in London.
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