by Carol Birch
“I won’t,” she said into the handkerchief.
He went and sat down in the opposite chair. “This is nothing,” he said. “Not even a setback. Things are going well for us, and they’ll get better and then better again, you’ll see. Oh, for heaven’s sake! Who cares about the fool who wrote that? Who is he? No one! No one. You’re the one they want to see. You’re the special one.”
“But I’m not,” she said wearily, drying her face. “That’s the funny thing. I’m not special at all, I’m just an ordinary person.” She stood up and started walking about the room again.
“Listen,” he said, “tomorrow we’ll go to—”
“Where’s Yatzi?” she said sharply.
Theo sighed, suddenly very tired.
“Where’s Yatzi?” A rising note of panic had entered her voice.
“Oh God,” he whispered and set about finding the thing, and as he searched aimlessly she began crying again and stood biting her fingers like a child. He’d never seen her like this before.
“Oh, please, Julia,” he said. “Perhaps the maid put it somewhere.”
“Tonight of all nights!” she cried, and started pulling open all the drawers. “Someone’s taken him!”
“Julia.” Theo closed his eyes. “Why would anyone want to take an old stick of wood with a rag wrapped ’round it?”
“He’s not just an old stick of wood!”
She was in a terrible state by the time he found the doll wedged down the back of the bed a few minutes later. “Here,” he said. My God, he thought. Look at it, suck marks on, disgusting. It had two large blots for eyes, a line for a nose and an upturned curve for a mouth. A ragged dress of flimsy green and red cloth was bound ’round and ’round it like a loose bandage. She grabbed it and calmed down at once, and he left her rocking in the alcove, holding onto that horrible old lump of wood.
Back in his own room, Theo stared angrily at the stupid incomprehensible French. I won’t have it, he thought. Ridiculous. Poor girl’s been measured and weighed and fingered and prodded inside and out, and taken it all. Of course she’s human. Bloody obvious. He’d been in the business all his life, and he knew. Human. All of them. But the rubes wanted monsters. And the medics, the professors, the scientists, all of them, they were rubes too. Tell you what, I’ll get her picture taken. On Piccadilly there’s a place, I’ll call in tomorrow and have a word.
Discreet. She’s just a hairy girl is all, with a weird face and a sticky-out mouth, a mouth you could hang your hat on. Nice eyes. Nice girl. Roll up, roll up. And we’ll put the picture in the new booklet, and we’ll have new words. They’re not getting away with that.
And he sat down and composed a paragraph very quickly in his best florid, high-minded style:
THE NONDESCRIPT, MISS JULIA PASTRANA, from Culiacán in Mexico. There is nothing in her appearance in the least calculated to offend the sensibilities of the most fastidious, whether viewed socially, morally or physically. A feeling of pity, rather than of repugnance or antipathy, is generally experienced in the bosom of all who pay her a visit. There is sufficient of the characteristics of her womanly nature to dispel anything allied to the revolting or disagreeable, and connected either with her personal appearance, or the manner in which her levees are conducted. Persons who visit her with an idea of seeing a wild beast in the cage of a menagerie will be disappointed. Those who go with the expectation of seeing some frightful monster will have such expectations changed to sentiments allied at once to awe and astonishment at the mysterious ways of Providence, while his philosophy will be puzzled amazingly to account for his share of the milk of human kindness, and the abundant juiciness of his own heart in view of the wonderful phenomenon that will irresistibly for the time being engross his attention.
He read it back to himself. Good God, man, you’ve got a way with words, he told himself.
“Oh, no,” she said. “Absolutely not. You will not, you will not.” Lying drunk and sleepy on the sofa, slightly tearful, playing about with that awful burned thing, Tattoo, draping chains of silver and narrow thongs of black leather ’round what was left of its neck.
“Never mind,” said Adam, sighing and sitting down next to her, gazing around the room so he wouldn’t have to look at her. She was in something long and trailing, faded violet, with her hair piled up in a big black bush of tortoiseshell combs on top of her head. Laurie had gone too far this time, she said. Who did he think he was? She’d caught him loading a massive cardboard box into the back of his car.
“Theft,” she said, “pure and simple. My things. My property.”
“Well,” he said, “I suppose he thought…”
“I don’t care what he thought.” She rolled onto her side. “I said, no, you can’t do that. It’s only things, Rose, he said, the idiot. Only things. As if that meant anything. Oh, he can be a bastard, you know. Roll me a cigarette, lovey. Well, that was that. You will not, I said. And do you know? He refuses to carry them back up for me. Just dumps the box by the back door and the rain’s starting. Not even a lid on the box. I made about ten journeys up and down those stairs.”
“Oh, well,” Adam said, “everything seems to be back to normal now.”
She sat up, propped Tattoo comfortably against a cushion and poured more wine. “I’ve been really sorting things out,” she said.
“Have you?” He looked ’round. No sign of it. Things were just a bit rearranged. It’s like playing with Lego or building bricks, I suppose, he thought, yet still somehow wonderful, like a seriously overcrowded junk shop. Dried flowers and feathers hung from the ceiling, and the draped and carpeted walls were now scarcely visible as the growth rioted upward and outward. You had to admit she kept it clean, but surely it was a full-time job.
“Poor old Tattoo,” she said. “After all he’s been through.”
“Ah.” He swigged his wine. “He was in the box, was he?”
“He most certainly was. Right down at the bottom as well. Must have been the first thing he threw in. And he knows how I feel about that thing. And when I got up here, he’d been tidying up. Putting things away! I couldn’t find anything. So I’ve told him, I’ve said, look, you’re the landlord, you can evict me if you want to, but you don’t touch my things. You don’t live here, Laurie. I do.”
Adam smiled and shook his head, crumbling tobacco. Couldn’t live with her, he thought. Not for long. Poor old Laurie, she’s gone right off him. She doesn’t care. He’d seen Laurie crying on the stairs one night. Just turned the corner and there he was, the big dripping mess, but he tried to hide it, blowing his nose as if he had a cold. She couldn’t care less. She was drunk and sentimental now, not for Laurie but because of her poor things so nearly lost.
“Here,” he said, twisting the end of the roll-up and handing it to her.
“Ta.”
“You know,” he said, “we could open this place up as a museum. Charge admission. The Rose Museum.”
“Only no one would come.”
“They might.”
“No,” she said. “You have to be famous.”
Adam slid down and sat on the floor with his back against the sofa, and they lapsed into silence. After a few minutes he said, “When you think about it—every person’s like a museum of their life.”
She smiled. “That’s nice.”
“Only most stay uncurated. Things fade away into old cupboards and drawers that never get opened. Junk stalls. Rubbish on its way to the dump. Then they just vanish.”
“You’re a poet, Adam,” she said.
Adam turned his head. “If ever you die, Rose,” he said. “It’ll be a hell of a thing for whoever gets to go through all this lot.”
She laughed. “And who would that be, I wonder? Probably my mother.”
She hardly ever saw her family. She’d liked her father and didn’t like her mother, that’s all he really knew. Her father was dead, and there was a brother somewhere, and they came from somewhere quite posh that he could never picture, somewhere
like Welwyn Garden City or East Grinstead, those places that just looked like nothing on the map.
“She might get my brother to do it, I suppose,” she said, reaching for the tobacco.
Adam picked up Tattoo. “Now this”—he held it at arm’s length—“I doubt if you’d be able to give this away.”
“Oh, don’t,” she said, “don’t make me feel sad.”
“He’s in an awful state, Rose. Look. He’s got a hole in his shoulder. What’s that? Moths?”
“I don’t have moths.”
He put his finger in the hole, wiggled it about and pulled it out. A tuft of dirty white stuffing came out with his finger. “You ought to patch this up,” he said.
“You know,” she rolled a cigarette, one-handed, “it’s kind of like he makes me feel sick now. Laurie.”
Adam put his finger in the hole again. Inside was scratchy.
“I don’t know what it is,” she said. “He always seemed on the edge of being beautiful, but now he’s on the edge of repulsive.”
“So how did that happen?” He dug deeper. Straw. Fluffy stuff.
“I really don’t know.”
“So is that it then?” he said. “You and him? What happens now? Will you still live here?”
“Oh, yes!”
“And he doesn’t mind?”
“He won’t have to, will he? It’s all right. He’s got his wife.”
“I think he’s quite upset though,” Adam said.
“Well, I don’t see why. We’ll still be friends. There was never a commitment. That was supposed to be the good thing about it.”
“Ha,” he said, “if only things were that simple.”
Rose shrugged. “You have to face reality.”
He laughed. “That from you!”
She licked the edge of the cigarette paper, “What are you doing?”
“Look. A big hole. There’s all sorts in here.”
“Don’t rip him to pieces,” she said, hitting him lightly on the head.
“I’m not.”
“Stop it. Give him to me.”
“Here.” He handed her Tattoo, and the matches.
“You can be quite hard, can’t you?” he said.
“I’m not hard.”
“Yes. You are. You get all sentimental over bits of old paper but you don’t give a toss about people. You’ve got more genuine feeling for that old doll than you have for any human being.”
“What rot,” she said, striking a match. “You don’t know anything about it.”
He put his hand on her hip, just to see what she’d do. She ignored it. He saw her frown as her long chipped nail examined the hole in Tattoo’s shoulder. “You’ve made this worse,” she said.
“You need to patch him up.”
She laid the just-lit cigarette on the edge of an ashtray. “You know, I used to think this was wood,” she said, “but it’s not.”
“What is it?”
“I’m not sure.”
He picked up the cigarette and took a drag. “There’s all sorts in there,” he said.
“Straw. Dust,” she said. “Ticking. Paper. Something lumpy.”
“You should get some foam and block it up.”
“Look at this.” Out came a clump of hardened straw. “That’s really old.” She laid it on the sofa and dug a little farther. “Paper,” she said.
He took his hand from her hip, wondering if she’d even noticed.
“Oh, look!” She sat up straight. Leaning forward, she set about smoothing a couple of scraps of screwed-up fragments on the low table.
“What is it?”
“And there’s more—” Fishing about inside and drawing out another strip, longer, creased into powdery near-disintegration. “Wow! Look at this.”
“Writing,” he said.
“It says—”
They put their heads together, poring over the words that survived, the rubbed-out extremities. An old-fashioned leaf pattern, any color long faded, coiled up one torn edge. Three scraggy scraps, soft and wrinkled, the print rubbed to gray by many years. Here and there a few letters or a word or two made it through the gray.
“Look,” she said, “this piece fits with that.”
—of Provid—
—A feeling of—
—eeing some frig—
—NDESCRIPT, MI—
—he mos—
—and Mis—
—Sanfa—
—little prin—
“It’s an old leaflet,” she said, “a handbill, playbill, something. Look.”
—dmission—doors ope—
“That’s ‘admission, doors open.’ ”
—allery, Regent Stre—
—ndon—
Then one whole word: Culiacán.
“Culiacán,” said Rose.
“It’s in Mexico,” said Adam.
Flowers were heaped everywhere in the dressing room. Every show there were flowers, that’s how it was now. They’d given Paris a miss and gone straight to Berlin. Germany loved her, and suddenly life was fast and bright and swept her along—theaters, gold brocade, lights, the face of a crowd, hands touching hers, hands that stroked shyly, as if she were very rare and very wild.
When it came to being stared at, Julia was an expert. She could handle them all, the Rapt Bedazzled, the Eyestalk Gawker, the Holy Seeker, the Furious Affronted, the Scared, the Nauseous, the Shyly or Archly Flirtatious, and—most rare—the Frank Equal. Theo was a Rapt Bedazzled but now he was also turning into a Used-to-Me, like the people back home. For so long now her face had been a fascination, a honey for looks. They flew toward her like darting insects, flew away, returned, irresistibly drawn. But she knew what to do. Meet. Read. Drop or hold. Release. Don’t challenge unless challenged. Drag them away from the mouth, the whiskers, the breasts, into the eyes, and sometimes smile. You know when. You always know. If they shout, laugh, shoot hate—look away, resist. Pretend.
But never yet, after all the shows, the little towns in England, the rainy villages, the big-city stages, the lowlands of Holland when the rain never stopped; after all the stares of all the people in all those places and all that went before on the far side of the sea—never once had she been more scared than when standing on this balcony, looking through her veil at the obscure mass of faces. Something was different. The crowd was rowdy. She had to act, speak a language she didn’t know, remember the cues. Her heart was beating too fast.
It seemed as if the entire city of Leipzig had turned out.
Der Curierte Meyer!
For the first time ever, after her triumphs in America and England, the Remarkable Miss Julia Pastrana in a play written specially for her.
Der Curierte Meyer—The Milkman Cured
It wasn’t a real play. It was a musical comedy, a silly little piece, but Theo was right—it pulled them in, the high and the low, and the place was bursting at the seams. German wasn’t one of her languages, but she’d learned the lines specially and knew the cues. It was really just her doing her usual songs and dances, with a few lines she had to say here and there, no long speeches or anything like that—
It didn’t feel right.
Those men. She’d heard them laughing.
Well, it was a funny play.
Better they laugh than be afraid.
When the curtain rose, a hush fell. A drum rolled.
Stage left, paper roses hung over a wall. A rustic seat by a fountain. Stage right, a garlanded balcony, on which she stood sweating under the veil. A single violin played a sweet rising air, and she ran lightly down the steps as the rest of the strings and the woodwinds came in, danced as the music swelled. If it were just the dancing, her arabesque, her plié, she could do that. Or the songs, but laughter was a different thing. She wore white flowers in her hair. She’d rubbed the love potion into her arms and shoulders. Her gris-gris bag was in a secret pocket. Smiling in expectation, the audience settled in. As the dance drew to a close, voices were heard, stage left. She ran bac
k up the steps, white mesh, tiny white slippers, the dress bouncing and frothing around her in dusty pink and gold layers, and sat down at a small table on the balcony, taking up a large fan with gold and red tassels. Two young men entered below and began speaking in loud braying voices. One was tall and handsome, the other shorter and slightly plump, both with a dandyish air. She couldn’t understand a word they said but knew they were talking about their friend Stefan, a fool of a milkman who falls in love as easily as he falls asleep.
But wait! Who is that on the balcony!
She rises, taking up her fan.
Why, she is the remarkable Fraulein Lieselotte. In her own country she is considered a great beauty!
So graceful!
Fraulein Lieselotte! Dear lady!
Down she comes.
Up and down in the footlights, skirts swinging, one small gloved hand idling with the fan, she saunters around the stage. They dart playfully before and behind her like circling bees, calling to one another and to her in ridiculous tones, words that draw bursts of expectant laughter and a few whoops from the audience, vying with each other to praise her pretty foot, her figure, her elegance, begging her to please, for just one moment, please, dearest lady, lift up your veil.
She waits for the piccolo, and when its plaintive sound rises up from the pit, she stands still, turning fully to face the audience.
For the thousandth time, the reveal.
A great sighing groan of wonder rises from the audience. Same as ever, but the joke’s on those two silly men, now following her as she walks, always keeping her back to them and her face to the crowd. The fat one falls over. Laughter pools like smoke in the domed ceiling. She shares a smile with the crowd. We are in this together, it says. When the horns and the drum blare and she turns on the men, there are screams and disbelieving laughter. She’s impossible. My God! My God! To be that.
The young men, poor actors, step back, open-mouthed. Julia’s heart hammers madly. She smiles and they scream some more. She parades, the piccolo playing, up and down the front of the stage with her skirts seductively swaying. Something in this new laughter, a braying quality, an imp of misrule, an ugliness to square up against her own. She feels as if she’s in a pit. The uglier the air, the more gracefully she moves, a sweeping implacable presence chasing them across the stage with her face, driving them to the wall, where they stand knock-kneed and quaking, biting their nails.
