TWENTY-FIVE
Later on this same night, from inside the telephone box on the Little Venice bridge, a man is watching a boat. He has been watching since it got dark, with both hands holding binoculars steady against the glass. The image through the binoculars is blurry around the edges but sharp at the centre. The boat is well lit by a streetlamp. The lamplight makes the ripples of the water yellow and its shadows black. It discolours the paint of the boat’s exterior but keeps its form sharp. The man makes adjustments to the angle of the binoculars to look, again, from one end of the boat to the other.
The front of the boat is furthest from him. He moves his binoculars back from the snub nose, the short front deck and blunt prow, along the side. The bowl of the boat is sitting below the towpath level and is barely visible, but the tops of the orange buoys wedged between the boat and the bank are luminous in the lamplight. There are four along the side, in the same positions as the rope bumpers used to be. Above each one is a brass porthole – through the binoculars the man can see the three screws in the brass frames, but the glass glares from the streetlamp and he cannot see through. He can’t tell if she’s inside or not.
Between the central two portholes is the painted name in an arc. He knows the shapes of these letters. They come through the binoculars with a clarity that is almost too much. They pinch the breath out of him. He blinks, and they are still there. As he watches, they begin to shimmer.
It has started to rain. He sees the surface of the water speck. Hears the flat sound of drops on the roof of the telephone box.
He brings the binoculars back to the cabin doors. They are the same as they were – double doors in the blue of the boat – but now they have a lock bolted at the top and two white handles, most likely plastic, where they used to be brass. The paint looks patchy around the locks and he can see that one of the handles is split. The thought that the boat has not been well kept stirs something. For a few seconds his view of the boat loses its sharpness, shakes slightly. He can hear his breathing get faster.
He brings his binoculars along to the back deck, which is a lighter wood than it used to be: it must have been restored since then. The planks are well lit in the lamplight. He looks over them one by one. They have been fitted decently enough but the edges are water-darkened, which tells him that they have not been treated for a long time. They have not been nurtured as they should have been.
Again a cloud passes over his sight and his breath tugs at his chest. And again something within him strains, although he doesn’t know what this is. He wouldn’t have the word for it. He is someone who has learned to speak, but not to speak to himself. He feels a pull, a strong leaning from inside him towards the boat. And also a pull back, to the time he saw it last. When he saw it last in the fire’s light. Saw it last half afloat in the bowl of the canal. He feels no different to the boy who stood on the bank and stretched his mouth to howl noiselessly, water pulling at his jumper, streaming down his legs, one cold, stiffening hand clutching the windlass in his pocket. He ran away from it that night in the smoke and the chaos, leaving his clothes in the drawstring bag, his gas mask. If he goes back to that moment he can hear his own blood pumping and the muffled sirens as he heard them then through newly deafened ears. He can see his shoes pounding soundlessly along the slabs of towpath, the laces soaked, undone and hitting the stone. He can smell the smoke from the fire chasing him, about to catch him up.
He brings the binoculars down and leans back against the wall of the telephone box. Puts his hand on the warm, bent, dented metal of the windlass in his pocket, rubs a thumb along the numbers in the handle. The boat has returned to him. She has restored herself and come back to him. For all the changes, there is no doubt she is the same boat. He knows every inch from memory; he could shut his eyes and move around the shape knowing the place of each screw and each join. This is what he used to do at night in his room at Walt Chaplin’s to quieten himself. It became a habit.
For the last two years, he has given his days to building this boat again. He came back to London because he’d grown used to the way cities left him alone. He took a job doing repairs on the community boat at Camden. This allowed him access to tools and a boatshed. He bought a forty-foot narrowboat from a scrapyard and stripped it down to the shell, replacing any rotten wood in the frame. He built the cabin and laid plywood flooring over the joists. He used old pine for the decking. He fitted the engine into the cabin at the back of the boat, and built a fold-down bunk over it as Walt Chaplin had done. He found old brass portholes and screwed them to the cabin walls – and one to the ceiling, after he’d painted the compass points around a circle of paper. He found a brass handle and fitted it to the tiller. He varnished the interior and the decking and took his time painting the outside. He matched the colours to his memory: blue, with white letters and a red outline.
But the boat he has been building these last two years doesn’t feel right. It looks right – he has remembered everything precisely and his drawings have been accurate. But when he is on board and closes his eyes, he knows it is not her. This boat he has built is silent. It doesn’t have the sounds of Walt Chaplin’s boat, the little creaks and sighs that were the small murmurs of someone gently listening. He had known that Walt Chaplin felt it too. He had heard him talking to her sometimes, seen his head and lips moving silently as he steered. The boy had talked to her too as he lay over the bow watching her blunt nose push through the water. Watching the water fold away to let her through. He had practised talking to her and she’d listened. She had been his companion.
A knock on the glass of the telephone box and the man jerks up, hitting the edge of a glass pane with his binoculars. He does not find it easy to interpret the signals given out by faces or voices. He doesn’t know what means anger, what means friendliness, what means wariness. This has made life difficult for him and it has felt safer to keep himself away from other people.
Two boys in tracksuits outside – one wet-haired, the other with a rain-darkened hood over his head, holding a rolled cigarette in its shelter. ‘You done in there?’ the second one mouths through the glass. The man pulls the peak of his baseball cap down before pushing the door open.
‘Thanks, old man.’
A woman had found a boy soaking and shivering in her Anderson shelter. He wouldn’t talk and she thought he’d lost his hearing to the bombs. She took him into the house and put him on a stool by the stove to warm up. She had tried to take his jersey off, to put a towel round his shoulders, but his fists were jammed tightly into his pockets. When she came downstairs with fresh clothes he had gone. He hadn’t taken anything.
A young girl outside her front door had caught a glimpse of a boy running up the road as her mother knelt to do up the buttons of her coat – it was a cold day. She didn’t see which way he turned at the end.
A seller on Golborne Road heard an animal coughing from under his stall and thought it must be a mongrel sniffing for rubbish. He looked below and saw a boy crouched over a dropped carton of beans, pawing it up from the road. The boy looked up expressionless. The man shooed him away as he would have done a dog.
In rented rooms above a pub in St John’s Wood, a woman froze when she heard hammering on the door. It wasn’t a client’s knock. She thought if she stayed quiet they would think she was out. But the hammering became wilder and it seemed they would beat the door down. She opened it then, not to the police but to a wild-faced boy whose eyes blazed at her. He pushed past and stood in the room full of her things, looking around. He began to scratch his arm and blink purposefully, as if doing so might open up a different view. She opened her mouth to speak but he pushed back on to the landing and heavily down the stairs. The pub door crashed shut and brought a cold gust of air up the stairs. The woman shivered and went back into her room. Her heart was still knocking with the fright. She looked around and wondered what he had been looking for. Her chest, dressing table, mirrors and silk screen sat there, looking too precious against the dirty
white walls. She had taken the room on a few months ago, after the last woman had left with a soldier, a woman with troubles, they said.
The boy was picked up that night on Lisson Grove, trying to climb over the gate to the canal towpath. He fought hard and it took two policemen to get him in hand. He wouldn’t answer questions. Didn’t speak. He spent the night in the police station and it was presumed that he had been damaged by a bombing. He matched no records of the missing in the area. There were institutions for these kinds of children.
Other children on the train didn’t take much notice of the boy. Like evacuees, these children were not accompanied, and so played or fought amongst themselves. The journey was long and most slept for a few hours. He didn’t join in or sleep but those sitting nearby noticed him drawing on his papers. He drew the same thing repeatedly, a long boat with doors at the back and portholes along the side. This time names weren’t called out at the station. All the children were taken up to the street and climbed up on to benches in the back of a bus. And then were driven out of the city.
The institution was strict with him. If he wanted something he had to learn to ask for it. And so he began to speak, although never much to anyone else. To the other boys in his dormitory it sounded as if he was practising to himself, little mutterings under the blanket after lights out. Something about him kept them from teasing. Some said that the brass lock key he kept hooked in his belt was a torture instrument, that the boy was the son of a pirate. He acquired a sort of mystery, and the teachers asked no questions of him either. They had worse cases to deal with. The boy attended all his lessons, although much of the time his pale face would be turned to the light from the window, looking out. Still, he learned to read slowly and to write a kind of alphabet, the characters made of painstaking circles and lines. Strangely uncertain script for a boy who could draw so well. On the day he left he signed the name they had given him in these wobbling circles and lines, and next to it a perfect diagram of a narrowboat drawn from above. They had found him an apprenticeship with a cargo company in the Edinburgh docks.
TWENTY-SIX
It is mid-morning of the second Sunday in September and Odeline is on board the return coach from Luton to London Paddington. She arrived at the coach depot with only a few minutes to spare before departure and so has not managed to secure a double seat for herself, or even a window seat. She is squeezed in next to an overweight young woman who prattles stupidly to a child on her lap. The child has fat legs which stick out beyond the partition between the two seats, and it has stared at Odeline without embarrassment since she sat down. The stare is blank and incurious and controlling, as if the child is challenging Odeline to complain to its mother about this invasion of her space. Odeline finds she can’t, under this stare, say anything, and so sits on the far side of her seat with her legs in the aisle. Her prop box is wedged in the footwell against the seat in front, her bowler hat in her lap.
The word ‘DISAPPOINTMENT’ returns to her mind and its letters seem to land there heavily as if dropped from a great height. The letters are hard, sharp-edged, made of welded metal. Particularly the D. In the D there is too much reality.
Her father hasn’t invited her to stay with the circus. He hasn’t seen her repertoire. When she asked to show it to him a final time, he had mimed an expression of regret that turned the corners of his mouth down into a mournful upside-down U.
‘Next time, chérie, next time. I am so sorry we did not find an opportunity on this meeting. You will have to come and see us again.’
He had winked and stepped up on to the steps of his caravan, positioning himself in the doorframe. He lifted a hand to wave as the caravan was towed out of the field, but had gone inside and closed the door by the time it reached the entrance gate. Odeline stood in the field as the other caravans and lorries drove out, leaving muddy scars on the grass and a row of light-blue Portaloos. There were old tissues and cigarette butts stamped into the ground where the steps of each caravan had been. Bits of colour glinted in the dew: empty crisp packets, tin cans, a yellow leather slipper from someone’s costume. The shape of the big top was marked by a circle of flattened grass in the middle of the field, silver in the milky morning light. It looked like a pool of water.
She hasn’t performed for him, or been invited to join the circus. Equally distressing to Odeline is the fact that her father extracted money from her. She fingers the zip on her moneybelt as she thinks of it.
When the evening circus performance had ended, she left the big top and walked around to the stage entrance, where the other performers were congregated, already half out of their outfits, drinking and talking. Her father wasn’t there. She asked a Lycra-clad acrobat who was leaning against a tent rope where she might find Monsieur Odelin. The acrobat was about the height of her breast pocket and barely looked up at her in reply. His small muscled shoulders lifted and dropped. ‘Je ne sais pas,’ he said, and closed his eyelids. Odeline went to her father’s caravan. The door was closed and the curtains drawn over the windows. She climbed up a step and knocked on the door. There was no answer, although she could hear talking inside. She knocked again.
‘Oui?’ said a sharp voice.
Odeline stepped down on to the grass.
‘Oui?’ her father’s voice said again.
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘It’s me, Odeline. I wasn’t sure where you were.’
‘Ah. I am just conducting an interview here, my dear. I will be ten minutes more.’ At this Odeline heard a single peal of high-pitched laughter. She pulled her prop box over to the side of the caravan and waited. And then pulled it further away – she had a sense that she didn’t want to be nearby to whatever was going on in there. She sat down, not caring how she looked, and took out her pocket watch. She counted seventeen minutes before the door opened and a woman appeared on the top step. She was wearing a floaty mauve dress with yin-yang signs and sandals. She had brown hair that was longer at the front than the back and a large, loose mouth. She was laughing as she looked back into the caravan: ‘I’ll make sure it’s front page.’ She had a camera over her shoulder and a pad and pen in her hand. Odeline felt an instant repulsion. She heard her father’s voice say, ‘Au revoir, Mmeselle’, with a long emphasis on the ‘elle’. The woman carried on giggling as she trotted down the steps and away over the grass. The lines of her underwear were visible through the flimsy material of the dress.
Her father stuck his head lazily around the door. He was still in his performance trousers, barefoot, with just a white vest on his top half. He watched the woman walk away and flexed his brown toes over the top step of the caravan.
He looked over and saw her sitting on her prop box.
‘Hello,’ said Odeline.
He came down the steps slowly, his eyes smiling and his hands held behind his back. A little wizard. ‘Would you like to sponsor us, Odeline?’ he’d said. ‘Would you like to be a sponsor of the Arts? Think of it, my dear. We will put your name on the programme. With special thanks. Your name and my name together. You will have the satisfaction of knowing you are keeping the traditions of the Cirque Maroc alive.’ He crouched down next to her and raised his eyebrows in mimed wonder. ‘Throughout history great artists have only been able to practise with the support of great patrons,’ he whispered. ‘You will be one of them.’
Odeline stayed sitting absolutely still, with her arms crossed over her moneybelt. On realising she was expected to say something in reply, she cleared her throat, resolved. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t have any money for anyone else.’
‘So, you are keeping it all for yourself.’ Her father had tipped his head to the side. ‘My dear girl. I know you have grand dreams in your head. When I was your age I did too. I think I even dreamed of Paris as well!’ he winked. ‘But your money invested here will be better spent than burning it away on your own fantasies. I am older than you with more years’ experience in this world: I know its realities. A community like this is the only way these traditions, these a
rts, can survive. The only way they can live on into another generation.’ He nodded to Odeline. ‘You understand this?’
‘Well, yes,’ she said. ‘But I don’t have any spare money with me.’
‘Did I not see a note or two in there?’ He leant forward and tapped at the strap of the moneybelt, next to Odeline’s hand. ‘Some little purple notes?’
Her father put a hand to his chest. ‘Every time a circus disbands another performance art is lost for ever. The Cirque Maroc is a jewel, and one of the last surviving showcases for these arts. We are receiving applications from young talent all over the world.’ He paused and clasped his hands around hers. Odeline looked down and saw her fingers within the basket of his, the long caramel-coloured fingers and pink nails an older version of her own. ‘We just want to give them a chance,’ he said.
She had found herself untucking her shirt and unzipping the top of her moneybelt. She felt shamed into giving some money, as though she should have known that this was what was expected of her, that this was what she was here to do. She picked out the rest of the notes in there and he took them from her hand. ‘We are so grateful for anything,’ he said, giving her hand a squeeze. She formulated a question about showing him some of her repertoire but the words didn’t come out.
Later, at the party, there was a bonfire. Two of the troupe sat on the ground next to it with their legs crossed around low African drums, which they hit with their fingertips. Others did mini performances in time to the drumbeat and laughed as they tried to teach each other parts of their own act. There were posts set out in an octagonal formation around the bonfire with strings of coloured lightbulbs running between them like telephone cables. Many of the bulbs didn’t work.
Odeline sat a little way outside the octagon on another bench and looked in. It did look like a magical scene. The circus troupe were lit by the firelight, their stage faces washed off but still half costumed. When the two tiny acrobats juggled empty bottles between each other they cheered and when two clowns tried and failed to do the same they roared even louder. The clowns began a waltz around the bonfire. Odeline saw her father’s head thrown back in laughter, his mouth stretched open and teeth bared to the sky. She wondered if her repertoire could ever entertain him this much. She hoped he wouldn’t ask her to do it then, in front of this audience.
Chaplin & Company Page 23
