The Architecture of Song

by Gary Crew

  ‘Luv,’ she said. ‘Luv, I always said if there’s anythin’ yer wanted me ta make, let me know. Nothin’s too good fer yer, kid. Nothin’. Yer made me cry, yer did. Yer lovely voice like. Ow is yer, Hogie?’

  ‘Hogie was the monkey,’ Augustus protested. ‘I’m Augustus, the dwarf.’

  ‘Awww,’ she groaned.

  ‘But I am well, Needly,’ Augustus recovered. ‘Very well in fact. Um, is it all right if I call you Needly?’

  ‘Course,’ she laughed. ‘Them circus days all gone now, eh?’ Don’t care whatcha call me no more. All gone that lot. An’ I don’t miss ’em neither.’

  ‘I live with Rosa Colleano and Stan the Roustabout,’ Augustus admitted.

  ‘Rosa? Her what killed the monkey?’

  ‘Did she?’ Augustus gasped, being ignorant of the murderer’s identity. ‘I don’t believe you. Never!’

  ‘Humph,’ Needly shrugged. ‘Then don’t believe me. But everybody knows. All except you. And that Stan, a course. Would have been the end of him, eh?’

  So Augustus understood. After all these years. The sense of it, he thought. The raw and bloody logic. The cold hard cruelty. And after Barkus, it had to be. It had to be Rosa.

  ‘I’m sorry Needly, I never knew. It had to be Rosa, hey?’

  Seeing his surprise, Phyllis backed away. ‘So they say,’ she fussed, ‘so they say. It was that Bertie Sullivan who told me. But who’d believe Bertie Sullivan? So forgit it. Forgit it, eh. That Stan, he’s a good man, eh? I liked him.’

  ‘Yes,’ Augustus agreed, his head reeling, perhaps from the news about Hogie’s murderer or possibly, and equally potent, that goaty cheese, all manky and mouldy in the chest pocket of his lederhosen. ‘Stan is a good man. But I was wondering, Needly, could you make me a uniform?’

  ‘Tell me whatcha after and I’ll run it up fer ya,’ she declared.

  ‘A school uniform,’ he admitted, somewhat sheepishly, ‘for St Sufferings Church of England Boys School. I’ll pay, of course. I’ve got a tin full of money …’

  ‘I don’t want no money,’ Needly declared. ‘I said I’d do ya fer nothin’. And I will. Never heard nothin’ like the way ya sang that day you popped outta that spittoon. The day ya sang that ‘Please Give Me a Penny’, Sir. I never forgot that. Never. So yer after the uniform fer what school?’

  ‘St Sufferings.’

  ‘Funny that. Made one just the other day. An’ fer another little fella too. Much like yaself.’ She clamped her hand to her mouth, sorrowful, ‘Like yaself and Little Donny. Ya remember Little Donny, do ya?’

  ‘How could I forget?’

  ‘Yairs,’ she said, thinking. ‘Wants ta go ta Hollywood he does. Wants ta be in a cartoon ’e does. Fer Disney. Aaaah …’

  ‘Needly …’ Augustus whispered, calling her back.

  ‘Yairs,’ she said, focusing. ‘Roger his name was, that other little one. I still got the pattern and a bit a the fabric. Enough, I reckon, since yer only small. Yairs. Tell ya what. Let me check ya fer size and we’ll see what we can do. Oright?’ And pulling her tape measure from her scrawny neck, she set about taking his vitals.

  Once the uniform had been collected and the meagre contents of the Arnott’s biscuit tin handed over, despite protests, one thing remained in the way of Augustus’s assault upon the library: to find a time when Rosa wouldn’t be there. The need for her absence had become an issue for a number of reasons. The first was self evident: Rosa didn’t want him singing in her place of work. That much had been made perfectly clear back at Miss la Vie’s. Needly’s faux pas regarding Rosa’s involvement in Hogie’s death only added to the boy’s reluctance to perform in her presence. If she could kill a creature that had done her no harm, what might she do to him, the yodelling dwarf, the bane of her life? This particular horror rattled around in his brain like a marble in a jam tin. Nor could he relieve his angst by telling anyone. Who would I tell? he wondered. Not Stan, that’s for sure. Then he got to fretting over why Rosa had murdered the chimp in the first place – if she had, and he hoped she hadn’t – and whether maybe he should ask her outright and get it over with but he couldn’t. If I did and she said she did it, what would I do? And if I did and she said she didn’t, what would I do?

  So Augustus hid his St Suffering’s uniform under his bed and sat on the steps for another few months – or was it a year?

  I’m suffering, he thought. Suffering …

  The drab miners passed, and their drabber wives, and the too-tight Lutherans and the itchy brown Catholics, but in time, as he watched, listless, ceasing to hope, a very small C. of E. boy came into view.

  Augustus sat up. Why, he thought, That’s Little Roger from St Sufferings, and on the instant he was at the gate, calling.

  ‘What?’ the child responded, evidently annoyed.

  ‘Your name’s Roger, isn’t it?’ Augustus asked.

  ‘What’s it to ya?’

  ‘I talked to your mum a while back. Down at the station.’

  ‘Yeah, so?’

  ‘So how are you going?’

  ‘I’m all right,’ Roger replied, suspicious.

  ‘Just wondering. Don’t you catch the train with your mother anymore?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘How come you don’t catch the train with your mother anymore?’

  ‘Because I’m six years old and two foot six inches tall and a man can’t hide behind his mother all his life. So how about you grow up?’

  That’s it! Augustus realised. Little Roger got it in one. I’m acting as if Rosa is my mother, and she isn’t. She’s not even my manager anymore. Not since the circus. It’s time that I stood up for myself. That I let her know. For poetry, for song. If I am to become a man …

  Augustus chose the following Monday to return to the library, thinking midmorning would be the best. Stan was down pit and once Rosa had left, taking the 8.05 as usual, he slipped into his smart St Sufferings uniform.

  On looking up at the words engraved above the library door he hesitated, remembering: The Accessions desk. How can I get by? Emboldened by his uniform, or St Suffering himself, Augustus stifled a laugh, skirting the building to enter by the rear.

  Once inside he spotted the cast-iron gallery that had so daunted him. ‘Not this time,’ he announced and taking to the stairs, he climbed floor after floor, reaching dizzying heights until, gripping the cold hard railing, he looked down at the murky light seeping from the clerestory windows, not bright (never celestial), but dense, grey as flannel unravelled from the bolt, its grim yardage adrift in that steely space, and planting his military feet, and lifting his military head, he sang:

  The Minstrel boy to the war is gone,

  In the ranks of death you’ll find him;

  His father’s sword he has girded on,

  And his wild harp slung behind him;

  ‘Land of song!’ said the warrior bard,

  ‘Tho’ all the world betrays thee,

  One sword, at least, thy rights shall guard,

  One faithful harp shall praise thee!’

  The Minstrel fell, but the foeman’s chain

  Could not bring his proud soul under;

  The harp he loved ne’er spoke again,

  For he tore its chords asunder;

  And said, ‘No chains shall sully thee,

  Thou soul of love and bravery.

  Thy songs were made for the pure and free,

  They shall never sound in slavery.’

  The effect was miraculous. Rising out of that pit where the Madam had cast them, books appeared – poetry, surely – to swirl and snake, all pages and print, all songs and sighs, and whirling above the mullock – in all the giddy glory of creation – they rose above that heartless building (a library, was it?) to dive downward, all in a rush, piercing the murky glass of the clerestory windows, so striped with grime, so streaked with dust, to flutter, white-winged, dove-like, into the grey, smog-bound void below. />
  ‘Ah!’ Augustus sighed, gripping the rail. ‘I have achieved. My voice. My song …’ And the books, so grateful to return, having plunged downward through the void, rose up, rejoicing, hurling themselves over that cold cast-iron railing, seeking their rightful shelves where they might nestle, patient, fertile, waiting for that lover to borrow, to open, and reading, to laugh, to cry – as lovers do and always have.

  And this time, for the first time, Augustus saw.

  Beneath him those steely pins (whether three or nine) sprang from the grey, marbled plaits of the stony librarians and (considering the constraints of their binding) the hairy serpents so released reared from those unfettered heads to escape (all hissy and delighted) into the lush green foliage of the freshly leaved willows beyond.

  At the round table in the frosted glass room, the Stampers so released ceased their labours, joining hands to dance, squashing their stamp pads (all red and spongy, oozing ink) into that hardwood floor.

  And among this confabulation of poetry and dance, especially the white pages, aflutter like doves, the boy saw a coloured paper (a postcard, was it? A brochure? An airline ticket, possibly; a parrot among doves), and this page, so lively and joyous, having a mind of its own, separated itself from those avian others to land, trembling, upon the chilly desk of the grey librarian in her steely nest and she (being distracted by books; white-winged, dove-like), on reaching out to snatch, sensed her pince-nez darken, such was the brightness, the sheer glare of the tropics on that ticket (was it?), and suddenly she smiled, an island romance in her sights.

  Augustus was not alone in witnessing his handiwork. Upon hearing his voice (possibly at the word ‘men’, probably at the word ‘free’), Rosa on Accessions lifted her head, peering through the gloom, to catch his thrilling tones. And having both seen and heard – after all this time, after all those years – she was changed. Pushing aside her catalogue, ‘Augustus,’ she cried, ‘I’ve tried the life of the body; I’ve tried the life of the mind. Show me the life of the spirit!’

  Looking down from the clerestory, the dwarf laughed.

  ‘Rosa,’ he called, ‘what will you become? A nun?’

  THE TEMPLE

  IN THE WEEKS FOLLOWING his emancipation of the library, Augustus returned to sitting on the front steps of the cottage in Booval.

  Once, Rosa sat beside him. ‘Don’t let your little miracle go to your head,’ she warned. ‘Just as the Bodhisattva sat beneath the Bodhi tree, I am also coming into my own. Spiritually, so to speak.’

  Having suffered through a variety of Rosa’s egocentric incarnations (personal manager, whore, librarian), Augustus gave her little credence. ‘Ah,’ he said, never batting an eyelid, ‘then you will appreciate that I am meditating myself. Would you mind?’ And he nodded in the direction of the crazy paving leading to the gate.

  Augustus liked to watch the world pass by. He especially liked the door-to-door hawkers, the household wares in their carts and carpetbags, a cornucopia of the useful and otherwise. Certain of these merchants came with children in tow, usually some pitiful wretch elicited from home or convent, haven or hovel, dragged weeping and alone from the shadowy sanctuary of arch or doorway, hollow log or drain, kennel or carton to stand, hang-dog and soulful, while its master rattled off a spiel about ‘scratchin’ for a feed, if you could spare a penny?’

  Sales pitches meant nothing to Augustus since he had not a penny himself; all the same, he was ever so glad when these colourful rogues happened along – especially those with kids.

  Dr A C Jones was a Purveyor of Cure-Alls and Elixirs, or so the faded sign on the hand tray he toted declared. Having examined his array of bottles and jars – to the extent of removing them to shake, to hold against the light, and once to open and sniff – Augustus was of the opinion that their primary ingredient was water, with the addition of a certain pinkness; perhaps cochineal, possibly Condy’s crystals. He said nothing.

  Augustus liked Dr A. He liked his shortness, his corpulence, his face full and cheery, his bald head, his ears broad and red as the leaves of a cabbage he had seen once in a greengrocer’s window out Goodna way. He also liked the man’s taste in clothes. Dr A was inclined towards the flashy, favouring suit coats in plaid or tartan worn with a bright, wide tie and white leather spats (sometimes clean, most often not). Augustus liked that Dr A was always on for a yarn about one of his ‘regulars’ who had the pleurisy or the poonemony, once even the plague, curable only by copious doses of the good doctor’s personally branded elixir.

  One time – and one time only – when Augustus laughed, the doctor betrayed himself. ‘Augustus,’ he said, ‘mate, a man’s gotta earn a crust. You of all people …’ and he looked the dwarf up and down – what there was of him – ‘will appreciate that one day.’

  Augustus laughed no more.

  As amusing as the doctor could be, his offsider, the boy Ralph, also appealed. Ralph was ‘soft’, as the kinder ones said; the less gracious called him ‘loony’. It was the meningitis that had done him in; the brain fever. Yet there were those, the kinder ones, who said God did him a favour. His mother, illiterate, took in laundry; his father, a drinker, beat her regularly. Ralph saw and heard but failed to comprehend. Not that he condoned; he simply turned away, smiling his silly smile, to feed the sparrows down the yard or collect the pegs, dropped by his mother when she was struck. The circumstances of his family life, such as it was, made it easier for the doctor to take him. Three quid, the doc offered; the father took five.

  If the day was hot, the doctor might sit in the shade beside the steps, at the top of the crazy paving, sorting his cures. Which was when Augustus would step down and take the only-too-willing Ralph by the hand, lead him around the back for a sugary biscuit and a glass of milk. Conversation there was none; happiness of the smiling and nodding kind there was aplenty.

  Bill Brown, who sold buttons, and his boy Bob were also favourites, them in their bib-and-brace overalls and Bill so bright, though Bob was a dill. Different-coloured eyes, the kid had; one bright as the southern sky, the other bleak as concrete. His moods also varied: all giggles and dribbles one minute, then he’d sour, cowering behind his minder’s back, snarling and spitting, ‘Up you!’ or ‘Bugger orf’, sticking his head out just long enough.

  ‘Two bob both ways is me Bob,’ Bill would say by way of explanation, though it was not, neither to Augustus nor anybody else, Bill included.

  Still, Augustus liked Bill and Bob Brown as he liked all the hawkers and their kids, because they were different, and respected his difference, mostly.

  About the time of the hawkers, Augustus’s baby teeth fell out. Two, at the front. He ran his tongue over the gummy gap. I am being reconstructed, he thought. And I have not sung. If I don’t find the right song soon, I might be too late. New teeth might come, grown-up teeth, men’s teeth. Even hair, down there. And I will be too late to sing myself into being the man I want to be. The one in the white uniform. That broad man. That tall man … He tongued the space again, afraid.

  Of all the hawkers, it was the man with the doves and the finches who fascinated the most. And his girl, especially, who wove cages of cane. So different from the others – if hawkers they were. Yet for all his fascination, when they came, which was rarely, Augustus could not speak, sitting mute, staring, so taken was he by their presence.

  They have white skin and white hair, both of them, and keep white doves, he observed. They dress as travelling players, their clothes as multicoloured as their finches, yet white as they are, they are not albino.

  Augustus had known such a person; a man who did a stint at the circus. Augustus once talked to him outside his caravan. Nice bloke he was, fine boned, with white skin and white hair; his eyes pink. He talked ordinary, this albino, about ordinary stuff. He said that he was twenty-eight years old, that both his mother and father were normal, as was his sister and brother. He said he had been to school and could read and write but could never keep a job. He was just a week with the circ
us before he moved on. Didn’t draw a crowd. For five bob he sat on a box in a tent, dressed in a robe of blood-red silk. When someone came in for a look (from behind a rope), he stood to let the robe fall, turning this way and that, a white towel knotted about his waist. He could have made more if he’d dropped the towel, but he would not.

  Augustus accepted this, being different himself.

  The man with the doves and the finches and his girl (his daughter, was she) stepped up the crazy paving like dancers: toes first, then heels, light, soundless in patchy hose of red and green, the colours of their choice. Reaching the stairs to find Augustus sitting, staring, mute, they prepared.

  Placing their willow-woven baskets at their feet, they stood, red and green motley drifting in the heat, lifting and drifting, so gauzy was the fabric. From their faces they brushed their hair, hanging heavy as it did in silvery ropes. Then bending, his long fingers knuckled and sinewed, he (the man first, always) twisted the woven tie that held the basket lid and skipped away. Doves rose to circle him; white, silvered, shimmering, hovering about his shoulders, about his head (oh, he was tall!) and he smiled his broad smile, his teeth fine and narrow, never yellowed, never ivoried against his pale skin. Then she – the girl, his daughter, was she? – did the same, loosening the willow-woven basket at her feet, freeing finches to rise, glorious in motley themselves, wings whirring, their gaudy brilliance hallowing her silvery hair as she laughed.

  What is it about them that silences me? Augustus wondered. Why can’t I speak to them? These questions vexed him for days after each visitation, and they were visitations, being spiritual, almost; more than just a foot in the door.

  When next they visited (was it three weeks or three months?) Augustus determined to speak but again their appearance arrested him. They are not white, he observed, astonished. They are silver. Silver as their downy doves. Nor are their eyes pink, but blue. And he sat, gaping, as always, until the thought came: It’s their beauty that silences me. The loveliness of their difference. I’ve never seen anybody like them, not even in the circus. And momentarily his chest swelled, since he was different too, but he would have been other; even ordinary, if he could.