‘Have you?’ I wondered whether he was one of her customers, and my blood began to pound with anger. But I didn’t want to start a conversation about that with Ernie at my side. After all, he didn’t know, as far as I could tell, what Hannah did for a living and I was keen to keep it that way.
However, before I could say anything else, Hannah continued, ‘Yeah. I don’t know where but I’ve a feeling it might have been up home.’
‘Up home’ for Hannah is not Canning Town, where she lives now, but Spitalfields, where so many Jews have their homes and businesses.
‘Military types go all over the place,’ Ernie said, ‘especially these days.’
‘Yes.’
What sounded like many hundreds of gasps made us all glance up. There was nothing, as far as I could tell, to see.
‘Oh, there she is, Gawd bless her!’ a fat, tired-looking woman standing just in front of one of the motionless MPs said.
‘Where’s who?’ Hannah asked, as she peered into the darkness to where the woman was now pointing. ‘Lily?’
‘The Blessed Lily,’ the fat woman corrected. ‘Gawd love her.’
Ernie and I squinted into the darkness until I saw the lone, bedraggled figure of a young girl drag itself slowly towards us. People cheered, some sang – the MPs gazed upon the crowd with menace and fear, and at a barked order from somewhere they made their weapons ready to fire.
I turned to Ernie and said, ‘This is madness.’
‘Lily! Lily!’ the people chanted.
‘Here she comes!’
‘What the Virgin say to you, love?’ one old man asked, as the girl, her face and clothes covered with mud, made her way past the MPs and attempted to get to her people. ‘The war over, is it?’
She ignored him. As she pushed forward as quickly as she could, all I heard her say was, ‘Leave me alone! Leave me alone!’
When she drew level with me, however, remembered what Mr Lee had said to Ernie and me about Lily when we were in his tent and I said, ‘Where’s the Head, Lily? Is he . . .’
‘He’s with me,’ she replied, and frowned. ‘He’s always with me. You just can’t see him.’
What she said and the way she stared at me made me feel cold. When the bombs are raining down and I’m out running away from the blood and the nightmares in my mind, I know I can’t always tell what’s real and what isn’t. Sometimes things appear that could be true of what is going on now and what went on in Flanders twenty-two years ago. But occasionally my ‘visions’ are not easy to interpret, even for me, and with the Gypsies’ seeming ambivalence to the Head and its reality, this was one of those moments. What on earth could Lily mean by saying that the Head was with her? Even I could see that she was alone. But before I could ask her to tell me more she had gone towards her mother and father, who had come out to wait for her in the wake of the commotion. Hannah, Ernie and I watched with the many thousands around us as Lily embraced her parents, then followed them into their tent. As she did so, Bruno the bear gave a contented growl from his place behind their canvas home.
‘Oh, well,’ a bright young girl, with a cup of steaming beef tea in her hands, said, as the crowd began to break up, ‘I suppose that’s all the miracles we’re going to get tonight. More tomorrow.’
The MPs on the perimeter of the camp seemed to relax, but not enough to want to talk to either Ernie or me. If senior churchmen wanted to verify Lily’s miracles then they, like any other citizens, could do so. The young privates we attempted to speak to made it clear that they’d deal with that eventuality as and when.
On the way back to the car I did look towards the bit of forest Lily had come from earlier, and I thought I saw a figure that could have been a military type sheltering there. Was it Sergeant Williams? Neither Hannah nor Ernie had seen whoever it was but later I remembered that I hadn’t seen Williams in or around the camp prior to that ‘appearance’. Had he, Lily and even the Head been out in the forest doing or saying things that they didn’t want others to hear? Was I going barmy even thinking that the Head was with them (or anyone else for that matter)?
Neither Hannah nor Ernie spoke to me about any of the things we had seen and done in the forest on our way home to the East End. All three of us were anxious to get back before the sirens went, as we all knew full well they would. Hannah and Ernie wanted to be near their own shelters when that happened and me, well, I just didn’t want to have to take responsibility for anyone other than myself. I didn’t want to have to make my girl and my mate safe before I took off, running away from the sounds and sights that torture me. When the bombs fall I have to be above the ground in a place I know I can look in the eye whatever might be about to kill me or make me go off my nut. It’s important for us old refugees from the mud of Flanders that we die above the ground.
As she got out of the car Hannah, said, as if remembering something, ‘Oh, H, tomorrow night you’re taking me out.’
I frowned. Of course, I always like taking Hannah out but I was alarmed as this arrangement had slipped my mind.
‘To the Hackney Empire,’ Hannah said, ‘to see my old mate David Green.’
‘David Green?’
‘Blimey,’ she said. ‘Brain like a sieve, you’ve got! The magician bloke with the Egyptian Head turn.’
‘Oh, yes.’
Now I remembered. The Egyptian Head. I’d wanted to know how like or unlike it was to Lily Lee’s attraction. Now I was going to find out.
Chapter Eight
I’m not, in general, a great one for music-hall turns. If you get a girl or a fellow with a really good voice and a rousing set of songs, that’s nice. But a lot of the other acts can leave me cold. A case in point was the ‘Comedy Partnership of Bertie Rouse and his “Cheeky” Niece Harriet’. The joke in this case was that the ‘girl’ was actually a forty-five-year-old bloke in a blond wig and a dress, which might have been funny if either of them had known any jokes. But the Rouses, just like the three poor old buggers who did a bad turn of the Wilson, Keppel and Betty type, were useless and I realised early on that I should’ve been drunk before I set foot in the place. Outside the concert parties to entertain the troops there’s little new blood on the halls, these days. There’s little new blood out of a uniform.
Hannah and I had caught a bus up to Mare Street, Hackney, which is where the old Empire is, just after I shut up the shop at six. It had already been dark so our journey was gloomy – on account of the blackout – and very, very cold. October was turning into November, which, in my book, is winter.
‘All Hallows Eve tomorrow,’ I said to Hannah, as I buried one of my arms in the deep pile of her astrakhan jacket.
Hannah said, ‘What’s that mean?’
‘All aboard!’ the bus conductor yelled, to anyone who might still want to get on to a bus where, on account of the blackout light we have to put up with, everyone looked deceased.
‘All Hallows Eve is when the dead are supposed to come back to haunt the living,’ I said. ‘There’s all manner of customs and frightening stories about it.’
‘Sounds horrible,’ Hannah said, then lit a fag and changed the subject. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘I wonder if they’ve got one of them ventriloquists on the bill tonight. I like them.’
But Hannah was to be disappointed – if not as much as I was. She did find some of the entertainment funny and she did tell me off for being what she described as ‘so bloody miserable’. But by the time the interval came, bringing with it a shower of fag ash all over my trousers from the bloke sitting next to me, I wanted to see this David Green bloke do his stuff and go. Luckily for me, I didn’t have to wait long.
‘There you are,’ Hannah said, as a short, fat balding man walked on to the stage. ‘The Wazir of the Pharaohs as promised.’
It didn’t take me long, in common with most of the audience, to realise that the Wazir was as drunk as a lord. What should have been card tricks, easy for a skilled sober man, became acts of pathetic comedy in the Wazir’s trembling hands
. People laughed, of course they did, and if the Wazir himself had not seemed so surprised and hurt, I would’ve thought that perhaps his act was meant to be funny.
‘Blimey, he’s gone down the pan,’ Hannah said, as she shook her head over the antics of her old friend David.
‘He’s drunk,’ I said.
‘I know. Never used to be, in spite of everything,’ she said. ‘Wonder why he’s so sloshed now.’
Some embarrassing nonsense with silk scarves followed, after which the Wazir, whose only concession to anything Oriental was an exotic scarf flung about his shoulders, said, ‘And now for the high point of my act – the amazing, astounding and magical Egyptian Head!’
One of the stagehands moved into the wings a screen I’d noticed earlier at the back of the stage. Behind it was a booth in which there stood an apparently empty table. The Wazir, who stood to one side of what was almost exactly the same arrangement as the one I’d seen in Lily’s tent, waved his magic wand dramatically in the air. Smoke appeared, as if it was coming out of the stage, covering the table and part of the booth.
Some wag in the audience shouted, ‘Them Egyptian fags ain’t ’arf strong, ain’t they?’
I laughed for the first time that evening. But all the time, as I watched the smoke clear around the Egyptian Head’s table, I was thinking. Anything could have been happening under all that smoke. Something obviously was. But with Lily’s Head the illusion had just appeared. No smoke, except that from the girl’s pipe and, except for the few moments I’d looked away from it to the Gypsy, the Head had just come into being before my eyes. And although Django, with his sinister made-up face, had been unnerving, he hadn’t been funny like this one.
‘Behold, the great Abu Abdul!’ the Wazir said, in a voice I imagined he thought sounded grand. ‘The famous, the impossible Egyptian Head of old Cairo!’
Like everyone else I beheld. God alone knows how old he was, but his face was sunken at each side, which suggested that the Egyptian Head didn’t have a tooth in his bonce. The fez on top of it all was several sizes too big, which didn’t help to make the illusion any more regal. Old the Head was, but mysterious and special he was not.
‘Oooh,’ moaned the Head, and then again, ‘Oooh!’
I looked at Hannah, who looked back at me primly. This magician was an old friend of hers, after all.
‘Great Abu Abdul, you sound as if in pain,’ the Wazir said, in what, to his credit, was only just starting to be a Cockney accent. ‘Can we help you, O seer and magician of the mysterious desert sphinx?’
As in Lily’s tent, I could see right under the table to the curtains at the back of the booth. This Head, like the other, floated on a table top. Whether it was concealed under the table or hidden somewhere else, there had to be a body somewhere.
‘O mighty Wazir, it was the terrible Pharaoh Tutikamin what done for me!’ the Egyptian Head said, in an accent that owed more to Canning Town than Cairo.
Hannah nudged me. ‘What’s David doing with that old geezer? He had some pretty girl when I saw him years ago.’
‘The Wazir of the Pharaohs has obviously hit hard times,’ I said.
‘He ain’t just hit ’em,’ Hannah replied. ‘He’s gone right under.’
Fortunately we didn’t have to put up with too much more of the Egyptian Head act. After the Wazir had finished and before the next act, ‘Freddie the Dancing Dalmatian’, could come on, Hannah and I agreed to go backstage.
In spite of his performance, I still wanted to meet the Wazir David Green. I wanted to ask him why he’d never passed in front of the Egyptian Head at any time. Lily Lee hadn’t either.
‘Hannah Jacobs, as I live and piss!’ The little fat man now wearing a rusty Homburg over his shiny pate took my girl into his arms and squeezed her. She didn’t seem entirely comfortable with it.
‘Blimey, it has to be twenty years!’ He pulled away from Hannah the better to study her. ‘Still gorgeous, girl.’
‘David . . .’
‘Come in! Come in and have a drink,’ the magician said, as he waved us into his tiny, dust-grimed dressing room. Looking now at me he said, ‘Husband?’
‘Friend,’ Hannah said, before I could.
David Green, the Wazir, smiled. ‘You still . . .’
‘Mama and Papa don’t speak to me and I still make my living in that way with . . .’ Her voice petered out.
But the magician shrugged, indicating, I imagined, that he knew what Hannah did. He went over to the battered chest and mirror that passed for his artist’s dressing-table and poured some gin into a cracked half-pint glass. He handed this to Hannah, then turned questioningly to me.
‘No, thanks,’ I said.
‘Suit yourself,’ he said. He offered Hannah his dressing-table chair. ‘Sit! Sit, Hannah! God, it’s good to see you!’ He poured himself a truly enormous drink and laughed. ‘Old sinners like us, thrown out of our nests, we should stay together.’
But his face, which became suddenly very red, told another story: that he regretted what had just been said.
‘Yes,’ a grave-faced Hannah replied. ‘Davy—’
‘Christ, no one’s called me “Davy” since before the Flood!’ He laughed again, maniacally as drunks do. He was, it seemed, as much a refugee from the Jewish heartlands as Hannah. I wondered whether the drink had been his offence or whether he drank to dull the memory of whatever had happened many years before.
‘So, you caught the act,’ he said.
‘Yeah.’ Hannah took her fags out and lit one. ‘Egyptian Head was a woman last time I saw it.’
The magician sighed. ‘She left me.’
‘To go back to the Pyramids?’
He shot her an unforgiving look.
‘Back to Barking, then, was it?’ Hannah said, and then, with a quick glance up at me, got down to the business of why we had come. It seemed that she didn’t want to linger here. ‘Listen, Davy, my friend Frank here, he wants to ask you something about your act.’
David Green pulled himself up to his full height of, at most, five foot three, and said, ‘A magician never reveals his secrets.’
‘Mr Green,’ I said, ‘I don’t want to know how you perform your Egyptian Head illusion—’
‘Well, that’s fucking good, then, isn’t it!’ he said spitefully, and threw a quarter of a pint of gin down his neck. ‘’Cause I ain’t telling ya!’
‘Davy!’
‘What?’ His belligerence was as quick as it was shocking. ‘So, the turn stinks. I’ve still got my pride, you know! I thought, Hannah, that you’d come to see me!’
He fancied her, or so it seemed.
‘Davy, you and me were never . . . You were a mate. You were.’
‘Yes, well, if I’d been more than that maybe a lot of trouble would have been avoided.’
‘Oh, don’t you blame me for what you done!’
‘Little Hannah Jacobs, so prim and nice and don’t-touch-me, what became a whore for the goyim!’ As if he knew he’d gone too far, David Green stopped and his flabby face drained of all colour. ‘Hannah . . .’
Her face was like a thunderstorm. ‘Oh, that’s rich coming from a bloke who likes to fiddle about with little girls! Thought that might have slipped me mind, did you?’
‘Sssh!’ He took another swig from his glass, then put one shaky finger to his lips. ‘No one knows . . .’
Hannah looked at me. ‘Davy here stuck his hands in the rabbi’s daughter’s knickers. Blames me for it, so I now learn.’ She glanced at him and said, ‘He was twenty-eight and she was seven.’
‘No, no, no, no!’
I’d never seen Hannah like this before: nasty. I felt quite sorry for the poor bloke – or, rather, I would have done if he hadn’t been a pervert.
‘Just because I left our manor before you don’t mean I don’t keep in touch with people,’ Hannah said. ‘I know everything about what you done, Davy Green. Why’d’ya think I only come to see your show once in twenty years, an old mate like me?
And we was good mates, but after what you done . . . Now, my mate Frank wants to ask you a few questions and I would suggest that you answer him – and polite, like, too.’
There was a moment when I thought he might hit me but then, maybe because deep down he knew he was too drunk and flabby to do me any harm, he slumped, sat down on his dressing-table and said, ‘So, Frank, what can I do for you?’
It wasn’t a comfortable situation and I could see he resented me, but I asked what I had to anyway.
‘I want to know,’ I said, ‘whether it’s possible in the illusion for the magician to stand in front of the booth and therefore in front of the Head?’
I’d given this some thought and I had an idea that mirrors had to be involved – not that I knew how at that moment.
‘I won’t say why but no,’ he said, ‘that ain’t possible.’
‘Are there mirrors under the table?’ I asked.
‘Reflecting the audience? Don’t be daft!’
‘No, reflecting something else,’ I said. And then a solution came to me. The body of the Head had to be somewhere. ‘If the mirrors come to a point in front of the table they’ll reflect the curtains of the booth that surrounds the act, won’t they?’ I became, I admit, quite excited by my idea. ‘It’d give the illusion from the front as if the Head was floating on top of the table. But the body would have to be behind the mirrors, wouldn’t it?’
David Green did not reply.
But it would explain why Lily had kept to one side of not only Django but the booth. If mirrors were in use she would have had to, as the Wazir had had to. The ‘Head’, if this solution was correct, had to appear through a hole in the table top. It made sense if, in spite of everything, I still had a creeping feeling that Lily’s ‘Head’ was somehow ‘real’. Partly it had to be because she was a Gypsy, with all the mysterious associations those people attract. I knew it was stupid, but then, in his next breath, David Green threw the question wide open again.
After the Mourning Page 9
