8
The Harvest Fair
Phoebe pitched her tent at the fair next to the reconditioned Victorian merry-go-round, where vermilion and gold goats and dogs and horses rose and fell on their barley sugar poles to the whirling music. Over the low entrance she hung a sign, ‘Phoebe’s Face Painting – £1.00’, and then propped up a board with a selection of designs, from spiders’ webs to the logos on kids’ favourite trainers. On her other side, the stall was selling soil-testing equipment (‘Test for contamination!’ ‘Organic farming at your fingertips!’).
The sky was racing with high cumulus; with shining scalloped edges the clouds shadowed the dark heavy haunch of the Nine Maidens behind the school sports field where the Fellmoor Harvest Fair was being held. But it was mild and fine, the lateness of the year indicated only by the length and wetness of the grass and the copper shadows of the bracken and the drift of crimson and lemon leaves from the hawthorns and crab apples in the hedgerows. So Phoebe set out her palette and brushes on the trestle outside the tent; against it she stood up a third, more decorative notice which called out to passing adult revellers:
map your inner feng shui:
find the place you feel at home
image the self you know but lost
make a chart of your very soul.
Written in spiky letters, blocked out in black ink, the sign gave out a message of a unique, intimate, ancient method of commingling and communication; meanwhile, behind the tent, stood the generator Phoebe was sharing with the merry-go-round; it spluttered along, a ramshackle contraption necessary to sustain her therapeutic enterprise, for Phoebe’s inner mapping was hooked up to a reconditioned computer and grinding old printer given her by one of the agencies that had originally helped settle the cluster in Fellmoor.
The tent was an idea Phoebe had come up with for weekends over the summer before she left to take up the place she’d been given at a specialist science college. It gave her a way of following the fairs and camping with her new boyfriend; he was working with a music theatre youth group, the Penny Whistles. But it was also bringing in extra, which she needed to keep towards her move to Enoch that autumn. With her exam predictions, she’d managed to persuade the authorities to delay her repatriation.
So Phoebe was moving away from Fellmoor, where she’d made her home for a longer time than anywhere previously, apart from Tirzah.
Her hair these days was waxed and burnished into curls flat against her head in the latest style, and she had a tiny sapphire crescent between her brows, and was applying the same in stencil to her fingernails, which were varnished in frosted silver. Some children began to come up; they approached cautiously.
‘She’s fine with kids,’ said Phoebe, putting out a hand, with fingers spread to dry, to indicate Lucy, who was lying across the tent flap entrance, her eyes opened, with yellow flares lighting, and her nose twitching. ‘She knows when I need protection,’ she added, laughing. ‘She won’t attack you.’
The kids shuffled together towards the board where Phoebe had posted the snapshots of faces she’d painted over the summer.
‘So, what’s it to be?’ she called out. ‘Butterfly wings or tiger stripes or flower fairy? If that’s too soft, what about a witch’s wart on your nose . . .’ she tapped one of the little girls on hers. ‘And horns on your forehead? Or I can square you up in football colours . . .’ But the children were as captivated by Phoebe herself as by her range of patterns, and they were stuck gazing at her as she sat in the autumn sunshine, giving off that faintly radioactive luminescence that hadn’t faded altogether since she was given her new skin.
She dipped the little brush back into its sparkling bottle and waved her fingers in the air to dry the nails, in a small mist of acetone fumes, while calling to her small customers that she’d still be a few minutes, but that she’d be open for business soon, and to have their money ready.
By the rostrum in the centre of the field, the Penny Whistles band was striking up, on fiddle and banjo, pipes and tambourine; she could see her new boyfriend, Timmo, in a saucepan helmet over his thick ropes of hair talking to his mate Bolan, the fiddle player. Timmo’s costume of tin trays caught the light and flashed – a signal to her. He was laughing and rolling a cigarette, and she could feel, even at a distance, the way the tip of his tongue passed across the paper; she shivered happily at the thought of it. Then he was off, bashing away at the Turk across the field, dinning into his enemy’s dustbin lid shield and shouting the lines at the top of his voice, not even trying to choke back his laughter as the band scraped and strummed and banged to keep up the good work of Albion and St George. A third player sprang into the acting area, in red tights, flourishing a garden fork in one hand and a frying pan in the other:
‘I am Beelzebub,’ he shouted, ‘Lord of the flies!’
‘Your teeth are black as charcoal,’ shouted Timmo, the champion of the civilised world. ‘Your breath smells like the devil’s arsehole.’ But then, as a swipe landed hard, he cried out, ‘Steady! ‘Ere! Have a care with that,’ at the excessive enthusiasm of the attack. Then he obligingly toppled down and lay stretched out on the field.
‘“Where’s a maiden pure of heart,” came the call.
“To kiss the gallant knight who’s slain
By the foul fiend’s wicked art
And raise him to his feet again?’”
‘Your cue, Gramercy,’ nudged TB. They had just arrived.
Gramercy was dressed up, but not for that role. She was to give away the prizes in the raffle. Monica’s urging, after Hilda in the post office suggested it to Monica one morning when they’d met in the queue between the revolving pic ‘n’ mix Candyman sweet drum and the rack of guides to Mystery, Magic and Myth on the Moor. Gramercy had said yes; she was pleased the villagers saw her as one of them. They wanted a local celeb; she was striking out in her new role as a committed campaigner, so she was happy to appear. Or, rather not unhappy to try public speaking, in this new context for her cause, her home patch. So that morning Gramercy and Monica had chosen an unstructured acid lime linen suit, and a hat – or so the designer called it, though it consisted of one curl of some tropical feather pinned to a cherry pink hairband.
TB said, ‘You look every inch the lady of the manor.’
Monica groaned, ‘That’s not what’s intended, at all. The message is, Seriously Grown-up Now, but not Posh.’
‘But,’ said TB, ‘that’s what the lady of the manor looks like these days.’
‘“Send the Fair Sabra to my aid”,’ cried the prone knight-at-arms.
‘Phoebe! Phoebe!’ joshed the crowd around him, the Devil and the Turk, who were still stabbing and thrusting with their wooden weapons.
‘Can’t you see I’m busy?’ Phoebe protested, as someone came over to pull her into the play to resurrect the dying hero with a kiss. There was a murmur of laughter as Phoebe was pulled over and bent down reluctantly; she brushed the corpse with her lips on his forehead.
‘A real kiss,’ cried the crowd. ‘That won’t wake him up!’
Phoebe wriggled away from the arms pushing her back towards the dead champion of civilisation and Albion where he lay prostrated, with a beer mug in one hand and the saucepan on his head, but they insisted. Phoebe said, firmly, ‘No tongue, Timmo,’ as she knelt down and placed her mouth on his; his limbs jerked and he leapt up like Frankenstein’s creature galvanised. A full measure was poured into his tankard. He raised it to her: ‘The Fair Princess Sabra!’ he called out, and downed the drink; for all his swaggering, he was looking at her shyly, wonderingly, as she turned with a laugh and a shake of her gleaming head to go back to the tent and avoid Gramercy; besides, she was there to make some money and the punters were lining up.
A customer for inner feng shui mapping came over from the soil tester’s stall. ‘So what’s this you’re up to here then?’ he enquired, tapping the sign.
‘Two quid and I’ll make you a complete map of your inner psyche. A “chromograph”
. A picture in full colour of your inner personality . . . it’s ancient science. Really strong. Try it.’
Inside the tent, a string of fairy lights sparkled, and the computer monitor glowed subaqueously. It felt like a sea cave, secret and intimate, and she started on her patter to the soft pulse of a tape of wooden flutes and gongs from a distant rainforest.
‘You’ve got this twin inside you,’ Phoebe began, conspiratorially. ‘And when you were born you were together, you were one, but then, soon after, you lost contact – you were split, you forgot each other.’
Half-dubious, half-excited, the soil tester smiled, ‘Yeah, I’ve always felt something like that. How d’you know?’
Sometimes one of her subjects would interrupt her, with a torrent of detail about all the premonitions and sensations of déjà vu that he or she’d experienced, and Phoebe would nod, and say, ‘Yes, that’s the sign of the other you that knows stuff the first you doesn’t.’
‘I thought that story of the lost twin’, the soil tester went on, ‘was about love – about looking for your lost half all your life until you’re at last reconciled – twin souls, soul mates.’
‘Yeah,’ Phoebe answered. ‘It’s usually told as a love story. But I think it’s more than that . . .’
‘More!’
‘Yeah, more! Love isn’t everything, you know. Leastways, not that kind of love.’
‘So what do I do?’
‘You find your twin inside – the real you that’s gone missing. Here, sit down, that’s right, in front of me.’
Phoebe settled herself at the keyboard of her computer.
‘Now I ask you some simple questions and when you answer, you get to pick a colour from one of the colour wheels there. Then I feed your choice into the computer.
‘When you think of the house where you were a child, what colour do you see?’
‘Blue, deep blue . . .’
‘Which blue – choose—’ She pointed to the colours on the screen. He chose, ‘Ultramarine.’
‘That’s good!’
‘Now, think of the food you liked best when you were a child – what colour comes up?’
‘I don’t know—’
‘Spin, then. Choose one of the dials and spin – there!’ She’d made colour wheels from paint swatches she’d coaxed out of the local DIY shop.
Eventually, ‘a unique chromograph of the inner you’ whirred from the printer.
‘“The inner you,”’ she read, ‘“is a tall, lean, dark and sensitive extrovert, capable of giving a great deal to others . . . fond of travelling, mushrooms and dogs . . .”’
‘But I’m a cat person.’
‘Maybe you’re not, deep down.’
‘It’s rubbish!’
‘I’m working on it.’
‘What a laugh.’ He took the printout, shaking his head.
In the course of the afternoon, Phoebe painted a clown, a pirate, an endangered species of bat, a yeti, a marquise, a seal, a zebra and the colours of the Premier League’s top football team. She issued about half the permutations of inner yous she’d so far programmed into her machine; and the jam jar of coins was nearly full for the third time (she put the notes away).
Phoebe heard Gramercy start speaking; her voice came in fits and starts across the field, through the rackety music from the merry-go-round: she was thanking a list of benefactors, praising the organisers.
She’ll have to practise if she’s going into politics, thought Phoebe. She should stick to singing.
‘. . . I’m more used to writing songs,’ Gramercy began, as if on cue ‘but I’ve got something I want to say to you, now.
‘I came here from Enoch, as you all know, but I feel, if you’ll let me say this, part of the scenery. And I love it here. People are doing things here the way they’ve done them since forever. But they’re – we’re – also doing different things: I write world music, folk rock, whatever you call it, it’s made from sounds from all over the planet. Patrick in there—’ Gramercy tossed her head towards the Crafts Tent, ‘– we were just talking about his dulcimers and his zithers. He’s bringing you sounds and the instruments that played them from far away and long ago. But they’re here, now, and they’re different when they’re played by us, for us, in this time that’s ours.
‘We’re none of us the real thing, we’re all of us mixed up and we have to take form here there and everywhere, we have to question the past in order to make ourselves a new future. That’s what my friend Kim used to argue . . .’
The crowd was moving around, buying ice creams and chocolate flakes from Donato’s purring van, and India Pale Ale and Fellmoor draught beer from the Bar Tent, children were lolling on the grass under their parents’ legs, or sizing up the form of the ferrets in their cages for the ferret races down drainpipes laid out in a pen. There was a murmur or two as Gramercy’s voice came and went over the PA system rigged up in the field, but mostly the inattention was good-natured. Back in the tent with another customer for inner mapping, Phoebe could no longer catch the words clearly.
‘What I’m trying to say,’ Gramercy went on, ‘is there’s no ethnicity that’s clean. Nowhere, and certainly not in this country.’ She took a breath. ‘You remember the refugee cluster in the town? They were deported, mostly. Back to the hell many of them had fled. Some stayed. Some hang around waiting for the tribunals to decide.’ Phoebe would not be pleased if she singled her out, so she left it vague. ‘The national policy’s all over the place, causing deep damage to people – some of them children – who deserve better.
‘I want to ask you to help me do something about it . . .’ She could see on the dais beside her the chairman of the Festival Committee looking anxious beneath her summery smiles.
She looked at her notes, scattered on the paper like a sketch for a song, and rushed on, ‘In the north, yellow butterflies started turning black and grey in the last century, to match the industrial pollution. Nature knows about change. And we do, too. There’s even a herd of ostriches in the next village now – you all know that! Look at the things you’re wearing: they’ve come from everywhere. But we haven’t lost connection to tradition. We’re still recognisable, to ourselves and to others. Tradition’s in play with the present and with the future and with things faraway from us as well as near. And you can’t have everything moving globally – goods, information, music – without people moving too.
‘You can see the process in the garden plants that were on sale in the tent (All Sold Out now!): they’ve been thinned out from overflowing beds, swelled by all the wet summers we’ve been having. They’re going to circulate, cross-pollinate, settle elsewhere. There are oriental yellow poppies in our hedgerows – and Himalayan balsam along our streams. And then there’s buddleia – the butterfly tree – which will seed and put down roots – anywhere.’
And Gramercy remembered Kim, looking at the shrub flourishing on urban wasteland.
‘All this is just to say to you – thank you for welcoming me to your festival and asking me to speak. If you’re interested in joining my campaign – we’ve brought the literature. Just come up and talk to me – or to Monica.’
But the festival crowd wanted to meet Gramercy more than take her HSWU leaflets; still, she felt better. She’d spoken, rather than sung, in public, about what she felt, what concerned her, and it made her feel loyal and connected, through Kim and his legacy, to something vital.
After she’d met a few of the audience, and signed a CD and a tape or two, she looked around for Phoebe.
In the tent Phoebe could hear the festival prizes being announced by a bass-voiced member of the Fair Committee as Gramercy picked the tickets out of a hat: ‘A ride with the local firemen after a guided tour of the station – No. 23. Anyone have No. 23? . . . A basket of organic vegetables – a free perm or tinting courtesy of Big Hair in the country capital – a £10 voucher for the local supermarket – a bottle of wine – a pot of homemade blackberry jam courtesy of Jenny Dimples’ Café—’
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As the event wound down, Phoebe began tidying up inside the tent, boxing up the equipment. She must find the money for a colour printer, she was thinking. But it was the cost of the cartridges that was the real problem. As she came out of the tent, her arms full of gear, Gramercy was standing a little way off, looking at the sign for inner mapping with TB beside her. He left with a low wave as soon as Phoebe appeared.
‘Phoebe, it’s been ages,’ Gramercy came towards her over the grass, crookedly, on account of her hobbling shoes. She peered under her feather through the flap. ‘This looks good.’
‘Here!’ said Phoebe, calling to Lucy who’d risen to her feet and was pushing her nose up between Gramercy’s knees.
Gramercy gave a nervous laugh, and gestured the wolf away. ‘Haven’t you heard anything?’
Phoebe scowled; then pushed her chin out. ‘I knew you were going to ask me, everyone keeps asking me. No, I haven’t seen or heard anything from Mum. And I don’t expect to.’
‘I thought she’d get in touch with you. That she might call or something.’ Gramercy paused, and sighed. ‘I went to the hearing. I went twice, Phoebe. I did my best.’
‘I know what you did. I’m aware of it. But after that Kim fellow died, Mum was so cut up, she was bonkers. She is bonkers. She said if it wasn’t my brother, she was going off looking for him. Now I was doing all right. That’s all I know,’ Phoebe paused. ‘She always loved him best, you see. It’s simple.’
‘Don’t talk like that.’
‘I know what she did for me, of course I do.’
‘Don’t get all edgy now. I wasn’t saying anything.’
The Leto Bundle Page 44
