Spring Comes to World's End

by Monica Dickens

  The band went ta-ra-ra-ra! Cinderella threw out the cigarette and put the magazine under her seat. Her grumpy dwarf coachman slapped the reins, and the ponies moved forward to the oom-pa-pa-pa-pa.

  The man with the dogs threw them on to the barrier to run round and round, yelping and jumping over each other and turning somersaults. They were dressed in tutus or baggy trousers, with little fancy hats held on by elastic. The hat of a black and white terrier had slipped over his eye, but he went on running and turning somersaults.

  The Liberty horses came in on their hind legs, front hoofs waving desperately to keep their balance, necks arched and jaws forced open by tight bearing reins. A man with a goad, its spike disguised by ribbons, jabbed it here and there, and the elephants plodded forward in their sagging skin. The young man on the percheron hoisted the girl on to his shoulders. The woman on the horse behind blew kisses from her gold teeth. The clown inside the dragon’s head puffed fire out of its jaws with a blow lamp. Lester and Carrie slipped under the painted canvas scales, and trotted into the tent inside its tail.

  Just before it got into the ring, they ducked out, and crawled round under the tiers of benches. The parade passed out on the other side, and a man on a trapeze swung out from the roof, with the glaring spotlight on him. While everyone was gazing upwards with their mouths open and their stomachs turning over each time the trapeze artist turned over, Lester and Carrie walked casually up the steps, and sat down on a bench near the front.

  It was not a very good circus. It toured the country with its train of animals, putting on second rate shows for people who dragged along the kiddies because it reminded them of their lost youth.

  Lester and Carrie sat glumly, with their elbows on their knees and their chins in their hands, saying, ‘Some liberty’ loudly enough for the trainer of the overflexed Liberty horses to hear; and, ‘He pricks it with a pin,’ when the talking horse nodded or shook its head; and, ‘I hope they kill him,’ when the brave White Hunter was in the cage with the mangy, cowed lions.

  When the elephants came in, Carrie glanced at Lester. He was clutching the bench, knuckles white, his mouth set into a hard line in his thin brown face, his eyes blank, looking back into another life. He had once been a circus elephant, humiliated and beaten, shot when he rebelled. He had told Carrie that, and she believed it.

  ‘They laughed at me,’ he had told her, his face pale with memory, his dark eyes haunted. ‘People in the crowd laughed at me, because I couldn’t do the tricks.’

  A blare of trumpets. The crowd clapped and laughed as the great elephants shambled into the ring like conquered heroes. Behind each huge grey head with its tiny sad eye, rode a girl in a leopardskin bikini, with a wig and false eyelashes. Ugly and grinning, with blue goose pimples on their legs, the girls hung on by the head harness while the elephants did embarrassing, unelephantine things like crawling, rolling over, and propping their front feet on each other’s backs.

  A drum roll. The girls jumped down and took a strutting bow, as if they had done something clever. Two of the elephants stood on the front of their heads, with their ponderous back legs waving meekly in the air. The third was slow getting his heavy back feet up, and the man with the ribboned goad poked him in the stomach.

  Lester uttered a groan, and doubled over, clutching himself as if he was ill.

  ‘What’s the matter, sonny?’ A motherly woman leaned over and put her hand on his arm. ‘Too much candy floss?’

  ‘It’s the elephants,’ Carrie said.

  ‘Aren’t they funny, the dear clumsy things,’ the woman maundered, ‘and to think it’s all done by kindness.’

  Lester groaned again, and Carrie felt his wrenching hurt within herself.

  ‘If you’re going to throw up,’ the motherly woman passed him a paper bag full of eggshells and apple cores, ‘you can do it in there.’

  * * *

  The bareback family was called The Rosinellas.

  The girl and the young man did most of the riding and balancing and jumping on and off the horses, while the mother stood in the middle with a whip, and the patient percherons cantered round and round, long manes flopping to the rocking horse rhythm.

  The second horse, who looked much older, began to blow and sweat while the front one was still quite fresh. He fell back a pace or two, and the young man almost missed a jump.

  Balancing in his soft shoes on the broad, moving back, he growled something to the horse. He had a face like a snake, slant eyes, high cheeks between oily sideburns.

  The girl stood on her hands on the front horse. The young man stood on his. As he dropped his feet on to the rump in a back flip, the grey horse half stumbled. The rider slipped, recovered himself, stood upright with his arms wide, and jumped down to the sawdust.

  Running across the ring to vault on again as the horse cantered round, he turned his glossy head and muttered, ‘Use the whip on him, Ma.’

  The mother flicked the long whip behind the old horse, but she didn’t touch him.

  It was not a very good act. The boy was quick and agile, but he was out of temper with the horse. The small dark girl was graceful and pretty, but she seemed nervous. Towards the end, she jumped down and took the whip, and Ma Rosinella did a few cautious jumps and feats of balance on the second horse, which was blowing quite hard by now, and dropping his head.

  When the mother came down from a handstand, and posed for thin applause, with her hands out and her frizzed head flung back, she was puffing too. She was a bit past it, like the horse.

  * * *

  The man in white tie and tails came in with the dogs: terriers, poodles, mongrels. They wore bonnets and shawls and pushed each other in prams. They jumped through hoops. They jumped through fire. They climbed a ladder and dived into a small tank of water. They chased the elderly clown round the ring, nipping at his pantaloons.

  The audience roared. Behind Lester and Carrie, a jovial father and two children howled with laughter. When the black and white terrier stood on one fore leg on the man’s outstretched hand, with its back legs in the air and its stump tail wagging, they split their sides.

  ‘Tell them, Carrie,’ Lester said grimly, and she turned round.

  ‘Don’t encourage them to laugh,’ she found herself saying. ‘It’s cruel.’

  ‘Oh get away,’ the father said. ‘He loves it.’

  ‘Don’t you know how he’s trained?’

  The man in tails was strutting round the ring with the terrier still upended on the palm of his hand, while the audience clapped and hooted.

  ‘Another man takes the dog and beats him up and hangs him by one hind leg from a hook in the ceiling,’ Carrie said. ‘When he’s in agony, this man comes in and puts his hand under a front paw to take the strain, and he pets the dog and feeds him. That’s how he learns to stand on one paw - as relief from torture.’

  The children stared. The father winced. ‘But he’s wagging his tail,’ he said doubtfully.

  ‘If you beat your head against a wall,’ Lester said loudly, without turning round, ‘it feels lovely when you stop.’

  ‘Go away,’ said the jovial father unhappily. ‘We were having fun, but you’ve upset me proper.’

  Nine

  Carrie and Lester went. out and wandered round the sideshows. They could not pay to go into any of them, so they stood outside and listened to the showmen raving about the Smallest Lady on Earth and the Man-Eating Ape, and the Two-headed Baby, and the Rubber Lady, and the Blood-sweating Hippopotamus.

  The only tent that wasn’t pegged down too tightly for them to crawl under was the Man-Eating Ape.

  The man-eater sat mournfully in a dark cage, picking through peanut shells and fruit skins. He was not much bigger than Joey, the woolly monkey who had lived at World’s End for a while. Carrie tried to talk to him in the chirruping monkey chatter that had worked with Joey, but the ape turned his humped back and wouldn’t answer.

  Out in the field among the crowd who were coming out of the circus
tent, Carrie and Lester turned out their pockets and the lining of Carrie’s jacket, which collected what fell through her pockets, and found they had enough for one sideshow between them.

  Roundabout, Dodgems, Switchback, Jet Rocket to the Moon, where girls were whirled upside down, shrieking and all the change fell out of a man’s pocket?

  ‘Let’s do something where we can win a prize,’ Carrie said, as she and Lester knelt to pick up the man’s money. ‘A clock, or a dish, something we can take home. A toy for Michael.’

  ‘Michael doesn’t play with toys,’ Lester said.

  ‘Only because he never has any.’

  They gave the man his money as he staggered off the Jet Rocket, his face marbled green and white, and he rewarded them with a coin. Now they had enough for two tries to win something.

  Lester went round the shooting gallery and the coconut shy and the Roll-a-Ball, judging the prizes with the tight, careful mouth his mother made at the supermarket.

  He came to rest at the hoopla. There it was. In the middle of the circular stall, farthest away from wherever you might throw.

  A transistor radio.

  Apart from the fact that it was set into the stomach of a repulsive purple rabbit, with two plastic teeth smirking between nylon whiskers, it was just what World’s End needed. There was no electricity to plug anything in. They had always wanted a transistor, but there were always more important things to buy if anyone ever had any extra cash.

  Someone else wanted the purple rabbit radio too. A watery young man with no chin or eyelashes was desperately casting hoops at it.

  His girl friend stood cynically by. Turn it in, Harold,’ she said. ‘You’ll never get it in a million years.’

  ‘Who says?’ He fished out money for another go. ‘What Harold Snelling wants, Harold Snelling gets.’

  ‘Har, har,’ said the girl.

  ‘Watch this.’ The next hoop fell over the rabbit’s ear.

  ‘It has to be right over the whole thing to win,’ Carrie said helpfully.

  ‘I know.’ He threw again, on to the other ear.

  ‘Good try, sir,’ Lester said, in the sporting voice he used for village cricket matches.

  ‘Next one will do it.’ The young man sucked his bottom teeth into his receding chin, took aim, flung, missed. The bored hoopla man picked up the ring on his stick like a robot.

  ‘Har blooming har,’ said the girl, and started to walk away.

  ‘Clarisse!’ The young man went after her with his desperate pink eyes. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To see the freaks. Not that they’ll be any change from you.’

  ‘But you wanted the tranny!’

  ‘Some hope.’ Her cynical bottom disappeared into the tent of the Two-headed Baby.

  Lester had paid one of the coins. He gave the three rings to Carrie. ‘You go first.’

  ‘I’ll mess it up.’

  ‘Throw it high so it drops down over the ears.’

  ‘It’s impossible.’ The young man could not help coming back to the rabbit. ‘It’s a cheat.’

  Without a word the robot man took a ring and passed it easily over the rabbit.

  Carrie threw. Her rings went all over the place, nowhere near where she was aiming. Her last one almost fell over a card with a hideous clown brooch on it.

  ‘Bad luck,’ Harold Snelling said generously, because Carrie was worse than him.

  ‘I wouldn’t want that anyway.’

  But the brooch reminded her of the silver pendant. As Lester threw, with one eye shut like a sharpshooter, Carrie put her hand inside the old denim shirt of Tom’s she was wearing, and held the little flat heart.

  Lester’s first ring was near. The second ring nearer. The third ring sailed high, hesitated, and dropped right over the tips of the rabbit’s ears, wiggled down the purple body and came neatly to rest without touching the squatting paws.

  ‘You could knock me down.’ The watery young man looked as if he were going to flow tearfully into the ground.

  The hoopla man never moved a muscle. He handed Over the rabbit, and turned away to the other side of the stall, as if people won a transistor every day of the week. Perhaps it didn’t work.

  Carrie let go of the silver heart, and turned on the radio. It worked beautifully.

  ‘We can always take it out, and give the rabbit to Irma to play with,’ Lester said. No question of his taking his prize to his own home. He spent all his spare time at World’s End anyway.

  They walked off, making music among the straggling crowds on the sour, trodden grass between the sideshows.

  ‘I say there.’ The young man panted after them. ‘I say, would you sell me that tranny?’

  ‘Sell?’ Carrie stopped. She had thought only of the transistor. Now she thought of the red flour crock with Michael’s label: ‘sawing world end’.

  ‘For my dolly bird.’

  ‘You could buy her another.’ Lester had the rabbit under his arm, feet one side, whiskers the other, music coming out of his armpit.

  ‘Not like that one. Never seen one like it, and she took a fancy for it.’ He looked back towards the two-headed baby tent, and gabbled, ‘She thinks I’m no good at anything, see? But if she thought I’d won the rabbit - oops, here she comes.’ The girl came out of the tent and mooched towards them.

  ‘I’ll give you twenty pounds for it,’ the young man said desperately.

  ‘Twenty pounds!’ Carrie didn’t think the radio was worth half that.

  ‘Done,’ Lester said crisply.

  ‘It’s a deal.’ The young man pulled out a wad of notes that made their eyes bulge, licked a finger and counted them out, looking nervously over his shoulder.

  Lester gave him the rabbit radio, just as the girl came up, with a grating whine, ‘Two-headed baby, what a cheat. It was three inches high and pickled in a glass jar.’

  ‘Look what I won for you, Clarisse.‘ Harold Snelling held out the rabbit.

  ‘Well, you could knock me down.’ She sauntered off, without even touching the rabbit.

  Ten

  Lester and Carrie went behind a dynamo lorry and took off their shoes. They divided some notes, in each shoe under the foot, in case of robbery, or one of them losing a leg in an accident. The rest went into the aerated match box which Lester carried with him as an ambulance for wounded insects.

  On the way to get John and Peter, and ride home with the marvellous news, which burned the soles of their feet at every step, they walked through the tent where the horse lines were.

  Carrie wanted to go up to each tethered horse, but the man who trained the Liberty horses recognized her, and chased her away with a broom.

  She went behind some bales of hay. On the other side, the two big great percherons were tied in stalls, with a swinging pole between them.

  Lester went to talk to the younger one, who had led the act with the nervous girl on his back. Carrie went up to the older horse. He had fading dapples on the strong muscle of his shoulder, and on his huge round quarters. He dropped his heavy head into her hand. His long white forelock fell into his blue eyes, and she stood on tiptoe to put it back behind his ears.

  ‘You like His Lordship, dear?’ Ma Rosinella was sitting on a bale of straw, with her frizzy hair in small rollers to make it frizzier, picking her gold teeth with a match.

  ‘He’s beautiful.’ Carrie would have said that about any horse, but the grey percheron, with his massive chest and crested neck, did have a special beauty in his proud, controlled strength.

  ‘He’s old, poor lamb. Past it really, I don’t know.’

  ‘Put a sock in it, Ma.’ The oily son had been oiling tack. He came up, cleaning the long nails of one hand with the nails of the other. ‘Lazy brute is good for two more seasons at least, if you’d do your job and not let him dope off.’

  ‘I’ll not take the whip to him,’ the mother said. ‘Fifteen years he’s worked for us, and just because your Dad’s not here any more, I’ll not let you abuse him.’ />
  Carrie laid her cheek against the hoary muzzle of the horse, but she was listening. So was Lester.

  ‘It’s our living, Ma.’

  ‘Get another horse. You’ve weeks before our next booking.’

  ‘Put a sock in it.’

  When he had gone away, Carrie said to Ma Rosinella, ‘You’re right. The horse is too old. He didn’t stumble on purpose. It’s because, when they get old, they get a bit anaemic, you see, and that will cause some nerve and muscle weakness, so they may drop a foot sometimes, if they place it wrong.’

  ‘Yes,’ the mother said, getting that glazed look that came over even the most intelligent faces when Carrie launched into horse lectures. ‘But my son is stubborn. He won’t get a new horse, because he’s no good at training them, see. Not like his poor Dad. Do anything with a horse, his Dad could. He had His Lordship from a colt. I’d like to pension the old fellow off, if I knew somewhere.’

  ‘Tell her, Carrie,’ Lester said, and Carrie said quickly, ‘There’s World’s End.’

  ‘What’s that, a pub?’

  ‘It was. Now it’s where we live. There would be lots of room for—’ She couldn’t bring herself to say ‘His Lordship’ - ‘this good old horse.’

  ‘My son would kill me.’

  ‘Don’t tell him. Say some stupid kids - me and Lester, if you like - untied the halter rope, and he got away.’

  ‘He’ll find him.’

  ‘We’ll hide him.’ Lester came out of the stall towards her, his lively, shining eyes reflecting the challenge of adventure. ‘Trust us.’

  ‘Perhaps I do,’ Ma Rosinella said in surprise, ‘though I never did trust my own boy when he was your age. Or now, come to that. But it’s no good, my dears. You couldn’t afford it’

  ‘The spring grass is coming in.’ Carrie left the horse to stand in front of her too, hugging her growing excitement. ‘It wouldn’t cost much to keep him, and we - oh. Oh, I see.’ She looked down at her moneyed feet, and shuffled her toe in a wisp of hay. ‘You want us to buy the horse.’