The Palace Of Curiosities Part 25

His eyes dart from one side of the room to the other as though we are overlooked by men who would do us harm.

'Please. Let us sit awhile. You are my friend.'

The words freeze as they tumble from my mouth. I stare at him, and remember. His embraces, his desire, how he thrust them aside and me with them, his vicious words. He was my friend.

'I shall not keep you,' he says quickly, not meeting my gaze. 'I must go.'

He withdraws his hand and I do not stop him.

'Yes, so you must.'

He turns and walks away, leaving me heavy with memory. He was my friend, and then he was not. As simple as that. I wrote his name on my doc.u.ment. But as easily as it has been burned away, so is he gone. How many other times have I written the heart of myself on to a sc.r.a.p of paper only to see it lost? I drift back to the table and my new companions. Lizzie is gone, as is her habit. Mr Arroner is leaning back in his chair and drawing on the stub-end of a cigar, talking at the top of his voice.

'Bill? Run and fetch a bottle, lad. On me. You've all worked very hard.'

He spills coins into the skinny palm. The boy nods quickly and scampers off.

'Now I shall go and make safe the remainder.'

Mr Arroner pats the flank of the money-box and leaves the room. I take the opportunity to seat myself in the empty s.p.a.ce beside Eve for, I declare, I wish to find more ways to be at her side.

'Off he goes,' grumbles George. 'To cuddle up with his one true love.'

Eve stares into her lap. When Bill returns, George grabs the bottle, measures out a gla.s.s for himself and one for Bill. He waves the gin at Eve and she shrugs, but pushes her gla.s.s forwards to be filled all the same.

She seems subdued tonight, which is not like her usual self. As they cradle their cups, I consider her muted brightness. Who would not be so if wedded to such a puffed-up bore as Mr Arroner? I sigh. We may pretend friendship but I know that I want more. I want communion, a far closer bond than any man may have with a woman who is another's wife.

Eve declares that she wants my friendship, it is true. But so did Alfred. So did the fortune-teller, in his twisted way. How many other so-called friends have I lost in the fug of memory? How often have I been spurned, betrayed? Why should she be any different? Perhaps I am deluding myself with hope and loneliness. I must be a fool to trust again.

These miserable thoughts transport me into a maudlin state, one in which I do not wish to dwell overlong. I consider how George and Bill cram their leisure hours with drinking, how merry it makes them, how swiftly they fall into the numbness of sleep. If they can drink themselves into a snoring oblivion, then so can I.

'I would like a cup of gin,' I say.

Their heads turn.

'What?' squeaks Bill, and George tugs his ear, stretching it out some distance.

'Now, Bill. Have a care. The good Mrs Arroner has instructed me to be philanthropic to our poor companion. Pour him a big one.'

Bill limps off to fetch a fresh gla.s.s, rubbing the side of his head. He presents me with a tin mug slopping with clear liquid, smelling of tar. I toss it back, pat my stomach and belch loudly.

'Another!' I shout.

'That's more like it!' George snickers. 'Why not get another one of them inside you?'

He makes a s.p.a.ce for me at his side, suddenly companionable; feeds me cup after cup, his pleasure at my new-found thirst matched by my hope that it will make me forget how dear Eve has become, how impossible it is for me to trust anyone's offer of friendship.

'Down in one, Abel!' he coos. 'Come on, man. One more for your old pal!'

'George,' I hear Eve say, in the swooping to and fro of my drunken thoughts.

'Watch, everyone! Watch old George make this dead fish swim!'

'I am a happy man!' I shout, shoving my drink into the air, spilling it down my arm. 'Look at all my friends!'

George laughs as though I have made a wonderful joke, and quickly refills what I have lost. Somewhere in the midst of George's merriment I hear Eve say, 'Hold off, you'll make him sick,' but George ignores her and so do I. Later, much later it seems, Lizzie returns.

'Good evening, Lizzies both,' I slur, for there are two of her.

I wonder how they can both fit through the door at the same time, for she is a broad woman. Bill runs to her side and tucks himself under her arm, walks his fingers up her belly, finding the overhang of the first billow of fat and tucking his hand into the warm envelope. He sighs, burrowing his cheek into the comforting flab.

'Not too deep, now, William,' she says, softly. 'There, child; there.'

'I'm not a child,' he mews, without complaint.

'Be glad you are, Bill. Don't be in any hurry to become a man.' She turns her attention to George, then to me. 'I think he's had quite enough.'

'Oh, we're just getting started. Aren't we, Abel?' George throws his arm across my shoulder and I nudge my head in the crook of his neck. 'You're my pal, aren't you now.'

'My pal!' I belch. 'Here's to friends! Best thing in the world!'

'What's he on about?' asks Lizzie.

'Who cares,' says George. 'But what larks I'm having finding out.'

'George, stop this. I know your ways.'

'Lay off, Lizzie. Just welcoming him into the fold.'

She stares down her many chins at him.

'Enough. It is time for us all to be abed.'

'Have it your way,' he mutters. 'Can't a man have a bit of fun at the end of a working day?'

She shoos us away, to the complaints of Bill and George, who swear they wish to drink all night. My knees loosen as I stand, so they crouch under my armpits and carry me swinging between them down to our sleeping-room and drop me on the bed. I roll on to my back, eyes blurring the walls into doubles of themselves.

'Look at me! The happiest man in the world!' I slur at them, and close my eyes.

This is when my pictures come and torment me. I want them to flood in upon me tonight, for nothing could be more cruel than the torment of being knowing myself d.a.m.ned to an eternity of loneliness. But the gin seems to have sealed the jar of myself, and the horrors flap within, teeth pecking too feebly to effect an escape. I grind my teeth with hope, praying for wild dreams to rush in and blot out all thought of Eve and how unattainable she is. I close my eyes, and feel the sway of the great earth beneath my bones.

It begins, in greater force than ever: I am wrenched once again to the top of the tower. I cling to the finger-holds between the bricks, this h.e.l.l I am returned to.

Go on. Do it again, commands the voice.

I look about me and see that the building I am about to throw myself from is different tonight. The houses below are tiled with black stone, gleaming in a spray of rain, and it is no tower: rather, I am scrambling on to the steep pitch of a roof. But wherever I may be, whichever one of the thousand roofs I have climbed on to, my purpose is the same, to grind myself to nothing.

I slip on wetness and my heel catches in the broad mouth of a leaden gutter, which gurgles a stream along the side of the building and spurts it out of the jaws of a stone demon carved at the gable end. The rain gathers force, soaking my hair on to my face.

You are alone. You are outcast.

'I know!' I yell.

Jump. Finish it off. Finish yourself.

'But this does not work. It never has.'

I laugh at the gargoyle, and jump. Feel the storm hammer my body down on to the flagstones. Hear the familiar breaking; the familiar prayer. Let me be done with. Let it be the end, this time.

It is said that a man finds himself at the bottom of a fall. I wish only to be lost, to die, to be human with its attendant bleeding, ageing, gentle dissolution into dust. I yearn for brokenness, and as I leap I know it is the one thing I have been forever denied. My existence is a cycle of dying and healing. I can no longer avoid the truth of the countless times I have done this, in countless different places, how I have failed at every attempt.

I cannot count the number of times I have been compelled to climb, seeking a place I pray is high enough to kill me when I fall. There is nothing I cannot heal from. Nothing I can do to stop trying to find a way.

Try drowning! cries the voice.

I dive into a river. Water presses into my ears; I breathe in its sweet promise, but however hard I labour it does not want me and throws me on to the bank.

Or disease? Surely there is some sickness you haven't tried yet?

So I breathe in the corrupt air of hospital wards but remain uncorrupted; I press filthy bedsheets to my body, lick the sores of old men dying of fatal distemper, put my tongue into the soft green wounds of soldiers, taste the foul breath of cholera, typhoid, diphtheria and every other slime for which there is no name and still I do not sicken.

See how many deaths you have evaded!

I am stripped, a leather thong around my throat, thrown into the maw of the marsh, the sour water smacking its lips, sucking at me and then spewing me up. See! My belly crammed with poison. See! I sway on the end of a rope; I fall on to my sword; I am broken, burned, drowned. And always healing.

I am surrounded by men and women who have found their way out of life and into death, when I cannot. It seems I have spent my life trying to do so, and a lot of time trying to forget. The dying is not successful; neither is the forgetting. I am remembering and do not want to for there is no comfort in it.

The pictures crowd me to the edge of myself, finding any s.p.a.ce to push their way into me. They are memories: that truth I can no longer avoid. I have tried to run away from them and now they have caught up, mobbing me as small birds do a hawk, pecking until it tumbles from the sky: eyeless, its flight feathers ripped away.

Perhaps I was happy in my state of blank indifference, before I began to search for answers. Perhaps I was happy when I was the b.u.t.t of jokes, the 'dimwit', the 'cold fish', 'the slack-jawed one'. Now I am intelligent and all I wish to do is return myself to my former state of childishness.

Light begins to seep through the window from a sky I cannot see. I cannot lose myself in gin. If I cannot finish myself off by hurling myself into rivers or off towers it was foolish to think I could do so by drinking. I rub my aching head. Eve offers me friendship. I am a mean sort of creature if I turn her generosity aside merely because I have been spurned or mistreated by others. Away with such wallowing self-regard, I tell myself.

I am a selfish wretch. I barely deserve to claim so much as a kind glance from Eve, yet she offers far more. Terror or loneliness, memories or nightmares, I shall go forward as I have done a thousand mornings before, and a thousand thousand mornings before that. Today, I will cut my body open, and it will heal and close up. I consider the dreams of last night and it comes to me that all I do is plough the same furrow of self-pity and self-torture, over and over. Perhaps it is time to lay off my self-entranced mirror-gazing and look into the face of the world.

EVE.

London, June 1858 'You need a new name,' mused my husband, drinking his third cup of coffee that morning. 'The Lion-Faced Girl is not sufficient. We need a fresh twist. There is tea in the pot,' he added, seeing me staring at him.

'Why not use my real name? Eve is a fine name. It means mother of all.'

'Our paying guests do not want a mother. Not with a face like yours. They want something pretty. Dimpled. Helpless.'

'Medea?' I smirked.

'Sounds a bit grand. You are a fair English rose hidden in a bush. There's a thought. Your name must blossom too. Flora. Dora. Rosaletta. Doralinda.'

I let him play with his Floras and Doras. Despite his promises of travel once the winter became summer, we were still in London. Our address was now a little less flash: a medium-sized villa with no flight of scrubbed steps leading to a front door gleaming with a lion-faced knocker. There was now a cheap bra.s.s plate, a 'necessary disburs.e.m.e.nt' in the words of my husband. He cleaned it himself every Sunday morning, rag in one hand, tin of polish in the other, smearing on the oily muck and then buffing it to a proud shine: 'J. Arroner, Esq. Entrepreneur. Exhibitor of Exquisites, by Appointment'. Bill was foolish enough to ask 'by appointment to who?' He never learned how to avoid getting his ears boxed.

We still had a fire in every room, although not all of them stocked with wood and coal in the colder months. And whereas our previous water-closet had sprigs of blue posies inside the bowl and was situated in a tiled room of its own, our new offices were of plain cream porcelain with a st.u.r.dy brown seat. At least we shared it only amongst ourselves and were not fallen to the penury of my childhood, when the yard privy was used by countless weary backsides.

My personal maid was gone, leaving us only a girl-of-all-work, for whom the word 'work' seemed a foreign idea. As often as not I drew the curtains, lifted the rugs, hauled them outdoors and beat them. And every morning I listened to my husband bl.u.s.ter about landlords milking our hard-earned sovereigns. His bedroom, still separate to mine, had become his Chamber of Retreat and his strong-box resided therein, chained beneath the bed like a chamber pot.

He glanced up from his newspaper.

'You have on a hat, Mrs Arroner.'

'Yes, my dear.'

'Are you dressed to go out?'

'Yes, indeed I am, Mr Arroner.'

'Are you well?'

'I am very well.'

'Hmm,' he said. 'Where will you go?'

'I am going to walk to the end of the street,' I said. 'And when I am there, I may turn the corner and walk to the end of that street, also.'

'Will you?'

'If the weather continues to be fine, I shall. I shall walk up and down the street and take the air.'

He smiled over the top of the newspaper he was pretending to read. He still believed I could not tell the difference between reading and peering at the shapes of words.

'An enchanting idea. You could perhaps call upon your mother.'

I clenched my fingers together so tightly I thought they might tear the st.i.tching in my gloves. For months I had sent letters inviting her to visit us, and all of them had been returned. I half hoped she might come now we were in less impressive lodgings, but the letters continued to come back. I wondered if she was living a new life, one in which I had never been her daughter. I might be famous, but I hardly kept respectable company.

'No,' I said with a casual air, as though his words had made no impression upon me. 'I believe I shall call upon the Cow-Horned Lady who is residing in Goverton Square. I hear she is strange as am I.'

'Indeed, I have heard the same. It is a fine day. Very fine. You will have a long and pleasant walk. Will you, at least, return by evening?'

'I shall,' I whispered.

'For we shall want you for the show. It would not be the same without you.'

'I have never missed a performance.'