The Palace Of Curiosities Part 36

'Let go. We can come back for it.'

'Never!'

He laughs, a thin whistling sound. The fire is flattened out like a demonic rug, dashing across the floorboards from one side of the room to the other. It gobbles the bed-curtains, the quilted coverlet, the wallpaper, the press and all the linen stored within.

'If you wish, I will stay here and guard your money.'

'Leave you alone with my riches? I'm not stupid,' he caws.

'You are stupid. The fire will finish you off. It can't touch me.'

He struggles against my grasp, inhales smoke and starts to cough. A tendril of flame weaves round the leg of his britches, but he does not appear to notice. I am also wrapped in fire, but it laps me cool as a breeze from the river.

'You are on fire,' I try again. 'Drop the box.'

'No!' he howls, hugging it to his breast. 'You'll not get it, you hear? None of you!'

Flames scramble up the ladder of his body, from trousers to waistcoat to shirt. His hair is gone in seconds. The ferocious heat begins to crisp his skin and still he will not let go.

'You'll not beat me,' he wheezes.

It is the last thing he says. He gags on the fumes, slackens in my arms. Still I try to haul him clear, but it is too late. I watch as his skin sears, peels back from his cheeks. When I am sure there's no hope I drop him, and he tumbles to the floor.

My clothes singe; the fire crisps my skin brown, then black, baking me to a hard crust. Memories flower, of myself in countless fires, my flesh una.s.sailable. It breaks upon me that all my burnings have been a preparation for this moment. I love Eve, and I can save her with this gift.

This is the simple offering my Italian master could not accept, nor Alfred, nor any one of innumerable thousands. Why, I do not know, for it is a sun that suffuses my being, flooding me with joy.

It is time to leave. I pick up the iron coffer from where it has fallen to the floor and it sticks to my fingers. The bed-post is quite burned through so I carry it, chain and all, through the impossible heat to the door, which is so frail I can push it through.

The street is too bright for this late hour. I look at my body and realise I am the torch lighting the cobbles. I wonder how long it will be before I am consumed; then I remind myself that I cannot burn away, for it is another of my body's tricks. As I watch, the flames grow green, waver and die.

I look back at the house, for I have a fancy that Arroner is watching me, rubbing his hands together and chuckling: Yes, I can see the banner! The Human Torch! He burns! He lives!

It begins to rain, the drops sizzling as they strike.

She is suddenly before me. I try to ask her how long she has been there, what she has seen, but my jaw will not open. Hers will not open either. She reaches out to take my hand, but shrinks back from the charred thing at the end of my arm.

'Abel, can you walk?' she says at last. 'Come away, now. Quickly.'

I follow where she leads. I do not ask where. Up many steps, into a room I fill with the scent of charred meat. My eyes hiss when I close the lids. I lie down and know that if I die this time, it will not matter.

EVE.

London, November 1858 and onwards That first night, I did not sleep, and he did not die.

I stood in the crowd and watched the house burn, unnoticed in the scald of the blaze. George hurled a few buckets of water, but it was more to prove himself innocent of any involvement, and he tired quickly.

The fire had much to devour: the costumes, the back-drops, the curtains, the props, the chairs, the rugs, the floors, the window-frames and doors. When I thought the roof was about to go, the front door fell open on a belch of smoke and Abel fell out with it, clutching a tin box.

'It's the devil himself!' screamed one woman.

Fire poured up his body. He teetered forwards with small stiff steps.

'Fetch water!' cried another.

No-one moved. As we watched, the flames swimming over his flesh flickered and went out. He steamed with blood. Lizzie and I looked at each other. I stepped forward and waved my hands over my head until I got the attention of our new audience.

'Ho!' I yelled. 'I am the Lion-Faced Woman! What a show we have put on for you tonight! See before you the Marvels of Professor Arroner's Famous Exhibition!'

They looked at each other, wondering if we could be so mad as to burn down our own house to entertain them. Lizzie danced a flamboyant polka, the conflagration her back-drop. George had slipped away, although I did not see him go.

'Come! Dig deep!' I yelled. 'Give generously! Have you ever seen such a marvellous and surprising show?'

Lizzie pa.s.sed round an old hat of hers, and I heard the tumble of a few pennies. Behind me, the roof fell in and it started to rain. The people began to trickle away, already bored by the fading spectacle, and to escape giving us any more money. Abel's body was fizzing gently in the drizzle.

'Eve, my love, I don't think he can survive this one,' said Lizzie, tucking the coins into her bodice.

I wanted to sit down. I wanted to cry. I had not meant for Abel to be caught in it not him.

'What'll we do?' I whispered.

'Let's go. Now,' she said. 'Too hot for me.'

I stepped towards Abel, but dared not take the cinder of his hand. He was black as the dead bole of a lightning-struck tree. Lizzie took us away from the fire. She seemed to know her way but I cannot be sure: my memory is as dark as that night. Abel stalked beside me, an automaton with rigid limbs. I was out of my wits, for how could a man live through that furnace, even a man like Abel? She led us to an empty attic room, and we helped Abel lie down. He pa.s.sed me the box clenched beneath his arm.

'It is yours,' he croaked, and did not speak again.

The hinges had been so twisted in the fire that Lizzie was able to crack it open with her bare hands. It was full of money. The paper notes were charred at the corners, but the sovereigns were only warm. There were more of them in one place than I could ever have imagined. I sat beside him and I waited for him to die. I wept for my blind stupidity: all the time I had wasted on my husband when Abel was right before me. The only man who saw me for what I am and did not wish to erase any part of it.

Too late. I had been a fool.

The next morning Abel was still a living creature of sorts, his whole body scorched tough as a slab of overdone beef. I went into the yard, filled a pot from the stand and dribbled it, drop by drop, through the slot that was once his lips.

We divided the money. George discovered our bolt-hole, for I declare he was a man who could hear the particular tinkle of any coin he felt he had a claim to. Lizzie gave him one of her glares when he suggested I should get less, on account of how I was Arroner's wife and would be provided for in the will, and Abel none, on account of him being half-dead and a half-wit.

'All will get their equal share, and not a penny less,' she said.

'Who will stop me taking it all?' he grunted, lurching forwards and baring his teeth at her.

She folded her arms across the thrust of her stomach. 'Oh, George, I believe I shall.'

'You-' said George and raised his hand.

'And I shall also,' I added and stepped forwards too.

'So, the cat's found her claws,' he sneered. 'All right, have it your way.'

Lizzie buried her portion in the valley of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. George took his share and did not bother us again, there being no sign of further monies forthcoming.

'Well,' I said. 'Our business is done. It seems we shall make our adieus.'

'Oh no, Evie. I won't leave until I see you set. I promised, remember?'

'In faith, Lizzie, I shall-'

'I shall not hear of it.'

So she stayed. I barely noticed the pa.s.sage of night to day and day to night, for I sat with Abel and ate only when Lizzie placed a plate into my lap or a cup into my hand. One evening she came back with the news that the police had found a man's body in the ashes of the fire. She peered at me, but I discovered I had no tears for my husband.

'It appears no-one is much concerned about the burning of weird folk,' she remarked. She gathered me into her vast arms and kissed the top of my head.

I watched Abel. Fed him water and milk when he would take it. He lay in a half-death, arms frozen in a clutch around the s.p.a.ce where the box had been, as though he cradled a baby of air. It was just wide enough for me to crawl into and sleep; in the consolation of his wooden embrace, I whispered my confession.

'I did it, Abel. It was me who lit the match. I know what you did; how you tried to save him. I'm glad you didn't manage it.'

He said nothing. A half-corpse cannot speak.

I sniffed. 'I am sorry. I saw you come out, lit up like a torch. I have lost you.'

It seemed I could do little else but cry out the days, weep through the nights. Then one day he stirred. The black beetle casing of his old flesh cracked along joins I could not see, and came away like the sh.e.l.l of crackling on a piece of roasted pork. I lifted off the lid of his skin. Beneath he was pink and hairless as a baby. His eyelids split along their seams and he opened eyes pale and liquid as soft-boiled eggs.

'Your name is Eve,' he croaked.

'And you are Abel,' I said.

'Am I?'

He fell into a drowse once more. I held his hand, more to comfort myself, and with the holding I entered his mind. He burst into me, or I into him, in a headlong plunge so precipitous my soul caught in my throat. I bobbed like a cork on top of the swelling tide of his memories, and at first I could get no purchase on the torrent of images. But either it slowed, or I became a better navigator, and I read him.

As carefully as I could, I swam into the sea of his lives. At first I stood in a slaughter-house, carcases swaying so close I could sniff the dangling meat, slippery against my skin. Then I stepped into a clock-mender's shop, awash with the kindly tick of a myriad pocket-watches, and felt the twitching of his fingers, aching to be at work. Next, a place filled with the deep peace of dead bodies, and the anatomists who worked upon them. And back, a wheelwright; and back, a blacksmith; and back, a soldier; and back, and back.

He was nested with lives, the skin between them thin enough to shine a candle through. The past poured out of his palm and into me, life upon life: I saw him stumbling through each, unchanging, with no understanding of his true nature, given glimpses which terrified rather than awed him. Wondering always: Will this be a place I can rest awhile? But he found no respite, only movement and in one direction: forwards. Oh, the wonders he had seen, and forgotten. It was surely the cruellest joke, to live for ever and remember nothing of it.

He stirred in my hand, and came to wakefulness.

'You are reading me,' he husked, voice still rough.

'Abel,' I said as tenderly as I would to a child. 'Do you still wish me to stop? All you need do is say the word, and I shall.'

'No.' He ground his teeth. 'I must do this. Tell me: what have you seen? What do you know?'

'I have seen some of your lives. The most recent: at the slaughter-house before you joined the troupe; your friend Alfred.'

'Alfred,' he sighed. 'A lonely man. I had forgotten.'

'A fortune-teller also. Something of a mountebank. What greed!'

'Ah yes. I can still feel him pawing at my lives, trying to force his way in.'

'And before that, your sojourn in Holland, as a skilled watch-maker. Very skilled. And quite well-off, too.'

I pressed his hand with great gentleness and smiled. He gave a small one in return, his shining lips struggling to stretch into the shape.

'More,' he rasped.

'Before that, you were in Italy, and were a student at a school of anatomy. I see you standing next to a man who looks on you with an air of mastery. But he cannot tell you what you ache to know. It makes you confused.'

'Ah, yes. I recall him.' His eyes swam, and he closed the lids over them. 'As you tell me, I remember. It seems that through every one of my lives I have been nothing but a blank canvas on to which all have painted their need.'

'Blank? My dearest Abel, nothing could be further than the truth. You burst with stories. If your lives were painted they would fill every gallery in every city and still men would have to build more to fit you in.'

'Yet I have forgotten.'

'Forgetting you have done something is not the same as not having done it.'

'Please.' He cleared his throat and nodded. 'I am ready.'

So I held his newborn hand and read his stories one by one as they surfaced like slow fish from the pond of his being. I told him the secret of himself, and very simple it was too: he had lived a hundred and one lives, and a hundred and one more. I was his Scheherazade and might never be done. He listened, and it seemed that with my telling he grew a little calmer, that his mind began to heal up its great breaches just as his body did.

Gradually we settled into our new home, a room under the eaves of a quiet house with a window that opened out on to roof-tops. I liked to lean on the sill and contemplate their slate expanse stretching into the distance. When it rained they looked like so many whales surfacing from the ocean of the city, and our home was a small boat making its way on that heaving sea.

I scrubbed the floors and windows, beat the rugs like any other wife and bore the stares of our neighbours as I went back and forth to the privy, or the pump, or the laundry. By and by they shouted, 'Hey missus!' and halloa as they pa.s.sed and I said halloa back. One Sunday afternoon a woman from the room beneath us tied up my hair in blue and red ribbons and the whole household laughed, but it was kind laughter. By small degrees I became their 'kitty-cat' and they grew quite proud of me, letting me know how the whole of London was jealous because they alone laid claim to the residence of the one and only Pretty Kitty of Stepney.

Lizzie paid us visits when she was not too busy; and busy she was for she had a string of gentleman friends in thrall to her particular charms and they demanded a great deal of her attention. She told us how George had moved to Birmingham or somewhere equally far off.

'But don't you worry about him. He'll get into one fight too many some day. Lizzie's got friends in more places than you imagine,' she said darkly.

I did not enquire too closely what she meant.

'How is Bill?' I asked, to change the subject.

'He's quite the young gent.' She grinned with affection. 'Working the halls now. Got himself a nice little act with a dog. You know how everyone likes a dog.'

'We should catch him some evening.'

So she amused us with tales of her amorous admirers, each one more intent than the last on seeing her comfortably settled.

One night, some months later, I heard Abel crying out, and took his hand to soothe him. The orbs of his eyes flickered back and forth beneath the closed lids. I stroked my free hand up and down the inner side of his forearm where the muscles flexed; I felt them straining urgently against some great force.

But I did not see more of his lives: this time I was a.s.saulted with the vision of his attempted escapes into death. I saw him hurl his body into rivers and plague pits blistering with quicklime, devouring rotten meat and bread blue with blight, hanging from ropes which would not strangle away his breath, falling upon swords and spears and knives of every variety, seeking poisoned oblivion that swam like honey through his veins, and, over and over, throwing himself into tumbling falls from the highest buildings.