Breaking Light Read online

  The air around them went still as cork after cork hit its target. Gabriel kept his fingers crossed in his armpits and, once, he even closed his eyes; perhaps he said some kind of prayer. And, when all the Indians were slain, Michael flicked a ‘Yippee!’ into the sparkled night as his child’s pleasure soared once again and for the very last time.

  The spell was broken and Gabriel laughed and hugged his friend. The man behind the counter smiled and congratulated Michael on a terrific shot as he handed over the trophy and a bonus sheriff’s star.

  ‘Yeah! I’m the best sheriff this side of the Rio Grande,’ he jeered and fired an imaginary revolver out of his free hand. Gabriel smiled and boxed his friend’s arm, because he dared not hug him again. And Michael smiled back at him, his strength renewed with the achievement.

  And so they tumbled on deeper into the magical night until they found themselves in front of a sign reading Dr Buster’s Sideshow. Gold-painted boards had been mounted in front of a red tent. Gabriel stared in fascination at images of giants and dwarfs, a lady with a long beard, a seal-boy with flippers instead of arms, a half-man, half-woman, naked above the waist, which looked down from the golden boards. Presiding over them was the smiling figure of Dr Buster, with a tall hat and red bow tie. A speech bubble emerged from his mouth with the text Alive! The thrill of thrills! The world’s strangest freaks!

  Gabriel pulled at Michael’s sleeve. ‘We must go in there.’ His voice could hardly make it out of his mouth.

  ‘No, I don’t want to,’ Michael said and stepped back.

  He was dumbstruck. ‘Why not?’

  ‘We don’t know what we might find in there.’

  ‘But we do, don’t we?’

  ‘Yeah … Perhaps that’s why I don’t want to go in.’ His voice was clear as water and he seemed to stand alone in the grey light.

  ‘Don’t be a chicken; come on, now.’

  He moved forward and Michael followed reluctantly. They paid sixpence each to a man with no arms. They stared in disbelief as the man, who sat on a high stool, collected the money with a curled foot and put it into a tin box. He rolled his eyes in a crazy grimace and gestured for them to enter through a red velvet curtain.

  Inside was an anteroom with curtained openings into a number of passages. A chandelier with dripping wax candles was suspended from a metal hook in the canvas roof. They heard a noise to their left as a midget, dressed in a tuxedo, stepped out of the shadows to greet them. ‘Good evening, gentlemen! Welcome to the house of Dr Buster.’

  Just then, a fully-grown man entered from one of the covered passages. It was the man with the tall hat and red bow tie they had seen on the board outside. ‘You’re most welcome! I have been waiting for such fine company as yours. And you shall not be disappointed. My menagerie consists of some of the most celebrated and wonderful freaks of nature that you will ever have seen.’ The man’s eyes looked very dark, as if they had been lined with kohl, and his face had been painted white. He had a broad American accent.

  Michael moved a step closer to Gabriel. From somewhere inside the passages, they could hear laughter and music from a piano.

  ‘You have already met Alfred, “the bust that speaks and moves its goggling eyes”. Not bad, eh? I found him in Montana. It seems like an unfortunate soul is born every minute in Montana. That backward state alone keeps me in business, even in these hard times.’

  Gabriel did not quite understand and swallowed hard.

  ‘But I am sorry,’ the American doctor continued, ‘you will find me boring, talking about myself. You seem like clever English boys, all raised on lamb, choral music and poetry, no doubt. Well, I have got some poetry for you!’ He tilted back his head, closed his terrible eyes and recited in a booming voice,

  ‘All out-o’-the-way, far-fetched, perverted things,

  All freaks of nature, all Promethean thoughts

  Of man, his dullness, madness, and their feats

  All jumbled up together, to compose

  A Parliament of Monsters.

  ‘Ha! Can you tell me who wrote that, then? No, I thought not. And yet it was your own precious William Wordsworth.’

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ Michael whispered in Gabriel’s ear, but Gabriel did not seem to have heard.

  ‘Ah, you’re impatient, I can see. Would you like to step into my house, then?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Gabriel managed, and, with a bit of courage, ‘I mean, yes, please, sir.’

  The doctor laughed and the midget at his feet giggled and skipped around in a strange dance. ‘Okay, you may choose your passage, but you may not choose the same one.’

  ‘Gabe, I don’t want to go on my own,’ Michael wheezed.

  ‘It’s okay, Michael; it’s not dangerous, just weird. It won’t hurt you, I promise,’ he said, being the older of the two. And then he suddenly remembered: ‘Anyway, it won’t happen to you – you have to be born this way.’

  Michael was not convinced, but nodded, holding the blue vase to his chest.

  ‘I’ll go in there –’ Gabriel pointed to a passage on the left – ‘and you can go in there, and then we meet on the other side.’ He ushered Michael towards the passage next to his own.

  Looking around, he saw the American lighting a cigarette and chatting to the midget, who had stopped dancing. They looked quite normal all of a sudden, but, as the doctor caught Gabriel watching them, he transformed his face back into the crazy mask again and shouted, ‘Go on, my boy. Go on.’

  Gabriel smiled encouragingly at Michael, then he turned to the passage he had chosen for himself and pushed aside a curtain of silver-foil tassels. Inside was a corridor of mirrors. They lined the walls, the ceiling and the floor. He stepped hesitantly and was immediately met by myriad versions of himself. ‘Oh!’ he said, and held out a hand, which touched nothing. It was hot and suffocating in the passage and he began to feel uneasy. He walked on and the mirrored path seemed to fork and curve. It was as if the space was a lot larger on the inside than on the outside. He followed one of the forks and was immediately lost. He tried to look down at the floor, but the path had divided into a maze of possible offshoots and he could not tell one apart from the other. Ever since he was very young, he had avoided mirrors and now he was suddenly faced with a thousand reflections of his own image and none of them recognisable. He could feel a deep dread rising in his throat and smiled uncertainly, perhaps apologetically, at one of the strangers – only to be met by his own horrid, mended grin, copied a thousand times. The eyes which watched him from every angle looked like pieces of broken glass. But there was something else in all the faces that surrounded him, something quite familiar. At first he could not put his finger on it, but, as he stared harder at the reflections, he recognised the features hidden in the mask of his own face. ‘Michael?’ he whispered in surprise. ‘Is that you?’ He could hardly breathe now and stepped quickly towards one of the characters, which blurred as he moved, and inevitably hit his face hard on a mirror. ‘Ouch!’ He was convinced it was a nightmare and he closed his eyes tightly in an effort to remember the tree by the river that had comforted him so many times in the past. His hand seemed to stroke it and he could smell the muggy green of its bark.

  ‘Gabe!’ Michael’s voice shouted from somewhere nearby, breaking the nightmare – and the dream.

  ‘Yes, I’m here.’

  ‘Well, hurry up – there are some grand people here!’

  Keeping his eyes closed against the nausea, carefully placing one foot in front of the other and feeling along the mirrors with his hands, he slowly made his way out of the glass labyrinth.

  The doctor was waiting outside, smiling his terrible smile. ‘Well, my boy, what did you find in your little maze – the monster within? Or were you perhaps the young Theseus, come to slay it, eh?’ he asked, chuckling.

  Gabriel shrugged and looked around for Michael. They had exited into another dimly lit room, which looked like a small cinema with six rows of soft chairs in front of a raised stage. A
few people were scattered around on the chairs and it took a moment before he spotted Michael, who gestured for him to sit down next to him. But, just as he moved towards Michael, he noticed another boy, not much older than himself, who was standing in the shadows at the back of the room. Something made him stop and turn towards the boy, who seemed to be looking straight at him, grinning. He was dressed in a strangely old-fashioned three-piece suit in a shiny green material and, at the neck, he wore a loosely knotted red and white polka dot cravat. His face seemed ghostly pale under a shock of reddish blond curls. For a moment, Gabriel couldn’t take his eyes off the boy, who looked to him like a character out of a Dickens novel. Just then, the boy winked merrily, cunningly, as if the two of them were sharing a secret. Gabriel looked around quickly to make sure there was no one else there. There was not; the gesture of complicity had clearly been meant for him. He turned back, wanting to ask the strange boy a question – any question – about how he came to be there, but the boy was gone. Gabriel shook his head in disbelief; he squinted into the shadows, but the boy was nowhere to be seen. Just then, he heard Michael calling for him again.

  There was an organ on the stage in front of a pair of curtains of gold brocade. A large woman with long black hair was playing a jazzy tune. As Gabriel sat down, the woman started singing slowly, in a man’s voice.

  ‘It’s a man dressed up as a woman,’ Michael whispered, excitedly. ‘And he’s wearing make-up. Look!’

  Gabriel had never seen anything like it and could think of nothing to say.

  And then the heavy curtains parted to reveal a couple of young girls in figure-hugging sequined dresses, standing face to face in a strobe of blue light. The girls were absolutely identical and their blond curls gleamed like the ribbons of gold scattered on to the lake by the breeze on a sunny day.

  ‘Oh!’ Gabriel gasped. Somewhere behind, he could hear the doctor laughing softly.

  Then the twins turned slightly to smile at the small audience and started singing in harmony to the music from the piano. Their separate keys made a perfect union. They started moving softly to the music, each with one arm around the other’s shoulder and the other arm stretched out like that of a prima ballerina. Their movements were slow and fish-like; the sequins sparkled like the scales of mermaids. Suddenly, Gabriel realised that they were stuck together. Their dresses were attached somewhere below their chests so that they could not move away from each other.

  After a couple of songs, the music stopped abruptly and the stage went dark. When the lights came on again, the mermaid twins were gone and Dr Buster was on the stage, his arms stretched like a V towards the ceiling and his face turned upwards so that the light fell in its hollows until it looked more like a skull than the head of a living man. Gabriel shivered and Michael jumped in his seat when the doctor burst out in one of his strange laughs.

  ‘He’s weird,’ Michael whispered. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

  ‘That was Mary and Anne – or Maryanne, as we call them,’ the doctor boomed. ‘The beautiful Siamese twins from Louisville, Kentucky. And aren’t they the prettiest things you have ever seen!’

  The boys looked at each other. ‘What is a Siamese twin?’ Gabriel hissed, but Michael only shook his head.

  ‘And please give your applause to one of the most talented musicians in the sideshow business – straight from Eindhoven, where our boys found him wandering around the ruins after the liberation – half man, half woman: Carl by day, Vanessa by night.’

  The boys clapped their hands absentmindedly. And then the overhead lights were turned on, chafing on the worn velour of the seats and on the magic, which was at once lost to the electricity. The boys squinted in confusion and stood up from their seats. The midget in the tux was standing by the side of the stage, ushering the few people in the audience out through an opening where the canvas had been rolled up. ‘This way, ladies and gentlemen! This way!’ he was shouting in his tiny, childlike voice. ‘The show is over!’

  ‘Excuse me, sir. What are Siamese twins?’ Gabriel dared to ask as they passed.

  The midget looked up with an irritated expression. ‘They were born like that – stuck together. Can’t pull them apart,’ he said and pushed at the boys. ‘Shoo! Shoo! Get a move on, now – we haven’t got all night – another lot is coming through!’

  Outside, it had gone chilly and the fairground music seemed distant and unreal. Michael was still clutching the blue vase to his chest. He seemed stunned. ‘Wow, Gabe, that was weird,’ was all he could say.

  Gabriel nodded. He looked around one last time for the strange boy in the green suit.

  ‘What are you looking for?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Perhaps it had just been his imagination.

  ‘That woman … That character at the piano played really well.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  They were both silent for a while as they strolled back towards the main part of the fair.

  ‘I wonder what it’s like …’ Gabriel said, thoughtfully.

  ‘What?’

  ‘To be so close together as those girls – to be so connected … as if you were one and the same person.’

  ‘Yeah, and how do they go to the toilet?’

  ‘Hmm.’

  Michael shook himself as if shaking off the strange experience and felt in his pocket for change. ‘What shall we do next? I still have a shilling left.’

  ‘What? Oh, I think I’d like to go home now.’

  ‘Already? There’s so much more to do. We haven’t done the Ball in Bucket yet.’

  ‘We can come back tomorrow; the fair will still be here.’

  ‘Oh, come on.’

  ‘No, I just don’t feel like it anymore.’

  Michael sighed. ‘Okay, then; if you promise we’ll be back tomorrow?’

  ‘Alright.’

  The meadow outside the circle of caravans and tents was very dark and the grass was wet with dew. There was a deep scent of sleeping greenery on the night air. A dog barked in the distance.

  Suddenly, Gabriel remembered something he had forgotten to ask: ‘What was in your corridor?’

  Michael, who had been sulking since they left the fair, had almost forgotten. ‘Oh, just some boring corridor with a couple of mirrors – one that made me look like that midget and one that made me look like a stick insect. What about yours?’

  ‘Nothing special. Just a lot of mirrors …’ He did not want to talk about it now, not even with Michael.

  Michael, who may have heard some unusual tone in his voice, looked across but could not see his face in the dark. They had reached the road now and the gravel under their shoes brought them back to reality – but too cruelly. Heading towards them out of the dark was a group of boys.

  ‘Who’s there?’ somebody called, and Michael and Gabriel froze.

  ‘Fluffy, is that you?’

  ‘Oh no,’ Michael moaned.

  ‘It is, isn’t it? What have you got for us tonight, then? What will you do for us?’

  Jim and Billy were standing in front of them with a couple of older boys from another village. The greenish light from the full moon made their eyes look like dark holes in their pale faces. They look a bit like the American doctor, Gabriel thought to himself, and felt the old prickling of the skin under his clothes. Michael was holding back, looking around for somewhere to run.

  ‘You know there’s no use in running, Fluffy; we’re a lot faster than you.’

  It was true, as proven on many previous occasions.

  ‘Let’s see now … What’s that in your hand?’

  Michael tried to hide the blue vase behind his back.

  ‘Now, now, you know the deal.’ Jim tutted and smiled with his head to one side. ‘Give us that thing.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘No? But you promised to give us everything we asked for, didn’t you?’

  Michael stared down at his white plimsolls that gleamed back at him like the eyes of a large cat.

  ‘Just give it to them
, Michael,’ Gabriel whispered. ‘We can get another one tomorrow.’ Don’t give them any opportunity.

  ‘Yes, listen to Bunny-boy; he says some good things from time to time … now that he’s got a mouth to talk with.’

  ‘Ugly bloody mouth, though!’ Billy echoed and spat at the gravel.

  ‘Yeah, well, that’s a shame … but it doesn’t matter what kind of mouth a poofter has because we all know where he puts it.’ The other boys laughed at this and Jim looked around, pleased with his gag. ‘Anyway, I suddenly got a better idea,’ he continued. ‘You give me that thing now and I’ll give it back to you tomorrow, if you meet us at the Giant’s Table at noon.’

  Gabriel nudged Michael in the side with his elbow. ‘Go on; give it to him.’

  ‘But I won it for my mum – what will I tell her?’

  ‘She won’t know and you’ll get it back tomorrow – it’s either that or we get a real bashing …’ He was terrified.

  Michael hesitated and then stretched out the vase towards Jim. ‘You promise I’ll get it back tomorrow?’ he bleated.

  Jim laughed. ‘I promise. Why would I want to keep such an ugly thing? Anyway, it’s only a ransom for your free passage tonight.’ And, at that, the tormentors retreated back into the dark.

  ‘Shit!’ Michael kicked at the gravel. ‘Shit, shit, shit!’

  Gabriel didn’t say anything. He felt that his whole life was about to take a new turn and it frightened him more than anything had ever done in the past. He swallowed. ‘Let’s go home and get some sleep before tomorrow. We need to wake up early in order to get to the Giant’s Table by noon.’

  *

  The following morning was bright and breezy. Neither boy had slept very well. The lack of rest was gritty in their eyes and lumpy at the back of their heads and the bothersome wind pulled at their thoughts like a young child wanting attention. Their separate experiences of the freak show had faded for the time being. In front of them lay the bitter sweep of the downs and the looming threat of the day and the appointment at the Giant’s Table. They walked in silence, the tall bracken sharpening against their shins, their hearts heavy with dread.