Lionboy (8 page)

Several of the monkeys were called Dandy Jack.

“Why?” asked Charlie.

“Because they ride the ponies,” said Bikabhai, as if that explained it.

“Where do we get dinner?” Charlie asked.

“I do not eat,” said Bikabhai. So instead Charlie asked where in France they were headed.

“It matters not, so long as the journey is undertaken with a pure heart,” said Bikabhai.

Charlie thought all this less than helpful, and set off to find somebody with a more practical outlook, and an opinion on where the dining room might be.

 

There were at least three decks that Charlie could make out. In the deep hold was the feed, and who knows what else—it was dark down there, and smelly, and dank, and Charlie found it quite impossible not to think of the deep, cold river water just on the other side of the thick clinkered struts and beams of the hull. The second deck, at the waterline, was where most of the animals lived: The cabins were small, and it seemed almost as if there was something huge in the middle of the ship and everything else had been stuffed in willy-nilly around it, to fit in as best they could. But it was a bit warmer, and through the thick portholes you could see greenish daylight and sky, usually. Tonight, in the reasonably flat waters of the river, the waterline crossed right along the middle of the portholes in the monkeycabin, so you could see sky in the top semicircle, and dark water in the bottom half. The effect was peculiar, and made Charlie feel a bit ill.

The upper deck, where the humans lived, basked in full air and light. Pirouette had said she had a cabin here on the port side, near Major Thibaudet, which she shared with someone she called Madame Barbue. (Charlie thought that was the name. He was having a bit of trouble with the names, and was pretty sure he would be calling it Tib’s Show, not Tiboddy’s Floating Philharmonic What-have-you.) Charlie decided to go and see Pirouette. She would know about dinner. She had the air of a girl who knew things.

So how to find her cabin? He asked a sailor, got lost, asked another sailor, got lost, and asked another sailor—who directed him to the door in front of his nose.

His knock was answered by what could only be described as a beautiful lady with a large, fine, curling, silky black beard.

He gulped.

“Hallo,” she said. She sounded French like Pirouette.

“Bonjour, madame,”
said Charlie politely, but still gawking. How could a lady have a beard like that? Was it real? If it were fake, why would she be wearing it off-duty? And goodness, what a fine beard it was. He could even smell it—a faint clean tinge of lavender pomade.

“Are you looking for Pirouette?” she asked.

“Yes, madame,” said Charlie. He couldn’t stop staring. There were no strings that he could see, nor signs of glue.

Then quick as a bird, the lady took Charlie’s hand in hers (which was cool and gentle) and put it to her cheek.

“You can stroke,” she said, her smile curling up into the corner of her elegant mustache. “You like?”

Charlie couldn’t tear his hand away. Her beard was beautifully soft and silky, like a very young goat’s ears, or the curls between a calf’s horns.

“We are about to eat,” said the bearded lady. “You like to come with us?”

Charlie just nodded. Bearded lady. Okay. He could handle that.

 

Dinner took place in a long narrow chamber along the stern on the upper deck. Everybody took a dish up to the hatch and was given a dollop of food—tonight it was a stew with dumplings and green peas—and a piece of bread. Then they sat around eating and gossiping, and Charlie was able to see for the first time exactly whom he was heading out to sea with. There was a group of about ten tiny Italians, of all ages, with long noses and cheerful expressions, who Charlie guessed were acrobats of some kind. There was a rather fat woman with a squint, wearing overalls—“Snakes,” said Madame Barbue mysteriously. A cross-looking gray-haired man sat reading all through the meal. (“Mr. Andrews,” said Pirouette with a sniff. “He leads the bears.”) An enormous young man came in a bit late, with an enormous dish, and had three helpings (“Hercule. Strong man,” said Madame Barbue), and then a gang of energetic boys of about twenty, chatting loudly, playing around and talking about horses, with François the cowboy. (“The trick riders,” said Pirouette.) There were various children around the place too, Charlie was pleased to see: a downtrodden-looking boy with mud on his face, a curly-haired boy who sat with two squabbling clowns, ignoring them, and two girls of about nine who had to be twins, wearing matching dresses and imitating each other’s every move. They were interesting to watch, but they made Charlie feel seasick.

“What do you do?” Charlie asked Pirouette.

“I am
trapeziorista volante,
” she said with a proud little smile.

“Gosh,” said Charlie, because he felt he ought to. He could tell by Pirouette’s tone of voice that a
trapeziorista volante
was clearly fantastically cool, but he hadn’t a clue what it meant. “Gosh,” he said again politely. The bearded lady shot him a look and winked at him.

“You will see,” she said, “when we do the Show.”

“When will that be?” he asked eagerly.

“We go to Paris now,” said Pirouette. “We have a date for the big show in just one week. The Imperial Ambassador is having a big party, he invites all the eastern potentates, we are to be the fun for them. They all will come.”

Paris! He tried to remember where Paris was. Sort of in the middle, but north. Certainly nowhere near the sea. So, when they got to land he could find a cat and get more information, and move on . . .

Charlie, to tell the truth, was having contradictory feelings. With the circus, he realized, he felt safe. All the activity, and so many people, would give him some protection if Rafi
was
coming after him. So on the one hand, he was looking forward to snooping all over the ship, finding the animals and making friends, and above all seeing the Show, the real magic of the circus. He hoped (and hoped that this wasn’t disloyal to his parents) that there’d be chances to see and do loads of things before they got to France. On the other hand, running through this cheerful prospect like an icy current was the constant, repeating knowledge of his parents’ danger. And just behind that was the figure of Rafi: cool, unknown, frightening, challenging.

But until they reached France, there was nothing much he could do. Okay. It was frustrating, but he could handle it.

Pirouette was still talking. “We can only make the Show in the big top. We travel to where the people are, then they come on board and we make the Show.”

“They come on board!” said Charlie, who had been listening to his fears, not to Pirouette. He wasn’t sure if he was understanding right.

“You haven’t seen the big top?” said Madame Barbue. She wondered at this boy—so alone, so distracted, yet so accepting. “Oh, Charlie—we have the most beautiful circus ring here on the boat. With the seats and the sawdust and the flying trapeze and the striped tent-roof and everything.”

Now, Charlie very much wanted to hear more about how you could fit a circus ring onto a boat, and where it was, and when he would get to see it, but just at that moment another person entered the cabin.

He was not tall like Major Maurice, nor was he huge like Hercule, nor amazing like the bearded lady. He was a brown-haired, brown-skinned man of about forty, or maybe fifty—an African, well-built, quiet, and very calm. What was strange was that he seemed to bring a wake of calm with him. It was as if nothing that was not calm could get anywhere near him, and if it tried to, it
became
calm, no matter what its intention had been in the first place. Silence spread out from him, stillness formed a pool around him. As he walked in, the trick riders stopped laughing and the Italians turned their faces quietly to their plates. Pirouette and Madame Barbue stopped chatting. A forced gentleness descended on the company.

Charlie could not take his eyes off this man, and he could not understand why. Then the man turned to face Charlie, and looked straight at him. His eyes were deep wells of darkness, and then suddenly, from deep within these dark eyes, Charlie saw a flash, a reflection of light like from an animal’s eyes, as the man turned his head away again.

“Who is he?” Charlie whispered to Madame Barbue, huddling a little closer to her.

“Ah, he is our dear Maccomo,” she said. Charlie was surprised. Was she being sarcastic? “Dear” was not the kind of word he would apply to that man. “He is our lion tamer. Oh—he doesn’t like us to say tamer. He is our lion trainer. He is African like you.”

He may be African, thought Charlie, but he is not like me. He is like—he is like the feeling you get when your father is angry with you. He is scary, and this calm he carries with him is not a good, relaxed calm; it is the calm of fear. Charlie shivered.

Lion tamer, eh? Well, he certainly seemed to have this group tamed.

Charlie glanced at Pirouette. She was looking at her meal, and seemed not to want to look up.

Maccomo had made Charlie lose his appetite, so he just sat and listened to the gentle conversation that flowed around the cabin as the circus people finished their dinners. One of the Italians was trying to persuade one of the others to get his mandolin and play a song. Mr. Andrews the bear leader had offered part of his newspaper to the Hungarian. Some new people came in, including a large, proud-looking bald man. (“What does he do?” inquired Charlie eagerly, but Madame Barbue just gave him a look, as if to say he should know better than to ask.) There was a small group of wiry Arab boys, and a very tall, elegant, pale man with feathery white hair and exceptionally long hands and feet. Charlie found himself giving Madame Barbue a pleading look, and she relented enough to say:
“El Superbe Aero: funambuliste,”
which didn’t help Charlie much.
Funambuliste, trapeziorista volante
. . . he needed a dictionary.

Gazing around the dining room, Charlie thought they looked like a rather large and odd family. He smiled to himself. He liked it here. At least—he would have. If only . . .

 

After dinner the twins came over and said—both of them: “Hello, we’re the twins. Who are you?”

“I’m Charlie,” said Charlie. “I’m helping with the monkeys.”

The twins looked at each other meaningfully, then continued: “Major Tib always puts people with the monkeys first. He’ll have you doing something else soon. Do you have any chocolate?”

It was amazing the way they talked together. How could they have known to jump from talking about Major Tib to talking about chocolate? If this was a trick for the Show, it was a very good one.

“I do, actually. Would you like some?”

“Yes,” they said, and smiled. They were weird.

Charlie said good night to Pirouette (who had undone her tight hairdo and suddenly looked much nicer) and Madame Barbue, who made him promise to come to breakfast with them the next day, and went off with the twins. Part of him wanted Pirouette to ask him to stay with her rather than go off with the younger girls, but she said nothing, so he went. Also, he wanted to find out if the twins really talked in tandem all the time.

Charlie didn’t quite know his way back to the monkeycabin where he had left his things, but the twins—“We’re Sara and Tara,” they said—were able to show him where it was. Well, they could show him where the cabin was, but where the chocolate was, was another thing, and no secret: The monkeys had been in Charlie’s bag, and they had devoured the chocolate, the remaining crackers and sugar cubes, and the teabags.

“Yuck!” said the twins. “Raw teabags!”

Maybe they’re one person in two bodies, Charlie thought. That would make sense.

Oh, no, it wouldn’t, he thought then. How could one person in two bodies make sense?

Sara and Tara then announced that they had some chocolate in their cabin. He followed them back up to the open deck, along toward the bow, right into the bow, as it seemed. And then suddenly the girls turned and disappeared from view.

“Oi!” called Charlie. “Where are you? Where’ve you gone?”

“We’re here!” the girls called, and their heads popped out from a hole in the wall right by the figurehead. “This is where we stay.”

Their cabin was right inside the figurehead’s chest. It was sort of triangular, and though they had no porthole as such, if you climbed a ladder in the top corner of the curiously shaped chamber, you found yourself inside the figurehead’s face, and you could look out of spyholes cut into her beautiful green eyes, and you could peer through a thick glass window behind the great teeth of her beguiling smile. Now of course there was nothing to see but a few swaying stars, misty and far away, but in the daytime what a view that would be! When Charlie had admired the ship from the outside earlier that day, he had had no idea that the figurehead was hollow, with a peculiar little room inside where two girls lived.