Mourning Ruby (14 page)

‘So it was all right?’

‘No.’

17

How My Mother’s Vision Came True

To know the change and feel it,

When there is none to heal it

Nor numbed sense to steal it –

‘No,’ said Mr Damiano. He ground his cigarette into the flagstones with his heel. ‘Are you all right, Rebecca? You’re not cold?’

‘No, it’s warm.’

‘It’s very warm.’ He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and carefully wiped his face and the back of his neck. ‘Do you want a drink?’

‘Yes, all right.’

Instead of the lean-to, there was a brick-built shed in the garden now. Mr Damiano kept a few bottles of wine there. It had electricity, and a fridge. Mr Damiano disappeared inside, and light curled out of the shed and lay on the stones like a tongue. Bottles clinked, then there was the pull of a cork. Mr Damiano came out of the shed with a round tray on the flat of his hand. He swivelled, switched off the light and closed the door behind him. All the while the tray in his hand remained perfectly steady.

Mr Damiano put the tray on the iron table, poured
the wine and gave me a glass. It was nice wine. It had a French stoniness in it, instead of ready fruit. I drank it slowly. My head felt as light as zero. Aeroplanes and fear and seeing Ruby on the fire-truck were cancelling each other out. I could remember everything very clearly, but I couldn’t feel it.

Ruby had not worn her bike helmet. She had taken it off when they left the park, because Adam was pushing her bike. If she had been wearing her helmet, would it really have protected her? Adam had taken time over buying the best type of helmet for Ruby, and making sure that it fitted. But it had been fastened around the handles of her bike.

Ruby was wearing a child-sized fireman’s helmet, as the fire-truck raced alongside our plane. Where had that come from? My brain was still flying. I wasn’t even tired. Maybe sleep had been a con all these years. You only needed it if you thought you needed it. I would not let myself go there. Today, I’d seen Ruby. It was still today. I wasn’t going to let myself sleep, and turn it into yesterday. I wasn’t going to let sleep separate me from Ruby’s presence.

Mr Damiano drank his glass rapidly, in silence, and then he poured another.

‘Bella stopped crying,’ he went on. ‘My mother smoothed Bella’s hair and wiped her face. She said she was going to finish the chicken stew, and she left us to practise again. Bella was still angry. She was burning with fury because I’d come up behind her and lifted her down just when she was near her goal. I could feel the stiffness of anger in her.

‘I was almost fourteen and I had learned how to work
safely when I was angry or tired or upset. I had learned how to get tension out of my body before I performed. But Bella was too young for that. She felt something and it was there in her body, instantly. I had plucked her off the ladder like a doll. I had humiliated her, and made her feel as if she and her plans were nothing. And maybe I had meant to do it. I have often asked myself if that is what I meant to do. I told myself I was trying to save her, but was that the truth of what happened? You know, Rebecca, you can ask yourself these questions many times, and you don’t find answers.

“‘I wouldn’t have fallen! I never fall!” Bella said. Yes, she was stiff with anger. I can see it now. But did I see it then?

‘I should have told her to go and play. She spent too much time practising anyway. She didn’t need to practise. I had a little square of
turrón
in my pocket. I had been thinking of it all the morning, with part of my mind. Thinking of when I would give myself the pleasure of it. The taste of the
turrón
in my mouth.

‘I could have given that
turrón
to Bella. She would have curled up on my lap to suck the sweetness out of it. She would have known that I was sorry. She’d have been ready to begin again.

‘But I did not. Instead I said to Bella, “If you want to work so much, then we’ll work.”

‘I squatted down. She stood facing me, between my legs. I took hold of her waist and as she sprang I lifted her so she rose up onto my shoulders in a handstand. We had done it many times before. I must have felt the stiffness in her body but I don’t remember it. I’ll tell you what I was thinking of. I was thinking:
How can I find out when I must say horse, and when I must say mount?

‘Slowly, I stood up, still supporting her by the waist. I walked to where the chalk mark was that my father made for us. I thought she was in position. I took my hands from her waist.

“‘Point your feet, Bella,” I said. Maybe I said it too quickly. She needed more time to feel her balance, to get herself perfectly into position. Then she could make a line of her body, her feet together and pointing upwards so my father could catch her by the ankles as he swung forward.

‘Her feet tipped and her balance changed. She was going over. I felt it and my hands flew up to grab her. But she came right over my head, backwards, and I couldn’t catch her.

‘She fell on her back in the ring.

‘It wasn’t far. She didn’t cry. But I froze all over at once because she didn’t cry. I was down by her side and her eyes were open, looking at me. Begging me to help her. She was trying to breathe but the fall had knocked the breath out of her.

‘She was winded. That’s all it was. I raised her in my arms to help her. I moved her and she made a noise I shall always remember. The noise of a child trying to scream who has no breath to scream.

‘My mother came running. I must have called out for her without knowing it. She took Bella from me and laid her flat on the ground. She knelt beside Bella.

“‘Move your feet, Bella. Show me how you move your feet.”

‘But Bella didn’t move anything. She just stared at us, pleading for us to help her as she struggled for breath.

‘She had fractured the top of her thigh bone, near the
hip socket. There was a doctor in the town but he was attending a difficult labour at a farm in the hills. It was evening before he came back. My mother and father put a board under Bella and carried her into the house of the apothecary.

‘My parents had no money to send her to the city hospital. There was a little charitable hospital run by the Sisters of Mercy, in a convent ten miles away. They cared for Bella there. She lay in a high, narrow, white bed with a crucifix over it, in a row of beds with crucifixes over them. There were twenty tortured Christs in that room.

‘The sisters were good women but they knew little about Bella’s injuries. They did what the doctor told them to do. She lay perfectly still, with a board under the mattress, with her leg in a heavy cast. They fed her from a cup with a spout. They knew nothing of what we know now. Now Bella would have had an operation. The bone should have been pinned, but even so it would have been difficult. It was a bad break, too close to the hip joint. Nowadays they would be able to do a hip-joint replacement if the pinning didn’t work.

‘Bella lay still. Her muscles wasted. She had sores on her elbows, her heels, her buttocks. She developed a chest infection. If she had not been Bella she would have given up.

‘She recovered from her chest infection. My mother treated the sores with marigold cream, which she brought in each day and rubbed into Bella’s skin secretly. The sisters didn’t approve, because the doctor hadn’t prescribed it. If my mother had left the cream by the bedside, they would have thrown it away.

‘When the cast came off, Bella taught herself to walk again. She limped badly. No, it was more than a limp. She lurched as she transferred her weight. Already we could see that her injured leg was shorter than her healthy leg. My mother rubbed oil into Bella’s muscles and massaged them to try to build them up again. Day by day, Bella was in pain. Her hair was matted from lying so long, and the sisters had cut it short. Her face was yellow with pain and lack of sun. She looked terrible.

“‘I’ll carry you, Bella,” I said when I saw her struggling across the stone floor.

“‘No,” she said. “I can walk.”

‘For my father, life was over. That sounds like an exaggeration, but it was the truth. Bella came back from the convent and he had to watch her limping, lurching across the rough ground. My mother tried to go back into the ring, but it was no good. She was too old. What remained of our act was me and my father, a flyer and a catcher. But we never got the applause Bella had got, and nobody threw coins into the ring.

‘We were touring new towns where no one had seen Bella waving and blowing kisses. She was just a crippled child, and Spain was not a good country for crippled children. So you see, Rebecca, my mother really did have second sight. She saw Bella in the convent and we all laughed. She saw the pictures but she couldn’t interpret them. Maybe she was lucky.

‘This is how my mother’s vision of Bella in the convent came true.’

‘And then what?’ I asked.

18

Living Statues and the Dwarf Shakespeare Act

‘It was because of Bella that Damiano’s Dreamworld came to be,’ said Mr Damiano. ‘My future would not lie in libraries. I wasn’t going to be a student. I had to earn money for Bella. I had to create a place in the world for Bella. I was never going to be a great flyer but the circus had taught me the most important trick it possesses: to discover what people want, before they know it themselves, and before anyone else knows it. To discover it first, and act on it. It sounds very simple, doesn’t it? You wonder why everyone doesn’t find it out.

‘I discovered it through our failures. By the time I was sixteen my father was finished in the air. He had rheumatism in both knees and it was affecting his spine. My parents knew they couldn’t stay in the circus. When my father warmed up I could almost hear the grind of pain in his joints. He never complained, but as he swung his arms and flexed his knees he would make a strange sound, deep in his chest, like a steam engine.
Heu, heu, heu
. He made that sound to deal with the pain.

‘I told you that my mother had foresight. She’d become skilled in mending costumes, and making new ones. She reckoned that she could set up as a dressmaker, with the bit of money they had saved. But for that, they needed to be in a city where there would be plenty of
clients. Every small town already had its own dressmaker and the clients were taken.

‘They rented a room in Valencia. It was cheap, as it deserved to be. It was small and dark and my mother had to go down three flights of stairs to the cold tap. But it would do for the time being.
Until I make money, and then I’ll send you some every week
. I kept telling them that and I think they believed me. They wanted to believe me. My father was heavy and weary. It was as much as he could do to get himself through the days. Now I know that he was depressed, clinically depressed, but this wasn’t how things were thought about then. He would go to the same café every afternoon and sit over his wine. My mother encouraged him. It was good for him to be out, she thought, in a man’s world.

‘He sat in the café and drank his wine. You won’t know those leather bottles they used in Valencia then, to serve wine in the ordinary cafés. He would order a bottle, or half a bottle, never more. He would read the newspaper headlines, because he couldn’t get through close print. I think he liked to sit there. He was not part of the circus any more, not forcing himself out night after night with his joints burning, not needing to please anyone. He was away from the ring and from memories of Bella as she had been. He would go to the café about four o’clock, after his siesta, and settle there with his paper and his wine, and watch the people passing in the streets.

‘“He deserves his retirement,” my mother said. She was happy to work. She soon got clients, just as she believed she would. The hours were long but she had company. Clients were always coming in and out for
fittings, or to talk over a new dress for a christening. They were ordinary people, small shopkeepers, the wives of policemen and minor officials. Nobody grand, nobody my mother wasn’t easy with. They were quite happy to climb the three flights of stairs. Her prices were good and everything was finished as it should be.

‘She never talked about the past. People assumed that she’d always been a dressmaker, but in another town.

“‘Your father doesn’t need to worry any more,” said my mother.

‘I had changed a great deal. No more English language books, no dreaming, no imagining myself elsewhere. Even my body had changed. I was becoming solid, as I am now.

‘Bella would come with me. That was agreed without question. There was no life for her in that room.

‘We went north, to Madrid. The war in Europe was over. Everyone was moving, the whole of Europe washing from one side to the other. Like a stream after a flash-flood, when the water runs thick and dangerous and you can’t see the bottom of it. But in the middle of it all, people still wanted what they’d always wanted.

‘We started with a street-corner act. Tumbling, juggling, a low wire lashed between street lamps. We had to watch out for the police all the time. Bella juggled with eggs, with oranges, with knives. She told fortunes. She was eight years old and when you looked into her eyes you believed that she had the right to tell fortunes. She knew more than some of the grown women who laid their hand in Bella’s.

‘We lived on bread and olive oil and oranges. Sometimes, when we were in the money, we bought rabbit
stew from a street vendor. At first we slept in church doorways and then we rented a room half the size of my parents’ room in Valencia. I buried a coin for every coin we spent, under the tiled floor of our room. We worked like demons, every day and twice as much on Sundays, when Bella would sit outside the richest churches with her crutches at her side and her beautiful eyes fixed on the fine ladies and she’d call out, “For the love of God, for the sake of holy charity, bless me with bread.”