ACT ONE

My name is Charlie Stratton, and I am what the General used to be. The General is thirty-two years and three months old; he’s pulling himself together, he’s going onstage to astound the Antipodeans with his Napoleon. I’m four years old and I’m not going anywhere. I have been four for a long time. You can’t see me, can you? I’m hiding. I’m good at hiding. I’m like the boy in the picture puzzle. The boy in the fork of the tree, the boy-shaped space the branches make. It’s kind of lonely up here, but it’s the best place for me. As long as I keep still, you can’t see me.

What happened was the General came. He strutted in and he sat down, plonk, with his chest out and belly up and legs spread. He filled up all the space where I used to be. I had to climb up into the puzzle tree. I don’t mind, not really. The General is great and good. You know that old story, the one where the king of the gods had a splitting headache, it hurt so bad his head split open, just like a plum? Out sprang the goddess of wisdom, fully grown, with all her armour on. That’s how the General was born. He sprang out of Mr Barnum’s head. I guess it didn’t hurt Mr Barnum too bad — the General was much smaller than the goddess, and he didn’t have a helmet and spears and such.

But he was fully grown. He smoked cigars and drank wine and walked with a swagger and a stick with a lion’s-head handle and a man-about-town way of wearing his hat and saying howdy-do to the ladies. His waistcoat held a manly chest and a thumping great heart and his breeches held I don’t know what, but it was something mighty important. He knew everything and he was afraid of nothing. Did he know about me, then? I cannot tell.

Of course he had to learn first what to know and what not to fear. But he was a mighty fast learner.

‘Show me how small you are,’ said Mr Barnum.

The General stood in the study by the fire. It blazed hot all down his right side. Mr Barnum kneeled before him, as he might with a favourite dog.

‘Come. Show me.’

The first time Mr Barnum said it, the General crouched down.

‘No, no.’ Mr Barnum frowned. ‘You must do the opposite. If you want everyone to notice how small you are, you must try to appear big.’

The General held his breath and spread out his arms. Would he float off the floor like a balloon?

Mr Barnum smiled. ‘Watch me.’ He drew himself up and walked all round the room with straight legs. It made the General think of a rooster. He had to tip back his head to watch. He gurgled with laughter. ‘Now you try.’

He did the walk, but it was harder than it looked.

Mr Barnum watched him. ‘Stretch taller. Raise your chin towards the ceiling. Pull back your shoulders. Oh, you are a big man, a big man. A general reviewing your troops. No, that’s too solemn. Strut, boy, strut.’

‘Cock a doodle doo,’ crowed the General.

‘That’s the boy. You’re cock of the walk. Look me in the eye. You are equal to anyone you meet. Puff out your chest. Strut, strut.’

The General did his best. Legs of tables and chairs bumped into him. The hungry tongues of the fire licked towards him.

Mr Barnum took down the looking glass from the mantelpiece and placed it flat on the rug. ‘Stand on that. See how you look.’

He stood on the shiny surface and looked down. He saw great thick tree-trunk legs, a big belly, small shoulders, a tiny head.

‘What do you see?’

‘A mighty fellow, Mr Barnum.’

Mr Barnum laughed and laughed. ‘A mighty fellow indeed … No, don’t stop.’

Strut, strut, until long after the fire died.

The wine and the cigars were harder. Both tasted worse than the most horrid medicine. They made the General so sick he could hardly strut and twirl his cane. Mr Barnum put out a spittoon so he could empty his stomach if he needed to. He would kneel down and pat the General’s back as he heaved.

‘I am truly sorry, Charlie. But you must learn to smoke and drink before you can be a man.’

‘But I’m not a man, Mr Barnum. My ma says I am four years old.’

Mr Barnum’s merry face quite lost its ruddy glow. He stood back and looked at the General the way his father would look at a plank of wood he planned to turn into a table.

‘Eleven, Charlie. You’re eleven. It’s being such a little fellow that makes you feel a child.’

He put the cigar back in the General’s mouth. One puff, and then he coughed and coughed.

Mr Barnum laughed. ‘Don’t look so doleful. You want to grow up, don’t you? All boys want to grow up.’

I still fancied then that the General and I were pretty close. Other times, I fancied that if he ever met me in the street, the General would smile and pat me on the head and slip me a coin and walk away, twirling his stick with the lion head. He always had a soft spot for children, the General did.

I was a good boy, mostly. I sat very quiet and still in my boy-shaped space in the puzzle tree while the General did his stuff. I came out sometimes when he was asleep. I’d creep around his fancy bedroom and sit in the red velvet chairs that were specially made for him and were just the right size for me too. I felt like Goldilocks before the three bears came home. He had a dressing table with a stool and a mirror, all his size, and two silver-backed brushes. I’d sit and look at the boy in the nightgown in the mirror and pretend to brush my hair. But the bedroom didn’t have any toys, and in the end I’d get bored and go and hide again.

I never came out when the General was performing. I knew I’d only get into trouble. Well, I did peep out once. I was so excited, I couldn’t help it. The General and Mr Barnum were visiting the Queen of England. She was all in black, a bit of a dumpling. She looked like someone who was kind pretending to be fierce. The General was doing his show, and it was a good house — all the royals loved him. What the General saw was a long picture gallery, and the royals and their attendants, and Mr Barnum secretly mouthing his lines at him in case he forgot. What I saw was a poodle. I don’t know why it was, I’d seen lots of dogs before, but when I saw that poodle, I remembered how much I’d always wanted a dog. I wanted so bad for that poodle to come over and lick my hand, and jump up and fetch my stick when I threw it. I wasn’t thinking of anything but that poodle, and so I stepped out of my boy-shaped space, just for a moment. And it saw me. You know what, it didn’t like me. It froze, and then it growled and barked and came at me. It was only a little toy dog to the royals and to Mr Barnum, but it was as big as a bear to me. I turned to run, right out of that great room and down the marble steps of the palace and out into the streets of London and find somewhere I could hide again.

It was the General who saved me. He stood firm and raised his stick like a sword and he had a fencing match with the poodle. Parry, feint, lunge. Mr Barnum had taught him some nifty swordplay. The royals were in fits, they laughed so much. The little dumpling Queen had tears in her eyes. In the end the dog had enough and retreated, and the General bowed and there was great applause while a flunkey grabbed the dog by its collar and dragged it out of sight. I hope he didn’t hurt it.

The only creature who ever saw me was that dog, and it didn’t like me. Everyone came to see the General, and everyone loved him. Kings and queens, princes and princesses, dukes and earls and counts and marquises shook his hand and patted him on the back and kissed his cheek or even his cherub lips. Hundreds, thousands more jostled to get near him, cheered and hollered for him. They wrote songs and plays, polkas and quadrilles in his honour. They painted his portrait, they made models of him from clay and dough and spun sugar. It never went to his head. He was a man, he had money, could do anything he liked. He married the sweetest, the most bewitching little beauty in the world. She called him Charlie, and I liked that, I must say. He travelled everywhere and he thought it would go on forever. When you have always been fully grown, you never think you will grow old.

Now he looks in the dressing-table mirror when he thinks nobody else is around. He’s forgotten I can see him. He looks and he looks and he fluffs up his hair, or combs his whiskers, or tries buttoning and unbuttoning his waistcoat, but the picture doesn’t change. I don’t know what he sees, but it isn’t a mighty fellow anymore.

He tries to stay away from that other little fellow, Commodore George Nutt, but sometimes he just can’t avoid him. He watches him sideways, watches the mob and the way they cheer and clap for him, the way they once cheered and clapped for the one and only General Tom Thumb. He’d like to land a fist or two on that snub nose. But he doesn’t go in for fisticuffs. And anyway, George might hit back, hard. He’s awfully young.

The General tries to remember his mother and father. But all he knows are the Strattons, who are very amusing. They considered themselves so hoity-toity, and he always Thundering, and she always Damning, and both forever asking poor Mr Barnum for more money. Mr Stratton is dead now. He was a carpenter who thought he knew about things other than wood. He had red eyes and a grumbling way of talking and rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand and picked his teeth with his fingernail. And he drank like a fish. Mrs Stratton’s still around, though the General doesn’t see her much. She has boobies that bulge so from her low-cut gowns, she might as well yank them out and push them in your face. She flashes diamonds in her ears and on her wrists and rolling about on those boobies, more diamonds than the General ever saw on even the Queen of England. All paid for from his shows, of course. Her voice is loud and cracked and she has a whooping laugh that can end in a shriek like these Australian cockatoos. He’d laugh when Mr Barnum made fun of the Strattons behind their backs, but sometimes he just wished the ground would open up and they’d fall into the centre of the earth, particularly when everyone was in a grand restaurant in Paris and Mrs Stratton ordered duck by flapping her arms and quacking. Don’t be too hard on the General. He wasn’t unfilial. They weren’t his parents, remember. He was Mr Barnum’s brainchild.

I don’t recall much of the time before the General sprang fully armed out of Mr Barnum’s head. I was only four, remember. Still am, though I’ve learned a thing or two. I think my ma used to sing me songs. She never sounded like a cockatoo to me. She had a soft, wistful singing voice and a blue apron warm from the fire.

Sometimes I want to comfort the General. I want to come out and tell him it’s all right. You can be unhappy and afraid. You can howl and rage in a tantrum because it’s not fair, this getting old and fat and tired — nothing is fair anymore. You can suck your thumb and cry for your ma. I do that, sometimes. It doesn’t do me any harm. But then I’m stuck in my boy-shaped space in the puzzle tree, and he’s a man. He can do what he likes. He does things, in his head and for real, that I don’t understand at all. Especially the things he does with ladies. So why should he understand me? And what’s to understand, anyway? He is a General, great and good, and I am only a very little boy who hides.

Now there’s going to be a baby. A tiny, tiny baby. The smallest baby in the world. I don’t know much about it, not even where it’s going to come from, but the General knows. He’s all perked up again. He can’t wait. This time, everything will be right. A proper childhood. No wine, no cigars, no strutting. Everyone in the whole wide world will love this little boy, forever and ever, and no one will love him more than the General himself.

I can’t wait either. I’m going to have a little baby brother. Oh, I know Tommy isn’t really my brother, but that’s how I think of him. I’ll come out for him, and he’ll see me and know me straight away. We’ll build mud forts and shoot each other with sticks, we’ll catch minnows, we’ll sail paper boats, we’ll shout and run along the beach trailing seaweed. We’ll have a dog with curly hair that follows us everywhere. And if by any chance anyone doesn’t love us, we’ll just go away and hide. I’ll teach him everything I know, and I’ll never have to sit in this puzzle tree again.