AROUND THE FIRE

It is a dark night, the last night of the fair. It is cold and clear, and the moon is a thin line.

Julie, the bearded lady, has made a fire, and Fish watches the light of the flames casting shadows on the faces of the Freaks around him. They are eating chicken and bread, and there is even some cake. Oswald the dwarf has raided Earl’s supplies; they do not usually have so much good food to eat.

Lampie has given Fish a plate of food too, but he pushes the chicken around, without eating anything. He just looks. At Julie, who needs two chairs, one for each buttock, at how she bites and chews and makes a mess of her beard. At the bird-woman, who is pecking her food like a chicken herself. At the tall man, who always hunches his shoulders but still sticks up above everything else. The Siamese twins are eating from a single plate on their lap and squabbling over the tastiest morsels.

Everything is so strange for Edward. Sitting here in the evening air is strange. Not being in his room, not being hidden away, everyone being able to see him – all of it is strange. No one is paying any particular attention to him; only Oswald the dwarf catches his eye from time to time and gives him a wink. His wife is sitting beside him. She is a completely ordinary woman, not fat, not thin, not small. She has a baby on her lap, which she keeps kissing and cuddling. Edward can’t help staring at that too.

 

When most of the food is finished, Lanky Lester fetches a small guitar, which seems even smaller in his big hands, and he plays songs that drift into the night. All around them, everything else is quiet; the only other sound is the crickets’ chirping. The fairground is empty. The locals went home long ago. Lampie and Edward are the only ones who have been allowed to stay, because they had such a fright and because Edward almost drowned. Earl is recovering inside his caravan, snoring away, with the door locked tight.

“We won’t be seeing him tonight,” the dwarf had said. “So there’s no need to be afraid.”

Edward is not afraid. And that is another strange thing. He feels so odd, and there is suddenly so much to think about (like why he did not drown). About how he briefly had an aunt – and now he doesn’t. And maybe a mother – and what was the truth about that? And how he nearly got caught and put on display for ever and ever, just like these people around him, who have crowds gawping at them every day. How do they put up with it? Why don’t they run away?

Lampie is sitting beside him, quietly singing along to the songs she knows. She knows nearly all of them. She has put her arm around him, and that is strange too. He just lets her. They are telling stories about the mermaid, about what she was like when she first came, and about how she changed.

Lester strums a sad song, which Lampie knows too:

“Sleep with the fishes, roll on the deep,

Let the kind waves rock you to sleep.”

But she is not sleeping, she is dead, he knows that. She is wrapped in a blanket inside the dark tent. In his blanket – the dwarf’s wife has given him a dry one, which smells quite different. He pulls it tightly around himself, even though it is not too cold this close to the fire.

“My beautiful baby,” the woman whispers as she cuddles the child. “Yes, you are. Oh, yes, you are.”

Edward has already noticed that this is not true. The child has a harelip that twists its whole face and it is completely bald. How can she think it’s beautiful?

But maybe all mothers think their children are beautiful. Except for his own, that is.

 

Lampie is having a wonderful time. Her cheeks are warm from the fire, she is breathing in as much as possible of the delicious smell of woodsmoke, and the tall man seems to know all the songs she remembers from the old days. It is almost like being back there; if she half-closes her eyes, the strange people sitting around the fire could easily be pirates, and the fairground could be a beach by the sea. She listens to the stories they tell, she gnaws on chicken bones – she was starving! – she sings along and sometimes, as she sings, she cries a little too, but that doesn’t matter. It’s that kind of evening.

The dwarf’s wife makes up a bed for them, on the floor of the caravan. It’s already far too late to go home, says Oswald, and besides they have something to do tomorrow morning.

Lampie feels soft from the singing, and glowing from the cup of mulled wine she was given, and so she snuggles up next to Fish and goes straight to sleep.

 

The boy does not sleep, but lies there, looking into the unfamiliar darkness. He has slowly rolled away from the girl, as he is sure that she does not want his cold legs touching her. Tail. Tail – yes, maybe you could call it a tail. His aunt had a tail, the aunt who he had for a moment and has already lost. He thinks about Earl with his grabbing fingers. And he thinks about his father too, and what he would say if he saw him lying here. With the fairground folk, with the dregs, the failures, where his son does not belong. He thinks a thousand things, about the whole day, about his whole life.

And among all those thoughts, there is one, as steady as a heartbeat, which will not go away: what it was like, that instant before the aquarium exploded, when he was completely underwater, and how it felt.

 

Back at the Black House, Lenny is sitting and waiting by the gate. He will not come inside, not for tea, not for dinner. Martha can call as much as she likes and she can threaten him too, but he does not come. His eyes wide, he stares through the bars and into the darkness, looking in the direction they should be coming from.

But she does not come, the girl, all night long. It gets cold and dark and the dogs went inside long ago, but not Lenny. Lenny stays and waits.