5

Introducing the Carneous Mole

They all left Staßburg along different paths, Nelke with her Frenchman, Shminiak with his sadness and Lamentations, Philbert with his Kroonk and the Fair. Only Frau Kranz stayed, buried in her blankets all the night while her neighbours combed the streets with their newly-sharpened knives. They came back during the night several times, hammering on her doors, shouting out to release the pig, but by then she’d braced a bolt of cloth up against the handle so they couldn’t get in and, after performing this last rite of protection for the boy and his pig, she crawled from door to bed. Several days later, one of her neighbours came looking and did what she should have done before and had her man beat down the door with a sledgehammer. And there was Frau Kranz, curled up like a hedgehog on her bed, surrounded by blood-boltered sheets, her body a sack of rot already leaking out of every orifice.

No mourning for good Frau Kranz, nor the encomium she deserved, only the shack being put to torch and flame – with her inside – once it had been pilfered of anything vaguely useful, the conflagration surrounded by those same women in their clogs to whom Frau Kranz had so assiduously administered during the Great Grippe; paying that kindness no mind at all and ­spitting into the flames for allowing the boy to escape with the pig they’d been so eager to purloin, assuming it to be communal property having fed it their scraps and chuckings-out, dreaming of all the crackling and moist flesh, soups and pies now beyond their reach. They treated the traitor Frau Kranz no better than they would the coom that gathers at the naves of wheels, or the soot that blackens the oven mouth, pulling down the last of the shack after the burning, and brushing its ashes – and hers – roughly from their hands, as if they’d already forgotten her name.

By then, Philbert was many miles distant and so in thrall to his new adventure he immediately forgot everything that had gone before, including Frau Kranz and what might have become of her. He was bemused by everything Lita showed him, by the oddities and eccentricities of the Fair, no one giving his taupe a second glance. That first night, Lita tucked Philbert and his Kroonk away up over the tailgate of her travelling caravan, squashing them into a corner between the drawer she used for a bed and the giant Frau Fettleheim, who claimed to be the ­fattest woman in all the world, and whose wheezing filled the small space, along with her grunts and grumblings.

‘More mouths to feed, Lita,’ the huge Frau Fettleheim moaned. ‘What were you thinking?’

But Frau Fettleheim was not a cruel person, and she had not refused the extra company of Philbert and his pig despite her apparent objections. She recognised straightaway, just as Lita had done, that both were cast-offs and had nowhere else to go. Everyone in the Fair understood this because, in one way or another, they’d all been there themselves. It wasn’t long, therefore, before Frau Fettleheim began to pat Kroonk’s head and tickle her ears, especially after Kroonk laid her head on Frau Fettleheim’s knee, at which point she saw in Kroonk rather more of herself than she was comfortable with, this fat little piggling who had been destined, before her escape, to being gutted, sliced, divided and devoured.

‘Poor Piggy,’ she said then. ‘Poor little piggy. And of course you must both stay.’

And so they did, Philbert and Kroonk hugging each other tight that first ever night away from their home, Frau Fettleheim huge and snoring on the one side, Little Lita curled up in her drawer on the other. They both lay awake for a long time, ­listening to the whelps of dogs, the stamping feet of unknown animals, the gentle plash of the river as it wrestled a tree bough down its length, men and women lurching and leaning against the wood of the small caravan, retching or relieving themselves a few inches away outside, owls later screeching close in the darkness, swooping down on wide black wings, claws ­skewering the mice and shrews that ran amongst the debris of the carts, and then the final, empty egg-blown silence when only the faintest fibrillation of wind and water were left once humankind had at last gone away, and all else was left to sleeping.

Morning came of a sudden, a huge hullabaloo that grew with every moment like a large bear growling and stretching at the dawn. The Fair people arose in a ripple, one person waking up their neighbours in the adjoining cart or tent, who woke up the next one, who woke up the next. There were general shouts of ‘Come on! . . . Halloo! . . . Good morning . . .’ and the sounds of animals scratching and yawning, water splashing into kettles, onto faces, onto feet, fires being coaxed back into life, the strong smells of potatoes and cabbage frying together, of acorn coffee and pine-needle tea, pots and harnesses rattling, stalls being broken down, the clacking of wood on metal, great whooshes of canvas being folded and stowed.

Lita woke in a moment, put on her battered red shoes, and was up. She tidied the last few oddments still lying around, packing Philbert and Kroonk into a corner and telling them to stay quiet and still, folded some of her tiny dresses and put them into her drawer and closed it shut. Other cupboards in the ­caravan, cunningly concealed in floors and walls, under seating and tables, were revealed and filled. Frau Fettleheim’s ­voluminous garments doubling as tablecloths and covers flicked expertly into the air and caught on the way down, rolled into tubes and pushed between Frau Fettleheim’s feet if they could not fit elsewhere. She herself was still asleep, and Lita put her finger to her lips, whispering to the newcomers not to wake her, to stay put, that they would soon be on their way. Outside she went, pushing up the tailgate behind her and closing the wooden hatch of the door. The cart jangled and creaked and jolted as an animal was hitched into its shafts. Frau Fettleheim slept on, her giant, ­goitre-necked head lolling to and fro, the great bun of her hair gradually sliding to one side, unravelling with the movement, slipping onto her lap like a lazy cat. Then without further warning the cart lurched forward, began trundling over the ­flattened ground, settling after a few minutes into a gentle rock. Frau Fettleheim awoke briefly, her eyes misty and glazed, grunting something incomprehensible before falling back to sleep.

Cautiously, Philbert crawled upwards and knelt beside the snoring Frau, lifting the corner of the canvas. Up front he could see a man’s dark back, hands casually flicking the reins back and forth over the rump of the pony that was pulling the caravan on, and could see maybe twenty, thirty carts in front, doing exactly the same. Little Lita suddenly tumbled into the back end of the cart and he turned towards her, saw she was holding a small basket on her knee. Lita smiled, thrusting towards him the basket filled with warm bread, dark and moist, smelling of pumpernickel and rye. Philbert pinched it off bit by bit, one for him, one for Kroonk, savouring it, glancing out behind Lita, who had turned her attention away. He could see through a chink in the tailgate’s canvas the dust bowling up from the wheels of this cart and the one that followed, and the faint glories made by the newly risen sun around the salt ­crystals that had always made up his world, wondering what would happen now, searching for a last glimpse of the riverbank and the chicken-shed and the shack that lay beyond; but there was nothing but the sunrise and the dust-motes and the flapping of the canvas, until Lita tied it shut.

Philbert’s new life was unimaginably exciting and exhilarating as he tried to make himself useful in every way he could. He watered Tomaso’s third eye relentlessly until Tomaso begged him to stop, take it easy, do it every now and then or not at all. He was sick of having his collar drenched every few minutes, he chided Philbert, pushing him away, telling him to make himself useful elsewhere. Philbert was glad at this rejection, disliking the way that ghastly third eye kept gazing on unperturbed, always ungrateful, and switched his attentions instead to the man known as Herr Fischmann, finding in him a more willing recipient of his care.

Herr Fischmann had skin that flaked and floozied into red-rimmed scales, and he taught Philbert how to rub the tubs of paraffin-wax and jelly into his sores, making his skin shine like the oiled fish-back he was supposed to resemble, discovering that without this constant treatment Herr Fischmann would dry out like desert sand, his outer surface falling in handfuls to the floor, leaving raw red welts behind, scabbed over with dark black blood. He began to understand that Hermann, Herr Fischmann, spent only a tiny proportion of his life as a prize exhibit, the rest remaining hidden, dominated by a never-ending regime of being daubed over with liniments and swabs, or ­collecting the herbs that went into such treatments, no glamour for The Half Man, Half Fish advertised on his hoarding, who was the saddest man Philbert had ever met.

‘You cannot imagine what it’s like,’ Hermann said, as Philbert rubbed Hermann’s skin with soothing sage-scented oil, ‘to lie in bed and have a million moth-wings flutter at your body, feeling their eggs hatch and writhe beneath your skin, wriggling and squirming, squirming and wriggling. My whole night is like that, Philbert. My whole life. Turn and itch, scratch and turn, itch and scratch. And when I rise in the morning I shake from my sheets the litter of my body, the parts that have escaped me during the night. It’s terrible, Little Maus, a terrible curse . . .’

And Philbert supposed that it was. Certainly his own little bodily oddity was nothing in comparison, so unworthy of comment that nobody ever commented on it at all except for the adoption of the name Little Maus following Lita’s lead, a pet name he became proud of, relating to his head absolutely and yet absolutely without offence. He’d no third eye, nor was he a giant like Frau Fettleheim, or a dwarf – as he now recognised Lita to be. His taupe, amongst such people, was negligible.

Philbert tended Hermann assiduously, quickly learning how to make his special liniments, soaking gelatine leaves overnight, mixing rose-water with the necessary albumen before adding glycerine of borax, heating and filtering all through a piece of twill. Hermann, in return, was the kindest of men, despite the constant scritch, scritch, scritch of blunt nails against skin and the stink of fish seeping from his pores.

‘It’s the show,’ Hermann sighed, dousing himself in cod-oil, standing in his pail and the green light quivering through his tent. ‘They pay and they expect,’ he explained, staring at the plate of perch or trout or whatever else had been provided, that stared right back. The crowd came in and clumped about him, holding their noses, touching their fingers momentarily to his scaly skin, grimacing as Hermann forced the flesh of raw fish inside his mouth. They threw pennies into the water surrounding his flaking feet, gagging at the smell of him, the stink of his breath, the stench of his disease, then out they rushed into the fresh air, laughing at the spectacle they’d seen.

One night Philbert brought out his sack, extracting the first of his treasures, holding out to Hermann the long, long, lock of Nelke’s hair, hoping it might give him some pleasure. Hermann would not touch it, saying he could not, would not taint it with his fingers. Philbert persisted but Hermann pulled back, reaching instead behind him and slipping a velvet cover from a large glass bottle and placing it on the overturned crate that made his table.

‘See?’ Hermann pointed. ‘This is my treasure, and my mirror.’

Philbert looked, saw a forest of green fronds and a small fish winding between them, a startling thing: blue on yellow with horns like a cow, and almost as square as Nelke’s box.

‘Beautiful,’ Hermann murmured. ‘And so happy inside his strange skin . . .’

Philbert loved it, had never seen anything like it, watched it paddle around its bottle, twitching between the weeds. Hermann never did tell Philbert how or where he’d come by this flash of delight, though he did show Philbert later how to chew up bits of meat for it and spit it into the bottle, how to net algae from the ponds and riverbanks they passed, wrapping it around sticks serving as a treat for Butterblume, as Hermann called the fish.

‘Every time, before we travel,’ Hermann told Philbert, ‘we must make sure to cover the bottle with this velvet cloak so that Butterblume can sleep.’

Very important, said Hermann, for when upset the fish released a toxin, and in such a small space all that would achieve was self-destruction.

‘Just like a man,’ Philbert heard Herr Hermann saying as he gazed sadly into the water where Butterblume was nibbling on the shower of Hermann’s skin that had floated down from his dangling fingers. ‘Just like a man.’

It was morning, it was summer, and three months since Philbert had left Staßburg.

He escaped the gloom of Hermann’s tent to attend to his other duties, which by now included waiting on Maulwerf, the Father of the Fair. When first introduced by Lita, Maulwerf studied Philbert top to toe, telling him to turn around slowly, all the while stroking the sharp point of his beard.

‘Hmm. The Coconut Boy, possibly. Although who in this country has heard of coconuts? The Boy with An Egg in his Head? That might work.’

‘His name is Philbert,’ volunteered Lita, ‘but we call him Little Maus,’ and Maulwerf laughed like a squeaking door, squealing into his beard.

‘Very good! Very good!’ he gurgled, ‘And why are you here, my Little Maus-Junge?’

Philbert mumbled out his brief, all too common, tale, pointing also at Kroonk emerging from Frau Fettleheim’s skirts, jumping inexpertly down from the cart, snuffling enquiringly at a curl of discarded carrot peel. Maulwerf became serious.

‘I’ve heard you’ve been most useful to Herr Hermann,’ he said, ‘and that is to be admired. But be warned, Little Maus-Junge . . . I am the man who judges who has earned his keep and who has not. And if I find you wanting then you’re off. You understand?’

Philbert nodded, his face pale and frightened at this threat of expulsion, then Maulwerf twirled his cane and stabbed it into the ground an inch away from Philbert’s foot.

‘Good,’ he continued. ‘That is settled, then. You will see to Hermann, and you will also be my personal valet and sous-chef.’

He lifted his silver-topped, mud-bottomed cane an inch above Philbert’s head, leaning in very close, a faint whiff of garlic escaping him as he gave out his further orders. Every morning Philbert was to brush his velvet jackets, clean his glasses with a special piece of lint, prepare the day’s food to his precise ­specifications, and aid him in his act.

‘The Mouse and the Mole,’ Maulwerf murmured, chuckling. ‘Yes, Little Maus, you will do. And your duties for me will start tonight.’

And so that very evening Philbert helped set up Maulwerf’s stall and started to shout out the words he’d been taught:

‘Come and see! Come and see! The Man who eats anything! The Carneous Mole! The Man who eats anything so long as it’s flesh – foul or fair! Come and see! Come and see!’

Maulwerf sat at his table, bibbed-up and tuckered, white napkin hovering beneath his chin, white teeth flashing at the gathering crowd. The latter did as bid, turning up with off-cuts of maggot-ridden mutton, bowls of slithering worms, raw and festering chicken-combs and mash of beetle, rancid pork, moulded bacon. Maulwerf sat there calmly, smiling at the pile upon his plate, knife and fork poised daintily, and ate what he’d been given, ate every last scrap to the horror of the crowd – although this was what they’d paid to see – swallowing it down in a satisfied gulp. Women’s hands stayed motionless on their cheeks, children gagging into their skirts; menfolk laughing half-heartedly before turning away as they went a bilious green. The Carneous Mole ate all before him then dabbed his lips carefully with his spotless bib, bowing to those who’d had the stomach to stay, before turning and walking stately back into his tent. Here Philbert was at the ready holding the bucket and up the whole lot would come, a mangled mess of gristle and skin, maggot and meat, all slimed in the stench of warm vomit.

‘How utterly disgusting!’ they could hear the excited cries outside the tent. ‘How revolting! How does he do it?’

‘How easy to make a living,’ chuckled Maulwerf, rubbing his hands.

‘How do you do it?’ Philbert asked, his eyes bright with admiration, his belly churning its way down to his knees.

‘No sense of smell, Junge. No trick – can’t smell nor taste a thing. Never could. Good plexus control is the key, swallow it down, bring it up. Years of training went into this,’ he said, slapping his velvet-bound paunch and letting rip a short ballad of burps. ‘Now bring me some proper grub, and a decent decanter of wine.’

So Philbert returned the table to the privacy of the tent, where Maulwerf sat as meticulously well dressed as before, velvet brushed, bib tucked, smile rucked in expectation across his face, Philbert bringing out a plate of boiled and mashed potatoes, some fried leeks (squeaky), an aubergine roasted in its skin (crisp on the outside, creamy within) and, to finish, a bowl of grapes, which sometimes Maulwerf peels and pops into his mouth, spitting the pips out one by one, and sometimes sucks like sweets until they burst and melt in his mouth.

‘Better than a mountain of meat,’ says Maulwerf, in a well-rehearsed speech, ‘better than a bathful of beef . . .’ and under the table Kroonk bows her head, polishing his plates one by one.

‘Kroonk,’ she grunts and falls asleep.

‘Quite right,’ laughs Maulwerf, delighted to follow suit, his head on the table, his velvet shoulders hunched in the evening light.

Philbert was happy in those times, travelling from town to town, forgetting the last as soon as he arrived at the next. The only person who looked backwards was Tomaso, and only with an eye that didn’t see.

‘It’s bad luck to look back,’ announced Maulwerf as Philbert rode at his side, the giant and the dwarf in the cart behind them. ‘Look around you, look ahead,’ he said, ‘but never, ever look back.’