Nina Allan's fiction has been published regularly in magazines such as Black Static, Interzone, and Midnight Street, and her first collection of stories, A Thread of Truth, was published in 2008. Her story "Angelus" won the Aeon Award in 2007. She lives and works in London.
Lammas Worm: manifestation, sometimes corporeal, of the spirit of daemonic potency. See also Lammas, Lammas Tide, Lammas Eve, Gule of August, Spirit of First Birth.
(Taken from A Fabulous History of England, John Scobie Press 1881.)
The girl's name was Leonie Pickering. Someone had labelled her like a parcel, scrawling her name in square black capitals on the back of an old cereal packet then fastening it around her neck with a piece of string. There was no return address. She was wearing a yellow dress, soiled at the back with what looked like mud, or perhaps excrement.
Her features were odd. I don't mean deformed, just strangely put together. Her skull was elongated, like the artists' impressions of the Neanderthal people who used to roam the earth before modern man came along and made such a mess of things. There was a small ridge on her forehead, just above her eyebrows. Her eyes were a liquid black. Her frizzy dark hair looked a mass of tangles, matted together at the back like a piece of old carpet. She seemed not to have a clue where she was.
It was early on a Sunday morning, well before nine, and there wasn't very much on the roads. We had played a ground in Marlborough the night before and our next stop was Cirencester. Most of the wagons were already there. I was bringing up the rear with Rudy Shyler and Piet van Aspen. Rudy was taking it slowly because his engine had developed a knock and I was taking it slowly because I always tended to end up driving with Piet. Piet was moving at a snail's pace, as usual, because that was the fastest his decrepit old jalopy would go. Rudy braked so suddenly I almost went into the back of him. Steady on, Rudy, I thought. What the hell do you think you're doing? Then I saw the kid. She was standing at the edge of the road, staring out into the traffic like a dummy in a shop window. I hooted to warn Piet to slow down then pulled over on to the verge. As I switched off the ignition I saw Rudy jump down from his cab. He went straight up to the girl and put out his hand to her, the way you might do with a frightened animal. The girl's lips drew back from her teeth in a kind of snarl. She looked like an angry baboon.
She was tiny, no more than five feet tall. Shit, I thought. She'll have his hand off if he's not careful. I opened the door to get down.
"What's going on?" said Mae. She had been dozing in the seat beside me. Her blue eyes had a misty, faraway look, as if she were still half in a dream.
"Just some kid," I said. "A runaway, I think. I'm going to help Rudy before he does something stupid. You stay here."
I wasn't in the habit of telling Mae what to do but for some reason the girl made me nervous. Mae leaned forward and peered through the windscreen.
"She doesn't look like a runaway to me. I reckon she's been dumped there."
"Perhaps," I said. I was sure she was right. I jumped down from the cab and went over to where Rudy was standing. Up close the girl seemed even smaller, and so skinny she looked half-starved. Rudy towered over her like a full-grown grizzly on its way to the hunting grounds. Rudy was a gentle giant, daft as a brush, but the kid wasn't to know that and I supposed she was terrified.
"Back off a bit," I said to him. "Give her some room."
I noticed that she had no shoes on. Her feet were bony and narrow, with high, graceful arches, the feet of a ballet girl. Her toes were long, more like fingers than ordinary toes. I put out my hand as Rudy had done, hoping to show the girl that I meant no harm.
"Are you hurt?" I said. "Can we give you a lift somewhere?"
The girl's lips pulled back in another snarl and I caught a glimpse of uneven, yellow teeth. A second later she was flying right at me. I leapt instinctively to one side, my mind seething with visions of those crooked yellow incisors gouging into my flesh. She raced straight by me and underneath Rudy's trailer, going flat like a rat under a grain store and tucking herself in behind one of the wheels.
"Well that's our morning cancelled," said Rudy. "Anybody fancy a cup of tea?"
I swore quietly to myself. I had visions of us stuck there for hours, trying to tempt the girl back out on to the roadside so we could drive on. Eventually I supposed we would have to call the police. I imagined them forcing the girl out with a cattle prod and then carting her off somewhere in the back of a panda car. I didn't like the idea of that. I rested my hand on the wheel-hub and bent down, hoping to see better, but there was just the rusty, diesel-smelling underside of Rudy's wagon and the humped dark unmoving shape I knew was the girl.
"What's happened? Has Rudy got a flat?"
Piet's voice made me jump sky high. In all the fussing over the girl I had forgotten all about him.
"No such luck," said Rudy. "We've gone and got ourselves a luggage louse."
Luggage louse was an old company expression for stowaway. Piet edged closer to the trailer, toddling down the bank with that rolling, sideways walk of his. The grass was long and slippery and I was afraid he was about to go flying.
"Let me see," he said. "Perhaps I can help."
Privately I thought the sight of Piet might only make her more frightened, but I stepped back from the wagon, giving up my space by the wheel. I watched Piet peering into the shadowy darkness, wondering what he would make of it all. He had on his old jeans, and one of the brightly-coloured paisley shirts he liked to wear, a diminutive figure, shorter by a number of inches than the runaway girl.
"Come on," he said. "Don't be afraid."
Piet was about forty then, although like many dwarfs he had an ageless quality. His whole lower body was stunted, and in addition to this he had spina bifida. Mostly he could get about all right but from time to time he was in a lot of pain. The curvature of his spine meant that he carried his head a little to one side. With his well-shaped mouth and high cheekbones his face was strikingly handsome. He had iridescent violet-coloured eyes. The public loved him, not just for the freakish contrast between his noble head and mangled body, but for his broad cockney accent, his dandyish clothes and his passion for gambling. Many people seemed to assume that a carnival was not a carnival if there wasn't a resident dwarf somewhere around, and Piet was the kind of dwarf they wanted to see.
Officially he was in charge of the funhouse. Unofficially he ran poker games into the small hours, relieving the local card kings of large sums of money. He had been with us for longer than anyone could remember. He never talked about his life before the company and none of the stories about him seemed to join up. My father told me that Piet had Dutch grandparents and that he had spent his childhood on one of the Rotterdam barges. But Vaska Malahniuk's wife Marnie told me that was all nonsense, that Piet had grown up in a children's home attached to the London Hospital in Whitechapel. The Malahniuks were both aerialistes. They had been very close to my father before he retired.
"Piet never knew his parents at all," said Marnie. "Although I think he had a sister he was very fond of."
"What was she like?" I asked her. I was endlessly curious about Piet. The idea that someone could erase their past and walk into a new life was fascinating to me.
"I couldn't tell you, love, I never knew her. I think she died when Piet was still in the home."
It was often difficult to tell what Piet was thinking. I guess he had grown so used to hiding his feelings that in a way he was always performing, even when he wasn't on stage. But I swear I saw something go off in him at the sight of Leonie Pickering, some sort of inner explosion. He became incredibly still, and a light came into his eyes, the same as when he knew he was about to win an important hand at cards. Something must have happened in her too, or at least she seemed less afraid of him than she had been of Rudy and me, because suddenly she raised her head and began inching forward. As she emerged into the light she put a hand up to push back her hair. The hand was filthy like the rest of her, but the fingers were long and delicate, finely-made. Some of her fingernails were broken, as if she had been scrabbling on the underside of a coffin lid.
Gradually she straightened up, her black eyes never leaving Piet's face. The scrap of cardboard with her name on it was still fastened about her neck.
"It's all right," said Piet, very softly. "Would you like to have a ride with me in my van?"
Slowly he reached out his hand, and incredibly the girl took it, her long fingers wrapping themselves around Piet's short stubby ones like vine suckers around a beanpole. She looked down at the ground then, as if giving herself up to his charge. Piet set off back towards his trailer, leading the girl step by step along the verge as if she were a blind woman. Her dress flapped in the warm July breeze like a creased yellow flag.
"Bloody hell," said Rudy. "What do you reckon?"
"What I reckon is we're late already," I said. "Let's get back on the road."
I swung myself into the cab and started the engine. I was aware that Mae was eager to talk but I drove the rest of the way in silence. I couldn't get what had happened out of my mind. As we lined up to enter the ground it occurred to me that Leonie Pickering, in her smallness and her vulnerability, might well have reminded Piet of his dead sister.
Cirencester was a good pitch, the ground adjoining one of the main roads into the town and with views of the Cotswold Hills in the distance. I parked the trailer then left Mae to sort out our stuff while I went to help Vaska and Rudy with the marquees. I forgot about Piet for a while, though later on when I caught sight of old Jones doing his site inspection I thought it best to go and tell him about our strange visitor. Jones's real name was Diccory Bellever and in his heyday and before he put on all the weight he was famous all over Europe as an escapologist and wire walker. The name Jones came from Davy Jones's Locker, and the near-miss Jones had had in his twenties when one of his routines had gone wrong and he sank to the bottom of the Solent wrapped in half a hundredweight of chains.
"Can she do anything?" he said. "I mean, can she work?"
"I don't know," I said. "I doubt it. She's just a kid."
Jones sighed. "You know how I feel about carrying dead wood, Marek. And the last thing we need is the cops on our backs if she's run off from somewhere. How old do you think she is?"
"About fifteen," I said. "I didn't really get a proper look at her." Actually I thought she was younger, but I didn't want Jones blowing a fuse.
"Can you handle this for me, Marek? God knows I've got enough on my plate." Jones sighed again, and folded his sinewy, still-muscular arms around the vast barrel of his stomach.
"Don't worry," I said. "I'll have a word with Piet, see how the land lies." I wandered around the outfield for a bit then ambled over to Piet's trailer. There was no sign of Piet but I could smell cooking so I guessed he was inside making supper. The girl was sitting on the trailer steps under the awning. She was wearing one of Piet's vests and a pair of his corduroys. The trousers were too short for her and the shirt too big. The armholes gaped open, revealing the hollows of her armpits, matted with tawny hair, and her saucer-sized adolescent breasts. In front of her was a deep-sided bowl containing a generous helping of Boston beans and the paprika-seasoned potato cakes that were Piet's speciality. She was shovelling beans into her mouth with a spoon, her head bent low and her hair almost dragging in the food. She looked up at my approach and put both arms around the bowl as if she were afraid I might try and take it away from her. There was a crusting of potato on her upper lip.
A moment later Piet appeared in the doorway. He had a tea towel tied around his waist, and was holding a potato masher.
"Mark," he said. I am Marek Platonov, the knife thrower. My father, Grigor Platonov, was a champion fire eater. Mae and Piet have always called me Mark. "Would you like some latkes? There's plenty to go round."
"No thanks, Piet,' I said. 'I'm having my supper later with Mae."
I wondered how Piet had managed to persuade the girl to remove the filthy yellow dress she had been wearing. Once when we were both drunk I asked Piet what he did for sex. He told me there was a woman he saw in London from time to time. I had assumed he meant a prostitute. Now I wondered if he saw this girl as her replacement. The idea worried me but I didn't see what I could do about it. I chatted with Piet for a while then went to get changed. By the time I arrived backstage Marina was already there.
"You're late," she said. "What's all this about a runaway?"
Marina Kraicek and I are astrological twins. We were born on the same night but to different mothers, just fifteen minutes apart. We were inseparable as children and spent most of our teenage years thinking we were in love, but things don't always turn out the way you plan. Marina met Tolley and then I met Mae. Things were difficult for a while, but I don't think either of us ever considered breaking up our act. We had a connection on stage that was close to telepathic. You don't throw something like that away. What you do is bury the past the best you can.
"Just some weird kid," I said. "Piet's looking after her."
She gave me a look, as if she suspected me of trying to hide something. I shrugged my shoulders in a silent denial and then it was time for us to go on.
It was a full house and a good crowd, and I was soon lost in the danger and the excitement of the strange craft that earned me my living. When I got back to the trailer I found Mae already in bed. She was reading The Aspen Papers. I could never understand Mae's addiction to Henry James. I had tried reading him, for her sake, but had found his writing turgid and deeply dull.
"In bed with another man again, I see," I said.
"Oh, Henry's the perfect gentleman," she said, smiling up at me. "All we ever do is sit and talk."
I took the book from her hands and laid it aside. She was wearing a white slip of some silky material that clung to her breasts and pooled in her lap like spilled milk. I undressed quickly and lay down beside her.
We slept where we lay, in the warmth and salt-stickiness of our lovemaking. I woke once in the night, and pulled the sheet up over us. Mae's hair lay scattered across the pillow, turned silver by the moonlight creeping in between the curtains. In the instant before I fell asleep again I glimpsed in my mind the face of Leonie Pickering, her narrow lips drawn back from her discoloured teeth.
After Cirencester came Stroud, then Tetbury and Malmesbury and Frome. Each time we arrived at a new ground the girl would jump down from the cab and run about like a child that disliked being shut indoors. She made no attempt to help us set up, but would sidle up to us as we worked, standing at a short distance with her hands behind her back as if we were some fascinating new species of animal and she was afraid she might scare us away. It was unnerving at first but we soon grew used to it. For the first couple of days she was silent, then suddenly she wouldn't shut up, though it was sometimes difficult to make out what she was saying. Every now and then something would startle her and she would dash to find Piet. She seemed devoted to Piet, yet sometimes she teased him, pulling faces behind his back. Once I saw her dart out from behind some bushes and begin jeering at him in her high excited sing-song voice, cupping her hands around her mouth to make a loud hailer.
"Come on, Piet-Piet, you old slowcoach, you old monster!"
She leapt up on the fence, gripping the top bar with those extraordinary long toes of hers. She seemed light as a feather, with all the natural balance and poise of a trained wire walker. The spikes of her elbows cut "v" shapes in the clear July air, and her top rode up, exposing a stripe of her flat dirt-brown stomach. I felt a rush of desire in spite of myself. Most of the time she gave me the creeps.
Piet bought her things, clothes mostly, but also the bright, gaudy trinkets she seemed to have a passion for: silver-backed brushes and mirrors, gilt snuffboxes, crystal animals. Some of the things, I could tell, were actually quite valuable. Leonie guarded them jealously, counting and recounting them, glowering from under her eyebrows at anyone who came too near.
Piet called her "the kid" or "the hoodlum," and tried to make light of his attachment to her. He insisted she'd had a tough life and deserved a bit of care and attention, but within a matter of days it was obvious not just to me but to everyone else that he was in love with her.
"The girl is something special, Mark," he said to me. "She has talent. Just you wait and see."
I dismissed his words, believing they were just another aspect of his infatuation, but in fact he turned out to be right. Leonie Pickering was special. She possessed the kind of talent you see once in a lifetime. She reminded each of us, in her way, of who we were.
She reminded me of my father, and my father's father, of the days when circus had really meant something. In the years before the war, when my grandfather was still performing, people would save for weeks to get a ticket to see him and talk about what they had seen for years to come. Leonie gave me a window on that world. Sometimes I still dream about what I saw.
It was midweek, a Wednesday, and we were pitched up at Shepton Mallet. There was no matinee that day, so I decided to take advantage of the fine summer weather and go for a walk. On my way up the hill I caught sight of Milena, Marina's sister, practising her bareback riding in one of the fields. She had used some yellow rope to rough out a circle, and her two horses, Gideon and Gilgamesh, were cantering around it in opposite directions. Milena was standing on Gilgamesh's back, her bare feet dusty with rosin. As the two horses passed each other she leapt in the air and somersaulted down on to the back of Gideon. Neither horse so much as broke his stride.
Milena was a tall girl, much taller than Marina, with the flat-chested, well-muscled build of the professional gymnast. She was five years older than Marina and I and because of that she had always seemed distant from us. On that day she was wearing a pair of snagged ballet hose and an old running vest but she was still incredible to watch. She had worked with horses all her life, yet I could never help being impressed by her control over them, especially since Gideon and Gilgamesh were big horses, rangy and full of mettle, with the narrow muzzle and intelligent eyes of the true Arab thoroughbred.
I stood and watched them, leaning against the gate with my eyes half closed against the glare of the sun. Suddenly I saw Leonie entering the field on horseback through a gap in the hedge. She was riding Pierrot, one of the two skewbald ponies that the twins used to pull their glass carriage. As I watched she stood up on the horse's back, bent backwards and then went into a handstand. She was wearing a halter top and yellow shorts, the thin material pulled tight across her buttocks. The soles of her feet flashed white as plovers against the sky.
She made a whooping noise, somersaulting off the horse's back and landing on her feet in the grass. Milena called out to her and Leonie responded excitedly, but they were too far away for me to hear what they were saying. I realised Milena must have been training the girl. Just then Milena caught sight of me. She sprinted towards me across the field, her long legs lithe as a deer's.
"Oh Marek, you mustn't spoil things. This was meant to be a surprise." She leaned on the gate, resting her chin on her hands, smelling faintly of horses and dry bracken. Golden freckles dusted the top parts of her cheeks.
"How long has she been doing this?" I said.
"Only a week. But she's a natural. I've never known anything like it."
We both turned to look at her then. Leonie stood with her arms around the horse's neck, her face resting against his withers. She seemed to be breathing him in. Pierrot whickered with pleasure, slapping flies away from his hindquarters with his tail.
"I won't say anything," I said. And I didn't, not even to Mae, although I wanted to. I didn't have to keep the secret long. Five days later at Yeovil, Leonie's act was added to the bill.
At first she was just a warm-up for Milena. She didn't do anything too complicated, just a couple of turns of the ring and some basic tumbles. But what a carnival audience wants mostly is spectacle, the sense that they are seeing something extraordinary and preferably freakish. With her small size and her long toes Leonie Pickering was an immediate success. She wore a tiny sequined leotard and Pierrot wore a plume of pink ostrich feathers. Old Jones came down to watch, prepared to be furious, but he changed his tune quickly enough when he heard the applause.
For a while Milena seemed happy to regard Leonie as her protégée. But soon things began to change. Leonie's stunts became more daring and her act quickly became the main draw in the show. By the time we played the Goth festival at Whitby I think Milena hated Leonie. Even worse, she had begun to show her age.
On the last night we got a fire going and Rudy organised his usual pig roast. Piet had some kind of stomach bug and had gone to bed early. He had seemed uncommonly tired in recent weeks. The girl left her things strewn about the trailer and made no attempt to clear up after herself. Piet was forever cleaning or preparing more food. I began to grow concerned about him. I knew that Piet, like many dwarfs, had a dicky heart.
"Oh nonsense," he said when I suggested he should get Leonie to help out more. "You're only young once." His violet eyes had their faraway look. His veins stood out in blue knots on the backs of his hands.
Leonie sat close to the fire. She gorged herself on meat, sitting hunched over a pile of spare ribs with the juice running down her chin as if she hadn't eaten for a week. Yet she had eaten most of a chicken at lunchtime, I had seen Piet cook it for her. No matter how much she ate she never seemed to put on weight. It was as if she had a tapeworm inside her. Once she had finished she slipped away, disappearing into the darkness. She never stayed anywhere long if Piet wasn't there.
I watched her leave, then after a few minutes I followed her. We were camped in a field set back from the clifftop, high above the town. Once away from the fire it was bitterly cold. There was no moon and it was very dark, but I could just about see Leonie as she hurried along. I moved quickly to close the distance between us then reached out and grabbed her by the elbow. She was wearing an old anorak, something of Piet's. My fingers slithered on the down-filled plastic. She let out a scream but I quickly stopped her mouth with my other hand.
"It's all right," I said. "It's just Mark."
I took my hand away from her mouth. Her teeth were chattering with cold or perhaps it was fright. I pulled her towards me and unzipped her coat. I was already hard. She seemed to weigh nothing at all.
I gripped her head between my hands and forced my mouth down on hers, opening her lips with my tongue. Her flesh was cold. My first taste of her was sour, the tart acidity of unripe apples. But there was something behind it, a clogged stickiness, as if I were gulping mud, and in my nostrils the fœtid odour of spoiled meat.
She was clinging to me eagerly. I pushed her away, wiping at my mouth with the sleeve of my coat.
"What's wrong with you?" I said. "Are you sick?"
Leonie laughed then pulled her coat tightly about her and scampered away.
I was horrified at what I had done, that Leonie might tell Piet or even Mae. I couldn't understand what had come over me. I wondered if whatever disease she had might turn out to be catching.
I never looked forward to winter. It was then that I worried most about the future. Sitting in a Dalston laundrette on a Sunday afternoon while freezing February rain lashed the pavement outside I would start to think of my father's last years in a static caravan on the Isle of Sheppey and wondering what would happen when I lost my touch.
I tended to go for long walks. When I became particularly restless I would get on a train and just go somewhere, calling Mae later from some down-at-heel boarding house in Lowestoft or Aberystwyth, telling her I would be back the following day.
It must have been hell to live with, and that winter was particularly bad. I felt constantly on edge, as if there were some urgent unfinished business I had to attend to. I lay awake into the small hours, Mae soundly asleep beside me, endlessly reliving those few brief violent moments on the cliff.
Piet always spent his winters in Norfolk, and this time Leonie had gone with him. I had last seen Piet in the service station on the Peterborough ring road where we had stopped off for a final breakfast before going our various ways. Leonie had stayed behind in the van. She seemed to have a dislike of public places. As I watched Piet heading for the A47 turn-off for Wisbech I couldn't help asking myself how he and Leonie would occupy the long winter months.
"Do you think they'll be all right?" Mae said.
"He'll look after her, don't worry," I said, and we had left it at that. I had avoided Leonie since Whitby, but now more than ever I wanted to know the truth about her, who she was and where she had come from. The obsession did not fade with time as I hoped it would. Instead it seemed to grow stronger and in the end I grew sick of myself. I told Mae I needed to get out of London.
"I'm going stir crazy," I said. "It's only for a couple of days."
She smiled at me sadly. I hated leaving her, but I did it anyway. I packed an overnight bag and hitched a lift in a Ford Sierra. I was in Cirencester before nightfall.
I remembered the town as bustling, almost festive, but the arrival of winter had made it turn in on itself and I barely recognised it. The streets seemed dour and stark, the stone cottages huddled like beggars, the outlying fields where we had set up our tents reduced to a grubby wet pastureland. I booked into a bed and breakfast on the Gloucester Road. In spite of the dreariness of the weather and of the place I felt curiously exhilarated. I realised how rarely I had the chance to be alone.
I slept better than I had in weeks and woke up refreshed. I was eager to explore the town. It was not the tourist sites I was interested in, the Norman arch or St. John's church or the fine old buildings on Castle Street, but the corner newsagents and garage forecourts, the rows of terraced cottages with their untidy back gardens, the anonymous outskirts. I knew it was crazy but I couldn't help myself. I wanted to see where Leonie might have lived.
I walked for a couple of hours. The houses I passed were mostly well-kept and respectable-looking and I quickly began to resent them for it. My eyes fastened keenly on any sign of dereliction or dilapidation: a rotting shed on an overgrown allotment, the torn mesh on a line of empty rabbit pens, a broken pane of glass, replaced with cardboard, in the window of an abandoned Morris Minor. Through the gaping doorways of old tractor barns I caught glimpses of rusting machinery. On a low-slung washing line outside a mouldering farmhouse a yellow dress flapped wetly in the chilly air. I kept feeling I was being watched, yet in all the time I was walking I hardly laid eyes on a soul. Finally it began to rain. There was nothing for it but to head back into town.
The library was housed in a modern building, which had recently undergone a refurbishment. As well as the main lending library there was a reference section, where you could consult a selection of more specialised textbooks, or use one of the library's PCs. I paid for an hour and logged on. I typed Leonie Pickering into the search bar, but none of the results it generated seemed even remotely relevant. I did a search for local papers, and discovered that the main newspaper for the Cirencester area was the Wilts and Gloucestershire Standard. I clicked on the tab marked archive, then went back a full twelve months. I felt frustrated at first, with so much information to sift through, but I became engrossed in spite of myself and quickly became sidetracked. The articles were mundane but they had the compulsive quality of any good soap opera. I was halfway through a story about the neighbourhood war that erupted over a dog-stealing incident when the name Pickering leapt out at me from the opposite page.
It seemed that in the May of the year before a local man called Wilfred Pickering had been taken into custody for the murder of his grandson Eric Quayle. According to the newspaper report the boy was less than a month old when he died and he had been in the care of his grandfather at the time.
A later report said that Wilfred Pickering had been acquitted. The report carried a photograph of Pickering leaving the courthouse together with a woman the paper claimed was Willis Quayle, Pickering's twenty-nine-year old daughter and the mother of Eric Quayle. The picture was out of focus, and the two people in it were facing away from the camera. They could have been anyone.
I carried on searching, typing in Wilfred Pickering and Eric Quayle and even Pickering murder, but all I managed to find were the same two articles in slightly different versions in other newspapers, plus one further photograph of Willis Quayle. She had on the same belted mackintosh she had been wearing in the other photograph and I guessed that both pictures had been taken at the time of the court hearing. The photographer had made an attempt to get her in close up, but she had turned her head at the last moment, blurring her features.
I was no further forward. I considered paying for more time on the computer but decided against it. It was late in the afternoon and I had had enough. For all I knew the Wilfred Pickering in the articles was a complete red herring. Pickering was a common enough name, after all. I closed down all my searches and called it a day.
Outside it had stopped raining but it was beginning to get dark and the wind had turned bitingly cold. I was also extremely hungry and I realised I hadn't eaten since breakfast. I headed back towards the old part of town, where I knew most of the eating places were bound to be concentrated. I went into the first pub I came to, a place called the Dog and Soldier. It was a narrow-fronted, dark red building with small windows and did not look particularly inviting but I wasn't in the mood for hunting around. Once inside though I was pleasantly surprised. The place was cheerful and deceptively spacious, a warren of side rooms and alcoves extending a long way back from the street. There was a log fire burning, and a television set in one corner tuned to a football match. I heard relaxed laughter and the chink of glasses. The clock above the bar was showing half-past five.
I ordered a pint and the chicken casserole from the bar menu then went to sit down. I felt suddenly very tired. I tried watching the football but couldn't summon up much enthusiasm for it. I wished I had something to read. Then I noticed there was a small bookcase just to the right of the television. The top shelf was stacked with magazines, Woman's Own and House and Garden and What Car, the same as you might find in a dentist's waiting room. On the lower shelves there were some paperback spy thrillers and crime novels, also a clutch of guide books and town histories, most of them long out of date. None of them appealed to me. I flicked through the pages of one or two of the spy stories, trying to rouse an interest, but it all seemed too involved, too much of an effort, and eventually I settled on one of the guide books, a dusty red hardback called Gloucestershire Myths and Legends. The boards were cracked, and the book smelled as if it had spent a long time in someone's attic, but the chapters were short and I thought I could probably read through one or two of them while I waited for my food to arrive.
The book was not what I had expected. I had prepared myself for something po-faced and old-fashioned, but the prose was clear and direct and the stories themselves were compelling. There was one about a primary school teacher who turned out to be a distant relation of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, and another where the inhabitants of a village got together and burned one of their neighbours as a witch. I supposed the book was meant as a gimmick, the kind of joke travelogue that was either funny or unsettling depending on the state of your nerves. It certainly kept me entertained. There was one story that was particularly gruesome about a giant mythical land leech called the Lammas Worm. The book claimed that some of the more isolated communities in the steep wooded valleys around Stow had built a cult around it, that they kidnapped local girls and offered them to the worms in a kind of debased marriage ceremony. The offspring the girls gave birth to were monsters, a man-worm hybrid of low intelligence and rapacious appetite. The girls themselves had to be slaughtered, not so much to conceal the crimes of the cult as to assuage the agony and madness that followed in the wake of what they had suffered.
I laughed nervously to myself as I read this, and I jumped in my seat when the barman brought my food. The Dog and Soldier was evidently a popular place to go for an early supper, and I was glad to be surrounded by other people. Just as I was clearing my own plate the barman delivered two steaming platters of fish and chips to the men at the table next to me. The men were both large, with callused hands and ruddy complexions. They ate steadily and with intense concentration, as if they were engaged in some arduous professional task. They finished their food at the exact same moment, then sat back in their seats, their beer bellies resting comfortably on their knees. One of them began setting up a game of chequers.
"I see they finally caught up with that Pickering lunatic," said one of them.
"I don't read the Standard," said the other. "Not since that new bloke took over the sports page. It's really gone downhill since then."
"They say he drowned that kid in a bucket like a new-born puppy. Deformed, they say it was, not properly a child at all. That's why he drowned it, at least that's what Pickering says. Says he wanted to put it out of its misery. But you can't believe everything you read though, can you? Not the way the papers are these days."
"I suppose that's what you get for fecking your own daughter."
The two of them began to laugh, a soft, companionable chuckle that rocked them back on their chairs and hid their eyes in the flesh of their faces like currants in dough. A wave of heat and nausea rushed over me, a sensation so intense that I wondered if there had been something wrong with the food I had just eaten. The two draughts players seemed to shimmer before me like a mirage. Their conversation had already begun to take on an edge of the surreal. I turned away from them so that I could put Gloucestershire Myths and Legends back on its shelf, and when I looked at them again they were so deeply engrossed in their draughts game it was as if they had never spoken.
When I reached for my beer I found my hand was shaking, and my sweaty fingers left visible prints on the glass. In spite of the log fire and the massed body heat of the many drinkers standing around the bar my teeth had begun to chatter. There was a sharp, dry tickling at the back of my throat, as if someone had given it a prod with one of my knives. I realised with a kind of dazed relief that the sickness and dread I was experiencing had nothing to do with the chicken casserole or the book of horror stories or even the prurient gossip of the two draughts players. I was simply going down with a cold.
I paid for my food and left. As I walked through the darkened streets the cold symptoms intensified and by the time I got back to the guesthouse I was ready to drop. I didn't often catch colds but when I did they always laid me up badly. When I woke the next morning my throat was burning and my nose was blocked with mucus. All I wanted was to turn on my side and go back to sleep, but somehow I managed to get myself moving. I knew that no matter how rough I was feeling I didn't want to spend another night alone in Cirencester. I bought some aspirin from a local chemist, swallowed three tablets straight off and set off on foot towards the bypass.
I was lucky that day. In less than ten minutes I caught a ride from a frozen foods haulier who let me sleep in the back of his van all the way to Potter's Bar. I was home before it got dark. Mae was so preoccupied with feeding me chicken soup and dosing me with more aspirin that she didn't ask me a single question about my trip.
I did my best to forget what had happened, to put it all down to a kind of fugue state brought on by the 'flu virus. But sometimes I would hear again the quietly contemptuous laughter of the two red-nosed draughts players, remember the book with its dented covers, and a feeling of panic would creep over me. I drowned the panic in tedium; the blank grey stasis of those days in late February and early March that normally left me tense as a wire now soothed me with their sameness, their repetition. Once I was fit again I found work on a building site and later in a canning factory. In the evenings I sat on the sofa with Mae in front of the gas fire and read detective stories. Around midnight we went to bed and made love. Gradually I realised that I was happy, that I was glad it was just Mae and me. I wanted things to stay the way they were. I saw the approach of the start of the season with something like dread.
On the weekend of the spring equinox we gathered as usual at Stevenage for the off. When I first saw Leonie I hardly recognised her. Her frizzy hair was combed smooth, and there was a dash of vermilion lipstick on her mouth. Her jeans and T-shirt were spotless and most extraordinary of all she was wearing shoes. She smiled at me, and I could not tell if that smile was meant as invitation or mockery. I felt like shaking her. It was as if the peace of the last two months had never been.
"Mark!" Piet came hurrying across to where we were standing on the outfield, moving with that lopsided, twisting gait of his that always reminded me of a brandy bottle rolling downhill. Normally he might have greeted me with a high five, or by punching me playfully in the stomach, but on this occasion he put both arms around my waist and hugged me close, as if he had not seen me for many years.
He raised his head then and looked at me and I saw his violet eyes were shining with a kind of dumb elation. He kept tugging at my shirt cuff, and I realised he was trying to show me something.
"We've got something to tell you," he said. "We got married last week."
He thrust out his hand, eagerly displaying the gold band. I saw then that Leonie was wearing a ring also, a matching band in the same yellow gold but narrow as wire.
"They had to make it specially," Piet said. "They didn't have anything small enough to fit her." He took her hand and bent forward to kiss the ring. Leonie's painted lips twitched in a half smile.
"Silly old monster," she said quietly. She touched the back of his hair with her other hand then wandered off to where Rudy Shyler was getting ready to load the ponies. She laid her face against Pierrot's neck then nuzzled him behind the ear. She stood for a while, watching Rudy fill up the haynets, then went inside Piet's trailer and closed the door.
"She's pregnant," Piet said suddenly. His face filled up with a kind of earnest tenderness. I stammered my congratulations. I felt my stomach curdle and a chill went through me, as if cold hands had reached inside me and given my intestines a squeeze.
Once we were on the road I told Mae the news.
"I think it's wonderful," she said. "Piet is one of the angels. If anyone can help that girl it's him."
She glanced across at me as if fully expecting me to agree with her, but I said nothing and kept my eyes on the road. I hoped she was right, but I doubted it. In my heart I already believed that Leonie Pickering was beyond help, but I could not explain that to Mae. I was afraid that if I tried she would think I had gone insane.
I watched Leonie like a hawk. I was waiting for a sign, I suppose, something I could use to prove what she really was. My suspicions disturbed me so profoundly they kept me awake at night. And yet my sexual desire for her only seemed to grow more intense. Sometimes when I made love to Mae I found myself imagining Leonie's tiny, bud-like breasts, her brittle clavicle, the ripe green stench of her. I imagined myself battering her so hard with my body that it broke her bones. I would come so violently then that it was like having a piece of me torn away. Sometimes there were tears on my cheeks. I would lie in Mae's arms, my breath coming in heavy gasps while she stroked my hair. Eventually I would fall asleep, waking the next morning to a bad headache, as if I had been drinking heavily the night before.
We had three full houses at Cambridge, and Leonie's picture was in the local paper.
"You're going to be famous, my sweetheart," Piet said to her. "We'll have to start keeping a scrapbook."
He seemed thrilled with the photograph, and carried it with him everywhere.
"Aren't you worried about her performing?" I asked him. I hoped he would know what I meant without my having to mention the pregnancy directly. He beamed like a schoolboy who had just been awarded a gold star for some improbable feat, a record-breaking tap dance, maybe, and shook his head.
"She knows what she's doing, you only have to look at her. She'll know when it's time to stop."
I had to suppose he was right. We played Northampton and Rugby and Warwick, Coventry and Leamington and Worcester, then headed south towards Great Malvern and Tewkesbury. Leonie performed every night and usually did the matinees too. Her act, as daring as ever, had become even more ambitious, her movements so quick and light you could almost believe she was weightless. I saw her do things that Milena had never attempted, not even when she was in her prime. Leonie loved being in the spotlight and she relished applause, wolfing it down the same way she wolfed her food. In the down times she was oddly withdrawn. When she was not rehearsing she spent most of her time with Corinne Cooley, who ran the insect circus. Corinne was part Chinese, with long black braids that reached down to the ground. She was very fat and ponderous in her movements, and always reminded me of the giant African land snails that had long been a favourite feature of her act. She would have made three of Leonie. But Leonie seemed calm in her presence, and although they were physical opposites their friendship seemed to benefit them both.
I dreaded our return to Cirencester; I was convinced that the place was unlucky. On the evening we arrived there I tried to work out my anxiety in rehearsal. I had to practise without Marina. She had injured her arm the week before and so I had to re-jig most of our routine. The tension in me worked in my favour and I was throwing well, but even so my heart was not in it. Piet must have been anxious too, because I couldn't get rid of him. He stood and watched me, congratulating me on every throw, even the easy ones, until I finally gave in and asked him what was on his mind.
"Do you think I should talk to her?" he said at once. "Try and explain where we are?"
"I think it's best we don't make a thing of it,' I said. 'Just carry on as normal. It's no big deal."
I was trying to reassure myself as much as him. In all our months on the road Leonie had displayed no curiosity about the towns we visited or the distances we travelled. Time seemed to have no meaning for her beyond the immediate moment. She was like an animal in this way. I looked across at her, sitting with Corinne on the back steps of Corinne's caravan looking at fashion magazines. She seemed perfectly calm and happy. It never occurred to me that the trouble might come from outside.
No one saw the boy arrive. It was a beautiful evening, warm and filled with the scents of wood smoke and dry grass. Rudy and Vaska had a quoits match going and I remember hearing the twins' accordion. Leonie's scream came out of the blue. It was a dreadful sound, high and drilling. I thought at first it was one of the horses.
He was skinny as a daddy-long-legs, his narrow, pointed chin shiny with acne, the back of his jeans jacket stained heavily with what looked like machine oil. His right cheek was horribly scarred, the hardened tissue bunching out of his face like some kind of cancerous growth. I had seen a similar injury once before, in a lion tamer who had been mauled by one of his cats.
His feet were bare. I noticed with slow astonishment his toes: long, almost prehensile, the same as Leonie's.
Leonie was backed up to the door of Corinne's caravan, pressing her hands to her face. Corinne stood off to one side in a slew of magazines. Her black, pinprick eyes looked completely blank.
"I knew you'd come back," said the youth. "Dad's been asking."
His voice was unpleasantly nasal and for some reason I felt certain his clothes were squirming with lice. He darted forward and grabbed Leonie by the arm, moving with unnatural speed. Leonie screamed again and then bit his arm, shaking her head from side to side like a dog with a bone.
"Get off me you cow!" The youth shrieked with pain and tried to pull his arm away but this only seemed to make Leonie hang on tighter. She thrashed out wildly with her tiny fists, raining down blows on his chest and lower abdomen. I dived in behind her and locked my arms about her waist, trying to pull her backwards and away. It was the first time I had touched her since Whitby. Her body was stiff as a rail and she reeked of fear. As I struggled to restrain her Vaska and Rudy came dashing over and laid hold of the bawling youth on either side. By our joint efforts we managed to separate them. The youth clutched at his injured arm and blood flowed down between his fingers in bright rivulets. He tried to turn on Rudy but Rudy was triple his weight and twice his height. It was really no contest. Rudy locked his fingers into his hair and tugged it, forcing the boy's face up towards him.
"You can see you're not wanted, son, so bugger off. If we catch you round here again we'll feed you to the blooming lions."
Someone laughed, Tolley, I think. Rudy and Vaska marched the boy as far as the road and turned him loose, giving him a push and a shove by way of encouragement. I saw him standing there, a dishevelled stick figure, his long arms trailing. He should have been pathetic, comical even, but something about him made all the hairs rise up on the back of my neck.
"I'll tell Dad what you did, you dirty bitch,' he screamed. 'Don't think you've heard the last of this."
He turned then and ran, his bare feet slapping the concrete. I was left holding Leonie. Her body had relaxed a little but she was shaking so hard it was difficult to keep hold of her. Her dress was glued to her back with sweat, and gradually I realised that the acrid stench boiling off her was not just body odour and that she had wet herself. There was a damp patch on the ground between her feet.
It was then that Piet appeared, his chest heaving from the effort of running. Leonie moaned at the sight of him and threw herself into his arms. They huddled together like frightened puppies. The rest of us stood around awkwardly, not knowing quite what to do.
"Who was that?" Piet said to her at last. "What was it that frightened you, sweetheart?" He stroked her head, his pudgy fingers smoothing her ruffled hair. I saw his gold ring flash, catching the last of the evening sunlight.
"Aaron," Leonie stammered. "He's my brother."
Leonie didn't perform that night, but for the rest of us it was business as usual, the show must go on, as the saying goes. I was exhausted by the end, but I still lay awake for some time, my ears alert to every sound. When I finally fell asleep I slept like the dead. When I woke the next morning my head felt muzzy and sore. I washed and dressed then went outside. I saw Piet at once, standing at the edge of the ground and looking down towards the town. I walked over and stood beside him.
"How is she?" I asked.
"Much better," he said. "But I've told Jones she's not going on tonight. It's too much of a risk, with that bastard around. Especially in her condition."
I nodded in agreement, though I felt more than ever embarrassed and disquieted by the mention of Leonie's pregnancy. She was still not showing at all, and I could not help remembering that when I grabbed hold of her the evening before her belly had been as hard and flat as a child's.
"Tell Mae I've gone into town," I said at last. "I need to stretch my legs. I'll be back in an hour."
I think I had some insane idea of returning to the Dog and Soldier, of hunting down the two red-nosed draughts players and demanding they tell me what they knew about the Pickerings. It wasn't until I reached the High Street that I realised that all the pubs would still be closed. I wandered aimlessly through the streets for a while, trying to gather my thoughts. Once I thought I saw Aaron Pickering, slipping away from me between the houses, but as soon as I set off in pursuit he disappeared.
There was no more sign of him that day or the following morning. We packed up and set off for Stroud. Leonie stayed in the trailer, and I did not see her again until five days later, when we arrived at Melksham. I was shocked at the state of her. Her hair was a mess, and her skin had a greyish cast, as if she were sickening for something. The worst thing was that all her natural grace seemed to have left her. There was a clumsiness in the way she walked, and she held her arms awkwardly, slightly away from her body, as if her sides were painful or bruised.
I thought her circus days were over but I was wrong about that. She didn't perform at Melksham but at Frome she went on for the matinee. I watched her go into the ring, half-convinced she would fall and injure herself, but once she was in front of the audience her clumsiness seemed to evaporate. Her performance was tight and spotless and appeared to be completely secure. The crowd were mainly schoolchildren and they gave her a standing ovation. As I turned to go backstage I overheard one little girl speaking excitedly to her teacher.
"Is that lady real?" she said. "Or did they make her up out of computers?"
"Of course she's real, Janey," said the teacher, a pretty young woman with shiny light chestnut-brown hair. "You can smell her from here. Here, you've got some chocolate on your chin."
The teacher leaned over and dabbed at the girl's face with a large white handkerchief. Her glossy hair swung forward like a bell. The child's pale eyes glimmered in the shadows like blue crystals.
Leonie did not appear in the main performance and I assumed she had spent the evening resting in the trailer. But later as I returned to the van I saw a dark shape moving swiftly between the wagons. I thought at first it was a fox or a stray dog on the lookout for food, but suddenly it made a dash for Piet's trailer and I saw that it was Leonie. For a moment she looked straight at me, her tiny face pale in the security lights, her black eyes hard and glittering as jewels. I took a single step towards her, but she went inside the van, disappearing so suddenly it was as if she had melted through the door. I wondered where she had been. She never usually went far without Piet.
"She's seeing him, I know she is," Piet said to me a day or two later. We were at Warminster by then, and the summer was ripening, the fields around the camp heavy with corn. I thought at first Piet was talking about some love rival, some lad she had met in the town. When I realised he meant her brother I knew at once it made a hideous kind of sense. The thought that Aaron Pickering had been with us ever since Cirencester, shadowing us, spying on us, perhaps even stowing away in our wagons, filled me with horror. I told Piet he must have got it wrong.
"She can't stand the guy," I said. "You saw what she was like."
I didn't tell him that I had already been a witness to one of Leonie's midnight escapades, but from that moment on I saw Aaron Pickering everywhere, or imagined I did, and my thoughts dwelt on him constantly. He disturbed and repulsed me, as an infected wound repulses, or a seething mass of maggots on a garbage heap. I couldn't get him out of my mind.
We continued travelling south and west. The nights were hot and humid, the trailer was like an oven. In Yeovil the dashboard thermometer reached a high of thirty-four degrees. I lay sleeplessly in bed beside Mae, making futile attempts to get more comfortable. From the very far distance came the rumble of thunder, but it was a dry sound, like an old man coughing, and did nothing to dispel the heat of the day. I lay twisted in the sheet, my mind turning in exhausted circles. I thought Mae was asleep. When she spoke to me out of the darkness I jumped a mile.
"I know there's something wrong, Mark. I wish you would tell me."
"It's nothing," I said. "It's this heat, that's all. I can't sleep."
I laid my hand in the small of her back. I wanted to make love to her but my thoughts and the sweltering heat had sapped my strength.
"I think we should talk," she said. "I know there's something." Her voice was heavy and slurred. A couple of minutes later we were both asleep.
We were awakened by Leonie screaming. There was the crash of breaking glass and then, unbelievably, a burst of wild laughter. Mae started to get out of bed but I told her to stay where she was. I threw on a pair of jeans and raced outside.
The door to Piet's trailer stood wide open, and as I ran towards it I saw a man emerge. He was completely naked, his scrawny body white against the surrounding darkness. He started down the trailer steps but then tripped and fell headlong. In the light from Piet's old carriage lantern I saw that it was Aaron Pickering. His back was a mass of scars, as if he had been beaten on repeated occasions with a nylon rope or a cat o' nine tails. As he picked himself up off the ground I saw that his groin had been shaved. His penis hung stunted and flaccid like a limp white worm.
Our eyes met and he grinned. Then he was on his feet and racing away. I was after him in a moment but he had a head start on me and unlike Pickering I wasn't used to running in bare feet. It was clear to me almost at once that I wasn't going to catch him. I stood at the edge of the ground, breathing in painful gasps and trying to work out which way he had gone. In the light of the single streetlamp the road was empty. It was as if the youth had simply vanished into thin air.
At that moment there was a flash of lightning so bright it was as if daylight had momentarily been restored. The thunderclap that accompanied it was loud enough to make me cover my ears. There was a moment of complete hiatus, as if the universe itself had paused for breath, and then the heavens opened. It was as if the rain of many months had been saved and stored precisely for this moment. I was saturated in an instant, the torrent coming down so hard I could almost imagine I was standing under a waterfall. The ground gave up its heat with a hissing sigh.
It was a moment of insanity, of joy. I felt flooded with an intense vitality, a kind of pagan exhilaration. My skin prickled and my heart rate increased. The smell of wet grass was intoxicating. It was as if every cell in my body stood rampant, confirming its allegiance to the earth.
I wanted to run and shriek, to roll in the bracken, to give myself up to the night. It was only the sight of Piet that stopped me, that brought me back to myself. He had tried to run after Aaron Pickering but had fallen down. He lay on the soaking ground, his violet eyes overrunning with rain and helpless tears.
"I woke up and he was there in the bed with us," he wept. "He was lying on top of her. I threw the water glass at him. I didn't know what else to do."
He tried to get to his feet but couldn't get any purchase on the slippery ground. He was still crying, and his tiny body was beginning to shake with cold. I knew that Piet's lungs were not of the normal capacity, that colds and chills were more dangerous for him than for other people.
"We can worry about all that later," I said. "Let's just get you out of this rain."
Some of the others had appeared by this time but I waved them away. I didn't want to have to talk about what I had seen. I caught Piet under the arms and lifted him up. He was surprisingly heavy. I supported him towards his trailer but when we got there we found the door locked and all the curtains drawn. I rattled the door handle and called Leonie's name but the noise of the rain drowned everything out. I toyed with the idea of fetching my hacksaw and cutting my way in but decided that would probably make things worse.
"She's had a bad scare," I said to Piet. "Let's give her some time to calm down. Come over to our place, at least until the morning. You need a change of clothes, for a start."
I looked down at him and for the first time I noticed he was still in his pyjamas. By the time I got him back to our trailer Mae already had the kettle on. She gave Piet some towels to dry himself and found an old dressing gown of mine for him to put on. I took the cushions off the sofa and made up the foldaway bed.
"Try not to dwell on things," I said to Piet. "You'll see her in the morning."
He hadn't spoken a word since his outburst about Pickering. He looked more miserable than I had ever seen him, shrunken somehow, and it was not just that my burgundy dressing gown was way too big for him. It was as if the stuff that made him Piet was leaching away.
Mae hung his sopping clothes over the drier in the bathroom and made him a cup of sweet tea. Once we were sure he was asleep we went back to bed.
"Has that boy gone for good, do you think?" Mae said. Her soft features were drawn tight with anxiety, and suddenly I had a raindrop-bright memory of the first time I saw her, all by herself, hanging around the entrance to the funhouse and eating a chocolate ice cream. I had known I was in love with her before we exchanged so much as a single word.
"I don't know," I said at last. She seemed better after that. Perhaps it was because she knew I was no longer lying to her.
The next day dawned bright and clear, with that particular apple-crisp freshness that only comes in the wake of a summer storm. The sky was high and infinite and blue.
Piet's trailer was as quiet as death. I wondered if Leonie had escaped in the night somehow, but I didn't like to say as much to Piet. I left him with Mae while I went and did my morning practice with Marina. We worked in silence for a while, going over the routines we intended to use in that evening's performance, then suddenly Marina turned to face me. She still had a knife in her hand, one of the antique Savitskas that had belonged to my father. She was in her tracksuit bottoms, with her hair pulled back from her face in a black bandeau.
"What's been going on with Piet?" she said. "What have you done? I bloody well want to know."
Her eyes flashed, sharp as the knife, yet what I read in them was hurt, for whatever secrets she thought I was keeping from her, for the summer as it passed its zenith, for the way our lives had diverged, long ago and inexplicably, the way a road does when it suddenly splits in two.
"I've done nothing," I said. "I don't know what you're talking about." I bowed my head, refusing to meet her eyes.
If I get free of this it's over, I thought suddenly. I felt heartsick and somehow in peril, and I knew then that I was finished with the company. It was as if, peering through the dust-streaked windscreen of my old trailer, I had unexpectedly glimpsed the shape of another life.
The day passed in a kind of dream, the sun arcing across the sky like a blow torch slowly cutting through a steel bulkhead. When it got to five o'clock and there was still no movement from Piet's trailer I had a quiet chat with Vaska and we decided we would have to break in. I used the hacksaw to cut around the lock then eased my hand through the hole and opened the door from inside. The drawn curtains had created a dingy semi-darkness, and there was a bad smell, a cross between rancid butter and rotten vegetables. Except for the faint buzzing of a fly trapped in the narrow corridor between the curtain and the window glass the place was eerily silent. I looked cautiously about, prepared to find squalor and chaos, but there was just Piet's living room, with the ancient Ultrabrite television in the corner and the reproduction Audubon bird prints on the walls. There was a half-finished cup of coffee on the draining board in the kitchen but apart from that it was spotless. I left the bedroom until last. The sheets were torn back from the bed, and I saw shards of glass glittering like tiny daggers on the carpet, the remnants, I supposed, of the broken water glass. The rancid smell was far stronger. The room appeared as empty as the others but I knew it was not. Somehow I could sense her presence, tugging away at my being like the pull of a tiny fish at the end of a line. Or perhaps it's just hindsight that makes me think this. Most likely it was just that I refused to believe she had escaped without my knowing.
"What shall we do?" said Vaska. "She's gone."
Silently I shook my head, willing him to be quiet. I knelt down and peered under the bed but there was nothing there. Then I crossed to the wardrobe and opened the door.
Leonie was crouched inside, folded so tightly into the narrow space that my first confused impression was that this was not Leonie herself but some clever imitation, a shopkeeper's mannequin made to look exactly like her. She was hugging her knees, the tiny face upturned, a white blank space in the greenish forest of paisley shirts and velvet jackets. She was holding something of Piet's, a lemon-coloured silk waistcoat, clutching it between her fingers as if for support. She had on some brief garment, a slip or camisole, stained in patches with a dark viscous substance that looked like treacle.
The rancid smell was close to overpowering.
My heart was knocking in my chest like a hammer on stone. I seemed to hover above myself, observing my own actions with a rapt curiosity as if I might be tested on them later. I had a sudden and poignant memory of a children's quiz programme that Marina and I used to watch on BBC1, where they showed a panel of young contestants a short piece of film and then asked them questions about it: how many boys were on the bus? What colour was the headmaster's car? Which hand was holding the gun?
We had always enjoyed that programme. I was still thinking about it when Leonie unfurled her limbs and came out of the wardrobe, shooting between my legs like a spider passing through a crack in the wall. I could not believe the speed with which it happened. One minute I was looking right at her, the next there was just the wardrobe's velvety interior, the terrible smell, the cacophonous jangle of wire coat hangers.
"Catch her!" I yelled. I heard Vaska roar uncomprehendingly behind me but it was already too late. I bolted past him, striking my elbow painfully against the door handle. I saw Leonie ahead of me, in the square, cupboard-like space between the kitchen and the tiny bathroom. I lunged at her, grabbing at the back of her camisole, but the material slipped through my fingers. She flung herself out through the door of the trailer, which foolishly I had not thought to close.
She ran hunched over as if protecting her stomach then staggered and went down on all fours. Her hands were splayed, her outstretched fingers clawing the dirt. The crowd drew back, parting before her as if she were not the girl they had sheltered and worked with for more than a year, not her at all, but some other creature, dangerous and diseased. The bright daylight made her garment transparent, and as she righted herself again I saw that she was naked beneath it, the narrow hips and child's breasts, the dark tuft of hair between her legs were all clearly visible. Her belly, once so flat, seemed to have become enormous overnight. It swung before her, quivering grotesquely, like the stomach of a famine victim distended by poisonous fluids. Her pale skin was criss-crossed with blue, the veins pulsing in her flesh like living wires. She looked back at me once, her face blank with terror, as if it was not me she saw but some vision of hell. Then she gathered herself and ran on, making for the ragged copse of beeches at the edge of the field.
I went after her at top speed, yelled out for Vaska to follow. At the back of everything, as if from some far distance, I could hear Piet crying Leonie's name, like a drowning man miles from the shore and calling for help.
We kept looking for several hours, tracking back and forth through the fields and copses and the small tracts of woodland in the immediate vicinity of the camp but in the end it began to get dark and we had to stop. As we retraced out steps to the wagons I caught sight of something white glimmering in the grass. It was a scrap of cloth from Leonie's camisole. Part of me did not like to touch it, but I picked it up anyway. As soon as it got light Rudy joined us and we carried on with the search. I had hardly slept a wink all night, kept awake by the helpless, agonised sound of Piet's weeping.
It was Rudy that found her. She was lying in a shallow ditch at the edge of a small stand of sycamores, half in and half out of one of the old poacher's shacks that were common in the area, as a hiding place for illegal snares or simply as a protection from the rain. An obvious place, really. I don't know how we had missed it the night before.
She lay with her face to the ground and half covered in leaves. Her legs were drawn up under her, the filthy smock torn almost in two. The tops of her thighs were slathered with congealed blood and some other substance, a greenish-yellow mucus that stank like bile. I knew without having to touch her that she was dead.
"Where's the child?" said Vaska, stupidly.
"Goodness knows," I mumbled. "A fox must have taken it, I suppose."
I don't know if they saw what I saw, the narrow track through the leaves where something had dragged itself free of Leonie's body and crawled away. The leaves had been pushed aside, revealing the brown earth beneath, and over it a silvery encrustation, transparent and brittle as ice, some kind of solidified slime. It crackled when I touched it, breaking into glistening pieces like spun sugar.
I moved about noisily, kicking up twigs and leaves, covering up the traces as quickly as I could.
"Are we going to call the police?" said Rudy.
"Are you mad?" I said. "They'll keep us here for weeks."
We walked back across the fields. None of us spoke. The sun was up by then, and I realised it was the first day of August, Lammas day. My grandmother Dmitra used to say that any child born on Lammas day was a sign of good fortune for the whole community, but she was funny that way, a great believer in old proverbs and superstitious rituals. My father always insisted it was a lot of nonsense, and that I shouldn't believe a word of it.
Piet became ill soon afterwards, and seemed to go downhill very quickly. Someone came to take him away, a stocky, rather taciturn man with a Dutch accent who claimed he was Piet's older brother. We heard later that Piet had died in a hospital in Amsterdam, of complications following a heart attack.
I thought how strange it was, that Piet had had a family that cared about him after all. It made all the years I had known him seem unreal, as if his time with us had been a fantasy of his own making, a kind of dream-projection, and all the time he was somewhere else, living another kind of life entirely.
I worked on until the end of the season. I thought at first that I would not be able to do that, but actually it came easily. People said I was on fire, and I would smile at that, and think of my father. I gave everything those last few months, with a kind of desperate joy, and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong for me, that I could not make a mistake, the kind of perfection that only comes when you no longer care.
I told no one about my plans, but I think Marina guessed. We went weeks at a time without speaking, though we performed together as well as ever.
On a freezing January morning Mae and I left our old life behind. I drove the trailer to a campsite in Leigh-on-Sea, where I had booked a berth for the rest of the winter. It would give us some time to think, if nothing else.
Mae settled quickly. She signed on to a computing course at the local college and soon got a job as a receptionist at a private clinic that specialised in cosmetic surgery. I teased her about it at first, but she said she liked it, she liked hearing people's stories, that in some strange way it reminded her of the company.
For a while I earned money as I had always done in the off season, working on building sites and in factory compounds, getting by but without any particular aim for the future. In the end I took up a new trade as a sales rep for a pharmaceuticals firm. It was Mae, in fact, who found me the job. I thought at first that I would hate it, but I quickly learned that there was an art to selling potions, a kind of alchemical magic that I grew increasingly fascinated by and that I suppose reminded me also of the company. It also gave me the freedom to travel, and I found there was enough of my old life in my new one to keep me satisfied.
My usual patch was the Home Counties, the old fortress towns of the south coast, the rural hinterland of Kent and Essex, the outer suburbs of South East London, but occasionally something came up that would take me a bit further afield. About eighteen months after I started working as a rep the chap who did the South West fell off a ladder whilst painting a window and broke his arm. He was off work for a couple of months, and his beat was temporarily split between me and one of the others. It meant a lot of extra driving but I didn't mind. It was late July when I happened to drive through Yeovil. I had no calls to make there but it had been a packed day, made more tiring by the heat, and I decided it was as good a place for a rest stop as any. I enquired at several bed and breakfasts only to find there were no vacancies. I hadn't realised I would have such trouble in finding a room. Yeovil was not on the coast, and even in high summer it was usually a quiet backwater.
Eventually a pub landlord took pity on me and let me sleep in his own spare room for a nominal fee.
"What's going on?" I asked him. "Why are you so booked up?"
"It always gets like this when the carnival's in town," he said. "It's the Lammas fair. But you're not from around here, are you, so you weren't to know."
I ate a meal in the pub, and afterwards I set out walking across the fields. It was a perfect summer evening, the sky high and transparent, the sun setting behind the trees in an amethyst haze. I found the place easily, as if my feet still carried a memory from the time before. I was expecting the old shack to have been taken down, or blown down, but it was still there, its boards a little more warped and weathered but otherwise it looked the same. As I approached I saw that the lower branches of the trees had been hung with ribbons and paper decorations, stars and lanterns and other, more mysterious shapes. The walls of the shack had been chalked all over with a series of symbols, or letters in a foreign alphabet I did not recognise. In the doorway of the hut an assortment of food had been laid out on some squares of rush matting: summer berries and plantains, three golden plaited loaves of Lammas bread.
It was a still place, but somehow not quiet, and I was anxious to leave. As I turned away something bright and shiny caught my eye. I reached out my hand, grasping at the empty air, and found myself holding a small glass ornament. It was star-shaped, about the size of a fifty pence piece, and had been tied to a twig with a piece of nylon thread. I brought it closer to look at it properly, and it was only then I saw what was embedded at its heart. It was a small grub, or insect, with a long, segmented putty-coloured body and six multi-jointed amber-coloured legs. Its legs were flung out to either side, as if it had died while trying to escape.
I had never seen anything like it before, and did not wish to again. I left the glass star where it was, and hurried away.