“Yes. Not too far.”
She stroked his brow.
“When you've grown up,” she said, “we will go far. We'll get out of Helmouth. We'll move, just like those people in the circus move. We'll find a lovely life, Joe, you and me.”
He heard her gently beating heart, her gentle breath.
“L-love you,” he breathed.
“Yes,” she said. “Love you.”
And started to sing, sending him to sleep.
“If I were a little bird, high up in the sky,
This is how I'd flap my wings and fly, fly, fly.
If I were a cat, I'd sit by the fireplace,
This is how I'd use my paws to wash my face.
If I were a rabbit small, in the woods I'd roam,
This is how I'd dig my burrow for my home.
If I were …
“Good night,” she whispered. “Good night, little one.”
She went downstairs. Soon she came up again to her own bed, her own sleep.
Joe slept. The night deepened. The tiger began to move again, out of the wasteland toward Joe Maloney.
Joe smelt it, the hot, sour breath, the stench of its pelt. He felt the animal wildness on his tongue, in his nostrils. He heard the beast padding up the stairs. He heard the long slow breath, the distant sighing in its lungs, the rattle in its throat. It came into his room, it stood over his bed.
“Tiger,” he gasped. “Tiger. Tiger.”
He prepared to die as the great striped face came closer, as the great curved fangs opened, as the cruel cold eyes stared into him. And then he changed. He felt fur beginning to break through his skin. He felt heavy paws and lethal claws. He felt his breathing deepen. He felt a tiger heart drumming in his chest. He rolled on his bed. Through his head rushed memories of running through hot forest, deer leaping before him.
“Tiger! Tiger! Tiger!”
It came from the night.
“Tiger! Tiger! Tiger!”
And the tiger took its wildness and its scent away, and Joe became simply Joe again and he went to the window and made a funnel of his hands and peered out and saw the orange stripes beneath the orange lights and the black stripes against the black night as the tiger loped toward the huge dark figure waiting there in the Cut.
“Tiger!” Joe whispered, and the tiger turned, and looked at the boy in recognition. Then was gone, disappearing with the man beyond the Cut.
Joe Maloney stroked his hands, licked his teeth, listened to his heart.
To the east, beyond the village, above the Black Bone Crags, a thin line of orange striped the black sky. Joe Maloney dressed himself, tiptoed from the house, followed the tiger, and the scent of tiger was on him, and the memory of tiger was running through his blood.
One
Easy breath, easy heart. The scent of sawdust, canvas, animal skin and animal dung. Soft earth beneath him. Gentle noises: creaking and flapping of canvas. He lay there. Something moved across his face. Something soft, delicate, that stroked his skin.
“Joe. Joe. Joe Maloney.”
He opened his eyes.
Corinna knelt at his side with a thin paint-brush in her hand. Beyond her was the net, the trapeze, the faded galaxy. Over everything, the blue blue light.
“I knew you were here, Joe,” she whispered. “I dreamed that you were here. I knew you'd come. And here you were, fast asleep.”
She showed him the paintbrush, her little case of paints.
“Turning you into a tiger,” she said. “A disguise. Hold still. Nearly done.”
He lifted his fingers to his face but she stopped him.
“You'll smudge it, Joe.”
“A tiger came for me,” he said.
She smiled.
“A tiger?”
She continued to paint him, orange, black and white. Then passed a glass of warm milk to him. He sat up and sipped and licked his lips.
“Straight from one of our goats,” she said. “There are no tigers, Joe.”
She gave him toast, saturated with butter.
“Eat this.”
He sat up and ate the food and drank the milk. Her skin was so smooth, so speckled, just like a skylark's eggshell. Her eyes the deepest blue. She wore the tightly fastened coat over her spangled costume, black tights, spangled slippers. He peered at the trapeze. He imagined jumping, spinning so fast that he disappeared. She handed him some neatly folded clothes, black satin shirt and trousers.
“Put these on,” she said. She sniggered, turned round. “Go on, then.”
He quickly took off his jeans and T-shirt, and put the new things on. She giggled when she turned round.
“Those boots, Joe! We'll have to see about those as well!”
He stood there awkward, blushing beneath his tiger stripes. He looked up again. In his head he leaped through empty air.
“I'd l-like to go on that,” he said. “That rope. I want to d—”
She grinned.
“Oh, Joe. You'll have me strung up.”
“I'd like—”
“It's against the rules. It's against the law. You'll get me sacked and us shut down.”
“N-nobody'd know.”
“You break your back and nobody'd need to know?”
He looked down, thought of falling from thin space onto the solid earth, thought of his back cracked in two, thought of lolling stupidly in his bed for a lifetime.
Corinna giggled.
“It's OK,” she said. “Just joking. Course you can have a go. But not in those boots. And anyway, first we go to Nanty Solo.”
“Nanty S—?”
“She told me to take you to her if you came. Don't worry. She won't eat you up.”
Two
She led him from the tent. The paint on his face made the skin tight, inflexible. His dark satin clothes flowed and flapped, allowed the air through, so cool. Helmouth's windows glared in the early-morning light. He looked across toward the motorway, but Stanny and Joff would already be far gone, probably already climbing through the Silver Forest.
Someone called, “Tomasso! Tomasso! Tomasso!”
The man with the goatee beard stumbled out of a caravan. He wore a grubby white dressing gown. He threw scraps of bacon to his little dogs. He smiled and waved at Corinna.
“Lovely Wilfred,” she said. “He'll not go away from us.”
They moved toward the back of the tent. Caravans and trucks were coated with dust. Many tires were already flat, and the vehicles slumped into the long grass, as if they'd never move again.
“Tomasso! Tomasso! Tomasso!”
“That's Charley Caruso,” said Corinna. “Greatest knife thrower the world had seen. Then his son died in the Ring of Fire. Tomasso. He was only five years old.”
“He called me T-Tomasso.”
“He thinks every boy might be Tomasso. And maybe one time he'll be right. Maybe his Tomasso will come back to him one day.”
“But if he's …”
“They threw him through the blazing ring. It had always been dead safe. He'd done it every night since he was three. But that night the spinning fire caught an edge of his clothes. It burned so quick. Burns and shock, and he was such a tiny thing.”
“Tomasso! Tomasso!”
“They wanted to take him away from us. But he wanted to stay, wanted to keep on traveling with us. Said it was the only way he'd see so many boys, the only way he might find his lost Tomasso again. Now he stares at the audience every night, stares into the face of every boy. He's another that'll never leave.”
They wandered on across the stony earth.
“Maybe you are Tomasso,” said Corinna. “Maybe you are and you don't know it. Maybe we're all something else and we don't know it.”
“Mebbe,” muttered Joe.
“What do you think you might be?” she said.
Joe screwed up his face. He knew that others saw a small scared thing. He knew that he was a quiet awkward thing. But he knew that this awkward thing called Joe Maloney could be
many things: a lark, a fox, a bat, a snake. He watched Corinna. He wanted to tell her what he knew and dreamed about himself. But the words stumbled on his tongue. He shuffled and shrugged.
She smiled and reached out and touched the stripes on his cheeks.
“Joe Maloney the tiger,” she said. “Here we are.”
Three
A tiny timber caravan, blue like the tent, the paint flaking and cracking. There were remnants of old words above the door: Fortune, Future, Stars. Corinna knocked, then took Joe's hand, stepped inside, closed the door again. Pale light from the single small window. Tiny gaslights flickering on the walls. The smells of candles, gas, urine, cats. A narrow low-roofed place. Threadbare red carpets covering the floor and walls.
“Corinna.” A low cracked whisper. “You brought him, my Corinna.”
Small and scrawny, she sat in a narrow bed. Red hair with silver roots, a threadbare cardigan across her shoulders. Her cheeks were shrunken, almost corpselike, but her eyes gleamed in the shadows as she turned her face and smiled upon Corinna.
On the walls, illuminated by the gaslight, were photographs of ancient scenes. Ancient caravans with ponies resting alongside them. Great tents with animal cages outside. Photographs of inside: bears and elephants, tigers snarling, lions roaring, horses leaping, panthers prowling, zebras, buffaloes, llamas, leopards, all of them within great tents, all of them watched by thousands of goggling eyes. Trapeze artists flew and somersaulted through the empty air. Men balanced great rocks and balls of steel above their heads. They supported pyramids of other men.
“I smell him,” said Nanty. “Bring him nearer.”
“His name is Joe Maloney,” replied Corinna.
“A timid deer kind of thing. Let us touch him.”
Joe recoiled, but Corinna only smiled and took his hand and held it to the woman, who touched it with her twisted fingertips like claws.
“Her name is Nanty Solo,” said Corinna. “Say, ‘Hello, Nanty Solo.’”
“H-hel—”
“He has trouble with words,” said Corinna.
“Words?” said Nanty. “That's no matter. Words is babble and noise and nonsense, Joe Maloney. But you know that, don't you?”
Joe chewed his lips. There was a pale membrane stretched across her eyes, clouding her iris and pupil, but it was as if she saw through this thing and right into his heart. She squeezed his hand and grinned.
“What is words beside a lark song, eh?”
Above her eyes, just above her eyebrows, there was a scar, a horizontal band of red that stretched straight across into the darkness beneath the thin red hair. A line as if at one time her head had been sawn or slashed in two, as if the top third had been lifted off and placed back down again.
“Your flesh is soft as buttercups,” she said. “And I see enough to see that my Corinna's been at you, boy. What is it? Ah, tiger. Bless you both. Where you come from?”
“H-Hel—”
“They let you out of there?”
She wheezed and cackled and doubled up on herself.
Corinna smiled.
“Nanty is lovely,” she whispered. “She'll do you no harm.”
The ancient woman and the young girl contemplated the tiger-faced boy. Joe took his hand from Nanty, turned away toward a group of pictures. There was a blurry Polaroid, white animals grazing in the circus ring. Joe leaned close: squat little things, their horns growing in twists and curves. He leaned closer. He moved his head aside so that whatever morning light there was could fall upon the picture. And what he thought was true: each animal had just one horn growing at the center of its head.
Nanty cackled.
“Unicorns. Yes. You ever see their like before?”
Joe shook his head and stared again. Beside the unicorns was a much older picture: a huge sleeping tiger in a net, carried by bearers on long poles from the edge of a dense forest. Then another: a tiger again, in a net again, being carried by bearers through the open flap of Hackenschmidt's Circus. He tried to match the tiger that entered the tent with the tiger that left the forest.
Nanty laughed. “Come back to Nanty, Joe. Let her smell you true. Let her divine you.” She tipped her awful head to one side. “You been this way before?”
“N-n—”
“He lives here,” said Corinna.
“Ah! An' don't we all. No memory of being any other place? No memory of traveling with a bunch like us?”
“N-no,” said Joe.
Nanty drew Joe toward her. She bent down and sniffed his throat. She ran her fingers through his hair and sniffed her hands. She held her open hands below Joe's face.
“Spit in here,” she said.
Corinna nodded: Just do it, Joe.
He licked his dry mouth and spat, a sparse spray that glistened in tiny droplets on the dark creased skin of her palms. Nanty giggled.
“That's all? But it'll do.”
She raised her hands to her nostrils and breathed in deeply.
She caught Joe's hand and lifted it to her mouth. She licked his palm.
“Nice,” she whispered. “Nice, nice.”
“Yes,” said Corinna.
Nanty's pale eyes softened as she pondered.
“And who'd you say your father and mother was?”
“I—I—”
Corinna clicked her tongue.
“Just tell her, Joe.”
“Mum's in Helmouth. Works in B-Booze Bin. Dad ran the Tilt-a-Whirl in a fair.”
“One of that crew. And he's gone and left you long time back.”
“Y-y—”
“Step closer. Let Nanty listen to your heart.”
She took his elbow and rested her ear against his chest. Joe felt his heart quickening, thumping.
“Aye,” she whispered. “The heart is beating in you as it should, then far beyond it is the secret one, like some creature panting in a deep dark cave.”
She reached beneath the covers on her bed, drew out a broad shallow wooden box. On the lid of the box was a tracery of silver. Nanty lifted the lid. In the pale light, Joe saw teeth, feathers, claws, fragments of bone, fragments of fur. Nanty closed the lid and gently rattled the box. She tipped her face closer to Joe.
“Corinna's right in picking you out, boy. Nanty gets the taste of something old and animal in you. You're not at rest in that world out there, is you, Joe Maloney?”
“N-n—”
“That's why words is such a trouble to you, boy.” She turned her eyes toward her window, toward Helmouth. “The things you know is mebbe not suitable for the words and the world that exist out there.”
She rattled the box again.
“But look at these things, Joe. Look at the world that's in this box. These,” she hissed, “is relics. Precious precious things. Bits of a world that was here before and that's here still for them that knows how to see.”
Joe reached toward the box but she held his hand, held him back.
“Not yet,” she cackled. “Look into my eyes. Forget Nanty Solo's scar. Forget the world out there. Just look into the milky eyes of Nanty.”
He looked into her eyes, but still he saw the deep channel cut horizontally across her skull, still he saw the deep fault line, still he wondered what kind of weapon and attack could have done this.
“Now close your eyes, boy.”
Joe closed his eyes. He felt Nanty's hands cradling his head, and he felt how tender they were.
“How can a thing like a head be held within a lady's fingers?” she whispered. “Here's dreams and memories and ancient tales that's being told and told. Here's stars that shine a billion miles away and deep dark caves and forests and Helmouth and teachers and mothers and horns of unicorns and the stripes of tigers. Here's a thing that's bigger than the world and all the worlds there ever was. And look. All held within a little tent of tender bone and skin and cradled in a lady's fingers. How can this be so?”
Joe licked his lips, attempted no answer.
“There's them that say t
hey know how it is so. They look inside the tender bone and skin and tell us what's inside and how it came to be there and what's right in there and what's wrong in there.” She sighed. Her fingers shifted, and it was as if they melted and began to mingle with the bone and skin of his skull. “There is them that has already tried to tell you this, Joe Maloney. Isn't there?”
“Y-y—”
“Do not believe them when they tell you, Joe Maloney.”
He heard the squeak of the lid as she opened the box.
“What would happen if Joe Maloney's head was lifted open? What would happen if they looked inside to take something out? What would happen to Joe Maloney's worlds?”
“Dun-dunn—”
“Nor does Nanty. Where does the dreams go when the tent of bone is broke?”
Joe heard skylarks screeching, rabbits squealing, cats yowling. The tiger prowled. Beasts flapped across the Black Bone Crags and padded through the Silver Forest.
“Touch,” said Nanty Solo. “Take something out.”
Joe scrabbled in the shallow box with his finger-tips, felt the sharp edges of bone and teeth, the lightness of feathers, the density of fur. His fingers closed on something hard, sharp, brittle.
“Bone,” breathed Nanty. “Bless you.”
Joe looked. A graying fragment rested on his palm.
“Bone,” she said again. She licked it, pondered. “Bone of a tiger if I'm not mistaken. Back in the twenties, or mebbe further back. Well chosen, boy.”
She snapped off a tiny fragment with her thumb-nail.
“Swallow it,” she said.
Corinna nodded: Swallow it, go on.
“Will match up with the tiger in yourself I tasted,” said Nanty. “Will prepare you for the coming torments. Let me see your tongue.”
Joe opened his mouth, rested his tongue on his lower lip. She pressed the bone fragment onto the tip of his tongue.
“Swallow the bone of the tiger,” she said.
Joe swallowed, felt the tiger bone slipping past his throat and entering his darkness.
“You must say, ‘I thank you,’ ” said Nanty.
“Th-th—”
“Say it.”
“I… th-thank you.”
Nanty Solo closed the box.