the bearded lady

They call from her hometown, asking if she is dead yet. She has brought shame on her people. They paint messages on the wall of her mother’s house. She is bad. She deserves to be killed.

She says she isn’t scared. She has lived through worse fear. This is the dress I wore when I did my beautiful dance. She holds up the ivory and silver shalwar kameez. This is the dress of freedom.

She always acts according to her emotions. She says music lifts the heaviness from her heart. She says if there was no singing, the world would be silent.

# 1

“What kind of music do you like?”

I shrug. “Oh, a bit of everything, really.”

“Everything? You can’t like everything. That’s stupid.”

I take the bait. “Why is it stupid?”

“Do you like Shania Twain?”

“Not especially, but…”

“Do you like death metal?”

“No, I don’t really…”

“Do you like car alarm music? Do you like French pop music? Do you like Christian rock?”

“No.”

“Do you like dolphin relaxation music, Jean Michel Jarre, Shakin Stevens, elevator music? Do you like Katie Melua?”

I say nothing. I give him a hard stare, and finally he retreats and leans back in his seat, folding his arms. “I’m just saying,” he says.

# 2

“I love to travel,” he says. “Do you love to travel?”

“Well, I guess I…”

“Me too. Love it. Like, I went to South America last year? Amazing. We went in the Amazon jungle and had like this major party? And then we went to Argentina and it was so cool. The entire economy had like just totally collapsed so we were drinking champagne for like fifty pence a bottle. Awesome. So what about you? You been to South America?”

“No, I just came back from Africa. I was working on a health project in Congo…”

“The Congo? Um Bongo, they drink it in the Congo. Do they all drink Um Bongo?”

“What?”

“Um Bongo?”

“What?”

He gives me his best little-boy smile and I fire back my best quizzical frown. We sit like this, silently, for the remaining two minutes.

# 3

“Tell me everything about yourself.”

“Everything?” I laugh. “We’ve only got three minutes. I hope I can’t sum up my whole life in three minutes.”

“Good point! You seem like an interesting person. I love intelligent, strong women. Tell me about your work. What do you do for a living?”

“I’m a nurse,” I say. “A tropical nurse specialist. I work for Medicin San Frontieres. Just come back from Congo, there was a lot of cholera and malaria there, but obviously we were seeing a lot of victims of violence and rape too. Now I’m training other nurses to work in areas affected by civil war.”

“A nurse? Woah. That’s awesome.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I really love my job.”

“I bet you look hot in a uniform.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Hey, we all know what nurses are like. Woo boy. I’m definitely marking your card.”

Baby has dirt in its eyes. Baby is crying dirty puddles, splash splash on the linoleum. Baby is caked with mud. I am swabbing away the dirt with balls of cotton wool and oil, gently easing it off Baby’s skin, slowly revealing the lustrous soft brown of its body. Baby’s crying is monstrous, far too loud. Within its screams I can hear pneumatic drills, ringing telephones, alarm clocks, cats fighting, cars backfiring, trees falling, nuclear bombs exploding. There are frightening little cracks as my tiny ear bones break.

Shush now, it’s alright, I say. I think I’m shouting. Through the kitchen window I can see the dog sniffing round the big hole in the garden. And it’s raining, making everything green and jungly. I want to get Baby clean and get outside and fill the hole up before everything turns to mud. If only it would stop crying! I imagine myself filling the sink with tepid water, and holding Baby underneath for a long time, until silence. Such thoughts. But then Baby stops, and tears spring to my own eyes, I am so relieved and grateful.

Now we can be a family. But Baby won’t eat. I put it to my breast and it turns its face away. I hold a rubber nipple at its lips, dripping milk into its mouth, but Baby spits everything out. Baby grows old and small, its head withering to a wispy point, its fingers twisted and gnarly.

Winter comes. Everything in the garden is dying. Rose petals turn grey and crispy, the soil hardens, the sky is growing black. Then the dog is sick. She won’t move from her bed, and whimpers when I try to touch her. Our house is too cold. There are cracks in the linoleum that I never noticed before, and peeling wallpaper and broken hinges and ceilings that sag and leak and drip water.

So I take a spade and I try to dig the hole again, but the ground is so hard and dry now. Still I scratch at the grey soil, stab my spade into the ground so hard that it jars my whole body. I pour on buckets of water, watching it run off into the drain. I dig and dig, with bleeding hands; spine breaking, heart breaking, but I must make a hole that is deep enough for Baby.

If you dream of an old woman holding out her palms, this is lucky.

If you dream of the green half of an apple, this signifies virtue. If you dream of the red half of an apple, this signifies poison.

If you come across a well in your dream, this is a well of emotion. If it is dry, and a bucket clanks in the hollow space, and scrapes against the mildewed brick, this means that you must bring your feelings up on a winch.

If you dream of violence and wake up with your heart banging in your chest and thudding in your ears, and you reach for the light and switch it on and lie back on the pillow, trying to calm yourself, but the room closes in on you, collapses around you like a sack, and the old woman laughs, and a metal bucket clanks in a dry well; if you realise you are still dreaming and you force yourself to wake and reach out for the light, but you can’t touch it and your fingers fall through it; you’re a ghost, and the only thing you can grasp is the red half of an apple: if this is your dream, you have already eaten the poison.

If this is your dream, you must try to wake up.

He didn’t know how she did it. Some kind of feminine inner strength, he supposed. He stood in the doorway of the bathroom, his dressing gown hanging open, and watched as his wife scrubbed the toilet. Something genetic, maybe. All he knew was that he couldn’t stand the thought of doing that, scrubbing away in the loo. Disgusting. But he helped in other ways, of course. She only had to ask.

He tried to talk to her while she worked, telling her about something he’d watched on television last night, but it annoyed him the way she kept her back to him the whole time. She doesn’t understand me, he said to himself. She’s not listening. Finally he got bored and told her to get a move on so he could jump in the shower. She sighed, stood up and flushed the toilet.

Will you please clean it after you get out? she said.

He laughed. It’s a shower, he told her, with rising intonation, like hello? It’s water and soap? It’s already clean? He sniffed, and the smell of bleach filled his nostrils. He admitted he liked the house to be kept clean. He just didn’t see why she had to be so obsessed about it all.

You’re a fucking child, his wife said, slamming the door behind her. He winked at his reflection. That’s her out of the way for half an hour.

He reached up to twist the dial of the shower, and as he did so a violent pain gripped his bowels. He doubled over, grabbing at his stomach, and the pain came again. Another contraction that made the sweat pop out all over his body. Jesus. He sat himself on the toilet, expecting a mighty volley of shit to come flying out of him, but in the next moment he was on the floor again, fallen in pain as his gut wrenched open, and from out of his arse shot an enormous crop of bright green feathers. He whimpered, The silky feathers rose luminous, spreading out from his backside, raising their round eyes in the long, iridescent plumes.

He was on all fours, the peacock’s tail raised kaleidoscopically over him, when his wife opened the bathroom door. God, she said. My god.

Look at me, he said. He wept. Look at me, please.

It was high up. Going up to my floor in the lift added a whole five minutes to my commute. And when I got there it was all hotshot lawyers and high heels and pencil skirts and New York on line one and a hundred words per minute, and I, the lowly filing clerk, would get carpet burns from being on my hands and knees, scrabbling in the lower regions of the metal alphabet jungle.

The building was supposed to be earthquake proof. Oh, that used to make me laugh. In the event of a quake, the building was designed to use its height, to sway like a reed in the wind. I could never get over that. I mean, how stupid can you get?

And then, when there was an earthquake, because that’s what we thought it was, although it wasn’t in the end – but anyway, when it happened, the building shook and splintered and broke up like a stick of dry, dead wood. Everyone screamed blue murder and scattered, or threw themselves to the floor, but not me. I was on the floor anyway, in the aisle between Zbigniew and Zoloft, between the great gunmetal grey cabinets, facing the windows.

And so I watched the enormous fist punch into the side of the building, and those fingers like great plump leather sofas uncurl into the office, and the tip of the index finger land right before me, almost touching.

You don’t think, in moments like that. You just act. I pulled myself up on the leathery pad of the finger, and slid down into the soft cushioning palm. And the hand closed up around me, firmly but gently, and carried me away. It was like the hand of God. I think I fainted.

It carried me out of the city in a few leaps, and strode towards the sea. Helicopters buzzed around its head, and with its free hand it swatted them away like flies, all the while tenderly holding on to me. Some of the helicopters flew into its fist, trying to liberate me. Men in bulky uniforms dangled from the underside of the copters, screaming at me hysterically. I waved them away. I wanted to scream: go away, get away from me! But I knew they wouldn’t listen. Men like that never do.

We shook off the helicopters after a while and by this time we were in the sea. It swam, holding me up out of the water. From my crow’s nest I saw dolphins and dugongs, and felt the salt spray on my face. After only a little while, we arrived in another country, a peaceful place.

It lay back against a hill, and opened its hand, and I stood up, shyly, on its palm. I loved its big gentle face. It had enormous watery eyes. It let me climb up its ear, across its forehead. When it laughed, its whole body shook. I thought I could sleep in the soft fur at the crook of its neck. I would live on fruit and berries, and at night I would climb up into its hand and tell of my adventures, and sleep in the warm nest of its fur.

But the men couldn’t leave us alone. That night they came, stealthy in fatigues, and snatched me away, dragging me into the belly of a plane, even though I fought them off, even though I told them I wanted to stay. They had tied the beast with steel cables and it roared and cried, but couldn’t break free. I knew it would have come for me, if it could. I knew it would save me again. It loved me. Why couldn’t they just leave us alone?

The sound of water running over stone. Centuries of rock. A tree grows horizontally out from the side of the mountain. A dragonfly flickers out of the mist, darts over the purple heather. I am so still. Finally my sadness can find me. It makes a cave in my stomach. It makes a fist in my solar plexus. It is sad but peaceful. It only wants me to listen, to know that it is there. Later, in the wood, there is a stone doorway, remnants of a folly, I suppose, overgrown with ivy, mildewed, dying. Mindfully, and making invocations to my gods, I step through the doorway. It is a different world on the other side, if one comes through the right way. I think I have done it. This is what it feels like to walk in the valley.

Nights she’d go flying in her tin pyjamas, flapping her arms and kicking her feet, a clanking metal fish in the blue night sky. Her aeroplane dreams were long hauls over the icing-topped world to the Far East, to the pulsing electric seas of Taiwan. Here were spare parts and wiring, robotic buffers, machines that stripped the pyjamas down and fixed them with shiny new rivets at the seams. A long time ago she had flown in bright feathers like a bird, tame, and trusting every hand that called her down from the sky. A small bird’s wings can be broken with one quick snap. Girls need armour.

The skinny dog who runs through the nights, who lives in my dreams, has long clever legs and a wet nose. She speaks with a voice as clear as a bell. We walk by the river and she comes up to me holding a white rabbit between her teeth. The rabbit is wearing clothes. When the dog opens her mouth to speak, rabbit falls out and scampers away, shirt tails flying in the wind. I stay the dog with my hand, and reach into my pocket for a treat, pulling out a pebble and a spider. She does not want either, so I eat them both myself.

I speak only a few words of dog. I am weak. I mean no harm. I am nothing. It is not enough to allow me to travel easily, fluently, in their world. I will always be a stranger here.

I have been growing my fur, but the pale bald skin still shows in patches, and my leathery knees and hands are black with dirt and swollen with sores. Still I am proud of the way my forelock hangs down, blonde and chocolate, and my tail which can wag a little. It’s not enough to pass unnoticed, but it shows I am trying.

When the dogs come I roll onto my back and show them my throat. I am weak. I am yours. They do not want me, ugly thing that I am. But they are too frightened to kill me, in case I am holding a charm or a spell. Dogs are very superstitious.

If only my fur would thicken and cover me, and my hands and feet become paws with pads and claws, and my face grow long and pointy. If only I could be beautiful, like them. I could run with the others, leaping in the air, my ears flipping back, barking. Then later, slink into the circle of sleeping dogs, curl into them and dream their dreams of juicy bones and magic.

Instead, I sleep in the bushes at the side of the canal, around the back of the pub. I am careful not to let any people see me. I don’t trust people; their faces lie, their hands pull and pinch. People can do things to you and smile and laugh an hour later. I dream about tearing them apart with my long, sharp teeth.