The parents of those children: they would be the ones who’d hate her.
They replaced Barnaby. They will replace you.
“Ahoy!” came a voice from behind. She turned. The Magnificent Jimmy, in a pillowy orange Michelin Man down coat, his ankles bare to the wind and his little velvet slippers horrid, splattered. “You all right?”
She nodded, though it was a lie. “Quite a finish,” she said. “Was that arranged?”
He laughed. “Never had a show end like that before! A chundering ovation. Where’s your child?”
A reasonable question. She looked around before she remembered. “I don’t have one.”
“Oh,” he said, puzzled. Then, “Me neither.”
She’d always thought it was good for a children’s performer to be childless. Otherwise you’d meet children thinking, Not as smart as mine. Or worse: smarter than mine, lovelier than mine. She judged every piece of art sent to the show: Martin, age six, of Sussex, you drew that with your foot. Penny, age nine, of Walthamstow, that’s the worst fucking fairy I ever saw: it looks like a wingéd footstool.
“I hate children,” said Mistress Mickle, with the force of a criminal confession. It echoed the same way. “Never wanted them.”
The Magnificent Jimmy appeared stricken, and cold. “Oh. Pity. I did. We did. Wanted them. But it didn’t happen for me and the wife.”
Mistress Mickle felt dizzy. Her whole back ached. Panic. She should say something. Ask for help. Then, “You were great. You were really great.”
“Thanks very much,” he said, but he was turning away, going back in. “You all right, then?”
“Listen,” she said, “I can get you work.”
“I’ve got work.”
“No, I mean—I’m—”
“I know who you are,” he said, and went back in.
She sat in a chair and pulled her coat around her and threw up again, and then, without knowing it was going to happen, without a single premonition, she shit her pants: it was the most awful and bewildering feeling—all that warmth against her cold, sodden skin. Mistress Mickle was dying. Jenny Early was dying. Not of embarrassment after all. She was embarrassed, but that wasn’t what was killing her.
She was afraid.
Of death? Yes, she felt the edge of it, like a metal box buried in the dirt of the yard that’s worked its way up. All these years she hadn’t been brave about death but incredulous. On the most fundamental level, and despite all the evidence to the contrary, she hadn’t believed in it. She might have believed when her parents died—her father of a heart attack, her mother of liver cancer—because she did grieve them, miss them. Eventually she cheered up, and it didn’t feel as though it were time healing all wounds, but an incorrect assumption made correct. They weren’t dead, they were elsewhere. Of course, she’d had her mother cremated; she’d gone to the funeral arranged by her father’s second wife. Then she’d seen neither parent for years. But there was no part of her that believed in their permanent absence. That’s why heaven. Heaven was invented not because people believed but because they didn’t.
She could feel the boat of people behind her. They were in the wine bar or the cinema. They were wiping the brows and mouths of their children. She, she was facing all they’d sailed away from. Jonas in the garret, the Irishwoman home and coming up the stairs, everywhere the tatters of fireworks. Her money would go to Jonas. Her nice house. It would save him or ruin him. The ferry was an hour from Harwich, but she’d never see Harwich again. The crew would find her body an hour after docking.
She tried to say something to the air. She felt like one of those Rotterdam dogs, barking and barking while the humans laughed and set off explosions. Don’t you understand, I’m not unhappy, I’m warning you, I’m telling you this is wrong, dangerous, calamitous: the sky will fall around your ears at any moment. Stop looking up and laughing. It isn’t cute. It isn’t beautiful. It’s the end of the world.
And then—how do we know this? reader, we have it on the highest authority—the ocean came calm and smooth, and Mistress Mickle’s heart did likewise, and she felt entirely better, and safe.
Birdsong from the Radio
“Long ago,” Leonora told her children, and the telling was long ago, too, “I was just ordinary.” Of course they didn’t believe her. She was taller than other mothers, with a mouthful of nibbling, nuzzling teeth, and an affectionate chin she used as a lever. Her hair was roan, her eyes taurine. Later the children would look at the handful of photographs of their mother from the time, all blurred and ill lit, as though even the camera were uncertain who she was, and they would try to remember the gobbling slide of her bite along their necks, her mouth loose and toothy on a shoulder. The threat of more. She was voracious. They could not stop laughing. No! No! Again!
Children long to be eaten. Everyone knows that.
“Don’t you want to devour that child?” Leonora asked. “Oh, look at that bottom. I am, I’m going to bite it. I’m going to eat that child whole.”
(To speak of love as cannibalism! She would have thought it bizarre herself, before her marriage, but here were the children, Rosa, Marco, Dolly, plump loaves of bread, delicious.)
Those were the days just before busses replaced the trolley lines. The children could hear from their bedroom windows the screech of the streetcars up the hill. Their father ran his family’s radio manufacturers, and there were radios in every room of the house, pocket and tabletop, historic cathedrals. His name was Alan. “Poor Alan,” Leonora called him, and they both understood why: he was in thrall to his wife. He was a very bus of a man, practical and mobile, and he left the children to Leonora, who had a talent for love, as he had a talent for business.
Winters she took the children tobogganing. Summers they piloted paddleboats across the city
