Zizou Corder Page 6

  “Are you looking for Pirouette?” she asked.

  “Yes, madame,” said Charlie. He couldn’t stop staring. There were no strings that he could see, nor signs of glue.

  Then quick as a bird, the lady took Charlie’s hand in hers (which was cool and gentle) and put it to her cheek.

  “You can stroke,” she said, her smile curling up into the corner of her elegant mustache. “You like?”

  Charlie couldn’t tear his hand away. Her beard was beautifully soft and silky, like a very young goat’s ears, or the curls between a calf’s horns.

  “We are about to eat,” said the bearded lady. “You like to come with us?”

  Charlie just nodded. Bearded lady. Okay. He could handle that.

  Dinner took place in a long narrow chamber along the stern on the upper deck. Everybody took a dish up to the hatch and was given a dollop of food—tonight it was a stew with dumplings and green peas—and a piece of bread. Then they sat around eating and gossiping, and Charlie was able to see for the first time exactly whom he was heading out to sea with. There was a group of about ten tiny Italians, of all ages, with long noses and cheerful expressions, who Charlie guessed were acrobats of some kind. There was a rather fat woman with a squint, wearing overalls—“Snakes,” said Madame Barbue mysteriously. A cross-looking gray-haired man sat reading all through the meal. (“Mr. Andrews,” said Pirouette with a sniff. “He leads the bears.”) An enormous young man came in a bit late, with an enormous dish, and had three helpings (“Hercule. Strong man,” said Madame Barbue), and then a gang of energetic boys of about twenty, chatting loudly, playing around and talking about horses, with François the cowboy. (“The trick riders,” said Pirouette.) There were various children around the place too, Charlie was pleased to see: a downtrodden-looking boy with mud on his face, a curly-haired boy who sat with two squabbling clowns, ignoring them, and two girls of about nine who had to be twins, wearing matching dresses and imitating each other’s every move. They were interesting to watch, but they made Charlie feel seasick.

  “What do you do?” Charlie asked Pirouette.

  “I am trapeziorista volante,” she said with a proud little smile.

  “Gosh,” said Charlie, because he felt he ought to. He could tell by Pirouette’s tone of voice that a trapeziorista volante was clearly fantastically cool, but he hadn’t a clue what it meant. “Gosh,” he said again politely. The bearded lady shot him a look and winked at him.

  “You will see,” she said, “when we do the Show.”

  “When will that be?” he asked eagerly.

  “We go to Paris now,” said Pirouette. “We have a date for the big show in just one week. The Imperial Ambassador is having a big party, he invites all the eastern potentates, we are to be the fun for them. They all will come.”

  Paris! He tried to remember where Paris was. Sort of in the middle, but north. Certainly nowhere near the sea. So, when they got to land he could find a cat and get more information, and move on . . .

  Charlie, to tell the truth, was having contradictory feelings. With the circus, he realized, he felt safe. All the activity, and so many people, would give him some protection if Rafi was coming after him. So on the one hand, he was looking forward to snooping all over the ship, finding the animals and making friends, and above all seeing the Show, the real magic of the circus. He hoped (and hoped that this wasn’t disloyal to his parents) that there’d be chances to see and do loads of things before they got to France. On the other hand, running through this cheerful prospect like an icy current was the constant, repeating knowledge of his parents’ danger. And just behind that was the figure of Rafi: cool, unknown, frightening, challenging.

  But until they reached France, there was nothing much he could do. Okay. It was frustrating, but he could handle it.

  Pirouette was still talking. “We can only make the Show in the big top. We travel to where the people are, then they come on board and we make the Show.”

  “They come on board!” said Charlie, who had been listening to his fears, not to Pirouette. He wasn’t sure if he was understanding right.

  “You haven’t seen the big top?” said Madame Barbue. She wondered at this boy—so alone, so distracted, yet so accepting. “Oh, Charlie—we have the most beautiful circus ring here on the boat. With the seats and the sawdust and the flying trapeze and the striped tent-roof and everything.”

  Now, Charlie very much wanted to hear more about how you could fit a circus ring onto a boat, and where it was, and when he would get to see it, but just at that moment another person entered the cabin.

  He was not tall like Major Maurice, nor was he huge like Hercule, nor amazing like the bearded lady. He was a brown-haired, brown-skinned man of about forty, or maybe fifty—an African, well-built, quiet, and very calm. What was strange was that he seemed to bring a wake of calm with him. It was as if nothing that was not calm could get anywhere near him, and if it tried to, it became calm, no matter what its intention had been in the first place. Silence spread out from him, stillness formed a pool around him. As he walked in, the trick riders stopped laughing and the Italians turned their faces quietly to their plates. Pirouette and Madame Barbue stopped chatting. A forced gentleness descended on the company.

  Charlie could not take his eyes off this man, and he could not understand why. Then the man turned to face Charlie, and looked straight at him. His eyes were deep wells of darkness, and then suddenly, from deep within these dark eyes, Charlie saw a flash, a reflection of light like from an animal’s eyes, as the man turned his head away again.

  “Who is he?” Charlie whispered to Madame Barbue, huddling a little closer to her.

  “Ah, he is our dear Maccomo,” she said. Charlie was surprised. Was she being sarcastic? “Dear” was not the kind of word he would apply to that man. “He is our lion tamer. Oh—he doesn’t like us to say tamer. He is our lion trainer. He is African like you.”

  He may be African, thought Charlie, but he is not like me. He is like—he is like the feeling you get when your father is angry with you. He is scary, and this calm he carries with him is not a good, relaxed calm; it is the calm of fear. Charlie shivered.

  Lion tamer, eh? Well, he certainly seemed to have this group tamed.

  Charlie glanced at Pirouette. She was looking at her meal, and seemed not to want to look up.

  Maccomo had made Charlie lose his appetite, so he just sat and listened to the gentle conversation that flowed around the cabin as the circus people finished their dinners. One of the Italians was trying to persuade one of the others to get his mandolin and play a song. Mr. Andrews the bear leader had offered part of his newspaper to the Hungarian. Some new people came in, including a large, proud-looking bald man. (“What does he do?” inquired Charlie eagerly, but Madame Barbue just gave him a look, as if to say he should know better than to ask.) There was a small group of wiry Arab boys, and a very tall, elegant, pale man with feathery white hair and exceptionally long hands and feet. Charlie found himself giving Madame Barbue a pleading look, and she relented enough to say: “El Superbe Aero: funambuliste,” which didn’t help Charlie much. Funambuliste, trapeziorista volante . . . he needed a dictionary.

  Gazing around the dining room, Charlie thought they looked like a rather large and odd family. He smiled to himself. He liked it here. At least—he would have. If only . . .

  After dinner the twins came over and said—both of them: “Hello, we’re the twins. Who are you?”

  “I’m Charlie,” said Charlie. “I’m helping with the monkeys.”

  The twins looked at each other meaningfully, then continued: “Major Tib always puts people with the monkeys first. He’ll have you doing something else soon. Do you have any chocolate?”

  It was amazing the way they talked together. How could they have known to jump from talking about Major Tib to talking about chocolate? If this was a trick for the Show, it was a very good one.

  “I do, actually. Would you like some?”

&nbs
p; “Yes,” they said, and smiled. They were weird.

  Charlie said good night to Pirouette (who had undone her tight hairdo and suddenly looked much nicer) and Madame Barbue, who made him promise to come to breakfast with them the next day, and went off with the twins. Part of him wanted Pirouette to ask him to stay with her rather than go off with the younger girls, but she said nothing, so he went. Also, he wanted to find out if the twins really talked in tandem all the time.

  Charlie didn’t quite know his way back to the monkeycabin where he had left his things, but the twins—“We’re Sara and Tara,” they said—were able to show him where it was. Well, they could show him where the cabin was, but where the chocolate was, was another thing, and no secret: The monkeys had been in Charlie’s bag, and they had devoured the chocolate, the remaining crackers and sugar cubes, and the teabags.

  “Yuck!” said the twins. “Raw teabags!”

  Maybe they’re one person in two bodies, Charlie thought. That would make sense.

  Oh, no, it wouldn’t, he thought then. How could one person in two bodies make sense?

  Sara and Tara then announced that they had some chocolate in their cabin. He followed them back up to the open deck, along toward the bow, right into the bow, as it seemed. And then suddenly the girls turned and disappeared from view.

  “Oi!” called Charlie. “Where are you? Where’ve you gone?”

  “We’re here!” the girls called, and their heads popped out from a hole in the wall right by the figurehead. “This is where we stay.”

  Their cabin was right inside the figurehead’s chest. It was sort of triangular, and though they had no porthole as such, if you climbed a ladder in the top corner of the curiously shaped chamber, you found yourself inside the figurehead’s face, and you could look out of spyholes cut into her beautiful green eyes, and you could peer through a thick glass window behind the great teeth of her beguiling smile. Now of course there was nothing to see but a few swaying stars, misty and far away, but in the daytime what a view that would be! When Charlie had admired the ship from the outside earlier that day, he had had no idea that the figurehead was hollow, with a peculiar little room inside where two girls lived.

  “This is absolutely amazing,” he said. “This is amazing. I am amazed.”

  The girls—acting together as always—found the chocolate. Then they unfolded their cot, and there was just room for all three to sit on it (there was no floorspace left) and start to nibble their way into a happy chocolate reverie.

  A knock at the door made them jump. “Password!” cried the twins.

  “Bucket!” said a voice, and the door opened and in marched the curly boy who had been with the clowns.

  “Ah, you’ve got him!” he cried in a cheerful tone. “The twins have got him!” he called over his shoulder, and from behind him Charlie could hear a chattering, scrabbling sound, which turned out to be the muddy-faced boy and four or five of the smallest Italians, who had come to investigate Charlie. They all tried to come into the twins’ cabin, the twins told them there wasn’t room, and then a great coo-cooing noise started up from behind one of the walls, and the twins said, “Now look! You’ve woken the doves,” and shooed everybody, including Charlie, out.

  “Where’re you sleeping?” said the curly boy to Charlie.

  “Don’t know,” said Charlie. “I’m supposed to be in with the monkeys, but since they’ve been through my bag and eaten everything, I don’t want to.”

  “Do you want to come and bunk with us in the rope storeroom?” asked the curly boy. “It’s above the galley so we never get cold. It keeps the ropes dry too so they don’t rot. It’s next to the lions . . .”

  The boy was going on about the lions needing the heat too, but Charlie wasn’t listening. Next to the lions! There were lions! He’d been told, and he knew it, but only now did it really get through to him. There really were lions on this ship and he was going to be next door to them.

  CHAPTER 8

  The curly boy was called Julius, and the thin clown was his father. The muddy boy was called Hans, and he looked after the Learned Pig, which was why he was so muddy. (The boy, not the pig. Though the pig was muddy too. But the boy was muddy because of the pig, not vice versa. In fact, the pig would have been a lot muddier were it not for the boy.)

  Hans and Julius slept on piles of coiled-up ropes in the rope storeroom. Each had his own shelf, quite big enough for a smallish boy, though without much headroom. Julius had the top shelf and Hans the bottom one, so there was a shelf for Charlie in the middle.

  “There’s a sleeping bag here already,” said Charlie. “Does someone else sleep here?”

  Hans started to giggle nervously. Julius shushed him with a furious look.

  “What is it?” said Charlie.

  Julius snorted. “Oh, well, there was a boy,” he said. “He helped with the lions.”

  “Really?” said Charlie, interested. “And what happened to him?”

  “Major Tib had him thrown overboard,” hissed Julius.

  Charlie stared. “Why?” he whispered, adopting Julius’s air of mystery.

  Julius shook his head and made a zip-the-mouth gesture. Charlie looked at the shelf and its sleeping bag again, and wrinkled his nose a bit. “Bad luck isn’t contagious,” he said to himself. “Bad luck doesn’t exist. It’s all in the mind.” This is what his mum always said—though when she did, his dad tended to raise an eyebrow and say, “The mind is a very strong thing, Professor.”

  Charlie decided that he wasn’t going to mind about the sleeping bag: “It’s all in the mind and I don’t mind,” he said to himself.

  “You staying then?” said Julius. “Or have we scared you off?”

  “No way,” said Charlie. “I’m staying.”

  “Well, if you need any help, I know everything,” said Julius in such a friendly way that Charlie decided to try him out then and there. He liked the look of Julius: He liked his curly hair and his freckly nose.

  “What’s a funambuliste, what’s a trapeziorista volante, and why are monkeys called Dandy Jack when they ride on ponies?” he blurted out.

  “Tightrope walker, flying trapeze artist, and after Major Jack Downing, who was a very famous trainer of trick horses,” said Julius, without batting an eye. “That’s also why naughty people are called Jackanapes—an ape who thinks he’s as talented as Major Jack was.”

  Charlie blinked. “Thanks,” he said.

  “De nada,” said Julius.

  “What does that mean?” said Charlie.

  “It’s nothing, in Spanish,” said Julius. “I mean, it means nothing, the word nothing, not that it doesn’t mean anything, though of course it doesn’t mean anything, it means something: It means nothing. Nothing is what it means. Not it doesn’t mean anything.”

  “No, it means nothing. I know what you mean,” said Charlie with a straight face.

  They started to giggle.

  Although things on this boat were so interesting that it was easy to be distracted, the thought of his parents was only ever a speck away from the surface of Charlie’s mind.

  He needed to check his phones and see if there were any messages. But privacy is very hard to find on a ship—especially when you’re sharing a ropelocker with two other boys—so he went out on deck into the cold night to be alone. The moon was up, like a big pearl button on a navy blue suit. Charlie shivered and pulled his jacket around him, then curled himself up in a corner by one of the smokestacks and tried first his own voicemail, then his mum’s.

  There was still nothing on Mum’s. Why wasn’t anyone calling her? Probably they’re just leaving messages at home, sending her e-mails . . .

  He tried his own line.

  The voice leaped out at him.

  “Now listen here, you disgusting little rodent. Personally I don’t know why your stupid smug stubborn parents didn’t just drown you at birth, but as you seem to exist, and as your existence is giving me grief, I just have this to say: I know where you ar
e, I know what you’re doing, so you just stay there and I’ll be along soon to get you. All right? I’ll be along. Soon. To get you.”

  And the phone banged down.

  Charlie stood staring at his cell phone. He was shaking. He’d never heard such anger in anyone’s voice. He’d lived his whole life in the city, he’d seen fights and been in fights, he’d yelled and been yelled at, but no one had ever spoken to him with such—such deep nastiness.

  Very quickly he pressed the delete button.

  Then he cursed himself. He should have kept it for—evidence. To listen to again and learn from . . . But he knew he wouldn’t ever listen to that again.

  He had heard what it said. He knew whom it was from. He didn’t need anything else.

  It wasn’t that he’d thought Rafi would just let him go. He just . . .

  His hand was still shaking from the violence of Rafi’s message. He’d had no idea Rafi could be like that. But he still couldn’t quite believe Rafi was involved in his parents’ disappearance—not directly. How could a kid kidnap adults? Anyway he’d been at the fountain that afternoon, relaxed and playing football—

  And talking intently on the phone, and taking notice of Charlie for the first time ever . . .

  So there must be other people involved too. Someone had paid Rafi to take him, Charlie, out of the way . . .

  When Charlie curled up on his ropes that night, he pulled his tiger out of his bag, secretly so the other boys wouldn’t notice. Listening to Hans scratching himself on the shelf below and Julius shouting orders in his sleep on the shelf above, for a moment Charlie wished that his mum were there to say good night to him and check that he had taken his asthma medicine (he had), and that his dad could come up and look at him just as he was dropping off to sleep. He said a prayer quickly and firmly under his breath: “All gods, watch over my mum and dad and help them be safe, please please please.” His mum and dad hadn’t brought him up to be religious at all, but so many other people believed in so many different gods, and seemed to get help from them, that sometimes Charlie did join in, quietly. “All of you, whatever your name is, please, watch over them,” he whispered. Just in case.