The woman held his arm. She moved the ladder further along the cage, trying to balance the shafts against the bars.
On an impulse, more or less out of sympathy, I stepped forward.
‘Can I help you?’ I said. ‘Perhaps I can reach the roof. If you hand me the sign..
The dwarf hesitated, looking at me with his doleful eyes. He seemed prepared to let me help, but stood there with his hat in one hand as if prevented from saying anything to me by an unstated set of circumstances, some division of life as formal and impassable as those of the most rigid castes.
The woman, however, gestured me to the ladder, turning her face away as I settled the shafts against the bars. Through the dim light she watched the horses cropping the grass along the bank.
I climbed the ladder, and then took the sign lifted up to me by the dwarf. I settled it on the roof, weighing it down with two half bricks left there for the purpose, and read the legends painted across the warped panel. As I deciphered the words ‘marvels’ and ‘spectacular’ (obviously the signs bore no relation to the animals within the cages, and had been stolen from another fair or found on some refuse heap) I noticed a sudden movement from the cage below me. There was a burrowing through the straw, and a low, pale-skinned creature retreated into its burrow.
This disturbance of the straw — whether the animal had darted out from fear or in an attempt to warn me off I had no means of telling had released a strong and obscurely familiar smell. It hung around me as I came down the ladder, muffled but vaguely offensive. I searched the hutch for a glimpse of the animal, but it had scuffled the straw into the door.
The dwarf and the woman nodded to me as I turned from the ladder. There was no hostility in their attitude — the dwarf, if anything, was on the point of thanking me, his mouth moving in a wordless rictus — but for some reason they seemed to feel unable to make any contact with me. The woman was standing with her back to the street lamp, and her face, softened by the darkness, now appeared small and barely formed, like that of an unkempt child.
‘You’re all ready,’ I said half jocularly. With something of an effort, I added: ‘It looks very nice.’
I glanced at the cages when they made no comment. One or two of the animals sat at the backs of their hutches, their pale forms indistinct in the faint light. ‘When do you open?’ I asked. ‘Tomorrow?’
‘We’re open now,’ the dwarf said.
‘Now?’ Not sure whether this was a joke, I started to point at the cages, but the statement had obviously been meant at its face value.
‘I see… you’re open this evening.’ Searching for something to say they seemed prepared to stand there indefinitely with me — I went on: ‘When do you leave?’
‘Tomorrow,’ the woman told me in a low voice. ‘We have to go in the morning.’
As if taking their cue from this, the two of them moved across the small arena, clearing to one side the pieces of newspaper and other refuse. By the time I walked away, baffled by the entire purpose of this pitiful menagerie, they had already finished, and stood waiting between the cages for their first customers. I paused on the bank beside the cropping horses, whose quiet figures seemed as insubstantial as those of the dwarf and their mistress, and wondered what bizarre logic had brought them to the town, when a second fair, almost infinitely larger and gayer, was already in full swing.
At the thought of the animals I recalled the peculiar smell that hung about the cages, vaguely unpleasant but reminiscent of an odour I was certain I knew well. For some reason I was also convinced that this familiar smell was a clue to the strange nature of the circus. Beside me the horses gave off a pleasant scent of bran and sweat. Their downcast heads, lowered to the grass by the water’s edge, seemed to hide from me some secret concealed within their luminous eyes.
I walked back towards the centre of the town, relieved to see the illuminated superstructure of the ferris wheel rotating above the rooftops. The roundabouts and amusement arcades, the shooting galleries and the tunnel of love were part of a familiar world. Even the witches and vampires painted over the house of horrors were nightmares from a predictable quarter of the evening sky. By contrast the young woman — or was she young? — and her dwarf were travellers from an unknown country, a vacant realm where nothing had any meaning. It was this absence of intelligible motive that I found so disturbing about them.
I wandered through the crowds below the marquees, and on an impulse decided to ride on the ferris wheel. As I waited my turn with the group of young men and women, the electrified gondolas of the wheel rose high into the evening air, so that all the music and light of the fair seemed to have been scooped from the star-filled sky.
