Chaplin & Company Read online

  Theatre Tickets plus booking fee £63

  Transport £35

  Tourism Allowance £50

  Laundry costs unknown

  Top Hat Agency Subscription £90

  Food Provisions [Long life] £29

  Food Provisions [Perishable] £11.93

  Gas Cylinder unknown

  Diesel unknown

  Deficit TOTAL −£774.31

  She has allowed herself two months to earn this sum back, and after that would like to move into her budget plan ‘A’, which is based on her taking four work engagements per week. This, she has calculated, will lead to entries of between £360 and £440 in the profit column at the end of each month, after all necessary expenses. Any less than three work engagements per week and she will have to fall back on budget plan ‘B’, which would make profits negligible, even if she reduces expenses. She looks forward to the day when she can open this Arundel Magic account book, run her finger down the right-hand column and feel proud.

  This is one of her aims. Here’s another:

  In that pale brown receipt box there is also a card: it is the advertisement for the Moroccan Circus that came through Arundel nineteen years ago. It is faded now but otherwise in good condition – it has been well kept. ‘CIRQUE MAROC’ is written across the top, red letters on a yellow banner, and underneath is a picture of a white cat leaping through a red hoop. A Harlequin stands in the centre, holding a placard on which is written the main attractions:

  CIRQUE EXTRAORDINAIRE!

  Les frères BOUM-BOUM

  Le Jongleur PI-KA-TA

  ODELIN le clown (Exercices au Trapèze)

  AKBAR et ses CHATS

  Le SINGE et le PERROQUET

  et Madame FATIMA clairvoyante

  Odelin the Clown.

  There was no mention of Odeline’s paternity as she grew up and something had always stopped her asking. But Odeline knew the seeds of her existence must have come from somewhere more spectacular than mere Eunice Milk, the accountant, with her cardboard receipt boxes and HB pencils. Sometimes she felt she was trapped inside one of those beige boxes, forced to live a small life of endlessly repeated routines. Boiled egg and toast for breakfast. Every morning. Her mother checking the weather forecast on teletext for Odeline’s walk to school. Every morning. Her mother standing in the doorway until Odeline reached the end of Maltravers Street. Every morning. An hour of homework on the kitchen table before dinner. Every night. Tinned soup and rye biscuits with cheese slices for dinner. Every night. Hot chocolate in the mugs with the Pierrot clown before bedtime. Every night. Weekend routines were just as repetitive. Down to the newsagent’s on Saturday morning to collect the television schedule. Sponge fingers and fruit juice at eleven. Wafer ham and cheese-slice sandwich in front of the afternoon film. A walk down the Causeway road on Sunday morning. Tinned fruit and Neapolitan ice cream for pudding on Sunday night. Odeline did not fit this life. She was different. She knew there was something spectacular in her own blood, and soon found a theory to support this.

  Unclear as to the precise conditions of parenthood, she’d imagined that her mother had achieved an immaculate conception like the mother in the Bible readings she heard in school assemblies. This interpretation appealed to a girl who sensed she was in some way set apart from the other children. The more Bible readings she heard, the more she became convinced of it. Jesus, she learned, was revealed as God’s son aged twelve when he addressed the Pharisees in the Temple. During the lead-up to Odeline’s twelfth birthday she practised a slow, low public voice which might be appropriate for a child of God.

  Her birthday fell on a Wednesday, and there was no Temple in Arundel, but that morning she walked on past the school gates and into the wilderness of Arundel Park, where she sat beneath a plane tree and listened. She closed her eyes. She tuned out from the earthly distractions of dog-callers and traffic. She awaited the seed of her father inside herself, pressed an imaginary ear to the opening in a tiny shell deep within her chest. Orange blobs fuzzed in her eyelids where the sunlight came through the trees. After a minute or so, the blobs went a dark red colour, and she realised she’d been listening so hard she’d forgotten to breathe. She drew in a deep breath.

  ‘Hosanna in the Highest,’ she said to herself, dizzy.

  Then, as she sat there, something in her opened up and she felt as if she was growing taller, as if her shoulders were physically rising up, as if her body was being stretched from the tree root she was sitting on. Up and up she seemed to go, and there was a clean cold vacuum at the top of her head that was pulling her skywards. Up and up, and she thought that if she opened her eyes she would be looking down from a great height, down along an elongated torso that was swaying in the wind next to the other trees. The calls of the dog-walkers were distant now, and she heard a rushing of something in her ears. ‘The breath of God,’ she said to herself. ‘Alleluia.’ She lost her balance then and tipped backwards, knocking her head against the trunk of the plane tree. Her eyes sprang open and were flooded with the luminous green layers of the giant leaves above her. She stayed tilted back, and looked up without blinking for about a minute, her arms flopped at her sides. She felt held in the palm of her father’s hand. Her eyes were circles of wonder.

  When she finally forced herself up, aching, from under the tree, she thought perhaps years had passed since she had sat down, she felt so utterly different. She walked back into Arundel town reborn, still with that same light feeling, as if angels were gently wheeling her along. She ate her packed lunch on a bench opposite the church and then went inside.

  It was a cool, dark, empty place in which it was difficult to translate the ecstasy she had felt in the bright greenness of the tree. The statuettes of the crucifixions along the walls were quite alarming. But this is my father’s house, she told herself. I must try to feel at home. She parted the curtains and looked into the vestry – it was bare but for a cupboard and a toilet sign with an arrow. She climbed up into the pulpit and said, ‘Hello.’ Her voice came back to her impressively deep. She sat in the front pew, looking up at the enormous window of men in their colourful robes, and meditated on her new prophet status. She felt as if she had plenty of wisdom to share. She wished she had brought a pen to write some of it down. When the stained glass lost its glow and the church became even darker she got up and walked solemnly down the aisle and out through the church doors.

  At home her mother was bent rigidly over account books as usual, heavy clumps of tired ginger hair jiggling with the effort of pressing figures into columns. She had not heard Odeline come in. There was a tower of beige boxes at each elbow, and the hair, now fading, shot with grey, had started to match their colour, so that it seemed they were three parts of the same machine, two thick trunks with a vibrating ball between. Odeline looked at her mother’s head with a forgiving smile and closed her eyelids slowly in a gesture of omniscience and understanding. She wondered how her father had made his divine visitation. Perhaps via an angel. She imagined a stained-glass window of herself, her father and her mother, in long coloured robes, making the two-fingered blessing of Christ.

  Odeline’s passion burned brightly but did not last for long. She received no divine instruction, despite daily requests for it. She bought a copy of the Bible and began to study it from the beginning, hoping to find some kind of personal message, a reference, perhaps, to a girl from Arundel. She read five verses every morning before breakfast. She enjoyed the discipline of it and all the biblical names and the rhythm of the language, but after three months with the Old Testament, she noticed she was feeling more and more despondent at breakfast, often not hungry for her boiled egg and toast. The stories left her crushed. It was a saga of endless punishment! She felt no kinship with this undemocratic, thunderous, irrational deity. In fact she disapproved of him. All the stories seemed to be about men. Women, if they featured, did particularly badly.

  When Lot’s wife was frozen into a pillar of salt, Odeline closed her Bible for good. A li
ttle older and more worldly wise, she replaced her immaculate-conception theory with an adoption theory. It still explained her difference from the other children, and the feeling that she came from somewhere else. And it was easier, she had to admit, to imagine her mother interacting with adoption forms than angels.

  So she thought up a new set of grand and exotic origins for herself. Her parents were the exiled monarchs of Ethiopia, banished into the desert and unable to care for their only and highly precious daughter. Her parents were deep-sea explorers, brutally murdered by giant squid in the Marianas Trench. Her parents were genius codebreakers, imprisoned underground by the Communists and forced to decipher one thousand codes a day – they gave up their lives to smuggle her to safety. The Messiah complex never quite wore off.

  But then, before her mother’s cremation – a discounted early-morning slot at the mortuary, as outlined in her will – Odeline was handed a bag of clothes and her mother’s purse by the mortuary assistant. As she waited for the ceremony in the brick foyer, she opened the purse and found an account slip folded at the sides to make an envelope. Her name was written across the front in her mother’s hard-pressed capitals. Inside were folded two things. The first, her birth certificate. Odeline Eunice Milk. Born: 6.50 a.m., Arundel Maternity Ward. Years of elaborately imagined origins dispelled in an instant. Behind it, the immaculately preserved circus flyer with the name Odelin the Clown outlined by a neatly ruled blue box. She looked at the dates the circus came to Arundel, and counted nine months forward to her birth date. One world closed, another opened.

  Odeline had shaken her head when asked if she was waiting for other attendees, and was shown into the chapel. She took a seat at the back, and stared down at her father’s name on the flyer in her hand. She ignored the entrance of the mortuary assistant, the words of committal, the noise of the conveyor as it drew the coffin through the curtain. She kept her eyes fixed on the flyer, her mind focused on the film running in her head, the great moment of reunion with Odelin the Clown.

  Later, at home, she looked up the Cirque Maroc in her World of Magic Compendium and found it listed under ‘Travelling’. So she spent the next few days composing a letter and found she hardly had time to think of her mother at all. She wrote it out several times and posted a copy to every circus agency in the Compendium. After that she busied herself with administration. She followed the instructions her mother had left in the stapled pack of papers under the toolkit in the kitchen, entitled ‘IN CASE OF EMERGENCY’. She went to the bank and the lawyer’s office and read out the instructions exactly as they were written. She walked around Arundel like an automaton, carrying the pages in one hand and a shopping bag in the other (Eunice Milk had included a list for Odeline’s weekly food shop). She took the death certificate to the post office and made herself the major signatory on the savings account. She went to the estate agent’s and put the house on the market with all the contents included. At each of these places she left a small stack of Arundel Magic business cards; the instructions recommended not wasting these valuable advertising opportunities.

  The instructions suggested that she rent a smaller house for herself. But the discovery that her father was a nomad inspired her to deviate, and she began to look into more itinerant ways of living. Caravans were her first thought but the ones she saw were either extremely ugly or required horses. The idea of living on water occurred to her in a Eureka moment. She bought a Waterways magazine and very much liked the appearance of the traditionally decorated houseboats. When she found the Chaplin and Company listing she felt destiny’s hand as strongly as she had in those moments walking back from Arundel Common.

  She has yet to hear from her father, but before leaving Arundel sent a fresh batch of letters to the circus agencies with the return address of the British Waterways building at Lisson Grove. Again and again, she plays out the moment of their meeting. It can only be days away.

  It is thoughts of her father that finally allow her to fall into the half-dreams that lead to sleep. And as with every recent night, these half-dreams are of him. She has a clear idea of how he will be: she worked it out like one of her mother’s accounting calculations. Her qualities minus her mother’s must equal her father. She sees the three of them in adjacent columns on the page, he making the balance on the right-hand side marked ‘Profit’. Her mother was gingery fair with mottled pink skin, and she is black-haired with butterscotch skin. Therefore he will have hair that is pitch black and skin that is smooth, deep brown. Her mother was tall and big-boned, and she is tall and slight, so he will be slight, although tall too – Odeline wants him to be tall. And perhaps slight is not the word, more athletic in physique. He is after all an acrobat. And therefore deft and highly coordinated, which would explain Odeline’s gift for movement – her mother was an extremely clumsy woman. And her mother, though gifted with numbers, of course had no imagination. Odeline is all imagination. Her father will be pure imagination too. Her kindred spirit. He will be her artistic mentor and her springboard into the world of performing arts. He will look at her solemnly (according to her calculations, her father will have dark soulful eyes, bottomless pools of wisdom) and know that she is his daughter, that she belongs to him. That her star is aligned with his.

  A breeze travels along the canal and gently rocks the boat on the water, making it sigh. Odeline looks into those imaginary eyes; they become bigger and bigger until she tips into their dark, serene, bottomless pools, and into sleep.

  FIVE

  The boat is breathing. It is never still. Through the day and through the night, it is always moving, nudging at the bank, in, away. Things that live on water are like this. There are rhythms. Because water is never still. Even this water, contained by concrete, shadowed by buildings, locked out from the sea. Like all water, it is in love with the moon. Night after night it yearns towards the moon’s glow like a body arching, making invisible tides. Through the month it rises and falls and repeats and repeats, like deep and shallow breaths. The wet green line creeps up the concrete bank and creeps back again. People don’t notice. They don’t see the boat breathing. But people are the same. As long as there is breath they are never still. So the boat rises and falls, and it sighs as it falls. It is always moving.

  Walt Chaplin knew this as he fell asleep on his bunk at night, that what he was listening to was the boat breathing. He heard the creaks of planks ageing, cracking in the heat, closing in the cold. He knew that her nails would rust, her paint would crack. He and his boat, neither of them would last. Time would wash them both away. Time would wash it all away. He knew the boat was never still.

  SIX

  Lunchtime and the canal junction is busy. The two cruising narrowboats by the bridge have moved off from their moorings and come into the Little Venice pool. They are waiting, with engines chugging, to pass through a narrow neck of waterway that leads north-east up towards Lisson Grove. Steering through this now is an open-sided narrowboat that has travelled down the canal from Regent’s Park. ‘ERIC’S TOURS’ is written in red along the edge of the awning. A man in a golf visor is leaning against the front of the boat with a videocamera, other tourists are taking pictures out of the side. At the back, the tour guide is holding the tiller and a small black radio which is connected to tannoys at four corners of the awning. He is a tanned young man with sideburns, wearing wraparound sunglasses and a T-shirt which also says ‘ERIC’S TOURS’, in red. He brings the boat around the little island in the middle of the pool and into the bank next to the barge cafe. ‘Time for lunch folks!’ he calls into the radio. He hops out and winds the bow and stern ropes quickly around the mooring stones, and then holds out a hand to help the ladies – portly, middle-aged, rich – on to the towpath, pushing his sunglasses on to the top of his head so he can give them a proper smile. Eric from the tour boat company always brings his customers to the barge cafe for lunch. He has a deal with Zjelko.

  Vera has seen the tour boat approaching and is at the kitchen counter, peeling cling
film from a tray of sandwiches. All of the cafe’s nine metal tables are outside today, and she has kept five reserved. She takes a selection of soft drinks out of the fridge and puts them in a bucket with ice at the bottom, and then balances a stack of foam cups on top of the sandwiches. She loops the bucket handle over her arm and picks up the tray. When she goes outside, Eric is seating his tourists around the tables. He motions to her to hurry up, mock-complaining, ‘My poor passengers are thirsty! Typical British weather eh!’ Some of his boatload laugh, others are fiddling with their cameras and telephones. Vera puts the tray down and people lean in to take sandwiches. Eric takes the bucket from her arm and goes round offering the soft drinks. She follows him, dealing out the cups. It is just as hot as yesterday. She is wearing a V-necked mauve T-shirt and you can see her chest and arms reddening. Nobody says thank you. Eric hands her back the bucket and says, ‘Mr Z said we’d have ice creams too.’

  Vera nods. ‘I have plenty. In the freezer.’

  ‘Okay. Bring them out in five. I want to get going quickly.’

  Another table have left and Vera goes over to clear up, stacking the plates on to a chair and putting their discarded newspaper under her arm while she wipes the surface with a napkin. Inside she throws the napkin and ketchup packets into the bin, but keeps the newspaper. She glances through the doorway – all her customers are still eating. She puts the newspaper on the counter and flicks the pages over, scanning the articles. There is nothing. No international news at all. It is the wrong kind of newspaper. She puts it into the bin as well, pressing it down into the bag with her knuckle. There is a small flap of window at the back of the boat. She goes over to face it, leaning her hips against the sink and tilting her head back so that the air can cool the creases of her neck. The radio is playing its Summer Lunchtime Ballad Hour. Always the same station. This is the rule.