“What’s going on?” said Mae. She had been dozing in the seat beside me. Her blue eyes had a misty, faraway look as if she were still half in a dream.
“Just some kid,” I said. “A runaway, I think. I’m going to help Morrey before he does something stupid. You stay here.”
I wasn’t in the habit of telling Mae what to do but for some reason the girl made me nervous. Mae leaned forward and peered through the windscreen.
“She doesn’t look like a runaway to me. I reckon she’s been dumped there.”
“Perhaps,” I said. I was sure she was right. I jumped down from the cab and went over to where Morrey was standing. Up close the girl was even smaller, and so skinny she looked half-starved. Morrey towered over her like a full-grown grizzly on its way to the hunting grounds. Morrey was a gentle giant, daft as a brush, but the kid wasn’t to know that. She looked terrified.
“Back off a bit,” I said to Morrey. “Give her some space.”
I noticed she had no shoes on. Her feet were bony and narrow with high, graceful arches, the feet of a ballet girl. Her toes were longer than normal, more like fingers than ordinary toes. I put out my hand as Morrey had done, hoping to show the girl that I meant no harm.
“Are you hurt?” I said. “Can we give you a lift somewhere?”
The girl’s lips pulled back in another snarl and I caught a glimpse of uneven yellow teeth. A second later she was flying right at me. I leapt instinctively to one side, my mind seething with visions of those crooked yellow incisors gouging into my flesh. She raced straight by me and underneath Morrey’s trailer, going flat like a rat under a granary and tucking herself in behind one of the wheels.
“Well that’s our morning cancelled,” said Morrey. “Anybody fancy a cup of tea?”
I swore quietly to myself. I had visions of us stuck there for hours, trying to tempt the girl back out on to the roadside so we could drive on. Eventually I supposed we would have to call the police. I imagined them forcing the girl out with a cattle prod and then carting her off somewhere in the back of a cop car. I didn’t like the idea of that. I rested my hand on the wheel-hub and bent down, hoping to see better, but there was just the rusty, diesel-smelling underside of Morrey’s wagon and the humped dark unmoving shape I knew was the girl.
“What’s happened? Has Morrey got a flat?”
Piet’s voice made me jump sky high. In all the fussing over the girl I had forgotten about him.
“No such luck,” said Morrey. “We’ve gone and got ourselves a luggage louse.”
Luggage louse was an old company expression for stowaway. Piet edged closer to the trailer, toddling down the bank with that rolling, sideways walk of his. The grass was long and slippery and I was afraid he’d go flying.
“Let me see,” he said. “Perhaps I can help.”
Privately I thought the sight of Piet was only going to freak her out more, but I stepped back from the wagon anyway, giving up my spot by the wheel. I watched Piet peering into the darkness, wondering what he would make of it all. He had on his old jeans and one of the brightly coloured paisley shirts he liked to wear, a diminutive figure, shorter by a number of inches than the runaway girl.
“Come on,” he said. “Don’t be afraid.”
Piet was about forty then, although like many dwarfs he had an ageless quality. His whole lower body was stunted, and in addition to this he had spina bifida. Mostly he could get about all right but he had pain flare-ups from time to time, pretty bad ones. The curvature of his spine meant he carried his head a little to one side. With his well-shaped mouth and high cheekbones his face was strikingly handsome. He had iridescent violet-coloured eyes. The public loved him, not just for the freakish contrast between his noble head and mangled body, but for his broad cockney accent, his dandyish clothes and his passion for gambling. Many people seemed to assume that a carnival was not a carnival if there wasn’t a resident dwarf somewhere around, and Piet was the kind of dwarf they wanted to see.
Officially he was in charge of the funhouse. Unofficially he ran poker games into the small hours, relieving the local card kings of large sums of money. He had been with us for longer than anyone could remember. He never talked about his life before the company and none of the stories about him seemed to join up. My father told me that Piet had Dutch grandparents and that he had spent his childhood on one of the Rotterdam barges. But Vaska Kornilev’s wife Marnie said that was all nonsense, and that Piet had grown up in a children’s home attached to the London Hospital in Whitechapel. The Kornilevs were aerialists. They were both very close to my father before he retired.
“Piet never knew his parents at all,” said Marnie. “Although he did have a sister. He was fond of her.”
“What was she like?” I asked. I was endlessly curious about Piet. The idea that someone could erase their past and walk into a new life was fascinating to me.
“I couldn’t tell you, love, I never knew her. I think she died when Piet was still in the home.”
It was often difficult to tell what Piet was thinking. I guess he had grown so used to hiding his feelings that in a way he was always performing, even when he wasn’t on stage. But I swear I saw something go off in him at the sight of Leonie Pickering, some sort of inner explosion. He became incredibly still, and a light came into his eyes, the same as when he knew he was about to win an important hand at cards. Something must have happened in her, too, or at least she was less afraid of him than she had been of Morrey and me, because suddenly she raised her head and began inching forwards. As she emerged into the light she put a hand up to push back her hair. The hand was filthy like the rest of her but her fingers were long and delicate, finely made. Some of her fingernails were broken, as if she had been shut up somewhere and scrabbling to get out.
Gradually she straightened up, her black eyes never leaving Piet’s face. The scrap of cardboard with her name on it was still fastened about her neck.
“It’s all right,” Piet said, very softly. “Would you like to have a ride with me in my van?”
Slowly he reached out his hand, and incredibly the girl took it, her long fingers wrapping themselves around Piet’s short stubby ones like vine suckers around a beanpole. She looked down at the ground then, as if giving herself up to his charge. Piet set off back towards his trailer, leading the girl step by step along the verge as if she were a blind woman. Her dress flapped in the warm July breeze like a creased yellow flag.
“Bloody hell,” said Morrey. “What do you reckon?”
“What I reckon is we’re late already,” I said. “Let’s get back on the road.”
I swung myself into the cab and started the engine. I was aware that Mae was eager to talk but I drove the rest of the way in silence. I couldn’t get what had happened out of my mind. As we lined up to enter the ground it occurred to me that Leonie Pickering, in her smallness and her vulnerability, might well have reminded Piet of his dead sister.
Cirencester was a good pitch. The ground adjoined one of the main roads into the town. There were views of the Cotswolds. I parked the trailer, then left Mae to sort out our stuff while I went to help Vaska and Morrey with the marquees. I forgot about Piet for a while, though later on when I caught sight of old Jones doing his site inspection I thought it best to go and tell him about our strange visitor.