Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter Read Free Book Online Page B

pair of blue eyes.
    ‘I stood upon the mantelpiece and I gave a little shiver, for it was perishing cold in there before Lizzie lit the fire and the carpet looked further away than ever. But then, thinks I, nothing ventured, nothing gained. And behind me, truly, sir, upon the wall, I could have sworn I heard, caught in time’s cobweb but, all the same, audible, the strenuous beating of great, white wings. So I spread. And, closing my eyes, I precipitated myself forward, throwing myself entirely on the mercy of gravity.’
    She fell silent for a moment and runnelled the dirty satin stretched over her knees with her fingernail.
    ‘And, sir – I fell.
    ‘Like Lucifer, I fell. Down, down, down I tumbled, bang with a bump on the Persian rug below me, flat on my face amongst those blooms and beasts that never graced no natural forest, those creatures of dream and abstraction not unlike myself, Mr Walser. And then I knew I was not yet ready to bear on my back the great burden of my unnaturalness.’
    She paused for precisely three heartbeats.
    ‘I fell . . . and give my poor nose such a whack on the brass fireguard –’
    ‘– and so I found her, when I come in to make up the fire, bum in the air and her little blonde wings still fluttering, poor duck, and though she’d taken such a tumble and near busted her nose in half and oh! how it was bleeding, not one cry did she utter, not one, brave little thing that she was; nor did she shed a single tear.’
    ‘What did I care about my bloody nose, sir?’ cried Fevvers passionately. ‘For, for one brief moment – one lapse or stutter of time so fleeting that the old French clock, had it been in motion, could never have recorded it on its clumsy cogs and springs, for just the smallest instant no longer than the briefest flutter of a butterfly . . . I’d hovered.
    ‘Yes. Hovered. Only for so short a while I could almost have thought I’d imagined it, for it was that sensation that comes to us, sometimes, on the edge of sleep . . . and yet, sir, for however short a while, the air had risen up beneath my adolescent wings and denied to me the downward pull of the great, round world, to which, hitherto, all human things had necessarily clung.’
    ‘Since I was the housekeeper,’ interjected Lizzie, ‘happily I carried all the keys of the house in a ring on my belt and when I comes chinking into the parlour with my armful of sandalwood, I had the remedy for her bloody nose to hand, I slapped the front door key between her wings, it was a foot long and cold as hell. The flow stopped from shock. Then I mops her up with my apron and takes her down to the kitchen, in the warm, wraps her up in a blanket and anoints her abrasions with Germoline, slaps on a bit of sticking plaster here and there and, when she’s as good as new, she tells her Lizzie all about the peculiar sensations she felt when she launched herself off the mantelpiece.
    ‘And I was full of wonder, sir.’
    ‘But, though now I knew I could mount on the air and it would hold me up, the method of the act of flight itself was unknown to me. As babies needs must learn to walk so must I needs learn to conquer the alien element and not only did I need to know the powers of the limitations of my feathery limbs but I must study, too, the airy medium that was henceforth to be my second home as he who would a mariner be needs to construe the mighty currents, the tides and whirlpools, all the whims and moods and conflicting temperaments of the watery parts of the world.
    ‘I learnt, first, as the birds do, from the birds.
    ‘All this took place in the first part of spring, towards the end of the month of February, when the birds were just waking from their winter lethargy. As spring brought out the buds on the daffodils in our window-boxes, so the London pigeons started up their courtships, the male puffing out his bosom and strutting after the female in his comic fashion. And it so happened that the pigeons built