Nearly made it right across the valley, that time, eh?’
‘Yes, till you made me come home, sissy!’
Leo gave a chivalrous shrug. The silence stretched. I got the feeling they might forget I was there, and exchange something too private.
‘I didn’t know you were home,’ she said at last.
‘Back for the harvest.’ He nodded. ‘Here, take a look.’
He beckoned us over to his trailer and lifted the tarpaulin to show what was underneath. On the ridged metal bed lay three of the workers from the groves. Their limbs were cramped and bent, as rigid as wood, and their fingers had twisted into arthritic claws. Two were quite motionless but the third shivered feverishly. Disconnected plinks, clonks and twangs sounded from their thoraxes. Under their crusts of white paint, the three faces were paralysed in expressions of bewilderment.
‘Oh, dear,’ she said.
‘Mm hm.’
‘What happened?’
‘Nothing out of the ordinary. They get worse every season. Can’t take care of themselves. They want to lay around in the Liberties half the year, then, come harvest time, ride the bus down and work fourteen straight hours. No surprise some of them fall apart. Don’t have the gumption, and so we end up with this. Eh?’
He looked down at the quivering labourer, whose open eye held, perhaps, a fleck of comprehension.
‘Don’t you worry,’ Leo said. ‘These fellers are going to be fine. I’ll take them up to the sheds, have a tinker, give them a beaker of protein porridge and they’ll be well set up. You love that stirabout, eh? I do believe it’s the reason you come.’
He grinned at the figures. Then he turned to me, becoming more formal, and gripped my hand again.
‘I’m delighted for you. Make sure and take good care of her.’ He winked. ‘Or else I’ll want to know about it! Now I’d best get these up the hill.’
He climbed on the buggy and gunned the engine, then turned to us.
‘Listen, why don’t you two ride on with me up to the sheds? It’ll take you closer to the house. And, tell you what’ – he nodded to me – ‘while we’re there I’ll find you something for those allergies.’
There was just room for all three of us, if she perched on the seat behind Leo while I sat in the trailer, holding tight to the sides. We bounced up the track.
Later that day, as we walked through the town, we found a crowd gathering in the central plaza around a makeshift wooden platform. At the platform’s corners stood poles decorated with strings of flowers and swags of coloured cloth, and just behind it a striped tent had been erected on the back of a battered flatbed truck. As we watched, a man emerged from this ragged tiring-house and stepped directly on to the boards.
‘Most noble gentlemen, ladies, and my worthy patrons!’
He towered over the crowd, twitching a moustache that was stiff and pointed with wax, and lifted his mortarboard in salutation. He was bald except for a waxy tuft at the crown of his large egg-shaped head. Along with the mortarboard he wore a dusty black gown, but when he threw back the wings of the drab garment and placed his hands on his hips I saw hairy forearms, gleaming leather trousers, pointed white boots and a waistcoat of threadbare red velveteen over a naked torso. He grinned, showing long, stained teeth – horse’s teeth. The crowd fell quiet as he raised his cane.
‘My boys have but one desire, and that is to please you!’
His voice was an exaggeratedly clear, teeth-and-tongue baritone, penetrating and sustained like a singer’s. You could hear the ornamental curlicues at the end of each phrase. The tip of his cane slit the air.
‘For what have they travelled far through peril and privation? For what have they spent their tender lives in long study and hard schooling? For what have they endured the exquisite educations of which you are to enjoy the fruits? Why, for your pleasure alone. They feast or starve at your pleasure, gentlemen and noble ladies; they live or die, believe me, young masters and mistresses, as martyrs to your pleasure. And so, today, we present to you one of the old tales, which we call the tale of the little sweep.’
An unresolved chord rang out, and two diminutive figures appeared on the platform, one holding a mandolin, the other a flute. They were perhaps ten years old, in white satin suits, silver-buckled slippers and chalk-white faces with red spots at the lips and cheeks. They began to play an intricate overture, its complex harmonies twining around the simple music that tinkled from inside their small chests. As they played, they danced: their movements were minimal, never more than a step one way or the other, but they were so exactly controlled, so synchronised, that in their ornate costumes they seemed less like boys than dainty, elaborate works of mechanical artifice. Every move of a limb, every facial expression, was disciplined and stylised. Their large, liquid eyes kept focus above the heads of the crowd.
Four more children joined them on the platform, and with just a few gestures, rigid, exaggerated, yet graceful, they mimed a busy street scene into existence, singing in pure, unbroken voices in a language I didn’t recognise. Their master had withdrawn to the edge of the platform, from where, his cane twitching like a conductor’s baton, he began to narrate the performance, his voice resounding in the pauses between the boys’ songs.
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