gig now you’ve got it! Mrs. C. will ding you with her carving knife if she catches you at hanky-panky. She sent poor Melvin packing this morning, and his Tina, only because she was getting big in front.’
‘Is that Neville Melvin Reads Your Subconscious Mind?’ Aurora turned pages in the programme to find him, there, fourth on the bill.
‘Yes. East & Verrall are coming. Cleveland got them on their way down to the Death Trail.’
‘I love East,’ Temperance said. The only thing she’d said so far. Her eyes were thick-rimmed with black, and she was painting a line of palest blue along the soft pink inner edge of her eyelid. She was spectacularly pretty, if you liked an armful. ‘He gives you fudge.’
Mercy nodded. ‘No girl with them. We wouldn’t want to follow a girl.’
‘Comics?’
‘Double act, three hundred dates a year, but they run down to the Montana circuit to make that many. But what do they do with the money? They never seem to have any.’
Aurora watched Mercy paint her eyes. It was peaceful in that warm dark rabbit-hole of a room, while the work went on above them. In a droning, listless voice, Patience sang, ‘What’s my name? Poon’tain. Ask me again, I’ll tell you the same.’
Living Snake
Dogs were surging up the stairs stage left as Clover went to look for Bella. A moving river of white and black fur flowed onstage behind the curtain. Bella was there, watching the fray. Mama had returned, and she did not like dogs. Holding the pincushion out like a bone to tempt them, she backed away. One little dog, a ball of white fluff, snapped up at her with pointed white teeth.
‘Oh, help! Save us!’ Mama cried, and the Wonder Dogs man ran up behind the dogs and called them to order with a quiet whistle.
He avoided Mama’s eyes, but grunted, ‘Thorry,’ and dealt with the dog by a short punch on the nose, his expressionless face rough but soft, like bread-dough torn into halves. Was he mad, a little? He must be, to have cut that living snake away. Clover shuddered. She was glad Bella had not heard what he’d done to himself, the poor man.
Mama gathered Bella’s hand, clutched tight, and pulled her back down to the dressing room. Clover stopped to adjust her stocking (Mama’s—too big, it sagged gradually down, however tight she tied her garter) and stayed to watch the dogs: twelve of them lined up on a row of stools behind a long table. Mendel pulled the curtain aside and said in a careful voice, as if talking to someone slow or deaf, ‘Take that new opener all the way through, Juddy, Lights hasn’t seen it yet … Make it an Italian if that suits the dogs, but go through the whole dinner party—after that we’ll skip from cue to cue.’
Mama had made them do an Italian run of their songs at the hotel, speaking very quickly, to make sure that everyone remembered the lyrics. Nothing more inexcusable than forgetting lyrics, she said; some acts might be able to make them up, but the audience would know their old favourites, and any false word would jar. Clover was cold with dread that she might forget.
The Wonder Dogs man sat in the middle of the table, a row of dogs behind, led by a cock-eared black terrier. He whistled and they settled, with that same tight attention and excitement that Clover felt herself when standing ready to perform.
As the curtain opened, Juddy rang a brass bell for service and a maid-dog entered, prancing on hind legs, dressed in a darling little white cap and apron. As she set a plate in front of Juddy, a tiny poodle, nosed by the black terrier, jumped from the row of boxes behind and stood quivering upon the table. The maid-dog chased him off—but the same rascally black terrier nudged another onto the table, and another, until the maid found a whisk broom under the table and whisked the little dogs off, chasing them right offstage.
Juddy rang the bell again. No answer but a blat from the trombone, so he flung his dinner napkin down and went haring off after the maid-dog.
As soon as he’d gone, up jumped that rascally terrier—the instigator, Clover thought—and began to wolf down the abandoned dinner. Some commotion occurred offstage and the dog looked up, one ear cocked. He jumped down, grabbed a new dog, a hairy Pekinese-looking thing, by the scruff of her neck and