Lizzies Tiger -1

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    When the circus came to town and Lizzie saw the tiger, they were living on Ferry Street, in a very poor way. It was the time of the greatest parsimony in their fathers house; everyone knows the first huhousand is the most difficult and the dollar bills were breeding slowly, slowly, even if he practised a little touch of usury on the side to prick his cash in the dire of greater productivity. In aen years time, the War betweeates would provide rich pigs for the coffin-makers, but, back then, ba the Fifties, well -- if he had been a praying man, he would have gone down on his knees for a little outbreak of summer cholera or a touch, just a touch, of typhoid. To his chagrin, there had been nobody to bill when he had buried his wife.

    For, at that time, the girls were just freshly orphaned. Emma was thirteen, Lizzie four -- stern and square, a squat regle of a child. Emma parted Lizzies hair in the middle, stretched it back over each side of her bulging forehead and braided it tight. Emma dressed her, undressed her, scrubbed her night and m with a damp flannel, and humped the great lump of little girl around in her arms whenever Lizzie would let her, although Lizzie was not a demonstrative child and did not show affe easily, except to the head of the house, and then only when she wanted something. She knew where the power was and, intuitively feminine in spite of her gruff appea<s></s>rance, she knew how to court it.

    That cottage on Ferry -- very well, it was a slum; but the uaker lived on uned among the stiff furnishings of his defunct marriage. His bits and pieces would be admired today if they turned up freshly beeswaxed in an antique store, but in those days they were plain old-fashioned, and time would only make them more so in that dreary interior, the tiny house he never mended, eroding clapboard and diseased paint, mildew on the dark aper with a brown pattern like brains, the ominous crimson border round the top of the walls, the sisters sleeping in one room ihrifty bed.

    On Ferry, in the worst part of town, among the dark-skinned Puese fresh off the boat with their earrings, flashih and inprehensible speech, e over the o to work the mills whose newly erected eys closed in every perspective; every year more eys, more smoke, more newers, and the peremptory shriek of the whistle that summoo labour as bells had once summoo prayer.

    The hovel on Ferry stood, or, rather, lea a bibulous angle on a narrow street cut across at an oblique angle by anoth<q></q>er narrow street, all the old wooden homes like an upset cookie jar of broken gingerbread houses lurg this way and that way, and the shutters hanging off their hinges and windows stuffed with old neers, and the snagged picket fend raised voices in unknown tongues and howling of dogs who, since puppyhood, had known of the world only the circumference of their . Outside the parlour window were nothing but rows of terfeit houses that sometimes used to scream.

    Such was the anxious architecture of the two girls early childhood.

    A hand came in the night and stuck a poster, showing the head of a tiger, on to a picket fence. As soon as Lizzie saw the poster, she wao go to the circus, but Emma had no money, not a t. The thi<kbd></kbd>rteen-year-old was keeping house at that time, the last skivvy just quit with bad words on both sides. Every m, Father would pute the days expenses, hand Emma just so muo more. He was angry when he saw the poster on the fence; he thought the circus should have paid him rental for the use. He came home in the evening, sweet with embalming fluid, saw the poster, purpled with fury, ripped it off, tore it up.

    Then it was supper-time. Emma was no great shakes at cookery and Father, dismissing the possibility of another costly skivvy until such time as plague struck, already pohe cost-efficy of remarriage; when Emma served up her hunks of cod, translutly uncooked within, her warmed-over coffee and a dank loaf of bakers bread, it almost put him in a c mood, but that is not to say his meal improved his temper. So that, when his you climbed kitten-like upon his knee and, lisping, twiniiny fingers in his gual watch-, begged small ge for the circus, he answered her with words of unusual harshness, for he truly loved this last daughter, whose obduracy recalled his own.

    Emma unhandily darned a sock.

    "Get that child to bed before I lose my temper!"

    Emma dropped the sod scooped up Lizzie, whose mouth set in dour lines of affront as she was borne off. The square-jawed scrap, deposited on the rustling straw mattress -- oat straw, softest and cheapest -- sat where she had been dropped and stared at the dust in a sunbeam. She seethed with rese. It was moist midsummer, only six oclod still bright day outside.

    She had a whim of iron, this one. She swung her feet on to the stool upon which the girls climbed down out of bed, theo the floor. The kit door stood open for air behind the s door. From the parlour came the low murmur of Emmas voice as she read The Providence Journal aloud to Father.

    -doors lean and famished hound lauself at the fen a frenzy of yapping that cealed the creak of Lizzies boots on the back porch. Unobserved, she was off -- off and away! -- trotting down Ferry Street, her cheeks pink with self-reliand i. She would not be dehe circus! The word tinkled in her head with a red sound, as if it might signify a profane church.

    "Thats a tiger," Emma had told her as, hand in hand<footer></footer>, they ied the poster on their fence.

    "A tiger is a big cat," Emma added instructively.

    How big a cat?

    A very big cat.

    A dumpy, red-striped, regular cat of the small, domestic variety greeted Lizzie with a rauew from atop a gatepost as she stumped determinedly along Ferry Street; our cat, Ginger, whom Emma, in a small ecstasy of seal whimsy presaging that of her latter protracted spinsterhood, would sometimes call Miss Ginger, or even Miss Ginger Cuddles. Lizzie, however, sternly ignored Miss Ginger Cuddles. Miss Ginger Cuddles she cat put out a paw as Lizzie brushed past, as if seeking to detain her, as if to suggest she took sed thoughts as to her escapade, but, for all the apparent decision with which Lizzie put one firm foot before the other, she had not the least idea where the circus might be and would not have got there at all without the help of a gaggle ed Irish children from Corkey Row, who happened by in the pany of a lean, blad tan, barking dog of unforeseehat had this mu on with Miss Ginger Cuddles, it could go wither it pleased.

    This free-ranging dog with its easy-going grin took a fancy to Lizzie and, yapping with glee, danced around the little figure in the white pinafore as it marched along. Lizzie reached out to pat its head. She was a fearless girl.

    The child-gang saw her pet their dog and took a fancy to her for the same reason as crows settle on one particular tree. Their wild smiles circled round her. "Going to the circus, are ye? See the  and the ladies dang?" Lizzie knew nothing about s and dancers, but she nodded, and one boy took hold of one hand, another of the other, so they raced her off betweehey soon saw her little legs could not keep up their pace, so the ten-year-old put her up on his shoulders where she rode like a lord. Soon they came to a field on the edge of town.

    "See the big top?" There was a red and white striped tent of scarcely imaginable proportions, into which you could have popped the entire house on Ferry, and the yard too, with enough room to spare inside for another house, and another -- a vast red and white striped tent, with ripping naphtha flares outside and, besides this, all manner of other tents, booths and stalls, dotted about the field, but most of all she was impressed by the great number of people, for it seemed to her that the whole town must be out tonight, yet, when they looked closely at the throng, nowhere at all was anyone who looked like she did, or her father did, or Emma; hat old New England lantern jaw, those ice-blue eyes.

    She was a stranger among these strangers, for all here were those the mills had brought to town, the ones with different faces. The plump, pink-cheeked Lancashire mill-hands, with brave red neckerchiefs; the sombre features of the ucks imbibing fun with characteristi; and the white smiles of the Puese, who knew how to enjoy themselves, laughter tripping off their tipsy-sounding tongues.

    "Here yare!" announced her random panions as they dumped her down and, feeling they had amply doheir duty by their self-imposed charge, they capered off among the throng, planning, perhaps, to slither uhe vas and so enjoy the shows for free, or even to pick a pocket or two to plete the treat, who knows?

    Above the field, the sky now acquired the melting tones of the end of the day, the plush, smoky sus uo these unpreted industrial cities, sus never seen in this world before the Age of Steam that set the mills in motion that made us all modern.

    At suhe inparably grave and massive light of New England acquires a moal, a Roman sensuality; uhis sternly voluptuous sky, Lizzie abandoned herself to the unpremeditated smells and never-before-heard noises -- hot fat in a vat  doughnuts; horse-dung; boiling sugar; frying onions; popping ; freshly ed earth; vomit; sweat; cries of vendors; crack of rifles from the range; singsong of the white-faced , who clattered a banjo, while a woman in pink fleshings danced upon a little stage. Too much for Lizzie to take in at ooo much for Lizzie to take in at all -- too rich a feast for her senses, so that she was taken a little beyond herself a her head spinning, a vertigo, a sense of profound strangeness overing her.

    All unnoticeably small as she was, she was taken up by the crowd and tossed about among iive shoes aicoats, too close to the ground to see much else for long; she imbibed the freic bustle of the midway through her nose, her ears, her skin that twitched, prickled, heated up with excitement so that she began to colour up in the way she had, her cheeks marked with red, like the marbling on the insides of the family Bible. She found herself swept by the tide of the crowd to a long table where hard cider was sold from a barrel.

    The white tablecloth was wet and sticky with spillage and gave forth a dizzy, sweet, metallic odour. An old woman filled tin mugs at the barrel spigot, mug after mug, and threw s on to other s into a tin box -- splash, k, g. Lizzie g on to the edge of the table to prevent herself being carried away again. Splash, k, g. Trade was brisk, so the old woman urhe spigot off and cider cascaded on to the ground oher side of the table.

    The devil got into Lizzie, then. She ducked down and sneaked in uhe edge of the tablecloth, to hide in the resonant darkness and crou the crushed grass in fresh mud, as she held out her unobserved hands uhe distinuous stream from the spigot until she collected two hollowed palmfuls, which she licked up, and smacked her lips. Filled, licked, smacked again. She was so preoccupied with her delicious thievery that she jumped half out of her skin when she felt a living, quivering thing thrust into her ne that very sensitive spot where her braids divided. Something moist and intimate shoved inquisitively at the nape of her neck.

    She ed round and came face to face with a melancholy piglet, detly dressed in a slightly soiled ruff. She courtepusly filled her palms with cider and offered it to her new acquaintance, who sucked it up eagerly. She squirmed to feel the wet quiver of the pigs curious lips against her hands. It drank, tossed its pink snout, and trotted off out the back way from the table.

    Lizzie did not hesitate. She followed the piglet past the dried-ell of the cider-sellers skirts. The piglets tail disappeared beh a cart piled with fresh barrels that ulled up behind the stall. Lizzie pursued the engaging piglet to find herself suddenly out in the open again, but this time in an abrupt margin of pitch blad silence. She had slipped out of the circus grounds through a hole in their periphery, and the dark had formed into a huge clot, the night; whilst Lizzie was underh the table; behind her were the lig<strike>99lib?</strike>hts, but here only shadowy undergrowth, stirring, and then the call of a night bird.

    The pig paused to rootle the earth, but when Lizzie reached out to stroke it, it shook its ears out of its eyes and took off at a great pato the tryside. However, her attention was immediately diverted from this disappoi by the sight of a man who stood with his back to the lights, leaning slightly forward. The cider-barrel-spigot soued itself. Fumbling with the front of his trousers, he turned round and tripped over Lizzie, because he was a little unsteady on his feet and she was scarcely to be seen among the shadows. He bent down and took hold of her shoulders.

    "Small child," he said, and belched a puff of acridity into her face. Lurg a little, he squatted right down in front of her, so they were on the same level. It was so dark that she could see of his faly the hint of moustache above the pale half-moon of his smile.

    "Small girl," he corrected himself, after a closer look. He did not speak like ordinary folks. He was not from around these parts. He belched again, and again tugged at his trousers. He took firm hold of her right hand and brought it tenderly up between his squatting thighs.

    "Small girl, do you know what this is for?"

    She felt buttons; serge; something hairy; something moist and moving. She didnt mind it. He kept his hand on hers and made her rub him for a minute or two. He hissed between his teeth: "Kissy, kissy from Missy?"

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