The Invisible Circus (10 page)

part two

nine

London felt tropical. Dense, steamy air filtered the sunlight to watery yellow. The sound of church bells was everywhere.

With a map she’d bought at the airport, Phoebe guided herself through the tangle of streets. She was exhausted. She’d arrived this morning on the overnight Laker flight, after her second night in a row without sleep.

She’d had trouble finding the youth hostel, in part because it was tall and white like every house in Kensington, gleaming with wet-looking paint. When she finally discovered it, at 11 A.M., the hostel had closed for the day. But a man let her come inside to leave her backpack and use the bathroom, where she’d splashed water under her arms and brushed her teeth.

Phoebe’s exhaustion made things blur and run. She liked it. There was a clovery scent to the air, an intoxicating smell of flowering trees. It made her feel drunk.

The streets of Kensington curved; she had to keep checking her map. Phoebe did this furtively, not wanting to look like a tourist. In her dark sunglasses she felt incognito. She carried Faith’s postcards in her purse, along with her sister’s photograph, a small notebook in which to document her progress, her passport, more than twenty English pounds, a thousand dollars in traveler’s checks and the hit of LSD in its small white envelope. Tired though Phoebe was, a manic energy coursed through her as she walked. The taxicabs looked like limousines. Tiny oval-shaped parks were tucked in the middle of city blocks, encircled by locked gates. Peering through the brambles, she caught the glint of wet grass and long crimson branches. Once she heard the gentle
thock
of tennis balls and glimpsed someone’s white leg.

In Knightsbridge Phoebe stared through sparkling window-panes at silk handkerchiefs arranged into fans, neckties and smoked fish, old ladies still in their overcoats drinking tea, their hair faintly blue, like skim milk. It was all England. Everywhere she looked—England. Tabloid salesmen bellowed headlines around wet stubs of cigars, red double-decker buses sailed past. You could get on a plane and get off in England. It was miraculous.

What amazed Phoebe most, though, was the light. It seemed to pour from all directions at once, forming gleaming points on every window and leaf, heightening colors to surreal intensity. She felt she could
see
for the first time in months, as if the fog that engulfed San Francisco each night had enshrouded her mind, too, obscuring her thoughts, and now had burned off. What remained was this light, a mesmerizing clarity that made Phoebe feel she had arrived in a different land. It was just as she’d hoped.

Dear Mom, Phoebe and Barry, The first thing we did was we went to Harrod’s like you said Mom what a trippy place!! You re right those Food Halls are so intense. I bet they haven’t changed from the 50’s when you and Dad came. Wolf and I got some funny looks I can tell you that. People in London are pretty uptight they dont like jeans with patches but when I took off my poka dot jacket they were nicer. We ordered you a cake maybe you already got it. I hope it’s not stale they promised it would stay fresh. It has raisins. Love, Faith

Inside Harrods Phoebe found herself searching the crowds for a familiar face. She felt welcomed, expected, if not by a person, then by the city itself. Her own presence so rarely seemed momentous to Phoebe that the sensation electrified her. She felt almost high entering the Food Halls, lush columned rooms that gave the impression of being glass-rooved and flooded with sunlight. The walls were of glazed tile, orange, green, turquoise. Meats were displayed on marble slabs, stuffed with herbs, tied in string like precious bundles, huge gleaming livers and pale veals, lamb shanks, lamb legs, venison, crimson steaks, guinea fowl with loose velvety skins folded sumptuously around each breast and wing. The very food seemed to give off light. Men in straw hats stood behind each counter, holding long knives.

Phoebe wended her way to the bakery. Cakes big as hats, glazed, draped in shredded coconut or curls of chocolate, studded with fat raisins, cakes whose frostings gleamed like the shining white houses in Kensington.
We ordered you a cake maybe you already got it. I hope it’s not stale they promised it would stay fresh
… Here it was. Faith and Wolf had been in this very store eight years before, this very room, their sandaled feet had walked upon this same gray marble floor, perhaps touching the spot where Phoebe stood now. She felt a kind of wonderment. At that moment a loudspeaker suddenly crackled to life. “Attention all customers,” said a woman’s English accent. “The store must be evacuated. Kindly move toward the nearest exit doors as quickly as possible.”

A stillness fell. “All customers are asked to leave the premises at once. The store must be evacuated. Kindly proceed …” People began gathering their parcels and moving briskly from the room. Phoebe looked around in confusion. “Attention all customers …” Was the store closing for the day? But obviously not. Baffled, she followed the crowd into a central area filled with mirrored cosmetics counters, where hundreds of shoppers were already gathered. She heard the terse, complicit whispers of people in danger and experienced a thrill of fear. Something was the matter. Light poured in from the street, but the bottleneck of departing customers forced her to a standstill some distance from the doors. She began to grow nervous. Yet at the same time, she felt strangely exempt from any real danger. “All customers are advised to move toward the nearest exit doors. The building …”

“What’s going on?” Phoebe asked a man beside her, who carried a round loaf of bread under his arm.

“Bomb threat, I’d imagine,” he said. “Happens fairly often.”

“Wow, a bomb?” Phoebe said. Everyone seemed so docile. “I guess ‘threat’ doesn’t mean there’s really a bomb, though.”

“Rarely,” the man said. “Mind you, they do go off now and then.” From his half-smile Phoebe sensed he was baiting her, and tried to assume an air of indifference. The doors looked very far away.

“You’re American,” the man observed. He pronounced it “Amer-ee-can.”

“Yes,” Phoebe said. “I got here this morning.”

“You haven’t got many terrorists in America, then.”

“Terrorists?” Phoebe said, startled. “No. Well, I mean, Patty Hearst was a terrorist …”

He frowned. “Who’s that?”

“She was this rich heiress, but then she was kidnapped by terrorists and she became a terrorist, too. It was incredible,” Phoebe said, aware as she spoke that it didn’t sound particularly incredible. The man said nothing. “Are there a lot of terrorists in London?” she asked.

“We’ve got our share. Mind you, the French have it worse; they’ve got bombs exploding every time you turn round over there.”

A smell of anxiety and humanity filled the vast room. Phoebe wanted to escape. The man had a kindly, defeated air. She pictured his children leaping on him like monkeys before he’d had a chance to put down his loaf of bread.

“So … what’re they trying to do? The terrorists in London,” she asked.

“Depends which ones,” said the man. “The IRA hate the Brits, full stop. The Pal-ee-stinians want hostages freed, or they’re taking revenge over some bloody thing. Then you’ve got kids all over Europe that haven’t got a clue, just sod capitalism and that. Cooking up bombs and carrying guns around—that’s the bit they really enjoy.”

“I’m sure they have better reasons than that,” Phoebe said, feeling oddly defensive on the terrorists’ behalf.

“Avoid boredom?” he said with a short laugh. “Best reason in the world.”

Finally they neared the doors. Phoebe felt a sudden, odd reluctance to leave the danger behind. She pictured the terrorists observing this commotion from some hidden place, and longed to slow down for them, flaunt her fearlessness.

At last they pushed through a door to the street. Phoebe looked around for the man she’d been speaking with, thinking he might have paused to share with her the triumph of escape. But he’d disappeared. The crowd, still flooding from the doors behind her, forced Phoebe to move on. Policemen crowded the sidewalk, black helmets strapped beneath their chins like bonnets. Phoebe slowed, resisting the crowd’s momentum. Customers still leaving Harrods were caught in the press of bystanders pushing toward it. The policemen’s short-tempered warnings did little to quell the crowd’s desire to move nearer the trouble. And Phoebe felt it, too—here was the world of events, a place she knew only from pictures, from newspaper stories. Overnight she had reached it.

You see this lagoon well believe it or not we went swimming in it the water was totally clean just a little green from algae. The ducks weren’t scared they came quacking right up to us. But the English cops totally freaked and about eight of them stood in a row hollering for us to get out with their oval hats down over their eyes and we said No No you should come in the water’s so nice it would do you good but they blew their whistles and kept yelling so finally we came out with the ducks paddling after us. What a crazy day I was so happy!! Love, Faith

The trees of St. James’s Park hung like velvet drapes, heavy, dense, sunlight spilling between their leaves and soaking the bright grass. Phoebe walked to the water’s edge and looked at the ducks, their crisp, bright markings like costumes.

She circled the lagoon. It was large and sprawling, curved bridges spanning its narrowest parts. In the middle a spray of water shot straight into the air. A nervous excitement coursed through Phoebe. Following Faith’s directions filled her with a keen anticipation, though for what she had no idea. Objects seemed to leap at her, charged with significance.

Phoebe bought a ham sandwich, chocolate cake and a green apple. She carried her tray to a small stone table outdoors and devoured the food, ravenous. After finishing her meal, she opened her notebook and wrote: “July 2, 1978. In England everything is more real. The money is colorful, the coins are heavy like real gold, the parks are greener, the people have beautiful accents. There are terrorists all over, and bomb threats. Nothing is the way I’m used to. This is the real world and I’m totally alive, for the first time ever.”

Eating left Phoebe exhausted. She found an empty cloth chair on the grass and sat down, taking Faith’s postcards from her purse and fanning them in her hands like a deck of cards. There were eighteen in all. Phoebe looked at the postcard of St. James’s Park, then at the park itself. A part of her had not believed she would ever actually sit here, as if the real places would vanish, like mirages, just as she reached them. Now, for the first time in years, the ground felt so solid under Phoebe. She let her eyes fall shut, sunlight warm against her lids, sounds of birds and children and distant traffic lulling her to sleep.

Phoebe woke at six-thirty with a parched throat. Earlier, a boy had shaken her awake to collect money for the chair, but his accent had been hard to comprehend and there were moments of confusion before she’d managed to produce the desired coin. Now Faith’s postcards littered the grass. Phoebe scrambled to gather them up, afraid one might have blown away—but no, all eighteen were there. She tucked them back in their envelope. A ghostly population of empty cloth chairs scattered the grass. The sky had clouded over. Shivering, Phoebe stood.

Quickly she left the park, dogged by a sense of having lapsed, missed something important. She soon found herself under the overhead tracks at Charing Cross station, murky air illuminated by the greenish light from tiny fish-and-chips shops. Railway workers in blue uniforms and boots tossed half-smoked cigarettes into the gutters. Their speech, like that of the boy who had wakened her, was impossible to decipher. From the station doors came a dank, breathlike smell and a gush of human traffic. Phoebe stood in the shadows and watched. No one looked at her. She stared into the flood of oncoming faces and waited for one to sharpen into focus, to be singled out as in a movie crowd scene. People poured through the doors, hurrying to get home. Finally she turned away.

The youth hostel would be open now. Phoebe took the tube to the Gloucester Road station, where an Indian man at a fruit stand displayed a pyramid of figs dusted white with powdered sugar. There were rows of red apples, each wrapped in a tissue.

Trees tossed and bent in the wind. It felt like rain. Phoebe looked at the swollen sky and thought of her grandparents’ house in St. Louis, that promise of a violent storm, sticks and leaves dashing across the grass as if for cover. “It’s going to be a bad one,” people would say, but always with a certain excitement at the thought of watching the storm lash itself against their windows.

Phoebe walked in the direction of the youth hostel. She passed a small stone church, dandelions tossing in its graveyard. The long, crooked street blurred. She stopped to rub her eyes and suddenly felt that her sister was very near, not a memory or an echo but Faith herself—laughing, reaching—what else but her sister’s presence could explain the excitement Phoebe had felt since arriving in London, the swell of promise? It was Faith who brought these feelings, who always had. And Phoebe knew, then, that her journey would only be complete when her sister had finally revealed herself. Faith would simply appear, burst from nowhere as when she lost patience during games of hide-and-seek, exploding the stillness by leaping from behind a curtain or beneath a couch, announcing, “Time’s up, you couldn’t find me.”

A coldness broke in Phoebe’s lungs, like inhaling helium from a balloon. She froze mid-step. From across the street a tall, eccentric house leapt at her in flashes of orange brick. She searched the grainy air, half expecting to see the familiar form of a skinny leaping girl with dark hair. An old woman hobbled by, clutching a frilly black umbrella, and as the woman passed, so did the feeling, unmistakably as a wind shifting course. Phoebe resumed walking, a weakness in her legs, an odd, buttery flavor at the back of her throat. It was raining. Yellow squares of light had appeared inside houses. From a high window came the sound of a piano, notes floating down solid as leaves, then vanishing. The rain felt so good, the wet dress clinging to Phoebe’s legs. Her old life was gone. Gone forever, the years alone in San Francisco, years of waiting, looking for a sign, they had floated away like the thinnest dry husk, leaving Phoebe newly born in a strange land.