VAUDEVILLE - Eloise Poole

Illustration by Laylah Amarchih // https://laylahamarchih.com/

The baby looks like the clown emoji—really, it’s uncanny—and when they’re alone, they sometimes refer to the baby that way, to try and shake a laugh from each other. They don’t do this around other people. She doesn’t want them to be thought of as cruel.

#

They are twenty-nine years old, and have known each other ten full years, so long they ascribe ancient memories to one another, and argue about who was where and when, as if there is one singular golden truth. As if memory is infallible. Because although she knows she wasn’t at the black-tie event with the magician, maybe, just maybe, she was?

#

The baby doesn’t sleep like it once did. Uh oh. And the man has meetings in the morning, and could she just take them into the other room for a bit—

#

In the strange blue haze of the night, she lies across their old sofa, feels the cha-cha-cha of the baby’s heart, and watches the kitten tango across the rug. And in the night, the woman thinks about a boy with blond hair and orange eyes, who lives in a city three thousand miles away, and she thinks specifically of a party, back when she was a different person, when her and the boy held hands and jumped from a balcony into a swimming pool, and didn’t for a second loosen their grip.

#

In the night, the man dreams, he says, about vaudeville, spectacle. And is it possible, he says, that these things—these experiences—have been passed through the blood, that they, in fact, belong to his relatives, old-timey entertainers, who trooped across Europe and the US in painted caravans. Anything is possible, she says. Well, sorry, he says, for sharing something so personal with you.

#

The baby has a fever. The man has a cold. The baby has a partial tongue tie—snip—then it doesn’t. The man has a brief existential crisis lasting nine days and two convenient weekends. The woman gets half her hair cut off, and cries about it. The blond-haired boy, who is now a blond-haired man, takes a trip to Capri and posts five photographs. Somewhere, in a separate universe, she slips into the cobalt water with him.

#

She returns home to find the man singing to the baby. He has a beautiful voice, though it was most spectacular when he was young; she has seen videos of him at nine and ten, when he sang hymns with such purity. He picks up the baby and the two of them spin around the room. He stands on a wooden building block and the television remote and the kitten’s tail, but doesn’t falter. He is wearing the satin shirt he bought himself, the labels attached with fine silver thread; he is holding the baby away from the delicate material, because it was expensive, and he may still return it.

#

He is a good father, the woman’s mother says, and she would do well to remember that. And that is what marriage is, the woman’s mother adds, brushing over the fact they are not married, have had the child out of solemn wedlock, and brought it home not to a trim three-bed semi, but to a boxy flat above a shop selling Japanese denim.

#

A plague. A plague. A plague. A plague. A plague. The stomach bug passes from the baby to the woman to the man and back to the baby. The man misses a stag do in Berlin he was so dearly looking forward to; she drags plastic bags to the laundrette, muttering apologies.

#

Dawn approaching, and is the blond-haired boy back in Capri? Is it an old picture? Has he moved there? Half an hour searching, and she can find no evidence. Do people move to Capri? The kitten leaps from the flea market chair onto the kitchen counter and performs complex acrobatics.

#

The man is juggling three lemons and a lime. I used to do this riding a unicycle, he says, as happy as she’s ever seen him. I used to do this riding a unicycle and whistling—the trick is to stop thinking. To empty your mind of everything except rhythm. I’ve never been very good at that, she says, and if you’re planning on running away to the circus, could you take the baby with you—it would do them good, I think, to see the world.

#

This one? the man with the camera asks. It’ll do, the woman frowns down at the image. She looks so solemn. Bland. In their picture, the baby seems perturbed. It is Saturday morning, and the man has gone to the park, to ride his bike with his friends. Off somewhere nice? the man with the camera says. I don’t know, she replies, or maybe, actually, Capri?

#

Perhaps I could give up work, the woman says. Perhaps I could be a trad wife. She is stirring the baby’s porridge above a low flame, cutting tropical fruits into long thin strips. You are neither of those things, the man says, practising handstands against the wall. I don’t know who I am anymore, she says. Did you ever? No, she replies, but it didn’t matter, before, because I could still be anything I wanted. Or at least the option was there—

#

The worst thing she ever did to him was bad; the worst thing he ever did to her was worse, but chronology worked in his favour. The baby remains fair faced and without sin.

#

When the passports arrive, she slides them under the mattress like a loon. The man is on a video call with his parents, the baby pulling faces and chuntering toward the laptop screen. I think this kid is going to be a performer, he says. I think they’re going to be a goddamn superstar.

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Eloise Poole is a writer and researcher based in Manchester, England. She is studying for an MA in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her short fiction has been published by Banshee and Lunate.