I don't know why The Great Lucio and his Fantastic Ape came to Ambrose. Perhaps it was because I fixed the sign.
I already told you about the wonky sign on the front gate of Ambrose. I don't like when things aren't straight, like signs, for example. There's a word for people like me: OCD. It means Obsessive Convulsive Disorder – which doesn't make any sense, because if I was so Disorderly why would I go round straightening everything? Anyway, I learned this one from Sophie, years later. She got it from women's magazines she bought in the city. There was always stuff about Disorders in those magazines, and she read so many of them that she ended up an expert on Disorders. But like I said, this all happened later, and back then I didn't know I had a Disorder at all.
After we'd buried Elinor, I wanted to take my mind off it, so I went and found some wire and tied up the other end of the sign to make it straight. Then I cleaned it with a rag. Even Sophie was impressed. Somehow Ambrose didn't look so abandoned now that it had a straight sign.
Lucio and the Ape arrived that night. They were the first. We don't know why they came, and it's not like we could ask them. But we knew one thing: Lucio and the Ape didn't want to live in a hotel. They wanted to live in a circus.
When I first saw them I was sprawled out on the rug in the lounge room, completely fucked after a day of digging holes and dragging dead people all over the place. Sophie was feeding Fred in the kitchen. I could hear her cooing to him.
I'd never given much thought to the old TV until then. There had been so much other stuff going on that I'd forgotten all about it, to be honest. But now, as I lay on my back on the rug, I reached up and ran my fingers over the screen, and played with the controls without thinking about it.
I hadn't meant to switch it on. But suddenly I heard a man speak.
"Your break."
I jerked up and pushed myself backwards.
On the TV I could see the red room with the snooker table in it. Except it wasn't empty now.
"Sophie!" I shouted.
"What?"
"Come here! Quick!"
They were exactly as I'd imagined them. The Great Lucio wore a black top-hat and a dusty cloak with patches sewn on it. He had a face like a piece of cuttlefish and a moustache like a piece of seaweed. The Ape had bowed legs and clever ape feet, and a round face with kissing lips, and big brown ape eyes. He walked upright, but had to stretch his long hairy arms out and grab onto things to hold himself steady. Sometimes he scampered along on all fours.
Sophie raced in with Fred in her arms. I pointed at the TV and Sophie almost dropped the baby. "That's a monkey," she said.
"Ape," I corrected her.
The Great Lucio went to the scoreboard and put the markers on zero. The Ape made a blurting sound with its lips and went to the cue rack and grabbed a cue. It leaned over the table and sent the white ball whizzing into the pack of red ones at the other end of the table. Crack! The balls scattered.
Sophie put Fred down on the rug and we settled in to watch them play. Fred went straight to sleep. I could never get over how much he slept when he was a baby, and a lot of the time when he wasn't sleeping he was kind of half awake.
The Ape was good, but the Great Lucio was better. When it lost the game the Ape jumped up and down and threw the cue on the floor.
"You would be a reasonable player if you could only control your temper," Lucio said, twirling his moustache with his fingers. The ends of his moustache were already blue with chalk.
For the next game Lucio gave the Ape a twenty point lead. He broke this time, and one of the red balls flew straight into a pocket. The Ape hooted and covered its eyes.
"Consequences," Lucio said. He sent the white ball rolling gently towards a green one. It seemed to hang on the edge of the pocket forever before falling in. "It is one thing to perform a Fantastic Act; quite another to foresee the consequences of your actions." Another red ball was drawn into a pocket like a magnet. "Did you never consider the consequences of grabbing that lady? No you didn't. And now we've been fired from the circus."
The Ape hid its face in its hands.
"Yes, she was handsome," The Great Lucio said, missing the pink ball this time, and twirling the ends of his moustache as he walked over to the scoreboard. "Rather handsome." His eyes grew distant. Then he coughed and his eyes cleared. "But that is no excuse for what you did. Your shot, my Ape."
The Ape missed completely.
I wondered what Fantastic Things the Ape did. I wondered if the Great Lucio did anything fantastic at all. I had to admit he was pretty good at snooker though.
"Where're you going?" Sophie said.
"Downstairs."
"Ben -"
I was almost out the door before I heard her come racing after me.
She followed me downstairs. It was dead quiet on the ground floor. All the doors were shut. We went up to the door of the snooker room, which had the number three on it. I rapped on it.
Nothing.
"Hello?" I called.
I tried to open the door. It was locked. We went outside and peered in through the window. Lucio and his Ape were nowhere in sight. The cues were in the rack and the light over the table was off. The cover was over the table, and it was coated with dust.
"Maybe they left while we were coming down," I said. "Soph, go upstairs and check the telly. I'll stay here and watch."
She went upstairs. It wasn't long before I heard her bounding back down again.
"Well?"
"The Ape won a game! The magician guy said that it was just luck."
We both looked through the window into the empty room.
"Maybe it's a different room," she said, but I don't think either of us believed that.
And that was it, we just let it lie. What's the use in worrying about stuff like that?
As it turned out, me and Sophie never saw any of our guests, except on the TV. At first I figured the TV was just showing old footage, you know, like from years ago. That would have explained everything. It should have explained everything.
But there was still the matter of the typewriter.
As we went back upstairs that day I happened to look through the open door of the office, and there it was. The typewriter. I knew it hadn't been there before, I mean, it was huge – we would've seen it for sure.
"Typewriter," I said to Sophie.
She was still looking through the keyhole into the snooker room. She looked up at me. "What?"
I pointed through the doorway into the office.
The typewriter was one of those old ones, like from the twenties or something. There was a piece of paper inside it. I pulled it out and read it.
To the Managers,
We attach herewith, payment covering a Period of one Calendar Month, commencing this Day, Thursday February the Thirteenth.
Your humble Servants,
The Great Lucio
(and his Fantastic Ape of the Orient)
There were two signatures at the bottom. Lucio's was a magnificent curly scrawl. The Ape's was a squiggle.
Something about the letter bothered me, but I didn't know what it was. I only realised later that night when I read it again. The date was right. But February thirteenth 1985 wasn't a Thursday. It was a Wednesday.
Me and Sophie carried the typewriter upstairs. It weighed a ton. We put it on the big desk in the study. Sophie went and got a notepad I'd bought from the Chinas the day before, and we tore pages off it and rolled them into the typewriter. Then we both started banging away at the keys at the same time.
"Oh good one," I said. "You've jammed it up."
"No I didn't."
I stuck my fingers in there to un-jam them. "Stop with the bloody typing," I yelled, because she was still banging away on the keys.
"You jammed it," she said. "You don't know how to do it. Girls are better at typing than boys. Everyone knows that."
"No they're not."
"Yes they are. You never see any boy secretaries, do you?"
She was right of course.
"Have the fucking typewriter then if you care so much about it," I said.
"I will."
"It's just a stupid typewriter."
"If you say so."
"I'm going to go check on Fred."
"You do that," she said, and turned back to the typewriter and started pecking at the keys, biting her bottom lip with concentration.
"Girls are jerks," I said, leaving the room before she could say anything back.