'I ache to die. I cannot.'

'You want to die? You think that is possible?'

'You are not listening,' I cry. 'I drown myself, yet do not drown. I cut myself, and do not bleed. Over and over I climb to the top of a building a tower, a house, a church and I jump. I fall. I feel my bones break. They mend themselves. Is that not terrifying? Maybe I want to stay broken.' I lower my head for shame of hearing my voice speak such words of despair.

The old man pats my shoulder. 'Dear boy,' he murmurs. 'So inconsolable.'

'I am not a boy.'

I make an attempt to shake him off, but the warmth of his hand pierces the fabric of my coat and I cannot bear the thought of losing this small comfort.

'I am sorry,' he says. 'I do not mean to sound cruel. But, surely-'

'I am lost: lost in the forest of my thoughts. I close my eyes and am swept into b.l.o.o.d.y nightmares of falling, breaking and healing.'

'You think them nightmares?'

'No,' I whisper. 'They are memories.'

I have spoken the truth I did not wish to admit. It is a relief. I take a strengthening breath. 'I want to understand what they mean; why they plague me so.'

He clasps my hand. 'Listen, Abel, if that is your name now. I can tell you everything; it comes to me through the sweat on your palms. I can scent out your entire history and where it has led you.'

A strange sensation possesses me: I stand on the step of a great house, grasping the door handle. All I need do is turn it and open the gateway to myself. The old man bounces from foot to foot, as though the earth is burning the soles of his shoes. He rubs his palms together, eyes sparkling.

'So. You will scoop out my stories.'

'Yes, yes!' he cries, cracking his fingers.

'Will they not fill this tent, this fairground, this city? If I am as full as you say, will it not be so?'

'Of course,' he gasps. He scratches at my sleeve and pulls me close, trembling, his palms clammy. 'Give yourself to me.'

'And when you have taken everything out and laid it before me, what then?' I ask.

He blinks. 'All will be well. Come now.'

'Wait. How will I put them back in? How will they all fit?'

'Do not worry about that.' His eyes are famished. 'Let me have your stories.'

'No!' I shove him away but he hangs on, greedy as a leech.

'Please. Just one good sniff. That's all I ask; nothing more,' he whines.

It comes to me that I have heard lies such as this before.

'How can I trust your words? You wish to open me up, gawp at my insides and then leave me spread in pieces like a broken watch.'

'But I can tell you what you are,' he wheedles. 'Stay with me. We shall have such adventures.'

'Get away from me!' I cry. 'No more lies!'

All he wants is to satisfy his own need; slake his thirst on my soul, feeding and feeding. I thrust out my hand and he falls; I do not look where. I shall pretend I have not met this man. I will not write it on my doc.u.ment. I will forget him. I plunge out of the tent and run into the noise of the fair, grateful for the screech of peddlers, the sour puddles of beer, the pattering hands of wh.o.r.es.

At last I am far enough away to stop. My breath returns to me slowly. My mind spools in circles. At my feet are sc.r.a.ps of paper, trodden into the churned earth. I pick one up and see the picture of a girl entirely covered in hair, and straight away recall her strange image from the previous night.

I recognise her with an eye that is not one of common sight. It is an odd sense of communion: we are both different. Hers is the first thing people remark upon: she is never free of her distinguishing strangeness. Mine is less easy to find out, so that I can pa.s.s as a man amongst men. Yet both of us are shackled. I wonder if we have met before. I forget these things.

I try to smooth out the creases, but the paper is dirty, the words smudged. What if the same should happen to my doc.u.ment? I pat my breast and feel it rustle against the skin. I breathe in relief.

A man comes barrelling up to my side.

'No need to pick up the leavings! Here's a fresh bill of fare. The most astonishing aggregation of human curiosities gathered together in one place!' he yells.

I take one without thinking overmuch. As he pushes it into my hand I see a scrawl of dark paint on his hand: a tiny indigo bird in the V between thumb and forefinger. A memory stirs. He notices my hesitation and peers at me more closely.

'I know you.'

He stares a long moment, and then lets out a long whistle.

'Well, well. It's you. Mr Lazarus himself, risen from the mud. Wondered if I might run into you again sooner or later. f.u.c.k me and no mistake. You've had a bit of a wash and brush-up, haven't you?'

I blink at him, trying to make sense of his words. The memory is very close: he said mud. Yes, I am lying in mud ... He wiggles his thumb in front of my eyes and the inky bird flutters.

'It is flying!' I cry, and the attempt at recollection flutters away.

'Ha! Given you a taster, have I?' He tugs back his cuff to reveal a tangle of flowers. 'That's not all,' he whispers. 'I'm covered, here to here.'

He indicates neck and ankle.

'Why?' I ask.

He lays a lazy arm across my shoulder, hugging me to his breast in a sudden friendliness that serves only to remind me how friendless I am.

'It is a pa.s.sion. After the first I had, I could not rest until I had a second. Then a third. My skin hungered for them. Of course, I look at the old ones and find I grow dissatisfied with them for they bleed and blur. But I can have their lines redrawn, have them turned into something else. But I keep this first one untouched.'

He points to the swallow soaring in its sky of naked skin, as though the surrounding ink is pushed back from its minute power.

'I will not cover it.'

He rolls his sleeve up further to a banner unfurling around the blooms, etched with the word 'Mother'. Above, a scarlet heart drips blood on to the scroll.

'Why do you have Mother tattooed on to your skin?' I ask. 'Are you afraid that you will forget her?'

He smiles and twists his arm so he can see the riband. With the tip of his finger he traces the outline of the letter M. He notices me observing him, and shakes off the softness with a burst of angry laughter.

'Do all your tattoos bring such an excess of feeling?'

'Feeling? I don't know what you're on about! Her? Clouted me if I so much as begged a crust.'

He crooks his elbow, swelling the muscle of his upper arm, and the heart starts to beat in a steady rhythm.

'When my mother died, she left me her heart,' he sneers. 'It is a joke; a bit of patter,' he adds in a whisper. 'Keeps the paying customers happy. Got to keep them happy, eh?'

I think once more of my doc.u.ment fraying and softening against the rub of my skin, ink blurring when I sleep on it. How fragile it seems of a sudden. What if I were to lose it? I think of the word 'slaughter-man' inked on to my arm, where it would draw no attention to itself. I could record only what I wish and not a word more. I think of the fortune-teller and shudder.

'Can a man have anything tattooed?' I ask.

'Here's your answer,' he says, and removes his shirt.

The flowers at his wrist bloom into an abundance of stems and branches weaving up his right arm and across his breast, green-leaved and hung with swollen orange fruit, succulent and enticing me to bite into them. A striped cat roars, leaping across his stomach, and on the other side a warrior brandishes a silver sword before the great yellow fangs.

'You've seen nothing like it before, have you?'

I begin to say no, but as the word forms and falls from my mouth my mind sparkles with pictures, each small as a pin-p.r.i.c.k and as long-lasting: I see an ochre-skinned fellow, face swirled with dark waves; a woman with swollen indigo lips; an old man inked with furrows of dots punctuating the body's meridians. I blink them away.

'No,' I say firmly. 'I have never seen anything like this. Ever.'

'Of course you have not.'

He wraps his arm around my shoulder.

'Now. You come along with George. I'll not be letting you out of my sight so fast this time.'

'Where are we going?'

'To be entertained!'

He speaks this last very loudly, and heads turn. He stands, twisting himself in a way that makes his back appear broader. He winks at me and swoops his shirt in the air.

'Watch this,' he hisses. 'Yes!' he cries. 'You have before you the Encyclopaedic Man! The Wonder of the Taboo! Every forbidden enquiry satisfied! With ill.u.s.trations,' he croons.

Soon, he has an audience of eager listeners.

'Here I stand, chief wonder of Professor Arroner's Astonishing Marvels! Inked with every story from the Arabian Nights, ill.u.s.trations both saucy and satirical!'

He grins and twirls about some more.

'For you, gentlemen, and fine ladies of distinction, I think something salty shall suffice. I shall tell the "Tale of the Mermaid".'

He contorts his body into various postures, swelling first the muscles of his arms, then his thighs, then his shoulders. As he does, the pictures step forward for attention, or stand back to let another take prime position. The small crowd oohs and aahs. He bends his left arm at the elbow and a woman jiggles bright pink b.r.e.a.s.t.s and flicks an emerald tail.

'I caught her in the South Seas, when I was fishing for turtles. The native sailors would have gutted and pickled her but not me! She was the greatest prize a sailor could ask for. They told me she was cursed! That I was a fool! But did I listen? Do you think I listened?'

'No!' sings out the little gathering.

'No, indeed. Think of it: at sea for six long months without a woman's touch.' He winks again. 'Ah! She was fishy!'

He sniffs loudly and the men sn.i.g.g.e.r; I am not quick enough to accompany them.

'Fishier than a dockside trollop!' he cackles, to an answering chorus from the women, and this time I am faster.

'But, oh, she had skills that would put the most seasoned wh.o.r.e to shame. She was flexible as a flounder! Lascivious as a lamprey! Tight as a turbot! She'd take it any way I wanted.'

The snickering grows in intensity.

'A woman's touch! When your only companions are cannibals! Demons in human form!'

He turns about and shoves down the waistband of his britches, baring his left b.u.t.tock to reveal a devil's face, all teeth and long scarlet tongue.

'A portrait,' he whispers. 'Your actual portrait, taken from life, of one of my companions!'

There are exclamations of disbelief. He stops his narrative.

'Would you hear more?'

They rumble approval.

'Then, gentlefolk all, you may view me in greater detail, and hear even saucier tales each night as one of Professor Arroner's Anatomical Marvels on c.o.c.kspur Street. Not just me. You will have heard, of course, of the infamous Stomach-Dance of Salome, to which no ladies of a nervous disposition are admitted? Oh, sirs, a treat for the eye, and the body also!' He guffaws, flashing bright teeth.

He hands out the playbills, crying out their merits as he does so.

'And that is not all! See the India-Rubber Boy, brought lately from the Malay plantations! View the most true and genuine Lion-Faced Woman! What does she hide beneath her hair? What indeed!'

As he speaks, he holds out his cap.

'Thirsty work, kind sirs. Thirsty work indeed.'

Farthings and halfpennies tumble into his hat, and he nods at each small generosity; smiling as broadly at those who shrug and give nothing, muttering, 'Purely voluntary, sirs, purely donatory.' When he is satisfied that all forthcoming monies have been gathered in, he stands at my side once more and struggles back into his shirt.

'Does it hurt?' I ask.

'Hurt?'

'The tattoos.'

'Every one of them!' He laughs. 'It is a manly sport. The pain is not for weaklings.'

'I would have one. Like this.' I point to the word 'Mother', near-hidden in the flashier ill.u.s.trations on his arm.

'I shall take you. This is indeed my lucky day: my prodigal friend returned; money in my pocket; and business to conduct.'

He leads me to a modest tent in the midst of the fair. The tattooist greets George warmly, enquiring how the latest piece of work has settled. George rolls up his trouser leg and points to a dragon looped around his ankle, and they hem and haw over the alacrity of its healing and the particularly fine detailing on the drops of venom trickling across its scales. I amuse myself looking about the booth at the neatly drawn designs pinned to the canvas of anchors, snakes and ships.

'So, what is it for you, sir?' enquires Ivan smiling, for we are introduced to each other. 'This is your first?'

'Yes.'