It was the day that celebrated the birth of a carpenter who would later be nailed to a cross before he was forty, and the girl stood on the beach and watched the waves come in and soak the sand. She wore a soiled white dress over her thin body, and her black hair that ran halfway down her back was whipped into snaking tendrils by the harsh icy wind that rode in over the surging sea, beating the backs of the waves as it came and casting foam high onto the rocks further up the beach. Goose pimples stood out on her skin, for the dress was a short sleeved one. She stood facing the sea, but out of the corner of her eye she could see the man approaching, as he had been for the last five minutes, walking over the sand and parallel to the water’s edge, where he had slowly grown from a dot.
He was a fat man, muffled by layers of clothing, including a scarf that hid half his face so only two eyes, magnified by thick round glasses, showed over it. Eyes that squinted at her like those of a curious cat.
“This is something you don’t see,” he said when he reached her.
“Pardon?” she answered, not turning to face him, but her own eyes swivelled as far sideways in his direction as they could manage.
“I SAID THIS IS SOMETHING YOU DON’T SEE,” he shouted.
She turned to face him, her hair billowing as she did so.
“What is?” she asked.
“A girl on a beach on a cold Christmas Day.” He began to take off his coat. She noticed a second coat underneath it. “Girls should be indoors, opening presents.”
“What are you doing?” she said stepping backward.
“You’ll catch your death. You shouldn’t be out like this.” He held his coat in his arms and stretched them out to her, like an offering. He had loosened the scarf and she saw chubby, rosy cheeks and a kindly smile.
“Put it on,” he said.
She paused and looked at him, then she took the coat and pulled it over her brittle frame. It dwarfed her and her arms were lost in its sleeves. With difficulty she pulled them up.
“That’s better,” he said. “Don’t you think that’s better?”
“Yes,” she said. She put a hand in a pocket and pulled out some yellow tickets. Sommerbee’s was printed on them. “The name of the fair,” she said surprised.
“And what’s wrong with that?” he said. “It’s as good as any name.” He sounded disappointed.
Her hair blew over her face, then retreated.
“Your hair moves on its own like a Gorgon’s; are you Medusa? Or Stheno? Or the other one?”
The girl didn’t understand.
“Come off the beach,” he said and, turning his fat frame, wobbled off over the wet sand toward the promenade. She watched for a moment, and then followed. She saw the width of his shoe marks and placed a foot in one of them. Her foot was tiny in comparison.
Silently he led her up onto the promenade, then on over the main road, empty this morning, and to where a padlocked gate stood under a sign that repeated the word on the tickets she still grasped in her hand.
“Sommerbee’s,” he said, taking out a key from a trouser pocket and turning it in the lock. He took up the padlock and pushed open the gate. “In we go.” He padlocked it again when they were on the other side. “You can’t trust people nowadays,” he said.
He led her through the rides and booths, which she recognised despite their shrouds of tarpaulin, shrouds that lifted in the wind that seemed to follow her, and to a large caravan that stood behind the generators in a corner of the fairground.
“I like the ghost train best,” she said. But he did not answer. He took out another smaller key.
“Home,” he said. He unlocked the door and squeezed through it. The girl waited beside the open door, but he did not return. She stretched out her arms at her sides and shook them; how strange I must look, she thought. Like I have been cursed, perhaps by one of those Rose Lee gypsies you find in these places, and I am slowly shrinking into nothingness. “Roll up and see the Nothing Girl!” she said.
“Nothing Girl come in,” the man’s voice bellowed through the door.
Inside she saw a bed, a large comfortable chair that had a dint in it, a desk with an office style chair, which the girl was sure the man could not fit into, and a small kitchen at one end. There were lots of books. An electric kettle was making a noise on a bench.
“Tea, Nothing Girl.”
“Are you Summerbee’s?”
“Mr. Summerbee to you.”
“Mr. Summerbee,” she said apologetically.
“That’s better. Yes,” he said. “Tell me why a Nothing Girl is out in the cold, without a warm coat on a day like this? Where is your home?”
The girl didn’t answer, she began to peel off the great coat the man had given her.
“Are you sure you won’t disappear when you take it off?” The man asked her.
“It’s warm in here,” she said.
“Home should be warm.”
“You have plenty of books.” They were stacked in piles around the floor. “You should buy a bookcase.”
“So she is an expert on how to look after books,” he said. A grimace came to his face. The girl noticed it.
“What is it?”
“Nothing Nothing Girl,” said the man. He waddled over to the comfy chair and sat down. He stretched out his legs.
“Do your feet ache?”
Now it was his turn not to answer.
“Aren’t you going to take off your coat?” she said.
“So now it is you who asks questions,” he said.
The girl wasn’t listening, she had noticed a photograph on the bench next to the boiling kettle.
“Who is this?” she said picking it up. It was a black and white picture of a woman holding a large baby. “Is it you?”
“Put it down,” the man said crossly. “It isn’t polite to look without asking.”
“It is you, look how big the baby is!”
The kettle clicked.
“Tea’s boiled,” said the man.
The girl got the mugs and teabags from a cupboard, like the man told her, and the milk from a small fridge. She made two teas, fishing out the bags from the cups and throwing them into a small bin by her feet.
“Don’t let them drip,” warned the man.
As they sat and drank, he in his great chair, she in the office one, he told her about the fair and how he struggled to keep it going. “It isn’t fancy enough for today’s kids,” he told her. “Not enough flashing lights or lasers.”
“I like the Ghost Train,” she said.
“Ouch,” he said leaning forward and squeezing his shoe.
“Your shoes are too tight,” she told him.
“Are you my mother now?” he said. She put down her steaming mug and got up and went over to him, she stood over him hands on hips. He looked embarrassed.
“My feet are sore. I’m too fat,” he told her. “I wobble when I walk.”
She knelt next to him and began to undo the laces.
“Is it difficult to get shoes?” she said.
“ Yes, very. I send away for them. A man in Ireland makes them. I call him my leprechaun.”
“I’ve never been to Ireland.”
“I’ve never not been fat,” he said. “In the old days I would have been a circus fat man. I was brought up in the circus.”
“Really?”
“ My mother was an acrobat,” he told the girl.
“Did she have a nice costume?” she asked..
“Yes; sea blue, with sequins sewn on by hand, that sparkled under the big top lights.”
“I’d like one like that,” said the girl. “I had a blue leotard once.”
“When I was young there were lots of strange looking people around, others would pay to watch them –“
“Freaks,” said the girl.
“No not freaks – people. There was a leopard man, a crocodile man, a bearded lady, whose whiskers tickled when she bent and kissed me, a giraffe woman-“
“Lots of animal names.”
“And real animals too!” he raised his voice. “Ponies, lions, an old elephant-”
“I’ve never seen an elephant.”
“You won’t. The old circus is gone; the people are gone, the animals are gone” he said. “Only noisy machines remain. You can’t talk to machines.”
The girl thought of the empty fair outside and the padlocked gate. She looked around her.
“Haven’t you a wife?” she asked. She looked at his face. Water had formed behind the lenses of his glasses.
Tears ran down his ruddy cheeks.
“I’m just a fat man,” he said.
She stared at him, then got up and went to the sink. She emptied the crockery from a plastic bowl that sat in it and began to fill it with hot water.
“What are you doing?” said the man.
She did not reply. She found a sponge and some soap in a cupboard and turned off the tap. She added the soap to the bowl and some cold water from the other tap, then turned that off too. She tested the temperature with her elbow.
“My mother used to do that,” said the man.
She placed the sponge under an arm then carefully picked up the bowl. She carried it over to where the man sat. She placed it on the floor in front of him, and knelt down once more. She pulled off his great shoes, and then his socks and saw his swollen, raw feet. She put the sponge in the warm soapy water and, taking it out and squeezing it lightly, began to bathe an aching foot. The man was silent all the while, watching in wonder. She never looked up as she worked gently on one foot, then the other, and then, shaking her head lightly, she bent close to them and taking up a handful of long dark hair in each hand, began, delicately, to dry them.
Outside it started to snow.