Only after she joined Circus Alekan did Marion learn to ride.  One spring morning, the trainer offered her lessons; at a loose end, she said yes, thinking nothing of it other than the chance to indulge the fascination horses had held for her since girlhood; the chance too to see life from saddleback height.  Besides that, she could not have simply articulated the hold they had on her.  Perhaps she loved them because they seemed at once unfettered and gently docile; free and excitable and dangerous yet all-embracing in their comfort and sugary amiability.  Once she had finished the course of lessons, the trainer revealed his thinking – that she had it in her to perform her acrobatics from the platform of the horse’s back.  She laughed him off but eventually he persuaded her, buttering her into an affirmative through saying he had never seen as natural a first-time rider.  That, added to her gifts as an acrobat, not to mention her petite beauty…

Flying through the air on a trapeze had not been her ambition till late in her childhood. She had been something of a dreamer, scorning colouring books and pens – these could not match the colours generated by letters and phrases as she spoke them out loud or in her mind.  Out of fairy tales she span lengthier yarns featuring herself as their core character.  Her ever-extending vocabulary paraded across endless skies and each item in it competed for the most vibrant colours, or at violet hour the most delicate, the palest.  Because of her size, because she often seemed lost on a planet far from others, she fell subject to being labelled an oddity.  She didn’t care, for happiness came from perceiving ‘fingertips’ as silver, ‘horse’ as butterscotch and ‘leaf’ as an amber, autumnal hue; ‘star’ burned sapphire and ‘field’ revealed itself as an undulating sea of flax.  Soon she thought she might like to be a poet, only she fretted that the poems could never be as colourful to others as to their author.

Routinely the young Marion hid herself beneath the curtain-like tresses of a Salix Chrysocoma, there to dream and bring colours into being.  Besides nature only the circus could match the richness of the colours she perceived in her head.  It had begun the year they first pitched their tent nearby her home.  The red and the blue of the big top, the ginger spraying from the sides of the auguste’s face, the silver sequinned costume of the Russian funambulist sparkling in the spotlight as he danced the length of the tightrope eliciting intakes of breath.  From then on she had only one undeclared object in mind.  Circus skill training not being an option, she settled for gymnastics and spent all her unscheduled hours tumbling.

It started then, the living of a double life, the life all live to a greater or lesser extent – a double one, that of the interior and the exterior.  But hers by any measure had been an extreme case of the dominance of the interior.  If she looked back along the path her life had taken, she could see she had been happiest at those moments of conjunction – lighthouse flashes of love for another human being, the expressive movement of her handsprung body through the air, the age-old gliding of a bird of prey above a hillside hanger.  But rarely did she share anything of that interior life.  Her synaesthesia seemed itself a perfect conjunction of art and science, of magical colour and a predictable exactitude, yet instinctively she felt no-one could understand its meaning, except perhaps another poetic synaesthete, and she never met one of those.  She moved through her life either in languorous, ethereal motion or as a blur of elusive colour.  The others largely avoided her.

In the circus ring Marion and her horse Quicksilver spiralled the air into a life-affirming breeze.  The music and gasps and applause from the audience came as from afar, much like the rhythms of her heart – she heard them as a series of pulses on top of the galloping horse’s hooves, such familiar sounds that by them she could set her tempo as she performed near-miraculous feats.

She had been the horse trainer’s since the day he first picked her up all covered in bruises from the floor of the ring.  But though she loved the man he didn’t complete her and she felt obliged to look beyond him.  For a time she admired the taut muscles of the strong man, but he never made her heart sing.  The auguste brought forth music and made her laugh, but theirs could only ever be a brief encounter.  Then there had been the impalement artist; in the end she had cut him more deeply than he had her.  The day the lion tamer joined the circus, the horse trainer finally had his hegemony seriously challenged.  She had never felt such a thrust through her heart as in the moment Isaac first set his eyes on her.  Mute, she stood transfixed, oblivious to all else.  He carried his difference about him; instinctively she could see that he too had once been scorned and labelled a freak but had risen above it.  Livid red streaks scarred one side of his face; the result of flashing talons on the one and only occasion he had been careless.  Never before had she been attracted so magnetically.  And so the living of a different kind of double life began, one lived in both the interior and the exterior, conjoining them at last.  She tamed the lion tamer, and in so doing set him free, and vice versa.  Both in its command and spectrum of colours, Isaac’s strong, deep, accented voice thrilled her.  In an outlying caravan in the depths of the night, he became her horse and she his lion and together they merged the grace of acrobatic flight and the anticipation of formal strictures.

You could never be certain about the future, but time gave Marion to understand that Isaac loved her more than his lions.  He too had an interior like hers, and since he did, regardless of separation or loss, she could no longer envisage dying of a broken heart.  ‘Broken heart’ – she heard that phrase as the intermingled colours of a bruise.  ‘Heart’ by itself – a different matter.  One night in the caravan she told Isaac its colour as she perceived it and never loved her lion tamer more than for his immediate reply – ‘may your heart stay vermillion forever’.

It was a building more suited to the south of Italy than to its actual location, set into a terrace along one of the cobbled streets of an old English market town.  Like the rest of the house, the zenith – the octagonal cupola itself – was now a mess of peeling stucco.  But its bell still tolled the hours, albeit at some degree of variation from the metronomic chiming of St. Edmund’s.  For three hundred years the two bells had carried on their conversation, and for that same number of years, the townsfolk had been happy to eavesdrop upon it.

Built by a prosperous apothecary who had been three times mayor of the town, the Cupola House was the kind of informal institution from which every place of its size benefits.  For a building with an Italianate exterior, inside it was rather a spit and sawdust kind of place; no-one seemed to know how it had resisted the tide of gentrification that had swept the rest of the town, save for the landlords’ stubborn refusal to listen to offers.  The couple could see their customers liked it as it was, no frills save for a bar lined with the best beers that they could source; and so they kept the cracked flags and the stained tables and the wall above the roaring fire somewhat blackened by years of wood smoke.  It was lived in, and snug, like a cardigan worn for comfort rather than style.  Which is not to say that the Cupola’s customers lacked style, but that comfort was interpreted individually by each and every one of them without much regard for the fashions of the day.

Though a bastion of the non-conventional, the welcome was as warm as you’d get anywhere.  The landlord and lady strove not to preside over their domain like monarchs at court; they saw themselves more as servants of the mood, and the mood came from the customers and the longevity of their custom.  The drinkers relaxed into the Cupola’s unforgiving wooden chairs as if they were the plush leather sofas in the lounge bar of the grandest hotel in town.  In a nook of the Cupola’s rather more democratically open living room was a woman whose broad, immediate smile and mass of curling russet hair ensured she stood out even when she would prefer to observe rather than be observed.  A regular from down the years and across the week, she might be said to be House royalty.  Hers was a regal name, too – Charlotte.  Not that she affected airs, or found herself deferred to; in fact the reverse was true.  From the first sip of her opening drink, she exuded the warmth you saw in her face; a striking face whose attraction was in part that it was open to life, to the scenes that she witnessed as she went about her working day, and to the people milling about the pub, so many of whom seemed to take a chance at some point or other in the evening to engage her in conversation, like bees buzzing about an apian monarch.

As was the case with that earlier red-headed regnant, Elizabeth I, it was hard for a newcomer to gauge who her consort might be; but the outsider would swiftly divine that such a woman would not be walking through life alone; and on closer inspection, he or she would spot the man sat across the table from her, arguing the toss with a logic so unbending and rigorous that in its glint the observer would deduce the beginnings and sustention of their attraction.

The evening we see her embarked upon, this was the evening of her mock-coronation, for it was between the third and fourth pints that she let slip the news that the (cross-dressing) younger of her two sons had recently become the singer in a Parisian electro swing band called Princesse.  A wag nearby suggested that if her son was une princesse, then she was la reine – la reine Charlotte of the Cupola House!

But all was not what it seemed.  Charlotte’s life was two intertwined spirals.  As one helix spiralled up among the pints of ale and glasses of wine and shouted conversations and gusts of laughter, the other spiralled down on into the stillest part of herself, from which detachment sprang words, swimming upwards for their life, breaking the meniscus of the lake at the centre of the forest of noise around her with the sudden grace and surprise of a landlocked dolphin.  The words that rose mused on her fellow drinkers, on herself and her lot; and on the nature of existence.  They were beguiling words as they broke the surface of that pool in her mind and Charlotte knew she really ought to catch them before they lost their buoyancy and disappeared, very possibly forever.  But more often than not the stories and the images held in them sank from view as the whirl of the evening and the first of those two intertwined spirals scooped her up in its arms and bought her another drink.  Sometimes, however, when she got home in the early hours, or waking sore-headed in the morning after a broken night’s sleep, the words would still be there, bobbing like apples or corks or waterfowl, and she would net them or feed them bread and then once more she had language in the palm of her hand.  She didn’t care much if anyone read what she wrote; what was important was to name the nameless and numberless feelings and thoughts and images teeming up and down the two spirals, leaping from one across to the other and back again.  To do this was to achieve a moment of measurement, of graceful balance, in the see-saw of life, a life whose chief certainty was that the helter-skelter whirl of another night at the Cupola would be upon her again before she knew it.

*

Both spirals were silent – the one rendered speechless, the other wordless – the day she turned the corner and saw that the Cupola House, that beautiful building with its long history and its warm welcome, had been gutted by a fire.  Its bell tumbled, its cupola gone.

When the words came back, she would ensure that its memory was kept very much alive.

It was the ants who told her to leave.

Sunday morning he lay wasted in bed and she rose early to find a foraging column making its way to and fro between the back door and the pile of sugar he had spilt in the early hours but neglected to clear up. Each departing ant had in its clutches as many of the fine, translucent-white grains as it could carry. While the outgoing line descended from the worktop down the face of the fridge, the incoming ants ascended. The two broadly parallel lines stretched away across the floor, disappearing into and appearing from the gap under the door, a gap visible to both the human and the formic eye. Beyond were a couple of concrete steps, in the crevices of which the nest had been created and the colony lodged.

Feeling like his mother, if she had told him once about the sugar, she had told him a thousand times, but he. Never. Bloody. Listened. Away from the columns of ants – it wasn’t their fault – she smashed his Dunfermline Athletic mug on the floor tiles. The dregs splashed on her bare feet.

She wanted to go home. He didn’t want to; ‘Not just yet, hen.’ She wanted air that carried on it the scent of the sea or the heather over which it had blown rather than a single day and night more of kebabs and grimy heat and petrol fumes. Recently too she had been dreaming of feet kicking at her tummy from the inside, kicking her so hard that she would wake from sleep. She had told him the dream, but she could tell he didn’t want to; ‘Not just yet, hen.’ So she slept while he lived life as an urban ghoul. She needed to wake up, to snap out of it, to do what she wanted to do, be where she wanted to be. For too long she had clung to the belief that he had to get all this out of his system, and then he would be ready. But she knew now he would never be ready. He would always spill the sugar.

As a girl she had been fascinated by ants. The singular way they formed their collective, she supposed. They seemed so driven and determined. She crouched on the floor tiles as she might once have done to get a better view of them. Even here crawling across the theoretically hygienic space of the kitchen, they didn’t make her skin crawl. She watched them scurry, able to move off in any direction as curiosity or the surface over which they were passing required, always returning to the strength of the line.

She opened the back door, and there were the first flyers of the year, spreading their wings; or rather, rising as cavalierly and as uncertainly into the air as the pioneers of human aviation must have. She had refused to let him kill the ants, either with powder or boiling water. In that sense she was to blame for the problem as much as him. In all probability they were doomed from the beginning; perhaps she should have asked him back then what his position on ants was, or insects in general. Filtered out his mass murdering tendencies.

She stood up, stepped back over the ant lines, and added what sugar remained in the bowl to the spillage on the worktop. To her eye this did not create a sufficiently impressive mountain, so she opened the store cupboard, found the rest of the pack of sugar and emptied that out too, followed by healthy measures of demerara, caster and icing sugar. The ants deserved the lot, and he could walk for his afternoon cup of tea, or drink it unsugared for once.

She packed her suitcase to the rhythm of his snoring. He remained oblivious as she moved quickly and quietly around the bedroom. There seemed no point leaving a note; the sugar mountain was eloquent enough, and if he didn’t understand its message, then there really had never been any hope.

He became voracious, obsessive even, in his desire for novel savours.  A week never passed in which no new brew passed his lips.  Long gone were days of yore when all he drank was Earl Grey or Assam.  Now he quaffed far beyond even Lapsang souchong: high grade Rooibos or floral Manuka on honeyed, sunny mornings; herbal infusions such as fennel or lemon and ginger cleansed away a spicy lunch; while evenings saw him imbibe Masala chai or blackberry.  Office colleagues placing mugs under a samovar’s drip would likely consider him weird – a ponce, even – if he revealed how far his obsession ranged, how imperiously dismissive of cheap brews and milk he had become, so universally was such a sorry commonplace held: char was char.

Of course, come mid-morning or four o’clock, his preferred leaves were connoisseur brews: scrunched green gunpowder; hand-rolled Darjeeling, pale and mellow; hand-picked Nilgiri Orange Pekoe; and famous makes of Chinese ‘black dragon’ oolong hailing from Wuyi in Fujian province: Red Robe, Iron Monk, Cassia, Narcissus.  Noble and dangerous names which leisurely he unfurled in his mind; leaves he imagined picking in landscapes his eyes had never seen.

Some kinds he despised – he forbore from naming such cheap or queer-smelling brews. (Camomile was one; a brand famous less for savour and more for chimpanzees, a second.)  Like any obsessive, he disliked as hard as he loved, and you should know he would kill for a rare pack of Junshan Yinzhen yellow, allegedly beloved of Chairman Mao Zedong.

Before long he was mixing his own brews from leaves expensively purchased online.  He even essayed growing his own, a labour of love where a union of Camellia sinensis and Yorkshire’s growing season was concerned.  Success was variable; however, he was proud of his home-brewed Bai Mu Dan, whose fresh spring buds and baby leaves he had himself dried.  He ceremonially shared his inaugural bowl.  She much preferred coffee, and only acquiesced for love of him.  On occasion she feared he may be blinded by his obsession, wondered indeed if he was losing his mind; if char were peerless, life and she a mere second.  However, she had never wished him gone, would never cede him, even if someone offered her every leaf of char in China.  Caffeine junkie she may be – no force was required in drawing from her an admission of his calling: he had produced and brewed an unsurpassable cuppa.

Paula Weald had lost the means whereby she could conjure a sense of the person she was. Her ego was sorely taxed and self-observance had gone beyond a joke. Every day, she seemed to succumb to wound or trauma, and the only escape open to her was to leave her body. Detached then were her eyeballs and Paula knew not how she would be able to return those orbs to the sockets that usually housed and shuttered them. They floated free, roved above Paula’s head, former seekers of adventure and beauty now reduced to speechless autoscopy.

She had been a woman who never saw a handsome man that she couldn’t help but love the guy some; now she rose up above herself and the men she met and all she could see was the quarrelsome tangle of her curls and the spread of male pattern baldness. The faces were lost to her, as hers was to them. Nor could she puzzle out how she would become once more a person who looked out from – rather than down on – the body whose flesh and bone had once kept her heart warm. The phenomenon was a conundrum, for sure. The problem was momentous; the answer, one of moments. Moments slowly grown back together, become one. Whole; the self served.