Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter

a nest upon the pediment outside our attic window and laid their eggs in it. When the wee pidgies hatched out, Lizzie and I watched them with more care than you can conceive of. We saw how the mother pigeon taught her babies to totter along the edge of the wall, observed in the minutest detail how she gave them mute instructions to use those aerial arms of theirs, their joints, their wrists, their elbows, to imitate those actions of her own which were, in fact, I realised, not dissimilar to those of a human swimmer. But do not think I carried out these studies on my own; although she was flightless herself, my Lizzie took it upon herself the role of bird-mother.
    ‘In those quiet hours of the afternoon, while the friends and sisters that we lived with bent over their books, Lizzie constructed a graph on squared paper in order to account for the great difference in weight between a well-formed human female in her fourteenth year and a tiny pigeonlet, so that we should know to what height I might soar without tempting the fate of Icarus. All this while, as the months passed, I grew bigger and stronger, stronger and bigger, until Liz was forced to put aside her mathematics in order to make me an entire new set of dresses to accommodate the remarkable development of my upper body.’
    ‘I’ll say this for Ma Nelson, she paid up all expenses on the nail, out of pure love of our little kiddie and what’s more, she thought up the scheme, how we should put it round she was a ’unchback. Yes.’
    ‘Yes, indeed, sir. Every night, I mimicked the Winged Victory in the drawing-room niche and was the cynosure of all eyes but Nelson made it known that those shining golden wings of mine were stuck over a hump with a strong adhesive and did not belong to me at all so I was spared the indignity of curiosity. And though I now began to receive many, many offers for first bite at the cherry, offers running into four figures, sir, yet Nelson refused them all for fear of letting the cat out of the bag.’
    ‘She was a proper lady,’ said Lizzie. ‘Nelson was a good ’un, she was.’
    ‘She was,’ concurred Fevvers. ‘She had the one peculiarity, sir; due to her soubriquet, or nickname, she always dressed in the full dress uniform of an Admiral of the Fleet. Not that she ever missed a trick, her one eye sharp as a needle, and always used to say, “I keep a tight little ship.” Her ship, her ship of battle though sometimes she’d laugh and say, “It was a pirate ship, and went under false colours,” her barque of pleasure that was moored, of all unlikely places, in the sluggish Thames.’
    Lizzie fixed Walser with her glittering eye and seized the narrative between her teeth.
    ‘It was from the, as it were, top-sail or crows’ nest of this barge that my girl made her first ascent. And this is how it came about: –
    ‘Imagine my surprise, one bright June morning, as I watched my pigeon family with my customary diligence, to see, as one of the little creatures teetered on the brink of the pediment looking for all the world like a swimmer debating with himself as to whether the water was warm enough for him – why, as it dithered there, its loving mother came right up behind it and shoved it clean off the edge!
    ‘First it dropped like a stone, so that my heart sank with it, and I let out a mournful cry, but, almost before that cry left my lips, all its lessons must have rushed back into its little head at once for suddenly it soared upwards towards the sun with a flash of white, unfurled wing, and was never seen no more.
    ‘So I says to Fevvers: “Nothing to it, my dear, but your Liz must shove you off the roof.”’
    ‘To me,’ said Fevvers, ‘it seemed that Lizzie, by proposing thus to thrust me into the free embrace of the whirling air, was arranging my marriage to the wind itself.’
    She swung round on her piano stool and presented Walser with a face of such bridal radiance that he blinked.
    ‘Yes! I must be the bride