She’d always thought it was good for a children’s performer to be childless. Otherwise you’d meet children thinking, Not as smart as mine. Or worse: smarter than mine, lovelier than mine. She judged every piece of art sent to the show: Martin, age six, of Sussex, you drew that with your foot. Penny, age nine, of Walthamstow, that’s the worst fucking fairy I ever saw: it looks like a wingéd footstool.

“I hate children,” said Mistress Mickle, with the force of a criminal confession. It echoed the same way. “Never wanted them.”

The Magnificent Jimmy appeared stricken, and cold. “Oh. Pity. I did. We did. Wanted them. But it didn’t happen for me and the wife.”

Mistress Mickle felt dizzy. Her whole back ached. Panic. She should say something. Ask for help. Then, “You were great. You were really great.”

“Thanks very much,” he said, but he was turning away, going back in. “You all right, then?”

“Listen,” she said, “I can get you work.”

“I’ve got work.”

“No, I mean—I’m—”

“I know who you are,” he said, and went back in.

She sat in a chair and pulled her coat around her and threw up again, and then, without knowing it was going to happen, without a single premonition, she shit her pants: it was the most awful and bewildering feeling—all that warmth against her cold, sodden skin. Mistress Mickle was dying. Jenny Early was dying. Not of embarrassment after all. She was embarrassed, but that wasn’t what was killing her.

She was afraid.

Of death? Yes, she felt the edge of it, like a metal box buried in the dirt of the yard that’s worked its way up. All these years she hadn’t been brave about death but incredulous. On the most fundamental level, and despite all the evidence to the contrary, she hadn’t believed in it. She might have believed when her parents died—her father of a heart attack, her mother of liver cancer—because she did grieve them, miss them. Eventually she cheered up, and it didn’t feel as though it were time healing all wounds, but an incorrect assumption made correct. They weren’t dead, they were elsewhere. Of course, she’d had her mother cremated; she’d gone to the funeral arranged by her father’s second wife. Then she’d seen neither parent for years. But there was no part of her that believed in their permanent absence. That’s why heaven. Heaven was invented not because people believed but because they didn’t.