“I remember the sign above the entrance to the caravan. ‘The Most Mesmeric Collection of Freaks in All the Netherlands.’
I remember watching the silhouette of my father scribble his signature upon the contract through the caravan’s lace curtain, as I stood without. Watched him shake a menacing, meaty hand from across the desk.
I remember my mother’s melancholy lip quivering as she stepped outside, struggling to keep herself from crumbling into pools of tears – my father pale as a sheet, weak, trying his hardest to keep a stiff upper lip as the man from the freak show followed the two of them out, a slick, wicked grin unravelled the full breadth of his face. They did not know if they could ever reconcile themselves with what they’d done...”
I stood on my plinth, blinded by the spotlight, encompassed by the void.
In the blackness, the breath of the Beast grew hotter and heavier with every passing moment, drifting through the still like deathly spectres, sickening tendrils of silver vapour slipping beneath my skirts, kissing the skin of my bare legs, slowly, sordidly trickling ever further skywards, tracing the shape of my thighs, fingering mile upon freezing cold mile of petrified flesh that could not move, could not shake the sick sensation off by pain of death. Spiralling an imprisoning helix up my stomach and my spine that bound me like a piece of slaughtered game, feeling their way up the length of my waist to my plane-flat chest, seeking signs of womanhood wherever womanhood might at some terrifying juncture in time rear its head. Tiptoeing up my trembling crane of a neck until its sweltering wisps were spreading dendrites up my cheeks, penetrating the air I could not breathe, penetrating quivering lips that could not cry out I’d been born into the bounds of Hell, advancing like creeping, stalking spiders upon glistening little eyes that yearned to let their dams break and weep and wail until all of Holland was drowned, returned to the clutches of the great North Sea.
I could feel them. I could sense them. Salivating. Drooling like dogs.
They came in their thousands every single day.
They were waiting to possess me.
And they would possess me. I could have no autonomy. No right to speech or self-determination. No right to my own thoughts or even to the basest of emotions. ‘You’re not here to share your groundbreaking epiphanies with the world. No-one cares what you think. No-one cares what you have to say. No-one wants to see you cry, or shriek, or scream, or even bloody frown and call it a shame,’ so my master would bark as he woke me at the crack of dawn, as he rushed me out of bed and ordered me into my costume. ‘Your name’s not bloody Genius Girl, it’s not bleeding Bawling Belle, it’s not Little Miss Scornful Contrarian. Look at the plaque on your plinth. Groote. Meid. Big. Girl. That’s why you’re here. That’s the only reason anyone wants anything to do with you. Your job is to stand there, shut up, let them do whatever they would with you. So don’t you come crying to me unless someone’s threatening to cut those lovely long legs of yours off. They’re the moneymakers here.’
Wasn’t he right.
‘I could probably do as well as I do now if I killed you and stuffed you, told the world you were some Prehistoric Giant who roamed the Earth in the times of cavemen. Least then I wouldn’t have to put up with your moaning all the time. But I wouldn’t do that because I know you’ve got a family to keep on the money we pull in together. I wouldn’t want to let them starve, would I. And I certainly know you wouldn’t want them to go without their food and shelter…’
I wouldn’t. Dear God, I wouldn’t.
It was all for them, I used to tell myself as he dragged me up onto my podium. For Mother and Father. God knows they wouldn’t have been able to keep a normal child, let alone me. A child who could fit into a normal-sized bed. Whose clothes a King couldn’t use as curtains for his ballroom windows. Whose shoes a normal child on nine couldn’t use as a paddleboat. It was all for them. For us. For family’s sake. Because they loved me and I loved them.
Fear strangled me.
Anticipation left me gasping for the slightest shred of air.
Just beyond the canvas walls of this tiny, empty big-top in which I spent my every waking hour, on display somewhere, in some strange town I never got to cast my eyes upon, to catch my bearings and ward off the world-whirling disorientation I consistently found myself subjected to - as we were whisked off from one corner of the country to the next at dead of night, whilst we slept - I heard my master announce that I was opening for business. A flurry of Stupendouses, Astonishings, Astoundings, Extraordinaries. The odd Step right up and You won’t believe your eyes. It was the same old speech every day. The same declaration of my inhumanity and his God-given right to exploit it.
Suddenly, fingers would curl around my curtain-flaps and grip firm. The end of the beginning. Let my twelve-hour torturing commence.
Ladies and gentlemen,’ with thunderous gravitas he would clamour at his close, ‘May I present to you the nine-year-old girl who’s taller than every adult man in Europe.’
Here they come.
‘For your entertainment, I give you…’
Any second.
‘…De Groote Meid!’
An almighty crack of air. The flaps were ripped aside in a shot. Light. Blinding light.
I could see the whites of their eyes. Drinking me in. Savouring the sight of me. Three feet of plinth and seven Amsterdam feet of nine-year-old girl, this awesome alien vision, so human yet so otherworldly, held in captivity for none other than their pleasure and amusement.
Salivating men encircled me like packs of rabid dogs, sick imaginations running wild. I was nine!
I was a child!
I should have been back home in Edam. Should have been at school with all the other girls and boys that I once knew and loved so dearly. Should have been playing in the streets with them, rumbling and tumbling and charging about until Mothers’ calls started to rain down from windows, demanding we retire for our dinners. Should have been allowed to sleep peacefully, safe and secure beneath the roof my mother and father had made our home, our sanctuary, which they would give life and limb to protect come whatever horde of villains, plunderers or pillagers may - so that I might dream as they used to encourage me with every sinew to dream, so that I might dream as I once did, before it became so painfully clear that this world would not grant even the simplest of my ambitions due chance to be realised. I was a God-damned child, and I should have had as much of a right to a childhood as anyone else. No matter what I looked like! No matter who I was!
The big girl. De Groote Meid. That’s what everyone calls me these days.
Once upon a time, I did actually have a real name, believe it or not. A normal name for a normal little girl who had as much right for her humanity, her desires, opinions, ambitions, emotions, the fire in her soul and the sweetness of her character, to be recognised and celebrated as any other girl would. The day I was born, to my merchant sailor father and my maid mother in their draughty little home on the fringe of Edam, with all their heart they gifted me the gorgeous name of Trijntje – Trijntje Cornelisdochter Keever – and they filled my little head and heart full of beautiful dreams of the woman I might grow up to be. Impoverished yet eternally hopeful, barely scraping by on every guilder they could scrimp for food, for rent, to put clothes on our backs, week by week and month by passing month, in those fledgling, formative years of my little life, from the moment I emerged from the womb – began to scrawl, to walk, to witness the world, to talk – my mother and father determined I should be restrained, in my ambition, in my desire, in pursuit of my destiny, by no man or earthly bound. Every single night I could sense as clear as anything, as I lay curled up, shivering on the floor in the room across the hall from theirs, trying my level best to sleep for want of a proper bed and a sheet that could actually keep the biting cold at bay, my mother and father lying wide awake, plagued with regret, tormented by the memories of every crime against their future selves they had each committed in their youths, of every prejudice they had failed to overcome, of every locked portcullis, sealing every gateway to the Promised Land, from which they had sadly slunk away, entirely defeated, before even attempting to besiege them. Like spirits, like spectres, their sorrows haunted our shack, permeated the wattle-and-daub walls through the moonlit midnight hour, and whispered in my ear, ‘Our dearest Trijntje – be the force of nature you were always destined to be.’
And once more I would hear their hope twinkling through my head like soothing, charming chimes set off ringing by the freshest springtime breeze, as they held me, hugged me tight, knelt to look me in the eye and warmly reassure me everything would work out right in the end. ‘Be nothing, my girl, if not magnificent,’ whispered their sorrows, to the tiny beacon of optimism in the depths of their Pandora’s Box. ‘Be everything that we could never dream of being – be extraordinary!’
And indeed, in my infancy, my young heart ever drowned in daydreams of extraordinariness. Of stateliness and glory; of scientific breakthroughs; of libraries of books produced by my own pen; of security enough that no child of mine, no grandchild, no great-grandchild, would ever go hungry, find themselves in want of warmth or shelter, or be forced to don a threadbare frock if they wished not to walk the streets nude. I dreamt of honours and medals and statues with my name inscribed in boldest letters beneath, commemorating Trijntje, the Grand Dame of Edam, the City’s Own Daughter, in all her majesty. I dreamt I’d have my portrait painted by some great Dutch Master, to be hung in some stately gallery in the heart of Amsterdam. Above everything else, however – above all other aspirations – I dreamt of adventure.
In my infancy, my mother used to take me down to the water’s edge, to the shores of the Zuiderzee just beyond town, to watch the ships set sail – my father’s boat somewhere amongst the convoy preparing to depart for months on end – and as I watched them drift across the blue, broad, blustering curlicues of wind swirling about their sails, puffing them up like the chest of an almighty tenor singing songs of lost worlds found, mesmerised by the glorious sight, the sound of bow waves thundering off the ships’ cleaving prows, the feel of the fresh sea air buffeting my body, I dreamt that one day, when I was older – fully grown – that I would roam the open seas just like him. Except – whereas he was just a lowly jobbing seaman – I would take the role of Captain. Admiral. Whatever the highest station aboard a Dutch ship was, that rank I would hold; and with it, I’d command enormous four-mast galleons laden with treasures from the Spanish Main. Sail to the shores of Bengal and dine with maharajas in robes of purest Indian silk. Leap from rigging to rigging and deck to deck engaging pernicious pirates in swashbuckling duels to the death, as thunderous cannons blasted all about us, their explosive impacts shooting splinters sharp as lightning bolts straight for our jugulars as we fought. Trijntje, Hero of the Seven Seas. How majestic a vision she was!
Father used to say they never allowed girls on boats. That used to upset me terribly. He used to say most girls weren’t strong enough to hoist the sails, climb to the crow’s nest, load the chests and barrels, shift the cannons to their gun ports like the boys could, and I would feel like running to my room, throwing myself beneath my paper-thin sheets and bawling like a baby every time he said it; but he would always tell me then, before the tears welling up in my eyes could truly overpower me, that they would certainly make an exception for me. ‘Find the looking-glass,’ he’d say, ‘and take a good long look at yourself. You’re only a little girl – yet you’re already so big and strong and brave that surely no ship’s captain in all of Europe would refuse to take you aboard his boat in a heartbeat.’
I knew he was right, too. I had everything it took to be a hero of the seven seas – intrepid explorer, fearless warrior, favourite of the King. Perhaps I had yet to prove my courageousness properly – though I was sure the time would come eventually – but I knew my size and strength, believe you me. I could lift any of the children I’d befriended in the village clean above my head with one hand. I could look my mother in the eye and cradle her in my arms by the age of six or seven. I had never in my life come across a boy as big or strong as me.
In truth, I can’t remember a time when anyone was bigger than me.
My father was a man of superlatives himself, but I swear he was already the one looking up to me by the time I was eight.
A year has passed since, and I had surpassed seven Amsterdam feet.
And in that time, I had indeed become famous, my name had indeed become household across the European continent, and I had become a favourite of the King; but not for my endeavours, my achievements, my discoveries or my valour in the theatre of maritime battle, rather for the fact that I could wear bed-sheets as skirts, that fully-grown women could walk beneath my crotch barely ducking, that even the tallest of men would need to stand on tip-toes to nestle their heads deep within my chest, right where they were waiting with relish for my adolescent breasts to bud. Such was the life of a Female Giant. Such was life for a girl cursed to be taller than every grown man in the known world. Nine years old, and I should have been left at my leisure to play, to learn my lessons, to dream of the woman I might become by the time I was good and ready to let my childhood go, and mould myself into that marvellous figure of a woman all the while I advanced through those seminal years of puberty; yet by nine, my time to dream as young girls dream was done for. I could no longer dream of Trijntje, Commander of the Seven Seas, stood proud upon the prow of her galleon, chest all puffed out. I could no longer dream of that courageous explorer I knew I was once bound to be. Before long I could barely even remember the way my eyes used to glisten as I pictured her, how my heart would race and I’d suddenly have all the energy in the world; because already, by the innocent age of nine years old I wasn’t even Trijntje anymore. I wasn’t even human. I was only a little girl, for God’s sake – a little girl who should have been free to play, to laugh, to learn, to discover who she was and what her every ounce of being, brain awash with daydreams, blazing lion-heart alike, yearned for her to be – but with every passing day and every inch I rose, bigger and bigger, taller and taller, I advanced further from the civilised territory and nation of the Human Being and deeper into the wasteland of the Monsters.
I am a Freak. I am a Freak with a capital F, and by the day I turned nine there was no hiding it anymore. God knows, my parents tried. Tried to dress me up far older than my years. Told anyone who wished to know who I was that I was just some baby-faced adult relative who lived with them. By seven Amsterdam feet, though, there was nothing that could be done. Even for a grown man, let alone a prepubescent girl, I was inhumanly tall.
I understand exactly why they did what they did to me the summer I was nine. My mother and father were dirt-poor drifters. Ever going hungry, struggling to keep up with the rent. My parents always wanted what was best for me in the long run, but then and there they simply didn’t have the guilders to provide a decent life for three. They needed money. We needed money. Desperately.
I was doing it for my family. Because they loved me and I loved them.
Talk spread like wildfire that the King would be coming to Edam on the 30th June. He’d be bringing along an enormous contingent of courtiers, foreign dignitaries, ministers and generals, parading to the market square in all their gilded finery. Anxious, amongst the fervour and excitement that greeted the news the King was actually coming here, here to our insignificant little corner of the world, Edam’s mayor had arranged for a great cavalcade of entertainments to take to stages all across the centre of his great city for the royal party. ‘Any act they took a liking to would surely be granted instant fame and fortune across the kingdom,’ the Mayor declared from the steps of his Town Hall; and once the news filtered through to the fringes, my parents took note, and took action post haste.
I remember the sign above the entrance to the caravan. ‘The Most Mesmeric Collection of Freaks in All the Netherlands.’
I remember watching the silhouette of my father scribble his signature upon the contract through the caravan’s lace curtain, as I stood without. Watched him shake a menacing, meaty hand from across the desk.
I remember my mother’s melancholy lip quivering as she stepped outside, struggling to keep herself from crumbling into pools of tears – my father pale as a sheet, weak, trying his hardest to keep a stiff upper lip as the man from the freak show followed the two of them out, a slick, wicked grin unravelled the full breadth of his face. They did not know if they could ever reconcile themselves with what they’d done.
Sold their daughter to be some fairground attraction.
Sold her to be chained to a plinth in perpetuity, shipped across the country to be stood in a tent or a town square whilst the people came in droves, encompassing my tiny tent, champing at the bit for my master to rip aside the curtain-flaps and let them in to witness the sight of me. To drink me in. To surround me like petrified prey and savour me. This awesome alien vision, so human yet so otherworldly.
They advanced through the shadows of the tent towards me, pouring in through the slash of sunlight carving through the dark of my canvas dungeon. Gasps of shock and awe and grunts and growls of insatiable desire filled the black air. Women and children gawked up at me with wide eyes and gormless open mouths; many fainted at the sight, as though I were an ogre, a troll, a fully-fledged fairytale giant taking leave from the castle at the top of the beanstalk, who would snatch them where they stood and gobble them up. And the men wrapped their arms around my legs, around my waist if they could reach, as they stood right up next to me, making themselves as big and tall as they could be, marvelling at the fact I could nonetheless rest my elbows on their heads. Enjoying the fact I could rest my elbows on their heads, that they were barely navel-height to me. Enjoying their emasculation. Their humiliation.
Getting hard from their humiliation at the hands of a nine-year-old girl.
I should have been looking forwards to puberty. To womanhood. To growing up. Yet nothing scared me more. I was terrified of what would happen once I actually started looking less like a prepubescent girl and more like a woman. Everywhere the freak show whisked me away, contained in transit in a caravan I couldn’t fit inside without bending double, without being plagued by agonising backache, neck pain, shoulder pain, leg cramps, I was greeted by crowds of men gagging for a piece of me. Who told me they wanted to climb me like a tree. Who fantasised about conquering me. Who fantasised about me conquering them. Who couldn’t wait for those zygotic buds slowly swelling behind my nipples to grow into breasts, pouring forth from the plains of my chest for no other purpose than to provide them something to ogle, to grope, to bury their grotesque faces within, to satisfy the impossible sexual dream of a lifetime. I wanted to scream, to cry, to shrivel and die every time a man came by my plinth, started grabbing at my skirts, started squeezing my flesh just to prove to himself that I was real, a sexual fetish object ripped from the realm of fantasy and manifest in flesh and blood, manifest for his pleasure alone; I yearned for respite, but never would I receive it. The Royal Party had loved me, that day in late June when the King came to Edam and I was first shown off to the world. To a man, woman and child, they believed I was the most astonishing thing they had ever seen. Such royal acclaim meant I absolutely had to be the star of the show wherever the freak show went – and would be so until the day I dropped down dead.
Unless I escaped. Unless I fled the travelling show.
But I couldn’t. My family were reliant on the money I made. One day my master would let me return to them - he promised - and we would live happily and comfortably on the fortune I had made.
But can you wait that long?
I had to. If I ran away, no-one would take me in. No-one with my best interests at heart, anyway. No-one who would respect the fact that the mind and the being of an ordinary human girl lay within this enormous body – who loved her mother and father, who once upon a time had had a plethora of close childhood friends who didn’t give two hoots she was a giant who towered over everyone, who had opinions and likes and dislikes and an absolute, irrevocable right to self-determination over her own body. Anyone whom I approached to take me in and give me a bed, food, fresh clothes, would inevitably turn me in to my master in the hope of gaining valuable reward, or sell me off to a new one. I was far, far too valuable a commodity to keep as a child. Children haemorrhage money; freaks pull it in like nothing else. If I ran away in secret, in the dead of night, I would not just be doing so from the freak show, but from human civilisation itself. If I set foot from my plinth in the midst of a show, and displayed the full force of my fury with a world that had conspired to crush my humanity, they would come for me with pitchforks and torches, call me Monster, Man-eater, Skull-crusher, and run me into the wilderness and turn me into a thing of terror, myth and legend.
At least that way, though, you’d have your freedom.
At least that way, they’d all be so terrified of you that no-one would dare come near you. You’d be free of the staring. The fingering. The groping. You’d be free to be yourself again. Even if you’d be stuck in solitude, a million miles from the rest of civilisation - living in some distant field or forest - can you honestly say human civilisation’s been kind enough for you to stay? Civilisation turned Trijntje, this girl with so much fire and fight and heart and soul, into a terrified shell, a husk, this Big Girl who’s dead behind the eyes, who might as well be a waxwork or a stuffed corpse stood up there on that plinth. You don’t have to endure this. Run, Trijntje. Monsterhood is Heaven compared to this. Monsterhood is freedom to do and to live however you please. Monsterhood is power. Monsterhood is solace, salvation and strength.
I knew it all along. I just needed to convince myself of the fact. I would return for my mother and father someday - one day, in the distant future when I was fully grown, I would return to Edam, seek them, and we’d steal away with our small fortune to our own safe haven - but for now, I just had to escape. Flee to a far-flung land no man but Trijntje, Queen of the Wild Frontier would ever dare to tread, lest they would meet the stickiest of ends.
In the dead of night, I slipped from the cramped carriage in which I slept, tiptoed from the pitch-black camp of the travelling show with a slop-shovel under my arm and a knife hung from my waist, and sought a local graveyard. Upon whispering a quick prayer for forgiveness, for disturbing the honourable deceased, I dug up the skulls of a dozen skeletons, and after covering their tombs once more, laid a flower upon each grave-plot I had raided, by way of apology to the souls whose remnants I had defiled. They’ll understand, I told myself. Given the circumstances. I know they will.
I returned, skulls strung together on a line dangling from the shovel handle, to camp. Headed straight to the tent where the Big Girl was due to be displayed the next day. I piled up the dirt-ridden skulls upon my plinth, then slit my hand with the knife, letting the blood trickle all over the pile - permeating every crack, every eye-socket, every triangular slash from which noses once protruded - before piercing a fingertip, and smearing a message to all those who might wish to seek my whereabouts, recapture me, and slap me on show again, in blood around my deathly cairn.