Zarconi’s Magic Flying Fish Read online

  ‘It’s not my fault.’

  ‘I didn’t say it was.’

  ‘You make it sound as if it is.’

  ‘Sooky-sooky la-la, poor baby. Just forget it and come and help me with the horses. You can meet my dad.’

  A full moon was rising behind a factory and the whole field was lit up and alive with activity. A generator rumbled in the background. The last of the audience were climbing into their cars and heading off, and every member of the circus was busy pulling down tarps, pulling up stakes and wheeling gear into the back of trucks.

  ‘Dad, Dad, this is the kid I was telling you about,’ said Effie, tugging at the elbow of a man who was brushing down one of the horses.

  Cas Cuelmo turned around and smiled and Gus saw he was the man who had been with Kali in the ring. He looked different out of costume. He had black eyes just like Effie, but while she was sharp and sparky he seemed tired and soft around the edges.

  He nodded at Gus.

  ‘Very nice to meet you, Gus. It’s good to have you with Zarconi’s. But Effie, you know, you should be helping Nance. You promised to help her more.’

  Effie scowled. ‘She’s got Kylie, she doesn’t need me!’

  ‘No, Effie, none of that – take Gus with you and go and help. We’ll be in Balaklava before midnight if you both pitch in.’

  Effie stomped off towards Nance’s caravan and Gus followed reluctantly.

  ‘I want to help him, not Nance. I always get stuck helping Nance!’ she scowled.

  ‘Where’s Balaklava?’ asked Gus.

  ‘I don’t know and I don’t care. Just another place somewhere – a short hop. Doc and Nance know this route backwards and we just go where they say.’

  Nance and Kylie were counting the takings for the evening, smoothing out the five- and ten-dollar bills on the orange laminex table. Kylie looked up and smiled when the kids climbed into the caravan.

  ‘Have you seen Gazza around?’ she asked.

  ‘He’s already left,’ said Effie.

  Kylie’s face fell.

  ‘No he hasn’t,’ said Gus. ‘I just saw him. He’s still loading up.’

  Kylie turned to Nance. ‘I have to ask him about fixing something in my van before we head out. I won’t be a minute.’

  Effie and Gus had to count out all the change, making neat piles of coins that Nance then swept into little plastic bags. As they counted, she wrote things down in an accounts book. When she had finished, she put all the cash into a biscuit tin with a note on the top.

  As soon as Nance turned her back, Effie slipped out of the caravan into the night and left Gus sitting alone.

  He picked up a pen and fingered it.

  ‘Do you reckon I could write a note to my mum?’ he asked.

  ‘There’s a lot of work to do right now,’ said Nance.

  ‘It’s just I promised I’d write every day.’

  ‘Here,’ she sighed, ‘You can have this postcard if you like.’

  She offered him a card with a picture of an elegant cityscape. There was a tall church with spires in one corner, and underneath it said ‘Adelaide – City of Churches’.

  He sat down at the table and hunched over the card.

  Dear Mum,

  I hope you’re feeling better. How much longer til you can come and get me? I hope you’re better really soon. Everyone here is weird except Effie is okay and there is an elephant too. Doc eats fire and he made me clean up Kali’s turds. I miss you. I miss Melbourne. I even miss school. I hope you get better really quick so I can come home really soon. Next week would be good.

  Love Gus

  His handwriting looked big and sloppy and squashed up on the card. He stuffed the card into his pocket so Nance wouldn’t see what he’d written.

  She thumped around the caravan, putting things away and banging cupboards shut. Every time she turned around, Gus bumped into her. It didn’t take her long to get exasperated and send him out into the dark. He wandered off to watch the big top come down under the glare of floodlights while Doc shouted instructions over the roaring generator. The tent billowed out and collapsed, the last of the air escaping from beneath it like a sigh.

  The tenthands unlaced the canvas, rolled it into bundles and heaved it into a truck on top of stacks of bleachers. Piles of electrical cables lay in the grass. Mac and Garry loaded the last poles while Hannah and Vytas wound long lengths of guy rope around their arms, making thick fat coils. Vytas looked straight across at Gus and stared at him. He stepped further back from the circle of light, and shoved his hands deeper into his pockets. No way was he going to help. They’d probably get him to clean up more turds.

  A breeze picked up, bringing the smell of sulphur and rotting garbage. Doc was still shouting but this time one of the tenthands was shouting back at him about something and Doc’s voice was getting angrier. Gus longed to be back in Melbourne listening to Pete Spanner snoring. He shut his eyes and imagined himself home. This time of night, he’d be sitting in bed with an Asterix comic, listening to the sound of his mum cleaning up in the kitchen. A stinging, burning feeling in the back of his throat made him cough. Suddenly, he felt a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Would you like to help me put Miette into the float?’ asked Cas gently.

  Miette pushed her muzzle against Gus and he couldn’t help but smile. She was a tiny Shetland pony, barely up to his chest with a tufty white mane that stood in a peak between her ears.

  Cas pushed the reins into Gus’s hand. ‘Follow me and I’ll show you how you can help her,’ he said.

  Effie watched as Gus led Miette and guided her up the ramp into the float, following Cas’s directions. Two other horses were already on board – a medium-sized pony and a big white mare with a grey star on her forehead.

  ‘This is Anouk,’ said Cas, indicating the piebald pony. ‘And this is our beautiful Rosa. She’s our resinback.’

  He slapped her rump and a cloud of white dust rose up into the air.

  ‘See, resin!’ said Cas. ‘We rub it into her back. It helps us grip when we perform on her. Effie’s learning bareback riding too. Perhaps one day they’ll call her the next May Wirth.’

  ‘May Wirth?’

  ‘Didn’t your mother tell you anything about Zarconi’s, about circus?’ said Effie.

  ‘So. What if she didn’t? There’s nothing much worth knowing about it anyway!’ Gus spat back.

  ‘Oh, p-leeeaze! Nance reckons your mum was a hotshot bareback rider and she didn’t even tell you about May Wirth?’ Effie said, with a sort of angry amazement.

  ‘I thought she was an acrobat,’ said Gus, confused.

  ‘Well, you have to be a bloody good acrobat to jump on and off a moving horse. May Wirth was Australia’s greatest bareback rider – she even got herself in the circus hall of fame in America. Everyone who knows anything about circus knows that! Pathetic or what.’

  Cas raised his eyebrows and lifted a hand to shush Effie.

  ‘What, what did I do?’ said Effie putting her hands on her hips and frowning.

  Gus suddenly felt hot and scratchy.

  ‘Well, Gus,’ said Cas, ‘how about you hitch a ride with me and Effie in our four-wheel drive later and Effie can fill you in on all those bits you might want to know.’

  Gus felt sick and desperate at the thought of being trapped in a car, listening to Effie tell him everything she thought he should know. He just wanted to be alone.

  ‘I’ll have to go and ask my grandparents, I mean Doc and Nance,’ said Gus, shooting a defensive look at Effie.

  ‘They won’t mind you coming with us,’ said Effie.

  ‘Probably not, ’ said Gus doggedly. ‘But I’d better ask.’

  He wished they would mind. He desperately wanted somebody to mind about him. He trudged across the empty site and pulled the screen door of his grandparents’ caravan open. Inside it was dark and the clutter of photographs that covered the walls gleamed in the half-light.

  ‘Silly bugger,’ screeched the cock
atiel.

  Gus burst into tears.

  7

  THE ROAD TO IRON KNOB

  Gus opened one eye. Early-morning sunlight poured in through the caravan windows. He reached down to his knapsack and rummaged around in the front pocket for his notebook. Every morning he put a cross inside the front cover, and every night he’d recount them, the number of days he’d survived Zarconi’s.

  Gus counted off sixteen crosses. It was his third Sunday. Nance had said he could phone his mum on Sundays, on the mobile. Last Sunday she’d said she was having a new treatment. Maybe today she’d tell him he could come home.

  He got off the couch and gently pulled the cover off Lulu’s cage.

  ‘Silly bugger!’ she said, cocking her head on one side.

  ‘Silly bugger yourself,’ he said and he pushed a piece of stale seed cake through the bars. She unfurled her orange and sulphur crest and made a gargling noise in the back of her throat.

  Gus jumped down the caravan steps. No one was around, so he made his way over to where Kali was tethered behind a makeshift electric fence.

  ‘Hey, Kali.’

  She was swaying from side to side and paid no attention.

  ‘It’s me, Gus.’

  She swept the ground with her trunk and scooped a small cloud of dirt across her back.

  ‘She’s never gonna pay any attention to you, kid.’

  Gus turned and saw a pair of knees strapped to a pair of long green stilts. It was Pikkle, the tenthand, his spiky yellow hair making a jagged line against the morning sky.

  ‘She knows I’m here,’ said Gus.

  ‘Maybe. I reckon she wishes she wasn’t.’

  Gus looked back at the elephant and for a moment he was sure she was staring at him.

  ‘I know how she feels,’ he said.

  Pikkle laughed and strode away across the lot. He was a street performer and busker. Doc didn’t like the tenthands to get in on the performing side of things but the night before, he had finally relented and let Pikkle do a fill-in act on stilts. Now he practised dancing on his stilts, kicking his legs up in the air and wiggling his bum in Gus’s direction. A cloud of galahs swooped low over the circus lot and Pikkle fell flat on his face in the dry grass. Gus laughed.

  Doc came storming out of his caravan.

  ‘You! Pikkle!’ he shouted. ‘What’s the story with your mate Gazza?’

  ‘He’s not my mate, boss,’ said Pikkle.

  ‘Well he’s done a right bloody job on us. He’s cleared off and taken Kylie with him. She left a note in the cash tin. Took their pays without asking and now we’re two hands down and meant to make Kimba tonight. We’ll have to start packing right now. Stop mucking about and hop to it.’

  Pikkle shrugged, picked up his stilts and disappeared into the bunkhouse.

  ‘And as for you, boy. I’ve told you not to go bothering Kali,’ bellowed Doc, turning on Gus. ‘I’ve got enough to deal with. We could be shorthanded for weeks. I can’t waste my time checking up on you. You just keep clear of that elephant, you hear!’

  Gus nodded and stepped away from the elephant enclosure. ‘That’s tough about Gazza and Kylie,’ he said, hoping to deflect Doc’s rage.

  ‘Tenthands, they’re scum.’

  ‘I thought everyone was like family in Zarconi’s,’ said Gus tentatively.

  ‘Everyone ’cept tenthands,’ growled Doc.

  It was after lunch by the time the circus was fully packed up and ready to move. Gus was kept so busy he didn’t get a chance to phone his mum but Nance promised he could call as soon as they got to Iron Knob. He climbed into the front of Vytas’s old Dodge and sank low in the seat so Doc wouldn’t spot him. The last thing he wanted was to be stuck in the cab of the elephant truck listening to Doc cursing all the way to the next town.

  Vytas smiled when he found Gus slumped in the front seat.

  ‘Little Gus! My most favourite travelling companion!’

  Vytas loved a captive audience, especially if the captive was Gus, who happily listened to all his stories. As the truck pulled out of Whyalla and onto the highway, he started telling Gus about the day Hannah had arrived at the circus, a beautiful young acrobat who had worked with the finest circuses in Europe.

  ‘Vytas,’ shouted Gus above the roar of the engine. ‘Why do you reckon Doc won’t let me do stuff with Hannah? Why won’t he let her train me?’

  ‘Your grandfather says you are clumsy,’ said Vytas. ‘He says you would break your neck.’

  ‘I am not clumsy! I can do anything Effie does.’

  ‘No, your grandfather says you should be a clown. He is the boss of Zarconi’s and you should listen. Why won’t you try? You could be a fine performer. Don’t you know you are named after a clown?’

  ‘What? Gus? Who was he?’

  ‘No, the auguste. It is a type of clown.’

  ‘I thought Augustus meant great leader or something like that.’

  ‘Perhaps it does, but in circus, the auguste is a most important clown. He has sticky-up hair, just like you. You know him; the one who always does everything wrong, big shoes he is falling over and a big red nose – the one that gets picked on by the smart clowns.’

  ‘Sounds great,’ Gus groaned. ‘Just what I always wanted to be, the fall guy.’

  ‘You do not understand,’ Vytas said. ‘Beneath it all, the auguste is really the smart guy. Making people laugh – this is the hardest thing in the world. Zarconi’s big problem is it does not have a strong clown act. Pikkle, he could be okay alone, but together, you and he could do a spectacular slapstick routine. You learned how to do a pratfall like that,’ he said. He snapped his fingers. ‘You were born to be a clown.’

  Gus wasn’t so sure. Vytas had explained how he had to bend at the knee and break the fall so the whole thing looked natural and was not so painful, but the first few times he’d tried it really hurt.

  ‘Well, the thing is,’ said Gus, ‘If I can do a pratfall that well, I can do acrobatic stuff just as easy. Seems to me that you have to be a pretty good acrobat to do good clowning.’

  Vytas glanced across at Gus.

  ‘You are a cheeky boy. You are this keen to be an acrobat?’

  ‘Yup,’ said Gus, smiling at him.

  Gus wanted to try the trapeze so badly, that sometimes his hands itched when he looked up at it. Late at night, after the show had finished, he’d sit on the bleachers in the tent and watch Effie and Hannah train together. Hannah never asked him to join in any more, but he’d do the warm-ups and then practise doing floor work. Hannah wouldn’t tell him to stop, but she didn’t help either – except sometimes when he was really struggling.

  ‘Like this, Gus,’ she’d say softly, and put a hand on his back to help him flip over in a handspring.

  Gus looked out the window at the dry, treeless landscape and wondered why everyone tried to discourage him from doing acrobatics. Was he really that hopeless? When he thought about the chance of flying on the trapeze he felt a hard place inside him full of fierce longing. If he shut his eyes he could imagine flying under the big top, his body taut and swift, the caress of the air around him like an ocean without shores.

  The streets of Iron Knob were abandoned. It was a small mining town, a cluster of buildings dwarfed by the flat expanse of desert around it, with the Flinders Ranges a blue shadow on the distant horizon. The circus convoy pulled off the road at the edge of town, onto a stony red stretch of ground.

  Gus climbed out of the truck and peeled off his sweaty T-shirt as he walked back to his grandparents’ caravan. They were standing outside the door looking back at the township shimmering in the heat.

  ‘Are we gonna do a show here?’ asked Gus.

  ‘Not if I have anything to say about it,’ said Nance.

  ‘It’s too late to go to Kimba and set up,’ Doc snapped. ‘Last time we came through Iron Knob, we got a good crowd.’

  ‘There’s no point this time, Doc. Anyone can see we’ll only get five men and a dog. The town�
��s stripped bare. They’ve downsized the mine – you know that. There must have been five thousand here twenty years ago when BHP had the place working, but now there couldn’t be more than a few hundred left and half of them probably saw us when we played Whyalla.’

  Doc waved his hand as if shooing away flies, dismissing everything Nance had said.

  ‘I’ll see if I can get us permission to set up on the footy oval. We’ll get a good crowd, you’ll see – right in the middle of town. Everyone will spot us straight up.’

  Nance shrugged and climbed into the back of the caravan. Gus was glad that she’d given up before a full-blown row developed. Doc and Nance seemed to be arguing a lot lately. Sometimes at night Gus could hear the low rumble of Doc’s voice from their bedroom, interspersed with Nance’s light, sharp replies. As the argument dragged on, Doc’s shouts would become a steady roar that made the caravan shake. Somehow Nance would quiet him down and Gus would fall asleep listening to the uneasy ebb and flow of their voices.

  ‘Nance, can I have the phone now?’ Gus asked as he pulled the caravan door shut behind him.

  Nance sat at the table flipping through a pile of paperwork. She didn’t look up, but pointed at the kitchen bench and went on reading the sheet of paper in front of her. When he’d first arrived, Gus had thought Nance was really tough, the way she’d give directions with just a look or a gesture. She didn’t smile much either, but slowly he discovered there was another look she had, where she gazed at him for a long time in a kindly way, that was as close to a smile as she could muster.

  The line clicked and peeped as it made a connection across more than a thousand kilometres of terrain. Gus pushed the phone hard against his ear. The receptionist at the hospital transferred the call to Room 323 and Gus heard his mum’s voice on the other end of the line, faint but warm and familiar.

  ‘Are you feeling better?’ asked Gus. He lowered his voice and cupped one hand over the receiver so Nance wouldn’t hear him. ‘Can I come home now?’