by Polly Crosby
Instead, the desk was scattered with half-squeezed tubes of paint. A cloudy jar of water stood in one corner, its contents silty and grey like the moat outside. The painting I had glimpsed before was still there: a woman in a sequined leotard with candyfloss pink feathers in her hair. She was riding an animal in the circus ring, but the rest of the painting hadn’t been completed, and it was impossible to tell what animal it was going to be. I hoped it would be a dragon, or else a polar bear. Something unusual.
Scattered around the desk were close-up sketches of the same woman’s face. They were simple line drawings, but her eyes burrowed into me with a deep wisdom. I gazed back, transfixed. Was this my mother?
‘Romilly, what are you doing in here?’ Dad’s voice, usually so loud and booming, was somehow more menacing in its quietness.
I turned around. He was standing in the doorway. ‘Looking for Mum,’ I said.
‘Your mother doesn’t live here.’
‘I know. I just wanted to remember her a bit. To find something of hers.’
Dad sighed. ‘Well, you won’t find anything in here. Out, please.’
I wavered, summoning the courage to ask Dad about the picture, feeling as if a spell had been cast between me and the painted lady. I opened my mouth. ‘Is she my—’
‘Perhaps I can write to your mother,’ Dad interrupted, cutting me off before I could finish, ‘ask her to send you something. How about that? You’re old enough now to know a bit more about her.’
I nodded, taking one last, long look at the pictures. Was it my imagination, or had the woman’s mouth turned up at the corners? Were her eyes more wrinkled, as if she were smiling, just for me?
Dad cleared his throat and stepped aside, making room in the doorway, and I tiptoed out.
‘Please don’t come in here again,’ he said, pulling the door closed and locking it. This time he didn’t hang the key on the wall.
As the summer wore on, I hung around near where I had first seen Stacey, hoping she would turn up again, pretending to catch butterflies in my net and keeping an eye out for her watchful gaze between the buddleia’s branches.
On a hot, sticky night in July I woke up, pulled from a dream where Stacey and I were wading through a shrieking pit, the echo of a hushed voice still whispering in my ears.
‘Stacey?’ I said, thinking she might have somehow managed to climb in through my bedroom window. I looked around my room. Moonlight filtered through the thin curtain and lay in bluish stripes across the floor. There was nobody there, and yet the whispering continued, words that I couldn’t quite grasp, as if they were speaking another language. I knew that I should be frightened, but the sound was comforting, like little waves lapping at a shore.
I got up and tiptoed to the window, pushing the curtain aside and unlatching it. Leaning out, I could just make out the dark surface of the moat below me, and in the middle, the gargoyle, crouched low over the water. The voice intensified, whispering urgently, and for a chilling moment I thought I saw the gargoyle twist and look up at me, its mouth whispering. I slammed the window shut and ran to my bed, pulling the covers over my head.
The voice died away, and I lay, holding my breath, listening extra hard, but all I could hear were Monty’s cat snores.
I thought about the shrieking pits that Stacey was so excited to find. Had the voice come from there, drifting across the fields? I wondered if she had found one yet; if she would tell me about it in a spooky voice next time we met. I reached out from under the duvet, my fingers closing over the little brooch she had given me. I pulled it into the warmth of the covers and held it tightly in my hand, thinking about Stacey, conjuring her up in my mind.
‘Stacey, Stacey, come back to me,’ I chanted under my breath, clutching the brooch so hard it hurt, my eyes squeezed shut. When I opened them, I half expected her to be lying next to me under the duvet, giggling at my silliness, but of course she wasn’t, and I felt embarrassed that I had even tried.
I put the brooch on my bedside table and tried to get to sleep. I would just have to wait until I started my new school, when the autumn term began in a few weeks. The thought made my tummy flip with nerves. But Stacey will be there, I told myself sternly. She will take me by the hand and show me around, calming my fears and introducing me to all her friends. And I’ll be able to see her every day.
The chanting didn’t bring Stacey back to me, but it did bring another kind of magic.
The circus came to town.
It was to be a treat for my ninth birthday. I stood in the shade of the weeping willow waiting for Dad, and running my hands over the tiny squares of my best dress, a pink gingham one with an elasticated bodice that dug painfully into my armpits. From here I could just make out the moat, and the gargoyle crouched over it.
Earlier in the day, after a birthday breakfast of crumpets and smoked salmon, Dad had given me a painting. It was a portrait of me, standing in my bedroom, with Monty in my arms. Dad hung it on the wall near my bed, and told me to stand beneath it.
‘Now, look up at the picture,’ he said.
I looked up. The version of me in the picture was standing in exactly the same spot in my bedroom, holding a cat that looked just like Monty, and she was turning and looking up at a picture on her wall, of a girl standing in a bedroom, holding a cat. I screamed with delight, and Monty scrabbled away from me in fright. I reached up and took the picture down, putting my nose to it, examining every detail. The little version of me was looking up at a minute painting, no bigger than a drawing pin above her head. I got lost staring at it, trying to make my eyes go back and back, wondering how many versions of me Dad had painted, how strong the magnifying glass must have been for him to paint so small. ‘Watch out, Roe, you’ll go cross-eyed,’ Dad had laughed.
‘Where are my keys?’ His frustrated voice filtered out now from somewhere in the depths of the house. I made myself blend into the willow’s spidery branches. He had lost his keys three times this week, and made me search for them every time. This time he could do it on his own.
I had wanted Stacey to come to the circus too, and I had walked to the other end of the village to find her little red-brick house and ask her. But when I got to her road, I was confronted by a long line of ugly houses that all looked the same, the front gardens divided up with nasty-looking wire fencing. I thought about asking someone where she lived, but the only person within sight was a man with no hair sitting on a low wall, smoking a cigarette. An empty pop bottle rattled along the road, and I turned and walked home instead.
I told Dad I wanted to take Stacey to the circus, but he said since we didn’t know where she lived, we had no way of asking her. Instead I had asked if Monty could come, worried he would miss us. On the odd occasion that we had gone out before, we had come back to a kitten with no voice from mewing so loudly. But Dad wasn’t sure cats were allowed at the circus, and anyway he said Monty needed to learn to be on his own. He was halfway to being fully grown now, and would no longer fit on my head as a turban, but he curled snugly round my shoulders instead.
Eventually, Dad shouted that he’d found his keys and appeared at the back door, a brown parcel in his hands.
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s for you. The postman’s just dropped it off.’
I sat under the willow and pulled at the string and sticky tape. Out fell a denim pinafore dress with large red plastic buttons like round flying saucers.
‘Who’s it from?’ Dad said, leaning over and plucking out the card that came with it.
I watched as he read it, his eyebrows growing closer together the further he got.
‘Who is it?’ My voice was muffled as I pulled off my gingham dress, dropping it onto the floor, and stepped into my new pinafore.
‘It’s from your mother. I must say, I didn’t expect her to actually send anything.’
‘It is?’ I’d never had a present from her before. I looked down at the dress with renewed love, smoothing the denim. It was very grown up
. I wondered if my mum had one the same.
‘You don’t have to wear it,’ Dad said, starting towards the car, ‘the gingham one’s perfectly respectable.’
‘But I want to. Dad, where is Mum? Why doesn’t she live with us anymore?’
Dad was halfway to the car now. ‘I keep telling you,’ he called back over his shoulder, ‘she had to go away, she wasn’t well.’
‘Will she come back soon?’ I asked, but he was already heaving his huge bulk into the little car. Perhaps Mum would appear at the circus as a surprise, popping up from the middle of a giant birthday cake, or exploding out of a cannon into the audience. I smoothed down my hair with spitty fingers: I wanted to look my best, just in case.
The Circus – so important it required capital letters – was on top of a hill. We parked at the bottom, and as we made our way up the soft grass, a warm waft of animal smells filtered down to us with a hint of candyfloss. Dad took a deep breath in through his nose and pummelled his chest.
‘How could you capture that in a painting?’ he asked me. I ignored him.
Inside the circus tent it was dark and hot. My eyes took a while to adjust and I sought out Dad’s hand, dry and warm round my own. We took our seats halfway up a flimsy stairway. Dad’s seat creaked, while mine merely sighed. I couldn’t see much over the heads in front of me.
A man in a black-and-red suit made his way over to us, whispering into Dad’s ear. I peered round Dad to look at him. He had a tall top hat, and long brown hair flowing down to his shoulders: the ringmaster. As he was talking to Dad, he looked at me and smiled, his mouth glinting dangerously. I leant back in my seat, reaching for a hand to grab hold of, but instead I caught hold of the arm of a woman I didn’t know who was sitting next to me. She frowned, removing her sleeve from my grip.
Dad was getting to his feet. He indicated with a nod that we should follow the man in red. We navigated our way back along the row, Dad’s gruff voice apologising as person after person had to stand to let us out. The man in red-and-black took us to some seats right at the edge of the ring. These ones didn’t creak as we sat down. From here I could see everything. I craned my head back to look at the very top of the tent.
‘This is more like it!’ Dad whispered as he whisked a toffee apple from a tray held by a grinning clown.
I reached over to the tray and stroked the apples’ shiny surfaces, trying to decide which one had the thickest toffee. Suddenly, a stream of water hit me right between the eyes. I looked up, half blinded, to see the clown and my father laughing at me, a dripping plastic flower suspended from the front of the clown’s costume.
‘Serves you right for putting your sticky mitts all over them,’ Dad said, handing me a handkerchief to mop myself up with. I narrowed my eyes angrily at the retreating clown. He was still smiling, but I couldn’t tell if it was a real smile, or just one painted on over his sad, thin mouth.
Dad passed me his toffee apple instead, and I blinked the last of the water from my eyes as the lights went down.
A single spotlight illuminated a small circle in the centre of the ring. The ringmaster was there, appearing so fast it was as if he had teleported from right next to us. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but in a flash of fireworks, he disappeared again, and in his place was a woman dressed in glittering pink. The audience oohed and clapped, and the woman bowed, her feather headdress undulating.
I passed the half-eaten toffee apple back to Dad, and he took a bite, the toffee shell shattering with a satisfying crack.
‘Isn’t she beautiful?’ he said, winking, and I nodded.
We made our way out through the milling crowd. Night had begun to fall, and the air had lost its warmth. Dad wrapped his huge jumper round my shoulders. We stopped just outside the tent and looked out from the top of the hill. From here, Suffolk lay flat all around us, as if we were on the only hill in the world. The first lights of houses and streets could be seen against the yellow-blue sky. I stood, a little way away from Dad, on the edge of the hill, looking up at the countless stars. A warm hand slipped into mine, and I jumped at the touch, but when I looked there was no one there. I ran to Dad and hid my face against him, feeling his arms wrap tight around me, and peered back anxiously to check for ghosts.
A horse from the show pranced past us, coming to a stop nearby, its huge, feathery headdress shimmering as it tossed its head. The woman leading it stopped too. It was the woman in pink I had seen in the ring. Close up, she was a strange, glittery creature, but there was something familiar about her. A glimmer of sequined leotard peeped out from beneath a tan belted coat, and I realised that this was the lady in the picture Dad was painting at home. She had the same chestnut hair, set in waves, and the same pink feathery headdress.
‘Tobias,’ she said, then she looked down at me and smiled, a knowing, thoughtful smile. I retreated further into Dad’s jumper.
‘Lidiya,’ Dad clasped her hand in his, ‘thank you for getting us such wonderful seats.’ His voice was lighter than I had heard it before, as if the toffee apple had varnished his throat on the way down. They were still touching hands.
‘Don’t be silly, Tobias. Anything for your pretty girl.’ She pronounced it ‘preetty’, and she crouched down and smiled at me again, the pink feathers on her head nodding at me like insect feelers. From here I could see a great gorge of white cleavage encased in pink sequins. She was like a butterfly that had settled just for a moment. I held my breath, careful not to blow her away. She studied me, her head on one side, then reached up and plucked a feather from her headdress.
‘Here,’ she said, offering it to me, ‘a pretty feather for Tobias’s pretty girl.’ Her voice wasn’t the hushed Suffolk sound that I had heard a lot of recently. Maybe she was Scottish. Or Irish. I took the feather and whispered my thanks.
Later that night I climbed into my bed. Stacey’s little brooch was on my bedside table, and I picked it up and put the feather in its place, running my finger round the brooch’s rough edge. Dad climbed through my doorway and sat on the bed, watching me for a moment.
‘Treasure?’ he asked.
I nodded, and he smiled approvingly.
‘What story shall I tell you tonight?’
‘The one about The Circus.’
And he began. He wove our visit into a story of giant grey elephants and man-eating panthers. I could smell the sparklers, the toffee apples and the elephant poo, which is strange because we had only been at the circus a few hours ago, and I didn’t remember any elephants when we went.
Warm arms wrapped themselves around me and lifted me down into softness. Suddenly I was wide awake, remembering the way the gargoyle had whispered to me a few nights ago.
‘Dad?’ I said.
‘Yes, Roe?’
‘I’m scared.’
‘Oh? What of?’
‘The other night, the gargoyle in the moat spoke to me.’
‘Oh really? And what did he have to say?’
‘I don’t know. It was in another language.’
It was funny how Dad’s features sometimes looked a little gargoyle-like. I reached up and touched his cheek, trying to turn him human again. He got up and went over to the window, unlatching it and leaning out, just as I had done. When he came back, his eyes were hidden beneath his brows. ‘Our minds perceive things differently at night,’ he said. ‘Even grown-ups get scared sometimes.’
‘Really?’
He nodded. ‘Oh yes.’
I yawned, sleepy again. ‘Dad?’ I said. ‘Where did we live, before Braër?’
‘We travelled around for a while, don’t you remember? Lots of B and Bs and camping. A bit of sofa surfing. But before that, when your mum lived with us, we lived in London, you know that.’
‘But why did we travel? Didn’t we have a home?’
‘No, I suppose not. I think I was trying to work out where I wanted us to be. Trying to find us just the right place, and I think I managed it, didn’t I?’ He looked round at the walls of my bedroom, no
dding to himself.
I nodded back, not yet sure if I liked Braër as much as Dad did. ‘What was it like,’ I said, picking up the feather and stifling a yawn, ‘our house in London with Mum?’
‘It was a small flat. No room for thinking, or painting. Too many people, not enough space.’
‘Why can’t I remember it?’
‘You were only four when we left. That’s half of your life ago.’
‘Oh.’ But sometimes I thought I did remember it. Sometimes, just as I was drifting off into sleep, I started awake, an image hanging in my mind as clear as if it were suspended in the air in front of my face: a little toy hare, silvery and staring, perched on a shelf high above me. Sometimes when this image came to me, I would feel a hand reaching out from my dreams, patting me affectionately on the arm.
I was suddenly nervous about falling asleep. I grabbed Dad’s hand, rough and hairy. ‘Dad?’
‘Yes, Romilly?’ He looked down at his watch, clicking his tongue impatiently.
‘Have I been to the circus before?’ Memories of the flat were mixing with other memories now. A caravan like the ones I spotted behind the circus tent, a small brown dog, a lady covered in bells…
‘Well, yes. When we were travelling we followed the circus around for a while. I quite liked their nomadic life. But it’s not the right life for a child: your education suffered.’ He got up and stretched, going to the window again to check the latch.
‘Dad?’
‘Yes, Romilly?’ He was exasperated now, I could tell from the rasp of his voice.
‘Is that lady at the circus my mum?’
There was silence as Dad padded back to the bed and fiddled with the chain on the bedside lamp. The light went out, and the sky appeared in a rectangle of window, the strawberry moon huge and red.
‘No, Romilly,’ he said at last.
Stars in their millions fizzed in the blackness of the window, and Monty curled himself around my hands.