Genius

by Clare Nonhebel

CHAPTER 10

 

  The vehicle used to tow their caravan was the cab of a lorry to which any kind of trailer or truck could be attached. On its own, it looked strange, Lulubelle always thought - like a giant head without a body.

  Coupled to one of the trucks which carried fairground equipment or animal cages, the head gained a matching body, like Arto the strongman whose bulging biceps and muscled torso were matched by the almost square head, the dimensions of a compressed cannonball, which arose from a neck the same width as the head, balanced on shoulders like steel girders.

  There was special status attached to driving the lions’ trailer. Most circuses nowadays had given up having wild animal acts. Mannfield's had given up elephants, because of the expense, but kept the lions. Public reaction to lions was love or hate. Many county councils and city boroughs played it safe and wouldn't book circuses that brought lions into their territory, even though the cages had strong bars and an outer cage of reinforced steel mesh.

  Even in a motorway crash, there would be little risk of an escape. But it was that tiny element of risk that captivated audiences, and even the circus staff themselves. Sitting up in a big lorry cab, king of the road, driving the King of the Jungle, had to be more exciting than towing a generator or a load of scaffolding.

  Towing Lucinda Lacosto's small battered caravan was especially undignified and the lorry cab looked as out of place as Arto's head would look on Lucinda's narrow shoulders.

  Jake the driver felt it an insult to be allocated this job so Lucinda made an effort to be especially nice to him. And it was an effort this morning, with her head aching and Lulubelle getting on her nerves with all her nagging. Children had no right to speak to their parents the way that Lulubelle did; she seemed to think she was the mother and Lucinda the troublesome child.

  Lucinda snuggled up to Jake on the split leather cab seat. She liked sitting high up with a view of the road. Leaning against a man's solid body, smoking the cigarettes she had wheedled out of him and gazing sleepily at the cars on the motorway so far beneath them was preferable to a work day any time - all that endless rehearsing and exercising, trying to limber up when her joints were stiff with cold - and less supple with every passing year, she was forced to realize. She couldn’t wait to get going now.

  She tuned the radio to the country music station and prepared for the journey to the next place, whatever that was. It was hard to remember which town they were heading for and which they were leaving, half the time.

  ‘Oh, Mum!’ Lulubelle protested.

  ‘You don't appreciate good music,’ Lucinda said. ‘Does she, Jake? The oldies are sometimes the most romantic.’ She wriggled against him slightly and he half-smiled. His bad mood would evaporate by the time they hit the motorway. She knew how to get through to him.

  ‘I've got stomach ache,’ Lulubelle complained.

  ‘Have you, love? Take an aspirin out of my bag,’ Lucinda said absently. Jake revved the engine and they moved forward, the little caravan lurching as it left the rutted mud of the field and turned sharply on to the road.

  The locals always complained that the circus left the roads in a state, covered with mud and remnants of branches ripped from the overhanging trees by the huge vehicles. But the local farmer was well paid for the use of his field and the council could afford to clean up the roads. It was a small price to pay for the magic the circus and fairground folk brought into the ordinary lives of these townspeople for a few days. The children would talk about it all year till the circus came back again - if it was allowed to; if the local complainers’ committee didn't prevail.

  Lulubelle's knowledge of the geography of the British Isles was different from the geography she learned in the many schools she attended for a few weeks at a time. Her map was dominated, not by major cities and centres of industry, but by towns that were welcoming to the circus people and towns that were hostile or cold. These were the people who preferred clinging to their routine lives. They were unwilling to be seduced for a few days by supergirls in tutus who performed impossible contortions with ease and grace, seals that danced and balanced plates on their noses, lions that threatened to devour their trainer alive, and trapezists who defied death every night.

  What Mannfield's, and the other circuses she had belonged to since the day she was born, offered to people was a glimpse of another world, a world where every fantasy came to life. How could they be so chained to their environment as to worry about mud on the roads and the odd episode of being overcharged by Saul on the roller-coaster? Even if Mannfield's charged them a thousand pounds, could any cost be too much? And how could it compare with the sacrifice of the circus people, camping out in muddy fields, shivering with cold when the generators broke down, going hungry when they arrived in a town late at night and found all the takeaways closed?

  Lulubelle sometimes imagined what it would be like to live in one of those little houses whose lighted windows punctuated the anonymous streets the circus trucks rumbled through in the dark winter nights. Boring, said all the circus people. No business like showbusiness, duckie. They'd all tried the settled life, if only for a few months in the winter downtime. It was all right at first, they said: solid walls around you, good TV reception, warm fires or central heating, no tiresome erecting and taking down the giant marquees - often in driving rain - but instead hot water for baths, regular meals, a quiet routine and a chance to get your washing dry ... oh, it was fine for a while.

  Then they would start to miss one or two of the good things about circus life: the nightly applause, the gasps of incredulity at a spectacular part of the routine, and the look on the children's faces, as though they'd been transported to a land they had only known about in dreams.

  Then they would wake up one morning and find themselves missing even some of the things they complained about. Living cheek-by-jowl with the same people they worked with and could never escape from was suddenly remembered as the warm camaraderie of circus life, rather than one of its major annoyances.

  The secure and solid walls of their own little house would begin to close in on them. When the wind howled outside without sending the pans hanging on the wall clattering to the accompaniment of the rocking of the caravan, it no longer seemed a relief that the house stood firm against its buffeting, but a strangely unnatural lack of reaction. A life so safe and impervious to the elements began to seem lifeless. The day would come when they found themselves fondly recalling the rows between the animal trainers and the clowns about who came first in the billing, and feeling a glow of affection for the tyrannical ringmaster, so full of himself in his tailcoat and boots and drooping Victorian moustaches and so ordinary in the cold light of day, unshaven and in his shirtsleeves, chivvying the men as they battled to fold the vast tarpaulins in an autumn gale.

  Then they would know they were lost souls: enslaved to the merciless spirit of circus life that forced them to extremes of endurance, whipping them into a frenzy of overachievement, demanding miracles of them night after night, tiring quickly of their superhuman accomplishments and requiring ever more dangerous and difficult feats, and rewarding even their greatest success by kicking them out of town and on to the next before daylight.

  A gust of rain showered the windscreen and Jake switched on the wipers, smearing mud across his field of vision. He swore under his breath, pumping the windscreen-wash button that yielded no more than a helpless trickle of fluid. Lulubelle, peering through the side window that was equally spattered with mud, noticed a girl of her own age in school uniform, hurrying across a footbridge to join a group of her mates. She wondered what it would be like to have a whole day of school ahead, knowing it would be part of a whole term, a whole year, a whole school-age lifetime without the responsibility of a career until she was sixteen or seventeen or maybe more.

  To go to school and be taught, and be fed a meal at lunchtime, and be loosed on to a sports field once a week to run around playing some game as part of a team, pretending it was impo
rtant that you won but knowing it was only a game and nobody's livelihood depended on it, before returning to the same home every day, with homework time and tea around a table with a father returning from work ...

  She wasn't envious, she told herself. Certainly the children in the various schools she had attended had envied her, so probably the circus people had got it right and within a week she would be bored with that kind of life. But she wouldn't mind a chance to be somebody else for a while, someone whose mother didn't get drunk and risk losing her job and jeopardizing her daughter's dreams and hopes of a promising career. She sighed, rocking herself forward with both arms clasped across her stomach.

  ‘Still got the tummy-ache?’ enquired Lucinda.

  ‘There wasn't any aspirin in your bag,’ Lulubelle told her.

  Lucinda slipped an arm around her shoulders. ‘I'll get you some when we stop,’ she promised. ‘You all right, Lu? You're white as a sheet - isn't she, Jake?’

  ‘I feel a bit funny,’ Lulubelle admitted.

  ‘Well, cuddle up to me,’ Lucinda said. 'Nothing like a cuddle to make everything right.’ She looked at Jake and winked but he didn't notice. She leaned forward and turned up the radio with one newly nail-polished hand. ‘This one brings back memories,’ she said.

  The truck pulled out onto the motorway, cutting in front of a Porsche that swerved into the outside lane and sounded its horn. Jake squared his shoulders, appeased by his truck's show of strength, even if it was only towing a caravan. The windscreen wipers squeaked and the sky was darkening.

  ‘Stand by your ma - a - an!’ Lucinda sang.