by Jon Berkeley
“Maybe you could work with the circus band in some way,” he said.
“Just what we were thinking, Master Miles,” said Fabio.
“We were?” said Gila.
“He was thinking it for you, save you the bother,” said Umor, sucking the juices from his fingers.
“You could be the World’s Youngest Bandmaster.”
“We’ve already got the World’s Tallest Midget.”
“Not to mention the Tiniest Flea.”
They sat on their wooden stools, the coffee-skinned boy, his adopted little sister and three tiny men with black curly hair and eyebrows like caterpillars. A chilly wind whipped gray ash around them as the embers began to cool, and Miles felt his heart sinking as he realized that there was no place in this plan for him.
“I wouldn’t want to go without Miles,” said Little.
“We’ll be back before the year’s end,” said Fabio.
“From rains to rains is the season,” said Umor.
“That’s if Lady P. will release you from your schooling.”
“Baltinglass of Araby says there’s more education to be got from a day of adventure than a month reading books,” said Miles. He had not forgotten his promise to make Little’s new life as magical as the one she had left behind. A season with the Circus Bolsillo seemed like an excellent start, and he was torn between the excitement of the adventure that beckoned her and his disappointment at the prospect of being left behind.
“Don’t worry,” said Gila, looking at Miles with his little black eyes. “We’ll look after her good.”
“Like she was our own niece,” said Umor.
“Or our little spindly grandmother, even.”
Miles nodded, a lump in his throat. He looked at the colored wagons and the currents of people swirling around them, eating and working and tending their animals. The wistful sound of an accordion drifted from one of the small campfires, and from the window of a blue wagon came the sound of a girl shouting, and the crash of a plate. It was like a village that had appeared in the space of an hour, and would disappear just as quickly; a moving mirage that no one could hope to enter unless by invitation. When he turned back to the fire, Gila was playing with his gray mouse, Susan, and Umor was noisily stacking plates, which he balanced on his head as he trotted up the steps and disappeared into the wagon.
Miles cleared his throat. “Maybe I could . . . ,” he began, but Fabio shook his head. “Circus is a tight ship,” he said.
Gila looked up from his mouse. “No room for passengers,” he said.
There was the sound of another piece of crockery smashing in the blue wagon, and the girl’s voice shouted, “When I go, Hector go too. You don’t feed him even!”
“But Miles works hard,” said Little. “He could help with the tent, or look after animals.”
“Can he walk a wire?” asked Fabio.
“Or show a lion?” asked Gila.
Miles shook his head.
“He could wash the dishes,” came Umor’s voice from inside the wagon.
“Everyone in circus must do two or three things, Master Miles,” said Fabio. “It’s the only way we can survive.”
From the corner of his eye Miles saw a small muscular girl step out of the blue wagon, slamming the door behind her so that the windows rattled. Her glossy brown hair was tied back with a ribbon, and she wore an oversized coat. A small monkey sat hunched on her shoulder, and her eyes flashed with anger. She marched toward the Bolsillo brothers’ campfire, staggering slightly on her platform shoes under the weight of a large suitcase and a worn carpetbag. A sparkling pink sleeve hung from the suitcase, its end dragging in the mud.
“I will not anymore work with that animal!” she said in a voice much larger than herself. She dropped her bags and folded her arms, glaring at Fabio.
Fabio looked at the monkey curiously. “He’s a good little performer,” he said.
“Tchah!” said the girl. “Not little Hector. The monkey is beautiful human being.” She jerked her head over her shoulder. “Stranski is the animal! He never wash, smell like a badger’s bum. He never say please, never thank you, always so much rude.”
“Stranski can’t speak, Julia,” said Gila.
“Not since his accident,” shouted Umor from inside the trailer.
“Hasn’t said a word in twenty years,” said Fabio.
The girl sniffed. “I know that! It’s not what he don’t say. It’s the way he don’t say it. Always push me into the box, pull me out, pinch me with hard fingers. He never feed the monkey, always I give him from my own food. I finish with Stranski now, and I take the monkey with me. We finish with this circus for good!”
“You can’t leave now,” said Fabio.
“Stranski needs an assistant,” said Gila.
“You have a contract,” said Fabio.
Julia bent down and rummaged in her bag until she found a crumpled sheet of paper with spidery writing crawling over both sides. “This contract?” she said, and she rolled it into a ball and stuffed it in her mouth. She chewed for a minute, her head high and her hands on her hips, and swallowed the paper with an exaggerated gulp, then without another word she picked up her bags and staggered off in the direction of the road. The monkey turned back to face the circus, chattering loudly and pulling at the girl’s ear, but she shook her head resolutely and kept walking. Just before she reached the road Hector leaped from her shoulder and ran, dodging between wagons and under clotheslines, straight back to the blue wagon from which they had come. Julia paused for a moment and stared back after the monkey with a wounded look, then she turned and was gone.
There was silence around the campfire. Umor appeared on the top step and looked sadly after the girl. “Pity,” he said. “I liked her.”
Fabio stared into the embers for a minute, a frown knitting his bushy eyebrows together, then he looked up at Miles and smiled.
“How would you like to be sawn in half?” he said.
CHAPTER THREE
THE CANNY RAT
Miles Wednesday, bone-tired and chest-inflated, wheeled a barrow of elephant droppings over the stone bridge into Larde, with a broad grin on his face and Little skipping by his side. After Julia’s unexpected departure from the circus he had been hired on the spot as tent boy, junior beast man and assistant to Stranski the Magician, an expert knife thrower and trick swordsman who did indeed smell like a badger’s bum.
“Some people are just in the right place at the right time,” Umor had said, leading him over to the small elephant enclosure in the corner of the field.
“And you’re not one of them,” added Gila, handing Miles a shovel. He pointed to the miniature mountain of dung that Tembo and Mamba had already managed to produce. “Load up the wheelbarrow there, Master Miles,” he said.
“You have to ask their permission first,” said Umor.
“And mind they don’t step on you,” said Gila.
After several hours of backbreaking work he had been sent with Little to the Parks and Gardens Department of the town hall. The barrow of elephant dung, to which had been added a cocktail of exotic droppings from four continents (and a couple of incontinents), made an excellent manure, and selling it would help to pay for the animal feed. Miles’s hands were blistered by the shovel, and the handles of the barrow stung. He stopped in a narrow alley and put the barrow down gingerly.
“Is this it?” asked Little, squinting up at the sign that hung from the grim building beside them. Her progress in learning to read was slow, as she could not grasp how the music of speech could be tied down with such clumsy stitches. “T-heh . . . Can . . . ny . . . ,” she began.
“The Canny Rat,” said Miles. “No, this isn’t it—I’m just giving my hands a rest.” The sign showed a sleek white rat with pink eyes, rearing up against a striped shield as you would see a lion do on a coat of arms. The rat held a glass of stout in one paw, and a large key in the other. Above the sign a bare lightbulb burned weakly in the shadows of the alley,
suspended from a tangle of black wires.
As Miles bent to pick up the heavy barrow, a large thatched head poked out from the gloom of the pub doorway. Miles straightened up in surprise. There was no mistaking that mean squint and the heavy lower lip that dangled like a moist pink slug over a stubbly chin. It was Fowler Pinchbucket, who together with his flinty-thin wife had run the county orphanage—where Miles had once lived—like a juvenile prison.
“You can’t park that thing ’ere,” said Fowler. Miles picked up the barrow hastily. He knew that Fowler Pinchbucket usually had to squint at something for a few seconds before he could identify it, and he wanted to use this narrow opportunity to make good his escape.
“’Ang about,” said Fowler, stepping into the road and blocking the way. “I know you. You’re Wednesday, ain’t you?” He folded his arms and peered from Miles to Little with a puzzled frown.
“Never heard of him,” said Miles, “and you’re standing in the way of fresh manure on wheels. You might want to reconsider.”
Fowler Pinchbucket didn’t budge. “You can’t fool me,” he said, forgetting that Miles had done so on many occasions. “I never forget a face.”
“Fow-ler!” barked a hard voice from the gloom inside. “What are you doing out there—discussing the weather? There are barrels that need changing.”
Little glanced at Miles. “We have to go now,” she said to Fowler Pinchbucket, but having failed to identify her he found it easier to ignore her.
“Found two of ours,” Fowler called over his shoulder. His voice was thick, as though he had swallowed a sock. “The Wednesday lad, and a girl I can’t remember.”
“We’re not yours!” said Miles, and he pushed the wheelbarrow into Fowler’s shins. Fowler’s mouth opened in a grimace, waiting for a word to arrive from his brain. The sound of Mrs. Pinchbucket’s voice had made knots in Miles’s stomach, but while Fowler blocked the narrow alley there was no way around him.
“Which Wednesday lad?” shouted the voice from inside. “We had a dozen of them.”
“Ow!” said Fowler. “It’s the one that got away. The dark one.”
Mrs. Pinchbucket appeared at the doorway in an instant. In contrast to her husband, who appeared to have been pieced together from a number of blubbery and mismatched bodies, Mrs. Pinchbucket was dried and wrinkled like a single stick of vanilla. Only her face was smooth, so stretched by her tightly tied hair that it looked as though it had been lacquered. “Miles Wednesday!” she said, her eyebrows climbing her forehead. “What a nice surprise. You’ve grown so big! And you’ve found a little friend, I see.”
Miles stared at Mrs. Pinchbucket as though she had sprouted feathers. In the eight years he had suffered the gray tedium of Pinchbucket House, he could not remember ever hearing a pleasant word from Mrs. Pinchbucket or her husband.
“She’s . . . she’s my sister,” he said.
“Your . . . sister!” echoed Mrs. Pinchbucket. A sickly smile bisected her face. “Well come in, the two of you, and we’ll get you a drink of . . . pop, or whatever. I hear rumors that you’ve been saving the town in our absence. You must tell us all about it.”
“Thank you, but we have to go,” said Miles, with as much politeness as he could muster. “We’re already late,” added Little.
“Nonsense!” said Mrs. Pinchbucket. “Fowler, park that wheelbarrow while I show these children our new establishment. We just opened on Friday,” she said to Miles.
Fowler Pinchbucket grunted, and grabbed the rough handles of the barrow. He was just as puzzled as Miles, but had long since learned to avoid any delay in carrying out his wife’s instructions. With reluctant curiosity Miles, followed by Little, stepped over the threshold of the Canny Rat.
If you have ever seen a place decorated by two people with absolutely no taste or talent, who like parting with money about as much as having their legs chewed off by a cannibal, you will have a pretty good picture of the interior of the Canny Rat. The Pinchbuckets had tried to scrub years of greasy dirt from the bile-green walls, on the basis that soap and water is cheaper than paint, but Fowler’s homemade ladder had buckled under his weight before they were finished, leaving a tidemark just below the ceiling. Three bare lightbulbs gave off such a feeble light that it was hard to be sure they were switched on. Mrs. Pinchbucket had splashed out on one tub of paint, a gallon of special-offer pink emulsion, which she had applied to the bar and part of the floor around it until the paint had run out. It made the bar look like a half-melted block of ice cream.
“Make yourselves comfortable,” said Mrs. Pinchbucket, pointing at a straggle of hard stools along the bar, “and I’ll get you both a drink. What would you like?”
“Orange juice will be fine,” said Miles.
“Don’t hold your breath,” said Mrs. Pinchbucket in a chirpy voice.
“Water?” ventured Little.
“Tap’s broken,” said Mrs. Pinchbucket. “Two bitter lemons.” This last remark was aimed at the far end of the bar, beyond the reach of the feeble lightbulbs. Miles could just make out the figure of a girl polishing glasses in the gloom.
“Two bitter what?” asked the girl.
“Bitter lemons. Bitter lemons,” snapped Mrs. Pinchbucket. “Behind you on the right, in the glass cabinet.”
The girl slid into the light and placed two bottles on the bar, and Miles recognized her immediately as Julia from the circus. She had evidently found a new job as quickly as Miles himself had. “Two bitter lemons,” she said in a bored voice.
“Well,” said Mrs. Pinchbucket, settling herself stiffly behind the bar. “How do you like our little pub?”
“It’s . . . different,” said Miles, looking around. There did not seem to be another customer in the place. In the corner was a stack of boxes with the words EXPORT ONLY stenciled on them.
“I’m glad you think so,” said Mrs. Pinchbucket. “We get very busy in the evenings, of course. But you must tell me about yourself, and your little . . . sister. Are you still living in a moldy old tub?”
“My barrel got flattened,” said Miles.
Little took the straw out of her mouth. “We live with—” she began, but Miles shot his elbow out and sent the two sour drinks flooding across the bar before she could say another word.
“Oops!” he said loudly.
Mrs. Pinchbucket glared at him, then stretched her mouth into a smile. “Accidents will happen,” she said. “Julia?”
“The cloth is where?” said Julia from the gloom.
“Hanging from the tap, girl,” said Mrs. Pinchbucket, “and bring two more drinks, chop chop!” She moved to a dry spot on the bar. “Now,” she said to Little, “I don’t believe I got your name, child.”
Miles stepped down from the stool. “We really have to go now,” he said. “We have some important manure to deliver.”
“Then you must come again,” said Mrs. Pinchbucket, the sweetness in her voice stretching thin. “Where will you be if we need you? There are always odd jobs in places Fowler is too big to crawl into.”
“I already have a job,” said Miles, but he was interrupted by a squeal of delight from Little. Following her gaze he saw two sleek white rats, like the one on the signboard outside, running along the bar top toward the spilled drink. Before Julia could start to mop it up they had dipped their pink snouts into the sticky puddle and were lapping it up greedily.
“Fow-ler!” shouted Mrs. Pinchbucket, her voice once again hard as industrial diamond. “Get in here and box those rats of yours.”
“Where are they?” said Fowler, shambling in with a plywood box under his arm, the wire-netting door swinging open. He spotted the two rats on the bar. “How the blazes did you get in here?” he said, and slammed the box down heavily on the bar. The rats flinched, but they carried on drinking. “Titus. Larry. Get back in yer box,” said Fowler thickly. The rats ignored him. “Back in yer box,” he wheedled. “Come on, don’t be pigheaded.”
Miles and Little forgot their hasty departure for
a moment, watching the unequal struggle between man and rodent. Little, who could understand all animal speech, gave a giggle. “You should hear what the rats are saying,” she whispered to Miles.
Fowler grabbed one of the rats, but it struggled from his grip and managed to bite him in the process. He swore, and sucked his thumb.
“This way you will not succeed,” said Julia. “You must talk to them. Find out what they want.” Miles and Little exchanged glances.
“What do you know about rats?” said Fowler. “I’ve been breedin’ ’em for years, me.”
Julia said nothing, but she reached under the bar and produced a packet of nuts. She opened it and held a couple of peanuts out on her open hand. The rats paused in their drinking and sniffed, their whiskers twitching.
“I bet you like some of these, don’t you, boys?” said Julia. She did not speak to them in rat language, as Miles had half expected, but her voice was soft and he could see they were listening to her. He wondered why the monkey had chosen to stay with Stranski. “It’s time to return back in your box. Come on, Titus; come, Larry,” said Julia quietly, and she put a handful of nuts in the box. The rats hesitated for just a moment, then trotted inside. Fowler slammed the door and glared at her, as though she had just done him a disservice.
“Let’s go,” whispered Little, and as they stepped out into the alleyway they heard Mrs. Pinchbucket say, “Those nuts will come out of your wages, girl.”
CHAPTER FOUR
SPECIAL DEVILRY
Stranski the Magician, mute and malodorous, plucked the last of his twelve knives from where it quivered in the scarred and painted board by Miles’s left ear. Like most circus performers he was short and compact and looked as though he could be packed away neatly in a large suitcase. His head was shaved bald, and a bushy beard fringed his chin, which had made Little comment the first time she saw him that his head was on upside down.