The Trapeze Act

by Libby Angel

  I remembered seeing the photograph of the crime scene on my father’s desk at his chambers; the van’s counter tops and upholstery were black with blood. There was also a close-up of Mr Whippy lying dead in the morgue, the bullet hole in his forehead. My father had tried to sweep the images out of my sight but it was too late.

  As I lay in my bed I resurrected Mr Whippy from the dead. He stood in my room offering me a soft serve dipped in blood. The top of his skull was caved in, as if he had taken off part of his head with his hat. In the distance I heard the tinny, distorted tune of Greensleeves wafting through the hills.

  I imagined the neighbours turning off their televisions, drawing their curtains, double-locking their doors. One thing I knew for sure: the town’s Mr Whippy franchise was in peril.

  For the next six weeks a procession of officers rotated shifts, driving my father to and from work, stationing themselves in a car outside, and acting as his personal bodyguard. My father spent the first few days pacing, wearing out the carpet to a soundtrack of scratchy opera records on the stereo. At night he sat at the dining-room table and worked.

  Just relax and enjoy a holiday at home with your family, Brian cajoled him. I’m under house arrest, Gilbert joked to Mrs Gore on the phone.

  Sometimes we sat together, my father and me, on the built-in bench seat watching Bogie and Bacall on VHS. Every ten minutes he would get up to look out the window or go outside to smoke, having, for the moment, given up giving up.

  After a week of visiting car dealers and test driving, Leda took the opportunity to explore the potential of a new family wagon, a pale blue Volvo. Nobody wanted to kill her—she reminded us, as she packed an overnight bag, one of the few items of luggage that was not rotting among the sword ferns—and they would soon regret it if they did.

  A series of motel bills and speeding fines mapped her progress along various coastal roads and desert highways across the state and beyond. One day a postcard arrived from a northern surf beach. Back by next Thursday. In all likelihood.

  In the beginning, Brian made a habit of visiting at dinnertime. He wanted to know why Leda was not at home preparing the meal, and made overtures to the effect of it being unreasonable that she should abandon Gilbert in his hour of need. But after Gilbert served baked beans on toast three times in a row, he stopped asking questions about Leda, and started turning up much later.

  The officers stationed in the car outside subsisted on takeaway from the local fish-and-chip shop. My brother served as their butler, ferrying endless cups of coffee. I overheard him asking them if they had they ever shot a person, and how often they had to—or in my brother’s words, got to—use their bludgeons. He asked how fast their car could go and if they had ever used the siren to avoid a traffic jam. He was hoping to become a detective like Brian, he told them, if he could only avoid getting a criminal record.

  When my father went outside and told my brother to leave the officers in peace so they could do their job, my brother argued, within earshot of the officers, that with their high-fat diets they needed all the caffeine they could get to stay vigilant.

  Brian and his team looked at me with pity when I, a motherless child, bid everyone goodnight after dinner and traipsed off to my room to read.

  In the mornings, the officers were obliged to drive my brother and me to school, or at least to the bus stop. We made Gilbert late for work as usual, but now that we had company, he refrained from swearing.

  The men in the bodyguard post were charged with shadowing my father even as he executed such mundane tasks as putting out the rubbish. But mostly they stood around the house while my father worked at the table, or they sat in one the lounge chairs—the wingback or the Danish leather chair—and looked uncomfortable, perhaps aware that their blue polyester uniforms didn’t match the décor. At Kingston’s mercy and with little else to do, they drank so much coffee they seemed to hover across the floors with hands shaking, jaws clenched and smelling of meat, cigarettes and Brut 33.

  In the third week of our protection, a young officer with a buzz cut called Brett came to fill the bodyguard post for the overnight shift. For most of the evening he sat in the wingback and fiddled with his watch, contemplating with a perplexed look the glass sculpture from Moreno on the coffee table beside him. Unlike the others, he refused all offers of tea, coffee and anything else, deflecting my brother’s inquisition as politely as a person can using only monosyllables.

  My father stayed up working late, his books and papers spread out on the dining table. I was still awake in my room reading Ernest’s journal when he made off to his bedroom.

  I was curious to see what Brett would do now my father was in bed. I wondered if he would sit outside my father’s door as the others had done, and how boring or awkward this would be for him. But Brett stayed in the main part of the house. Through the wall, I heard him switch on the TV and flick through the channels. He soon gave up trying the commercial channels and settled on a current-affairs program on the ABC. Later still, I heard the crunch of his boots on the gravel driveway outside. I got out of bed and looked out my window to see him talking to the officers in the car. One of them made a joke, which I thought was probably at the expense of my family, and they all laughed before Brett came inside and resumed his posture on the built-in bench seat.

  As an extra precaution during this time, I started sleeping with the ivory-handled knife under my pillow. I didn’t feel unsafe exactly, but somehow it was a comfort for me to know the knife was there, and only after checking it was in its place could I drift off to sleep.

  Sometime around dawn I woke up feeling an electric charge in the room, a presence. I lay still as a corpse, unbreathing, as if I could will myself into non-being, too frightened, even, to reach for the knife. I began to picture the van I would soon be cast into, the gag and cuffs, the warehouse I would be taken to, the concrete floor I would be thrown on, upon which my blood would spill.

  Now his hands were around my neck with surprising tenderness. Shhhhhh, he breathed. Shhhh. So that I was almost reassured.

  I am a warrior, I told myself in my mother’s voice, and I will not die today. As the hands tightened around my throat, I reached for the knife with one hand, stuck a fingernail in the groove to unfold it, then stabbed and stabbed at the shadowy mass that hung over me, until the blade struck and the form fell away, back into the dark.

  Jesus! Bitch! came my brother’s voice, and, at the same time, the light snapped on.

  I turned to see Brett straddling my brother on the floor, pressing the end of a revolver to his head.

  It’s me, Kingston, my brother squeaked. Underneath the mask!

  Brett tore off my brother’s balaclava with such force he might have ripped his head off, and then, recognising him, dismounted and rose to his feet. My brother remained prostrate on the carpet, writhing and clutching his side where I had stabbed him.

  My father, in his plaid dressing gown, stood narrow-eyed in the doorway. You deserve to be shot, you little wanker! And on and on he railed.

  The officers from the car had come inside and suddenly my bedroom was full of men, all of them shouting, except for my brother, who was sobbing.

  And into this scene walked my mother, her timing as sharp as ever.

  Did I miss something? she said, cocking her head around the doorframe. Her face was bright and tanned, framed by a short chestnut-coloured wig. Did something actually happen in this godforsaken place?

  My father hardly seemed to notice her. Tell this little fuckwit here, he said to Brett, his voice an octave higher than usual, how many people get killed each year by the police in mistaken-identity cock-ups.

  Brett was unsure of the stats. He called my father Sir and stood like a military man on the seagrass matting, surrounded by perfume bottles, dresses and books.

  By morning, the balaclava had been confiscated, scissored and binned, my brother grounded and Brett administered with something strong, which this time he did not refuse.

 
; …

  JANUARY 4TH 1860

  The wind blows in hot gusts, the horses stand with their backs to it, and their noses to the ground, without the muscular strength to raise their heads; at night we are obliged to tie them to trees to stop them wandering off in search of food. They partake only sparingly of the weeds we bring them, but gnaw at the bark of the trees all night long.

  …

  and their hooves are so brittle that pieces fly off them like splinters when they strike against the stones.

  …

  but all that remained was a dry bed of shallow salt—lagoon fringed with samphire bushes, clay and gypsum.

  …

  continuing over the barren, stony, and undulating ground that lies between the main and outer ranges. Even the feathered races have abandoned us, all but for the common kites and as many crows: these birds continue with us for the offals of the sheep.

  …

  but the felloes and wheels of the drays have shrunk to nothing and it is with great difficulty that we continue to wedge them up.

  …

  The thermometer stood at 125°, and perceiving no change, I placed it in the fork of a tree—when I went back to read it, the mercury had risen to the top and exploded the glass.

  …

  Later we met some Natives—when we asked them where the water had gone they told us the sun had taken it.

  …

  MAY 17TH

  For the last 3 days, most of us have barely left our tents. Nevertheless, it has been agreed I must persist in travelling onwards and testing my hypothesis. I have made my choice of three men—Misters Z, B and R—to form a side party. We will set out at first light tomorrow, with horses, two camels (including Mrs Smith, who, despite being ill of temper, is a sturdy beast, and I have grown rather fond of her), several sheep and a light cart, carrying fifteen weeks provisions to provide for our safety and comfort.

  …

  Capt X marked a tree under which he will bury a bottle, with a letter in it to inform us of his intended movements.

  …

  JUNE 12TH

  With the wind at west, we set out at six, and rode along the base of some low hills of tertiary fossil formation, the summits of which form the table land of the interior.

  …

  but using the instrument on the following morning in the bed of the basin itself, I unfortunately broke it.

  …

  our horses beginning to flag, living only on grass, being ridden from sunrise to sunset, wearing their hooves down to the quicks, suffering saddle sore and inflammation. We tried to bleed him but he threw himself down violently on the ground, and bruised himself all over, so that we were obliged to fasten him up

  … where we surprised an old Native in his hut, from whom we learnt that there are both hills and fish to the north.

  …

  They will point at any star and tell you that when it shall get up higher then the weather will be cold or hot.

  …

  but an hour later, Mr B’s horse fell again. We helped him up and abandoned his saddle. He continued walking but after another hour he fell—the water revived him for a time and we hoped he would struggle on, but after another hour he again fell. We stopped, made a fire beside him and sat there a while, but he seemed all worn out. We went back again later but he would not move. Mr B left a pannikin of water for him, as we did not want him to suffer more—and we left him there to die.

  …

  Mr R got a pin, and soon had a rough kind of apparatus prepared, with which he went to the water; and, having cast in his bait, almost immediately pulled out a white and glittering fish.

  …

  ‘Good Heavens,’ said he, ‘did ever man see such country!’ Indeed, if it was not so gloomy, unaltered in a single feature: herbless and treeless. For prepared as we were for bad country, we were not prepared for such as the Natives described.

  …

  a hot air blows upon us like a sirocco from the N.W., and the air is so rarefied that we can hardly breathe.

  …

  until the moon should rise, and we threw ourselves on the ground to take a temporary repose, the evening being cool and agreeable.

  17

  AFTER I stabbed my brother, and once the wound, which was actually little more than a scratch, had been attended to in the bathroom and it had been established his condition required no further medical intervention, my father, brother and I went back to our respective beds. Leda stayed up the rest of the night talking with Brett.

  In the morning we woke to the scent of cinnamon and nutmeg wafting through the house. We found Leda banging about the kitchen wearing a fit-and-flare dress, a frilled apron and an oven mitt in the shape of a giant lobster claw. Upon seeing us—her husband and children—she removed from the oven, for the first time in her limited domestic career, several trays of biscuits and two cakes.

  Poor boy, she said, waving the orange quilted claw at Brett, who was sitting on a stool and leaning over the timber breakfast bar. Such a terrible shock we gave him!

  A glass tumbler and an unstoppered crystal decanter, severely depleted since last sighting, stood beside Brett’s elbow.

  Did Brett like cream cheese icing on his carrot cake? My mother inquired of him. And what about the officers outside in the car? No, it was no trouble at all, the children needed it for their school lunches anyway…

  It’s the least we can do, my mother said, addressing Brett but looking at my father.

  My father soon conceived of a solution to our unnatural confinement. Defying all advice and protocol, he demanded Brian accompany him to the state prison so he could confront Keuper directly.

  The prison was located on the northeast outskirts of town, far beyond the respectable suburbs, beyond the factories and the abattoir.

  As I see it, Gilbert told Keuper as they sat in white plastic chairs at a white plastic table in the visitors’ room, you are shooting yourself in the foot, so to speak. Two months ago you sent instructions asking me to help you appeal your sentence. Impatient with my deliberations, you then persuaded your friends to get out their voice distorters and make a series of silly phone calls to my office, during which they threatened to hang me up by my tie. For one thing, considering you are on a murder charge, a death threat doesn’t look good for your appeal, and, secondly—perhaps this hasn’t occurred to you, sir—it will be impossible for me to represent you if I am dead.

  Two days later, the threat was retracted. My father went back to work, Brian stopped visiting and the officers drove away.

  You might think you’re pretty hoity-toity with all the attention we’ve been getting around here lately, my mother remarked to my brother and me one night as we lay either side of her on her bed, as we had done in old times. She lit a candle and turned out the bedside lamp.

  But don’t forget, she warned us, no matter which school you go to or how famous your father gets, in the eyes of the people of this godforsaken town, you children are precisely one half of me, that is, one half peasant low-life carnie.

  We looked at our mother. My brother grinned as if this was something to be proud of, and perhaps it was.

  It’s time I told you the truth about your uncle Horatio, she said.

  This was the first I’d heard of any uncle called Horatio, or any uncle at all, in fact. I’d always believed that, like our father, our mother was an only child, though, come to think of it, she’d never said as much.

  Well, okay, she conceded, he wasn’t your real uncle.

  So what did Horatio have to do with us?

  He was as good as a son to my parents, my mother explained, and I loved him like a brother.

  I considered this for a moment, then opened my mouth to protest, to say that this was not a good analogy, that only that morning my brother had threatened to strangle me. But my mother was not interested in tell-tales or dobbers. Here was my brother beside me with his long eyelashes and perfect teeth, no less innocent than I.

  I was
overcome with vertigo, gagged from speaking.

  My mother, oblivious, rattled on. There followed a list of Horatio’s many virtues and achievements: his escape from Mexico in the back of a gun-runner’s truck, his illegal work as a stripper on a cruise ship, his disembarkation one afternoon in Amsterdam.

  After working in the red-light district for a few weeks, Horatio heard about the Rodzirkus and started visiting the boatshed, where he quickly made friends with Jack (married to Clementine the horse trainer, who was a descendant of the legendary Madeleine).

  Jack had recently returned from a stint in Paris where he had been training on the Wheel of Death. For some years now he’d been trying to reintroduce the Wheel act to the Rodzirkus program.

  What is a Wheel of Death? My brother asked.

  The Wheel of Death, our mother explained, is one of the most dangerous of all circus acts: its performers are untethered by safety cables and there are no mats or nets should they fall. It consists of a massive, vertically rotating frame with a wheel on each end. A performer walks inside or outside of each wheel; as the wheels spin, the frame is set in its rotating motion. The inevitable comparison audiences make is that of two giant hamster wheels.

  The act was introduced to the Rodzirkus by a pair of American performers in the 1940s, but it was soon shelved after one of them fell in rehearsal and broke his spine. The Wheel was dismantled and packed away, and the act had never been revived since. Apart from the risks to the performers, it was expensive to tour with a piece of equipment weighing over three tonnes, and the act required the use of the larger of two remaining Rodzirkus tents, which badly needed repairs (the Wheel of Death had a diameter of over seven metres).

  But in Horatio, Jack identified a rare combination of strength, fearlessness and cunning. Of a similar height and build to Jack, he was an ideal candidate for a partner on the Wheel.