by Olivia Levez
He glances at it, and waves his hand towards the back of the little shop.
There, on the wall, are several large colour photographs of the pier. In all of them, it is on fire: flames engulf the whole length of it, apart from the struts where it’s planted into the sea. The grand central building and all of the shops along it are blackened skeletons. In one of the pictures, a crowd has gathered on the beach to watch.
‘2010,’ says the man. He’s finished his call now, and has come to stand behind me. ‘A couple of kids left their fags burning, and whoosh! Up it went. The council had only just raised the funds to regenerate it too.’
‘What happened to the circus?’ I say.
He raises a pierced eyebrow. ‘There’s never been a circus there. The ballroom you see in the middle was used for tea dances and stand-up comedians. That’s about it.’ He pushes the photograph back to me and suppresses a yawn. You can tell he wants to go back to whatever he was doing on his phone.
‘Well, are there any circuses in Hastings?’ I ask.
He shrugs. ‘You could ask at the Art Café,’ he says. He nods towards a leaflet on a stacked stand. ‘Oh, and there’s the grand opening of the pier, I suppose. There’ll be performances and stuff then. I think there’s meant to be a tightrope…’
He gets up and passes me a flyer. There’s a clown on it with tufts of black hair above each ear. A leather-clad couple balancing on something called the Wheel of Death. Chinese acrobats on a unicycle. But what transfixes me is the beautiful lady in the gold mask and gold dress, swinging in a hoop. She is the image of my mother.
My breathing quickens as I read:
Walk on Air! Play with Fire! Find Your Inner Clown!
We are looking for talented performers to join our show for
the Grand Opening of Hastings Pier. The World’s Only
Pop-Up Circus!
Come find us at the Art Café. Auditions at 9a.m., 10 May.
Then I frown. That’s two weeks away. I’ll need to find a job first. When I’ve found somewhere to live, of course.
But once I’m settled, I will become a performer.
It won’t be long before I’ll know how to fly.
Schoolgirl Missing, Aged Ten
We watch the gold lady fly.
Beanie likes her gold shoes and I admire her long shining hair. We each hold a lollipop as big as our heads and we are wearing matching glitter nail varnish and butterfly face paint.
Daddy has paid for this birthday treat. I squeeze up close to him, feeling the warmth of him through his business suit. He smells of the men’s perfume that Nikki, his PA, buys for him.
Beanie didn’t believe me when I told her I was having a circus in my garden. Now she has to. I hope she tells Miffy and Lexy and all of the others about this being the best birthday party ever.
The flying lady grabs the swing as it passes and flips herself upside down. Her wrists are trembling, but she manages to hold herself straight before she gracefully does the splits and swivels on one hand, high up in the ring.
‘That’s my mother up there,’ I tell Beanie.
She turns round to look at me. Her breath is huffy with strawberries.
‘Don’t be silly. You told me your mother’s dead.’
‘No, it’s true. Mummy’s a circus performer. Daddy said that I have to keep it a big secret, but I’m telling you because you’re my very best friend.’
Beside me, Daddy is shuffling. Nikki has her hand in his lap and is probably stealing his popcorn or something, which is a cheek after Daddy’s paid for it all. Daddy breathes heavily for a while, and then murmurs something into Nikki’s ear, but I can’t hear what.
I keep my voice low. ‘She had to leave because she got so successful. She’s literally the best acrobat that Russia’s ever seen. So, Daddy made me promise not to tell anyone, ever. But once a year, on my birthday, she comes back, especially to perform for me.’
Beanie breathes out a sigh, eyes shining. ‘That’s perfectly lovely,’ she says. ‘You’re so lucky, Wills.’
I like it when she calls me Wills. All of the girls at school have nicknames for their best friends. Even the favourite teachers have them.
‘She’s beautiful, isn’t she?’ I whisper, and I feel her nod.
We watch her flip and twist, ending in a spin that makes us hold our breaths. I notice how the spotlight picks the acrobat out exactly. How it catches the glitter on her costume and turns it into fire.
I want to do that. I can already do the splits because I’ve been practising every day since the last time we had the circus in our garden. I stand on my points every day too, like the ballet dancers at Sadler’s Wells.
There’s a shifting movement next to me, and Daddy and Nikki are both getting up to leave. I wonder why they haven’t taken their popcorn with them.
The flying lady is right up in the roof now, where the pigeons are.
‘Your mother’s bloody brilliant, isn’t she?’ sighs Beanie next to me. Her breath is all sticky-smelling from the lolly.
‘Bloody brilliant,’ I agree, but my mind’s on Daddy and Nikki. I wonder where they’ve gone.
Then the gold lady somersaults through the air and does a perfect landing, bowing and smiling.
Beanie and I clap loudest of all.
Afterwards, we get to have a special tea party with the circus performers. A clown on stilts lifts Beanie high in the air as everyone claps, and I try to look pleased. Nikki has had to go back home to her babysitter, so it’s just Daddy again, which is how I like it. I turn to ask him if I can have a go with the stilt walker, but he’s off talking to the gold lady.
She’s even more beautiful closer up. Her hair is piled in curls around her face, which is made up in shiny pinks and golds. Her costume has hardly any front, and plunges all the way down to her tummy button, which is pierced with a star. Daddy has bought her a tall, clear drink with ice and lemon in it. When she laughs, her teeth are perfect and white. Daddy has a moon-shaped lipstick mark on his cheek which makes him look silly.
Beanie nudges me. ‘Go and say hello to her,’ she says.
‘I can’t do that,’ I say. ‘I told you, it’s a secret.’
But she pushes me towards them, and now they’re both looking at me.
‘It’s the birthday girl,’ Daddy laughs. His voice is slurry. ‘Having a good time?’
‘Can I have a picture?’ I say to the lady. In front of us, Beanie is waving and holding up her phone to take a picture. The lady looks surprised, but crouches down and we both stare into the lens. I press up close against her and put my arm around her, so that she has to do the same.
I know at once she’s not my mother. Her wrists are too thin, and she smells horrid, of too-strong perfume and cigarettes. The drink that Daddy’s given her has made her breath all nasty. This close, her skin’s marked with little holes where she’s once had spots and her makeup’s trying to cover them up.
She lets me go the minute the picture’s done. I am glad.
‘What will you wish for?’ Beanie asks me, when we’re all crowding around my cake. It’s a big top one, and even has pink and yellow bunting around the entrance.
I look towards the open tent flap, where I can still hear Daddy and the gold lady laughing.
When I blow the candles, I watch them flicker out, one by one.
There’s only one thing I ever wish for, and that hasn’t happened yet.
Sea Spray
Rule #5: Have no plan. Be spontaneous.
So I literally choose a guesthouse based purely on the colour of its door.
Green, I think. I’ll go to the next green one.
The door to Number Six, Portland Square turns out to be Shrek-green, and the paint’s peeling at its base. The sign on the door says Sea Spray. Lace curtains hang at each sash window, tied with baby-blue ribbons. There are stickers all over the lower panes, saying No Cold Callers here! and Say No to Europe!
It doesn’t look very nice.
The land
lady is called Mrs Fox. She gives me a lipsticktoothed smile and says that I need to pay for the next week’s accommodation up front – ‘because of the holiday season just starting, dear. We do have a lot of bookings, and I’d hate for you to lose your room. What did you say you did again, dear?’
‘I’m a performer,’ I say firmly. ‘Mostly in the circus. I’m in the process of looking for work, but I’ll find some very soon.’ I pull out my brown envelope to show that I’m serious about staying.
Her eyes slide to the crisp twenties that I’m easing out. ‘Well, that’s very nice, I’m sure. We don’t tend to get a lot of those. We get a lot of artists, though, and writers – what you might call creative types – but no circus performers as yet.’ She stops to draw breath. Taps something into her computer. Then tells me a figure which makes me swallow hard and wish I hadn’t handed Daddy’s gold card to the homeless girl at Paddington.
‘That can’t be right, can it?’ I say. ‘That’s not what it says on your tariff.’ I point at the list hanging above a doilydraped hall table.
‘An extra week’s deposit in the tourist season,’ she says. Her tongue flickers over her lipsticky teeth. ‘You’ll find it’s the same elsewhere, dearie.’
I decide I’ll pay for a week. I’ll have a job by the end of it and can afford to go somewhere better. I count out the cash while she watches me. I smile brightly at her.
‘Well, I’ll get your key, then,’ she says. ‘Please respect our house rules: no smoking, no radio, no baths after five, no showers before six, breakfast is from seven thirty – but there’s no kippers tomorrow, not on a Thursday – no carousing, no canoodling, no coming in after eleven, no eating in your room – unless it’s the bourbon creams we provide – no pets, no poker, no alcohol on the premises, no –’
I stop her in mid-flow. ‘And my key?’ I say.
Mrs Fox scowls, and reaches over to a rack of hooks. The key, when she passes it to me has a large see-through plastic tag with the number 11 etched into it.
‘Upstairs and first on your left,’ she says.
She goes back to reading her Daily Mail, but I feel her eyes tracking me all the way across the hall carpet and up the creaking stairs.
I spend a long time staring at the room that is my new home. Then I swallow, take out my notepaper, and sink onto the groaning bed.
Dear Beanie,
You wouldn’t believe where I’m staying: a sort of bed and breakfast/boarding house. Beanie, you should see it. Hilarious! Think Bates Motel meets The League of Gentlemen and you get the general idea. My bedroom’s next to a tiny bathroom that’s smaller than the ones we have in our stable, and the bath’s literally filled with curly black hairs. Like someone’s killed a million spiders. There are rows of dolls, Beanie, staring at me with glassy eyes. And the landlady! She’s called Mrs Fox (AKA the Fox) and she’s like the one in the Roald Dahl story who stuffs her guests with sawdust and props them up on the top floor. I’ll have to make sure she doesn’t make me sign the guest book…
It’s squashed in the end of town which is filled with tat shops and clapperboard houses and dab sandwiches. Dab’s a sort of fish, which they fillet here and shove between two pieces of bread and butter. You’re supposed to eat it with vinegar. You’d love it – I can hear your voice now. ‘Wills – that’s literally sooo pseudo-ironic,’ you’d say.
Anyway, I’m off to find a job now – keep your fingers crossed for me. Love you!
Wxx
Street Act
Below me, the streets wind. Blue plaques on the houses state which poet or artist or writer lived there. Families tug each other along. Dogs. Toddlers. Friends. A girl sits in the sunshine, absorbed in drawing in chalks on the pavement, a tangle of friendship bracelets by her side. Seagulls shrill and wheel. Below, the sea.
Hastings Old Town is a maze of thrift shops. There are yards full of old tat cast off from people’s lives. Rule #5: Have no plan. Be spontaneous. If you’re random one day, be organised the next. Never know what you are going to do yourself, because if you don’t know, how on earth is anyone else going to know? How will Scally know, if I don’t even know myself?
So my new look is: no look. Totally unplanned. I end up with a long coat made of mustard-coloured velvet and a pair of battered scarlet Dr Martens. I also buy a stripy leotard and a ballet tutu. The only rule is: no rules. Things that I’d never dream of wearing in my past life. Things that the Handbag would never wear.
I think of the pretty, ditsy dresses I used to buy with Beanie. Willow wore what Beanie wore. Except that Beanie liked to wear stuff her granny had passed down from the forties and fifties, proper vintage finds from trunks lurking in her family’s attic, whereas Willow had to buy brand new. She thought that made her better, before she realised that it was simply nouveau. That all the girls could see through her.
‘Oh my god, you’re so nouveau, Wills. I love it!’ Beanie’s voice, bubbling with glee.
I switch her off; realise that I am starting to think of myself in the third person. Does that mean I am going mad?
I pay the owner, a whiskery old lady smoking an antique pipe, and then sit on a bench in the sunshine while I tie up the laces on my cherry boots. I roll down the top of the brown envelope and push it back inside my bag’s lining, deep as it will go. My new clothes cost me £22.50. I need to be really careful with what’s left of my money.
I huddle into my yellow velvet coat, and wind my way to the seafront. I walk past the ghost train, along the shingled beach to where the rotten hulks of fishing boats wait, with their gaping sides and creepy names: Rosa-Lee Returns, Strange Sally, Black Nancy. I pass a little stall selling freshly caught fish fillets with bread and vinegar, and a miniature railway and the funicular. It is cold and bright. Early holiday-makers are bravely wearing sunshades and sundresses with winter coats and walking boots.
I think about posting my letter to Beanie, but I can’t, because of Rule #4. Finally, I sit on the wall outside the fairground.
A girl is smiling down at me, tanned-skinned, yellowdreadlocked and dirty-faced. She’s taken hold of my wrist and is wrapping coloured silk round it, plaiting rapidly.
‘You like it? It’ll bring you luck. A gift of friendship.’ She has an Australian accent, throaty and twangy.
She holds out my wrist, and it feels strangely disconnected from me, a floating body part. On it, a bracelet made from coloured silks, yellow and black and orange.
My new friend’s smile doesn’t reach her eyes. She’s keeping a check on a battered top hat by her pavement art. Her eyes flit about, perhaps for the police.
‘So you’ll buy? It’s two pounds,’ she says, still smiling. Her teeth are short and yellow.
I stare at her hopelessly. ‘I don’t have any change,’ I say. When her smile hardens, I decide to pay. Reaching inside my bag, I rummage around inside the brown envelope and draw out a handful of coins.
‘That’s all I have –’
But she’s gone, melted away into the crowds. When I see her next, she’s binding her threads around the wrist of a little girl in fairy wings, while her parents look on bemusedly.
The first place I try is a coffee shop in the Old Town. I feel bright and confident in my yellow coat. I have a new role now: a performer who’s just in need of work while she waits for her big break. There are rows of delicious-looking cakes behind the glass counter: macarons and Florentines and chocolate brownies with bits of gold leaf on top. Early morning business people are sitting over their laptops drinking coffee. Jazz music is playing through the radio. I feel at home here already.
‘Good morning.’ I smile at the girl who’s just come in from the back, drying her hands on her apron. ‘I’m looking for a job, and wondered if I could speak to your manager.’
I stand up straight, push my shoulders back. I can see myself adding various flavours of syrup to coffee, serving customers giant white chocolate and cranberry cookies from one of those jars on the counter.
But she’s already sh
aking her head. ‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘We have no job. We are all fully staffed for the holiday season.’ She has a Polish accent like our groom, and a tiny tattoo of a daffodil behind her left ear. She lets me fill in a form anyway, and I hesitate over the name, nearly writing ‘Willow Stephens’ before I catch myself. I fill in Mrs Fox’s address, leaving out the postcode, which I don’t know.
‘You have a mobile number?’ she asks.
I shake my head. This is because of Rule #4: Never tell anyone where you are. Never contact home. Don’t rely on friends. Mobile phones are one of the easiest ways for police to find out where you are, who you’ve been in contact with. I have a vague idea that they contain some sort of tracking device, but, however they use them to find fugitives, I do know that they are a definite no for people like me.
‘I’m only staying at this address for the next week,’ I tell her. ‘I’ll pop back once you’ve spoken to your manager.’
I leave her looking doubtful. I know that once I’ve left, she’ll stuff the form with a huge pile of others somewhere, or worse, shove it straight in the bin. I know that I won’t come back.
The smell of coffee and homemade scones wafts after me as the door closes.
Money in Money out
£1280 (total gap year savings) 2 weeks’ rent + deposit at Sea Spray Yellow vintage coat
Red DMs
Leotard
Tutu
Friendship bracelet
Total spent:
£490
£12
£5
£2.50
£3
£2
£504.50
New total: £765.50
A Little of What You Fancy
There are no jobs in Hastings.
I have scoured the town, and spent £3.75 on a local newspaper and a dab sandwich for lunch. I also spent £3 on a family-sized box of tissues, a multipack of crisps, and a triple pack of lip balm in the pound shop.