by Olivia Levez
I watch him saunter back to his friends. He grabs two of his mates’ shoulders and squeezes them, laughing. He doesn’t look back.
‘Chrissakes, Frog. You coming?’
Suz leads me back outside the cinema, but not before she’s grabbed a handful of jelly snakes from the pick ’n’ mix and shoved them in her pocket.
I refuse to eat one out of principle and she laughs, taunting me by sucking up the snake, red, green and quivering, into her mouth and making loud, ecstatic mmm noises.
‘Here we are. Stand back now. Be subtle.’
A door opens, and cinema goers spill out of Screen Six onto the street, blinking in the last threads of the sun. Suz and I slide inside.
‘Shhh, now. We wait here, while they clean the place up. Then we go and choose a nice comfy place to sit. There’s no way this film’ll be packed, don’t worry.’
We sit on the floor in the little passage, while the boy and the girl in uniform wander about the auditorium, sweeping up popcorn and picking up cups and 3D glasses. They don’t see us, and I have the feeling that, even if they did, they wouldn’t care. Both have earbuds and are plugged into their music.
After a while, they take the wheeled bin bags and trundle them away.
Suz and I sit down near the back where there’s more leg room. We have the place to ourselves for the moment and Suz’s pocketful of jelly snakes. I forget my earlier disapproval. It’s utter heaven.
The film, as Suz predicted, is utter rubbish, and, as we don’t have 3D glasses, is out of focus anyway. It’s something about a father who is trying to save his family from an alien invasion of giant grasshoppers. The wife does a lot of shrieking and the two children are sickly cute. It’s awful.
But we don’t care, not one bit, because we can sleep, and it’s warm and it’s dry, and we’re sinking into the velvety softness of the chairs, our legs over the ones in front. Suz passes me another jelly snake, and I eat it with my eyes closed, halflistening to the film family.
Female voice, high, panicked: Oh my gooood, Martin, what are we going to do? What about the kids?
Male voice, low, strong, reassuring: Leave it all to me, Dinah. I can handle it. Stay strong for me, won’t you, Junior? And you too, Princess.
I slip in and out of weird dreams of grasshoppers and aliens and jelly snakes, all the time smelling the strawberry and lime huff of Suz’s snake breath, which is a big improvement on the usual.
‘We need to go, Frog. They’re cleaning again.’
‘One last show.’
By the time we’re kicked out after the last show, I know the movie word for word.
‘D’you think that Princess was ever able to stay strong?’ I ask.
Suz snorts. ‘Not without her daddy and Junior to help her,’ she says.
The last thing the girl’s mother ever saw was the giant grasshopper’s mandibles. Unfortunately, Martin wasn’t able to handle it quite as well as he’d hoped.
There’s something different about Suz, and now I see what it is. She’s wearing a new coat: a quilted silver jacket with a hood. She looks sheepish when I point this out to her.
‘She won’t miss it, Frog. Honestly, you should have seen her. She could have bought up the whole high street, just like that.’
‘You took it from the back of someone’s chair, didn’t you?’ I say. ‘At the cinema.’ I touch the collar. ‘And it has fur, Suz. I thought you were supposed to be vegan?’
‘Crikey, Frog. I’m vegan-esque. How many times? And it’s faux. There’s nothing wrong with wearing faux.’
‘Oh, I forgot, you have no principles.’
‘It’s a luxury, having principles,’ she reminds me. She pulls her hood up and plunges her hands deep inside her pockets. She looks like a little silver pixie.
She also looks warm.
Carnival
Suz shoves the lit devil sticks into two crumbling plant pots. ‘Up there,’ she says, jerking up her chin.
She means the thin roof high above us, the balustrade made of stone.
‘Walk it,’ she whispers, and her eyes look dark and wild. I shiver as she fixes my peacock tail to my costume, weaves feathers in my hair.
She has been different recently. Extra bright, extra energetic, extra happy. The black tins of cider are lined up along the beam in our squat and they are replacing the jars of lentils, pulses, almond butter. We live off chips, sharing them from the same bag. Sometimes we add winkles, gritty with sand and vinegar. You can get them for free if you hang around the fish stalls at close of day. We eat them together, picking them out where we’ve shaken them over our chips, with cocktail sticks.
‘They’re not actually life forms,’ proclaims Suz. ‘They count as mineral or vegetable.’ And if it wasn’t for her toobright eyes, and the ever present smell of cider that hangs around her, I would think that she was back to her old self.
‘Feet,’ says Suz, and I watch as she wraps them with ribbon, criss-crosses it over and under. Crushes chalk with a stone and rubs it briskly on my soles.
My heart buzzes, the blood in my veins feels on fire as I climb. I have done this, I think, many times. I place my foot on the edge of the railing, stare straight ahead over the skyline, and raise my arms either side of me. It is a calm, clear day; the recent storm has settled the weather, and the blue mist of sea is quiet as velvet.
‘You need a pole,’ she shouts. reaches up and passes me a broom handle.
I walk.
I walk, one foot in front of the other, feeling the edges with my toes. Time stops, and below me, the morning shimmers. Cars crawling like caterpillars, sun-lit windows, the mocking cry of the seagulls.
And I walk above all of this, a creature of fire and air.
When I climb down, Suz is applauding, her face dancing with sunlight.
‘That was effing amazing, Frog,’ she tells me. ‘I believe you’re ready.’
Tree Peacock
Suz peers again at the green leaf invitation.
‘It does say admits one,’ I say. ‘But I’m sure you can come too.’
I remember how I felt with Bee Beard’s eyes watching me. A mile high. Higher than his stilts. Higher than the tallest tightrope.
‘It’s an opportunity,’ I say. ‘Isn’t it?’
Suz passes it back. ‘You don’t want me to go, right?’
‘Of course I do. I never said that. I’ll make them let you in.’ I squeeze Suz’s shoulder. ‘I’m not going anywhere without my friend.’
Suz sniffs. I can’t help noticing that her hair is even filthier than usual. ‘There’ll be lots of food there,’ she says. ‘We should take bags. Those sort of people put on a real spread. I’ve seen it before. They pretend it’s all ethical this and organic that. But really it’s just an excuse to gorge and glut and glamp it up. Artisan chic. Ethical glam.’
I stare. ‘Bee Beard seemed really helpful and nice. This could be my chance, Suz.’
‘Seemed really nice,’ Suz mocks, in my boarding-school accent.
I hate it when she does that.
‘We should take bags,’ she repeats.
We find the tent by the organic bread shop.
Le Petit Cirque at Jack in the Green! proclaims a hand-drawn sign outside. Silver and yellow bunting flutters. Outside, the streets are filling with revellers.
People are setting up stalls on the pavement, selling green juice and luminous cider and veggie curries and patties and Green Man masks and hand-whittled wands and feathered earrings and beaded necklaces and chutneys and jams and magic spells. A tree druid sashays past, leaves fluttering.
Suz scowls as she looks at the circus tent. ‘You sure you want me to come?’
‘Of course I do,’ I say. I look at her.
She has refused to dress as a tree, but is wearing her battered and ancient top hat. She no longer looks like the Artful Dodger, but now just carries all the ingrained grime of every homeless person. It is there in the shuffle that she has started to develop, in the stoop of her shoulder
s, in the glass-eyed gaze of her eyes.
People always stared at Suz, but now they’re staring for all the wrong reasons.
Crouched in the littered street, leaves fluttering, I catch sight of myself in a shop window mirror. Suz has made me a full peacock costume, complete with emerald eyes and laurel leaf corset. She has used every scrap of fabric in her tat box, and emptied her glue gun, sticking strips of sari and sequins to sticks. Some passers-by turn and take pictures of me on their phones.
‘I am a Tree Peacock,’ I say. I lift my arms and twirl, and my tail spins around me, a million fluttering leaves and feathers. My face and neck and hands are painted with broad, sweeping brushstrokes of emerald and gold and russet.
Suz nods. Her eyes are flitting over towards the cider stall. I watch a giant green cat do the samba with a tribe of painted ladies, their butterfly wings pulsing with the drum-beats as they grind, grind, grind.
‘Ready?’ I say. The silver and yellow bunting flutters.
But Suz is dragging her feet, scowling.
I shrug. Unpin my leaf invitation from my costume. Take a deep breath and enter the tent.
‘Helloooo!’ It’s Bee Beard, dressed this time in a crumpled linen shirt and shorts. ‘Lovely to see you – Frog, isn’t it?’ He pulls me into a quick hug, and he smells so clean.
I spent an hour this morning, washing myself in the beach lavatories: my face, my armpits, even putting my feet in the basin and ignoring the sideways glances of early swimmers. I hope I don’t smell of anything worse than squirty handwash.
If I do, Bee Beard doesn’t seem to notice. I see that he has crocheted bees stuck all over his beard. ‘I’m Bee Beard, as opposed to Tree Beard,’ he explains.
He breathes warm cider and smoke all over me as he pins a woollen bee to my leafy bodice.
‘Nice, aren’t they? My girlfriend knits them for me. I do it with real ones too, of course.’
His beard tickles my skin as he fiddles with the safety pin, then stands back, satisfied.
‘Do what?’ I ask.
‘Bee-bearding, of course.’ He’s shouting over the noise of drums from outside. ‘We keep real bees at The Meadows, for honey. It helps when the circus closes at the end of the season.’ He stoops down to pick up a leaf that has floated from my tail. ‘Nice costume, by the way. Love the tail feathers.
‘Let me introduce you to my girlfriend. Lala – meet Frog. She’s a street performer, and she’s bloody excellent. She’s also the most amazing, um, Tree Peacock?’
I look down at my costume, laughing. Suz has done a brilliant job. I am teetering in silver skyscraper sandals which Suz said she ‘found’ outside a nightclub.
Lala gives me a limp handshake. She looks utterly bored. She’s wearing an off-the-shoulder black top and jeans.
‘Lala doesn’t do festivals,’ Bee Beard confides. ‘Thinks they’re beneath her. Only tolerates them to pay off her massive overdraft, don’t you, love?’
Lala scowls.
‘So what act do you do?’ I ask her.
She mutters something that could be ‘aerial’ and wanders away to the buffet. People are piling in now, pulling in their children, trailing leaf-bunting and balloons. Outside, I can see a woman sitting by a table of face paints, children queuing up to be turned into green Spidermen and fairies, and it makes me think of Suz. Where is she?
Bee Beard is shaking hands with a group of tree druids, all of them laughing and spilling plastic pints of luminous cider. The tent is packed with people now. I tug down my leaf corset and wonder what to do.
Then I see Suz, over by the buffet. She looks every inch a homeless person, clutching her carrier bag, in her dirty trainers and baggy old cardigan. She doesn’t look creative and kooky any more, just grimy and street-worn.
She sees me and shouts.
‘Oy, Frog. They’ve got a real spread. Free booze too.’ She waves her bag at me; shoves another bread roll into it.
I shrink and redden. I can feel the tree druids watching.
Bee Beard’s at my shoulder now. ‘Hey, Tree Peacock! Come and say hello.’
‘Interesting-looking creature over there,’ he’s saying. ‘I wonder how she got in?’
He watches as Suz waves frantically at me. My heart sinks as she limps her way over.
‘You know each other?’ He’s too polite to raise an eyebrow.
Suz plants her arm around my shoulder. I wish she wouldn’t.
‘Know her? Of course I know her. We’re sisters, aren’t we, Frog?’
I smile brightly at Bee Beard. ‘I won’t be a moment.’ I steer Suz back towards the entrance, by the buffet.
‘What on earth are you doing?’ I hiss. ‘Are you trying to spoil my chances?’
She’s holding a paper leaf plate piled with slithering heaps of olives, hummus, falafels, stuffed vine leaves and salads. Bottles of cider poke their necks out of her pockets.
‘You do know that’s fish eggs, don’t you?’ I jerk my head towards her taramasalata.
‘For god’s sake, Frog,’ she slurs. ‘I’m vegan-esque, aren’t I? How many times?’
‘Maybe you should go now,’ I say. I can feel Bee Beard and his friends watching us curiously.
‘Am I embarrassing you?’ She takes another huge mouthful of food, then reaches for more flatbreads and falafels.
‘Well, a little. Yes, actually.’
‘So why don’t you go off with your new friend, then? I’m all right here,’ she says. She burps, and coughs out some couscous.
I leave her eyeing up the Jack in the Green cupcakes, and make my way back to Bee Beard, who’s helping his friend carry some bongo drums to the centre of the tent. His girlfriend leans against a table and takes out her phone.
‘Everything all right?’ he says.
‘Mother – meet Frog. She’s the fire dancer I was telling you about.’ He’s shouting over to a woman in riding boots and a gypsy headscarf. ‘Frog, this is Tilly, my mother. She’s the boss.’
Tilly is a young-looking fifty-something. She has good skin and even better teeth. Wide apart eyes and no make-up. Her handshake is firm. I wonder how my life would have been if Daddy had chosen someone like her instead of the Handbag.
‘A fire dancer, you say? We don’t have one of those.’ She pulls out something from her gilet, and hands it to me. It’s a card, edged with yellow and silver circus stripes. ‘Here – come and see me to show me what you can do. We’ve been staying at The Meadows. We’ll be popping over to Eastbourne for the summer, and then moving on to Paris…’
Paris.
I remember my promise to Suz. ‘My friend is great at performing too. She can make costumes – do all sorts of things –’
I take a deep breath and point her out.
Tilly and I watch Suz as she sways to Bee Beard’s bongo drums, paper plate in hand. One of her shoes has come off and she hasn’t noticed.
‘What a shame. We only have room for one more act,’ says Tilly.
Her eyes are smiling, but there’s a shudder in them.
The Green Man
It begins with the stilt-walkers.
There are five or six of them, combing and picking their way through the streets like oyster-catchers looking for limpets. Each walker is dressed head to toe in green, leaves fluttering from each extended arm and leg like newly sprung beanstalks. Black horns curl from their heads and their eyes stare out of magnificently painted faces.
There is a drumming and a hooting. People dressed as animals, kings and demons whoop, howl and grind. Someone blows a hunting horn, and Bacchus, the god of wine, is being pushed down the hill in a bathtub on wheels, glugging a stone jar of red wine. He has grapes in his beard and vines in his hair, and his student friends around him are pissing themselves laughing, and handing out free Green Man cider punch, which looks radiation-luminous.
I look around for Suz, and think I see her top hat bobbing. Imagine her tipping back the cider and sliding her hand under butterfly wings and leaf arms and green po
ckets. I sigh and follow the crowd as it weaves its way along the street. Dirty cartons, cups and paper plates that once contained green dahl, curried dabs, stuffed vine leaves and artisan Scotch eggs, apple juice and Green Man punch litter the pavements and swish around our feet as we walk.
By the time the crowd picks us up and swirls us through Old Hastings and up to West Hill, I am drunk with laughing and whooping. Bee Beard taps glasses with some men in long green evening dresses, and then passes me a spilling plastic pint of luminous green cider. I drink, and drink again.
‘It’s wonderful, isn’t it?’ he laughs. His eyes are bright. One of his friends knuckles his hand and dances off in his silky dress, high heels wobbling. They’re dressed as tree elves, but have rugby players’ bodies.
I feel nice and swimmy with cider and sun and drumming music. My leaves are drooping, but I don’t care. I feel like dancing. I feel like flying.
I tap Bee Beard on his arm. ‘What’s happening now?’ I ask. There is a buzz in the crowd, as if something is going to happen. I crane my neck, looking for a top hat, weaving its way through the crowd, but I can see no sign of Suz.
‘Jack in the Green has to be slain to release the spirit of summer,’ shouts Bee Beard, waving his cider so that some of it slops over us.
‘Kill the Jack! Kill the Jack! Kill the Jack!’ chants the crowd. A huge effigy of the Green Man is lifted by the stilt-walkers onto an unlit bonfire made of old crates.
‘Where’s the Green Woman?’ shouts someone, and everyone laughs.
There’s a platform rigged up on the green, and revellers are climbing up, dancers and drummers and singers. A troupe of Morris dancers performs to howls and stamps of approval, jangling their bells and waving green handkerchiefs.
‘Your turn,’ yells Bee Beard, pushing me up to the stage. ‘Do your fire thing – quick!’
I stare at him. ‘I can’t – I’m not ready, I –’
‘Make way!’ he’s shouting, in a surprisingly strong voice. ‘Make way…for the Tree Peacock!’
And I have no choice but to be tumbled and shoved forwards; his tree elf friends are laughing and spilling cider and lifting me, with my tail scattering leaf feathers. I am raised over the crowds, and people are helping carry me, and just once, just for a moment, I think I see Suz’s hat, lost in the crowd.