by Olivia Levez
Aged eight. Summer’s day. My birthday party, which I wanted to be a riding party. My best friend at the time came. She wore a dress with strawberries on and her breath smelled of sugar. I had to lend her some jodhpurs and teach her to sit on my pony, because she didn’t have one; she’d never ridden before. That was before the Handbag ruined everything. That came later, when I was so much older.
The newscaster is talking again, and now the screen fills up with a huge recent photograph of me with my bright schoolgirl smile. This one is zoomed in close, just in case you didn’t catch that chicken pox scar on the side of my nose, the way my nose is too big and my eyes are too small.
Kit is talking about the last jobs we need to do before leaving.
‘I’ll do anything,’ I say, trying to keep his attention away from the TV screen. ‘I’m strong. I’ve always been strong. I mean, I can lift things.’
He laughs. Behind him, my face is huge as a giant’s.
‘Glad to hear it,’ cuts in Tilly. ‘And you’re adaptable, I hope? Not precious about doing just one type of act? With such a small troupe of performers, we need flexibility.’
My picture snaps off the screen, and is replaced by a report about climate change.
I breathe again.
‘I’ll be anything you want me to be,’ I say.
Stooge
Dear Suz,
I had to do it – come here, I mean. You do understand, don’t you? That I couldn’t miss this opportunity – I had to go. I feel it’s been ages since I last saw you. I’ve been sooo busy since we arrived in Eastbourne.
My main jobs are mucking out the stables (I actually helped build them, Suz. Can you imagine that?), stacking and unstacking the chairs each time there’s a performance and rehearsal, and of course, practising for my own performance.
Turns out I’m to be a stooge.
A stooge is a person who aids and abets the performer by pretending to be a member of the audience. All the time they’re really working for the circus.
The other definition of a stooge is an underling, subordinate or lackey. Not exactly a starring role. I vowed straight away that this wouldn’t be for long. I mean, how the mighty fall! From Phoenix Girl to minion in less than a week!
I let Ana kit me out in my stooge outfit. Utterly dull. Just normal clothes with a bit of make-up to make me look older. I had to sit in the front row next to one of the acrobat kids, who was pretending to be my son. Even though he’s only five years younger than me, and Chinese!
The performer I’m working for is the Great Garibaldi. He’s basically a clown, but does a bit of magic too. He does a thing where I sit inside a counter and pop my head up through different holes as he lifts and lowers giant cups. The boy who is supposed to be my son then tries to guess which cup Mummy’s head will be under. The twist is, Garibaldi starts to become angry and tries to chop my head off. So I have to remember the routine, and count very exactly, and move my head to the right position in order to make it work properly. I have no idea what it looks like from the audience perspective because I’ve never watched it in action. All I know is that the audience seems to enjoy it. There’s always a lot of clapping and cheering.
It’s all rather boring, and then there’s Garibaldi’s toenails.
He has the most revolting feet, which he never washes, and they literally make me want to heave, as I’m crouching awfully near them during the act. There they are, shifting and shuffling, and when he’s standing still, he has a habit of scratching the back of one ankle with his other toenail, which makes this hideous rasping sound.
His toenails are long and grey and horny. I think he must have a fungal infection. Even writing this makes me want to be sick.
But it will all be worth it once they give me the starring role!
Miss you,
Frog. x
Ribbons and Corsets
I am perched on a red velvet sofa. It has great swirls of wood at each arm, like giant scrolls, and it is dirty and thready and patched all over with pieces of mismatched velvet. On one arm lies a sliding heap of corsets, their eyelets and laces all different jewel colours: purple and amber and turquoise.
In the lamplight, the costumes shimmer like ghosts.
Ana, the costume-maker, shuffles to a large wooden cabinet and riffles through it. I watch as she takes out a corset, hanging by its laces from a tiered rack. It’s beautiful: swagged with teal-green velvet ribbons, the colour of a mallard’s neck. It’s green and black, with little satin-stitched metal holes for the criss-crossed ties.
Ana climbs onto a stool and places the corset reverently around a woman’s ample waist. The woman bows her head and lifts her grizzled hair up, out of the way. Her hair is not typical old lady’s hair; it is mad and wild and wiry. Ivy attacking brickwork.
Ana nods and grins as she draws in Silviya’s corset ribbons, slow and tight. The performer closes her eyes and braces until it is done.
‘Looking good, Silviya,’ calls Delilah. She’s reclining on a battered chaise longue, like the one we have in our library, the one that Daddy paid a designer to buy from an auction house in Mayfair.
I flinch as something springs lightly onto my shoulder, and then onto the table in the middle of the tent. It’s Kahlo, Ana’s tiny spider monkey, with a woven basket attached to its back with blue ribbon.
Kahlo chatters quietly in my ear, patting my cheek and neck with cool dry hands. I try not to mind.
We watch as Silviya is transformed. Ribbons and green chiffon are pinned onto the base of her corset with deft tugs. Ana spits pins, stitches and nods; all the time, her little monkey beside me silently chatters. Silviya spins round, her doughy arms held up, curved nails shining.
Kahlo the monkey jumps down and actually starts collecting up all the empty cotton reels and tossing them over his shoulder into the basket. Satisfied, he picks his way delicately over the rest of the table, gathering loose threads and pins and ribbon, still with the little woven basket strapped to his back.
Silviya gazes into the age-spotted mirror. The harsh lights throw into relief every line, every crease and fold. But she is beautiful. She stands silently as Ana pokes a brush into a china dish of grease paint, draws a gleaming red bow over that proud mouth.
Silviya licks rouge from her teeth and spits. She lifts her mermaid wig of real dog’s hair, curled and brushed.
‘Dobur,’ she says. ‘Good. This will do.’
Delilah stands up. ‘Your turn now, love,’ she says. She turns to Ana, who is nodding and waiting. ‘This lass needs kitting up,’ she says. ‘For her first show, like.’ She winks at me. ‘Good luck, kid,’ and she is gone, in a swish of fuchsia silk kimono.
Ana waits, smiling. She makes me stand on a wooden stool, and hold my arms out to be measured. Then she searches among the shelves and rails deftly, pulling out blouses and dresses and tights, while all the time her little spider monkey sits on a rail and chatters.
I wish I could wear a mad costume, like that silver lobster hat, its beetle body hugging the shape of the head, and its antennae spiralling upwards. Or the one that looks like a giant clam, its ribbed sides clasping the wearer’s head like Princess Leia’s side buns in the original Star Wars movie. There are costumes hanging from a wooden airer, its wooden slats reached by lifting and lowering knotted ropes; flesh bodysuits in shades of brown and cream and pink, costumes which sprout strange tubers of octopus leg suckers, moon craters and sea anemone-feelers. I touch a glittery flapper dress, pink and gold and burnished as a rose, but Ana smiles and shakes her head.
I take the clothes she hands me, and wonder why she doesn’t talk.
Behind a screen, I dress, pulling on the cotton tunic dress in pistachio green and cream stripes, flat pumps, and a lemon cardigan. As a stooge, I have to look ordinary, just a regular member of the audience. When I’m done dressing, I look just like the mothers of the girls I was friends with before, the ones who drove Land Rovers and ran committees and drank secret gins and tonics. It is as if An
a has seen beneath the hard-faced, crop-haired girl I am now to the person I could have become.
I look like I’ve come home.
Later, dressed in my stripy dress, I squeeze past a dad with his toddler on his lap, and sit on a hard plastic seat. My ‘son’ is already in place, catching Pokémons on his iPhone. I stare into the ring and feel my heart skittering as I wait for my turn.
Warm lights made to look like burning torches throw shivering flames over the tent walls. A girl with headphones around her neck is up a ladder, fiddling with the lighting.
A sweep of pink spotlights. A drum roll.
Then, a spotted horse appears in a cloud of sawdust.
Astride it like an avenging angel, a wild woman, a Mer Queen, is riding bareback with no bit or reins. Her hair is wild like the wind, her long thighs gripping the horse’s flanks, strong as saplings.
It is Silviya, the woman from the costume tent.
She raises her arms in the air and clapclapclaps.
The horse bends its forelegs and bows, and the little group cheers and whoops.
‘Behold, be astounded, by Mirela, the Magnificent Mer Queen!’ shouts Tilly, in full ringmistress costume.
Silviya leans forward and whispers in the horse’s ear. I lean forward to watch. The horse, which looks just like Spook, picks up its legs in a delicate trotting motion. Silviya guides it using only her hands and fingertips. With no saddle, no bit, no bridle, she gets the horse to spin and dance; to raise its heels and point its toes and march and trot and side step. All with only a whisper, a light stroke of command.
I love it.
With a mysterious motion of her hand on the horse’s withers, she makes her horse ‘swim’, like a true horse of the ocean.
Without warning, from a puff of the Mer Queen’s breath, the horse rears and spins in the opposite direction, snorts froth from its nose. It explodes into full gallop – making the front row gasp and cower – and then stops, in a perfect pirouette, before performing the same feat in each direction.
Then, up it rises in a terrible rear, legs pawing at the dustmoted air, plumes trembling.
The audience explodes as the boy beside me yawns.
Next, Lala, the aerial dancer. Seated around the ring are the fiddlers, zithering faster as she climbs the trembling ladder in the centre of the ring, the fringing on her dress shivering.
She hangs by her hair, her face a blur as she spins, faster and faster, her dress a flash of gold. I lean forward and sigh.
I want to do that.
Hair Spray and Rose Oil
Mother smells of rose oil and cigarettes. It’s the most beautiful scent in the world. She doesn’t talk to me – it’s a serious business, getting dressed up. I can feel her cool hands as she tucks my hair behind my ears, smooths it with oil. She backcombs my pony-tail hard and it hurts, a little, but I don’t care because she’s watching me in the mirror and that little frown of concentration is all for me.
I hang my head upside-down like she tells me, as she sprays so much hairspray on that it makes me cough, but it’s all worthwhile because she scoops back the hair, smooths it lightly, tucks, teases, tweaks, tugs, and now I’m not Willow Stephens any more: I’m Willow the Indefatigable, Gypsy Princess.
She does my make-up too, swooshing blue and green shimmer over my eyelids, leaning so close that I can feel her eyelashes on my cheek as she applies mascara.
‘Now you look beautiful,’ she says. ‘Now you are a princess.’
And she laughs as she whirls me about the room in my gold tutu and my sparkly pink tights, my hair shiny and smooth and long as a mermaid’s, even longer.
Martyna used to take me into town to have my hair cut. I kicked and screamed but she was used to tantrums. Her hands were firm as paddles. She’d brought up her five brothers who were a lot worse than me, she said. Couldn’t I scream a bit louder because not everyone’s looking yet? It’s the tangles, she told the hairdresser. Hair too thick to be long, she was fed up with battling it every morning. Who did I think I was, anyway? A bloody princess?
Fancy Pants
‘So what would you like to be, more than anything in the world?’ asks Kit. We are resting between rehearsals, sitting on garden chairs in the sun. Kit has dyed his hair bright red, and is now applying the dye to my hair too. Delilah shudders when she sees it.
‘Disgusting, that,’ she says pleasantly, handing round mugs of milky coffee.
‘Make it shorter,’ I say, when the dye’s taken.
‘Are you sure?’ Kit wields the scissors. He’s in one of his silly moods, and I wonder if I should trust him with my hair. But then, it’ll always grow back, won’t it?
‘I would like to be a pigeon,’ I say. ‘All those chips, and rooftops.’
‘I was talking about jobs, stupid.’
I shudder. ‘Ugh. Who would want one of those?’
‘Well, not you, for a start. You would never need one.’
I look at him, and feel the freeze of scissors against the back of my neck. Kit’s words come out, easily as ever. Flippant, thoughtless, throwaway. But now my old paranoia is back, and I am thinking of a hundred different meanings behind his words.
Does he know my background?
Is it just my voice that gives me away?
Has he seen or heard or read anything about Willow Stephens, the Missing Schoolgirl, who walked out on her rich daddy’s wedding day?
I can’t let him see that it’s affected me. We’re friends. Aren’t we?
And Kit’s back to chattering away about his dreams of becoming a lawyer, of going to Sofia University, and I retort with ridiculous ambitions of being an ice cream-seller, magpie-breeder, kipper shop-owner, and it is as if nothing’s been said.
It’s been so busy, exhausting but fun, even with the tension between Fabian and his mother, and the fact that his girlfriend seems to hate me. We have set up somewhere near Eastbourne, and have a small field, about the size of a village green, all to ourselves.
Tilly arrives early each morning, to exercise her beloved horses with Silviya, and check that everything’s running smoothly, and no one is shirking their duties. My back and shoulders ache from all the lifting and carrying.When I’m not practising or performing, I help Delilah with the cooking, or hang around with Kit. Fabian likes to sleep in. Sometimes he doesn’t come home at night.
When my hair’s done, Kit holds up a mirror, and we peer into it together, his and hers matching hair, cropped short, tomato red. We look awful, but free and careless and happy.
More importantly, I don’t look like the girl called Willow.
Not one bit.
Bunting
The tea tent is fluttering with grey and yellow bunting. Outside, the sounds of families drifting to the ticket booth to buy early bird tickets, the squeals of children running as Kit chases them in his toy clown car, beeping his giant horn.
Inside, Tilly is poring over drawings and charts, her hair knotted up in a green headscarf, severe black spectacles slipping down her nose. Wax crayons and Staedtler fineliners and pencils are all over the table, on its tastefully garish sunflower-yellow oilcloth.
Delilah is in her Cook Knows Best apron, a cerise-pink fan sticking out of her black Geisha bun, bulk-making scones. Her latest cupcake creations sit neatly in trays in various stages of icing; she is trialling piña colada flavour, although Tilly says that it is common. She’s stabbed yellow cocktail umbrellas into some of them, and Tilly reaches over and plucks them out briskly.
She looks up when she sees me.
‘You’ve inspired me, Frog,’ she beams. ‘Come and look.’
I lean over her drawings, and there are various sketches and mood boards, showing a girl with outstretched arms, showering flames behind her; a giant peacock with a tail made of fire, horses with flamed and feathered plumes.
I remember the pink-plumed horses at the Handbag’s wedding, Spook tossing his pink-feathered head. I imagine how long that would have taken her to plan.
‘Th
at’s lovely,’ I say. But it isn’t.
Tilly is not great at drawing. I imagine Suz, head bent over her drawings in this sunny marquee. Then I feel a stab. I haven’t thought about Suz for ages. Not since we first arrived here.
‘Phoenix Girl,’ says Tilly. ‘The next show’s all about fire. We’re going to take it as a theme. Create more costumes, themed cupcakes, horses with flames as plumes.’ She takes my arm. ‘It’s all down to you, Frog. I was inspired by your costume at the Jack in the Green Festival. It was…remarkable. I’m sure you won’t mind me stealing a teeny-weeny bit of the idea.’
‘It was Suz’s idea,’ I say. I watch Tilly as she carefully shades in a tail feather. She draws like she’s filling in one of those colouring books for adults.
‘Mmmm?’
‘Suz. My friend. She designed my costume.’
‘And a bloody good costume it was too. You looked bloody fantastic in it.’
Fabian’s back.
He walks carefully between the tables and I know at once that he is drunk. He sits himself at the counter and picks up a cupcake. Takes a cocktail umbrella and spins it between his fingers.
‘Well, these are rather nice.’
‘Are you going to go through the books with me, like we agreed?’ says Tilly. Her tone is as careful as her son’s walk.
‘Are you going to make me, Mother? Do I have a choice?’ He takes a huge bite of cupcake. ‘Now that’s more like it. Needs a splash more booze though, Delilah, my sweet.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Fabian,’ Tilly snaps. ‘And where’s the bloody signage for the tea tent?’
‘Where’s the bloody signage for the tea tent?’ Fabian mimics. He walks unsteadily towards his mother’s table, and leans over her shoulder, breathing heavily. ‘Wasn’t there a girl with you – before?’ he says.
I realise that he’s talking to me. I look up at him, and am shocked by his appearance. He looks like he’s slept in his clothes, and his eyes are pink and wet. He starts laughing silently. ‘You really are the limit, Mother, stealing someone else’s ideas. I suppose you’re going to pass them off as your own?’