The Circus

by Olivia Levez

  ‘I don’t mind,’ I say. But I do really.

  Suz should be here, sitting at this table, licking the buttercream off piña colada cupcakes and drawing her wonderful, mad, vigorous worlds all over the sheets spread out on this spotty, dotty oilclothed table. For a flash I want to sweep the whole tablecloth and its contents onto the floor, snap every one of Tilly’s expensive pens and crayons, and scribble over her awful, careful drawings.

  But I don’t do that.

  Instead, I smile sweetly and say, ‘I love it.’

  Night Music

  Silviya’s home is tiny but cosy. It’s hung with framed photographs in colour, black and white, and brown sepia, covering every spare piece of the wall. There are babies being balanced on strong men’s arms, a man holding up a baby elephant, blank-eyed twins on tightropes, fierce monobrowed women swallowing fire, a blonde lady in a catsuit hanging by her hair. The more modern ones show family groups: smiling husbands and wives and children standing in kitchens, in gardens, amongst horses and dogs and tigers.

  ‘My family.’

  I stand awkwardly in the stuffy room, which is full to the brim with Silviya’s children and grandchildren. At its centre, the woman who sings every evening sits on a wooden chair, her hands on her knees, her hair drawn back under her scarf. Baya and his sister perch on the arms of the sofa; smaller children climb onto knees and laps and the backs of chairs.

  ‘Come, come, little bird.’

  I am given a wooden chair, taller than everyone else’s, as if I am somehow special. I move it back, so that I am not on show. The old man next to me says something in Romanian and laughs toothlessly. I look across at Delilah, and she nods and smiles.

  ‘This here’s the real circus,’ she says.

  After we have all been passed food – little plates of pastries, still warm, buttery and crumbly and filled with cheese; plastic dishes of garlicky dips; fruited breads with seeds and olives; paper plates of chopped spicy sausage – the woman in the middle – who Delilah whispers is Silviya’s daughter, Marika – lifts her head and sings.

  She is unaccompanied by the musicians. Just as before, her voice begins soft and throbbing, then rises into a keening song of longing. Her family around her close their eyes. Silviya nods and smiles, tears wet on her cheeks. The children are still; even the babies are quiet in their shawled nests.

  I look at Delilah, and she is weeping too, careless of the make-up that is coursing in shimmers down her cheeks.

  I think of Suz, hiding in her homemade cave. I think of Tilly, bright and hard amongst her bunting and cupcakes.

  And I wonder if my mother ever sang to me.

  Feathers

  Silviya turns round, and her eyes are tender and heavy. She is stripped bare of make-up, her face shiny with cream.

  ‘Come closer, little bird,’ she says. ‘I am going to tell you a story.’

  Behind her, the mirror shimmers with a thousand costumes, a thousand dreams.

  Her hand clasps mine, and feels warm and oily. I pull up a stool and we sit, knee to knee, the distant violins lilting with the night cries of children in the dark.

  ‘I used to gaze at you for hours,’ she says, stroking my hand in hers. ‘Your eyes, so dark, so knowing. You tried to climb, even before you could sit. I would lift you under the arms when your neck was strong enough, and your little legs would scramble, trying so hard to climb up my belly to be lifted high. If I placed you down, you would scream and holler, enough to wake up the whole park. You wanted to be lifted and to be seen, even then, even at a few days old.’

  ‘You…’ I say. Silviya has taken off her corset, and her body floods out into her favourite orange and turquoise robe. She looks like an empress, regal as a queen.

  ‘I had no choice but to give you up. Your father and me, we were from different worlds, different lands. I tried to live as he wished, but at night I lay in our bed, feeling all that house, all its empty rooms, around me, and I wanted nothing more than a crocheted blanket, a window full of stars. I had more space than I had ever had before, all the time I would ever need, yet I had never felt more imprisoned.’

  She leans closer, till her breath strokes my cheek.

  ‘You and me, we were born to fly,’ she says. Then I watch as she unhooks her robe, and releases her wings, which have been crushed and folded at her side. At last I see the reason for her corsets. She gives them a shake and laughs as many coloured feathers scatter and drift.

  ‘Join me,’ she says, standing up, and pulling my hand. ‘I’ll catch you if you fall.’

  Then we whizz around the room on pretty-coloured wings and soar out into the night sky. Oh, and live happily ever after.

  Obviously.

  I wish Silviya was my mother, though. She’d be strong, and tough, and wouldn’t take any shit from anyone.

  I wouldn’t have ever had to run away.

  Illustrated Girl

  I am being transformed.

  ‘Is this the final time?’ I ask, as Delilah scratches and scuffs.

  ‘I bloody told you, yes,’ she mutters.

  Delilah doesn’t like being interrupted when she is at work. She’s copying my tattoo from one of Suz’s drawings. It’s one from the few scraps of paper I kept when she replaced my money. The drawing I chose is a phoenix, stretching its wings across my shoulders, dripping molten fire across my back.

  I am lying tummy-down on Delilah’s bed, and around us are the tools of her trade. Her tattoo needles are neatly lined up, along with all of her coloured inks, with their strange and wonderful names: magenta and lollipop, hunter green and banana cream and fleshpot. In front of me, the television’s on, ‘to distract me,’ Delilah said, but I don’t need distracting. I feel excited, as if I am reinventing myself.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Delilah asked, before our first session.

  ‘Yes, I’m sure,’ I said. Because each mark made, each drop of colour scuffed in, makes me feel like I am a new person, like I am being scribbled out and remade, whole and new. I am something definite.

  Today, she’s doing the colours: filling in each carefully drawn outline with jewel shades.

  The gardening show on the TV switches to Crime Solve! Delilah looks up as the title swims around with its seriouslooking font.

  ‘Oh, I like this one,’ she says.

  Behind the title of the show, people’s faces float, and it’s not clear whether they are victims or perpetrators. The music starts, it’s a heartbeat, faint at first, then getting steadily louder and faster. It reminds me of that gruesome story by Edgar Allan Poe: The Tell-Tale Heart.

  The presenter (blonde, female) arranges her legs elegantly around the table, and perches on her seat, grave-faced, coffee mug in hand. Behind her, rows of volunteers are busy answering phones and tapping on keyboards.

  And there I am.

  My schoolgirl-head and-shoulders shot swims into view next to the presenter, and now the presenter’s trailing her fingers over me, like I’m the weather, a cold front that’s approaching from the west.

  Delilah’s needle hovers. I hold my breath.

  Will she recognise me?

  The presenter’s saying something about my multimillionaire father. She mentions the word ‘devastated’. Her co-presenter strolls on, equally serious-faced (black, male, handsome). He says that Willow was a ‘bright and popular schoolgirl’ with a ‘bright future’. He says the word ‘bright’ a lot, as if I’m something that needs toning down, or they’re running out of adjectives.

  ‘Big mystery this one, isn’t it?’ says Delilah. I relax.

  It is very strange to view myself in the third person. It is even stranger to see the actor that they’ve chosen to play me in the reenactment. It is as if I’m dead and have come back to gatecrash my own funeral.

  The girl is too thin and too tall. They’ve also got my hair wrong. She’s dressed in a bridesmaid dress that is deliberately black and a little long. I grow cold as I see my own bedroom, my bed with its heaps of pillows and folded Wels
h blanket and Egyptian cotton bedlinen. Just seeing it makes me want to cry. There are all of my artfully abstract photographs of my ponies and horses. My first pony, Storm, from when I was five. Big Bonnie. And Spook. My beautiful, gorgeous Spook. Hanging from my dressing table are my necklaces and beads and vintage handbags. There’s the bag of letters that Beanie and I would write to each other, even when we were going to see each other soon, over the long school holidays.

  My heart grows even colder when I see what Almost-Willow is doing: she’s opening her bedside drawer and taking out a large pair of scissors.

  Suddenly I don’t want to watch any more.

  Delilah yawns and picks up a different size needle.

  ‘It’s a strange one, isn’t it? About that girl. Can’t really tell if she’s the victim or criminal!’

  Almost-Willow’s face is in close up, and I shiver. She looks vindictive. Now she’s in the Handbag’s room. And now she’s cutting the buttons.

  ‘Just look at that poor girl!’

  But Delilah isn’t talking about Willow Stephens, little rich girl. She’s shaking her head at the Handbag – Kayleigh-Ann, who’s being played by a skinny actor with big boobs. Almost-Kayleigh-Ann is pouring her heart into her role, sobbing into Almost-Daddy’s arms, her ruined dress in the foreground.

  I watch Willow climb down the wisteria and run through the woods. I watch her hitch a lift with a Santa Claus lorry driver. I watch her dodge the fare on the train to Paddington.

  All the time, I’m thinking, Do I know her? Is she really me? I can’t get Kayleigh-Ann’s sobbing out of my head.

  Delilah’s needle scratches and scuffs, and I begin to feel a little sick.

  Then there are the interviews.

  ‘And there the trail ends,’ frowns the presenter. ‘We know that this disturbed schoolgirl is somewhere on the south coast; that she spent some time sleeping rough in Hastings, where evidence suggests she has turned to a life of crime.You see her here, tying up a fairground worker with Christmas fairy lights, along with an unknown female, believed to be a busker. In true Thelma and Louise-style they have terrorised the streets of Hastings, stealing and breaking and entering to survive.’

  Terrorised, I think. Suz would smile at that.

  ‘We believe that Willow may be in a state of psychological disturbance; that she is being influenced by her friend. She may even have forgotten her old identity, and be confused. We have reason to believe that she has assaulted a police officer –’

  Here, the camera cuts away to show a shaky mobile phone video of me and a large yellow dog, leaping onto a police officer’s chest, me smacking her with a dead seagull. There I am, turning to look at the screen, with my droopyeyed clown face. With my knee on the officer’s chest and my painted face, I look less like a schoolgirl and more like some kind of deranged action figure.

  I glance at Delilah through the reflection on the screen. She’s watching very intently.

  ‘We have eyewitnesses who say…’

  And here, on camera, is Terry the Disney dad, complete with lemon shirt and swirly tie.

  ‘She was clearly mentally disturbed,’ he’s saying. ‘Concocted some cock-and-bull story about being on a game show. We believed her. Why wouldn’t we? Gave her a place to stay out of the kindness of our hearts. She abused that. Stole from us –’

  Well, a banana and a packet of crisps, I think. Terry’s making me out to be some sort of unhinged psychopath.

  Afterwards, Delilah lets me look before she mends me with bandages. Each swirl, each feather, makes me bleed, is dotted with pinpricks of blood, but she has stripped me raw and remade me.

  ‘I love it,’ I tell her, and she hugs me close, those big hands holding me like I am something precious and loved.

  ‘There now,’ she says.

  On the television, the female presenter leans forward and looks earnestly at us both.

  ‘If you see this girl, it’s important not to approach her but to phone this number immediately. Her father is offering a large reward for her return. We are expecting a significant amount of interest in this case. As always, our team is on hand twenty-four-seven to handle any calls.’

  Here she mentions a sum that makes me dig my fingers into my palms and Delilah suck in her breath.

  Shit.

  I touch my dressings; I can’t wait for them to be unpeeled so that I can be revealed, finally, as the Phoenix. But I feel like I’m already playing with fire.

  Trapeze

  It is Lala who teaches me to fly.

  Fabian finds me writing my journal up in the crow’s nest.

  ‘Who are you writing to?’ he asks.

  I hide my notebook. ‘No one. Nothing.’ (It was you, of course, Suz. I haven’t forgotten you, although you’ve probably forgotten about me by now.)

  ‘You’re always writing,’ he says. He smiles, slow as a cat. ‘Let me see. Is it poetry? I rather like poetry.’ The ladder bounces as he climbs up.

  I sit on my book, and don’t know whether to feel annoyed or pleased that my private time has been disturbed.

  In the end, I decide to feel pleased. After all, it was he that found me, gave me my first break and bought me dinner at the festival. I owe him. But I don’t trust him. His eyes are too bright and knowing. He drinks too much. I sense the darkness in him, just like the spice held Suz.

  But he makes me laugh. In all that darkness, there’s a child trying to get out.

  ‘I spy, with my little eye, something…high…that will make Frog…fly,’ he sings.

  I stare at him. ‘What do you mean, Bee Beard?’

  He jerks his head up at the apex of the small big top. There it is, glinting silver, hanging, at rest.

  ‘I know you want to,’ he says, and neither of us is laughing now. ‘I have seen it in your face. I know that look.’

  I swallow. ‘I have always wanted to fly,’ I say simply.

  ‘Good. Your first lesson is today. Nine o’clock.’

  I’m still gaping at him. I have no idea when that is. I haven’t worn a watch or owned a phone in the three months since I ran away. He rolls his eyes and checks his own phone. ‘That’s, like, in three minutes.’

  ‘But…why?’ I say.

  ‘Lala’s old neck injury’s giving her trouble. She sprained it again, trying out a new move. Mum’s furious. Said it’s about time we had a back-up.’

  I am not sure about Lala. She has pretty much ignored me since I joined Le Petit Cirque. When she looks at me, if at all, she makes me feel like I am an insect grubbing around. A worm under her shoe.

  Still. Flying.

  All at once I am transported back; the years peel away, like pages in a diary:

  ‘Go on, little one!’ my mother’s eyes smile. ‘Fly! Up you go!’

  And she’s throwing me, higher and higher. Up, up, into the clouds that are apricot-dipped; and beneath me, her head is upturned, waiting for me to fall.

  Ringmistress

  ‘It’s awfully good of you to step in like this,’ smiles Tilly. ‘Lala should have been more careful – she’s always taken far too many risks.’

  She casts her eyes around the tea tent, straightens a straggling line of bunting.

  She’s already dressed in her ringmistress costume: polished riding boots and midnight-blue velvet frock coat with copper epaulettes and embroidered frogging. Suz would adore it.

  She doesn’t like Lala, I realise. Doesn’t want her for a daughter-in-law. She likes me because we’re the same. We have the same accent.

  Would she like me so much if my father swooped up in his GAS 1 reg Porsche? If she saw Suz and me shoplifting, street-drawing, squat-sleeping?

  ‘I’ve told Lala to teach you. I can’t pay her as much now she’s not performing of course, so she’s sulking, I’m afraid. But the show must go on!’

  Tilly smiles brightly. She doesn’t look like she’s been sleeping much. I wonder if she worries about Bee Beard, when he’s away ‘on business’.

  ‘Are you sure you
’re comfortable in the tack room? I can fix you up a bed in Lala’s caravan if you like. Now that Fabian…’

  Her voice trails off, then she seems to rally herself.

  ‘Pass me that newspaper, will you? I need to fix my face for the troops.’

  She always talks like this: like she’s the commandant in charge of a platoon.

  Tilly leans into her make-up mirror and starts to apply lipstick. It is when she reaches for the paper that I freeze.

  There’s a full-page picture of me. It’s open wide, picture up, one of the nationals too, not just a local one.

  The CCTV footage is blurry, but it’s me all right, in my mustard-yellow coat and cropped hair.

  HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL? the headline shouts. And CONVENT GIRL TO CRIMINAL.

  Tilly puts her lipstick down and tears off a long strip of paper. It is the piece with my photograph.

  She holds the newspaper up and seems to frown for a fleeting moment.

  I start to feel the familiar signs of panic: the hammering heart, the cold ice of sweat, the pressing down on my lungs. Will she recognise me? Will she recognise the girl in the photograph?

  Tilly presses the paper to her lips and kisses it to blot her lipstick.

  Then she screws up the paper and tosses it onto the table.

  ‘Let me know if you have any concerns about Lala,’ Tilly says. ‘Wish me luck with the show.’

  ‘Break a leg,’ I say automatically.

  The minute she is gone, I snatch the ball of paper and shove it into my pocket ready to read and burn later.

  I take a calming breath and look around at the artfully casual tea tent, with its local art and jam-jar flowers and spotty napkins. She’d be like me, I think, about Kayleigh-Ann’s wedding. She’d go round the guests, plucking tasteless fascinators from balayaged heads, replacing gold-swagged chairs with nice rustic hay bales. I imagine her mother-of-pearl polished nails popping all of Kayleigh-Ann’s naff balloons with a long, sharp hatpin.