Flight of a Starling

by Lisa Heathfield

  “We can go back,” he says.

  “I’m not leaving Lo,” she replies, but she doesn’t pull away from him as she sometimes does.

  “I’ve got Spider,” I tell her.

  “I’m staying,” Rita says.

  And then I spot him. Even with his back toward us, I know it’s Dean. The way he stands. Just the way he is.

  “Come on,” I say.

  We walk quietly behind the uneven circle of people, behind those standing and talking and disappearing down into the concrete bowls. I try to pretend that no one watches us, that no eyes follow these strangers with circus blood.

  “Hey,” I say, and he turns before my hand even touches his shoulder.

  “Laura,” he says, his smile instant. He’s standing with a boy I haven’t seen before. Spider quickly unhooks his arm from mine and we’re all awkward, out of place as Rita said we would be.

  “I’m glad you came,” Dean says, looking just at me.

  “I said I would.” I want to hold his hand but I know I can’t.

  A boy stands tall on pedals and lets his bicycle drop over the ridge. He speeds fast down and flies up high the other side, his front wheel twisting above the horizon line, before spinning down again.

  It feels like there’s a wire threading from him to us as we watch and it winds around everyone here. It’s a different adrenaline to the one I know. One that I can taste. One that burns my toes and makes me want to try it all.

  “Can you do stuff on that?” It’s Spider who breaks the spell, nodding to the skateboard Dean has leaning against his knees.

  “Kind of,” Dean says and the boy beside him sneers.

  “What?” I challenge. The boy looks surprised—that this strange girl speaks to him.

  “He’s good.” The boy’s eyes level with mine.

  “Can we see?” Spider asks. Dean looks to me.

  “We’d like to,” I tell him and he smiles back at me in a way that sparks fire in my veins.

  Dean flips down his skateboard, tips it and steps quickly on before the wheels run down the gray wall and up the other side.

  In the air, his feet stick magnetic to his board as he holds the end of it, stopping time. He bends his knees and twists his body before he’s facing down again, coming back toward us, stepping onto the level ground at our feet.

  “I thought he said you were good,” I laugh.

  “You should join our circus,” Spider says. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so impressed.

  “It can’t be that hard,” Ash says. “You could ride one of those through fire, Spider.”

  The boy next to Dean looks toward us.

  “The circus?” he asks and something in the atmosphere snaps.

  “Yes,” Spider says.

  “You’re pikeys?”

  “They’re cool, Ben,” Dean says.

  “Can we see more?” I ask, trying to smooth out the sudden jagged air.

  “We should go,” Ash says.

  “Why?” the boy says. “Our tricks not good enough for you?”

  “They’re very good,” Ash says. “We’ve just got to go.”

  “Back to your traveling fleapit?”

  “Ben,” Dean says.

  “What? You must’ve heard of dancing fleas?”

  “Give it a rest,” Dean says.

  “You’re not friends with them, are you?” Ben’s eyes spark ridiculous, his eyebrows arched into perfect thick lines.

  I look at Dean, but he doesn’t hesitate.

  “Yes,” he says. “They’re all right.”

  “Why wouldn’t we be?” Ash asks.

  “Let’s go.” Rita starts to pull Ash away.

  “You’re not all right,” Ben says. “Because you’re pikey scum.” Spider moves straight toward him, stands taller, so close their chests are almost touching.

  “Don’t call us that again,” Spider says. The wheels of skateboards have stopped. Boys sit watching on their bikes. It feels like they’re stepping closer, but they stay where they are.

  “I say what I see, circus scuzz-boy.”

  Spider pushes him hard in the chest, enough to make Ben lose balance and have to run awkward down the slope. Humiliation follows his every step.

  “We’re going.” Ash pulls on Spider’s arm.

  “Do you have to?” Dean looks at me. But Ben is walking too fast up the bowl toward us.

  “Yes.”

  We turn, but I won’t run. I won’t let Ben know that he’s won. That our strangeness couldn’t give us even one evening with them.

  We’re on the edge of where the floodlight changes into darkness when Spider suddenly spins and falls. Ben is standing next to us, breathing heavy. Spider huddles, stunned. He’s bleeding. This boy made Spider bleed.

  “You hit him.” My words sit in the blurred bright air.

  Ash is pulling Spider up. Blood drips in streaks from his nose.

  “Tip your head back,” Ash tells him, wiping at Spider’s blood with his sleeve.

  “Why did you do it?” I shout at Ben, but he just forces a laugh and turns away from us.

  “Are you going to leave it?” I ask Ash, anger burning my breath tight.

  “Yes,” Spider says.

  “You need to go, Laura.” It’s Dean, his voice soft in this madness.

  “You’re going to let him get away with it?”

  “He’s a nut job. It’s his way of communicating.”

  “Thumping people?”

  “He’s not a friend of mine,” Dean says quickly. “I only know him from down here.”

  “Lo, we’re going,” Rita says. She’s pulling on my arm and I let her. I don’t want to be here anymore.

  “You can keep your world,” I say to Dean, as we walk away. “You can keep this life.” But a pain breaks open in my chest as I say it.

  “Laura.” His voice travels toward me.

  But I don’t look back. Spider’s blood still spills from his nose and it’s enough to make me follow the line that pulls us home.

  Rita

  “We’re different, us and them,” I tell Lo. I’m glad we’re leaving tomorrow so she never has to see Dean again.

  “Don’t be stupid, Rita,” she says, her voice a bit adrift.

  “I’m not.”

  “How many eyes have you got?” Lo asks, sitting on her bed.

  “Two,” I say.

  “Heart?”

  “One.”

  “Belly?”

  “One.”

  “So have they,” Lo says. “They’re not different at all.”

  “You know what I’m saying.”

  “I don’t. Because you’re wrong. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that deep down we’re all the same.” She rolls her sock all the way down her ankle and off her foot.

  “Don’t you mind that Spider was hurt?”

  “You know I do.” Lo is about to throw her sock into our laundry basket, tucked in the corner, but she stops and looks up at me, confusion strong in her eyes. “But it wasn’t Dean’s fault.”

  “He mixes with them.”

  “Maybe he’s not got much choice.” She gets up, puts her sock in the basket, and pulls the other off to join it. “It’s a small town,” she says, sitting back heavily on her bed. “There aren’t many people to choose from.”

  “It doesn’t mean he has to be friends with them.”

  “Since when did you turn into Dad?” Lo asks me, slipping under her duvet and pulling it tight up to her chin. Only her head sticks out, her blonde hair spikey but smooth all at once.

  “I’m scared you’re going to get hurt,” I tell her and the bubbling anger in her eyes switches quickly softer.

  “I’ll be fine,” she says. “You should be more worried about Miss Ladder Witch. I hear she’s waiting with sharpened claws tonight.” And she makes her eyes go cross-eyed.

  “Thanks for that,” I say.

  “You’re welcome,” she laughs and she watches as I put my hands on the wood against my mattress,
step onto her bed and haul myself up to my own, banging my knee and the edge of my foot.

  “Safely there?” Lo asks.

  I leave a silence, but I know she won’t be worried.

  “Maybe,” I say and she gives me her laugh as a reply.

  ★ ★ ★

  “Just in time for pancakes,” Dad says. A stack of them sits in the middle of the table in front of him. I can hear Ma vacuuming their bedroom. When Lo comes in their front door, Dad doesn’t seem to notice the strange feeling that follows her.

  “Morning, Gramps,” Lo says, and she goes to kiss him, but I know her mind is miles away, too twisted up with thoughts of Dean and flatties who hit and worlds we’ll never know or understand.

  “Blueberry or maple syrup?” Dad asks.

  “I’m not really hungry, Dad,” Lo says. “I’m going to see Spider.”

  “You’ll eat your breakfast first. Ma has spent time preparing it.” There’s a certainty in his voice that she won’t work around. A crackling of anger she won’t want to fuse. And so she takes a plate from him, slapping it heavy on the tablecloth as she sits down.

  I scrape the knife across the butter and spread it melting onto my pancake before I pour a puddle of syrup that spills from it onto the plate. Lo rolls hers up without any filling and eats it plain.

  “They’re getting cold, Liz,” Dad shouts when the noise of the vacuum stops. Their bedroom door opens and Ma comes in. She’s wearing her red shirt, the one with patterns down the front, and she looks beautiful.

  “Morning,” she says, ruffling Lo’s hair. If she realizes there’s an unsteady mood around Lo, she doesn’t say. “Anyone want chocolate sprinkles?” she asks, getting them from the cupboard before anyone replies. She sits next to me and puts a pancake on her plate. “So moving on today.”

  “I’m looking forward to the sea,” I say.

  “It’s the pitch we were on two years ago,” Dad says. “Right next to the beach.”

  “Got your bucket and spade, Gramps?” I ask. “Ready for the pier?”

  “Bring on the bright lights.” Gramps’s laugh swoops around to pick us all up.

  “Do you remember the storm last time, Liz?” Dad asks.

  “Almost carried the big top out to sea.”

  “And Lo insisted on going on that donkey.” Ma’s back is straight as she eats.

  “But you tried to stand on it,” I remind Lo. “And it bucked you off,” I laugh.

  “It wasn’t funny,” Lo says.

  Dad puts another pancake on her plate. “You need to eat one more before you go out,” he says.

  “Is it the same place where some flatties stole some of Helen’s jewelry?” I ask.

  “That’d be about right,” Dad says, squeezing lemon to drip sour on his plate.

  “They’re not all bad,” Lo says.

  “Of course not,” Ma says.

  “Why are you so frightened of them, Dad?” Lo asks. I try to catch her eye, to warn her that she’s stepping too close to a line.

  “Frightened of them? Enough of your cheek,” Dad says. “We just need to keep the circus blood going, or there’ll be no circus.” He pours a covering of sprinkles on what’s left of his pancake.

  “He just wouldn’t want to lose any of you to a flattie,” Ma says.

  “We’ve lost enough, Liz.” Dad is serious now. “Any more and soon it’ll be just you and me, and no one’s going to pay to see that.”

  “Lo and I would,” I say, but she’s quiet now, eating her last mouthful, getting up quickly, and stomping heavy to the sink.

  I finish my breakfast as Lo crashes through the washing-up, putting silverware in the drawer barely dry. I don’t say anything, though, and together we leave Mada before anyone asks her why.

  It’s a sunny day outside, but Lo doesn’t even notice. Normally she’d be the first to call out to the blue sky, yet now her thoughts are crammed too tight with Dean. Maybe I’m pleased that we’re moving on today and there’ll be a new town and she’ll be able to forget him and be happy again.

  With Spider’s van empty, we know to find him at his parents’. When we knock, it’s Helen who opens their door. I’ve never seen her scowl, but her face has fallen into the crease of one now.

  “He told me he fell over,” is all she says, the crinkled hiss of fatty bacon following her words.

  “Is he OK?” I ask.

  “I know the look of a thumped nose,” she says. “Have you got him into trouble?” She stares hard at Lo.

  “Why’s it got to do with me?” Lo asks. This is a strange place to be. Helen is like a second mom to us all.

  “Well it wouldn’t be Rita here, would it?”

  “Can we see him?” Lo asks.

  “Be my guest.” Helen sweeps up her anger and steps back. Inside, Spider and his dad sit in silence at the table. The skin around Spider’s eye is bubbled green and his nose is swollen red.

  “Does it hurt?” Lo asks quietly as she breathes in.

  “I’m fine,” Spider says.

  “He’s not,” Helen interrupts, pushing past us with two plates heavy with breakfast.

  “It’s just a knock,” his dad says. He picks up his knife and fork and doesn’t even wait for Helen to join them before he cuts dead through the cooked yellow of his egg.

  “God only knows what Tricks is going to say,” Helen says, putting down her own plate and laying her napkin flat across her knees.

  “With moving on and set-up, it’ll be a couple of days before he’s in front of the public,” Ernest says. “And by then any bruise that’s left can be covered with greasepaint.” He picks up his triangle of toast and swipes it through the fat leaked onto his plate.

  “I think we’d like to eat breakfast in peace,” Helen says.

  “Mom.” Spider almost winces with embarrassment. Since we were children, his parents’ van has been like home to us.

  “It’s OK,” Lo says. I think she’s as desperate as I am to get away. “We’ll see you when you’ve finished, Spider.”

  He nods at us, unsmiling, his knife cutting back and forth through the thick bacon, and we leave them, Lo closing their door soft behind us.

  “Don’t say it,” she says as we walk across the grass.

  “Say what?”

  “That it’s my fault Spider got hurt.”

  “I wasn’t going to. I was going to say that Spider will be OK.” Lo’s biting her nail in a way she hasn’t done since she was a little girl, ripping at the skin, deep enough to make it almost bleed.

  “You really like Dean, don’t you?” I ask quietly, following her under the heavy curtain of the big top, but she doesn’t answer.

  Someone has already been in here this morning as the lights are on. They’re not warm enough to feel them on our skin, though.

  Lo goes and stands at the edge of the seats, her arms hanging loose by her sides, her head tipped looking up as though catching raindrops.

  “Is this all there is, Rita?” she asks quietly. Her words so unexpected make me want to cry.

  “Aren’t you happy?” I ask.

  “I am,” she answers. “But is it enough?”

  “Enough of what?”

  She looks down and starts to sweep her foot in a circle on the ground.

  “I knew you wouldn’t understand,” she says.

  “But I don’t know what I’m meant to understand.”

  Lo looks at me. “Don’t you ever want to change? Be someone else for a bit?”

  “We’re someone else every night. Every night that we perform.”

  “But for longer. Change completely. Maybe just for a bit, but live a different life.”

  “A different life to the circus?”

  “Yes.” She looks so guilty, so lost, and it makes me want to wrap her up in all we’ve got so that she can see.

  “Why would you want something different to the circus? How can you forget how magical it is?”

  “I haven’t,” she says. “I never will.”

 
“Rob grew up outside the circus and he says he felt stuck. It was like being claustrophobic all the time. There was no freedom, Lo.”

  “So now he thinks he’s free to just do what he wants?” she snaps back.

  “Of course. We all are.”

  “Even if it destroys others?”

  “What do you mean?” She’s switched so quick to anger and I don’t know why. “You’re talking nonsense, Lo.”

  “Am I?” I think she might laugh, or cry, or both.

  “Is this because of Dean?” I ask, my annoyance creeping up to match hers. “He’s been putting strange stuff in your head?”

  “No.”

  “It is. You were fine until you met him.”

  She’s never looked at me in this way, and it strips layers from my lungs in an instant.

  “You don’t know anything, Rita,” she says, before she runs away, across the empty ring. As she lifts back the curtain, I see Tricks standing there. He watches her rush past him before he steps through.

  “What’s up with Lo?” he asks.

  “Nothing,” I say. But how much has he heard? Did her words reach him?

  “It didn’t look like nothing.”

  “It was, really, Tricks. It’s just Lo being Lo.” And I go from him quickly, even though he’s concerned.

  As I step outside, a hand reaches out to hold mine. It’s Ash.

  “Are you OK, Rita?” he asks. But he seems so young to me all of a sudden, that his kindness is useless and he won’t know how to help.

  “I’m fine,” I say. Because I can’t tell anyone that Lo’s mind is tumbling.

  “Do you want to go for a walk?”

  “No,” I say. I don’t mean it to sound harsh, and I know I’ve upset him. “I just don’t want to, is all.”

  “You could come to mine, if you want?”

  “Why can’t you leave me alone, Ash?” I’m shocked by my sharpness, but the sadness on his face makes me angry. I’m fed up of the games, his little-boy eyes. “I wish you’d just grow up a bit.” And before I can regret saying it, I turn from him and run away.

  Chapter Six

  Lo

  I’m folding the tent’s ropes when I see him, standing on the edge of the park. By the wall where I sat with Spider when my world began to change.

  The striped canvas has been hauled down and sits loose on the grass. Rita once said our big top looks like a giant dying jellyfish when it’s like this, and now that’s what I see as it settles slowly to the ground. I’m meant to help roll it up in the exact way it has to be, but instead I walk away.