George’s ambition was always huge. He wanted to be the biggest little man in New Hampshire, in America, in the world, bigger even than General Tom Thumb. But Mr Lillie would have none of it. He wore a ring on every finger and he turned purple when provoked. He turned purple a lot around George. ‘I must have tone,’ he said. ‘Your antics, George, they will shut us down. No profanity, no trousers down, no farting. Stay in your booth and doff your hat to the ladies.’
‘Aw, Mr Lillie, can’t I go in the ring? Can’t I wear a red nose and big shoes? I will be a sensation.’
Mr Lillie’s jowls darkened. ‘Roddie, can’t you keep this rascal under control? George, you don’t understand. You are not a sensation. You are a wonder.’
I did my best with George, I lectured him and cuffed him about a bit when he misbehaved, but he knew full well I’d never hurt him bad and he took no heed of me.
Meanwhile, I sought my own trick and thought it might come from study. So I studied Miss Emmeline and her brother Mr Ludovic at practice, to and fro on the trapeze above my head, to and fro. Their strength was not just in their arms or arched backs or their streaks of red hair. It was in their ankles, insteps and toes. And in Miss Emmeline’s smile.
I don’t know what it was about Miss Emmeline. You could say it was her queenliness or her grace or her beauty, and you’d be right, but that wasn’t it. It was maybe something in her eye when she looked down or looked away, when she thought nobody was watching her. I’d seen that look with a horse that’s been trained too hard, too cruel, but its spirit is still there, deep down. And then she’d see me watching and she’d put on her smile. A dazzling smile, even if it didn’t quite reach her eyes.
With the brightest of her smiles, Miss Emmeline got me to take charge of their trapeze apparatus. Every night after the show, I took a lamp into the circus tent and took down all the rods and poles, ropes and ladders. I held each load-bearing part and connection close to the lamp and tested it by hand for fault or weakness. Then I put the apparatus up again for the next day’s performance, spread and pegged the safety net, checked it for holes. I climbed ten, twenty, thirty foot, nimble and hard-handed as a sailor in the rigging, worked my way arm over arm along the horizontal poles. But I would never take to the trapeze. That was Miss Emmeline’s place.
Another task I had was to clean out the Sapient Bear’s cage, and there I could practise my speechifying. I can offer strong arms and a true heart. One day I will inherit a half-share of a farm. I want you to be free. I want to save you from hard training, from a dangerous trade. I want to save you from … The bear yawned, showed its yellow teeth. I caught a blast of mucky banana.
Sometimes Miss Emmeline would listen to my wisdom about struts and ropes and weights as she did her callisthenics on the grass. At least, I fancied she listened. I would hold samples of poles and leather straps in my hand and tell what load and stress they might carry while she stretched and swung. Sometimes she gave me a breathless, ‘Yes, ’twill do,’ over her shoulder, and twang, my chest swelled.
Alone in the circus tent, I practised my trick. Over and over again I leaped across a short gap from one rope ladder to the next. Sometimes I leaped to a single rope. I braced myself for the landing. I gripped hard to stop the slide that might scorch my palms. I flung out one fist, hard as iron, twirled lazily on a rope and smiled at the upturned faces, the drum roll, the clapping hands, Miss Emmeline reaching out her white arms. Then I looked down and saw a spider stretch of netting, a circle of sawdust, tiers of blank seats.
At the end of each day, I collapsed onto the straw pallet I shared with George and fell into a void of sleep. But one night George kept me awake to whisper to me his new plan.
‘It’s all worked out.’ He was trembling with excitement. ‘Only keep mum, so Mr Lillie can’t stop us. I’ll mount the trapeze with Mr Ludovic, and he’ll fling me to Miss Emmeline to catch. To and fro, to and fro. My costume will be red and green silk. I’ll tumble and fly like thistledown, like a hummingbird. Think of it, Roddie — Tiny George, airborne! How they will gasp and cheer!’
‘Are you crazy?’ I said. ‘You’re no acrobat. One slip …’
‘No slips. Maybe my trousers will fall down though.’ He was jumping on our pallet.
I grabbed him, forced him down, hissed in his ear. ‘Forget it. I forbid it.’
He looked at me, panting, all sly. His hair bristled with straw. ‘Roddie, I love you, lord knows. But you ain’t Pa.’
I knew I’d get no more sense out of him. I couldn’t go to Mr Lillie; I was not a snitch. Nor could I go to Emmeline’s brother Ludovic, who always looked at me as if I were a scraping from the Sapient Bear’s cage. But I made up my mind to talk to Miss Emmeline while she did her callisthenics.
She listened, stretching her leg above her head so I grew faint to see. ‘Tiny George will be safe with us, never fear.’
‘He is not a sack of potatoes you can toss about. He’ll wriggle and twist out of your grasp. He’ll fall.’
‘I don’t think so. But if he does, he’ll land in the safety net.’
I shook my head. I could not see it. George was never one to land in safety.
Miss Emmeline smiled and stretched her other leg. ‘It does you credit though, how you care for your brother.’
‘No more than you care for yours, I’m sure.’
She frowned, put her leg down. ‘I have no brother.’
‘But I thought … Mr Ludovic …’
‘Then you thought wrong.’
Her voice, and the dark roses in her cheeks, made me cold. I picked up a leather strap and pulled it tight between my fists. When she spoke again, she sounded brisk, practical.
‘If we don’t do this, I will have to offer Ludo something else. He is very insistent. It is not enough to entertain, he says. We must astound.’
I swear, I was so near to saying something foolish about how she astounded me already. But then Mr Ludovic slid by, as he always did sooner or later, with his panther’s ease and his soft call — ‘Come, Em’ — and clicking his tongue twice. She stopped in mid stretch, folded herself up like a tent and followed him.
I watched their shadows behind the canvas. No brother?
It was time to take down and put up the trapeze apparatus. I trudged slowly to the circus tent. High up, feeling my way along the poles, I wondered for the first time what it would be like to fall, to have the ground rush towards you. Would there be time for terror, for pain? Or would it all be the ecstasy of speed, of letting go? My eyes blurred; I reeled, dizzy. I waited for the fit to pass, then I turned, leaped from the ladder towards the guy rope.
Dozens, scores of times I’d done it, launched into nothing, slammed into the rope, knotted my fist tight around the heft of it, my body jerking back from the fall. Nothing different about this time. Yet I sailed past the rope, several inches wide, my outstretched hands clawing at empty air.
Much later, I heard a thin whispery voice.
‘Lift up your heads, O ye gates; even lift them up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in.’
I am told the pious Living Skeleton found me lying still as a statue, but not in a statue’s pose. I was half on, half off the safety net, my left leg thrown wide, my head under the front row of seats.
When they pulled me out, my head was full of nothing but swamp reek. They carried me to my pallet and sent for a doctor. I kept my mouth agape. I was choking on the stench of rotted grass under the bleacher seats. I gulped for air, for words.
‘Calm yourself,’ said George, attacking my arm with anxious little pats. A mountain of pain was growing in my left leg.
Sometime after that, George peered at me over the foothills of my mountain.
‘We are tough Nutts. It takes a lot to crack us.’
I didn’t answer. Cymbals crashed. I rose through the cooling air to the trapeze, where Emmeline waited for me. We were both naked as babes. Side by side we swung on the same trapeze, to and fro, to and fro. Emmeline reached out a
nd grasped the bar. She swung onto the platform as my swing moved back. Everything moved slow as molasses. She turned towards me, her arms high, one hand holding the second trapeze — she was tiny, so far away — and took off. Now my trapeze swung towards hers. We rushed slow, slow, towards each other. Blood pounded in my veins. Trumpets blared. Slow, slow. I saw her smiling face, with her dark nipples and dark triangle beneath like a second face. I knew that when the trapezes met, our bodies would melt together. Closer. I reckoned my nose would reach and touch her between the eyes of her second face. Sweat sprayed off her hair, sparkled in the lights. Closer. A drum roll. My nose was there, between the eyes. Nothing but mushy apples and bananas, and rotting grass, and a pimply hairy snout and rough tongue. No Emmeline, just the Sapient Bear gripping the trapeze with his paws, hard as iron, and Mr Ludovic laughing, and light flashing in my eyes, and George buzzing round, just his head with wings, a pestering cherub, saying, Please get better, Roddie, and my leg on fire again.
When the doctor took me off the laudanum, he said there was a difficult break in the femur, it might take some time to heal. He had put a splint on my leg, said it was a miracle I had not hit my head, I must have fallen into the safety net and then bounced or slid half off it. I had escaped with one broken bone and a mass of bruises.
In time, the pain faded and I learned to swing my body around on crutches, with George running round my feet and threatening to trip me up.
‘You still here, you pest?’ I said. ‘Not tumbled from the trapeze yet?’
‘Oh, that.’ He sighed. ‘Roddie, I changed my mind. Seen you lying there, day after day … I’m figuring, I ain’t about to put you through what I felt then. No, sir.’
Something swelled in my chest.
Then George grinned. ‘But you still ain’t my pa.’
I swung a crutch at his shins, and he shrieked as he scampered away.
Mr Lillie grumbled about mouths to feed and insisted I take up all my duties again. George threatened to walk out on the circus unless Mr Lillie waited until I could walk without support. They shouted at each other until I dropped my crutches and hobbled towards them and said I was ready for work.
My leg still ached in wet weather and I could not help limping. But I could do most of my tasks. So I went into the circus tent to the rods and poles and ropes of the trapeze. There, something cold seeped down my veins into my fingers and toes. I could not lift my feet even by one step onto the rope ladder. I sat down, still as a statue. A sour taste rose. The ring spun round. A rotten-grass smell clogged my head.
Miss Emmeline stood and listened as I hung my head and told her I could no longer take down or put up her trapeze for her. I wondered if she might despise me for a coward. But she nodded gravely. She seemed quieter and smiled less, though everyone said she was performing better than ever. In her arms she cradled spanking new pink boxes.
‘New costumes?’ I said.
Those dark roses again in her cheeks. ‘We are announcing it today. We are engaged. We will have our wedding on the trapeze.’
Something fell down, down inside me, and kept falling. I put on a smile, said a glad word or two. I wanted to tell her that I did not blame her for marrying Mr Ludovic, that the circus was outside the rules, a special place for special people who belonged together. Or again I could tell her that she should run away from the circus, and especially from Mr Ludovic. But I looked and said nothing. Her hair was drawn back under her bonnet, her arms were in wide sleeves, her thighs hidden in her skirts. Her miraculous strong ankles were all buttoned up in boots. The secret second face I had seen in my dream was no more than something for dirty boys to guess at.
I told myself she was no different after all from the New Hampshire misses who strolled the showgrounds on the arms of their beaux, mouths hanging open at the wonders.
The wedding took place as planned. The circus was packed; we all looked upwards. The couple stood on high trapezes, facing each other across the ring: he in black, she in white satin with a veil and a long train. A priest shouted the service from the floor. Then the band struck up the wedding march, and the happy newlyweds began to swing towards each other. Perhaps he would put the ring on her finger as the trapezes met. She stood high and worked her arms and knees, and her veil and train flew out in a silver arc behind her.
It was so fast, no one even had time to scream. At the top of her longest swing, she sprang out and up, silver thrown into space. Her arms were out as if to meet a lover, but she had already passed Mr Ludovic, still clinging to his trapeze. I saw where she would fall, way beyond the safety net, and I ran forward with my arms up and out, but there was no time. I could not meet her, could no more stop her than I could stop a horse bolting.
That was a few years ago. Now I drive a little walnut-shaped coach, wrinkled like a golden brain, drawn by two miniature ponies, and George sits inside and waves at the crowds. He’s Commodore Nutt, he performs with General Tom Thumb in New York. Mr Phineas Barnum bought him from Mr Lillie for thirty thousand dollars, with me thrown in. Mr Barnum’s face is pink to middling red and I took that as a good omen. He says I am the stoic of the walnut carriage. In the glory that was Greece, he told me when he first showed me the coach, the stoic was the still, calm fellow who held up a lantern to folly. He disdained riches and rewards, he welcomed poverty and suffering. Nothing, no one could perturb him.
I said to beg his pardon, but I could not be a stoic because I had too much feeling in me.
‘Perhaps,’ said Mr Barnum, all genial. ‘But your feeling don’t show, that’s the trick of it.’
My chest swelled and my arm muscles went tight. I had a trick. I wanted to swing out on a rope, across the courtyard, over the golden brain.
Sometimes when I drive the carriage and ponies round and round the streets of New York, and the people shout, and George sits safe in his shell, thoughts go round and round with me too. I had to take George from her and Ludo, had to, had to, could not let him be the one to fall …
The thing is, I’m good with horses. And if I’m quick, I can stop a horse bolting.
I don’t remember what I felt when I fell. I hope she felt the ecstasy, the letting go.
Four-Letter Words
RYAN O’NEILL
Cock
My father was very fond of telling the story of how he first met my mother because of a cock. He would always begin the same way, explaining that he had been born in Scotland (though this was obvious enough from his accent) in a small village near Aberdeen. He had come to Australia at the age of twenty-five, and settled in Newcastle because it had the same name as the English city. After some odd jobs, he found work as an apprentice glazier. His employer liked him because he was never heard to say a bad word about anyone, not thinking this might be because my father lived in a glass house himself.
One day my father was sent to a property in Bar Beach. The owner was a wealthy lawyer who kept a large greenhouse, vegetable garden and chicken coop, which he liked to potter around in on weekends. There had been a storm, and my father was to replace several glass panes in the greenhouse. At first, the owner tried to chat to my father about his prize chickens, but eventually went back inside when he couldn’t understand my father’s replies. My father took this opportunity to have a cigarette break. As he leaned on the fence, smoking, the gate gave way behind him, and a rooster ran out of the coop. Closing the gate, he chased after the rooster, which ran down the driveway towards the beach. My father dove at it, and the rooster leaped in the air and over a high wall into the garden of the house next door. My father jumped up, too, and pulled himself over the fence, falling onto his feet a few inches from my mother, a twenty-two-year-old girl, sunbathing in her underwear while her parents were away for the day.
Out of breath, my father said, panting, ‘Excuse me, miss. Have you seen my cock?’
This word, derived from the Old English cocc, is commonly used in Scotland to describe a male domestic fowl, but my mother did not know this. She screamed, and slap
ped my father in the face so hard that she burst his nose. At that moment the rooster came squawking from the open door of the house, and my father was able to catch it. He held the struggling bird with one hand and his streaming nose with the other. My mother, realising that he wasn’t a pervert, went to fetch a handkerchief. While she was gone, my father noticed that one of the lounge-room windows was cracked. When my mother returned with the hanky, he pointed out the broken window. Fearing her parents would notice the damage, my mother became upset, until my father explained his trade and offered to repair it free of charge. That afternoon, he asked my mother out. They were married two years later.
Fart
When I was a small boy, my father taught me his national anthem, ‘Scotland the Brave’. My mother loved to hear me sing it, especially the chorus:
Land of my high endeavour
Land of the shining river
Land of my heart forever
Scotland the brave!
Whenever her relatives came to visit — which wasn’t often, for they didn’t like my father — she would have me stand on a chair and sing, while my father would accompany me on the mouth organ. Shortly before my grandparents came to call one day, my father told me he had forgotten to teach me the chorus properly, and so together we rehearsed the new words:
Fart, fart, my bum is calling,
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