Flying Tips for Flightless Birds

by Kelly McCaughrain

  “What, like smoking? You want to quit but you get the shakes?” I laugh.

  He lifts his head at last and screws his face up, trying to think of a way to explain it to me. “You know how if you’re supposed to meet someone somewhere public and they’re late, you get out your phone and start messing about with Instagram and stuff? Just so you won’t look like you’re standing there with nothing to do and no one to talk to?”

  “Totally, Birdie’s late for everything.” Which is kind of why I’m sitting here.

  “Well, I didn’t get my own phone till this summer.” He goes back to his book like this should clear things up for me.

  “Hector, I feel like we’re having two different conversations. What has all that got to do with –” I wave my hands in his general, hunched direction – “all this?”

  He rolls his eyes like I’m the one being dense. “OK, imagine you’re in the middle of the playground at lunchtime and you have –” he counts off on his fingers – “no mates, no girlfriend, no sister, no football buddies, no juggling team, not even a study partner.”

  “Yeah?”

  “And no phone. Where do you go?”

  “The nearest cliff?”

  “Or the library,” he says.

  “Ah.”

  “Libraries have lots of benefits they don’t put on the posters.” He’s counting on his fingers again. “They’re quiet, so no one can yell insults at you. They’re staffed by adults, so no one can ram your face into a desk or shut your head inside a book. They’re unlikely to be populated by the people who most hate your guts because they’re outside slamming people’s faces into things. And,” he finishes in mock triumph, “they’re full of books you can read, which makes you look like you have better things to do than care that you have no mates and no phone.”

  “That’s kind of tragic, Hec.” I must look sorry for him because his expression lightens.

  “It’s not so bad,” he says. “If you carry a paperback in your pocket at all times, you can avoid any nightmare situation. Unattended classroom? Left on the subs bench for the entire football game? Valentine’s Day classroom post comes round? Get a book out and look busy. Parents want you to chat to the missionary exchange group that’s descended on your house and taken over your flipping bedroom?” He scowls for a moment at the imaginary missionaries. “Stick a desk in the attic and tell them you have an essay on the Industrial Revolution due on Monday. Eventually people start to forget you’re there.” He grins unconvincingly. “And you do learn the odd interesting fact.” He hesitates, then shrugs and ploughs on, a pink blush rising up his cheeks. “For example, when you google the new town you’re moving to and discover the circus blog of some people who go to your new school, you can read books on circuses so you have something to say to them.”

  “You cyberstalked us?” I’m more bemused than freaked out.

  “I wanted to make some friends when I got here.”

  “And you picked us?” Again – bemused.

  He shrugs. “I thought you seemed pretty cool.”

  “That says a lot about you, Hector. Now you know better, don’t feel you have to hang around with us to be polite.”

  He looks surprised. “I think you guys are great,” he says. Then he dives back into his book. There’s an awkward few seconds before he adds, “I suppose after a while it becomes your thing. That you read a lot and you’re smart, I mean. And if that’s the only interesting thing about you, maybe you start to take it too seriously. I dunno…” He waves away the conversation with a flick of his fringe and dives back into his book again. “Reading’s just my thing.”

  His cheeks fade back to their usual pasty shade. It seems rude to just get up and walk away, but I don’t know what to say either. I notice the way he clutches the book cover, the uncomfortable curve of his spine folded around it, as if he’d like to absorb the book whole, or fall head first into it and disappear.

  “OK, so tell me something about –” I glance at the page he’s reading – “Vincent van Gogh.”

  He looks suspicious, but when he realizes I’m serious, he straightens slightly and says, “Did you know he had an older brother, also called Vincent?”

  “No! Two Vincents in one family? That’s a serious lack of imagination.”

  “The first one died at birth. But the weird thing is he was born and died exactly a year before the second Vincent was born. On the exact same date. And because their father was a minister—”

  “Like yours!”

  “Like mine – they lived right next to the churchyard where the baby was buried. So our Vincent, the artist, had to grow up looking at a headstone with his own name and birth date on it.”

  “Creepy.”

  Hector nods. “It’s no wonder he went mad and chopped off his ear.”

  I’m lost in thought for a few moments, imagining this little kid playing in a graveyard, finding a grave marked with his name like it was waiting for him. Eventually I notice Hector grinning at me. “OK, I take it back; read whatever you like and tell me the cool bits.”

  “Deal,” he says.

  “Nothing about the Industrial Revolution though, yeah?”

  “Are you sure? There’s some bizarre stuff about train timetabling.”

  I give him a deadpan blink and gather my bags.

  “They had to standardize the clocks!” he says as I walk off, but we’re both laughing now. “Did you know Oxford time used to be five minutes behind London time?” he shouts after me.

  People in the yard are staring at us but I just turn and wave, walking backwards. “Later, loser.” And he waves back.

  Sometimes Lou waits outside school for us, like we’re six and need walking home. Mum says we can’t tell her not to, and I don’t think this is so we don’t hurt her feelings, I think it’s for our own safety. Lou has quite the temper.

  “Hiya, Lou,” I say as we reach the gates and find her sitting on the yard wall with her trolley, eating grapes and spitting the seeds a little too close to the feet of the teachers organizing the bus queues to be completely accidental. No one says anything. Lou thinks it’s brilliant that old people can do anything they like and get away with it. “I’d have got old a long time ago if I’d known,” she says.

  The buses for the out-of-town kids are pulling up and we’re being swarmed by people, but it’s taking her ages to get off the wall and put her grapes away and button her cardigans and swear at all the kids jostling past. I think she knows it’s embarrassing for us. I think that’s why she does it.

  She takes so long our head teacher, Mr Cooper, comes over on his way out and says, “Mrs Franconi, lovely to see you.”

  “Miss,” she says, sticking her chest out, sucking her stomach in and batting her eyelashes.

  Coop coughs. “Miss Franconi. While I have you here, I think I should mention that Finch and Birdie were late today.”

  “Yes?” she snaps, putting the lashes away.

  “Again.”

  “Well, I’m sure they had a good reason.”

  “I don’t doubt it. I’d be interested to know what it was, though.” He folds his arms and waits. The three of us glance shiftily at each other.

  “Er… Women’s Troubles,” Lou says. “That was it, wasn’t it, Birdie?”

  “Lou!” Birdie hisses. The surrounding bus queues give a collective snigger.

  “Finch had to wait for her; she couldn’t walk by herself.” Lou looks around conspiratorially and whispers the next word at exactly the same volume as her speaking voice. “Cramps.”

  “Yes, well, perhaps a note to that effect next time?” Coop says, not that he believes a word of it. He walks off down the road and when he’s almost out of earshot, Lou yells, “Josser!” after him. At least, I think she said josser.

  The bus queue begins to move and Kitty Bond sweeps past, her eyes gleaming evilly. “Sorry to hear about your Women’s Troubles, Finch,” she says.

  I imagine I’ll be hearing a lot about my Women’s Troubles fro
m now on, thanks, Lou.

  Lou eyes Kitty up and down, slowly, and Kitty looks grateful that the queue is still moving. I know who I’d put my money on.

  “Friend of yours?” Lou says.

  “Kitty Bond,” I tell her as we start walking. “And, no.”

  “Bond? Well, what do you expect from a family like that? I knew her granny, bitter old hag. Used to cross the street to avoid me when I was pregnant with your mother, just because I wasn’t married! She was only jealous because she had to tie a man to her apron strings.”

  To be fair, a lot of people cross the street to avoid Lou.

  “Why weren’t you married?” I ask, since dying now will at least save me hearing about my Women’s Troubles tomorrow.

  She glares at me. “You can put a lion on a leash,” she says, “but don’t expect to keep your hand.”

  I guess it was around the time James Keane, Kitty Bond and the Bond Girls shoved me up against a wall, jammed a tiara on my head and stapled a Miss Murragh High sash to my tank top that I started freeze-framing episodes of The Vampire Diaries every time Damon took his top off. Unless Birdie was there, and then I had to listen to her drool over Damon with his top off.

  At first I wondered if it was a phase. Adults are always going on about teenagers being confused; it was pretty much all they told us in sex ed, which wasn’t much help. If they’d given us some actual facts, we might have been less confused.

  Actually, I soon realized I wasn’t confused at all. And I was only bothered because I couldn’t stand the thought that those morons at school had been right. And that they’d known before me! I’d spent years denying and retaliating and ignoring and not sinking to their level, etc. I wasn’t going to just turn up one day and say, “Actually, yeah, you were all right about me.”

  No way.

  Because they were also totally wrong about me, but in ways I couldn’t really put into words.

  So I decided to keep things strictly between me and Damon. It’s none of their business anyway. They don’t go around making a big deal of the fact that they happen to fancy the opposite sex; they just go ahead and date someone when they feel like it. Well, there are exactly zero guys at Murragh High I would ever date, so there’s no need to tick the box that says Torture me, please! on my school records. If Damon decides to drop by, I’ll reconsider the matter.

  I haven’t even told Birdie. She would be totally cool about it, but Birdie’s the sort of person who tells her life story to people at bus stops. She’d want me to dye my hair rainbow colours and stage a one-man Gay Pride march down the high street (well, one-man, one-slightly-insane-sister) and I am so not doing that.

  I’m pretty sure my parents would be fine about it too. They’re not exactly conventional themselves. I found out two years ago that Lou isn’t the only one who never got married. I was filling in a family tree for our school’s “Tracing the History of our Town” project. The town is so small the project didn’t take long, and it basically proved that half of my schoolmates are inbred mutants. Which came as no surprise to me.

  “What date did you get married?” I asked Mum and Dad over breakfast.

  They looked at each other and Dad slapped his forehead. “Ah, crap, I knew there was something we forgot to do.”

  “Do you think we should return all those gifts?” Mum said.

  “You’re not married?!”

  “We had a handfasting ceremony.”

  “A what?”

  “We made up some vows and held hands in the forest. It was very romantic.” They gazed at each other over their cereal and then reached out to hold hands over the top of mine. I rapped their knuckles with my spoon until they let go.

  “Have you ever done anything normal in your lives?”

  “Oh yes. Wren and Jay were both home births. They were born in our living room, in a paddling pool!” Mum said. “No drugs, no machines, just the way nature intended. They came out like little sea creatures!”

  “Ugh! I’m eating!”

  “Couldn’t with you two, though; twins are tricky.” She said this like we spoiled her weirdo fish birth on purpose.

  “That doesn’t help me with this.” I stabbed my family tree with the end of my spoon. “I’m supposed to put ‘M’ for married, with the date.”

  Mum sighed. “So conventional. Put ‘F.I.L.’ 18 March 1994.”

  “What’s F.I.L.?”

  “Fell in love.” She grinned at Dad and he winked back.

  “You two are gross.”

  “Love is not gross, sweetheart. And you don’t have to be married to be a proper couple. You tell Mr History –” (Mum never knows the names of our teachers, she just calls them Mr History, Miss Chemistry, etc.) – “that your parents abstained from marriage on feminist grounds. Or was it religious grounds? I can’t remember. Anyway, we were staunchly anti or pro whatever it was.”

  So I doubt they’ll have a problem with me and Damon announcing our engagement, as long as we get married underwater, or up a tree, or while parachuting, or something else bizarre. In fact they’ll probably join the one-man, one-slightly-insane-sister Gay Pride march, along with Jay and Wren and Lou, and basically turn the whole thing into a circus.

  Literally.

  Roll up! Roll up!

  Posted by Birdie

  Since our granny, Lou, was once a travelling circus star, you might be wondering why Little Murragh has been inflicted blessed with her non-travelling presence for so many years.

  Her mother, Evelyn (Alouette and Ennis’s daughter), and father, Carlo, retired their act when Lou was a teenager and they all moved back to Little Murragh, where Ennis Mullins came from, because, even though they’d never been there, it was the closest thing to a permanent home they had.

  Lou often says she misses performing, and when she was younger she used to freak out the neighbours by walking the ridge pole of the roof of her house. She still threatens to do this every New Year’s Eve but we keep a close eye on her.

  Lou taught her daughter, Robyn (aka Mum), to juggle and tightrope walk, and made her love the circus so much she just had to start her own, and that’s how Franconis’ Circus School began.

  So, in the industrial estate just outside Murragh town, next to the noisy building site and across the road from the derelict biscuit factory with all the graffiti, we have a very big warehouse and a very small circus school, and we need you to come and join us! Don’t be shy – we’re so small you have a pretty good chance of being the star of the show!

  < < Previous Post

  “Did you read the blog today?” Birdie asks.

  “Um … yeah.”

  She gives me her X-ray-vision look. “What?”

  I frown. “It’s just … I don’t think you should mention Evelyn and Carlo. We’re trying to attract students, not put them off.”

  We’re sitting on Birdie’s bed while I sketch out a new trick diagram and she sews black sequins in the shape of skulls and crossbones onto a shiny red silk skirt. I have this idea for rockabilly-style trapeze costumes – fake tattoos, blue stripy boat-neck T-shirts, and red braces holding up her short red skirt and my blue jeans. The Flying Fifties Franconis! All timed to the song “Mama Don’t Allow No Boppin’” by Vern Pullens. If we can perfect the routine by the end of next term, it’ll be killer.

  “I couldn’t not mention them – they were the stars,” Birdie says through a mouthful of pins. “Anyway, they’re interesting.”

  “Yes, interesting from a historical point of view. But if your point of view is from ten metres up, you’d probably rather not know.”

  “Don’t be grisly.”

  “Where did you go after school today?” I ask.

  “Sew and Sew, for sequins. They had a sale.”

  “You should have said – I would have gone with you.”

  She tuts. “We don’t have to go everywhere together.”

  I look up from the trapeze diagram, a little stung. It’s not that we never snipe at each other, it’s just that usuall
y I can tell a mile off if she’s in a mood. “I didn’t say that; I just meant I could have got the elastic for the braces while we were there.”

  “We’ll get it tomorrow.”

  We go on with the sequins and the map of arrows that traces the choreography of the new routine, not speaking. In the background Vern Pullens is slapping his guitar around like a lunatic. It’s getting irritating.

  “Anyway, I only said they retired,” Birdie says eventually.

  “What?”

  “The Franconis. I said they retired. I didn’t say why.”

  Strictly for the birds

  Posted by Birdie

  Considering how much time our great-great-granny, Alouette, spent in the air, it’s a funny coincidence that her name is the French word for “skylark”. But it’s no coincidence that the rest of the family have been named after birds.

  Alouette and her husband, Ennis, had twin daughters, Evelyn (French for “little bird”) and Avis (Latin for “bird”). Together they formed the Flying Franconis’ Trapeze Act and travelled the world with the Rossetti Brothers circus.

  Evelyn married Carlo and had a bunch of kids, including our granny, Lou (named after Alouette). Lou had our mum, Robyn (father unknown and we’ve learned not to ask Lou questions), and Robyn married the very un-bird-like Diarmuid Sullivan and called us Wren, Bridget (Birdie), Finchley (Finch) and Jay.

  But don’t worry if you weren’t born with a ready-made stage name. We encourage everyone at Franconis’ Circus School to choose their own performance name, and not just because it looks good on the posters.

  Your stage name is like a costume – something you put on that transforms you. I never let Bridget Sullivan climb the rigging to the flying trapeze. She’d be nervous and whiny, and she’d fumble every catch. But Birdie Franconi? She can do anything. She’s fearless, with a capital “Let Me At It”.

  Most things in life you’re just stuck with – frizzy hair, little brothers, dads who dance at weddings, a complete inability to understand physics. Tough luck. But in the circus you can leave all that behind, invent a new personality and be whoever you want.