Flying Tips for Flightless Birds

by Kelly McCaughrain

  BF:

  You were pretty young when you started here. Do you think that’s important?

  JC:

  I think you can start at any age. It was just luck that I found this place so young. I’ve lived in (calculates on her fingers) thirteen different houses with thirteen different families in the last nine years. The very first family, whose names I don’t remember, brought me down here one Saturday because I wasn’t very good at mixing with other kids and they thought this would help.

  BF:

  Did it?

  JC:

  On my first day Finch lost control of his diabolo and gave me a black eye.

  BF:

  Ouch.

  JC:

  He started teaching me the unicycle to make up for it. Anyway, the foster families came and went, and I was sent to a bunch of different schools and got expelled from a few, but I kept coming back here every Saturday. It’s the only thing that’s stuck.

  BF:

  You’d have to screw up pretty bad to get expelled from Franconis’.

  JC:

  Yeah. It feels like home now.

  < < Previous Post

  I look around at the cold warehouse, with its salvaged kitchen furniture and charity-shop sofas. The roof is leaking, the industrial estate outside is dark, and our neighbours include a smelly animal feed factory, a noisy building site and an abandoned biscuit factory where the older kids from our school go to smoke and drink and snog in unhygienic conditions. If this is Janie’s “home”, I wonder what the rest of her life is like.

  I’m sitting on the sofa watching her practise. Her waist-length black hair is as straight and smooth as her silks, and she ties it in a shiny knot while she’s up there. When there’s an audience, she puts on fast music and does all the dangerous stuff, showing off for the crowd, but when she’s training she puts on her favourite tunes – nothing flashy – and zones out, just running through her poses, trying new ones, oblivious to everything, every muscle in her body standing taut as she changes positions. When she comes down, she seems peaceful.

  Today she scooches in beside me on the sofa, tucking her bare feet into the warm spot beneath my legs.

  “I liked your interview on the blog,” I say. “Better than Py’s, but don’t tell him that. At least yours doesn’t make us sound like a training ground for arsonists.”

  “I wouldn’t normally talk about all that stuff. My foster families and everything.”

  I look at her, alarmed. “Do you want Birdie to take it down? I’m sure she didn’t mean to post anything too personal. You know Birdie, she’ll say anything to anyone, but if she’d known—”

  “No, no, it’s OK. I told her it was OK. If it’ll help the school, I don’t mind. This place is important to me; it can’t close.”

  I wrap an arm around her knees and give them a squeeze.

  “Anyway, not talking about stuff can be harder than talking about it,” she says. “You get tired of being careful what you say, you know?”

  I sketch a few more lines on the diagram of the new trapeze routine I’m working out. “The family you’re with now, are they nice?”

  “They’re not bad. And I’ve been there two years, which is good. They remember how I take my tea and that I’m vegetarian. Life’s OK!” She grins and holds her mug out for me to clink. “Here’s to Franconis’ continued success!”

  I don’t know about “continued success”. At the moment, we’d settle for “survival”, but I don’t want to tell Janie that.

  Py leans over the back of the sofa and drapes his arms round our shoulders. “Liked the blog today,” he says. “Great photo of you, Janie, very pretty. I mean, it was artistic. Well lit, good contrast, yeah.” He coughs because his voice is getting tight. “Are you sure you don’t want me to get you a flaming hula hoop?”

  I roll my eyes and rustle my papers like I’m sitting right here, guys. Janie just smiles. “Any chance of new members, Finch?” she says. “Anyone see the blog?”

  “Hmm,” I say reluctantly. “There’s this one guy, but I really don’t think he’s circus material. And he definitely won’t be ready in time for the show. He’d need about five years’ solid practice before you’d let him loose with a bucket of confetti.”

  “Rubbish,” Janie says. “Everyone’s got potential.”

  “Potential he’s got. Potential to harm himself and others.”

  “Bring him,” she says firmly, getting up and going to the kitchen.

  Py, watching her go, nudges me and says, “This new guy, is he good-looking?”

  I laugh. “You’ve got nothing to worry about.”

  The unicycle turns out to be more of a success. Well, it’s more of a success in the sense that it’s entertaining to watch, not because Hector is any good at it.

  I make a cycle lane down the length of the warehouse, lined with crash mats, and the whole circus school cheers as he wobbles along. We make a game of it by each picking a spot along the route where we expect him to fall. Whoever is closest wins a jelly baby. There’s a bit of jostling for positions near the start line.

  Hector’s wearing all Jay’s skateboarding safety gear: crash helmet, knee pads, elbow pads and wrist guards, plus a groin protector cup I found in the school PE cupboard, but I feel like it’s not enough. We could encase him in rubber and it wouldn’t be enough.

  “Too slow, Hector, you can’t balance at that speed!” I yell over the noise of the Juggulars chanting “Hector! Hector! Hector!”

  “I can’t balance at any speed!” he yells back.

  “Stop waving your arms around, they’re toppling you!”

  Crash. Wren chooses a yellow jelly baby but gives it to Hector. “You need to keep your energy up,” she tells him and he blinks gratefully up at her from the crash mat.

  I sigh. “Take a break, Hector. Py’s making pizza.”

  Birdie and I practise on the trapeze for a while. Well, it’s practice for her; for me it’s stress relief. Hector gets me so wound up.

  “He can’t do anything!” I tell Birdie as we sit on the platform looking down at everyone gathered around the big table below.

  “Give him a break, Finch, he’s new at this. And I think you make him nervous.”

  “Me?”

  “You keep yelling at him. And you’re usually such a great teacher. You’ve taught loads of people here and you’re always so patient. Why can’t you be like that with him?”

  “Because he’s impossible. Have you seen him juggle?”

  She winces. “He showed us all in the kitchen earlier. We’re down three mugs and the toaster’s dented.”

  “Exactly.”

  “It was funny though,” she says. “I thought that was what you were going for.”

  “But you have to be able to control it; there’s a big difference between making people laugh and being laughed at. We can’t just let him loose in front of an audience and hope he’s funny in the right places and doesn’t kill any spectators.”

  We swing out and flip over into backward somersaults, tumbling neatly into the safety net like two ripe apples. There’s a smell of pizza and the sound of laughter from the kitchen area. Maybe Hector’s juggling again.

  “He is the worst I’ve ever seen,” Birdie admits.

  I know it’s not meant to, but this makes me feel better. The Official Circus Fool idea may not be going exactly to plan, but my attempt to make Hector completely undateable seems to be right on track.

  But then she says, “I think it’s sweet that he doesn’t mind people laughing at him. Like, he really doesn’t seem to care. That’s kind of cool.”

  Great. “You don’t have to constantly stick up for him, you know.”

  “Someone has to. And I want you to like him.”

  “Why? Why is that so important?”

  She puts her hands on her hips. “Because I’d like to hang out with him, and we do everything together. I can’t even have thin-crust pizza because you like deep-pan!”

  “What do
es pizza have to do with anything? Hang out with Hector if you want, you don’t need my permission.”

  She cuts me a look. “Yeah, right. Just go easy on him, OK?”

  Everyone’s crowded around the table, snatching slices of pizza and discussing ways to improve Hector’s unicycling (invisible wires? stabilizers?). Everyone except Hector, who’s squashed onto half of Janie’s chair and doing Py’s homework. An awful thought occurs to me.

  “Py! You haven’t traded him fire-poi lessons for homework, have you?”

  Py stops adding singe marks to his coat with his lighter long enough to say, “I’m not insane, Finch. He offered.”

  I drag a chair up beside Hector, who’s doing some intense-looking maths. There are symbols I’ve never seen before.

  “We haven’t covered that yet, how do you know how to do it?”

  “I took an advanced maths class at my last school. I might do the GCSE a year early.”

  “I might do mine a year late.” Py laughs.

  “But you’ve got brains in your hands and feet,” Hector says. “I wish I had that.”

  Py looks pleased with this assessment. It’s true too, he can do anything with his body. I’m always trying to cheer him up about not being good at school work, but I never thought to point out all the things he is good at instead.

  “This bit’s quite simple,” Hector says. Py looks dubious but Hector starts explaining it to him, slowly and patiently, getting Py to do each step. Soon both their pizzas are getting cold but Py seems to understand what Hector’s saying. I notice Birdie smirking at me. I can practically hear her saying “Like that!”

  So Hector’s even a better teacher than me now. Why can’t I walk him through some basic circus skills the way he’s walking Py through his homework? The way he walks me through my homework. I nick Birdie’s pizza slice and promise myself that tomorrow I’ll be calmer. I’ll be patient. I’ll be methodical. I’ll be kind.

  “Hector, I am going to bloody well throttle you!”

  “There’s something uneven on the floor there!”

  “There’s something uneven in your head! Pick up the stilts and start again. And next time you fall, don’t aim straight for the only bruise-able object in the room, i.e. me!”

  We pick ourselves up off the floor and I brush the dust off my brand-new shirt and pop the dent out of my fedora.

  “If I was capable of aiming my falls, I wouldn’t have a problem, would I!”

  Calm. Patient. Kind. I take a deep breath and lower my volume. “Never mind, you’re doing fine. Let’s just start again.”

  He looks suspicious but drags the stilts over to the wall, where there’s a rail two metres up he can hold on to. He almost strangles me, leaning on my neck and shoulders to get himself up on the stilts, but I don’t complain. When he’s up and clutching the rail, I say, “Good! That’s great. Now just stand there and get used to the stilts. You have a new body and it’s eight feet tall with very long, skinny legs. Where’s your centre of gravity?”

  He wobbles experimentally back and forth. “Theoretically, it should be higher up. Practically, I’m not sure I have one.”

  “Course you do. And you want to keep your centre of gravity from going outside your base. How do you do that?”

  “Widen the base.”

  “By?”

  He moves his legs further apart.

  “Good! You’re more stable already.” I’m so relieved I actually applaud.

  “I am! And I’m impressed, by the way,” he says.

  “You’re impressed?”

  “That you remember all that centre-of-gravity stuff we did for physics last week.”

  It’s true – the first time I’ve managed to teach Hector anything and it’s only because he taught me something first.

  We teeter along the wall for half an hour and he does seem to be getting better. He even takes a few steps without the handrail. I’ve never seen him so happy.

  “I’m getting this, Finch! Maybe stilts are my thing! Do you think I could learn to juggle while I’m up here?”

  “Um, sure. Someday. Hey, that was nice of you to help Py with his maths.”

  He shrugs, which is a mistake and he has to grab the rail again. “I don’t mind. They’re nice, aren’t they?”

  “Who?”

  “The circus guys. They’re friendly.”

  “I guess so.”

  “You’re lucky,” he says. “I’ve never had a big group of mates. Look, Janie gave me this.” He holds out his wrist, at great personal risk, and I grab one of the stilts to stabilize him as I look up at what he’s showing me. It’s one of Janie’s bracelets. She makes little plaited bands out of her old red silks when they’re worn out. Like a little Janie’s Friends badge. We’ve all got them: me, Birdie, Wren, Jay, Py. And now Hector. He looks thrilled to death with it. Over the last few weeks I’ve wondered why he’s putting himself through all this. I thought it was to impress Birdie, but now I wonder if he’s just so lonely, he’ll take a few knocks to make some friends.

  “Circus people are like that,” I say.

  “Like what?”

  I’m not sure how to explain it. “They treat each other like family. I think it comes from being travelling people. They take their community with them and that’s all they’ve got in the world, so they’re important to each other. Like a tribe.”

  “But Franconis’ doesn’t travel.”

  “I know, but it’s just part of the atmosphere. And maybe… Maybe it’s because people in circuses are all a bit weird to start with. Like, they have that in common: being on the fringes of normal life. If you get a whole bunch of fringe-people together, you can make your own middle. Does that make sense?”

  He nods. I guess people don’t come much fringe-ier than Hector. He looks so pleased with his bracelet, I can’t help adding, “They said you were great, Hector. You should come here more often and I’ll teach you some new stuff.”

  His face lights up. My heart sinks.

  Achieving stardom

  Posted by Birdie

  When they arrive at the circus school and see the trapeze bars hanging ten metres in the air, everyone wants to get up there and start swinging. Sometimes you have to let them, just so they can get it out of their system, otherwise they can’t focus on anything else. But once they’ve leaped off the platform and screamed their way across the heights of the warehouse, they realize that, actually, they have no idea what to do up there and also, how do they get down, please?

  Then Finch and I lead them to the static trapeze and start teaching them the basic positions.

  Number one is Star on the Bar:

  1. Sit on the bar with your hands holding the ropes.

  2. Lean back so you’re horizontal and the small of your back is resting on the bar.

  3. Lower your head and raise your legs, so they point straight up and your feet are on the outsides of the ropes.

  4. Spread your legs wide and point your toes.

  5. Smile like you’re not terrified.

  6. Let go.

  If you end up doing a “Falling Star” by mistake, remember to make a wish! (Strangely, people always make the same one. It involves their necks.)

  < < Previous Post

  In the crush of people squeezing through the school’s main entrance as the bell rings, my attention is drawn by someone ahead of me, and I find myself thinking something I never in my life thought I’d find myself thinking in a crowd of my classmates.

  Hey, nice shirt.

  It actually is. I can’t see who’s wearing it but it’s purple paisley with a wing collar and it would go really well with my yellow cords. In fact, I can totally picture myself wearing it. And then I realize why.

  I find Birdie at the lockers.

  “Is Hector wearing my paisley shirt?”

  “You were giving it away – you said it was too small.”

  “It is. That doesn’t explain why Hector’s wearing it!”

  “I thought it would suit h
im. It does, doesn’t it?”

  “No! It’s ridiculously geeky on him.”

  “It’s supposed to be. Geek chic, that’s what you said when you bought it. It looked so good with your Seventies newsreader glasses.”

  “Yes, on me it looked good. I was wearing it ironically. And my glasses were fake. Hector looks bizarre. You can’t go around giving him makeovers; he’s not a Barbie doll. I’m sure he has no desire to be dressed like a Seventies newsreader.”

  Birdie laughs. “I don’t recall you ever asking me if I wanted to walk around in a puffball skirt and an orange tank top. Why does he get a choice?”

  “You’re never going to let me forget the orange tank top, are you?”

  “Matching orange tank tops.”

  “The skirt wasn’t that bad.”

  “It was hideous.”

  “Whatever. The point is, that’s our thing. Ours, not his. And we only just get away with it.”

  She gives me a pitying look. “Oh, sweetie, you think we get away with it?”

  “Whatever. He won’t, and he’ll take us down with him.”

  “Fine, so I won’t make him wear an orange tank top. Anyway, I think he looks cute. And let’s face it, he needed to do something; he was never going to get a date in that school uniform.”

  I frown. “What date? Why does he want a date?”

  “Um, because he’s human?”

  “What did he say? What have you heard?”

  “Oh, nothing.” But she’s grinning her I’m not telling grin. “I’m just trying to make him one of us. I thought you’d like that.”

  “Why does he have to be one of us? Us is just you and me. We don’t need anyone else, do we? It’s not like he’s going to join the act – he’s not exactly trapeze material.”

  She sighs and gathers up her books. “Don’t you ever take a day off?”