Flying Tips for Flightless Birds

by Kelly McCaughrain

“From what?”

  “Franconis’. Does everything have to be about the circus?”

  “I am a Franconi. You can’t take a day off from who you are.”

  “Tell me about it,” she mutters. “Hey, why don’t you try and get a date so I don’t have to listen to you 24/7!” Then she slams her locker and walks away.

  I try to avoid Hector for the rest of the day but at lunchtime he corners me in the yard and starts planning this week’s study schedule.

  “Thanks for the shirt, by the way. I wasn’t sure it was me, but Birdie kind of insisted I wear it.”

  “It’s a great shirt,” I say through gritted teeth. And I’m not the only one who’s noticed it. Kitty, the Bond Girls, James and the lads are walking this way, and I suddenly realize that hiding in a corner of the yard wasn’t a good idea because now there’s nowhere to run.

  As they pass, Kitty turns towards us. I swear, it’s like she’s got heat seekers. Or geek seekers.

  “Isn’t that sweet!” she croons at Hector. “You swapped your clothes with a homeless person on the way to school! What a saint. Or did you two get confused when you were getting dressed in the dark this morning? Sleepover, was it?”

  I do a deadpan laugh. “God, you’re so funny, Kitty! You know, we’re looking for clowns at Franconis’ – you should audition. If you toned the make-up down a little bit, you’d be perfect.”

  “And would you lend me some of your pretty clothes for a costume? Or is it only His Holiness here you play dress-up with?”

  “Kitty, as usual it’s been a pleasure talking to you, but since I’m getting bored now I’m going to have to insist that you bite me and go away.”

  “Ooooh, the claws are out, girls,” she says, and behind her someone shouts, “Handbags!”

  With a quick glance around for teachers, Adi and Chris step forward, grinning and backing me towards the wall. I tense up, fists clenched already and stomach braced for impact, but suddenly Hector is leaping between me and them, shouting, “Stop!”

  They both stop, but only out of surprise as the diminutive, bespectacled Hector rams a restraining hand into Adi’s chest and looks fiercely (for Hector) up at him. Adi laughs, shakes his head and says, “Far too easy.” He and the rest of them saunter off, doing high-pitched, squealed impressions of Hector’s “Stop!”

  “For God’s sake, Hec, did you have to do that! He wasn’t going to hit me. Probably. And even if he was, I could have handled it. A lot better than you, in fact!” This is true. I may be Murragh High’s biggest loser (well, second biggest since Hector arrived) but thanks to the trapeze, I have the upper-body strength of a JCB.

  “From now on, Hector, can you just mind your own…” But he isn’t even listening to me. He’s bent over on the ground. “Hector?” Did Adi hit him and I blinked and missed it? I crouch beside him.

  “He’s not hurt,” he says with relief. He? Who’s he? I start to wonder if Adi hit him in the head.

  “What are you doing?” I follow his gaze to the tarmac by my feet, but there’s nothing there except a dead bee. No, it isn’t dead; as I watch, it twitches its antennae, or whatever it is bees have, crawls a few millimetres and stops.

  “He was about to stand on it,” Hector says.

  “A bee? You made all that fuss about a flipping half-dead bee?”

  “He’s just exhausted. Sometimes they run out of energy and you find them crawling along on the ground. If they can’t fly to find food, they die. I read about it.”

  “Of course you did.”

  “But we can save him!” He looks up at me excitedly. “If we give him sugar dissolved in water, he’ll get enough calories to fly away and find nectar.”

  I put my head in my hands. “You are unbelievable. It’s just an insect!”

  He frowns. “Bees are becoming endangered. Some people think that if they die out, it’ll be catastrophic for the whole planet!”

  “You’ve been reading too many sci-fi novels.”

  “It’s very serious. They pollinate food crops; without them we can’t grow food. Now you sit here and guard him, I’ll get the sugar. Do you think they’d give me some in the canteen?”

  “I’m sure if you explain the whole situation to them, they’ll give you anything you want to get rid of you.”

  “Right, stay here then.”

  He runs off and I’m left sitting on the tarmac guarding a dying bee from four different games of playground football. There’s a fair chance we’ll both get trampled before Hector comes back. I tear a page out of my physics textbook and slide it underneath the bee in case I have to make a quick rescue.

  “Good thinking,” Hector says when he gets back. “Now lift him onto this saucer.” I tip the bee off the page at the edge of the little sugary lake Hector’s brought and, to my amazement, it pokes out a long tongue and starts slurping the stuff faster than Lou hoovers up whiskey. A few minutes later it’s in the air, slow and woozy, but it’s up there. Hector watches delightedly. “I wonder what it’s like to be so small,” he muses.

  I shake my head at him. “I wonder what it’s like to be so weird.”

  And then the bee’s gone. Hector’s so thrilled, I forgive him for being such a monumental twit.

  “Well done, St Francis of Assisi. I suppose you didn’t give a toss if Adi was about to lay into me then?”

  He waves a hand at me. “As if! I’m not losing teeth for someone wearing tap shoes.”

  “They’re spats! And thanks a lot!”

  Falling in love with flying

  Posted by Birdie

  Everyone falls eventually. You’re better getting it over with, because once it’s done, you’re never afraid to fall again. And you will. Over and over. Unfortunately, along with Star on the Bar, Mermaid and Half Angel, one of the basic positions you have to get used to is “Flailing Octopus”.

  You’ll become fearless about pain, too. For example, Jay’s greatest ambition is to be able to dislocate his shoulder like Ennis Mullins. Dad wants to take him to a child psychologist.

  I was once almost dragged to social services by a visiting school doctor when I took my top off to let her listen to my heart, displaying the full extent of the bruise rainbow across my chest, neck and arms.

  “Oh, dear God!” she said.

  I grinned. “Good, aren’t they?” It didn’t occur to me that she might not guess the obvious explanation – we’d been learning to juggle with wooden clubs that week.

  So you will fall, and you will get hurt. But don’t be scared: Franconis’ little family of performers will always be there to pick you up, make you tea and post the embarrassing video on YouTube.

  < < Previous Post

  It’s true, you do get used to falling, but I still don’t enjoy it.

  I remember my first fall vividly.

  I knew all the static trapeze positions and I was used to swinging on the flying trapeze, hanging by my hands, knees or ankles, and then letting go and enjoying the free-fall feeling on the way to the net. But this was my first grab. Mum was swinging upside down on the bar opposite me, in a strong Catcher’s Lock position, ropes wound around her legs, waiting for me.

  I stepped out into nothingness and swung back and forth, gaining height. I flipped into a knee hang, arms outstretched, hands free, and then I was hurtling towards her and she was hurtling towards me, and I knew this was the one. We would meet in exactly the right position; all I had to do was let go.

  One moment she was there – I could have sworn she was close enough – and the next she was plummeting away from me. My fingertips brushed hers. Someone screamed.

  I was still looking up at her in shock, so it came as a surprise when the safety net hit me in the back and I realized I’d fallen. And screamed like a little kid.

  “Never mind, Finch,” Mum called, swinging above me as I lay, panting, on the net. “Next time.”

  I guess remembering what it was like to be a beginner makes me more sympathetic towards Hector as we practise in the yard at lunchti
me.

  “Maybe it would be easier if you only had to think about one hand,” I say as he dashes around after dropped beanbag balls.

  “I can’t juggle with two hands, never mind one.”

  “You’ll have two hands, except one of them will be mine.”

  “That makes no sense whatsoever.”

  “It’s called tandem juggling.” I get up from the yard wall and stand next to him, close on his left, so we’re both facing away from the school. “It’s the same as two-handed juggling but you do the right hand and I do the left, like we’re two halves of one person. Put your other hand behind you.” We tuck our inside hands behind our backs and he takes two balls in his outside hand and I take one in mine.

  “OK, go.”

  Predictably, it’s a disaster. Hector can’t stop his left hand twitching for the ball every time his right hand throws it, which means he keeps walloping me in the back, and he’s concentrating so hard on not doing that, that he isn’t placing this throws anywhere near where they’re supposed to go. But we keep trying, and when he gets used to how weird it feels, he actually starts to improve.

  “This is great!” he says. “I bet it looks dead impressive.”

  “Try to throw a bit higher. Past my forehead, remember.”

  “OK.”

  His next throw is almost perfect. He lobs it into the air and it rises in a beautiful arc over our heads. A perfect curve. A parabola Miss Allen would be proud of. Good speed, good height, maybe a bit off in terms of direction. We watch it descend gracefully, a metre behind us, where it lands neatly in the rat’s nest of Kitty Bond’s blonde hair.

  Hector immediately starts to apologize, as though Kitty Bond is a reasonable person you can apologize to for a reasonable accident and who’ll forgive you in a reasonable way.

  She turns to glare at him, struggling to pick the ball out of her complicated knot of over-sprayed hair. She’s wearing a T-shirt that says YOU CAN’T SIT WITH US.

  “That hurt!”

  As usual, I pile in, which is just what she wants. “It’s a beanbag ball! It couldn’t have hurt.” That’s why Hector’s using them, though I don’t say that.

  Hector tries to retrieve the ball for her, and Kitty thumps him in the chest and screams, “Keep your hands to yourself, perv!” She untangles it herself and chucks it at me, hard. Her aim is much better than Hector’s. “And keep your stupid toys to yourself, Freak Show.”

  She’s turning the glare back to Hector when I can’t resist saying, “I think it’s an improvement.” I nod at the collapsed mess of hair. “Hides your face nicely.”

  Kitty’s eyes narrow and her voice goes chillingly smooth. “You Franconis are a danger to yourselves and others,” she says, folding her arms and jutting out one hip. The Bond Girls close in behind her, matching her pose. It’s like being circled by extremely fashionable birds of prey. Hector and I each take an involuntary step closer together. “Maybe I’ll talk to Mr Cooper about getting potential weapons banned from school grounds.”

  “Potential weapons! It’s a beanbag ball!”

  “You could have broken a window. Or your boyfriend’s glasses.” She gives Hector a nasty grin. “We can’t have dangerous implements in the hands of unstable schoolboys now, can we?” she says in her best teacher voice. “They could be used to intimidate. They could be used for bullying.”

  “Yeah, and what would that look like?” I mutter.

  They start to move off but I know better than to relax. Sure enough, there’s a last raised eyebrow, a last slow scan of my clothes. “Did you lose a bet?” she says. “Hate it when that happens.”

  Finally she’s gone. “Jeez, I thought she was going to shoot lasers out of her eyeballs or something,” Hector says, collapsing on the wall. “Thanks for getting in the way.”

  “I’m used to it. You’re new; she should give you a break.”

  He’s thoughtful for a moment. “There was a girl like that at my last school,” he says.

  “There’s always a girl like that.”

  “Did you used to date her or something?” he asks.

  “What! Are you serious? She hates me.”

  “Yeah, I noticed. I wondered if that was why. The girl at my old school…”

  I look up in surprise. “You dated her?”

  “Don’t look so stunned. We were only eleven and ‘dating’ meant holding hands in the canteen queue. I broke up with her and after that she always had it in for me. Unfortunately when puberty hit, it turned out she was pretty and I was not, which meant I’d pissed off the most popular girl at school. I think she was furious at me for ever going out with her, like I’d tricked her into dating some nobody when she was too young to know any better.”

  “Why did you dump her?”

  He shrugs. “She wasn’t very nice. I thought maybe you and Kitty had a history too.”

  “Nah. James and Kitty have been on-again-off-again since he sent her a Valentine’s card in primary school.”

  I consider telling Hector about James, but I don’t feel like going into it. And it was all so long ago, it couldn’t matter to anyone any more, except losers like Kitty.

  James has probably forgotten all about it by now. In fact, I hope he has, because I’d like to think he’d tell Kitty to lay off if he still remembered we were ever friends.

  Kitty doesn’t make empty threats, and before the week is out, Hector, Wren, Jay, Birdie and I have been hauled into Mr Cooper’s office.

  Wren reasons with him, Jay argues, Hector pleads and we all stage demonstrations of our ability not to lose control of the various objects from his desk whirling over our heads. I even stand against the wall and let the others fire juggling balls as hard as they can at my midnight-blue velvet tuxedo jacket and ruffled shirt, but Coop is unrelenting. Actually, I have a feeling he’s on our side (and quite entertained by Jay’s stapler and hole-punch juggling), but he’s been backed into a corner by Kitty and her thorough knowledge of the school’s “zero tolerance” bullying policy.

  “Go on, Sir.” I force a couple of balls into his hands and stand back against the wall. “As hard as you like, it won’t hurt!”

  “Finch.”

  “Come on, when do you get the opportunity to chuck stuff at students! It’s not like the old days, is it?”

  “Finch!”

  “Remember the time I joined all the Bunsen burners together in chemistry?”

  “Finchley!”

  “And the fire brigade had to come?”

  “Mister Sullivan!”

  “One of the sinks cracked.”

  “Stop this.”

  “Miss O’Dowd was crying.”

  For a moment he weighs one of the juggling balls in his hand thoughtfully, remembering the smoke damage, I guess. But then he sets it down on the desk. “I’m afraid the decision has been made, Finch. I’m sorry, you’ll have to leave the equipment at home in future.”

  “I’m so sorry, guys, this is all my fault,” Hector says as we trail outside.

  “Don’t be silly, Hector,” Birdie says gently. Then, more harshly, “It’s all Finch’s fault.”

  “Me? I didn’t throw a beanbag ball at Kitty Bond.”

  “You’re his teacher! You’re responsible. And you know better than to do anything to attract attention to yourself around her.”

  “Yes, I’m all about being low-key, aren’t I?” I gesture at the velvet tux jacket.

  “Well, it’s too late now, you’ll just have to teach him somewhere else. He can come to our house!” she adds, linking arms with Hector, who beams at her.

  Even the ruffles on my shirt sag.

  So when we’re not at the warehouse, Hector starts hanging out at our house. In my room, to be precise, because Mum says if he breaks another plate in the kitchen, we won’t have anything to eat off.

  “Sorry, Mrs Franconi.”

  “That’s all right, Hector, we all have to start somewhere. It’s just that some of us should start somewhere with soft furnishings.”r />
  Birdie’s started going to the library most days to write her blog posts because she can’t stand listening to me yell at him, so it’s just me and Hector and the thud-thud-thud of beanbags taking a serious beating.

  “Jugglers the world over are weeping right now, Hec.”

  He sighs. “You think I should quit?”

  I’m tempted to say yes. But he looks so dejected, I get up from the bed, where I’ve been lying on my back bouncing three rubber balls off the wall, and say, “Let’s try the tandem thing again.”

  I stand next to him and put my right arm behind my back, but this time Hector wraps his left arm round my waist. Actually this is a much more natural way to stand because we’re closer together, like conjoined twins, fused from shoulder to ankle. We’re both more stable and it’s how I’d do it with Birdie or Jay, but it feels a bit odd with Hector. He’s just looking at me, though, waiting for me to start, so I put my right arm round him and say, “OK, go.”

  I fumble a few catches and Hector apologizes, even though it’s not his fault. I’m too aware of his arm round me, that’s the problem. Which is ridiculous, but it’s the first time anyone I’m not related to has ever put their arm round me, and the last time a guy put his face this close to mine, he was calling me gay boy and stealing my crisps.

  Eventually I get it together and we manage to get a rhythm going. We spend the rest of the afternoon like that, trying rings and clubs, bouncing balls off the floor instead of throwing them. It’s fun, actually, and I forget his arm round my waist, his skinny ribcage under my fingers.

  Until he moves away and says, “I’d better go or I’ll be late home,” and then suddenly I feel disappointed that he’s leaving.

  Which is my second brand-new experience today.

  I walk Hector out and then sit on our front step and watch him trot down the lane, tossing a beanbag ball from hand to hand and tripping over potholes.

  I tried to teach James to juggle once. He wasn’t bad but he wouldn’t practise enough to get good, so we could never do team stuff. In return he taught me to flick a football up behind me with my feet and make trick shots at pool, neither of which I was remotely interested in. But it didn’t matter that we had nothing in common; we just laughed a lot and talked a lot and stayed over at each other’s houses and had fun hanging out.