He stubs out his cigarette and puts the pack back in his pocket. “Kids at school will always have stupid things to say. Why don’t you say something intelligent back?”
“Hmm. Sarcastic, I can do. Intelligent, not so much.”
“So say something true. That’s even better.”
“I think you and Birdie would get on well.”
Tony grins. “I’m sure we will. Right, I’d better get back to work; there’s a bedpan on the second floor with my name on it.”
Speaking of death-defying…
Posted by Birdie
As part of my investigations into the Franconi family history, I’ve (rather bravely, if you’ve ever met her) interviewed veteran high-wire performer, the Amazing Alouette Franconi! (Aka, our granny, Lou!)
BF:
Hiya, Lou, thanks for agreeing to speak to me today about the original Franconis.
LF:
It’s about time one of you took a bleedin’* interest!
BF:
In your opinion then, the old days were the best?
LF:
Course they were. There was none of this flipping health-and-safety malarkey for a start. My granny on my dad’s side could do a handstand on horseback at full gallop, did you know that? There was no namby-pamby prancing about on soft mats in leotards; back then, the circus was about danger, and “audience participation” meant you let the tiger off its chain.
BF:
But surely, given your own family history…
LF:
You mean Aunt Avis?
BF:
Yeah.
LF:
(Shrugs) They knew the risks. We all did.
BF:
What do you think about the rumours surrounding the accident? I know a lot of people accused your father, Carlo, of having something to do with it.
LF:
That’s why I don’t go around listening to “people” and neither should you, Miss Know It All.
BF:
So he was innocent?
LF:
Oh, I wouldn’t say that, now. Guilt’s a funny business. My ma never got over Avis; she felt bad because they’d been arguing before their act that night. About Carlo. Let me tell you, you don’t want to go up there with anything on your mind. Distraction’s a killer.
BF:
So you think the argument was enough to put Avis off her game?
LF:
Ma thought so, but of course she’d blame herself; she was Avis’s partner. If your partner’s not happy, you do whatever you need to do to make them happy, or you suffer the consequences when they bugger things up.
BF:
I guess. Do you think if they’d both given up Carlo, Avis might have survived?
LF:
Who knows? Relationships with people outside your act are just a botheration. And they’re not worth risking a partner over. Partners aren’t ten-a-penny like boyfriends.
BF:
I guess your first loyalty has to be to your partner, huh.
LF:
If you’ve got one. That’s why I preferred to work alone.
BF:
Did you ever have a circus romance?
LF:
You mind your own bleedin’ beeswax, miss.
BF:
Well, thanks for talking to us, Lou. Just before we wrap this up, what would you say to kids who are thinking of joining the circus school? Would you recommend it?
LF:
Yes, kids these days need the stuffing knocked out of them. When I was young, if you weren’t bruised before bedtime, you’d wasted your day. Bunch of mollycoddled china dolls, the lot of them! Learn to play your flipping Zboxes on a high wire, then you can snigger at my shopping trolley in the street. Bleedin’ brats, what they need is a good kick up the… (Stomps out of earshot in direction of pub).
*Swear words have been modified to meet the standards of our censor (i.e. Dad).
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For someone in a coma, Birdie has a lot to say. Like “your first loyalty has to be to your partner”. And you don’t ditch them when they’re in hospital so you can team up with some guy in a red nose.
But Hector is so thrilled about being asked to entertain the hospital kids again, it’s hard to tell him that.
“Calm down, Hector, it’s not exactly Ringling Brothers; it’s a hospital ward.”
“Exactly! It’s practically charity work – even my dad can’t argue with that.”
We’re sitting on the yard wall during lunch break. It’s cold, it’s starting to rain, and we’re puffed up inside our coats. I couldn’t face the canteen clamour, but I don’t have any lunch with me. Hector offers me half his sandwich.
“I’m fine.”
“Eat it or I’ll stuff it under your hat. And no one likes the boy whose hair smells of tuna.”
“OK. But only because this is Jay’s hat. You don’t have to sit out here with me, you know.”
“Do you want me to go away?”
I shrug and he looks down, hurt, but actually I don’t want him to go away. “No, I don’t want you to go away,” I say and he grins.
Since we’re being friendly, I add, “Do you want to come over tonight?”
“Sure! Oh no, wait, I told Sinead I’d be at home. We got paired up in English for an oral presentation.”
“You got ‘paired up’? Kitty Bond won’t believe that any more than I do.”
“Well, Sinead had to pick someone at my table. It was me or Marc Norris, and I’m not convinced he can actually read.”
“Whatever. Have a great night.”
“I could come to the hospital with you after school first. I’d like to see Birdie. I can’t wait to tell her about the hospital kids.”
“No! Don’t tell her.”
“Why not?”
I shrug again and I’m about to tell him to do what he likes, she probably can’t hear him anyway, when he says, “Here she is now.”
“Birdie?” What’s he talking about? But when I turn to look, a lone figure is walking towards us, buttoning her coat and pulling her hood up as she approaches.
“Hiya, Sinead!” Hector waves.
She waves back, runs the last few metres to the wall and then plonks herself down beside him.
“Hi! Hiya, Finch.” She leans around Hector and nods at me. I take a large bite of Hector’s sandwich and nod back. “Just wondering if we’re still on for tonight?” she says. Hasn’t she heard of text messaging?
“Definitely! I was telling Finch about our presentation.” He turns to me. “It’s a debate on the literary merit of sci-fi novels. We’re ‘pro’.”
“No kidding.”
He turns back to Sinead. “I want to go with Finch to see Birdie first, though.”
“Of course, sure.”
“Hey, you could come with us!”
“Wawmph!” Too much sandwich.
“Then we could go straight to my house after,” Hector adds.
“Yeah, that’d be great. I’d like to visit her,” Sinead says. “That is … if it’s OK with Finch?”
Hector looks pleadingly at me. Well, I can hardly say, “No, you can’t come and sit by my very ill sister’s bedside”, can I?
“Sure, why not.” Because you’re an evil cow, that’s why not.
By the end of school I’ve decided that if Hector can’t bring himself to offend Sinead by calling her a psycho-shielding scumbag, I’ll have to do it myself. I find her waiting for us outside the school gate.
“Hiya, Sinead!” I say, super nice.
“Hiya, Finch!” She looks relieved. I suddenly realize that every time she talks to me, it’s like she’s nervous, which is weird because the Bond Girls are right at the top of the food chain around here. She is definitely hiding something.
“It’s nice of you to visit Birdie.”
“No problem. I hope she’s better soon; school’s sort of boring without her – you two always made me laugh.”
“Yeah, we noticed t
hat.”
“I didn’t mean…”
Hector’s running across the yard towards us, school bag bouncing on his back, and I wince, waiting for the moment he trips over his shoelaces, or a rock, or thin air, and takes a chunk out of the tarmac with his teeth. He makes it, but not without misjudging his braking distance and slamming into me. Sinead looks relieved to see him.
We set off, but I’m not dropping it. “A lot of people have been to see Birdie actually,” I say. “Didn’t I see you visiting with James once? Or was that Kitty? No, no, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t James and Kitty, it was James and you.”
She looks uncomfortable.
“I’ve seen you and James together a couple of times, now I come to think about it.”
Hector gives me a warning look, which I ignore.
“I had no idea you were such good friends,” I go on.
“Finch,” Hector says.
“In fact, the only time I’ve seen him on his own recently was that night. The night Birdie fell. I was on my way to the warehouse and I saw him down there, but he was alone; I guess you weren’t with him that night?”
She looks alarmed, glancing at Hector as if he might tell her how she’s supposed to answer.
“I… That was so long ago…”
“Ten weeks,” I supply helpfully. “Ten weeks exactly, I’ve been counting.”
“I don’t remember. I think—”
“I am starving. Can we hit the hospital canteen on the way in?” Hector says.
I give him my most convincing I am going to throttle you look. I’m certain she was about to crack.
“Ooh, I could murder a doughnut,” Sinead says. “Kitty and the girls are all on this protein diet. I don’t understand it, because you can eat loads of cheese but you can’t put it on toast. Basically anything that makes life worth living isn’t allowed.”
“Sounds rough,” Hector sympathises.
“Sounds self-inflicted,” I mutter.
“Doughnuts all round then,” Hector says loudly, determined to drown me out.
I am actually going to throttle him. That is, if I ever get to see him alone again. But he can’t hide behind a Bond Girl for ever. Not one that skinny.
Another week passes and nothing happens. It’s like Birdie and I have become statues while the rest of the world whirls around us. The show is taking shape, no thanks to me; I’m too miserable to even go down there any more. I just stay at home, where at least everyone else seems as slo-mo as I am.
Saturday afternoon and I’ve been lying on my bed for hours, scrolling through stupid selfies of us on Birdie’s Instagram account and listening to the playlist on her phone. There’s some awful stuff on there – not one Smiths song – but it was nice arguing with her in my head about it.
I’m watching her YouTube videos of us on the trapeze when I’m interrupted by footsteps racing, tripping, up the stairs outside my room.
“It’s me!” Hector calls.
“You’re kidding. Come in.”
He hops through the doorway, rubbing one ankle. “I had an idea,” he pants.
“Oh God.”
“We need to sort out costumes for our act. I thought we should do it here.”
“Why here?”
He grins, flings open the doors of my overstuffed wardrobe and gestures at my clothes like ta-dah!
I fold my arms and jut out my chin. “How rude. I’ll have you know my clothes are extremely stylish. Or were. When they were made.”
“Hey, I’m not knocking your sartorial brilliance,” he says, flipping through hangers already.
“What’s ‘sartorial brilliance’?”
“Fashion sense.”
“Oh. Thanks.”
“But I reckon if we mix and match a few things, we could come up with something hilarious.” My Rupert trousers tumble off a crammed shelf and land on his trainers. “See, we didn’t even have to look.”
“Ha ha.”
He starts dragging clothes off hangers and shelves and chucking them at me. “How about this?”
“That was expensive; you’re not throwing cream pies at it.”
“This?”
“I was going through a Gatsby phase. I’m over it.”
“What is this?”
“It’s vintage Versace! Versace is not even remotely funny.”
He sighs, drags a chair over to stand on and digs around on the top shelf. Then he pauses, head and shoulders deep in the wardrobe, and I start to worry, trying to remember if I’ve left any posters of Damon up there.
But it’s not that. It’s worse.
He glances at me, embarrassed, and tries to put the photo back, as if I haven’t just seen him look at it.
“That’s old,” I say quickly, which it is, but the fact that I obviously know exactly what it is kind of proves that it wasn’t just accidentally left up there three years ago.
“Hey, what about this!” He drags a red bowler hat from the back of the shelf, determined to pretend he didn’t see the photo. He jumps down and jams the hat on my head. “Perfect.” Then he wraps a red skinny tie around my black bowler, puts it on himself and we stand there facing each other. “There! We match!”
He sticks his right hand out to shake, and I roll my eyes, but you can’t ignore a cue so I stick my hand up in the air to wave hello. He sticks his hand up to wave as I bring mine down to shake. And then we do it again. And again, faster and faster. It’s the start of the Dead and Alive skit, and if you get the timing right, it’s pretty funny. We end up laughing and whacking each other’s hands as it gets too fast and falls apart.
“See, costume makes all the difference,” he says.
When it comes to clowning, he’s unstoppable, so while he goes back to rifling through my wardrobe, I just lie on the bed listening to him go “Ooh!” and “Yeah!” and “Eugh!” as he throws clothes at me until I’m buried under a huge pile. The Eau de Charity Shop is pretty pungent.
He’s right though, a costume does make you braver. Wish I’d been wearing one when he saw that photo of me and James, our arms round each other’s shoulders, posing at Adi’s birthday party. I swear I haven’t looked at it in ages, but I’m ashamed that it’s still there. I’m ashamed that it’s so dog-eared. Mostly I’m ashamed of how happy I look in it.
When it goes quiet, I lift my head out from under a paisley shirt to find Hector stripped to the waist and unbuckling his belt. He waves me away, frowning, and I pull the shirt back over my face, blushing. I wonder if he’s thinking about the photo and freaking out in case I’m eyeing him up, like the idiots at school. As if.
I’ve thought about telling him the truth. I always thought he wouldn’t be a josser about it, not like James and Adi and Kitty and that lot, but now I don’t know. Even if he’s only thinking all the things they say out loud, then that’s just as bad.
“What do you think of this?” he says eventually.
He’s wearing my baseball shoes, which are enormous on him, my brown suit trousers – far too long – a baggy Hawaiian shirt, and a tartan bow tie that he’s tied too tight.
“I guess if you’re going for comedy.”
“Exactly!”
I sit on the bed, reading the Buster Keaton book while he experiments with more bow ties in front of the mirror.
“So what will your clown autobiography be called then, Hector?”
“Hmm. How about ‘Sixteen, Clumsy and Shy’ and Other Smiths Lyrics That Basically Sum Up My Life.”
“You’re not sixteen.”
“I will be by the time I write the book. And I’m pretty sure the Clumsy and Shy parts will be eternally applicable.”
I don’t disagree with him.
“OK, now what about your costume?” He looks me over critically. “I think we should work with what we’ve got. I mean, we already look kind of funny together; we can exaggerate that with clothes.”
“What do you mean, funny?”
“Well, you know, I’m sort of skinny and pale and geeky, and you�
��re … you know…” He gestures at me vaguely. “Taller, and broader … and … you know … kind of … goodlookingandstuff.”
Goodlookingandstuff? What’s that supposed to mean? But he’s already rambling about trousers.
“You have to find a person’s comical features and exaggerate them. You should wear trousers that are too short, to make you look even taller, and I can wear baggy ones, to make me look skinnier. Here, put these on.” He pulls his own school trousers out of his rucksack, then plants himself on top of the pile of clothes on the bed, folds his arms and looks expectantly at me.
“Do you want popcorn?” I say. Apparently it’s OK for him to watch me.
He rolls his eyes and lifts the Buster Keaton book. “Like you have anything to worry about,” he mutters.
“Didn’t say I did,” I mutter back, suddenly wishing he’d just leave but not knowing how to say that without saying why.
The trousers almost fit around the waist but are a good ten centimetres too short. We add orange socks, white trainers, a custard-yellow shirt, a wide green tie and a tank top of Birdie’s that just about reaches my belly button, so you can see the red braces poking out underneath.
He hands me the red bowler and my red nose, drags me to the wardrobe and closes the door so we can see ourselves side by side in the mirror.
I can’t help laughing.
“We look totally professional!” Hector says.
“If by ‘professional’, you mean ‘deranged’.”
“Yep. Imagine making a whole career out of being certifiable.”
“If that’s what you’re aiming for, then we’re done here. I’m starving,” I say. “Do you think it’s physically possible to eat dinner in this lot and not throw cream pies around?”
“Lose the nose.”
So we go down to the kitchen, minus the noses, where Mum looks straight at me and says, “Finch, if you’re out this afternoon, can you buy loo roll?” And then Hector walks in behind me and she goes, “Oh, are these costumes? They’re fab, guys!”
Flying Tips for Flightless Birds Page 18
