The Pilo Family Circus

by Elliott, Will

  ‘Right,’ Jamie said. ‘Um, I don’t quite know how to put this …’

  ‘You’re among friends, young JJ,’ said Gonko. ‘Speak from the heart.’

  Jamie took a deep breath. ‘Who are you people? What are you people? What am I doing here? What the hell is going on?’

  Gonko peered at him through narrowed eyes. ‘You still want to know all that?’ Jamie didn’t quite know how to reply. ‘Fine,’ said Gonko. ‘Come with me. We’ll pop over to the fortune-teller and clear up all them little posers. Off we go, li’l JJ and Papa Gonko.’

  Gonko led him through the dark showgrounds. The dwarfs were out in swarms now, squatting in alleys playing dice games, or crouching up on rooftops with bottles in their hands, spewing profanities at one another. A pair of them tussled in a doorway over what looked like a ham bone. One combatant stumbled in front of Gonko, who booted him away like a football without breaking stride. The dwarf flew six feet in the air and crashed into a gypsy’s door, which opened, a hand reaching out to grab the dwarf by the hair, dragging it inside. Whatever happened in there resulted in much screaming and banging. The other dwarfs fell silent as they watched this unfold, staring after Gonko with quiet malice. He didn’t appear to notice.

  They came to Shalice’s hut, though Jamie barely recognised it from his dim memories of the day. Only the rattling beads seemed familiar. Incense still laced the air, though it was faint. A large white caravan, presumably the fortune-teller’s home, was parked a little way behind the hut. There was light shining from both buildings. Gonko marched to the hut and gave the wall a solitary thump with his boot. A hand parted the beads and there was the darkly beautiful woman with playful eyes — though for the moment she scowled. ‘Look who it is,’ she said. ‘Nice one, Gonko. Why didn’t you tell me this one was a recruit?’

  Gonko raised his eyebrows. ‘What’s your problem?’ He brushed past her and took a seat on the wooden crate, squinting up at Shalice, who watched him icily.

  ‘I did him a reading,’ she said. ‘As if he were a regular trick. You know. And he resisted me. It could have ended very badly. You could have lost your man. There are reasons I need to know these things.’

  ‘Ah, get off my case,’ said Gonko, though now he looked faintly amused. ‘What were the odds of him stumbling in here?’

  Shalice bared her teeth. ‘Pretty good, as it turns out.’

  Gonko shrugged. ‘Well, shucks, guess I figured you would have foreseen it, being the one with the spooky powers and such.’

  ‘I foresee it will not happen again,’ Shalice replied, ‘for I had a word to Kurt about it.’

  Gonko sprang to his feet and looked like he was about to strike her. ‘You fucking scag!’

  She smiled and stepped towards him, her dark eyes flashing. ‘Uh-uh, settle down, precious. You know better than that. Behave yourself.’

  Gonko ran a hand down his face; his fingers twitched. ‘We’ll talk about it later,’ he said. ‘For now, JJ here needs some answers.’

  Shalice glanced at Jamie. ‘The usual?’

  ‘Yeah, the usual,’ said Gonko. ‘Who are you why am I here what’s going on mama I’m frightened blah blah blah.’ Gonko lashed at the wooden crate with his boot, breaking one of its boards. ‘No, really, thanks for squealing on me, you fucking — that’s two piles of stink I have to clean up now.’

  He stormed out of the hut, swiping at the beads as he went. Shalice watched him go, muttered something under her breath, then turned to Jamie. She looked him up and down. ‘So. You want to know why you are here and why you should stay. You want to know who we are and what we do. Is that right?’

  Jamie nodded. ‘That would be a start, I suppose. Then maybe you can tell me where I can call a cab to take me home. I promise not to sue anybody. I’ll sign an affidavit. Whatever you want.’

  ‘I think you will see that is not one of our concerns,’ she said. She sat down behind the crystal ball and plucked off its cloth veil, then watched him in silence for a moment. ‘I will put it to you like this,’ she said. ‘You are not strictly in the world anymore, Jamie. Though of course it is not far away. You are here because you have been given a second chance. You see, you were meant to die young, and before you died you were to live miserably.’

  Jamie rubbed the corners of his eyes. ‘And how exactly do you know that?’

  ‘Because you are here,’ she said. ‘No one comes here unless they were headed for such an end. Everyone here was saved from death. That is why they stay. They owe something to the show — you, I, everyone else here. Whether we are better off, I could not tell you … I have never died. But I can show you what your life would be if we had not found you.’ She gave him an appraising look. ‘There is magic in the world, Jamie. You have seen enough today to know that. There is magic — it is rare, but most of it is right here in these showgrounds. The very air you breathe is thick with it. Yes, you see? You felt it today, did you not? The circus breathing its will into your lungs?’

  Jamie couldn’t answer. Shalice nodded, and said, ‘The magic is here for a reason. It is not safe loose in the world. Neither are we. And the clowns, in their wisdom, have seen something in you they can use, that the show can use. You are fortunate.’

  She traced a finger over the glass orb and said quietly, ‘Look.’

  The surface flickered white. Jamie stared at the glow and could soon discern shapes. Suddenly there he was in the glass, like a character on a silent TV show. Before him was a familiar scene; he was in his bedroom getting ready for work at the Wentworth Club, in the midst of the usual frantic search for his shoes and socks. He was flailing his arms around, swearing and crying to the heavens. Shalice said, ‘This is you, one month ago. Time shows me some of her secrets, you see. Just here and there, like wind blowing back a curtain from a window. Sometimes, when I ask her nicely, she shows me what I need to see. Now, if she will oblige, we will see what would have become of you, Jamie, had we not brought you to us.’

  Jamie’s mouth hung open, his eyes locked on the glass ball, mesmerised by the fortune-teller’s silky voice. He was just aware enough to see himself going through the motions of everyday life, though it seemed already like years before. And as he watched himself running around, desperate to get to work on time, it struck him that he looked ridiculous; what a strange purpose to have in life, what a strange thing to take so seriously.

  Shalice whispered something he didn’t catch, and the picture changed. At first he had to do a double-take, for he thought he was staring right at his father. The resemblance was almost exact, down to the stress lines, the thinning hair, the stubble. But no, it was Jamie, perhaps in his late forties, sitting in an office. There was a beer gut ballooning beneath his shirt and tie, sagging over his belt, absurd on his slender frame.

  ‘Look,’ said Shalice. ‘This is just twelve years away. You got a dead-end government job. You swore off alcohol in your twenties, but now you are as alcoholic as they come. There are times when you sneak into the bathroom for a swig of bourbon. Your co-workers laugh about it often. See that picture?’ She pointed to a framed photograph on his desk that he couldn’t quite make out. ‘You never married, but you have a son. He was born retarded, so your child support is not cheap. It is where most of your salary goes. You are earning enough for a nice place, but every night you go home to a roach-infested apartment, alone. The other men in the office talk of their vacations and their entertainment systems, but you? You have nothing. Despite twelve years of hard labour, Jamie. It has taken its toll on you. See that twitch below your left eye? That is permanent.’

  Jamie watched the hollow-eyed scarecrow with dizzy horror. Throughout life his father had seemed an almost melancholy figure, overworked and trapped in a loveless marriage, but the wreck before him now surpassed anything his father had been. ‘The mother of your child was your first girlfriend,’ the fortune-teller went on. ‘You were together two years. Protestant girl, very pretty. She wanted to be married but you didn’t. She stopped taking
birth control pills in secret, knowing you would do the honourable thing. You were wrapped around her finger. But it fell apart after your son was born that way. She blamed you. Keep watching.’

  At his desk, the wreck Jamie had become was staring at a huge pile of folders and sheets. A clerk of some kind waddled over and dumped another stack beside the first. Older Jamie buried his face in his hands.

  ‘It never ends,’ Shalice said. ‘Decades of this, Jamie. No reward. No way out. Inside you grows a tumour of cynicism and bitterness. Look at yourself. This is what fifteen years of study and twelve years of work have brought you.’

  Older Jamie snapped out of his morbid trance with a start to answer the phone on his desk. His resemblance to his father in that moment was so vivid Jamie had to look away, and his mind went back to the morning his father took the phone call telling them Jamie’s uncle had hung himself. His father’s body had slumped like a sack of loose bones, and he’d burst into tears. It was the first time Jamie had seen the man cry, and for some reason the sight had struck an obscure nerve of pleasure inside him which he’d never felt since. Nor did he want to.

  ‘This phone call will be important,’ Shalice said, drawing him back from the reverie he had been slipping into. Her eyes flickered constantly from Jamie to the ball, back and forth in a flash. ‘This call is from the mother of your child. She’s threatening to take you to court for more money. Your son needs minders, medication, equipment, special ed. Her pill collection is not cheap, either.’

  Jamie’s throat was dry and he swallowed what felt like a mouthful of lint. Opposite him Shalice was nodding. ‘You discovered six months before this phone call that you were entrapped. Your child’s mother and sister had a nasty falling out, and her sister told you out of spite. So now, every time you think of the mother of your child, you just want to kill someone. There is no respite from your anger. You want to wrap your hands around somebody’s neck and squeeze. That is what goes through your head, nowadays.’

  Jamie shut his eyes. His voice came out as little more than a croak: ‘What’s so special about this phone call?’

  ‘This is the call that drives you over the edge,’ the fortune- teller replied. ‘Watch.’

  In the crystal ball, older Jamie hung up the phone, gently, calmly, then sat back in his chair. He stared into the distance as another clerk came to dump more folders on his desk. Older Jamie didn’t seem to notice; he just stared into space, then calmly, gently, picked up his briefcase and strolled out of the office, to the lift, through the lobby, out the building’s front door.

  ‘Where’s he going?’ said Jamie. ‘Why are you showing me this?’

  The look in her eyes answered him, and a cold chill raced up his spine. ‘There, there,’ she said. ‘It is not a particularly unusual thing to happen. Most murders run to this script. Love gone wrong. A shame, but not unusual.’

  ‘I don’t want to see the rest,’ said Jamie, for he felt nauseous. ‘Turn it off. Please.’

  ‘A little more,’ she said softly. ‘You need to see it all, Jamie. I show you this for a reason.’

  In the glowing ball, Jamie was now walking up a flight of steps. The building looked like an inner city apartment block, a little rundown and in need of new paint. There was a slump in his shoulders, like a great weight hung from his neck, and a slow dreamlike rhythm to his footsteps. The door opened and a woman stood in the doorway, a thirty- something brunette with a bathrobe tied at the waist and sedated eyes. The look on her face said she’d been neither expecting nor hoping for a visit from older Jamie. The pair of them exchanged words for a minute, then she tossed her hands up in exasperation, stepping aside to let him in.

  Once inside she went to the kitchen and put on the kettle. Older Jamie watched her with a blank look on his face. With that same blank look he walked to the kitchen and stood directly behind her. She seemed not to have heard him as she reached to take two coffee cups from a shelf. Older Jamie raised his hands and placed them, calmly, gently, around her neck.

  She tensed and wheeled about, tried to shove him away, shouted something, and that seemed to break older Jamie out of his blankness. He grabbed her fiercely and threw her to the floor. She fell hard. Her robe came undone and parted, showing legs as white as wax kicking at the linoleum floor as she tried to back away. He took a knife from the rack, his face strangely expressionless as he fell on top of her and, without pausing, rammed it into her guts, again and again and again and again …

  Blood poured, coating his hands and wrists like another skin. Finally she stopped struggling and curled into foetal position, face gripped in a spasm of pain as her killer stepped away to let her die.

  Jamie watched all this and felt sickness rise in the back of his throat. He swallowed and kept it down for a moment, then stumbled out of the hut, bent over and threw up in the grass. Down on all fours, panting and sweating, he tried to swab his mind of what he’d just seen, to think of absolutely nothing.

  Across the path, two dwarfs eyed him with suspicion. One muttered something to the other behind the back of its hand.

  ‘Come back,’ Shalice called from inside the hut. ‘It’s almost finished.’

  Legs rubbery, he somehow made it back inside and sat on the crate. ‘Enough,’ he said. ‘No more. Please.’

  ‘Just a little,’ she whispered. ‘The worst is over.’

  It took effort to focus again on the glass ball, but he did it. He watched his older self in the bathroom, before the mirror, staring at his reflection. Older Jamie seemed to have washed the blood from his hands, and there were little specks of it over the mirror and sink. He held his hands together and said what looked like a prayer. His face still had that blank look he’d worn when stabbing the mother of his child to death. He retained that blank look as he walked through the apartment, passing the body on the floor without giving it a glance. He opened the sliding glass door and stepped onto the balcony. Impassively, without hesitation, he stepped over the rail and dropped from sight.

  The pictures in the ball faded and its light went out. Shalice replaced the cloth cover. ‘I know that was hard for you to watch,’ she said sympathetically, ‘but you had to see it. That is what you were spared by coming here. That is what awaits you, out there.’

  ‘I can avoid —’

  ‘No. You cannot. You would forget about us. We would arrange it. The clowns would knock you out, the appropriate rituals would be performed, you would be taken back to your room in the dead of night, left there, and you would wake thinking you’d had a very strange dream, though the details would escape you. Your present and this future would at some point coalesce. And you would be finished.’

  Jamie stood. ‘Okay … I need to go. I need to … think about this. Okay?’

  ‘Yes, Jamie.’ She reached for his hand and held it. Her fingers were cool and smooth. ‘It is better this way,’ she said, looking him in the eyes. ‘Much better.’

  He swallowed, nodded, and staggered from the hut. Shalice watched him go, then gave the ball a quick rub with its cloth cover.

  Gonko came in a moment later. She didn’t look up at him. ‘Did he buy it?’ Gonko murmured.

  ‘Of course,’ the fortune-teller replied. ‘Some of us are masters of our craft. Now get out of my hut.’

  Chapter 8

  Winston the Clown

  JAMIE found his way back to the clowns’ tent and sat outside on a log. From Sideshow Alley came the final distant sounds of carnies packing up for the night. Overhead the sky spread out like a vast black lake, with no sign of the stars or moon.

  He was trying, without luck, to put the day into perspective. The show as he’d seen it came back in blurred, disconnected snapshots. The fortune-teller’s story had shaken him badly, but he’d already seen so many things that should not be real, there was no reason not to believe what he’d seen. And it stung to think it could end that way; he’d never had grand ambitions, would have settled for the standard package: job, house, wife, 2.3 kids. Enough holiday tim
e to see some of the world, the odd game of golf. It wasn’t too much to ask, and he’d been willing to work for it.

  So, this was a second chance? Maybe, but she had not really answered any of his original questions. Who, what, why, where, how — those pesky little details.

  He turned at the sound of footsteps and saw Gonko squinting down at him. ‘Get some rest,’ said Gonko. ‘Not a good idea to be out alone after dark. Not here.’

  ‘Why not?’ said Jamie despondently.

  Gonko peered around into the gloom. ‘Stay and find out if you want to. Them dwarfs ain’t too fond of anyone who ain’t a dwarf. Or anyone who is. And they ain’t the only thing that comes out at night. Come on. Up. Inside.’

  Jamie sighed. He stood and followed Gonko into the tent. Shadows cast by kerosene lanterns flickered on the walls; the body bag still lay in the corner. Jamie and Gonko sat down at the card table, where Doopy and Rufshod were in the middle of a round of poker. Goshy and the apprentice were nowhere to be seen. ‘Deal JJ in next round,’ said Gonko, dropping a handful of odd copper coins in front of him. The clowns glanced at Jamie for a moment but took no further notice of him, and he was glad. He sat back quietly to wallow in his confusion.

  ‘What’s with your brother?’ Gonko said to Doopy, who flicked cards around the table. ‘Really, no bullshit now. I want to know why we can’t get through a single act these days. Kurt’ll put us on notice if we don’t get through a show sooner or later.’