The Trapeze Act

by Libby Angel

  It was almost unfathomable, Ernest thought, that, in an evolutionary blink of an eye, Man had evolved to use four sets of cutlery at dinner while the elephant had spent thousands of years wallowing in mud with little adaptation other than the loss of most of its hair.

  Considering elephants made Ernest feel humbled almost to the point of inconsequence: elephants made the higher purpose of Man and his dinnerware seem futile. He wanted to find a way to conquer these great thumping beasts. He wanted to demonstrate beyond doubt Man’s supremacy on God’s Earth. And he would make the whole endeavour as profitable as possible while he was at it.

  Ernest’s interest in the natural world was second only to his passion for progress. He hailed the invention of steam engines that enabled Man to travel faster and further than ever before. He hailed the laying of shining miles of railway across continents, and modern ships that cut swiftly through the seven seas.

  It was with wonderment that Ernest read the daily shipping news. Over time, he noted, passages betwixt England and Africa were becoming ever more frequent. The importation of exotic goods and materials from remote regions of the world was a blossoming industry.

  When he inherited a small sum of money, he invested in coal and steel and soon found himself making money from money without offering any real skill or service in exchange. By the time he was in his mid-twenties he was well situated to set up his own business.

  As he pondered for the umpteenth time the pictures of elephants frolicking in the quagmires of a distant savannah, Ernest had an idea so lucid he felt it slam against the inside of his skull.

  He rented a brick warehouse by St Katherine docks and, after conducting many interviews, employed five men: Misters Hopkins, Barnes, Jenkins, Hope and Foley. Above the door he hung a shingle with The Ivory Lord inscribed in an elegant font. His friend the Reverend Stone blessed the premises, waving his reverend arms and sprinkling holy water about.

  Eight months later, Ernest opened the paper to read that the Excelsia was due to dock in London in the next few days. Its shipment, from East Africa, included his first order of ivory.

  Ernest’s business was a success, and success suited him very well. He bought a house on the edge of Hampstead Heath, dressed the floors with zebra skins and hung a deer’s head in the hall. (The merchant business offered substantial perks.) In the parlour he installed a Broadwood & Sons piano with mahogany and walnut casing and ebony and ivory keys.

  Ernest soon lured the attentions of a number of women. One of them, a descendant of Huguenots by the name of Henrietta, had an edge over her contenders because, as well as being well-spoken and neatly dressed, she was, as Ernest discovered on a pleasant day of hunting in the countryside, a deadeye with a rifle.

  It was summer when Henrietta and Ernest made their vows in a church in Cornwall. Henrietta wore a broderie anglaise dress and carried a bunch of daisies. Reverend Stone read from a Book of Prayers with ivory covers. The reception was held under an oak tree behind the church, the table laid with Belgian linen, the silverware flashing in the sun. Twenty-seven guests ate pheasant and capers off pale green porcelain plates. Champagne flutes chimed merrily as the party saluted love and elephants.

  So I imagine.

  One Saturday morning, Henrietta brought in the newspaper and opened it to page four. Beside an advertisement for ladies’ shaping undergarments, the lurid headline, Lord Makes a Killing was accompanied by an article detailing the marvellous riches to be found in some of the farthest-flung regions of the Earth.

  Henrietta held up the paper for Ernest to see, but he only nodded distractedly, pricking his poached egg with his fork, watching the orange yolk bleed across his plate.

  The headline was mildly amusing at best, Henrietta observed, as she poured the tea; the pun had become the mainstay of English journalism and the merits of understatement were often overlooked.

  It was unthinkable that the supply of ivory from Africa should ever dwindle. For all its charm, what was the natural world other than an endless source of riches for Man and His Queen? But the elephants were not breeding fast enough. And as others sought to replicate Ernest’s success, hunters’ prices, shipping costs and importation tariffs all increased. Ernest had no interest in becoming involved with the illegal slave trade as some other merchants had done in an effort to increase their profits.

  A time arrived when Ernest made only a modest living from ivory, and then, barely a living at all.

  He spent a week at home to take stock. For two days he sat at the piano searching for an answer among its notes, leaving the piano stool only to sleep. By the third day he had decided to go to Africa himself. Perhaps he could find a hitherto-undiscovered region that was teeming with beasts? But by day five he had rejected the idea. At that very moment there must have been thousands of Englishmen crawling all over Africa looking high and low for that untapped region. Africa was no longer a frontier. On day six Ernest composed a new hymn, with an emphasis on the sostenuto pedal; the bass notes boomed down the hallway. Then he turned back to his books.

  Every morning Henrietta prepared Ernest’s breakfast and left it on a tray outside the living-room door with the morning paper, as she would for a benign but unfamiliar house guest. This was not the first time Ernest had considered visiting Africa. But they were planning on having children some time in the near future and, although she was fond of adventure, Henrietta did not fancy chugging down the Nile with an infant at her breast. Ernest would go alone or not at all.

  Perhaps, suggested Henrietta, there was some other, less-traversed land to explore, a land whose flora and fauna were yet to be plundered?

  She was right. He, Ernest Lord, wanted to find such a place. In the meantime he would return to his studies of geography and natural history. Where were his coloured inks?

  4

  FOUR GENERATIONS later, during Thatcher’s term, my father, Gilbert Lord, departed for London wearing a rain-soaked suit and pair of house slippers, carrying only a passport, a ticket, an American Express card and a pile of legal briefs tied in pink ribbon. He had mastered the minimalism of a monk, but unwillingly and without goodwill. Just hours earlier, everything in our family home, from the light fittings to the contents of our wardrobes, had been spirited away. The doors, windows and parts of the roof were missing, too.

  As he skidded through the airport to gate number four, Gilbert cursed my brother whose fault it was.

  After twenty-six hours of travel, and smelling of cigarette smoke, he arrived at Heathrow, where he hailed a black cab, directing the driver to the Royal Horseguards Hotel on Whitehall Place. On the way, he stopped to purchase a new shirt and pair of wingtips with hand-stitched leather soles. A decent set of footprints could save a man, here, on the streets of London, just as in the Australian desert.

  From the comfort of his hotel room, Gilbert picked up the phone and placed a call to Gary Gore, his friend back home. He apologised for the hour but implored Gary to assist in having our family home restored to its former state, and its contents returned to us as soon as possible.

  Mr Gore could use his connections to ascertain whose trucks were carrying our household goods away and in which direction. Nobody else need know, my father assured Mr Gore: it was no mystery who was at the bottom of it, after all. Just tell the guys to fix the house and return our stuff and it’ll be like nothing ever happened.

  Gilbert could have negotiated the wings off a chicken. Three days later, my mother and I returned home from her rehearsal of Salome: A Tragedy in One Act to find a pile of boxes in the driveway and, in the boxes, all that remained of our household effects, neatly packed and awash in polystyrene beads. The doors and windows on the house had been replaced, the missing tiles reattached to the roof.

  My mother sat down at the piano, which stood, somewhat out of tune, in the middle of the tennis court with the rest of the furniture, and played a sonata.

  I soon found the box containing all that was left from my room.

  Three days later
my mother and I found my brother, Kingston, in the bed-bug-ridden Hotel Hotel down past the Crazy Horse in the west end of town, the very place Leda had stayed when she first arrived in the godforsaken town, as she called it, fifteen years before. It still had the same floral carpet in the lobby, she observed, as we wrestled our way through the revolving doors, but it stank even worse than she remembered.

  I think my brother saw in Mr Gore a sort of mentor, and had registered under his name.

  Picked that a mile off, my mother said, as she fixed the bill.

  While we walked along the footpath, Kingston rattled on about the junkies and jezebels he’d met and how the manager of the hotel had salvaged the mattresses for the rooms from the local dump.

  You can pay me back for the account, my mother told him as we approached the car. And you can bloody well pay for this too, she added, ripping a parking fine from the front windscreen wiper and shoving it in his face.

  You could never tell with my mother whether our family life was an expression of her desire or merely a piece of experimental theatre. Certainly, she did not conspire her children into existence, she was not desperate to spawn and beget. There were no crossing off of calendar squares, no thermometers. She barely even registered the day of the week. My brother and I arrived organically in the manner of apples, which, being born of the natural dirt, are marked.

  Picture this. In a dusty southern town, a trapeze artist runs away from a travelling circus then meets and marries a criminal barrister. Ludicrous, yes, but the desert winds have been blowing their kinds together for centuries.

  It was my parents’ likenesses, I discovered, rather than their differences that were their undoing.

  5

  IN THE same town, in 1858, during the Rodzirkus’s second tour of the colonies, Flying Maartje May climbs onto the counter of the ticket booth with the megaphone and begins her spiel: Come and see our fireproof Lady. She touches it, she eats it! Bear witness to the extraordinary skills of the famous Flying Volgiers! She cocks her head under the awning. Ladies, Gentlemen, you must see this show once in your life. You’ll be dead a very long time…

  Beneath her, swarms a crowd of men in Saturday suits, women in hoop-dresses, and impatient, noisy children. Jugglers and acrobats herd them into a line towards the counter.

  She lifts the frill of her skirt to reveal an inch or three of leg above her boot then dances a little flamenco tango, the nails in her soles rapping the wood like gunfire. The entire booth shakes with the rhythm.

  Roll up, roll down, roll round and round. Witness here today the riskiest, most titillating show on Earth. See the Duendo Brothers’ astonishing acrobatic feats. See the Moreno brothers’ inimitable Teeterboard stunts. See the boneless Contortionists of Antwerp! Watch Educated Monkeys, and the one and only Dog of Mathematical Genius. Witness Fearsome Tigers, and the strength and grace of twelve Dancing white Horses. And from the deepest darkest depths of the African savannahs, let us present to you the Remarkable Waltzing Mammoth! All this and more, accompanied by the Gypsy Band of Birdland and the exquisite sounds of the Calliope. All illuminated with the modern convenience of gas. Ladies, Gentlemen and children, come and see the legendary Rodzirkus, all for the very reasonable price of—

  She reels off the price-list which includes a family concession and a two-for-one old-timers Saturday-matinee deal, then jumps down off the booth, runs around to the back of the big top and climbs onto the elephant. She strokes the beast between its eyes, under its glittering headpiece. She waits for the audience to be seated, the band to start and the opening procession to begin.

  Three days later the famous Rodzirkus receives a damning review in the local paper citing the appearance of a pregnant woman on the trapeze as a danger, not only to the mother and unborn child, but also to the moral integrity of the town.

  The local law closes down the Rodzirkus on grounds of indecency.

  Maartje storms into the police station. The trapeze was barely off the ground, she argues. What do they take her for? The officer on the front desk crosses his arms. Even so, he says, his face like a stone, the decision is final. The circus is finished. Now, hurry along and pack up your sequins, he says.

  That night, Maartje steals the master key from the animal keeper, swings open cage doors and pen gates, and lets the animals loose into the night. Panthers, bears, leopards, horses, monkeys, and a cloud of white doves run, dart, scamper, fly or hoof it down the main street; the elephant galumphs, sending up clouds of dust. Terrified, the people of the town lock their doors, draw their curtains and bite their nails. The mayor declares a state of emergency. A military search ensues.

  By morning, the horses have been rounded up and sent back to the circus site, the doves have returned of their own volition and the chimpanzee has become the property of the new zoo. In the following days, an elderly tiger is spotted wandering among the roses at the botanic gardens and shot dead. Many of the animals, including a giant poodle and an albino donkey, head for the hills and are never accounted for. The remaining dates of the Rodzirkus tour are cancelled and the troupe deported and banned from entering the country for twenty years hence.

  Maartje reclines in her caravan, fanning herself with a newspaper, on which is printed the offending article. She has been lobbying—no, raging—against the use of animals in the Rodzirkus for years. But her family and peers have cottonwool in their ears. They say the animals are loved and happy, and would never survive in the wild.

  Outside, a fierce northerly whips across the park, obstructing the crew’s efforts to strike down and pack up the show. She hears them cursing, speculating.

  Maartje smiles—she has gotten away with it.

  She tells nobody, except, in years to come, her daughter, who tells nobody except her daughter, who tells nobody except her daughter and so on, until my mother, Leda, tells nobody but me.

  And for many years, I too say nothing, but glow with a quiet pride in the knowledge that I am the next incarnation in a matrilineage of anarchists with wings.

  The Rodzirkus started out as a small family outfit in the first half of the nineteenth century when Maartje’s parents began performing acrobatics and pantomime on the streets of Amsterdam. They soon attracted other artistes—a contortionist, a dog handler with two trained poodles, a fire-eater—incorporating them into the show. The troupe, tentatively called Rodzirkus, rented a disused boatshed on the docks, in which to workshop and rehearse new acts.

  Within a few years, the circus had acquired its first big top and started touring. In consultation with the French luminary, Jules Leotard, the Mays had assembled the rudiments of their first flying rig from salvaged sailing ropes and rigging hardware, and worked up the beginnings of their most famous act, the Flying Volgiers. (Being Dutch, they had broad shoulders and were, according to my mother, the tallest, strongest fliers in the world.)

  My mother inherited nerves of steel and reflexes as quick as a pirate’s knife; she was hot-wired to fly. As an infant, her bassinet was the six-by-three-metre safety net that her ancestors had knotted by hand (repaired many times since), held taught with ratchets and pulleys.

  No sooner had Leda learned to climb the rope ladder than she was standing on the suspended plank of wood that served as a platform, one hand on the cable, the other in the chalk bag raising a cloud of white dust. Until she was six or seven, when she could reach the bar herself, Leda’s mother or another member of the flying troupe would stand on the platform beside her, pull the trapeze in with a hook and fasten her into the safety belt. Ropes attached at either side of the belt threaded up over two pulleys on the truss then down again into her father’s pigskin-gloved hands. Then, hoicked up by the seat of her pants, Leda gripped the bar, preparing to be released to her fate.

  Forwards, backwards, forwards, she imitated the shapes she had seen adults describe in the air, piking her body at the highest points of the swing, until, at the front, her father would pull the ropes taut and call, Komaan! Now! And she would let go. For a s
hining moment she was weightless, before falling and landing on her back like an upturned beetle in the net, bouncing there. More! she would cry out, breathless, trying to stand on wobbling legs, stumbling like a drunk back to the rope ladder. More! she would shout, already halfway up to the platform.

  My mother’s hands bore the traces of her lineage. She had calloused, capable, peasants’ hands. Heed this advice, she told me: When the blisters burst, the only thing to do is wee on them.

  Many people in the circus world blamed Maartje May for the decline of the Rodzirkus empire. Some speculated she’d hit her head on the platform one too many times (my mother maintained this feat was logistically impossible). Others claimed they had seen it coming; it was only a matter of time before Maartje plunged into a tailspin. Her genius as a flier was undeniable, they said, but it masked a deep-rooted lunacy. In any case, the circus never achieved the same success after its expulsion from the colonies.

  But were it not for Maartje May, my mother argued, the circus would never have reached such grand heights in the first place. Maartje May’s actions that night were completely reasonable, she posited, when considered within the context of the stifling mores of the town in which we now lived—its addiction to rules, its prudishness, its hatred of women and animals.

  Maartje’s offence was less that she caused big brown bears to run down the oak-lined avenues knocking over dignitaries and statues (and it was not always possible to tell the two apart) than it was to display, without apology, in spangled tights and tunics, the glorious potential of the female form.