The Trapeze Act

by Libby Angel

  * * *

  April 15th

  Sixteen Souls have been lost to Scarlet Fever to date, including three Children; several others show symptoms. A man was taken this afternoon by Syphilis. Some say he had begun to show signs of the disease shortly after we set sail. By last night, he was all but insane. The poor Soul kept mostly to himself; perhaps he was aware of his Fate even as he boarded the Ship. To travel so many miles & for so many months just to leave this Life altogether! Remarkably, nobody else shows any signs of the disease. Agnes has had no dealings with the man. Meanwhile, the Kingfisher is as robust as ever. There is no shortage of rodents to satisfy his appetite. Every night I hear the scuttle of rats, the snap of traps, screeching.

  * * *

  April 18th

  Still days & nights continue to make for slow progress. It has been stiflingly hot this past week. E says we are to be grateful for Doctor Edmund’s ventilating machine—a contraption that creates a pleasant draught through the Cabin &, it is said, helps prevent spread of disease. Most evenings, before lights out, he and I wander the Decks. E names the Constellations: Ara, Scorpius. Our Captain (who is, it turns out, more affable than he first appeared) says we are very close & if the wind picks up it may be only another day or two before we sight K Island, then the Mainland.

  * * *

  April 27th

  The thrill of our first sighting of land was tempered by a bad storm and our near shipwreck on a cluster of rocks just off a small island near the coast. There has been much sickness, lament & woe all around. E says that if we do not reach the mainland within twenty-four hours he will let the bird free and swim—I am welcome to join him if I care to! I must admit I have had quite enough of Mrs H—it is all A and I can do not to laugh every time we catch sight of her on Deck, her handkerchief clutched to her nose. I am certainly looking forward to sleeping in a room without the incursion of others’ hacking, snoring and vomiting. I hardly remember what it is like to stand on ground that does not sway and lurch.

  11

  THE PEOPLE of the town never forgot they were the descendants of free immigrants, rather than of horse thieves and murderers, like the people of other states. Two hundred years after settlement, tourist brochures in the town hall still touted the superiority of the place. The churches! The restaurants! The food! The wine! The parks! The beaches! The hills! The low crime rate!

  I don’t know why they persist with this fiction, my mother said of the pamphlet, which hadn’t changed since her arrival in the town some twelve years earlier. Everybody knows the priests are paedophiles and the highways are lined with shallow graves. Just ask your father.

  For generation after generation, local parents had stood outside kindergartens and school gates assuring one another that they enjoyed the highest standard of living anywhere on Earth; that this town, more than any other town, was the perfect place to raise a family. They hummed with self-satisfaction as their polished children rushed into their arms.

  It depends what you mean by standard of living, Leda argued, whenever anyone tried this sort of line on her. It depends what kind of children you want.

  I’ll do the moonlight flit yet, she threatened, an unreadable smile on her face.

  In the meantime, we lived in the same house by the racecourse, a red brick bungalow with a green iron wood stove in the kitchen, frosted glass doors and floral carpet. Leda bought a terracotta water filter to protect us from whatever the council was putting in the water. She would never be sucked into the quagmire of complacency into which the locals sank, would never allow her children to forget the culture of flower growers, ship builders, oil painters and conquerors of fear from whence she had sprung, no matter how distant they now seemed.

  One Sunday afternoon, after visiting the botanic gardens to pay homage to the Rodzirkus tiger that had been shot there more than a century before, my mother and I chanced on a circus in the parklands, a half-moon of caravans and trailers behind a candy-striped tent, on the same pitch where the Rodzirkus had set up for the last time more than a decade before. The very spot my mother’s caravan had stood when she decided to run away.

  For a moment I hoped Leda would lead me into the big top, that she might recognise therein long-lost friends. I imagined us scoring complimentary tickets, buying fairy floss and sitting together, mother and daughter, in a fug of popcorn and cacophony of big band brass. At last I would see some of the acts I had until now only heard about: the cloud swing, the teeterboard, the flying trapeze.

  I had never seen a circus.

  Mama, I whined.

  But the closer we walked towards the tent, the more the sides of my mother’s mouth turned down. We stopped in front of a make­shift paddock where a small section of the park, no more than five metres square, had been fenced off. Inside stood four dappled horses, snuffling at the dry ground. One had a bandaged leg.

  Look, my mother said, pulling me closer. Look into their eyes.

  I tried to wrestle my arm free, but she held me with industrial strength in front of the fence. I looked at the horses, their laboured breathing, their ribs pressing through their skin like washboards. They scraped the dust with listless hooves.

  Look into their eyes, my mother commanded me, in a slightly demented way. Look into their souls and tell me you want to see the circus.

  I lay that night in my iron bed, peeling off the pink and brown floral wallpaper, hiding bits of it between the side of the bed and the wall, as was my habit. A cold wind shuddered the windowpane.

  Though I did not want to, I thought about the half-starved horses out in the park, their hooves in the frost.

  My father was working late. I waited for my mother to come and say goodnight to me and turn off my light. I could hear her ticking off my brother for not having put the bin out and then switching off his light and closing his door.

  She sashayed into my room in a cloud of Opium perfume and sat on the end of my bed, one leg snaking around the other. She wore a long brunette wig.

  I had banked on her feeling contrite after forcing me to look at the horses the way she had that afternoon. I hoped she would tuck me under the covers with my shipmates and wenches, kiss me on the forehead and perhaps offer some words of reassurance to set me sailing through the dreamscape of night.

  But no.

  Tonight, my mother announced, especially for me, she would impart a story that had not been told for many years, a story so damaging to the reputation of the circus and to the mental well-being of all involved that the circus tried their best to erase it from history. For my special edification, she would break a long-held taboo and recount, for me, the story of Punch’s revenge.

  I’m tired, I told her.

  Listen, said my mother.

  I looked helplessly over the top of my quilt.

  Punch the marmoset monkey was born in captivity in Bolivia in the 1940s. At only six months old he was hand-picked by an Estonian primate trainer named Mr Zanzibar who then escorted him back to the Rodzirkus in Amsterdam, where he had recently renewed his contract.

  It was not long before the man and his monkey developed one of the most prestigious and celebrated acts in the circus world. Mr Zanzibar quickly secured a number of lucrative contracts for Punch, promoting and advertising various products—shaving cream, magi-mixers, security doors—at exhibitions, fairs and, later, on TV. Mr Zanzibar never tired of the circus and its thrills. Despite their better-paid commitments, he and the monkey never once missed a show, until one fateful day. And until that day, every child who had ever set eyes on Punch the marmoset monkey, in his little striped suit and beret, fell immediately in love with him. He was more popular, even, than the flying trapeze act, so that the fliers were moved to joke, We’ve been upstaged by a monkey!

  Mr Zanzibar fostered Punch’s talents carefully, with integrity; he had in mind for himself and the animal a long career, not just flash-in-the-pan success. He would spend an entire afternoon refining Punch’s ballet technique; then the next day, Punch would
be learning how to turn pancakes in a frying pan, tail held proudly erect.

  Of course, monkeys are highly intelligent animals, mischievous, yes, but exacting. Despite what you might hear about the inferiority of a marmoset’s brain compared to his primate brothers, a well-trained marmoset will be as skilled and obedient as any monkey can be. Indeed, Punch was better behaved than many of his human colleagues. He didn’t have a problem with drinking or drugs for a start! He was less prone to the histrionics shown by many of his co-workers, too, though no less talented, it must be said.

  Punch was as dedicated to his craft as any other artist and as loyal as a dog. In return, Mr Zanzibar treated him like gold. The animal lived the best life possible for an animal in captivity, wanting for nothing. He had his own caravan, dietitian and masseuse. He was allowed plenty of rest. He even had a girlfriend in Germany, with whom he was producing a whole new generation of marmoset artistes. (There is a picture of him somewhere, on his birthday, dressed up to the nines, and smoking a cigar, no less.)

  The only time Punch had ever been known to commit any act of violence was in Brussels when he bit the hand of a thief who had crept onto the site one night and tried to steal him from his caravan. (Punch raised the alarm and the thief was duly apprehended. Not for the first time, the marmoset appeared on the front page of newspapers across Europe.)

  Zo! One autumn the Rodzirkus was set up in a park on the outskirts of Amsterdam. In the big top, Punch and Mr Zanzibar were rehearsing their act. Others in the show were practising too. My mother (your oma) was on the trapeze platform, dusting her hands with chalk.

  Despite the range of high-class entertainments before his eyes, the new tent manager’s son, whose name was Dwayne (God only knows how a parent could be so cruel), sat in a ringside seat, bored out of his pea-brain. He was always bored. He did not want to learn any circus skills—not juggling or clowning or flying or tumbling or knife throwing or teeterboard or Russian pole—though plenty of the performers had offered to teach him. He didn’t even want to work front of house selling merchandise: T-shirts, mugs and juggling balls. The only place management wouldn’t let Dwayne work was in the kiosk, because he was a financial liability: he would have eaten everything—the fairy floss, the popcorn, the soft drinks, the lollipops.

  And now, for his own retarded pleasure, as he sat there ringside, Dwayne started throwing peanuts at Punch’s head, distracting our poor little hero from his noble work.

  Valiantly, Punch went on with his rehearsal. You could see the concentration on his face: The triangle chimes twice, I go up the ladder onto the platform, throw my hat in the air, pirouette, and the hat lands on my head.

  The next day when Mr Zanzibar and Punch were rehearsing their act, there was Dwayne the inbred, sitting in the same ringside seat with another bag of peanuts. And so it went for the next few days. Every time Punch ran through his act, incorporating details yet to be performed for the first time, the poor little monkey had to endure a steady missile attack of peanuts aimed at his head.

  Such was his professionalism, the animal barely flinched: The triangle chimes twice, I go up the ladder onto the platform, throw my hat in the air, pirouette, and the hat lands on my head.

  It was Mr Zanzibar, himself, who intervened. One day, after rehearsal, he grabbed the boy by his cellulite-dimpled wrists and drew him close, exclaiming, A thousand curses on your head. How dare you jeopardise the safety of my monkey and the success of our act! I do not care who your father is. This will not be tolerated, do you understand?

  The fliers watched from the platform and whispered to one another: Thank God. They, too, had had a gutful of the obese child and his imbecilic way with peanuts.

  For the next week, the boy sat ringside, sullenly watching rehearsals. He still had his peanuts but, now, instead of throwing them, he ate them all. It was with strange relief that the cast and crew witnessed the boy cramming each and every nut into the greedy hole in his face. At the end of the week the boy looked more obese and sulkier than ever, his eyes like buttons in a club lounge. His face had developed a bovine look about it.

  Leda paused here to impersonate before continuing.

  Nonetheless, all concerned were pleased that the matter appeared to be resolved.

  Alas! At the final dress rehearsal, the boy was at it again. Unable to resist whatever demon had gotten into him, he cast one, two, three peanuts straight at the poor little monkey. His aim wasn’t bad considering he was such a halfwit. The fliers stood on the platform, tutting and shaking their heads.

  To his eternal credit, Punch remained composed, barely flinching as the peanuts hailed down around him: The triangle chimes twice, I go up the ladder onto the platform, throw my hat in the air, pirouette, and the hat lands on my head.

  But by the end of his run-through, dear old Mr Zanzibar lost his cool. He drew the boy aside again—or rather dragged the boy’s backside behind the tent and threatened him with blue murder—then went directly to his father and complained bitterly, a delicate matter given the tent manager’s reluctance to believe any ill of the child. Finally, Mr Zanzibar marched over to the kiosk and forbade the staff from selling any more peanuts to the fat-arsed, red-faced devil-child.

  When Monday came it was time to strike down the tent and rigging, pack up and leave for the tour. According to years of careful ritual, each component was stowed in its rightful place—the tent poles and trusses on one truck, the rigging and canvas on another; the teeterboard, the trapeze rig, the net—each piece of equipment was checked and accounted for, then packed. Of course, there were no longer caravans and cages on wheels pulled by horses, but the trucks and trailers had the Rodzirkus logo painted on their sides for all the motorists to see. By sunrise, the circus vehicles were driving in convoy along the highways and roads that cut through the fields and forests of Nederlands, towards Germany. It was late winter now, and all across the land, tulip bulbs were preparing to shoot green spears up through the frost.

  When they reached Dusseldorf a few hours later, they pulled up to their first pitch. The animals were put out to graze in lush green paddocks with plenty of room to stretch their legs. The cast and crew unpacked the gear and started the arduous task of rebuilding the circus from the ground up, working hard and fast for eight hours straight, until the tent was raised, the guy ropes taut, the canvas threaded, the flying rig in place, the sawdust spread evenly over the ring. Only then did Punch and Mr Zanzibar retire to their caravan to rest before the premiere of their new act. While the tent manager worked, his son Dwayne amused himself outside the tent like a moron, repeatedly hitting a half-gallon drum with a stick.

  The next day, the town ran a promo in the local gazette featuring a close-up of Punch snuggled up to a young child’s face. The article announced the premiere, that very night, of the new Rodzirkus show, boasting feats of glory the world had never seen.

  That night, the queue went twice around the park before patrons fed through the tent flaps, filling the big top to fire-regulation capacity. As guests of honour, the town dignitaries were seated in the front rows.

  When at last the crowd was settled, the ringmaster let forth his spiel and the show began. First up was a newly choreographed tumbling tableau, a high energy start, followed by the revised act by the Siamese-twin contortionists, who really were from Siam (sadly, Bethany and Bessie did not live past the age of twenty-one), and then came the Chinese hoop-diving spectacle. The first act ran smoothly and, needless to say, was well received. Throughout, Dwayne sat ringside in the reserved seats behind the tent pole stuffing hot chips (procured by his father) into his cakehole.

  The second part of the program opened with the new flying act. On her first return from the catcher, Oma missed the bar and fell into the net. This was no big deal: whenever a flier missed a trick he or she would simply climb back up to the platform and try again. When, on her second attempt, she made it safely back to the platform, the crowd were all the more pleased. The flying act finished with the incredible Aramis ex
ecuting his first-ever-in-performance triple full-in-full-out twisting layout to catch. The crowd roared; some people rose to their feet. It was surely the best flying act since the days of Maartje May.

  Next came the Russian clown act, generally considered to be the lowest point in the show. Hobobouschka and Novobrutska, or whatever they called themselves that season, came cartwheeling out in their dadsy patchwork pants and oversized shoes. (So not sexy.) The children in the audience watched, mildly perplexed, suspecting the humour was over their heads, and the adults chattered away, thinking the antics beneath them, while the clowns dithered their way through some seriously lame slapstick involving buckets, umbrellas and kazoos. Behind them, the stagehands, dressed in black, dismantled the flying rig and raked the sawdust.

  After a seeming eternity there was a smattering of bored applause and the clowns left the ring. Next came Madeleine’s famous dancing horses: gleaming silver beasts with silken braided tails and manes, their necks arched and hooves held high. The horses pranced around the ring, reversed, pranced the other way. They turned in, turned out, reared up on their hind legs, skipped sideways and backwards, crossed and uncrossed their hooves in perfect synchronicity, forming intricate mandalas in the sawdust. As they snorted, their breath made soft clouds in the air. Such was their training that Madeleine herself barely needed to appear. The audience sat, transfixed. The front of house, the ushers and the canteen ladies all snuck inside the tent into the dark warmth to watch Madeleine’s magical horses, the most impressive horses on the circuit. They really danced; more than just spectacle, they offered a metaphysical experience.