The Trapeze Act

by Libby Angel

  …

  and in the evening we had distant thunder but no rain.

  …

  The information we gleaned from the natives here as to the inhospitable character of the country to the north-west agreed very little with the accounts we have previously heard. They state we should not be able to cross the ranges as they are covered with sharp pointed stones and great rocks, that will fall and crush us to death—but that if we do get across them to the low country on the other side, the heat will kill us all—that we shall find neither water or grass, or wood to light a fire with. That the native wells are very deep, and that the cattle will be unable to drink out of them—and, finally, that the water is salt, and that the natives let down bundles of rushes to soak it up.

  Capt says we should be aware, of course, that a great deal of what they say is fiction.

  …

  but they only inclined their heads forward, so as to rest their hands on each other’s breasts and wept violently, while the men kept shouting ‘kerno, kerno,’ ‘rocks, rocks,’ and insisted that we should all be killed.

  …

  15

  WHEN GILBERT didn’t come home for thirty-two nights in a row (I counted using a prisoner’s abacus on my bedroom wall), my mother pulled a suitcase and an overnight bag off the top shelf of the wardrobe and swept his belongings into them until his side of the wardrobe was almost bare. She hummed all the while, as if she were doing the dusting, except she never dusted anything. Then she pitched the whole lot out the bedroom window into the sword ferns beneath, where it lay, ties, shirtsleeves and pinstriped pant legs spewing out of zipper mouths.

  Another week passed and still my father did not come. I woke up one morning to find my mother leaning against the kitchen sink drinking Scotch and smoking a cigarette, her first in years.

  He’s not coming back any time soon, she informed me, as I dodged around her to use the tap. He’s moved into a flat in town, to be closer to Cara.

  Maybe I’ll move into a nice flat too, she added.

  I covered my mouth with the glass to hide an involuntary smirk.

  Where would that leave us? I mumbled.

  She flicked her ash into the sink and said, In the doghouse, I guess.

  My father rang on the house phone to talk to us, the children he’d left behind. He sounded cheerful. We could go and visit him every second weekend and stay in the spare room of his new flat. We could ring him up at his place any time we liked, though he might not always be there to answer the phone, of course (we were only allowed to ring him at work in cases of emergency).

  I asked my father if I could meet Cara. There was a long silence on the other end of the phone before he changed the subject. What would we like to have for dinner when we stayed over this coming weekend? It could only be one of two things: omelettes or nachos, which was more than my mother could be bothered with at the time, anyway.

  The following Friday evening our mother dropped Kingston and me outside the block of flats where my father now lived. We had barely stepped out of the car before she roared off down the road.

  We stood on the footpath holding our possessions like orphans.

  Adios! my brother said, throwing his bag over his shoulder, turning heel.

  Wait! I called after him. Which number flat is it?

  Fifty-six, he called back, before striding off in the direction of the parklands.

  I looked at the red-brick block. There were only ten letterboxes, five on each side of the entrance. A thatch of Salvation Jane covered one wall, its purple trumpets heralding my dismay.

  I dropped my bag in front of the security door then pressed buzzers at random until a woman, who turned out to be Kate, and lived in the flat adjacent to my father’s, answered my call.

  I heard her skipping down the stairs to let me in.

  She and my father had become the best of friends in the week since he’d moved in, she enthused, as she shook my hand. She led me to the second floor and knocked on a door.

  It’s your daughter, she announced, as if he might no longer recognise me.

  Where is Kingston? my father demanded of me.

  I shrugged.

  It was unfortunate but unsurprising that my brother didn’t have the maturity to deal with the situation, my father lamented, once the door was closed with Kate on the other side.

  I looked around the flat. The furniture was new: a sofa, a lounge chair, a small square dining table with chairs. A couple of paintings leaned with their faces to the wall, waiting to be hung.

  Oh well, all the more nachos for us, my father said.

  I perched on the edge of the sofa hugging a cushion to my belly. I scanned the room for evidence of Cara but found none.

  Kingston rocked up just in time for dinner, just as my father was about to ring Leda to tell her he’d gone errant.

  We sat around the table with matching glasses and plates. Afterwards, we watched a documentary about baboons on Channel Two, the volume turned up high enough to relieve us of any obligation to talk.

  The next morning my father introduced us to some other children in the flats. They showed us their toys with pride: a racetrack with pit stop and electric racing cars, a bright pink Barbie campervan, a Barbie doll and a Ken doll, the first I’d ever seen in real life, cartoon-faced and repulsive.

  In the evening we dropped in on Kate while she and my father watched the news. When the prime minister came on, Kate threw a cushion at the screen and yelled, Get off of my television, you moron! Gilbert haw-hawed beside her, having most likely voted the prime minister in.

  Back at my father’s, my brother and I went to bed in our matching red tubular steel beds set against opposite walls in the spare room. The bed linen still had fold marks in it from the packet.

  As it turned out, the closest I ever got to Cara was at school. One Monday morning, before general class announcements, the form teacher approached my desk and, looming over me with her hand on my shoulder in the style of a family portrait, she whispered, I’m sorry things are so difficult for you at home. If you ever want to talk about it, I’m here for you.

  My mother had warned me about the pitfalls of pastoral care.

  Later in the week the form teacher approached me a second time to tell me, in similarly hushed tones, that because of my special circumstances, the staff had arranged for me to join another maths class.

  I had never paid much attention in maths. It was of no consequence to me how many degrees there were in the angle between the ladder and the house; the value of x seemed beside the point. Admittedly, and I was not alone in thinking so, the subject was made even less attractive by the unfortunate fact that my maths teacher, Mrs Bagot, was overweight and had halitosis.

  It was Mrs Bagot’s initiative that I shift classes, the form teacher explained, because she felt it unfair for me to have to face her, the mother of the woman my father was having an affair with, in the classroom.

  My hand flew over my mouth to catch the laughter that was falling out. Mrs Bagot was Cara’s mother? Surely my father could do better than that?

  I had imagined Cara as one of the great beauties of the world, at least as beautiful as my mother, but that now seemed impossible. Mrs Bagot, who we dreaded standing over our desks and breathing her sulphur breath on us? Mrs Bagot of the scaly, lymphatic legs, ankles spilling over the straps of health sandals; of the broken capillaries; the underside of whose arms wobbled as she dashed off the equals signs on the blackboard! The same Mrs Bagot who deigned to spare my feelings?

  My mother started it, I told the form teacher. She went to the pub with Mr Nobis. This may or may not have been true.

  For the following six weeks, every Wednesday afternoon at two o’clock, while my classmates enjoyed a free double period in which they were allowed to work on handicrafts or read or write, I traipsed along to the main office building and sat in a windowless room in the company of the school counsellor and a dying pot plant.

  The counsellor asked questions a
bout my mother, father and brother, who were by now well-known public figures.

  But this was a subject, like any other, where my answers would be marked as right or wrong. In order to pass, I would have to admit that my mother was insane, my father a genius, and my brother and I damaged beyond repair.

  I told the counsellor instead what I had learned about Ernest, Henrietta and Flying Maartje May: I come from a long line of warriors and explorers, I assured her. My ancestors rode elephants and conquered deserts, seas and skies. Some of them, like my mother, could fly.

  It’s lovely to have an imagination, the counsellor smiled, but at some stage in our development we need to start distinguishing fantasy from reality.

  I pushed my glasses up the bridge of my nose.

  I am nothing if not a truth seeker, I told her.

  My brother remained at liberty to invent his own kind of therapy: stealing insignias off the boots and bonnets of prestige cars. Having saved and pooled their pocket money, he and Lloyd invested in a set of quality screwdrivers especially for the job. They roamed the neighbourhood after dark, targeting cars parked on the street: BMWs, Mercedes and, once, a Rolls Royce, hiding the trophies in a sack, to be swapped or sold at school.

  Driving with my mother through the car park at the local shops, I remember thinking how strange it was that so many cars had their logos missing. I wondered if, out of security concerns, their owners did not like to advertise the makes of their vehicles. Our own car, meanwhile, although dented and scratched in places, still had its Volvo tags intact.

  One evening the owner of a BMW looked out of his lounge-room window to see two figures dressed in black with matching balaclavas, one leaning over the bonnet of his car, a screwdriver flashing in the streetlight, the other standing on the corner, on the lookout. He called out to his wife to ring the police and ran outside to confront the thieves.

  Lloyd panicked and ran away down the street. Seeing no other way out, Kingston took off his balaclava and confronted the man.

  He came from a single-parent family, my brother beseeched, as he replaced the screwdriver in his tool roll; his mother was struggling to pay the bills and his sister was intellectually disabled.

  The man took pity and led Kingston into the house. He decided not to press charges, and asked his wife to cancel the call. But the police were already on their way and thus compelled, as they explained upon their arrival, to write a report, confiscate the stolen property and drive my brother home.

  From the kitchen window I watched Kingston step out of the back seat of the blue police car, the tool roll tucked under his arm, and wave the officers off down the road.

  If you speak a word about this, he threatened me, it will be the last word you ever speak.

  In fact, his cupboards were full of stolen objects, most of which were council property: street signs, witches hats, flashing lights—objects with no use beyond their intended purpose, objects so obviously stolen that this was their primary attraction.

  The nadir occurred during the school holidays when Kingston and I were wandering around a building site, where the local community library was in the early stages of development, and he noticed the key had been left in the ignition of one of the bulldozers.

  My brother climbed up the front tyre and into the cab. After a couple of splutters and false starts, the engine came to life.

  Bye, he shouted. I’m going for a ride.

  Wait! I yelled, but he couldn’t hear me.

  He tested the various levers and shifters; the shovel hinged up and down. He stepped on the accelerator and the yellow beast crept forward, busting through a string of orange pennants, out of the building site, over a bed of pansies. He drove across the footpath, rocked down the gutter and thumped onto the road.

  I ran along beside the bulldozer until we reached the intersection of Ormond and Ridley Roads. I stopped on the kerb and watched it sail on through the red light.

  Cars swerved around it or skidded to a halt before my brother stopped the machine on the pedestrian crossing and spun it around and around in tight circles, the shovel raised in the air like a hungry mouth, and he, the driver, standing in the cabin, laughing and pumping his fists.

  When a divvy van pulled up next to the bulldozer I hid behind a fuse box on the footpath and watched. Two policemen hauled Kingston by the armpits out of the cabin, escorted him into the back of their vehicle, locked the doors and drove away.

  I sprinted all the way up the hill to the spaceship to tell our mother what had happened. I was breathless, bursting with pride or shame, I don’t know which. But Leda was not at home. There was nobody to tell.

  My brother returned a couple of hours later, stoned off his head. He boasted about how he had shouted at the police, Easy up the front there, while he had thrashed about like a pinball in the back of the van. He told me how, just as the van had pulled into the car park behind the police station, he’d remembered the lump of hash in his pocket and swallowed it whole.

  He claimed to have used his single phone call to contact Channel Seven, offering them exclusive rights to his story, which he framed as a tragic illustration of the high rate of juvenile delinquency in children from broken homes.

  Cameras and microphones awaited him as he descended the steps of the station into the late afternoon sun. Or so he said. We never saw if the segment made it to air because my parents had arranged the aerial on top of the spaceship in such a way as to prohibit reception of all commercial channels.

  In any case, no charges were laid, no referrals made to the juvenile justice system, and neither my brother nor I found it necessary to mention the incident again.

  16

  MY FATHER came home without fanfare. As we had always done, my brother and I made him late for work whenever he drove us into the city. Fucking idiot! he yelled at any driver who cut in front of us. Fucking lights! he shouted, every time we had to stop at an intersection. Fuck!

  Leda thought it prudent to inform all those concerned that my father had returned to his wife and children. To Cara and Mrs Bagot she sent Hallmark condolence cards with basketfuls of kittens on the fronts; to my form teacher she sent a note requesting she make a general announcement at assembly or publish a notice in the school newsletter rather than continue to disseminate her speculations one individual at a time; and, finally, she rang the school counsellor to inform her that since my status as a member of a normative nuclear family had been restored, there were no longer any grounds for her to detain me from my usual lessons.

  The next time I saw Mrs Bagot was at careers day. Despite her amplitude, she seemed much diminished. Her eyes had shrunk back into her face as if she had seen too much. Or maybe she was becoming myopic.

  We had to be realistic in our career choices, Mrs Bagot counselled us, directing her pointer to a series of overlapping circles she’d drawn on the blackboard. An interest in politics did not guarantee one’s future as a prime minister, after all, but a degree in law or politics would give us plenty of options nonetheless. Other fields were more limiting.

  I always wanted to be a ballerina, for example, she told us, but I didn’t have the right shape.

  We did not restrain our mirth.

  When my turn came to stand up behind my desk and state my ambitions to the class, I announced: I am going to leave this godforsaken town and set the world on fire.

  Nobody challenged me.

  All the town’s secrets flew back into people’s mouths where they belonged. My father’s lovers crawled hush hush back into their burrows. The bilious light of scandal shone on me no more. Apart from passing Mrs Bagot in the corridor now and then or crossing paths with the counsellor under the poplar trees in the quadrangle, I regained some hope of anonymity.

  But neither of my parents was the mousy type, and it was not long before they again featured on the seven-o’clock news.

  There we were, the family unit, sitting together on the built-in bench seat, when there appeared on the television screen footage of a c
rane lifting our family car out of the river.

  My father, brother and I rested our splades in our bowls and looked at Leda.

  Forgot the handbrake, she shrugged, and continued eating her tuna mornay.

  Barely a week later, Kingston and I were watching the news when we saw pictures of our father running across the square, a gaggle of reporters in hot pursuit.

  Investigations are continuing, the reporter announced, into a series of death threats received by renowned local criminal defence barrister, Gilbert Lord.

  We bid our mother come and see.

  Zo, she sighed, handing us each a plate of cheese on toast.

  Cool, said Kingston.

  My father rang to tell us not to worry, that he would be home shortly to explain. In the meantime, we should lock all the doors and windows.

  My mother bolted the doors and many windows, humming as she did so, then sat down and resumed eating.

  An hour later Gilbert arrived with Detective Sergeant Brian Gilmore in tow. Brian (we could call him that) explained that although the situation was unlikely to amount to anything much, procedures had to be followed, precautions taken. A rotation of officers would be installed in and outside our premises. Where necessary, my father would be driven to and from work until such a time as the threat subsided. His forthcoming court appearances would have to be postponed.

  The assistance with transport would be much appreciated, my mother said; she was on the lookout for a new car.

  Gilbert and Brian stayed up half the night talking. Whenever one of us entered the room they lowered their voices. Slinking around the kitchen on the pretext of making a packed lunch, I gathered only that the threat had something to do with the Mr Whippy case. Keuper had been charged and wanted to appeal his sentence; since he was behind bars, one of his associates must have been issuing the threats on his behalf.

  When my father had first represented him, he had described Keuper as a low life with poor hygiene. I pictured Keuper in prison, scratching his crotch, his yellow toenails curling over the edges of his plastic flip-flops, dandruff snowing down onto the shoulders of his prison-issue jumper. I imagined his foul breath contaminating the payphone receiver as he instructed his henchmen to make threats to kill my father.