The Trapeze Act

by Libby Angel

  Poor old Oma—her husband dead, the flying act fallen apart at the seams, the reputation of the Rodzirkus in tatters. Out of love for Jack and Horatio, she went to work patching up the old tent, and scrubbing away the mould, while Jack and Horatio dragged out the Wheel, cleaned and oiled its parts, and assembled it in a warehouse near the docks, rented especially for the purpose.

  Six months later, the two men had become friends of the kind who entrust their lives to one another, and had developed a class act. Horatio’s transformation from Captain Humperdick to one half of the famous Wheel of Death act was complete.

  Captain who? My brother interrupted.

  Well…My mother began to explain the so-called subtleties of strippers’ stage names and sexual innuendoes.

  We get it, I said. By default, I had become the family wowser.

  Zo, my mother resumed. To the sound of thin matinee applause, Clementine exited the ring, bareback on the grey horse. Two men opened the tent flaps and she rode between them, out into the sunlight, the other horse following close behind. (There were, by that time, only two horses left in the show.)

  Jack and Clementine’s son, who was around three years old, waddled off after his mother, following the tracks of hooves in the grass.

  Clementine dismounted, stroked the animals’ necks, closed the pen gate then ran to meet the child, whose arms were outstretched towards her like a sleepwalker.

  It was interval. Feet clattered on boards as the audience made its way down from the seats. Outside, at the canteen caravan, adults purchased polystyrene cups of International Roast, children rotted their teeth on toffee apples and clouds of fairy floss (the cheapest kind, sad to say).

  Inside the tent, stagehands rolled the Wheel of Death across the sawdust, attached guy lines and ratchets, cranked the cables taut.

  Behind the tent, Horatio took a final drag on a Winfield Blue and ground the butt under the sole of his Russian boot. He and Jack, in matching white unitards, used the remaining minutes to shake out tight muscles, stretch sore thighs or biceps, and bounce up and down to energise their legs.

  They had been performing the act for almost a year now, had practised the same ritual four nights a week, twice a day on Saturdays, and every Sunday afternoon. It was like breathing for Jack. He was born into the circus, had never considered any other sort of life. With the Wheel act up and running, he felt more than ever, that he was fulfilling his destiny. Horatio, too, felt he had found his calling. He loved his new career, the chance to show that he was more than just a sex object.

  Every Sunday evening after the show, our mother recalled, Horatio would knock on caravan doors to muster as many troops as he could to join him at the local bars and clubs of whichever town the circus happened to be in. There were many stories about these epic nights—the night he and Mandos got apprehended by police in Rotterdam, the night he stole a double-decker bus in London and drove it down Oxford Street on the wrong side of the road.

  My brother chuckled.

  At the sound of the interval bell, the audience filtered in, children waving rubber skeletons and kewpie dolls on sticks (more of Mandos’ supposed innovations). They stared at the Wheel in wonder.

  Zo. The ringmaster switched on the mic, the speakers screamed with feedback, the children covered their ears. His voice blared over the tannoy, a stream of superlatives, introducing the act. As the opening strains of the music unwound, the men sprang through the curtains into the ring.

  What kind of music, my brother asked.

  Rock’n’roll, my mother replied.

  The night it happened, she went on, she was around the side of the tent, warming up for her recently introduced cloud-swing act. (She had suspected, rightly, that the flying act would soon get the axe, and, in the interest of self-preservation, had spent the preceding year developing a solo act.)

  I know how this is going to end, my brother again interrupted.

  Sh! I said. Despite the near certainty that somebody in the story would die, I felt comfortable on the big bed in the warm light, and my mother’s voice pleased me, the familiar resonance of it, if only because it was hers.

  Jack wiped his feet on a strategically placed square of carpet. With all his strength, he pushed and pulled one of the wheels, forwards, backwards, then jumped in. The faster he walked on the inside of the wheel, the higher it swung on the frame, higher and higher. As his own wheel neared the floor, Horatio grabbed hold of it and climbed in. On either end of the frame, each man walked in his wheel; as one neared the floor, the other arced high in the air, until the frame turned all the way over.

  After several rotations, the men slowed pace until the wheels stopped, the frame balanced horizontally, parallel to the floor. Each man faced outwards, legs apart, arms outstretched, their stances reminiscent of da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Their smiles expressed genuine élan; both had whitened teeth. The audience applauded, infected with joy.

  Next, Jack climbed onto the outside of his wheel and began to walk on top of it. He waved to the audience as he rode it round; they laughed and cheered him on. This time, when the frame stopped, Horatio’s wheel was at the bottom, and Jack’s directly above him, both wheels stilled in space. Way up there, balancing on top of the world, Jack pressed into a handstand, his feet almost touching the cupola of the tent. The audience oohed and aahed; some people covered their mouths with their hands.

  In the second half of the act, both men ran on the outside of their wheels like monkeys on barrels. The mechanical beast whizzed round and round, faster and faster, until the frame began to blur like a hubcap on a car wheel.

  Zo, our mother went on. Propelled by the spinning wheels the frame turned at such a speed that as each wheel descended, its rider was suspended briefly in the air, like a cartoon character running off the edge of a cliff, his wheel dropping beneath him before he landed on it and ran. The music throbbed, distorted by the speakers, and a force of air blew the top layer of sawdust to the edges of the ring.

  Until, at last, the frame slowed and came to a halt, and the wheels were still, balanced like a pair of scales, with the men standing inside them. With the sincerity of a midday game-show host, the ringmaster’s voice intruded over the sound system. Ladies and gentlemen, he said. Boys and girls. He requested the audience hold its applause and sit tight for the finale. The audience obeyed, for it was clear what was at stake. A stagehand appeared in the ring and threw a skipping rope up to Jack who caught it in one hand.

  Now our mother became edgy, breathless. Perhaps she had drunk too much coffee. She kicked the bedclothes down the end of the bed as if they threatened to swallow her. Her eyes became like whirligigs and she began to talk at an ever-increasing pace, as if she herself were the Wheel of Death, governed by the great gods of speed, gravity and centripetal force, spinning unstoppably towards catastrophe. I tried to stay clear of her elbows.

  The men ran, flew, ran on their wheels while the frame turned. Jack whipped the rope under his feet, two, three, four times in a row, while his wheel kept spinning beneath him.

  Thinking the climax upon them, the audience applauded, satisfied. But on the next rotation of the frame, after the wheel dropped beneath him, Horatio failed to find his feet, and, as his wheel neared the floor, he was flung into the sawdust.

  It wasn’t a bad fall. Every Wheel rider has envisaged it; most have experienced it at least once. The trick is to roll out of the way before the second wheel comes down.

  Clementine was in the caravan putting the child in his cot for his afternoon nap. She would follow the act by listening to the music and punctuating applause. They were halfway through the finale, she deduced.

  The moment it happened, Jack knew that Horatio had fallen. He dropped the skipping rope and lay flat against the outside of his wheel, gripping its edges, preparing to clear the floor.

  Without its counterbalance, Jack’s wheel thundered down.

  But Horatio did not move out of the way fast enough and Jack’s wheel slammed down on top of h
im, pinning him to the floor like a rat in a spring-loaded trap.

  My brother was silent now.

  This was not the victory over death that the audience had paid to see, my mother continued. It’s part of the act, the parents told their children, who were not convinced. A few people scuttled down the boards and out of the exits, others waited to see what would happen next.

  Clementine knew, from the long silence, that something had gone wrong. She heard the ringmaster over the system, the tone downbeat, but the words imperceptible.

  She sang to the baby. It’s just a technical problem, she told herself. They’re probably having trouble shifting the Wheel out of the ring.

  She heard the wail of the ambulance.

  I did not choose this life, she thought.

  The child was restless and she stroked his brow. She wanted to defer the moment of knowing, but, despite herself, looked out of the window to see Jack running across the field. He was running and flapping his hands as if he’d burned them on a frying pan. She saw the shape of her name in his mouth: Clementine!

  She freefell into relief before a new horror dawned: Horatio!

  After twenty minutes, the ambulance skulked away in silence. The stagehands packed up the Wheel and dropped the cloud-swing in from the truss. There was blood in the sawdust like in a butcher’s shop.

  By this time, our mother went on, there were no more than five sad-arsed ghouls left in the seats, but Mandos ordered us to finish the show. Everybody was spooked, of course, but what else were we to do? I climbed the rope onto the cloud-swing, numb, on autopilot. I usually swung so high the rope went slack but now I swung gingerly, as if for the first time. I skipped big tricks for safer options: back balance, crucifix, knee-hang. I did nothing where I had to lose contact with the rope. I don’t remember whether the audience applauded.

  The show ended unremarkably. Except that Horatio was dead.

  My mother was a veteran of doom, telling her stories as cheerfully as a crow at a funeral. But looking at her face in the candlelight I caught a glimpse of something I hadn’t seen before, something melancholy.

  And five days later, she concluded, Oma was taken away, you know, by the white coats.

  I started crying.

  Oh, for God’s sake! My mother laughed, suddenly back to her old form. It’s the Wheel of Death—how did you expect it to end?

  On the other side of the bed, my brother was sound asleep. Leda nudged him until he stirred.

  Think of it as a love story, she said.

  Kingston sleepwalked out of the bedroom and I followed.

  Our mother bid us goodnight in a formal way, as if we were somebody else’s children, then blew out the candle.

  …

  The appearance of the desert is like that of an immense beach, like the waves of the sea in endless succession, exhibiting a regularity that water alone could have given. No object of any kind breaks the horizon; we are as lonely as a ship at sea, and as a navigator seeking for land, only that we have the disadvantage of an unsteady compass, without any fixed point on which to steer.

  …

  The birds are mute, and the leaves of the trees, under which we are sitting, fall like a snow shower. The sky is without a cloud, either by day or night, and I cannot but be apprehensive.

  …

  The wind blowing heavily from N.E. to E.S.E. filled the air with an impalpable red dust, giving the sun the most foreboding and lurid appearance as we looked upon him. The ground is so heated that our matches falling on it ignite; and having occasion to make a night signal, we found the whole of our rockets had been rendered useless, as on being lit they exploded at once without rising from the ground.

  …

  Screws rattle loose, crates fall apart, the horn handles of our instruments splinter in the heat, so too our combs. Even the fluid in our pens and brushes dries so rapidly that it is nearly impossible to paint, draw, or write.

  …

  and the dazzling brightness of the moon is one of the most distressing things, impossible indeed, to shut out its light.

  …

  I suffer great pains in my spine and hips.

  …

  but returning to our little bivouac, we found the water there had sunk from 9ft-3ft. The colour at once betrayed its quality—the surface is quite green, and the water itself is of a red colour.

  …

  We looked towards the little sandy mound on which the tents had stood, but no white object there met our eye; we rode slowly up to the stockade but found it silent and deserted.

  …

  I went to the tree and dug up the bottle to find a letter informing us that they had been most reluctantly obliged to retreat.

  …

  a buzzing sensation on the crown of the head, as if a hot iron had been there.

  …

  the carcase of his horse dried up like a mummy, in a perfect state of preservation, and beside it, the cabbage hat and the stirrup irons in the sand.

  …

  The stillness of death reigns around us, no living creature is to be heard; nothing visible inhabits this dreary desert but the ant, even the flies shun it, and yet its unyielding surface is marked over by tracks.

  …

  We saw in the distance, a small column of smoke rising up from amongst the trees, towards which we silently bent our steps.

  …

  the women ceaselessly hammering and preparing the meat, of which, from their appearance, so small a proportion falls to their share.

  …

  how presumptuous it is of man to question the arrangements of an Allwise Power whose operations and purposes are equally hidden from us. I am half angry at myself for having been so credulous.

  …

  but when I turned from my meditations to address my companions, I found that I was alone.

  18

  LEDA ABANDONED her wigs without warning, then her costumes and, finally, all her fineries—the silk shirts, the linen pants, the Italian shoes—until everything on her side of the wardrobe was gone, except the few items she would wear from now unto eternity: a pair of overalls, two flannel shirts, a pair of work boots, the wooden clogs (long since covered in texta scribble) and a men’s trench coat (which doubled as a dressing gown and gave her the appearance of a park-bench drunk). She also kept seven silk scarves she had recently acquired—props for the forthcoming production of Salome, in which she was to play, with frightening conviction, the title role.

  At the end of this purge, a row of green garbage bags filled with wigs, polystyrene heads, lamé dresses, lederhosen, the astronaut suit, the follow-me-home shoes, the yeti feet and so on led from the master bedroom to the front door. Dressed in her latest utilitarian get-up, she dumped the first of several carloads into the charity bin outside the local petrol station. All her jewellery, including a Cartier watch, as well as several rings and brooches that had belonged to my father’s grandmother, she swept into a shopping bag and cashed for two hundred dollars at a pawnbrokers in town.

  That evening, using one of Gilbert’s disposable razors from the bathroom cabinet, she attempted to shave her head. The result was somewhat patchy.

  Let them see the truth of me, she said.

  It wasn’t long before she began applying herself to the other rooms in the house, starting with the kitchen. Out went the plastic measuring cups, the food processor, the toaster, the Tupperware; out went the jars of chutney and jam, most of them unopened. Out went the majority of the contents from the miscellany drawer: the tape measure, a tangled ball of string, a plastic tube of glitter, anonymous keys, electrical cords.

  All this crap, my mother said, is history.

  Next came the bathroom. Out went the rest of her makeup—lipstick, mascara, eye-shadow; out went the Reef Oil, the wax strips, my father’s collection of cologne. It stinks! My mother declared, piling it all into a bin bag.

  Out went the bathroom scales.

  In the lounge room, books went flying off the shelves,
all but a sacred few, the epics and tragedies—Homer, Euripides, Tolstoy. The rest were stacked in boxes and the boxes driven away in the back of the car like coffins.

  Sure enough, the time came for my brother and me to clean out our rooms.

  Fill them up, Leda instructed us, handing us two bin bags each.

  Hoping to minimise my losses, I set about filling the bottom of the bags with screwed up balls of paper before filling them with clothes that no longer fitted and some old text books. I tidied up my room, squashing toys and books down in crates, cramming as much as I could into the corners of the built-in cupboards. I hid the folding knife under my pillow. The writings inside the pillowcase I tied to the underside of my bed.

  Two hours later my mother appeared for the inspection.

  No more plastic crap, she said, pulling a couple of dolls by the hair out of a crate, stuffing them into one of the bags.

  She’d rather gnaw her own leg off, she ranted, than join the pageant of prestige cars outside the school gates, children waving their arms out of tinted windows clutching the latest capitalist abhorrence: Etch-a-sketch, View Master, Barbie and her anorexic cronies. She had apparently forgotten that she had not picked us up from school in years.

  I had purposely put my least valued items at the tops of the crates: dolls that had already been disfigured by my brother, their eyes full of pin-holes. As I watched my mother leave my room with a fat garbage bag in each hand and nary a look under the bed, I felt satisfied that I had, for the first time ever, matched her, or at least that I was beginning to understand the rules of the game.

  Not so my brother, who had spent the two hours penning a tract against my mother, which unsurprisingly, was the first item to be laid fell.

  I watched with trepidation from outside his room: out went the screwdrivers, the bottles and jars for bombs, the water pistols, the stack of car magazines. And, without any reprimand at all from our mother, after she had flung the doors of his cupboard open, out went the collection of council property: the witches hats, the high-vis vests, the string of orange pennants, the flashing orange lights.