by JH Fletcher
When he was tired of walking, he sat down on the ground and looked about him. All he could see was shadows. No light, no grass. No mother. Suddenly he did not like being alone. He did not like this place any more at all. He was frightened.
‘I want to go back.’
He said it quietly, then out loud, complaining to the trees. They stood and looked at him and did nothing.
He started to cry. ‘Jamie wants to go home.’
He listened to the sound of his cries, liking them. He thought they would bring his mother, as they always had before, but this time nothing happened.
Presently he got up. Now he was more frightened than ever. The shadows weren’t his friends. He wanted to run away from them but they were everywhere. He began to run anyway, wanting to get back as quickly as he could to the world where he was safe, but wherever he went the shadows followed him. The big trees were everywhere. He did not know which way to go, was crying so hard that he could see hardly anything at all.
The ground was covered with things that tripped him up, like the green and brown and orange-spotted thing. He turned round and round but could see nothing he recognised. All the trees and shadows looked the same.
Soon he discovered he couldn’t go on any longer. First he sat, then lay down in the space between two pieces of a tree that stuck out a long way before disappearing into the ground. There were big leaves, not green and shiny like the ones he knew, but hard and brown. They made a noise when he lay on them. He went to sleep all the same, because he was tired. He was still crying, although he knew that when he woke up he would be warm and safe again.
He wasn’t. He was just as lonely and frightened as he had been before. There was a horrible feeling inside him. He did not know what to do. He scrambled to his feet and walked on. Something was following him.
He stopped and looked back fearfully, tears once again beginning to flow. He couldn’t see anything, but something was there; he was certain of it.
‘Go ’way!’
He did not dare cry it out loud.
He was running again. The world was full of trees, of shadows. He was running, tripping, falling over, grazed hands stinging. Running again, while fear ran with him. The hollow place inside him would not go away.
He could not run any more. He was so tired and frightened he could barely walk. He slowed, slowed. Stopped. His thumb was in his mouth. He looked around at the trees. In front of him the ground sloped down, then up again. To a fringe of smaller trees. Behind the trees …
A brightness.
He was running again, running towards the brightness. Which grew brighter as it got nearer. Once again he saw light, gleaming on leaves. On green and shiny leaves.
Somehow he had found his way home.
He reached the edge of the trees, pushed his way through them sturdily. He expected to see the path, the tent, his mother. And stopped, just beyond the last tree. Because this was different. This was not the world of home, or of the shadowed trees. The trees here were different. The grass was different. There was no path, no tent, no … No mother.
He wanted to be home. Where it was safe and warm. Where his mother would hold him. He could feel her, breathe the smell of her, the comfort and safety of her. Not here, though; not here.
It was horrible that she was not here. Naughty Mummy. He was sobbing again, could hear himself crying, because the fear had changed but was still there.
He heard a sound beyond the grass: the sound of a footstep. At once he was still, sucking furiously on his thumb.
Go ’way! Go ’way!
A face he did not know stared down at him. Not his mother; not his father: a man he did not know. Jamie shut his eyes tight so that the man could not see him.
The man was still there. He could not see him, but felt him. He heard the man’s voice.
Bloody hell. What you doing here, eh?
He did not know what the sounds meant. Risked a quick look, saw the man still staring at him, shut his eyes again, fast.
Go ’way!
Felt the man crouch. He could smell him, very close. A strange, uncomfortable smell, not at all like his mother’s smell.
‘What’s your name?’
He was frightened of the man. He would not answer him. Could not answer him.
He felt the man straighten, take another step. Two steps. He knew the man was right beside him.
Go ’way!
The man’s voice was louder, calling out, while Jamie slurped his thumb.
‘Hallo? Anybody there?’
And waited. Silence.
‘Hallo?’
Silence.
The man spoke again, no longer shouting. ‘Where you popped up from, eh?’
Another quick look. Saw the man frowning down at him, his face very high up against the bright sky.
‘Best come with me, I reckon.’
The man’s hand took hold of his own hand. He pulled away but the man did not let him go. Panic, as he tugged and tugged.
‘Give over!’ the man said. ‘I’m not going to hurt you, for cripes’ sake.’
And pulled him along, while Jamie opened his mouth, shrieking.
‘Marge!’ The man’s voice. ‘Look what I got, eh.’
Jamie’s eyes were open now, as the man pulled him along. One hand in the man’s hand, one thumb in his mouth. There was a track through the grass, a strange thing at the side of the track. The thing seemed to be eating the grass. Beyond the strange thing, something else he had never seen before. It wasn’t a tent although it had a homely look about it, with two pieces of white cloth hanging on a line and flapping in the wind, just like they did at home. This wasn’t a tent, it was like the box his mother kept her things in, but much bigger. Big enough to go inside. It was green, with something round and yellow on either side of it.
As Jamie looked and looked, wondering what the strange box was, a woman came out of the box and looked down at him. Came at once in a rush towards him. He was frightened of the woman, too, but not as much as he had been of the man. She bent down so her face was close to his. Her smell was different from the man’s; it reminded him of his mother.
‘What’s your name?’ the woman asked.
He almost answered her but could not quite manage it. He sucked his thumb, looking at the woman.
‘My name is Marge,’ she told him. ‘What’s your name?’
He opened his mouth. ‘Jamie …’ The sound came out so softly that even he could not hear it.
‘What was that?’
Her voice was gentle. He wasn’t frightened of her any more. She was still strange, though.
‘Jamie.’ This time he managed a bit better.
Even so, it seemed she still didn’t understand him. ‘Never mind. I’m sure you’ll tell us later. I wonder where you’ve come from.’
‘Standing there at the edge of the trees,’ the man said. ‘I heard him, went to have a squiz, there he was.’
‘All alone?’
‘I called out, but no one answered.’
‘He gotta be lost.’
‘Dunno where he’s come from, then. No houses anywhere round here.’
‘I’ll take him into the wagon, tidy him up a bit, give him something to eat. You go and see if you can find anyone.’
‘In that lot? Strewth!’
‘Get on and do it!’ The woman’s voice was tart. ‘What’s biting you? Scared of the trees, are you?’ Her voice changed, became kind as she turned back to Jamie. ‘Like a glass of milk, would you?’
She took his hand, which the man had let go, and led him over to the big green box, where she lifted him up and carried him inside.
3
‘You didn’t see nuthin?’
‘I went bloody miles. I tell you, it’s black as the pit in there. Nuthin but trees. God knows where he come from.’
‘Little bloke like him couldn’t have come far.’
‘Beats me. I tell you, I couldn’t see a thing. Yelled out coupla times but never heard nuthin.’
&nbs
p; ‘What we goin’ to do with him?’
‘Ask around, I reckon.’
‘Ask who? Like you said, there’s no one round here to ask.’
‘The blues?’
‘None o’ them, neither.’
‘Can’t just leave him here.’
‘Have to take him with us, I reckon.’
‘Hold on a sec. You sayin’ we should half-inch someone else’s kid?’
‘What else can we do with him?’
4
He’s mine. I knew it the first moment I set eyes on him. He’s been sent.
Bruce doesn’t understand. When Colin died … It was like the end of the world to me. Doesn’t mean the same to a man. How can it? Could have lain down and died, myself, the way I felt. Coupla times I wished I had. Yet somethin’ kept me goin’. Like I knew what was going to happen without knowin’ it, know what I mean?
Now this. Angel sent by God. Grubby little tyke, really, but an angel, all the same. Mine. I sent Bruce off into the forest but I knew he wouldn’t find nuthin. It wasn’t meant. The kid was meant to come here, to be mine. I won’t let Bruce get rid of him. He’s my Colin, come back.
5
Written all over her. Marge is plannin’ on keepin’ the kid. Take the place of the one she lost: that’s what she’s thinkin’. Not easy to tell the way a woman’s mind works, but that’s what I reckon. One thing I do know: Marge is happy again. Reckon I’ll settle for that.
Maybe she’s right, too. I mean, it’s not as though I didn’t look. Gave it a full go, but never saw a thing. He’s too little to have come far, but where from … Beats me. You wouldn’t believe how thick that forest is, once you get into it. How the kid got through it I’ll never know. Maybe it really is a miracle, like she keeps on saying.
Just a kid, like any other kid. But Marge is singin’ again. I can hear her this minute, chortlin’ away like a bloody magpie inside the van. That’s the real miracle, and it’s the kid has done it.
One thing sure: we can’t hang around here any longer. We don’ get movin’, Gus’ll be long gone. No bloody way I can let that happen.
No, my lad, Colin or whatever she’s decided to call you, reckon you’re goin’ to be a circus brat, just like the rest of us.
6
Time passed. Days, weeks. Memory remained, but buried deep. On the surface it began to fade. Days, weeks, and it was gone. There remained only the present.
The horse, ears twitching, drawing the wagon in a soft rumble of wheels through the Australian countryside, the gums and grass and occasional long vistas of olive-green ranges, of plains stretching forever beneath a warm and golden sun.
A shout of grey-and rose-coloured galahs bursting from the roadside as the wagon passed. The endless warble of magpies. The ghost forms of kangaroos, motionless in the dawn light, then plunging rhythmically away while Jamie no Colin, Colin pointed and laughed.
The smell and feel of the wagon, its dark interior, the tight containment of all that had become his world.
The nights, sleeping and waking in a place no longer strange.
The man’s voice. ‘How long you goin’ to have him in with us?’
‘Till he’s used to us.’
Colin was already used to the incomprehensible noises of adults. Found, little by little, that he was even beginning to understand some of them.
The long days of solitude with the man and the woman, to whom he had by now grown accustomed. Until one day the wagon wheels rolled down a dusty track like any other, the gum trees cream with dust; they passed a scant congregation of houses, all tin roofs and sun-warped wood, and turned in through an open gateway into yet another world of noise and wagons and animals and people. Eyes everywhere, and voices, with shyness once again sealing his tongue.
TWO
1
The slow passage of days, of weeks. The rush of years.
Colin Mandale was seven, or so they reckoned. No one knew for sure. They’d told him how he’d turned up out of the blue, or the forest, and been adopted.
‘You’re my son now,’ Marge had told him. And told him.
It was his earliest conscious memory, of Marge saying it over and over again, as though trying to tie him to her in a noose of words.
‘You’re my son now.’
He’d long ago got used to the idea; without Marge’s constant and nervous reiteration, would probably not have thought about it at all.
You’re my son now.
Whose son should he be, after all?
In one sense he was also a son of the circus, as they all were. Because the circus was the enclosure within which they all lived and breathed. It was a world apart: on the one hand there was the circus and the people who inhabited that unique world; on the other, everybody else. The world out there, the world in here. And, within that world, the inner world where Colin still lived in the wagon with Bruce and Marge Mandale. The Marvellous Mandales, of whom Colin himself had now become a part.
2
Marge had told him his birthday was 15 September. Not his real birthday, of course; nobody knew that.
‘It was the day you first come to us,’ she said. ‘The day you became mine.’
Whatever that might mean.
Not that she didn’t do what she could to look after him: she would have died for the boy, and he knew it. Trouble was, she really didn’t have a clue: about Colin, or boys in general, or life. The way of the circus didn’t help either. Marge’s instincts might have been sentimental but, the way things worked in practice, the life they led wasn’t sentimental at all.
No time, for one thing, and too much work. There were always things to do. That was what made Colin’s seventh birthday important: not because he had a party or birthday cake, nothing like that, no presies either, but because on that day, 15 September 1897, Gus Evans expected him to start working, just like everyone else.
What Gus expected, Gus got. Colin’s first job was to give a hand putting up the kitchen tent, and setting out the tables and chairs for dinner. When that was out of the way, there were kerosene cans full of water to be humped up from the river. When they were full, the cans were so heavy he could hardly lift them, but a few clips around the ear soon showed him what was expected. Somehow he managed to carry or drag them up the bank to the kitchen tent, using so much effort that he half expected his eyeballs to pop. Half a minute’s break, a minute if you were lucky and Mr Gus wasn’t about, and back again for the next load. So it went on: water for the animals, water for the kitchen, water for the carbide lighting plant.
When he’d done with the water, he had to practise to become an acrobat. Every day, for an hour or two and sometimes longer, they had him work with the other kids: a bag of chaff for the flips, a rope harness mounted on pulleys so that he could practise shoulder somersaults without breaking his neck.
It was hard work, with precious little time for play or anything like that. Mr Gus took it for granted that if they worked the kids until they dropped they would spend whatever time was left over fast asleep. That way, he reckoned, they’d be no trouble to anyone.
Mr Gus always said that was how things had been when he was a boy, and maybe he was right or maybe he’d just forgotten what it was like to be a boy at all. Certainly, and for whatever reason, things didn’t always work out the way he expected.
3
The faint whisper came clear in the silence.
‘You ’wake?’
‘Yeah.’ Colin turned in his bed beneath the wagon, saw Benjy and Matt staring down at him.
‘Come on then.’
He scrambled to turn out into the warmth of the Queensland night, excitement pounding.
‘We gunna do it, then?’
‘Too right.’
They sneaked across the dew-soaked grass between the wagons, all dark and still in the hour before the dawn. Colin could hear the horses in the neighbouring paddock ripping at the grass with their spade-like teeth. A pale glimmer of starlight reflected from the canvas of the two-pol
er tent.
The three boys came to the cut and stared down at the shining surface of the river flowing twenty feet below them.
In Colin’s memory, Bruce’s voice threatened. Keep away from that bloody river, you hear me?
They clambered down the yielding bank, came to the water. The river was flowing swiftly on its way down the valley to the falls at the far end. When the wind was right, you could hear the cataract clearly, but tonight the air was holding its breath and they could hear nothing. All the same, the awareness of the falls was in all their minds; it was why they were here, in the middle of the night.
The three boys scurried along the bank. Adventure was what they were after and they didn’t care that Mr Gus would leather the daylights out of them if he caught them.
The danger of the river, the danger of punishment, spelt fun and challenge for kids accustomed to the routine excitements of the high wire, of horses galloping hell for leather around the forty-foot ring in front of two hundred or more gawping eyes.
That was work. This was adventure.
They came to the place where they’d hidden the boards they planned to use: three pieces of wood a foot wide and half an inch thick. Indian canoes to challenge the mighty Mississippi. To challenge the falls at the other end of the valley.
They looked at each other. Now was the moment of decision; they had time to feel scared of what they were planning to do. The circus ring had no dangers to compare with the black and shining river, flowing silent and fast and deep in front of them.
‘Let’s get on with it,’ said Matt.
Colin thought it was all very well for Matt Curtis. He was from Queensland; probably the river would take care of him, being local, but Colin and Benjy were both from Victoria.
‘Might make all the difference,’ Colin said, partly to himself, partly to the others.
Matt didn’t get it. ‘What might make a difference?’
‘To the river,’ he explained.
‘Dunno what you’re on about,’ Matt said.
