by JH Fletcher
He decided to give it a go.
Round and round on the balanced trapeze, faster and wider with every revolution. He did not look down, only a mug would do that, but through the smoke-blue air he was conscious of the white blur of faces turned upwards to watch them. Round. And round. Flying. Marge and Benjy on the other trapeze, going in the opposite direction. The swirl of speeding air against his face as they swung and swung.
Still further out, until he could feel the slight kick in the trapeze bar that warned him he was at the limit, that to go further would make the support wires jack-knife. Maybe one day he’d work out how to go that little bit further still, push the edge back another step but, for the moment, this was the limit. He could taste it, in his mouth and straining muscles. A kind of glory: you could make yourself drunk with it.
Round and round. Marge the same, Benjy with her, little bugger probably shitting himself. Because now they were coming to it, the moment that all the mob down there had been waiting for.
Bruce lifted his right hand and held it above his head, fingers pointing. That was his signal to the others, telling them to make ready.
Round and round, the air swooping, the canvas of the tent top almost close enough to touch.
Benjy had swarmed onto Marge’s shoulders, was now poised for the moment of take-off. Of flight.
Round and round, Bruce’s hand still pointing skywards. And then down as he hooked his knees around the bar and let his body swing outwards towards the other trapeze, arms outstretched, suspended in space only by his legs and speeding air. Benjy sprang, doing his somersault in midair, not bad at all, arms outstretched, fingers spread, and the flying figure, wind-borne, made contact, Bruce’s strong hands closed safely about the boy’s slender wrists and Bruce felt rather than heard the exclamations of wonder and terror coming up to him from the white-blur faces far below.
Benjy swinging from his hands, outspread, as Bruce’s thigh muscles pumped the trapeze even faster. Up onto the bar again, Benjy balancing on his shoulders, the fitted canvas pumps he was wearing rough against his skin, and again he sprang, the shock driving spikes of pain through Bruce’s head, and Marge took him safely once again.
Benjy on Marge’s shoulders, both trapezes drawing their wide arcs across the air. Bruce once again outstretched, knees crooked about the bar. Benjy to come …
Now.
But did not, drawing back at the last moment as though he could not face the air, the emptiness beneath the air.
Around again.
Come on, you little bastard …
This time Benjy came but Bruce was livid at the hesitation that, in this swirling world so close to the edge, could have caused catastrophe. Until now he had not been sure he was really going to do it but the delay had made up his mind for him. Benjy was in midair, hands already reaching for Bruce’s outstretched hands, and Bruce thought, Teach him a lesson. He pulled his hands back, making sure that Benjy saw him do it; the whole world reduced to a slow unravelling of split seconds as Benjy’s expression changed to pure terror. At once Bruce brought his hands back into the correct, the safe, position.
Except that Benjy, time flowing in split seconds past him, panicked, brought his arms protectively back to his body, holding himself in midflight, feeling the doom drop beneath him, and his shoulders crashed heavily into Bruce’s hands. Bruce snatched at the slippery sliding body and missed and Benjy was beyond reach, falling in a knife-blade scream to the unforgiving earth.
3
Hell to pay. The boy dead, Marge demented, screeching blame, Gus fit to be tied.
Bruce tried to bluff. ‘He pulled his hands away. If he’d done what he was supposed to …’
It was no use; everyone had seen what had happened.
With Marge screaming how she’d never go aloft with him again, Gus was deciding whether to chuck him altogether. Eventually he decided to give him a second chance.
Thank God for that.
‘I’ll not forget this,’ he said sincerely.
‘Don’t kid yourself,’ Gus told him. ‘Try that trick again, so help me I’ll dob you in to the cops myself.’
Bruce was tempted to ask why he was doing it, if he felt like that, but he didn’t have the nerve. Didn’t need to, as it happened; Gus told him why, and to his face.
‘If that kid had any folks, it’d be a different story, but he was all alone in the world.’
Which meant there was no one to make a fuss. And the next house had been even better than the previous one, which wasn’t to be sneezed at in these hard times.
Not that Gus was willing to be too forgiving. ‘Your last bloody chance, you hear me? And you’d better sort out that wife of yours. I’ll have no fights in this circus.’
No bouquets from Gus then. Not from anyone else either. Still, they’d get over it. Like people were always saying, the show had to go on. The truth was that the accident, tragic though it had been, wouldn’t do ticket sales any harm. The word was out and there’d be plenty turning up on the off-chance of seeing the same thing for themselves. Something to tell the grandkids, eh?
The funeral was a sad affair, of course. Little bloke, barely ten years old, dead in a tragic accident. Gus gave the eulogy himself, half the town there. It was like a free night out. He told them how accidents were an inescapable part of circus life, part of the burden they carried.
‘Part of the cross we bear,’ he told them, always one for the telling phrase.
Privately, after the service, he had other things to say. ‘You better hope the bloody cops don’t hear about it,’ he told Bruce.
While Marge said nothing at all, either to him or anyone.
4
Things went on, seemingly as before, but in truth it had made a difference. To Bruce, most of all. Thinking about it, he still reckoned it had been Benjy’s fault and not his own.
‘I’d’ve got him if he’d done what he was supposed to,’ he told Marge, and himself. It was important that he should believe it.
The stress of what had happened didn’t do his headache any good. Fair splitting it was, most of the time. Even the bottle wasn’t helping much any more, though he never gave up hoping it might. Most nights he was away with the pixies before he went to bed, which didn’t do his temper much good in the morning.
The Mandales’ wagon got to be a sour place, and once again Colin, and increasingly Marge, too, were on the receiving end of it.
‘Not our fault Benjy died,’ Colin complained to her, thinking how it could so easily have been him. He might even have come to resent his dead friend for visiting all this trouble on them, had he not resented Bruce more. It had got so he couldn’t abide him, which was not a good thing when he had to rely on Bruce catching him in midair so that he didn’t do a Benjy himself.
What made it worse, Bruce suspected how he felt. He couldn’t take it out on him on the trapeze — he knew Gus would never stand for a second performance — so he made up for it at other times. Practice, endless practice, which would have been all right had Bruce not been so eager to use his fists to make a point.
Half the time Colin was black and blue.
‘I want him to understand who’s boss,’ Bruce told Marge, who was afraid he’d kill him if things carried on the way they were. ‘I can’t stand his sulky face in the morning.’
Or anyone else’s face either.
Gus knew, of course he did, but said nothing. What went on between members of a family was no business of his, as long as the show didn’t suffer. And the Marvellous Mandales, for all Bruce’s grogging, remained the most popular act he had.
So it went on, until Colin was sick of it. He was ten years old, big for his age and self-reliant — the circus had taught him that. One evening, after another leathering for something he hadn’t done, he decided he’d had enough.
They were staying at a little place far up the North Queensland coast, a one-horse dump called Goorapilly, with a cloud-capped mountain behind it. Small town or not, it was a two-night st
op. After the first night’s performance, after his leathering, with Bruce’s boozy snores poisoning the air, Colin made up his mind. The next day, good and early, he got out of bed, dragged on his clothes, helped himself to something to eat from the kitchen tent and took off up the mountain.
Into the Cloud Forest.
FOUR
1
Up and up.
At first it was a long, slow drag, climbing steeply through paddocks of coarse grass broken at intervals by stands of timber, stunted and non-threatening. A thumping of rabbits as they broke and swerved, racing for cover; those apart, nothing stirred.
Further up the slope the real forest began: trees crammed close and dark across the slope of the hill. When Colin reached them, he turned and looked back. Far below him now, the silver-shining roofs of the town shone in the pre-dawn light. On the other side, beyond the green dream of paddocks, he could see along a hazed horizon the faraway blink of the distant ocean. Nearer, in a paddock on this side of town, he could see, tiny as the model he had studied once in a store window in Brisbane, the two-poler tent and scattered wagons of Corelli’s Great International Circus lying deep in its sawdust sleep. Looking down from the forest edge, Colin could sense, rather than see or even consciously imagine, the people with whom he spent his life.
In his wagon, smarter than the others — a Dallinger, no less — Gus Evans dreamt of packed houses, sensational acts and lots and lots of lovely money. On the far side of the paddock, in the stuffy darkness of the much smaller wagon that was home, Bruce Mandale groaned, pursued down the corridors of his booze-sodden sleep by fleeting images of boys and bottles that would never succeed in taking away his fear that one day, one day … The shadow of the trapeze, the doomed and falling figure that was himself, mocked him as they did every night. Jammed into the folding cot, Marge breathed her outrage at a world, and a husband, always beyond her ability to control.
Colin knew these things, not consciously but by instinct. They would continue to affect his life but, for the moment, up here on the mountain, they had lost their hold over him. He turned and plunged into the trees.
He couldn’t remember the last time he had been by himself; never, perhaps. It was a scary feeling. Now he had only the silence and the watchful trees for company. It was strange: everything should have seemed unfamiliar to him, yet was not. Deep within his head a thought chimed uneasily, repetitively: This was not the first time he had walked alone through the avenues of the silent trees. He had been here before. He knew that was out of the question, the circus had never been this far north before, yet the image remained. He placed his hand tentatively on the cool bark of one of the trees, seeking he knew not what, but nothing came back to him from the quiescent wood. He went on.
As he climbed, the slope grew steadily steeper but he was fit and strong and it did not trouble him. He was determined, too; he could not have said why he was so intent upon climbing to the top of the mountain, knew only that he was.
All about him the gum trees were hunched and secretive. He caught the occasional glimpse of a wallaby, loping soft-footed; from time to time a bird squawked; these apart, silence and solitude enfolded him peacefully.
He came to a succession of low cliffs, perhaps fifty feet in height. The rock face was crumbling, rotted by time and moisture; no way would he climb up there. Instead he scouted sideways across the slope until he discovered a defile leading upwards. He followed it, springing easily across unsteady piles of broken stone: there were advantages in a circus background, after all. Eventually he came out above the cliffs.
Now the nature of the forest had changed. There was dampness, a sense of perennial moisture that chilled the motionless air, leaving a gleaming patina upon rock and leaf. Between the interlaced tree branches the sky still shone in chinks of blue light but with a milkiness about it, now, that spoke of mist. The trees themselves, the undergrowth beneath the trees, had also changed. Everywhere there were ferns and moss; secret pools, spiked with stiff grasses, glossy brown and green, flourished in dampness. The lichen-rimed trees were unlike any he had seen before. Interspersed between them, the thin and wiry stems of plants broke open in a crown of feather-like fronds. Beneath them the earth was littered with the detritus of centuries. The forest was utterly still, even the air without movement, as though it had been lying here forever and he was the first human ever to have swum into its silent and invisible depths.
It was hard going now. There were no paths in this wilderness and everywhere lay the rotting hulks of fallen trees, of branches and twigs and piled leaves. A huge red toadstool provided an exclamation of brilliant colour in a green and muted world. He thought there might be snakes and trod more cautiously for the thought, but saw nothing.
Up again, sensing for the first time the bulk of the mountain looming high above him. He followed what might have been an animal track; came out upon the very edge of a cliff that plunged vertically into the trees far beneath. For a moment he paused to look down at the vista that lay below him. He had moved around the flank of the mountain and could no longer see the town or circus, the distant blue glint of ocean; it was as though these things no longer existed and he was alone in another world, another time. As far as he could see, the folds of the valleys were carpeted in a dense profusion of trees. They choked the depths, marched up the steadily steepening slopes and crowned the summits of the lesser hills before merging at last with the main mass of the mountain itself. Above the trees, the sky was white. Craning his neck, Colin could just discern around the shoulder of the ground ahead of him the place where the flat-topped summit must lie. He sensed it but could not see it, the upper slopes hidden behind a band of grey cloud, motionless save for the occasional spiral of mist, stirred by the breeze, that lifted and swirled and subsided once more.
He was determined to climb to that far, secret place. He would stand upon the summit of the mountain. The mist would be all about him and, for the first time in his life — standing above the swimming depths the realisation came to him — he would be truly free. His subconscious sensed that the cloud-girt summit would offer a haven profoundly different from the prosaic security of the circus, wagon and foster parents without whom, despite the blows and rows — how many times had it been chucked in his teeth? — he would never have survived at all. For the first time he understood what his unconsciousness had been telling him all along: there were degrees of freedom and the world up here amid the cloud represented something that would remain in his mind forever; the land of what might be.
He turned away from the high cliff and went back into the green depths of the trees. Once again he negotiated the steep slope that pointed the way upwards. Into the cloud.
A gush of streams ripped the silence as they plunged between dark rocks; animals moved away uneasily from the unexpected presence of the boy; clinging tendrils of mist thickened, bandaging the light and the watchful, silent trees.
Colin knew that he would have to watch his step. The slope narrowed as it headed towards the summit; more and more frequently he found himself balancing above emptiness, the rock face dropping vertically beneath his feet. One false step would be his last, but a circus boy used to heights had no fear of such places. Upwards he clambered, the trees thinning as earth and humus gave way more and more to stone. The mist grew dense, the world turned to shadows; it was hard to see where he was going, or should go. Still he went on, thinking not of danger, the long way back down to the valley or the reception that would be waiting when he got there, but of what he had come here to do: to reach the summit of the mountain, to stand upon it amid a secret isolation of rock and mist and stillness.
Through the curtain of mist he could see virtually nothing yet he knew, even before his feet and legs recognised the easing of the gradient, that he was there. There might have been vistas of the surrounding land but were not. There might have been wondrous plants, clambering in profusion like the fanged forests of fairy tales; there were not. There was mist, dampness and silence, and
they were enough.
Colin stood, letting the mist and dampness and silence seep into him. He knew that this place to which he had come, so purposefully yet without understanding why, would remain with him always: a magic world, sacred and apart, to which he would one day return, in body or at least in spirit, which would give him then a renewed sense of the comfort and homecoming that enfolded him now.
He stood unmoving for a long time before turning to begin the return journey back into the valley. He had thought he would experience a sense of loss at leaving the secret place behind him, but it did not happen. The sense of magic and belonging accompanied him as he made his way down the scree slopes and into the trees, across the gushing tumult of streams. He skirted precipices where the air fell silently into the haven of the distant valley. The mist shredded and vanished.
He was thirsty and hungry. The bread and sausage nicked from the kitchen had been eaten long ago but his thirst he quenched easily enough, crouching down with his face in a stream. The water was cold and metallic-tasting but cut his thirst like a blade. He went on.
Between the trees he saw another glimpse of the lowlands stretched out beneath him. Down there the sun was shining but he saw how the ground was patterned with patches of elongated shadow and for the first time he realised that he had spent all day up here in the Cloud Forest. There was no way he would be able to get off the mountain before dark.
Bloody hell.
At least it was a Sunday, which meant there would be no performance tonight. Thank God for that: Mr Gus would have beaten him to death otherwise, and Bruce would have chewed up what was left. Even so, he knew there’d be plenty of trouble waiting for him. Momentarily he considered not going back at all but, if he ran away, where would he go? The circus was all he knew; they might leather him, but it was the only place he could be sure of getting a feed and a place to sleep.
