Down the Road to Gundagai

by Jackie French

  ‘Alone? I think not.’ Aunt Lilac’s smile looked like it had been pasted onto her face.

  No, thought Blue, not alone. They’d have been here as well, or sent Mah with me, and Mr Jones the gardener too.

  ‘Not at all the behaviour of a young lady.’ Aunt Daisy glanced around to check that no one had heard her imply that a member of her family had been unladylike.

  ‘And not when you are so ill,’ added Aunt Lilac. ‘Who knows what you might catch in a crowd like this, in your weak state.’ Her eyes flicked over the farming families around them as though they were fleas on a dirty dog.

  Blue took a breath. They were acting like she was five years old. All right, she shouldn’t have worried them. But she wasn’t a child either.

  ‘The circus is really good.’ She didn’t add that the best bits were working out why it was so much fun. ‘Why don’t you stay and see the second half?’ She wondered if Aunt Lilac and Aunt Daisy had paid a shilling each, just to fetch her, or if the man on the gate had gone.

  Aunt Lilac’s smile faded, as if it had at last been used up. ‘I think it best if you come home now. We have Mr Thomas’s taxi waiting for you at the gate.’ Her voice held the unspoken accusation: you have cost us the expense of a taxi.

  Blue took another breath. ‘I’m feeling fine, Aunt Lilac.’ It wasn’t true. She felt dizzy and sick. Her feet kept knotting up with spasms and pain ran up and down her legs. But she wanted to see the circus, the flying trapeze. She wanted …

  I want to be myself, she thought, just for a night. Not Aunt Daisy and Aunt Lilac’s niece, hidden away up in their attic, the poor girl who had lost her family, her home, who was scarred and sickly.

  Suddenly she was aware that the ringmaster was just outside the tent, watching, listening. Was he going to give her the change from her ten pounds? Because if he did that would mean she had to go, the evening was ended. The circus people wouldn’t want a girl who might faint, disturbing the audience.

  The ringmaster stepped forwards. ‘Let the lass stay.’ His voice was soft and husky after the strident tones he’d used in the ring. ‘Let her see the Boldini Brothers on the flying trapeze, at least. Nothing like it in the whole of Australia.’

  Aunt Lilac didn’t even glance at him. ‘Daisy, fetch Mr Thomas. Tell him Miss Bluebell needs to be carried back to the taxi.’

  ‘No!’ She’d rather leave than have the embarrassment of being carried away.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ said Aunt Lilac clearly, ‘we are going to the Ladies’ Temperance Spa in the mountains. The cool air will be so good for you. You need a sound night’s rest before we leave.’

  Away again, thought Blue. Maybe they wouldn’t even take Mah this time. They wouldn’t need a kitchen maid at a spa. When Uncle Herbert arrives on Tuesday we will be gone.

  All at once she realised that people were staring at them. Blue flushed. Now that they were really looking at her they’d see the scars on her throat, the straggle of hair under her hat, the eyes that looked as if they’d been shoved in her face with a spadeful of dirt. She was also aware of her lack of knickers, as though the watchers could detect that even under her long dress.

  ‘I’ll walk,’ she whispered, looking at the distance between the Big Top and the waiting taxi, the crushed tussocks and thistles, the crumpled tickets.

  ‘You will be carried,’ said Aunt Lilac. She gestured to the taxi driver.

  Blue submitted.

  Chapter 5

  The house still exhaled heat. The scent of last winter’s mould battled with lavender polish. Blue stood as Aunt Daisy unbuttoned her dress and replaced it with her nightdress. Aunt Lilac stood by the door. There was no pretence of smiles now.

  They don’t love me, thought Blue. They don’t even like me. They smile and say, ‘Dear Bluebell.’ But it isn’t real. It was what everyone wanted to hear, what I wanted to hear, the loving aunts who take in an orphaned niece. But it is less real than the grizzly bear at the circus.

  Why did they take me in? Because it was their duty? A duty to care for a sick niece? To pretend they cared?

  ‘Get into bed,’ said Aunt Lilac. Blue shuffled as quickly as her scarred legs would allow and lay down. Aunt Lilac nodded at the flask of milk on the bedside table. ‘Now drink your milk.’

  It was easier to do as she was told. It had been easier for months. She could manage to do it now too. Blue drank. Her stomach clenched. But she was able to hold down her gorge for the few seconds it took for the aunts to leave the room, shutting the door behind them. Blue heard the snick of the lock.

  ‘No! Don’t lock me in! Please!’ She hated how her voice trembled, but couldn’t help it.

  Nausea took over. She reached for the washbasin.

  She retched till nothing more would come, then rinsed her mouth out with water, over and over to get rid of the taste. She lay back and looked at the ceiling.

  She was trapped.

  Stop it, she told herself. There won’t be another fire. Aunt Lilac will unlock the door tomorrow. And I won’t let her shut me in again. I’ll write to Uncle Herbert from the spa. Someone will post the letter for me. I’ll ask him to take me away.

  There had to be somewhere else she could go. Anywhere, except this stuffy house and its liver custards and aunts who dragged her back from the circus, who locked her in her room like a naughty child.

  Trapped …

  She forced her mind away from that thought. Could the aunts really force her to live with them till she was twenty-one? She didn’t even know if they were her legal guardians. She had simply done what she was told, like a child, ever since the fire. No wonder they treated her like one.

  Uncle Herbert had mentioned a nursing home. A nursing home would be better than this. Patients in nursing homes might be allowed a night out at a circus …

  But it would be better to be well. I will get well, she told herself. She’d go to a nursing home and drink warm milk and … and whatever else it took.

  But she would get better. And she’d leave this house that smelled like a long-closed linen cupboard. After she had got well, Uncle Herbert might help her find somewhere else to live. Maybe there was some way of getting her money before she was twenty-five, if she really needed it. Uncle Herbert would know. It was the sort of thing men did know.

  But what if Uncle Herbert didn’t answer her letter? What if there were no post offices near the Temperance Spa to even send the letter? What if Aunt Lilac had just said they were going to a Temperance Spa, where people might hear her, but they were really taking her somewhere else?

  No. She was being hysterical, just because she was scared of a door that wouldn’t open, no matter how much you tugged at it, or how loud you screamed. The aunts had no reason to hide her away, except from those who’d stare at her. They’d just never thought to tell Uncle Herbert where they’d gone.

  And if Uncle Herbert didn’t come and rescue her, she’d manage somehow. How did women who had no husbands survive, and who couldn’t work? Invalid women took in sewing, except she was no good at sewing. Ironing then: she’d never ironed anything, but it couldn’t be too hard. Or washing. Would people bring their washing to a girl who was scarred and bald? She could buy a scarf to hide the scars on her neck. If her hair stopped falling out, she could have it shingled. It wouldn’t look so bad if it was cut short …

  She shut her eyes and tried to think of hair salons, and not of locked doors and fire.

  She woke when someone pulled her toe. She opened her eyes, then opened her mouth to scream.

  A small hand pressed against her lips.

  ‘Shh.’ Someone looked down at her. It was the dwarf from the circus, except there was no hunched back. It was Tiny Titania, but without her wings and blonde hair.

  The dwarf and Titania turned into a nine-year-old boy with cropped hair. He gave her a crooked grin. ‘If I take my hand away, will you promise not to make a noise?’

  Blue nodded. The boy stepped back.

  ‘What are you doing?’ whispere
d Blue. He was obviously not doing what a grown man might be doing, up in a girl’s bedroom. Neither was he trying to steal Aunt Lilac’s silver tea service, not if he’d taken the trouble to wake her up.

  The grin grew wider in the moonlight. The curtains had been opened and the window too. ‘I’m kidnapping you. That all right with you?’

  ‘What! Why?’ She’d read about kidnapping in The Girl’s Own Annual. ‘No one is going to pay a ransom for me,’ she added, though she supposed that the aunts or Uncle Herbert might.

  ‘Not for ransom,’ said the boy scornfully.

  ‘Then why?’

  ‘Because Madame told me to.’

  ‘Madame from the circus?’

  He nodded. ‘And me mum says we have to do what Madame says.’

  This was unanswerable. Blue evaluated her rescuer. He was small and she was tall. He was strong for his age and she was an invalid, but she still didn’t see how a little boy could carry her off unwillingly. Or even willingly. ‘You couldn’t even carry me down the stairs.’

  The grin reappeared. ‘Can’t get to the stairs anyway. The old cows have locked the front door. And your bedroom door.’

  ‘How did you get in then?’

  He gestured at the window. ‘You got to go out that way too.’

  She almost laughed. It was a dream. But dreams didn’t smell faintly of face powder and elephant. ‘I can hardly walk. I can’t climb out of a second-storey window.’

  ‘Don’t have to. I’ll lower you down. Got the pulley set up and everything.’ The boy nodded through the dimness of the room at a contraption of ropes and wheels already tied around the solid bureau.

  ‘You’re joking.’

  ‘Nope.’ He looked at her, suddenly solemn. ‘Are you gunna come, or what? ’Cause if you ain’t, someone might catch me here and say I’m a burglar.’ He pronounced it ‘burg-you-lah’.

  It was impossible. Not even worth considering. And yet … ‘What happens when you get me down on the ground?’

  He shrugged. ‘Have to ask Madame.’

  What have I got to lose? she thought. Except my life, my life, my life …

  If Uncle Herbert was right, then she didn’t have much of that to lose. If a small boy could dive from the roof of the Big Top, she thought, she could survive being lowered from a second-storey window. Suddenly even that seemed better than being trapped in this hot little room.

  ‘Let’s get one thing straight. It’s not a kidnap. If I come with you, it’s because I want to.’ For some reason that seemed important.

  The boy glanced at the window impatiently, his eyes bright in the moonlight. ‘Well, do you want to come then?’

  ‘All right,’ said Blue.

  Chapter 6

  Dangling, wrapped up like a bundle of lamb chops, halfway down the side of a peeling country house wasn’t the best place to have second thoughts. The dangling itself was strangely reassuring, cocooned as she was in a canvas sling, with two ropes securing her at either end. The descent was slow, even, not the sudden plunge and jerks she’d expected.

  But what waited for her below?

  White slavers? Nice girls weren’t supposed to know about white slavers, men who kidnapped girls to be sold to brothels or sultans’ harems overseas — real harems, not the golden dancers from the circus. But no sultan would pay for a half-bald girl with scars.

  Ransom? Even if Aunt Lilac could be persuaded to pay a ransom to get her back, she and Aunt Daisy were far from rich. They might rent a large house, but only because it was relatively cheap now in the Depression, and by observing what Aunt Lilac called ‘necessary economies’, which meant only two servants, and no cook or gardener, like they’d had at home, not even their own automobile and chauffeur.

  Had the circus people been misled by Blue’s ten-pound note and the size of the house? No, she decided. Rich girls arrived at circuses in automobiles, with companions, not shuffling alone along a dusty road. Local gossip would have told them that the old women at the big house bought liver and shoulder of mutton, not leg of lamb and loin chops. Uncle Herbert had money, of course. They might have seen his car and chauffeur. Maybe that seemed riches enough to a barefoot boy. But she was sure he hadn’t been lying when he’d said that she wasn’t being taken for ransom.

  The cocoon inched down the wall. Blue glanced down into the garden. The world was shadows: a rose bush, a lilac tree; she could see no people. Surely this couldn’t all have been engineered by a nine-year-old boy?

  Maybe he was mad. Maybe every night after the circus the boy broke into homes and lowered the inhabitants out of their windows.

  The ground met her, hard. She twisted like a caterpillar in a cocoon, trying to get free.

  ‘Shh.’ A shadow parted from the lilac tree. ‘Lie still,’ it whispered. Hands untied her, then pulled her to her feet.

  Blue stared. She’d expected the ringmaster, or the peanut-seller. This was a woman, tall and wide-shouldered but with a timid rabbit-like face, in a long old-fashioned dress almost to her ankles, and a neat straw hat garlanded with what looked like ancient silk pansies.

  The woman put her finger to her lips. She looked up and tugged on the right-hand rope. It fell neatly into her arms. The other followed.

  A small figure appeared at the window, pulleys and straps secured about his waist. As Blue looked, the boy edged along the windowsill, reached out, then grabbed the drainpipe that led from the gutters into the water tank below. The boy clambered down, spider-like, until he was just above the tank, then leaped swiftly and neatly, avoiding the tank and a possible clang, landing on the ground by her feet.

  It was a feat worthy of Tiny Titania.

  He looked at her, grinning, then pulled her shoes out of his pockets and held them out to her triumphantly. He’s waiting for applause, she thought. He’s just got a girl out of a locked second-floor room …

  Suddenly she grinned back at him, imagining Aunt Lilac’s face in the morning. Her niece had vanished from a locked room! A girl with scarred legs who couldn’t climb out a window and down two storeys into the garden. It was as good a mystery as any in The Girl’s Own Annual, and she was part of it.

  The woman beckoned impatiently. She headed out the gate.

  Blue bent down and slipped her shoes on over her stockingless feet. She shuffled after the woman, her knees wobbly with weakness, clumsy in her nightdress. I should have changed, she thought. Put on my dress, petticoats, hat …

  The woman hesitated. She came back and put a firm arm under Blue’s shoulders to help her along.

  It was embarrassing. It was also necessary, Blue realised. The faster they were gone, the less chance they would be seen.

  She let herself be half dragged into the unknown. The boy — or dwarf or Tiny Titania — followed them.

  Chapter 7

  The lights, the crowds, the carts and the automobiles had vanished, as though they had all been part of the circus’s illusions. Only the trampled thistles and scattered tickets and peanut shells showed there had ever been a crowd here.

  The Big Top hung limp in the moonlight. As Blue watched, it collapsed on itself. Two dim figures moved purposefully about its folds.

  A single lamp shone in the window of the old-fashioned caravan. The other two caravans were dark. The elephant still stood by her pile of hay, making no effort to get away, even now the Big Top was no longer closing her in. As Blue looked, the big animal curled her pink-tipped trunk, inserting the hay neatly into her mouth. She turned as Blue and the others approached, her ears flapping back. She raised her trunk enquiringly, then lowered it again, and picked up the teddy bear.

  ‘She’s beautiful,’ Blue breathed.

  The woman looked at her. For the first time emotion flickered over her rabbity face. ‘Yes, she is.’

  The elephant took two paces towards Blue. The grey trunk held out the teddy bear. Blue took it automatically.

  The caravan door opened.

  The woman took her arm away. ‘Go in there,’ she said, an
d then to the boy, ‘Bed.’

  ‘But Mum!’

  ‘I said bed. Now.’

  The boy made a face. It was such a normal ‘I don’t want to’ face that Blue felt strangely reassured. Up till now the boy had seemed part elf. Now he was just another kid who didn’t want to miss out.

  But he obeyed, vanishing into one of the round caravans. He shut the door behind him.

  The elephant watched with her small bright eyes. Blue cradled the teddy bear. ‘Do you want me to have it?’

  The elephant didn’t reply. Of course she won’t answer, Blue told herself. She’s an elephant. But the elephant didn’t look away either as Blue clumsily made her way up the four steps to the caravan door, the bear in her arms.

  No one moved to help her. She peered into the caravan nervously. The light inside was dim, but bright after the darkness outside, its glow enough to see shelves, pots and shawls hanging from hooks, a most domestic-looking broom, the woman seated on the bed, the girl cross-legged on the floor. The woman was unquestionably Madame Zlosky, dressed much as she had been in the tent but without the shawls. The girl’s hair was short and black again, not blonde, but she was still recognisable as Glorious Gloria.

  Blue stepped inside the caravan. The girl got up and shut the door behind her. But at least, thought Blue, there was no sound of a key in the lock, or a bolt.

  ‘Sit down.’ Madame Zlosky’s accent was almost gone. Blue sat on the bed. She’d have preferred to sit on the floor with the girl, but doubted she could manage it. The girl scowled up at her.

  ‘Why have you brought me here?’ Blue found her voice wobbling with tiredness.

  ‘We didn’t. You came yourself.’

  ‘I didn’t lower myself out a window!’ Better, she thought. Her voice sounded stronger now.

  The girl snickered. ‘Scared, were you?’

  ‘No,’ said Blue. She suddenly realised she was clutching the teddy bear like a child.

  ‘You should have been. If there’s not a corner of you that’s scared when you’re up on the ropes, you’ll make a mistake. Mistakes can kill. That’s what my pa used to say. Pa was the greatest trapeze artist in the world.’