Down the Road to Gundagai

by Jackie French

  ‘Be silent, Gertrude.’

  The girl stilled at Madame Zlosky’s tone.

  Gertrude? Blue hid a grin. So Glorious Gloria was really a Gertrude. ‘What’s Tiny Titania’s real name?’

  ‘Ginger,’ Madame Zlosky answered.

  ‘No one calls a boy Ginger.’

  ‘Nor did his parents. But he is Ginger now.’

  ‘Why am I here?’

  ‘You wanted to come.’

  Blue felt a prickle of anger overcome her unease. ‘Stop being a fortune-teller. Why did you help me to come here?’

  ‘Because you are being poisoned. This is a chance to save your life.’

  The chill seemed to sweep from her toes upwards, despite the heat of the caravan. ‘I’m not being poisoned.’ The words were automatic. And then, as the dreadful possibility began to prickle: ‘How do you know?’

  ‘The same way I knew about the four-fingered lover, that the woman called Mrs Rundle would have a grandchild.’

  ‘The Great Madame Zlosky knows many things,’ intoned Gertrude.

  Blue glanced at her, then back at Madame Zlosky. ‘You have spies, don’t you?’

  Madame Zlosky smiled. It was a real smile, not the seer’s. ‘We listen. Ask questions at the gate sometimes. “You’re looking blooming today, my dear.”’ Suddenly the old voice was that of the ticket-seller. ‘And then the girl whispers, “I’m expecting, but no one knows yet, not even my mum.” And Ephraim tells me.’

  ‘Someone told you I’m being poisoned?’ asked Blue slowly.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘That I can’t tell you. One day perhaps. Not yet. ’

  ‘I don’t believe it.’ And yet she did. Or accepted it might be happening, which was almost as bad. Because she was young, had been healthy, and should be getting better, not worse. Because grief and burns didn’t cause nausea and retching day after day, or hair to fall out every time she brushed it. ‘How am I being poisoned then? Who by?’

  ‘The poison is arsenic, I suspect.’ The voice was matter of fact. ‘Arsenic makes hair fall out, like yours. You feel ill in your stomach, do you not? You vomit, you cannot eat?’

  ‘You know all about arsenic poisoning then?’

  ‘Anyone who read about the Glintock poisoning case in the newspaper last year knows about arsenic.’ The voice was dry. ‘Arsenic is easy to buy at any chemist shop, for killing rats or slugs or weeds. It can kill quickly. But small amounts, day after day, it can make someone sick, till it seems that death comes naturally.’

  ‘You … you think that’s what they are doing to me?’

  The thin face nodded to where Blue’s voice had come from. ‘You don’t scream “No, it is impossible” now? Mr Glintock gave his wife too large a dose too suddenly. The coroner even said so. The coroner was a fool too. He might as well have told the whole of Australia: this is how to poison your wife and not be found out. But men are so often fools. Did you know the police believe that the fire at your house was set deliberately?’

  ‘No! I … They never told me.’

  ‘You were too ill, I imagine,’ said Madame Zlosky. ‘Truly ill, back then.’

  ‘But why would anyone want to kill me?’ I’m a nuisance, she thought. But you don’t kill someone because they are a bother to you. And I wasn’t such a nuisance before the fire, before I was burned and disfigured.

  ‘I can’t tell you that either.’

  ‘Can’t or won’t?’

  ‘A little of both. If I told you, it would be a guess, not truth.’

  ‘You could be lying,’ said Blue. ‘Making all this up.’

  ‘Do you think I am?’

  Blue tried to think. Her stomach spasmed again. She wiped the sweat from her forehead. ‘I think … I think you believe it’s true.’

  Gertrude snorted from her spot on the floor. ‘Madame doesn’t lie.’

  ‘Of course I do. Well, Bluebell Laurence? You have a choice. You can come with us or go back to your big house. Mrs Olsen will help you in through one of the ground-floor windows. I do not think we could haul you back up to your bedroom. You will have to explain to your aunts how you got out of a locked room. I suggest you say you walked in your sleep and woke up on the sofa. It is obviously untrue but also cannot be argued with. So, what do you choose?’

  ‘Where are you going? Gundagai?’ Gundagai, she thought. It had an opera house, didn’t it? And a wide sweeping river and paddle boats …

  ‘Not to Gundagai.’

  ‘But the ringmaster said —’

  ‘The punters have no need to know where we are going,’ said Madame Zlosky. ‘Just where it will please them to think we go. We never go to Gundagai.’

  ‘Why not?’ She didn’t really care. Her brain was full. She was so tired …

  ‘There was a fire at Gundagai. Yes, all I loved I lost in a fire too. But I made the choice to build my life again. I had a choice, and you have a choice. There is always a choice, but few have the courage to choose. Now I need your answer. We must be gone by morning, when you’ll be missed.’

  Blue tried to think. She couldn’t just vanish. It wasn’t fair on the aunts. They had done their best …

  Or tried to kill her. She thought of the bitter liver custards, the flasks of curdled milk. They had taken her away from Melbourne, hidden her even from Uncle Herbert.

  Women like Aunt Lilac and Aunt Daisy didn’t kill people. Murderers looked like …

  Like anyone else, she thought, thinking of Mr Glintock’s face in the newspaper. He was such a nice man, the neighbours said. But Uncle Herbert would be concerned, and Mah. Mah had put a rose on Blue’s tray that morning because it had been her birthday …

  She thought of her hair, falling out. Someone is poisoning me, she thought. Even if I go to Uncle Herbert, he wouldn’t believe the aunts might be trying to kill me. Even if he did … She shivered. If someone had really burned down a house to kill her and then fed her poison, perhaps nowhere she was known would be safe.

  A thought floated unbidden into her head: if I go back to that house, I will die.

  It felt … real. On this strange day when nothing was as it seemed that was as solid as an old stump. It was simple too. Stay and die. Leave and live. But there was something deeper. She had been trapped in that musty bedroom, imprisoned even before Aunt Lilac turned the key in the lock. Today she had chosen to leave it to see a circus; had made her own decision to let Ginger lower her to the ground.

  This was her choice too.

  ‘Could you put a note in the letterbox?’ she asked slowly. ‘To say that I am all right and not to look for me?’

  Gertrude snorted. ‘Don’t be stupid. Of course they’ll look for you.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Madame Zlosky. ‘We can do that. Gertrude is right, they will look anyway. But we can leave a note.’

  ‘Can I feed the elephant?’

  ‘Certainly.’ Did she imagine pleasure somewhere in the old voice?

  ‘Then I will come.’

  A smile crept under the faded eyes. ‘You’re not going to say, “Thank you, Madame, for saving my life. Thank you, kind people of the circus, for putting yourselves in danger to help me”?’

  Blue considered. ‘Not yet,’ she said frankly. ‘Not till I know why you’re doing it.’ Not till I really believe someone actually tried to kill me, she thought. ‘If I recover and become healthy, then I’ll know I was being poisoned.’

  ‘That is a sensible decision.’ Madame reached towards one of the cupboards. Her hands folded over a bottle. She held it out. ‘Take a mouthful of this before you sleep, and then another six times through the day. I will give you more when it is finished.’

  Blue took it cautiously. Could this be yet another poison? But it didn’t make sense. These people had no reason to poison her. No reason to help her either. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Mostly garlic. A little yarrow, chamomile, valerian, powdered bark of the slippery elm …’

  ‘I don’t know what those are.�
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  ‘But I do.’ Madame stood, then felt for the quilt at the end of her bed. ‘You will sleep in this bed. Gertrude, use this as a mattress for me please, and make me a bed on the floor.’

  ‘I can’t take your bed!’ protested Blue, as Gertrude said, ‘But no one else ever sleeps in your caravan.’

  ‘Futures change,’ said Madame Zlosky, in her seer’s voice. ‘I see a girl asleep in this bed, and an old woman in what you will make into a comfortable mattress on the floor. I may be old, but I can get to my feet from the floor easier than this girl can. Now drink your medicine,’ she added to Blue, almost but not quite looking at her face. ‘Gertrude, make my bed, then tell the others the girl is staying.’

  Chapter 8

  Sleep claimed her swiftly, despite the strange narrow bed, the scents of herbs and wood and elephant. Sometime in the night, she woke to thumps and bumping.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Her voice felt blurred. Darkness had sucked in the world around her. Where was she?

  A voice below her said, ‘The truck has come back for us. We have only the one truck, so it must make several trips. Our caravan is the last to leave. Go back to sleep, girl.’

  She did.

  She woke to heat, the tattered teddy bear on the pillow next to her. There was no sign of Madame Zlosky. Light shattered through the thick glass of a small window, turning it blue and green and red. Blue squinted through it. The glass distorted the view, like trying to see through a boiled lolly. It must be late morning. How had she slept so deeply and for so long? She looked at the bottle next to the bed. Had they drugged her?

  She waited for the morning’s nausea. But for the first time in months there was none. She held out her hands. They were steady, and there was no dizziness when she slowly got out of bed, just a feeling that her knees weren’t quite up to keeping her erect. But they managed.

  She looked around the caravan. I need clothes, she thought. I can’t go outside in my nightdress. I need a chamber pot.

  No chamber pot. Clothes that were obviously Madame Zlosky’s hung on a wooden peg. She didn’t feel she should put on someone else’s dress. She settled for a shawl to cover the absence of underwear under her nightdress, and slipped on her shoes. She grasped the door handle.

  The door was locked.

  No! The first emotion was panic. The second was anger. How dare they lock her in, like Aunt Lilac had? Then fear. She suddenly realised that even a ransom of a hundred pounds might seem like a fortune to a barefoot boy and a circus woman in tattered shawls.

  Anger returned. If they thought she was going to wait here obediently, then they were mistaken!

  She banged on the door with both fists. ‘Let me out! Now!’

  The door opened at once. A boy scowled at her, but with Gertrude’s face. She was dressed in patched shorts and a faded check shirt, the trimmed ends of her hair tucked up under a hat, her feet bare. Her bosom had vanished, bound perhaps by a tight camisole. ‘Shut up! Do you want to bring the coppers down on us?’

  ‘I will if you don’t let me out!’

  ‘You were willing to come last night. What do you want to go out for now?’

  ‘Why did you lock the door?’

  ‘To stop any strangers wandering by coming in while you were asleep, of course. What are you getting your knickers in a knot about?’

  Blue flushed. ‘I need a chamber pot.’

  She expected Gertrude to sneer. She didn’t. ‘I’ll get you one. Just don’t let anyone see you. Or hear you,’ she added.

  ‘Why not?’ demanded Blue.

  Gertrude looked at her with annoyance. ‘Because they’ll be looking for you, stupid. Your aunts. The police.’

  ‘The police! But I said I was safe in the note!’

  Blue suddenly wished she’d asked them to give a note to Mah too. But Mah heard everything. She’d learn about the note to the aunts. Surely she will, thought Blue desperately.

  ‘You really think those aunts of yours will let their niece vanish? If they don’t report you missing, the coppers might think they’ve done you in.’ Gertrude looked at her steadily. ‘I don’t want you here. You’re not circus. You’re not even family. But you are here and … well, whoever was poisoning you will still want you dead. And anyone who doesn’t will be worried. So you need to stay hidden. If they find you, it’ll be bad for you, and even worse for us. We’re risking a lot for you. All right?’

  Blue nodded.

  ‘Thank goodness you’re showing some sense. Are you hungry?’

  To her surprise, she was. She nodded again. She shut the door, then looked at the bottle on the table and took another swig. It tasted horrible, bitter and mouldy at the same time. But it made her feel better, stronger, as though she could cope with anything.

  She sat back on the bed, and wondered exactly what she was going to have to cope with, and when.

  Chapter 9

  Gertrude brought the chamber pot, with a cloth to cover it, and a chipped white plate of strange-textured bread and sweaty cheese, and a jug of water.

  Gertrude waited outside while Blue used the pot — she was glad she could use the bed and the table on the other side to help lever herself down onto it and then haul herself back up — and covered it. Blue handed it to Gertrude — somehow it seemed worse to give your chamber pot to someone who didn’t like you, instead of someone like Mah, who did, especially someone who wasn’t a servant. Blue shut the door again, and looked at the bread and cheese.

  The bread was fresh, cut in big white doorstops and slightly doughy, with a pale brown top instead of a black crust. There was no butter. Of course, she thought, a circus wouldn’t have an ice chest and maybe not even a Coolgardie. The cheese looked hard and moist, but tasted good.

  She ate slowly, waiting for the nausea to come. But apart from a few faint spasms of pain after the first few mouthfuls, her stomach felt better for the food, not worse. She drank some water even more slowly. And then she waited.

  It wasn’t as boring as she had expected. There were no books or, if there were, they were hidden under clothes and shawls or in the chests under the narrow bed, and she didn’t like to forage too much among a stranger’s possessions.

  I should have brought the crossword puzzle, she thought, then remembered with a pang that she had left Mum’s postcard behind too. All she had was her bracelet. And my life, she thought.

  The caravan’s windows looked out onto more brown grass and thistles. She was wary of lingering in sight though. If she could see out, then someone could maybe see in.

  She listened instead: the creak of timbers, the flapping of canvas that she supposed was the tent being erected again, hammers, the swish of rope, voices yelling and laughing, someone shouting, angry. Gertrude, she thought, as the angry voice too became a laugh. But there was no sound that might be Sheba.

  A man yelled in the distance. It was the call she’d heard yesterday: ‘One night only! The Magnifico Family Circus!’ and the blare of the trombone. The calls drew closer. She focused on the sound, waiting for the heavy plod of elephant feet.

  And there they were, the rhythmic thud, the flapping of ears, the rumbling murmur that was almost too low to hear. A man’s voice — or was it a woman’s? — said, ‘There you are, old girl. Lucerne hay today and, look, a bag of carrots.’

  The elephant gave a snort, an about-time-too sound. Suddenly the sound of crunching just outside the caravan overpowered the other sounds, and the plop! of what must be dung.

  Blue grinned, despite the heat, the strangeness. She was sitting next to an elephant. She couldn’t see it, couldn’t touch it. But it was there. And she was on the road to Gundagai …

  No, the old woman they called Madame had said not Gundagai, anywhere but Gundagai. But it didn’t matter. Nor did the possibility that the aunts and Uncle Herbert might be worried matter either. They wouldn’t be very worried, she told herself. It wasn’t as though any of them really cared for her. She was a duty. And if the aunts were really trying to kill her
…

  It should have felt impossible. The fact that it didn’t frightened her more than anything else.

  Time passed. The sounds changed — the splash of buckets of water now and, all at once, a giant ‘Arggg hoo’ that she knew had to be the sound of an elephant laughing.

  The door opened. Madame Zlosky stood in the doorway. She wore a black dress that did not look at all like the respectable mourning dresses of Aunt Lilac and Aunt Daisy, the neck too low, showing a glimpse of wrinkled bosom between the fringes of her shawl, the cloth faded till it was almost rusty. Her hair was covered in another shawl, tied in a triangle across her forehead and hanging down her back. She shut the door behind her, then sat on the edge of the bed. She looked almost straight at Blue as she said, ‘We must talk.’

  ‘How did you get in here?’ asked Blue, then realised how stupid it sounded. ‘I mean, no one showed you the way.’

  Madame gave a faint smile. ‘It is fourteen steps from the Big Top to Sheba’s hay, which I can feel under my feet. It is five steps from the hay to my caravan. It is twenty-one steps from the hay to where I must stand in the ring, and fifty-two steps and then turn right and ten more steps to the tent where I tell fortunes.’

  ‘You do that all the time?’ Every day, thought Blue, counting and counting.

  ‘Always, no matter where we go, the tents and the caravans and Sheba’s hay are placed in exactly the same positions, so I can find them. And I listen,’ Madame added. ‘When you are blind — if you are not stupid — you listen. You learn to feel with your skin, to judge by smell. There are no clouds today, I think. Deep blue sky.’

  Blue had seen a cloud when she had looked out the window. But it was a small one, too small to make a blind woman wrong. ‘You weren’t always blind, were you?’ she asked softly. ‘I mean, you said the sky was blue.’

  ‘Even a blind woman can learn the names of the colours. But you are right. I became blind slowly, slow enough to learn how to manage the loss of sight. Slow enough to drink in everything I saw so it would last the rest of my life. Sometimes I think that being blind is almost a blessing, for I see only in my memory now, and my memory is filled with those who I love, those who have gone. But there are more urgent matters. The police will be here soon. We must be ready.’