Down the Road to Gundagai

by Jackie French

  On and on it rang, with stamping, cheering, hoots of joy. Blue felt the grin slide over her face as she sat up in her tank. All around her the others’ faces glowed too. Even Gertrude smiled. The susso-camp families in there may have paid least at the gate, but they had given a more magical experience than any other audience ever had.

  ‘That was incredible!’ Mah sat on a bale of hay, her hands in her lap.

  Madame smiled regally at her. ‘In two nights’ time you will be part of it.’

  ‘Really?’ asked Blue.

  ‘Yep.’ Fred looked pleased with himself. ‘I been practising a magic act. That’ll mean Ephraim don’t have to rush back and forth doin’ the lights and music, as well as be the magician. Marj can be my assistant. And take my place in that ruddy dance.’

  ‘Language,’ said Madame reprovingly. ‘And I will check this magic act tomorrow.’

  Gertrude gave a snort. ‘Another bit of fool the eye.’

  ‘What does it matter?’ asked Fred easily. ‘As long as the punters applaud.’

  ‘Of course it matters! How could someone like you understand?’ Gertrude looked at the circle of performers. ‘How can any of you understand what Mum and Ginger and I do? We work like Trojans. Practising from the time we can walk, hour after hour, day after day …’

  ‘Gertrude,’ said Mrs Olsen quietly.

  ‘It’s true!’

  ‘We know it’s true,’ said Ebenezer quietly. ‘We’re your greatest fans, lass. You make the circus — and we know it.’

  ‘Hear hear,’ added Ephraim.

  Blue nodded. ‘You’re wonderful. I wish I could do what you can. You make us all seem beautiful. I think everyone who sees you dreams that one day they could fly like you.’

  ‘Yes. Well …’ Gertrude looked unsure of what to do with the direct praise. ‘I’ll go get changed. It’s cold.’ She headed up to the Olsens’ caravan, Ginger at her heels, already stripping off his fairy wings.

  ‘How about dinner?’ Fred looked at Mrs Olsen, a shawl wrapped around her harem dancer costume. ‘I could eat a horse.’

  Madame’s blind eyes looked around the group, almost but not quite at their faces. ‘It is too windy to risk a fire tonight.’

  ‘No firewood to be had neither,’ said Ephraim. ‘Every bit o’ driftwood’s been picked clean right along the beach.’

  ‘Hope Town needs firewood more than us. But now my package is here we will have goulash again, soon. What was the taking tonight?’

  ‘Eleven quid and threepence,’ said Ephraim, ‘but most of that is the eight quid from the rich geezer Belle had the bet with. We also got a couple of loaves of damper, eight eggs, two boxes of tomatoes, a bucket of buttermilk — there’s a dairy farmer a mile away who gives it away to anyone from the camp — a jar of tomato jam, half a dozen grilled bunnies — reckon most of the boys around here have rabbit traps — about four pounds of cold grilled sausages and a jam sandwich with a note saying For the elephant. I have my doubts them sausages was legally obtained.’

  ‘Sheba shall have her sandwich,’ said Madame. ‘As for the sausages,’ she shrugged, ‘we cannot give them back to the butcher they came from, so their legality is not our concern. Tonight’s meal shall be cold sausages and rabbit and damper and tomato jam, and do not forget to drink the buttermilk. Mrs Olsen, if you would bring mine to my caravan? This wind is too cold for my old bones.’

  ‘Yes, Madame,’ said Mrs Olsen.

  ‘And tomorrow, Gertrude will ride Sheba with Belle through the shanties before Ebenezer takes her down to the sea for her swim.’

  Gertrude’s face appeared out the caravan door. She gave them all a swift angry look. ‘I practise in the mornings.’

  ‘One practice cut short will do no harm. You will be Gloria and Belle will be a dancer.’ Madame shook her head. ‘The mermaid would please them more, but a mermaid on an elephant is not believable. Best they keep the image from tonight. But wear the jewels. They deserve another sight of jewels. The children will tell their children.’ Madame stared into the darkness. Her voice was soft. ‘When they talk about these years they will not say, “We shivered in the wind with sacking walls, we ate stale bread and drank buttermilk,” but, “One night I saw a fairy fly across a tent. I saw a mermaid swim, and wave her tail at me.”’

  Madame turned neatly and accurately, and walked towards her caravan.

  Blue looked at Mah, still unable to believe she was actually here. ‘I need to get out of my wet things and hang them up to dry.’

  ‘I’ll be waiting,’ said Mah. She sat on her bale of hay, her suitcase next to her, her hands still in her lap, seeming to feel as little emotion as the moon.

  Chapter 16

  Mah was still sitting there when Blue came out of Madame’s caravan, back in her shorts and shirt, bare feet, and an old woollen beanie to keep off the chill of the wind. Fred sat with her, a plate of sausage and chutney sandwiches next to him. Over in the Olsens’ caravan shadows moved in the lamplight through the window. Ephraim and Ebenezer were shadows too, checking the Big Top’s guy ropes, in case the wind grew stronger in the night.

  Sheba stood by her pile of hay, steadily eating. There was no sign of any manure — Hope Town’s vegetable growers must have taken it after the show. Blue looked for the teddy bear, then saw it perched on the hay bale, between Mah and Fred.

  So Sheba had accepted Mah, she thought. For a second she felt jealousy, then thrust it away.

  The tents rustled in the darkness, the canvas creaking and flapping a little in the wind. Mah said nothing, just nibbled her sandwich, her eyes on Blue. Blue took a sandwich too.

  ‘I don’t understand. Not any of it.’ She looked at the blond-headed Fred and the dark-haired Mah. ‘How can you even be brother and sister? Mah is Chinese, and you’re …’ a bit exotic looking, she thought, but didn’t know how to say it politely.

  Fred shrugged. ‘I reckon our gran must have been Chinese. Marj and me, we’re orphans. I was only six when Ma and Dad died, Marj just a baby. We were sent to an orphanage. No one else wanted to claim us. My hair’s black, like Marj’s. I looked more Chinese before I dyed it. Bein’ blond were part of my disguise.’

  Blue stared at him. ‘Why did you need to be disguised?’

  ‘Got into a bit of trouble up in Brisbane,’ said Fred airily.

  Blue looked at him suspiciously. ‘What kind of trouble?’

  ‘Nothin’ much.’

  ‘He robbed a bank,’ said Mah flatly.

  ‘What?!’

  ‘What else were I to do?’ Fred made it almost sound reasonable. ‘The orphanage was bad enough, but at least they gave us three meals a day, even if it was mostly porridge and bread and scrape.’

  ‘It sounds terrible.’ Blue thought of her own childhood, walking in the park, Mum on one side, Dad on the other, licking ice cream from the ice-cream truck. Servants, like Mah, to do anything unpleasant or boring. Servants to tidy her toys when she tired of them, fetch Mum’s shawl if she felt cold.

  ‘They did their best,’ said Mah quietly. ‘There are so many orphans, so few to care for them.’

  Fred shrugged. ‘Anyhow, they chucked us out of the orphanage when we was twelve. Nine years ago, that was for me. Girls went into service, like Marj. They got me a job sweeping the floor in a shoe factory — not one of your dad’s. Blimey, but it stank. If it wasn’t the hides being tanned, it was the glue. Made enough to share a bed with two others in a boarding house, more porridge and bread and scrape, and Irish stew on Sundays. And then the factory closed down. Couldn’t get a job no matter how hard I tried. A quarter of Australia unemployed — who’s going to give a job to a skinny twelve-year-old who looks Chinese?’

  He looked at Blue, the laughter gone from his eyes. ‘I rode the rattler out of Melbourne. One of the older blokes on the road, Jim, took me under his wing. Showed me how to collect the susso rations “for me sick dad”, line me pants with newspaper so I didn’t freeze sleeping rough at night, how to pinch a shirt from some rich co
ckie’s washing line when mine wore out. Worked our way up from town to town …’

  Blue thought of all the men they’d seen in the past six months, humping their blueys — the rolled-up tatty blankets, the dangling billy — allowed to collect their weekly rations at a town’s police station as long as they were well down the road by sundown, not allowed to linger even when footsore or sick, some with beards like magpies’ nests, with years of grime darkening their skins, others with faces painfully bare from shaving in whatever water they could find in a dam or creek or storm-water drain. Fred had been one of those …

  ‘Got to Brissie finally, but there were no work there either. So Jim came up with a plan. Just one bank, on payday, when they’d have plenty o’ cash, an’ we’d have enough to set ourselves up real nice. Start up a little shop maybe. Marj too.’

  ‘Don’t you dare say it was for me,’ said Mah fiercely. ‘I knew nothing. What you did was wrong. Bad.’

  ‘Yeah, well.’ Fred gazed out towards the sea. The waves hushed faintly beyond the dunes.

  ‘What happened?’ asked Blue.

  ‘Jim had a pistol. Old German one. He’d brought it back from the war. No ammunition. Don’t think it even worked, but they weren’t to know that. Covered our faces in balaclavas. Got the money too, four bags of it, everyone lyin’ on the floor. But the manager had a pistol. An’ his was loaded. He got Jim as we was going out …’

  Fred’s gaze was still on the sand dunes.

  ‘Killed him?’ whispered Blue.

  Fred looked back at her, his face blank. ‘Didn’t die for two days. But he told them my name, what I looked like. They had a sketch of me in the newspaper. We had this hidey-hole in the shed of an old sugar factory. Snakes as big as your arm and the cockroaches … Anyhow, Jim didn’t tell them about it. I laid low till I was too hungry to hide any longer. Dug a hole for the money. Planned to come back for it later, when the fuss had died down.

  ‘Didn’t dare go near the train line. I knew they’d be watching the rattlers. Walked as far as I could that night. Slept under a bush, and then next morning, there were these sideshows in a fairground. I thought I could hide in the back of one of their wagons when they moved on, but soon as I got there I saw two police. I ducked into the fortune-teller’s tent …’

  ‘Madame,’ said Blue softly.

  He nodded. ‘She could see in those days. Took one look at me and knew just who I was. “You are a thief,” she told me. “The question is, are you a good thief or a bad one?”’ He shook his head. ‘Thought she was magic for a while, she knew so much, all about the orphanage and Jim. Found out later the coppers had already been in to see her. They’d checked on everyone at the carnival too.

  ‘Madame offered me a deal. Her Big Top had burned down at Gundagai. That was why she and the Olsens were with the carnival. She and Mrs Olsen were doing the Dance of the Seven Veils too, just the two of them — Gertrude was still too young, and Ginger just a baby. But before her Big Top had burned Madame had been on the trapeze.’

  It still seemed impossible to imagine Madame flying like Gertrude across the tent. ‘What was Madame’s act like?’

  ‘I never saw her,’ said Fred regretfully. ‘She was gettin’ too old for it even then and she knew her eyesight was goin’ too. Anyway, you can’t do the trapeze without a Big Top and the right ropes and pulleys. Gertrude was only eight or nine years old, but Madame and Mrs Olsen were training her up. Knew she was goin’ to be something good. So Madame offered me a trade. She knew how much I’d got in the bank job — enough for a new Big Top and a decent truck. If I told her where the loot was, she and Mrs Olsen would make sure I weren’t found. Never, not so long as I pulled up me socks and stayed on the straight and narrow.’ Fred shrugged. ‘So the Magnifico Family Circus got going again. Me and Madame and Mrs Olsen and the kids.’

  ‘And Ebenezer, Ephraim?’

  ‘Nah, they came later. Had some others with us before them too.’

  Blue stared at him. So the circus she loved had come from stolen money. There was something more he wasn’t saying. Something big. ‘And Sheba?’

  ‘Sheba was there, of course.’ Fred gave the elephant a grin. ‘Think Madame wanted that truck mainly so Sheba didn’t have to walk from town to town any more.’

  Blue looked at Mah. ‘Did you know what he was doing?’

  ‘I was still at the orphanage. I saw his picture in the paper. Not a good picture, but there was his name. I knew it was him. I was so ashamed. He wrote to me, but I wouldn’t answer.’ She shrugged. ‘Then when I was twelve I was sent to your parents’ house. Mrs Huggins was hard, but your mother was kind. She gave me your dresses when you grew out of them. Even the blue coat with the rabbit-skin collar. And new shoes from your factories where someone had made a mistake, so they couldn’t be sold.’

  Blue flushed. Charity. She’d had so much, and Mah so little. She’d never even noticed. She thought, you scrubbed the hall floor while I went to tennis parties. I thought of you as my friend, but you share with your friends, you don’t just give them the things you no longer need.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ She met Mah’s gaze. ‘You did everything for me back then. And I just took.’

  Fred looked from one to the other, puzzled. ‘I thought you’d both be happy. Being together again and everything.’

  Blue ignored him, looking at Mah. If only she’d smile. She attempted a smile herself. ‘You can share everything I have now, though that’s only two pounds, fourpence. Everything else belongs to all of us. Or Madame.’

  Mah considered. ‘So if I stay here …’

  Fred said, ‘Of course you’re goin’ to stay here!’

  Mah kept her eyes on Blue. ‘If I stay here, you’re not going to say, “Mah, please fetch my sandwiches?”’

  Blue looked at the sandwich in her hand, then back at Mah. ‘No. Well, no more than I might say, “I’m getting a sandwich. Do you want one too?” There are no servants here, Mah. We work hard, but we work together.’

  ‘That’s what I told her.’ Fred bit into his own sandwich. ‘Eat up, princess,’ he added to Blue. ‘Marj ate while you were changing.’

  ‘Mah? Do you hate me?’

  ‘Hate? No.’ Mah considered. ‘Envied. Resented.’

  Blue looked at her helplessly through the darkness. Behind them Sheba munched her hay. ‘I thought we were friends. Sort of friends.’

  Mah picked up the teddy bear and cuddled it absently. ‘Not at first. You were a young lady and I was the servant who got your cast-offs. But you let me read your books,’ she said softly. ‘You said, “You’ll like this one.” When you went into town and came back with chocolates you would give me one. You didn’t pick out the ones you didn’t like. You offered me the whole box to choose from. But I didn’t know we were friends till I found myself in the flames to find you.’ Mah met her eyes. ‘If we hadn’t been friends, you wouldn’t have hugged me now.’

  ‘You didn’t hug me back.’

  Mah grinned. Suddenly, magically, her face was Fred’s, with a touch of Fred’s wickedness too. Any housekeeper seeing that grin on a housemaid would have been automatically suspicious. She hugged Blue sharply, her wiry arms strong, then sat back. ‘There you are then.’ She wrinkled her nose at Fred. ‘You can stop worrying, big brother. I’m staying, just as you planned.’

  Sheba gave a satisfied rumble behind them. A pink-tipped trunk edged over their shoulders and grabbed the teddy bear. Mah gave a sharp cry as it was plucked from her hands.

  ‘She only lends it to you.’ Blue bit into her sandwich. The greasy meatiness was good. ‘Pass me another, Fred. I’m starved.’

  ‘Your word is my command, princess.’ Fred passed her the plate, then offered it to Mah.

  Mah took a sandwich and started eating. When she could, she said, ‘If you hadn’t been my friend, I wouldn’t have written to Fred, saying he must save you.’

  ‘I … don’t understand.’ But suddenly she did, the pieces of the jigsaw coming together. The servant who
heard everything, the brother at the circus …

  The wind sneaked over the dunes, smelling of ice and sea. Mah shivered. Fred took off his jacket and put it over her shoulders.

  ‘After the fire …’

  After you saved me, thought Blue.

  ‘… I heard Mrs Huggins say the police had found a couple of kerosene tins in the nursery next to your bedroom. The police came down hard on us, but why would servants want to do such a thing? Your family were good to us. Even if they hadn’t been, jobs were hard to get.’

  Blue tried to think who might have had access to the nursery. So many people had come back to the house after the funeral service, not just the aunts and Uncle Herbert but the factory managers, Mum’s friends from church and tennis, and men Dad had been at school with, as well as his friends from the business world.

  Blue shook her head. ‘Someone would have noticed if any guest carried kerosene tins.’

  ‘Reckon someone was paid to torch the place,’ said Fred.

  Blue felt the hairs rise on her arms. Fred knew about things like theft and arson. Kind, laughing Fred. Fred who had robbed a bank, with a pistol. Had it really been unloaded? She blinked.

  ‘Easy enough for someone to come in through the window. They could leave a couple of candles burning near the cans, nice fat ones, so they could get away afore it all flared up.’

  He’s talking like it was a circus trick. He doesn’t seem to realise it was my life, thought Blue. ‘So you came to the hospital to look out for me,’ she said to Mah slowly.

  Mah shrugged. ‘Partly. Mostly I needed a job too. Even a decent bed and my meals till I could find another one. Stupid Chinese girl, not speak English much. Work for nothing. At least I got to eat your liver custards.’

  ‘You had to eat my leftovers!’

  ‘Better than burned porridge at the orphanage. But I got worried,’ said Mah. ‘The burns healed, but you got sicker. Every day you got sicker. I watched. I listened. And then I heard your aunt say “arsenic”.’

  Blue sat as though the air about her had turned to ice. She had accepted intellectually that the poisoning story was probably true. She had even accepted that her aunts might have been responsible.