by Will Davis
‘What the fuck,’ snarls Vlad abruptly, ‘are you doing here?’
He stares at him, shocked.
‘I just . . .’ is all he can manage in reply.
‘You’re one of those very sad people, is that it?’ Vlad spits. ‘Who think that one stupid fuck means partners for life?’
‘No!’
‘Then what is it?’
‘I wanted to see you again, that’s all!’
‘How old are you? What, forty? And you act like this!’ Vlad gestures to him and snaps his fingers, producing a loud clicking noise. ‘Like a teenager! Like a stupid fucking kid. What do you think this is going to be for you? Some sort of love nest?’
He is hit by a burst of anger.
‘I don’t fucking know, all right? I don’t know what I thought!’
‘Ah!’ says Vlad, nodding his head up and down very fast, seeming to enjoy his flash of rage even more than he does. ‘You don’t know! So you are loopy as well as stupid?’
The anger dissipates, try as he might to hold on to it. All that is left is a great sense of shame. Vlad rolls his eyes as if despairing of the feeble creature before him. There seems nothing left to say, only the truth, and so tentatively he tries to say it.
‘Watching you the other night . . . it made me feel something.’
‘What?’
‘That I . . . I don’t want to leave.’
‘Too bad!’
‘I wouldn’t get in your way. Maybe I could help –’
‘Help? Help?! How could you help?’ exclaims Vlad.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Maybe I can show you some tricks,’ suggests the aerialist, suddenly looking back at him and grinning. Disconcerted by the change, he nods. Vlad’s grin deepens and he cautiously smiles back. Then Vlad’s grin vanishes and the aerialist takes a deep breath, as if filling his lungs with invective.
‘You think it is so easy as you just run away and join the circus? One of those people who think that all it takes is for you to one day decide “Oh, I shall learn a few tricks today” and then hooray the next day – ha! – you can be a great aerialist, perhaps even the vampire Vlad?! Why not? Oh, I will tell you why not! Have I got news for you! Because it’s not so fucking easy!’
‘That’s not what I –’ he starts to say, but Vlad cuts him off.
‘Where I come from you are made to do terrible things – terrible things! – awful, painful horrible exercises before you are allowed to even think about learning the tricks. You must sit for hours and hours with your legs in splits – until they are truly split! You must stand on your head until the blood is pouring out of your eyes and you must balance on one foot for a whole week and then on the other for another whole week, and you must smile while you are doing it also! And then the tricks! The tricks, they take years and years and years of practice. Years of dedication and courage. The timing and the strength, it comes not from nowhere, but from the training! The endless, endless training. And on top of this you need drive. You need spirit! You need what you can only get from years of living so poor it is not even living. From sleeping through icy freezing winters in the corner of some little tiny hut with nothing to keep you company but hungriness in your belly, the sound of the wind even hungrier outside, screaming because it wants to eat your soul! What you can only get from having to beg or steal in order to survive, let other people look at you and spit if they wish, do what they like with you, so long as they will give you a coin towards your supper. You need this and more, enough to make you want to go through any kind of pain and worse. To risk dying over and over. Break your limbs and carry on nevertheless. You must hurt and hurt and hurt and still you must keep on going because this is the only way you will escape. And this is what you think you got, eh? This is what you think you can just learn tomorrow? Stroll up and be in the circus? You think it is so fucking easy that just anyone can do these things?’
There is a long pause. Vlad now holds himself regally, his eyes flashing with proud fury. It is as if the aerialist is waiting for him to applaud.
‘I meant maybe I could, you know . . . help out,’ he says falteringly. ‘Not try and be an aerialist like you. Perhaps be . . . your assistant or something. Help with the costumes, things like that.’
‘Oh.’
The aerialist makes a sound like a snake hissing and whips his head away to stare sullenly, almost childishly, at the bedcover.
‘I don’t need no assistant,’ he says gruffly.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says.
‘You’re fucking mad. Get out.’
He doesn’t move.
‘Get out!’ Vlad screams.
But he is burning up, as if a volcano had erupted deep inside and spewed its lava into his bloodstream. His eyes sting and his breath catches. He sinks to his knees as the tears begin to slide down his cheeks, shuddering from the sobs that tear through his body. Vlad gapes at him, baffled by the transformation. A minute later the aerialist turns and starts to rummage among the bedclothes around him. He squeezes shut his eyes, trying to shut out the world, as if somehow this might also close off the source of his anguish. A moment later he feels fabric being draped around his shoulders and a voice whispering ‘Shhh’ in his ear as he is encircled by Vlad’s arms and gently rocked back and forth.
After a long while with this gentle, almost motherly rocking he is able to get a hold of himself and he speaks. His voice is cracked and hoarse, strangely colourless too, all the blazing emotion having been burnt away, leaving behind only the weary ashen facts of his situation. Vlad listens in silence until he is finished talking.
‘Oh fuck,’ sighs the aerialist eventually.
He will listen to the silence of the house, a silence at once familiar and alien. He will not go outside any more, but will remain shut away, a hermit. He will not answer the phone or check his messages and emails. Instead he will spend hours and hours pushing his legs out to the side or in front of him, bending over them, tendons pulled taut and shrieking, reaching for an invisible middle distance and letting the pain spur him on till he is gasping and gaping. He will take hold of the banisters and do pull-ups, throw himself on his hands and do push-ups, lie back on the table and do bench presses, and jog on the spot or do star jumps until his sides are cramping up. As the days pass gradually the pain will start to recede and his body will begin to feel charged and alive, as if he is a dangerous animal confined to a pen, forced to circle its enclosure over and over, poised to break out. Then the need will overcome him, and he will break out – but not until long after dark, when he can be sure the sedate world of his neighbourhood has closed its watchful eyes for the night.
He will take the route at the end of the garden that leads through the woodland, ducking his head as he passes the hedge that borders the Goodlys’ house and heading through a small gap in the undergrowth, onto a wild path barely distinguishable from the thicket that surrounds it. He will head down this path for half an hour. If it is a cloudy night he will take a torch, but when possible he will prefer to let the moonlight show him the way. The brambles will tear at his sleeves and rake at his skin, and often he will emerge scratched and even bloody. But he will be glad of this, for it will add to the strange sense of achievement he will feel when he reaches the common.
He will feel that familiar old pounding of his heart as he recalls again the night he encountered the circus. He will allow himself to remember the hopelessness, the awe, and then the combination of terror and lust he felt at meeting the aerialist in the pools of shadow outside the big top. He will thrill at the memory, at the romance, and the syncopations of his heart will seem like a dizzy dance in which he has been lost and fumbling ever since. If only he could go back to that time, he will think. If only he could relive that world again. Just for one night, for one hour even.
Sometimes he will lie down in the field, right at the centre in the place he approximates the big top to have once been staked. He will stretch out with his arms wide and welcoming and stare up
into the sky, imagining that he is at the circus again, only this time that he is performing in it, flying through the air, the stars above him the eyes of the audience twinkling with astonishment and admiration from the nether-space beyond the stage lights.
Later that morning the company is on the move again. He stays hidden in Vlad’s caravan, like a stowaway. Every time they turn a corner the vehicle lurches and he feels as if an earthquake is taking place. But once they are on the motorway the journey becomes smooth and steady, and he grips the sides of the bed and lies there, staring at the ceiling and listening to the burr of the engine, strangely content.
After several hours they turn off the motorway and as he peeps out of the little window a sign tells him they are not far off Manchester. He thinks of his car and his phone, left behind at the side of a random field, and has his first real shiver of hesitation. But it is too late to hesitate. There is no going back now.
That night, after the company have parked their caravans and trailers in the new grounds, he waits as Vlad has told him he must until the aerialist returns from setting up and informs him the coast is clear. Then he follows Vlad out into the chilly darkness, through the camp and to the far side of the field, where Vlad takes him in his arms and kisses him.
‘My dirty little secret,’ says the aerialist proudly, as the kiss deepens. Later, after they have returned and lie with their limbs entwined on Vlad’s little bed, the aerialist offers to tell him his life story. He is not really from Transylvania, he says, but from a village outside Craiova, in the south of Romania. He tells him that he came to Britain with his parents when he was twelve, and that they were illegal immigrants who crossed the Channel on a cargo ferry in a crate along with twelve others. His father had a contact in a circus who agreed to employ them, and eventually his father managed to get sponsorship from this circus to remain in the UK – but his mother and sister were sent back to Romania. The sponsorship deal turned out to be the equivalent of slave labour and they were forced to work like dogs, performing in the evenings and working through the days as if they belonged to the owner. ‘These owners, they are all of them cunts,’ Vlad spits. ‘Every last one! Especially that Big Pete and his bitch of a wife!’ After a few placatory gulps of beer the aerialist settles down and resumes his story: finally his father could take it no more and fled back to Romania – despite the fact that his mother had written to him that things were as bad as ever and they lived in abject poverty. But by this time Vlad had been there for six years and had only another year to go before he could apply for citizenship, and so he made the difficult decision not to return with his father. As soon as he got his passport he left the circus, making sure he smashed all the props and tore all the curtains before he went – ‘That showed the bastards!’ cackles Vlad gleefully. The only trouble was because of this stunt he had a bad name and for a long time could find no employment, since the owner had contacted all the other circuses he knew and told them under no circumstances to hire him. But circuses are suspicious of each other, especially the older ones, and sooner or later there is always work for good acrobats who will perform for low pay. Eventually Vlad found work with a small French-owned circus where he was given his own trailer compartment – a first. It was a difficult time though, because the other performers all hated him for being the most popular act, and no one would talk to him except to order him around or make fun of his accent. He stayed with the French circus for a couple of years until he’d saved up enough to buy a second-hand caravan of his own – ‘A clapped-out old heap of junk that won’t even fucking heat!’ Vlad mutters. Then he left and a couple of circuses later joined Big Pete’s show. It is his second season with the company.
He listens to Vlad in awe, trying to swallow his disbelief at this life he is describing, so impossibly alien to his own. Already he harbours a strong suspicion that Vlad exaggerates for dramatic effect, but he considers he has no right not to take him at his word, and he makes the requisite gasps of astonishment and sympathy as his narrative unfolds. The truth is he wants to believe him, for though the story is harrowing and nightmarish at times, there is something hauntingly romantic about it, and to be there, listening, in his caravan in a field under the midnight moon, he feels himself to be taking part in that romance, making an appearance in another chapter in the ongoing fairy-tale adventure of the aerialist’s life.
Vlad does not ask him much about himself. He does not seem to want to know any more than what he has already told him. Instead Vlad appears to have accepted him for what he is, like a wounded baby bird found at the side of the road which the aerialist has taken it upon himself to nurse back to health until the time comes, once it is older and its wings mended, for the bird to be lobbed out the window. And he is glad Vlad does not ask questions, for he does not wish to talk about his own life.
‘We stay here for a couple of days,’ says Vlad the next day when he returns to the trailer with ploughman’s sandwiches from the nearby supermarket for lunch. ‘Have to wait for a fucking part for the winches. The stupid wanker should have got it last week. But it’s fun, no? This sneaking around.’
He likes it too, though sometimes during the day the little room gets so hot and stuffy it feels as though he is trapped in an oven, slow-baking. But he feels protected too, cushioned and closeted away from the outside world and all its problems, incubated and safe. He knows soon he must venture out, if he is not to go crazy, but for now he is glad to be where he is. It is the closest to non-existence he has ever come.
The following afternoon he puts the caravan in order while Vlad is out training, getting ready for his performance at the end of the week. The aerialist warms up just outside the trailer, so that he can watch him from the little window as he arches his back impossibly high and flips over his head and onto his legs, seemingly defying gravity in the process.
‘What have you done?’ Vlad cries when he comes in, sweaty, for a towel so he can use the shower in the camping grounds. For a second he is worried the aerialist is genuinely angry, but then his face breaks into a smile of pleasure as he surveys the tidy space. ‘Now I will never find a thing!’
Vlad kisses him on the cheek and a shiver of pleasure runs up his spine. He is afraid to admit to himself how happy he feels. That night he listens to the music and the screams coming from the big top twenty yards away and sneaks out of the trailer, moving not inside the big top but just nearer to it, so that he might be closer to the aerialist and the performers, and the magic inside.
Edward never came to his house except for once, early on, when he took him because Edward insisted that he was dying to meet the people who had exerted the most influence over his life. They showed up unannounced after school, and his mum, who had just come in from the old people’s home herself, started when she saw he had Edward with him, inspecting the drab furniture and the watercolours on the walls with wide-eyed amazement as if he had never beheld such quaintness.
‘It’s a pleasure to meet you,’ Edward said warmly, shaking her hand.
‘Thank you,’ she murmured, eyeing him as if he were an alien, which he thought Edward might as well have been. Then his mum panicked, as if a thought had just occurred to her. ‘Are you staying for dinner?’
For a moment he was panicked too, dreading lest Edward should answer yes. He didn’t want Edward to sit through one of their deathly boring dinners, in which his parents made observations about the weather and about their jobs, as if competing to deliver the greatest platitude. He knew Edward would find such conversation unbelievable for its sheer inanity.
‘Oh no,’ Edward assured her, ‘but thank you.’
He breathed a sigh of relief and his mother visibly relaxed herself and suggested a cup of tea, which Edward thought was a wonderful idea. Edward began to tell her about himself and she listened carefully, looking increasingly charmed. Edward told her about his impressions of the town and the school. She smiled and nodded when he called the local church beautiful and said how peaceful life was in the countr
y. Finally Edward said, ‘Of course Mum and Dad don’t think much of it here, but then that’s the point.’
‘The point?’ asked his mum, smiling.
‘Yes – we came here so Dad can’t fuck around any more. And there’s no one else’s bed within half a mile’s radius, so it’s physically impossible for him!’
Edward laughed gaily but his mother blanched and a few minutes later she developed a headache and remembered something she had to do in the other room. He looked at Edward and saw he was mystified that she had not laughed too. He was sure he must be horrified by their immaculate little home with its pictures of meadows and vases of flowers, its uncluttered shelves, perfectly plumped cushions and spotlessly hoovered floors. But he was wrong about this.
‘I like her,’ said Edward quietly. ‘She’s normal. You’re lucky.’
He had never thought of himself as lucky before. He wanted to deny it, to explain how often he felt like he was being smothered by the cooped-up politeness of his parents’ little lives. But he saw then that Edward would not understand this, he would only tell him he didn’t know a good thing when he had it. He resolved then and there not to bring Edward home with him again.
From time to time his mother would ask about Edward and fuss about how much time he was spending over at his house, saying she was sure his parents must be tired of him. But he knew really it was because she’d been frightened by Edward, and was worried he might be picking up bad habits and grand ideas – which he secretly knew he was.
That night he will survey the other items the men delivered: twelve metres of shipping rope, two rope thimbles and a steel bar for the trapeze, three foot long and welded to thimbles at both ends.
He will measure out three metres of the rope then will take some shears and cut it. He will lay the shorter piece on the floor, take up the frayed end and pick at it until the weave of the rope has come loose and flows in three thick curling locks through his fingers. He will wrap these locks around one of the thimbles and will then work loose a single lock of the rope further down. He will then begin to weave the rope back into itself, working free more locks and plaiting the loose ends around them, creating an eyelet. He will tighten this eyelet until it is firm and secure around the thimble. The process is painstakingly slow, but gradually he will succeed at splicing the rope to the trapeze. Then he will measure out another three metres, cut the rope, wrap it around the other thimble of the bar and repeat the process.
