by Will Davis
‘I see the box office,’ he says carefully.
Marie loses her grin.
‘You tryin’ to be smart with me?’ she snaps.
‘No, ma’am.’
‘Oi, Marie! Who you talking to?’ booms an unmistakable deep voice from inside the trailer. ‘Something you need me to come and sort out?’
He quakes lest Marie should tell Big Pete to come.
‘Like you’ve ever sorted out a fucking thing in your worthless piece of shit existence!’ yells Marie in the general direction of behind her. ‘And I’d sure as hell be sorry if I ever had to rely on your flabby arse!’
She turns back to face him.
‘You be here at seven tomorrow and I’ll give you something to do. And mind you’re not late cos I’m a busy woman, ain’t I?’
With these words she picks up the basin. He jumps to the side as she flings the water into the air, where for an instant it glistens under the stars in a spangled splash before falling to the grass and being lost to the earth forever. He turns to say goodnight to Marie and is just in time to have the door shut in his face.
That week Edward did not act like his usual self. It was as if he’d slipped into an exclusive universe of his own making, one that could not be tarnished by anything said or seen in reality. He smiled a lot at the teachers, even at other kids at school, and once or twice he heard him humming snatches of the very sort of pop music he professed to hate. When Katy passed by at lunchtime, her tray loaded with food, Edward did not whisper to him his usual comment about a hippo feeding, and when Fred yelled at them from the back of the assembly room that they were bum chums he did not so much as bother to give him the finger. Edward even put his hand up once or twice in class when no one else knew the answer and offered it to the teacher in a voice devoid of sarcasm.
After school Edward’s father picked him up. He was always doing something with him – taking him to an arts cinema in the next town to watch a documentary on Slovakian immigrants, or to a local gallery to see rare imported Aboriginal art. One morning Edward didn’t even show up at school and the next day he said he’d played truant in order to go shopping with his father in London. ‘There’s this really cool thing we do,’ he said. ‘We walk into a designer shop and Dad pretends he’s deaf so I have to do all the talking. I can say anything I want and so I tell the assistant he nearly drowned trying to save my mother after their luxury cruise liner capsized, and they were never able to get the water out of his ear holes – shit like that. But it’s a fucking hoot! They always look like they don’t believe you, but of course they can’t say so because they want to make a sale!’
He couldn’t help himself: he was deeply jealous of Edward’s relationship with his father, and hurt that Edward never asked if he wanted to tag along. He thought he could hear Edward’s father in Edward’s voice too – a put-on optimism with which he greeted the world, as if optimism itself were an ironic joke which everybody else was too dumb to understand. Moreover he was maddened by the hypocrisy of it. Had Edward just forgotten all the things he had said about how useless and pathetic his dad was? Now all Edward could do was talk about his father as if he were the most brilliant giver of life on the planet, about the games they played to see who could come up with the best one-liner or who could make the most cutting riposte, and the trips to museums, theatres and cinemas. He wanted to shake Edward and tell him to snap out of it, but he didn’t dare, and so he kept silent while Edward chatted away about the trip to Cornwall that his father was taking him on that weekend to meet some old writer friends, knowing that while Edward and his father sipped cocktails with intellectuals and played at who could think up the catchiest aphorism, he would be at the old people’s home with his mother, sitting beside absent-minded octogenarians being told what a fine and good-hearted young man he was.
The next morning he is outside Big Pete and Marie’s trailer at seven. Inside it is dark and the curtains are drawn, and he waits twenty minutes before getting up the courage to knock. From within he hears a man’s voice swearing and then some stomping coming towards the door. Marie throws it open and stands there glaring at him. Her hair is a mesh of frizz around her head and she is wearing a beautiful pink silk kimono with silver birds embroidered on it, inelegantly draped over her stumpy frame.
‘You told me to be here at seven,’ he says quickly.
Marie looks him up and down.
‘I said eight,’ she replies in a voice that dares him to contradict her.
‘You said . . .’ He thinks the better of this. ‘Shall I come back?’
Marie considers for a minute.
‘No,’ she says. ‘Since you’ve woken me and my ’usband up you can get started now. Round the back is a bucket and sponge. Get cleaning.’
She starts to close the door.
‘Sorry . . . but what do you want me to clean exactly?’ he asks.
She gives him a withering look as if it is the most moronic question she has ever heard. He is suddenly reminded of Katy from school, and how she would sometimes jeer at the other kids when they put up their hands to ask questions, as if the fact that they didn’t know the answer and wanted to was a shameful thing.
‘The trailers,’ Marie says very slowly, as if talking to an idiot. ‘Them things with the wheels, all around us. See?’
With this she slams the door.
With the trapeze in place he will gently swing it back and forth, testing for space. On the back swing it will be a good three metres from the wall, but on the front swing he will hit the side of the room, just beneath the lip of the torn-out floor. He will go to the garage and retrieve the hammer, as well as a chisel and a saw.
It will take him another three days to beat his way through the wall, during which he will sleep and eat sporadically, paying no attention to the clock or the movements of day and night outside the house. Time will become irrelevant, a system with no basis in his world. He will knock out great chunks of brickwork, which he will ferry to the garage every hour and pile up beside the empty space where he used to park the car. When he takes breaks he will do chin-ups and sit-ups on the trapeze bar, and sit on the ground with his legs splayed out either side of him, reaching for an invisible middle distance, trying to will his chest towards the floor.
At the end of three days he will be covered head to toe in dust and paint flecks, the skin of his arms and hands hidden beneath a thick layer of grime. He will go to the bathroom and run a bath as hot as he can bear into which he will lower himself, centimetre by centimetre, until he is submerged to his neck. He will wonder as he lies there if he feels guilty or sad, but the searing heat will seem to deny things like guilt and sadness, as if purging him clean of any unnecessary state of emotion. He will lie there until the water has turned ash grey and lukewarm.
Clean, flushed and wrinkled, he will towel himself dry, put on a bathrobe and slippers and make his way downstairs to inspect the space he has created. A huge chunk of the house will have disappeared, as if an explosion had ripped through it. His mother’s room and the wall that separated it from the landing, as well as some of the landing itself, will be missing. When he climbs back up to the trapeze, lifts his legs and swings back and forth, space will no longer be an issue.
Marie gives him the worst jobs and he knows she is doing it deliberately. It is a sort of game, to see if she can break him, get him to give up and leave. She makes him clean the toilets and empty the sewage out of the buckets. She has him scrub the wheels of the trucks to dislodge stones and clumps of mud, polish the windows and hose down the paintwork. When this is done she makes him iron costumes and fold them, all the while berating him for not doing it carefully or fast enough. Whenever he is finished with a task she inspects his work rolling her eyes and muttering to herself, as if to say what is the point of bothering? Nothing he does is good enough. Nothing he does is right. But what Marie doesn’t know is that he doesn’t mind. She thinks she can break him but he knows she can’t, no matter what she tells him to do or how
much she swears and tells him off for failing to do it properly. He is happier than he can remember having been in a very long while, and sometimes he smiles to himself to think that he can enjoy life while mopping up piss or scouring mud from the step of a trailer. After all, he’s been doing jobs not unlike these for years, and been snapped at by people no less rude than Marie for never getting it right.
Vlad is always busy during the day, either rehearsing on his trapeze inside the big top, stretching out his limbs in the sun on the roof of his caravan, or else taking long naps inside it. Sometimes he crosses paths with the aerialist, on the way back to Marie’s trailer carrying buckets of bleach or baskets of wet costumes.
‘That woman,’ tuts Vlad. ‘She takes advantage. You should tell her where to stick it.’
But Vlad does not tell her this himself, and after a while he realises that Vlad is afraid of Marie too – that everyone is afraid of her, and that whatever she yells at Big Pete to do, after a few token fireworks, he does.
‘Wishing you hadn’t left a perfectly decent job for this crap, eh?’ she says one morning while they are scrubbing down the bleachers with scours and soapy water. ‘Had a fella once who followed us from place to place pestering us till we agreed to give the stupid wanker a job just to shut ’im up. Lasted a whole three days, ’e did. You weirdos always think it’s going to be like something out of a picture book or a film. All romantic and shit. Bet you don’t think that any more though, do ya?’
With this she laughs to herself, a short burst of dry air. He waits to see if she will say more but afterwards she closes up and does not speak to him again all day. She is a hard woman who evidently enjoys giving the impression of having been through a lot. He does not doubt she has the scars to prove it though, and thinks it is little wonder everyone in the company tiptoes around her.
Although he does not contradict Marie, the hard work has by no means rid the circus of its romance. While he works all about him he gets to see it come to life. When it is sunny the couple who do the acrobatics come out to train on the grass outside the big top – a man who balances his tiny wife in impossible positions, culminating in a single-armed handstand off the centre of his head. A woman with a snake tattoo contorts on a foam mat, and the two silks performers do sun salutations and sit with legs akimbo to one another, stretching out each other’s limbs. Even the clown can occasionally be seen practising his steps, falling backwards so that his feet rotate up into the air and coughing up mouthfuls of glitter. Sometimes when Marie is not there to shout at him he pauses to watch the company, wondering if they are aware of their glamour – though indeed part of that glamour seems to be their lack of awareness, as if the mad world of impossible feats they are part of is simply the norm. As if each day is just another day at the circus.
He is not of this world though and nobody lets him forget it. The hardest thing is not the work, it is the fact that people do not acknowledge him. ‘They will come around,’ Vlad assures him when he mentions this, ‘once they get used to you.’ But he sees no sign in support of this promise. When he passes by in the morning no one greets him, not even a smile or a nod, let alone any other indication of acceptance. He understands that they do not want him here and resent the fact that he has been granted permission to stay. They think he deserves to do hard labour and are amused that Marie has turned him into her slave. They are waiting for him to be broken too, for him to throw in the towel and leave.
On Monday Edward met him outside his house, flushed with excitement. He would not say what was on his mind though, and he was quiet all the way to school, smiling secretively to himself. But halfway through class he couldn’t keep it in any longer.
‘Dad’s taking us to France!’ he burst out in a whisper.
‘What?’
‘I’m going to live with Frogs in a bona fide chateau!’
‘France!’
‘Oui! C’est formidable, non?!’
They were the cruellest words he had ever heard. He couldn’t even smile, never mind laugh as though he thought it was wonderful. As Edward chattered on about how he would have to learn to speak French properly and drink lots of red wine in preparation, he felt his features freezing up and he tried to turn his head so Edward wouldn’t notice. But Edward did notice and his flow of happiness faltered.
‘Of course you’ll come and visit me lots,’ Edward said quickly after a short pause. ‘And we’ll write and phone each other. You’ll still be my friend, you know. It won’t change anything.’
But this wasn’t true and he wasn’t sure if Edward understood this and was just being kind, or if he really believed what he said. Edward would be in a new school, in a new society, with new things to see and do and talk about. Edward would have no need of him and within a few months the short time they had been friends would fade from memory along with their friendship, until it was forgotten altogether. He knew it, as certain as the bones beneath his skin. Meanwhile he would be here alone, struggling to maintain the image that he didn’t care when the other kids ribbed him and called him a queer, struggling to be someone, struggling for a reason to struggle.
‘Yeah,’ he said. It came out as a choke, a cross between a grunt and a sob, and he quickly stood up. The teacher peered over at him.
‘Something the matter?’
‘May I use the toilet?’
‘May I use the toilet, sir,’ corrected the teacher. ‘Go on.’
He hurried out of the classroom and down the corridor, feeling as though his insides were being churned – a rising sensation of dread was filling his stomach and he wanted to vomit it out before it became too much to bear. But when he reached the toilet bowl all he produced was a small lump of phlegm that splatted against the yellowy water below and floated there like an egg white. He knew he should return to class but could not raise himself up from his knees. The idea of spending the rest of his school years without Edward at his side was dizzying and the feeling in his stomach would not go away.
The bell rang and he was still there. He heard voices and doors and feet and laughter. Soon the toilets would be full of other kids, he knew, the slackers who went there to smoke cigarettes and Tipp-Ex their slogans on the cubicle walls. Knowing that he would not want to be found by them finally gave him the energy to force himself up.
Outside Edward was waiting.
‘Hey,’ said Edward, ‘are you all right?’
‘Yes,’ he lied. ‘Fine. Why wouldn’t I be?’
But he could see that Edward got it, for he acted nicely towards him for the rest of the day and even suggested that on Sunday when he got back from Cornwall perhaps he would like to come over. Though it was exactly what he really wanted to do, he shook his head and said he couldn’t. For some reason he knew he must not go. He was ashamed of the way he had acted and was sorry that Edward had noticed. Already it felt as if Edward had started to become a stranger.
He watches as they set up the big top. He has asked Marie if he should help but she curtly informs him they do not need him and he will only get in the way, and instead sets him to hand-washing curtain material in a large basin of cold soapy water outside the costume trailer. ‘Mind you get all the grease spots out,’ she tells him, ‘or else you’ll have to do it all again right away. It’s gotta be dry for tomorrow night.’
Big Pete and three other men are in charge of setting up the tent, though everyone seems to be expected to assist at certain times – at which point Big Pete will bellow, ‘Oi, every cunt out here now!’ and everyone will emerge from their caravans or stop what they are doing to help carry the vast expanse of canvas and lay it out flat across the grass so that it resembles a navy lake of painted planets and stars. He notices that Vlad does not come to help, though he knows he is in his caravan because he left him sleeping there that morning, and he realises he is making himself scarce on purpose.
Setting up the big top takes them just three hours, from start to finish. First they erect two twelve-metre poles, feeding them into eyelets at ei
ther side of the central section of the giant pool of canvas. These poles have a piece of truss to link them, and are held upright by two of the men while Big Pete and the other man drive them through the canvas and into holes they have tunnelled into the ground with great groans of effort, until the poles stand firm. The truss between the top of the poles is then used as a winch, and four metal cords feed through pulleys and are attached to a large piece of circular scaffolding that forms the central turret of the big top. Once this is all in place the men begin to drive metre-long stakes into the ground all around the circumference of the tent, using a great mallet to beat the stakes into the earth until they stand a foot high out of the grass. These are then attached to ropes that feed through loops on triangular flaps of the canvas. Everyone is called back again to assist with carrying a seemingly endless number of two-metre poles out of one of the trailers, which are then laid out beside the stakes. The men insert the poles through the fabric and pull them erect all the way around the tent. Now it is time to raise the turret, which is done with large rotating contraptions at each end of the big top. The metal cords feed into these machines and the men turn two large handles on either side in order to draw the turret up into the air, a few centimetres at a time, until it dangles precariously just beneath the truss, a good ten metres from the ground. It is amazing to behold, for it seems as if out of nowhere a palace has been constructed, something towering and three-dimensional out of what was previously flat. Once the cords are secure the company are yelled for yet again, this time to assist with slotting together six more poles, which are then ferried inside the tent in order to buttress the canvas around the turret. There are plenty of shouts and sounds of swearing from inside, and he suspects this is the most arduous part of the labour, though he cannot see what is going on, only the outside, where the canvas rises as each pole is put in. He would like to go and assist, or at least sneak a look, but Marie’s ever-watchful eye keeps him scrubbing like Cinderella at the bucket of never-ending washing.
