“And these are for telling me I can’t see Dean,” I tell Dad.
“And this is for giving up on us,” I tell Dean, clicking four round circles onto my palm. They are difficult to swallow and they rub against my throat and they make me start to cry again.
There are six pills left and one by one I free them all and drink them back, hardly feeling as they slip past my tongue, the taste too faint to barely notice.
Now, the cut edges of my family will hurt less. And maybe if I’m not here, they won’t hurt at all.
I lie down and curl my tears into my pillow. Because Dean is right—I could never really stop still in his house of bricks and he’d fall from our turning wheels. He can’t visit, the further away we go. The road will stretch and snap, and he won’t find his way to me. I’ll never have a house, my garden with roots.
I take the empty packets and hide them in the bin.
In the bathroom, I wash my face in a stream of water. The mirror shows black streaks down my cheeks, which I wipe away with cream and swabs of cotton wool.
I sit on my bed and wait. I don’t feel anything. I lie on my back and stare up at the slats above me. How many of my secrets are hidden there? The edge of Rita’s sheet is tucked under her mattress. I try to hear the ladder-witch breathe.
I wait to feel sick, to vomit the pills back up, but it doesn’t happen.
And I start to laugh, too loudly into the silent room. I turn on my side and pull my pillow to my face. I laugh so much that it’s difficult to breathe, and I wish that Rita was in here too. I want to hear her laughter right now, to string alongside mine.
But she’s not, and the loneliness falls like a blanket and it stops my mouth tight.
I wait for sickness, for something, but nothing comes. The pills have dissolved, they’ve gone, but they haven’t taken me with them.
Chapter Eleven
Lo
I wake up and the morning is at the edge of the curtains. I’m under my duvet, in my costume. And I remember.
I run a nail along my skin, and I can feel it. And I can feel my heart thudding into my palm. There’s the sound of Rita sleeping above me.
Did I take those pills last night? It feels like my real mind stopped and something else took over. If I had found more pills, would I have taken them?
Did I really, really not want to wake up? Not ever?
Rita would have woken this morning and called to me and I wouldn’t have answered. She would have jumped down from her bed and found me.
Guilt pushes hard on my chest. But relief pulls at me. I want to take last night and break it into little pieces that I’ll never see again. Because I didn’t want to die. I don’t know what I wanted, but I didn’t truly want to disappear. Not forever.
Quietly I get up, take off my feathered costume, and put on my night T-shirt. I go from our bedroom, unlock the front door and walk barefoot down the silent van steps. I run across the morning grass, the air light on my skin. I’m over the small wall and on the beach, the sand gritty and cold between my toes. Sharp seaweed catches my ankles as I run.
The sun is fierce and small in the sky, painting shining starlings on the surface of the sea, gathering into a bright streak of line toward me.
The water is freezing on my skin and whips hard at my breath, but I don’t want to stop. The cold bites around my knees and tries to push me back, but I dive light above the gentle waves, close my lungs and plunge into the salty green.
Ice pain in my head stops my body tight, and I gasp into the white sky, my feet sinking into wet sand, the block of cold encasing me as I kick through it, feeling it all.
I didn’t know that I would swim today and feel like this. I’m alive. The pills didn’t work and my relief is as big as the ocean.
I lie on my back, the sea pulsing into my bones. My bones that belong to me and no one else. I move my arms up and down, making an angel shape. And I laugh, knowing that the dot of sun will keep rising in the sky and today I’ll be able to face everything and see it all.
My T-shirt is heavy as I splash clumsily from the water, my wet hair like icicles. I run back home slowly, weighted down with cold, but there’s a miracle in the sand too and in the colors of the low brick wall, the hard tarmac of the path. And the grass I walk on.
The van still seems to be sleeping. Quietly I open our bedroom door.
“Where have you been?” Rita whispers.
“To see the sea,” I laugh.
“You feeling better then?” She turns to face the wall, pulls her knees up tight.
“Much,” I say.
“Dad was furious that you missed clear-up last night,” she says. “He wanted to wake you up, but Ma said he had to wait until today.”
“I better go before he gets up then,” I say, rubbing a towel over my hair.
“Go where?” She sits up.
“Only for a bit,” I reassure her. “I’m meeting Dean.”
“I thought it was over.”
“So did I. But I don’t want it to be.”
“We need you to help pack up.”
“I have to see him again, Rita. I won’t be long.”
“Dad will go mad.”
“He’ll be OK.”
“He won’t, Lo. You know it. He’ll go nuts.” The headache from the cold sea has settled in me, but I can’t tell Rita, in case she looks for the acetaminophen and finds them gone.
“What’s the worst he can do?” I say. We both know that he’ll shout until his face purples, but he’ll never do more. “Dean makes me feel alive, Rita.”
“And we don’t?” She seems so sad and I want to tell her that she mustn’t be. That Gramps says things always work out, that the sun rises every day.
“It’s different,” I say.
I can tell she’s hurt, but I haven’t time to explain. I get dressed quickly and creep quietly from the room.
Dean’s car is around the corner, where it usually is.
“Hey,” he says, as I get in. But he sounds nervous, as though maybe he shouldn’t be here. He doesn’t kiss me. Instead he’s already started the car, quick to escape.
“I thought you might not come,” he says, concentrating on the road.
“Well I did.”
“Are you still angry with me? About what I said?”
“A bit.”
“I didn’t mean it. We’ll work something out.”
I smile over at him. But guilt weaves in and out of my veins again, because I nearly left him. And Dad and Ma and Rita. I would have left them all. But now it doesn’t make sense. Looking at Dean, at his face, his hands on the steering wheel. How could I have risked losing it all? The pills were a strange crack of time where I thought everything was wrong. But it wasn’t true, because I’m alive.
My head pounds at the thought of it. A deep, cold headache that I deserve because I didn’t see. I nearly took my sixteen years and snapped them shut. Shame spreads through me like fire.
“What do you want to be?” I ask, needing to see beyond now, to a future I nearly stole.
“When I grow up?” he laughs. “I wouldn’t mind being with you.” He seems embarrassed suddenly, as though they were words he meant to only think.
“As a job, a career.”
“I’d like to be an artist.” He says it quickly, as though it’s the first time he’s dared to let the words out.
“You’re good enough,” I tell him.
“Do you think?”
“I know it.”
“But I’d want to be one that breaks boundaries. Maybe a secret one, like Banksy.”
“Who’s he?”
He glances over at me. “Do you really not know?”
“Why would I?”
“He paints amazing pictures on walls all over the world. Like graffiti, but better. He makes people see things differently.”
“He sounds brilliant.”
“He is. His paintings sell for loads of money now.”
“You could be like him. And you could e
arn enough money to build us a house. We could have a garden, and I could grow my tomatoes.”
He glances at me and nods.
“You have more options than I do,” I say. “I only know the circus.”
“You could do anything, Laura, if you wanted to enough.”
“You really think that?”
“I know that.”
He reaches over and briefly holds my hand.
“We’ll be OK,” he says.
“We have to be,” I tell him. Because we do.
“Your dad’s going to be even more angry with me now, though, taking you for a drive when you should be there.”
“He shouldn’t have put up barriers then,” I say. Although thinking of his disappointment makes my chest hurt and my heart beat too quick. It makes my palms sweat and the pounding makes my head hurt more.
“Are you OK?” Dean looks at me strangely.
“I feel like I’m going to pass out,” I say.
“Put your head between your knees,” he says, but it makes the pain whistle deeper into my skull. “Take some deep breaths.” He opens the window and I breathe invisible droplets from the sky and it helps clear my lungs. My beating chest begins to steady. “There’s some water in the back.”
I reach behind me for the bottle. I open it and the drink is cool on my tongue.
“It’s made my headache worse,” I say.
“It’s because it’s cold,” he says. I screw the lid back on and drop it on the floor of the car. “Do you think I should take you back home?”
“Maybe.”
So Dean turns the car around and keeps glancing at me. “Were you feeling ill before?” he asks, his forehead a knot of worry.
“No.”
“Do you think it was a panic attack then?” he asks.
“I don’t know.” I rest my head against the back of the seat and close my eyes.
“We need to talk to your dad,” Dean says. “If it’s making you feel like this, we need to show him that I’m all right and he’s got nothing to worry about.”
“You’re a flattie,” I say simply.
“But you can’t go getting sick because of it.”
“I know.” I move my head against the window, hoping that the cold glass will somehow soothe the sharpness in my head. But it doesn’t.
Dean stops the car close to the circus field. Even from here I can see my dad standing outside the van, his face buried in anger.
“I’m not sure I can do this,” I tell Dean.
“You can. You have to. You can’t just never go back.”
“Will you come with me?”
“Now?” Dean runs his hands over the steering wheel. Dad spots us. It feels like a net has fallen onto the car.
“No. You’d better go,” I say.
Dean looks at me, and I want to kiss him, but Dad’s eyes are boring into us. Instead I touch his hand and I hope that it’s enough.
“When will I see you?” he asks, his fingers holding onto mine. But Dad is walking toward us, his strides big and heavy.
“Soon.”
“Are you going to Thetford next?”
“Yes.” And I have to let him go.
I open the car door, step out onto the pavement, and start to walk away. I hear the engine start, and I know that Dean is leaving.
My legs are shaking, and my dad is almost here. I’m waiting for him to bellow the sky down, but he doesn’t. Instead, he comes right up to me, his face a hard mask of anger.
“Where were you?” he asks.
“I went out with Dean.”
“That’s clear,” he says.
“I wanted to see him before we move on.”
“First last night and now this.”
“I’m sorry.” There are clouds above us, but it feels like bright sun is pushing through my eyes. “I don’t feel very well, so he brought me back.”
“That’s good of him.”
“He’s a good person, Dad.”
“He’s a flattie, Lo. That’s all I need to know.”
He starts to walk and I follow him. I glance back, but Dean is gone. There’s nothing to show he was even there.
Chapter Twelve
Lo
After an hour of silence in the car, we set up in the new place, an empty space at the edge of town. The ground is mangled and chewed on.
“Nice,” Rita says, kicking at a dirty plastic bag. Gramps says the site we pitched on last year has been pockmarked with new houses, so we’ve been pushed down the ladder to here.
“We won’t get half an audience if they have to drive to us,” Spider mumbles, as we carry heavy poles between us.
And I wonder if I care. If people don’t come to see us, our circus life would stop. I could finally sow my roots and have my vegetable plot. But Dad? Rita? I think they’d shrivel up and die.
We do it all, as we always do. Inside the big top, ropes are hauled up, the floor is swept, curtains are fixed. Rita and I piece together the small wooden wall of laughing clowns and jugglers and circle it around the center ring.
“Are you going to see him again?” she asks.
“Yes. He’ll come here,” I tell her, but she frowns at me, so I turn away. The rolled-out air is still stale, so I step outside into the daylight, hoping there’s a breeze to take my headache with it.
Ma is standing with Rob. They’re talking, her face serious. He watches her all the time, the way she tucks her curls behind one ear with one hand, the way she holds a pile of costumes in the other. He tries to touch her arm, but she pulls away.
Lightning breaks behind my eyes as I head from them. I walk past the ticket booth, where Gramps is tucked safely inside, doing the one job he still can. He waves at me, and I know Dad will be even more angry if I sneak away now, but I open the door to the little wooden shack and step up.
“Come to help?” Gramps asks and there’s something about his smile that makes me feel suddenly tired. I want to curl up in the warmth of his coat and go to sleep.
“To get away,” I say and he nods.
“That’s why I like it in here during set-up. I can hide in here for hours.”
“What are you hiding from?” I ask.
“Noise. I can’t hear Margaret so clearly in the rabble.”
“You hear Margaret?”
“Of course. She speaks to me all the time.” He takes a small bag of change from the box at his feet and sprinkles it into the till. I like the noise. It feels very real, something you can touch.
“You never told me,” I say.
Gramps puts the empty bag back in the box and looks up at me.
“And I never told you that Margaret was a flattie,” he says. It’s as though he’s unwrapping a truth and passing it carefully to me.
“My grandmother?” I say quietly.
Gramps nods. “I met her one year when we stopped for the winter. I was working on the arcades when I saw her. And I could tell straight away that I would marry her.”
“I never knew.”
“My parents never forgave me. Even when I didn’t leave the circus, as they’d feared, even when it was Margaret who left everything and joined us instead, they wouldn’t come around. They never quite accepted her.”
“Dean can’t join us,” I tell him. “He lives alone with his mom, and he can’t leave her.”
“If he’s the one, you’ll find a way.”
“Sometimes I think I want to leave,” I say.
“The circus?” He raises his ragged eyebrows at me.
“Yes.”
“Margaret battled with that for years. But the circus got into her blood and that was that.”
“But what if I don’t want this forever?”
Gramps picks up another bag of coins and tips them crinkling into the till.
“It’s harder than you think to leave. There’s magic here that you don’t get anywhere else. There’s our ways. We’re different to them.”
“We’re not so different.”
“When I
was a boy, I’d think that if we stopped moving, we’d sink through the ground. That underneath the top bit of earth was quicksand.”
“You told us that when we were little. Rita believed you.”
“And you?”
I laugh. “I thought you were mad.”
“Maybe we all are, a little bit.”
I lean my head into my arms on the ledge in front of me. It’s uncomfortable, next to the till, but I don’t care. I feel too tired of it all, of the thinking and the rights and the wrongs, the tightrope threading my family together, which feels like it will snap under the weight of us.
“You’ll be just fine, Lo,” Gramps says, his hand gentle on my shoulder. I could sleep now, tucked into his words. “You’ll see.”
★ ★ ★
The air around the supper table is stifling. Ma eats in absolute silence and Rita chews quickly, wanting to make it over. Dad has his head bent low, weighed down heavy with the tension looping among us. I’m hungry, but the chicken is making me feel sick. I was hoping food might settle my headache, but instead the pain pushes deep into me.
When the meal is finished, I wash the plates carefully, scrubbing every scrap of food from them. Ma always tells me to wear the rubber gloves, but today I ignore her. I want my hands to wade through the soft bubbles and feel them pop to nothing against my skin.
“Spider’s bringing his guitar to the barrel fire,” Rita says, wiping a plate dry with her cloth. “At least out here we’ve got no neighbors to disturb.”
“I’m not coming tonight,” I say.
“You can’t not come. He’s been working up to this for ages.”
“I’ll ask him to play it for me tomorrow.”
“That’s not fair on him,” she says.
“I’m not feeling well,” I tell her.
“Rubbish. You’re just wanting to show how angry you are with Dad.”
I put down the sponge and don’t bother to wipe my hands as I walk away from her.
“You’re being selfish,” Rita says. She’s angry with me, but I’m too tired to fight. I want to switch off my thoughts, just for tonight.
“I’m going to bed.” And I close the door on her before she can say any more.
★ ★ ★
I wake up with a sharp pain digging under my ribs. It comes on strong and then disappears, ebbing with the tide of my breath. I wonder if I’ve been sleeping awkwardly, pressing into my arm, but it feels different to a bruise, like something is wrong inside.
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