The Circus Read online

  This train is headed to Ashford, somewhere in Kent. I squash in behind a lady with a little girl and take out my Little Kit of Happiness.

  A plaster to heal you when you hurt.

  A diamond to bring a sparkle to your eye.

  A Love Heart sweet so you know that someone loves you.

  A rubber to erase those little mistakes you make.

  A piece of string to hold it together in tough times.

  A marble for when you start losing yours.

  I place them all neatly on the fold-out table. Then there are the extra things, the ones I’ve added. There’s your head girl badge. I don’t know why I took it. Sometimes I just take things. It’s like they’re little pieces of other people that make me feel like I’m someone too. Wearing the badge makes me feel like I belong somewhere.

  I unfold the newspaper clipping of me and my pony, Spook, cheek to cheek after winning at the gymkhana last summer. I try not to think of him, with those ridiculous pink feathers bobbing about on his head. Will he be pulling her Cinderella carriage at this very minute, with her all squashed inside like a giant jellyfish?

  And there’s the button, still with its little twist of silk thread where I cut it from the Handbag’s dress. But what I’m looking for is at the very bottom, tightly folded so that it is no bigger than a stamp.

  There she is, the image of me.

  My mother.

  She’s staring a little past the photographer, as if there’s something of unfathomable interest beyond. She has my face, my jawline. My chin. She’s dark as a gypsy, beautiful and strong. You can’t really tell from this photograph, but I am sure that she has strong wrists, thick ankles.

  My mother is wearing a gold sequinned dress that looks like it is made of fire. She is smiling, dimple-chinned, with bare brown shoulders. Around her neck is a plump-looking python, its head cradled in her left hand. Behind her, a pier stretches out to sea. You can just make out a building on it, which must be the circus. There is a gold label in the corner, with one of its edges curled and worn.You can only read one word, which is: stings. I have tried and tried to make out the rest of the letters, but it is impossible.

  I know this much about my mother:

  I know that she loved the circus. It was her life’s dream, and she gave it all up for me.

  I know that her name was Bettina, and that she was partly Romanian.

  I know that she named me Willow after the trees around our lake.

  I know that, when I was three years old, she left us.

  That’s all.

  There aren’t many photographs of her. Daddy said he couldn’t bear to keep any, but there is this one. It’s all I have.

  I have only one memory of her.

  She is throwing me up to the sky, over and over again. Looking down, I can see her smiling face, the dark eyes half peering over my shoulder. I remember the rush of flying; my hands outstretched to find only air and space. I see the sun tilted on my mother’s face, her red painted lips, the golden hairs on her cheeks and upper lip. My mother always wanted me to fly.

  ‘Ready when you are, love.’

  I jerk awake. My keepsakes from the Little Kit of Happiness are sliding over the pull-out table. I push them all back into the bag.

  ‘Sorry – can you give me a minute?’ I say. The ticket-checker shrugs and moves to the woman with her little girl. I grab my bag and slide out of my seat; hurry into the next carriage.

  ‘Hey,’ shouts the guard. ‘Where d’you think you’re going?’

  So I jump out at the next station. Vault the ticket barrier. And this time I really do fly.

  Contortionist

  The first ones to stop are a family from Kent.

  I feel relief when I see them. They look like they’ve just come back from Disneyland, Paris; the kids on the back seat a re wedged in with Chip and Dale and Dumbo. The little girl’s dressed as Elsa from Frozen.

  ‘Rounded off the trip with a weekend in London,’ says the dad.

  Luckily, it’s a people carrier, one of those vans that Happy Families usually take on holiday, so I find myself in the front with Happy Father. Happy Mother is in the back, trying to bottle-feed her baby. I am shoved between a pink broomstick and a flight case in the shape of a crocodile.

  ‘Call me Julie,’ the mum says. That’s all she says before she shoves the bottle back in the baby’s face and tells the boy off for wearing his sister’s Elsa tiara.

  ‘What’s he like?’ smiles the dad, rolling his eyes.

  He asks me what music I like, and where I’m going.

  ‘Anywhere south,’ I say. I’ve decided to try to get a cheap ferry crossing to somewhere like Calais. Will I need a passport for that? I really don’t know.

  ‘And music?’

  I tell him that I don’t mind. He ums and ahs, and finally settles on Ellie Goulding, sitting back with a pleased sort of sigh when he’s done choosing.

  ‘So what’s a well-spoken girl like you doing hitch-hiking, if you don’t mind me asking?’ he asks, in a low voice. ‘Can’t be too careful, you know.’ He winks.

  I stare out of the window. Behind me, the boy and the girl are having a fight, and the Good Dinosaur keeps shoving its head through the seat well. We’re on the motorway, and I feel a surge of exhilaration at speeding further away from them all, from my old self, all the lies, the Handbag.

  ‘I’m actually taking part in a sort of game show,’ I say. ‘Like the one that’s been on television. I have to see how far I can get without being tracked. It’s for charity,’ I add.

  I feel him rise to the challenge. ‘Do you hear that, Julie?’ he shouts, above the mayhem. His son’s still got his sister’s ti ara. Julie, of course, doesn’t hear anything, not with Elsa roaring to her brother to let it go. ‘We’ll have to see how we can help you, love.’ He winks again. ‘I’m sure we can think of something.’

  ‘Something’ is a sofa in their house.

  The Carters live in a boxy-looking house on a housing estate. All the roads are named after detectives. It’s all very bijou, the sort of thing the Handbag would love. I’ve told them my name is Beanie, and that I’m at uni.

  After they’ve shown off their new conservatory, and pointed out the units in their new kitchen, Julie goes upstairs to put the kids to bed and Terry comes into the sitting room with two glasses of wine.

  ‘How old are you, love, if you don’t mind me asking?’ he says.

  ‘Nineteen,’ I lie. I take a large slurp of wine. It’s disgusting, cheap plonk. ‘Yummy,’ I say.

  ‘Lovely,’ says Terry, and I’m not sure if he’s talking about the wine or me. I wish you and Miffy could be here, Beanie. You’d be pissing yourselves over Terry’s attempts at seduction while all hell breaks out upstairs. Julie sounds like she needs some help. There are high-pitched screams over the sound of running bath water.

  ‘Families, eh?’ smiles Terry. He leans back comfortably, his arm laid loosely over the back of the cream leather sofa. I’m sure if I look at him he’d be winking again.

  I sip my wine.

  When Julie comes back down, Terry sends her into the kitchen to put some dinner on. I go into the kitchen to help her and to escape from Terry’s trailing arm.

  She’s pouring a jar of pasta sauce onto some cooking mince, yawning.

  I help her put the spaghetti on and pour her a glass of wine, because Terry seems to have forgotten her.

  ‘So, how long have you got to be on the run for?’ she asks. She’s pulled on her night clothes, a horrible pair of droopy green leggings and a baggy grey T-shirt. She has a scratch on one cheek from where the baby’s probably clawed her mid-scream.

  Julie rips open a packet of garlic bread and shoves some in the oven. The mince is burning, so I turn it down. I am playing the role of high-flying student, doing something zany for charity. I enjoy it while it lasts. It helps me to forget who I really am.

  In the night, Terry comes down, as I knew he would.

  He’s panting nervousl
y, and there’s a creak as he sits on the sofa. I feel, rather than see, his hand grope for me.

  ‘Touch me and I’ll fucking kill you,’ I say in a clear voice.

  Stupid old perv doesn’t know that I’m an old hand at dealing with this. I’ve run away many times before.

  Schoolgirl Runaway, Aged Twelve

  The fifth time I run away from school, it is raining, so I don’t stay out long.

  By the time I get back to the school lodge, Mrs Threshbold is waiting for me by an unmarked police car with DC Scallion. I like DC Scallion the best. I call her Scally for short, because I feel like we’re old friends, we’ve known each other for so long. All the girls at St Jerome’s call each other by nicknames.

  She puffs out her breath when she sees me struggling with my rucksack up the school drive.

  Because she’s a detective, she can wear her own clothes instead of police uniform, and her skirt is a bit too tight over her hips and tummy. There’s something about her that makes me think that if she had a tattoo, it’d be a huge one, and if she could choose, she wouldn’t be wearing those boring black shoes, but ones which are red and shiny and fabulous.

  ‘Where the effin’ heck have you been this time, Willow Bettina Stephens?’ she asks.

  She’s the only person who ever uses my middle name. No one at school knows it.

  ‘You’ve led us a right old dance.’

  I open my mouth to speak, but my head feels swimmy all of a sudden. Mrs Threshbold looks like she wants to make me carve my punishment in my own blood, like Dolores Umbridge in Harry Potter.

  ‘None of our girls has ever…’ she splutters.

  It’s Scally who catches me when I fall.

  ‘There, now,’ she says, her arms all warm and solid. ‘There now.’ I feel her large hands patting me on the back.

  I squirm out of her grip. ‘Where is he?’ I demand. ‘Where’s Daddy?’

  I can’t see his sports car anywhere on the drive. They must have contacted him by now, surely?

  Scally sighs. ‘Let’s get you inside, lovey.’ Then, to Mrs Threshbold, ‘Get this girl some hot cocoa, will you?’

  Scally stays while I have my hot chocolate and biscuits, and then she checks her phone again.

  ‘My kids will wonder where I am,’ she says. ‘I’ve left messages for your dad, love. He knows you’re safe and sound, don’t worry.’

  She starts to lecture me on safety and risk and responsibility. I’m not listening, though.

  All I can think of is Daddy, and why he never comes to catch me.

  Night Owl

  When Terry’s gone, I tuck up my knees under my borrowed duvet, and stroke the picture of my mother. I try to uncurl the tight roll of the label at the corner, but if there were any more letters, they have long faded away.

  At four in the morning, Julie comes down with the baby. I hear the ping of the microwave and several huge yawns. The baby’s making strangled kitten cries. Another yawn.

  I find Julie leaning against the worktop with her eyes closed. The baby’s shoved under her T-shirt, and she’s holding a bottle under the tap.

  ‘Too hot,’ she says, without opening her eyes. ‘I’m trying to get her used to formula, but I made it too hot.’ She begins to cry. She shifts the baby to her other breast with a loud plop.

  I make her a cup of tea.

  ‘He never helps,’ she sobs, letting me sit her on a bar stool. The kitchen’s too small for a table and chairs. I decide not to mention the little night episode with Terry. She wipes her eyes with the kitchen roll I give her. ‘Will you take her a minute? I need the loo –’

  And I am left holding a hot, heavy bundle. The baby is an ugly one, I decide. But then it opens its eyes and gives a wide, gummy smile. I smell the top of its head and breathe in its sweet, warm milkiness.

  I wonder if my mother ever did that to me.

  It is as Julie is taking the baby from me that I see it.

  The pictures on the kitchen wall are pretend-vintage railway posters in cheap black frames, advertising different places to visit. The one in the centre shows a pier and a wide beach and a plump, jolly couple with two plump, jolly children in tow. The pier is long and strutted with a large white Victorian building in the middle. Beneath it, curly letters invite passengers to Visit Hastings.

  It looks exactly like the one in my mother’s photo.

  I stare at the reddened cheeks of the father with his knotted handkerchief, the mother with her picnic baskets. I stare again at the pier, and at the script beneath it. In front of me, the baby gives a gentle burp.

  ‘Are you OK, Beanie?’ Julie is looking at me curiously. ‘You’ve gone really pale –’

  Hastings.

  Ha – stings.

  I know now where my mother was a circus girl. I know what the missing letters are.

  Because snakes don’t sting, do they?

  Of course they don’t.

  Street-Walker

  Next morning, Julie makes Terry drive me to Hastings.

  He is tight-faced on the way, and there is no Ellie Goulding this time. I make sure that I sit in the back. There is something digging into me. I pull it out, and it’s a broken Elsa tiara.

  Terry drops me off by the seafront. St Leonards, a sign says.

  ‘This is as far as I’m going.’ It’s the first time Terry’s spoken to me since I got in the car. Ellie’s been replaced by Talk Sport; I’ve had miles of middle-aged bores ringing in and giving endless analyses of endless football matches. ‘I’ll be late for work now,’ he tuts, rummaging in his briefcase. He’s wearing a pink shirt, red tie combo that does nothing for his pot belly. Disney Dad has been replaced by Business Man.

  He doesn’t help me with my rucksack, and slams the door shut the moment I am outside.

  ‘Bye, arsehole!’ I call after him. He doesn’t look round.

  I watch as he drives off with a rev of testosterone.

  Fine. I don’t care.

  I try to get my location. The rain spits and I am by the sea. I hitch my rucksack higher and follow the promenade. The sea is a muddy olive, kicking up little white curls. The wind ruffles my hair.

  Rule #5: Have no plan. Be spontaneous.

  I am free and I have money and can do whatever I want.

  I shift my rucksack onto my shoulders and, keeping the sea on my right, head for Hastings.

  There are Georgian houses on my left, and a long, pebbled beach to my right. Some girls pass me, about my age, in spotty wellies, wearing flowery shorts and quilted jackets. They seem a world away from me. I sit on a wall and eat the packet of crisps I stole from Julie’s cupboard for breakfast. There’s a box of crackers too, and a banana, still with its label on.

  A police car passes, and I duck my head instinctively.

  I expect that Daddy will have called them now. And our intrepid Scally will be hot on the trail. She’ll be wondering, won’t she, where I’ve headed to this time?

  I pull out my notepaper, and shake the rest of the crisps into my mouth.

  First, the pier. I can see it in the distance, old and grand and regal-looking even from this far away. It’s where I’ll go to next, to see if it still has the circus shows, like the one my mother must have performed in.

  I feel like I have come home.

  Dear Beanie,

  You’d like Hastings. It’s all sea air, Victorian street lamps and promenades.

  I mean, I know my mother’s not going to still be here, obviously. She’ll be in Las Vegas now probably, or somewhere exotic, like Russia or China, twisting and somersaulting and back-flipping over the scented sawdust, spinning in that gold dress.

  There’ll be a reason she never came back home.

  But, just to be here, breathing the same air, and getting an idea of the world she lived in before she had me – it makes me feel closer to her, as if she’s my guiding spirit. She’s in the clouds and the sky and the sea. I’ll feel even more connected once I’ve achieved my aim.

  Because I’ve d
ecided that I’m going to join the circus.

  That’s right, Beanie, I’m going to be a performer! I’m going to make my living by making people crane their necks, and suck in their breath and gasp in wonder. It’s like it’s all fated, somehow. Why I can climb and ride and do gymnastics: it’s all for a reason. It’s because it’s in the blood.

  I need to find a job first, I expect. I’ve never had one before, have you? I mean, I need to be careful with my gap year money, obvs. Mustn’t use it up too soon. Don’t worry about me missing my exams, Beanie. They’re not important any more, honestly.

  First I’ll look for somewhere to stay, and then I’ll ask around for where auditions and things are held for the pier show. Can you imagine it, Beanie? Me in a gold sequinned dress, spinning, spinning, at the top of the roof, with the spotlights and sawdust and glitter…

  Just imagine.

  Wills x

  Foxtrot

  I don’t send it to you, of course. Wouldn’t do to let anyone at home know my whereabouts. Rule #4: Never tell anyone where you are. Never contact home. Don’t rely on friends. Three ticks for me so far then.

  I hitch my rucksack onto the other shoulder and start to hurry towards Hastings Pier.

  It is empty. A shell.

  The wooden floor planks look newly oiled, and there is a little information hut at its entrance, but other than that it is completely empty: no Hansel and Gretel gingerbread houses with curly roofs, no shops selling seaside rock and popcorn and starfish. And there certainly isn’t a circus.

  I pull out my mother’s picture, and trace the line of the grand-looking Victorian building at the pier’s centre. That must have been where she performed, I think. It’s the only building big enough.

  I push open the door of the information hut and go in.

  A man is painting his nails black and talking on his phone.

  ‘What happened to it?’ I say. ‘What happened to the pier?’ I push my photograph at him. I don’t care that he hasn’t finished his call. This is supposed to be his job, isn’t it?