Secret Heart (3 page)

“Just th-this,” he muttered. He closed his eyes, turned a circle, opened his eyes again. He looked upward, to the pale blue tent, so beautiful. He started to walk up the slope toward it.

“And where you going?” said Stanny.

Joe peered back.

“Just th-there.” He pointed. “Just to the tent, Stanny.”

Stanny clenched his fists.

“The tent! For what?”

Joe searched for words to explain how it drew him toward it.

“Sometimes you're hopeless,” said Stanny. “It's time you bloody toughened up, Joe.”

Joe turned away, walked on.

“Five o'clock tomorrow morning,” Stanny said. “Be there. Let Joff get working on you.”

Up he went beneath the larks and through the breeze. The roofs of Helmouth appeared. The great sloped circular wall of the tent filled more and more of the sky. The arm-thick guy ropes creaked. On this side were the caravans and trailers of the circus people. Close to, he saw that they were ancient things. The frames were twisted, the tires were treadless, the chrome was cracked.

An old man stared into the sky from a caravan window. His head rested on his hand. He broke into laughter as Joe passed by. He knocked on the window and pressed his face joyously against the glass.

“Tomasso!” he called. “Tomasso! Tomasso! Oh, it's you! Isn't it? It's you!”

Joe hurried on. He shook his head violently.

“No,” he mouthed, “no. M-my name is Joe!”

He chewed his lips in confusion.

“Tomasso!” called the man. “Tomasso! Tomasso!
Tomasso…” Until his lips were still and he looked to the sky again.

Half-naked children scampered here. A pair of little gray dogs in pink frocks trotted for a few seconds on their hind legs at Joe's side. He circled the tent, toward the billboards, a twisted ticket booth, the canvas door. A white-faced clown practiced juggling, throwing up sticks and stones and rubbish he lifted from the ground. Then Joe saw her, the girl from the tent door. She sat on a little stool with some village kids around her and she painted their faces. Mothers stood and watched and smiled from nearby. The kids were animals. They were mice, cats, dogs, lions, tigers, bears. The girl painted with thin brushes. She held up mirrors so that each child could see his new face. The children raised their hands like claws and growled at each other. They padded on all fours across the wasteland. They raised their heads and sniffed the air. They leaped at imaginary prey. They killed. They licked their paws. They giggled and their mothers grinned. One of the children called Joe's real name. “Joe! Joe! Look at me. Joe!” And the girl turned her eyes to Joe and smiled and held her paint-brush up and asked, “So what will you be, Joe?”

He blushed and walked on and stood before the biggest billboard. The paint on it was flaking away. The sheets of timber underneath were cracked. The animals on it were clumsy and stiff, as if they'd been painted by children. Lions, tigers, elephants, zebras
roamed together through a forest of oak trees and sycamores, like an English wood, and there were daffodils growing and sparrows flying. In a clearing in the wood, people held hands and danced in rings. On a little hill was Hackenschmidt's Circus, a shining bright blue tent. The real blue tent was threadbare and faded and covered in patches. There was another billboard resting against the wall of the tent. It was an ancient blurry photograph of a barrel-chested man with his fists raised to show the muscles in his arms and the width of his chest.

“The greatest wrestler the world has ever seen.” Joe turned and there she was behind him.

“He was,” she said. “George Hackenschmidt. The Russian Lion. Champion of the World. And he still performs every night. Can you believe it?”

“Yes.” He looked at the photograph. “No.”

“No? You wouldn't say that to Hackenschmidt's face.” She smiled. “I saw you this morning, walking past with your friend. Your name's Joe.”

“Yes.”

“And I'm Corinna,” she said. “Corinna Finch. And this is our owner, Hackenschmidt. So now we're all at home.”

She watched him in silence. Her face was smooth and pale and oval. Her skin was splashed with freckles. Her eyes were brilliant sky-blue. She still wore the grubby raincoat, fastened tightly at the waist, and black tights and silver slippers.

“Would you like to look inside?” she asked.

Joe's eyes widened.

“C-can I?” he said.

She laughed, and turned to the heavy canvas door. She held it aside.

“Come on,” she said. “Nothing'll eat you, you know.”

Joe looked back at the painted children, the dancing dogs, the village rooftops dark beneath the sunlight. Then went to her, pushed his way into the tent, and the canvas slid smoothly over him. Corinna followed, and let the door fall back into place.

Almost dead still. Almost dead quiet. Just the walls of the tent shifting gently in the breeze. Just the muffled drone of the city beyond the village that seemed a thousand miles away. So calm, in the subdued blue light. Joe breathed deeply. The scent of drying earth and grass, of old old canvas.

“Lovely, isn't it?” she said.

He nodded.

“Lovely.”

High up, in the summit of the tent, were the remnants of an ancient golden sun and silver moon and stars, faded to almost nothing. Below these were the trapeze, the high wires, the tiny platforms with the safety net stretched below. A ladder dangled from the central pole.

They walked further in, stepped over a low wooden wall onto the sawdust and straw that lay in the ring. The sloping wooden benches circled them.
The blue light fell on them and made them gently luminous.

“I work up there,” she said. “Always have.” She tipped her head back and gazed upward. “But I'm not very good. None of us are. Hackenschmidt says it's because we've lost our way and our will and we're in our final days.” She turned her face to him. “Did you hear us, in the night, when we came?”

“Yes.”

She watched him.

“Go on,” she said.

“I d-dreamed about you,” he said.

“What kind of dreams?”

He sighed. He smelt the breath, the pelt. He looked around himself, but there was nothing.

“Tell me,” she said.

“A tiger come,” he said.

She laughed suddenly, and turned away as if what he said was absurd; then she watched him again.

“We weren't sure why we came here,” she said. “But maybe you're the reason, Joe.”

Joe blinked. He had no way of knowing what to say to this.

“I could swing for you,” Corinna said.

“Eh?”

“I could climb up for you and do some of my act for you.”

They looked up together toward the trapeze.

“Of course there's no one to catch me,” she said.
“Never is these days. I just do it all all alone, Joe. But I could swing, let go, and somersault down into the net. At least you'll have seen something. Well?”

“Dunno. Anything.”

“Dunno. Anything. You don't say much, do you?”

Joe shrugged, looked down.

“Words is…,”he muttered.

“Words is?”

“H-hard,” said Joe. “They get all t-tangled and tw—”

“Twisted?”

He raised his eyes and looked at her.

“Aye,” he said. “Aye.”

She smiled.

“That doesn't matter,” she said. “There's stronger things than words.”

Her eyes clouded. She toed the sawdust with her silver slippers. The tent flapped in the breeze and the huge central pole creaked and sighed.

“Once,” she said, “when I started, when I was a little girl, I had a strongman as a catcher. Lobsang Page. Now he's in Las Vegas. Once, there were many many things.” She looked around the ring. “Once, they used to run in with great sections of a cage. They put the sections all around the ring, so the whole ring was a cage.” She swept her arms out, showing the extent of it. “Then they ran a low narrow cage to the outside of the tent. That's what the lions came through, and the tigers and the leopards. They growled and screamed
and clawed the air and the ring was filled with wildness. The animals loved us, though. The trainers whispered into their ears and they did their acts for love.”

She watched Joe.

“You believe that?”

Joe blinked and saw the roaring beasts. He saw the trainers in shining clothes, dancing on tiptoe, holding whips and chairs.

“Yes.”

“Then my grandfather had his arm ripped off. Right here where we're standing.”

“Wh-what by?”

“A tiger. And mebbe that's when things started to change. When the animals stopped being close to us. When things would never be the same again.”

She looked up toward the trapeze.

“There's no t-tigers now?” Joe said.

She narrowed her eyes as she turned to him.

“What do you think, Joe?”

“I can't … tell.” He looked inside himself. He thought of last night. “I think there are.”

She shook her head.

“No. There's no tigers now, Joe.”

She took off her coat. She wore a spangled costume. She quickly climbed the rope ladder that dangled by the central pole. She climbed through the safety net spread out above the ring. She stood on a tiny platform. She unfastened a trapeze and set it swinging back and
forward beneath the faded stars and sun and moon. Then she leaped with her arms outstretched and held it tight. She swung from her arms, from her knees, moving gracefully through the blue shade, and her spangles shone and her face gleamed. Then she leaped, and tumbled, and seemed to hang motionless for a moment, held in the air above by nothing, as if she could stay there as long as she wanted. Then a somersault and she dropped into the net.

She lay there dead still, then swung herself over the edge of the net and back to earth again.

Joe's eyes were shining.

“That was brilliant,” he said.

“No, it wasn't. My mother, now she was really something. And her mother…”

“Your m-mother? Where's she now?”

She toed the dust again.

“In Russia.”

“R-Russia?”

“She trains kids in circus skills.”

“She trained you?”

“She should have stayed longer and trained me for longer. She shouldn't have cleared off to bloody Russia.”

She put her coat back on.

“What else d'you want to see?” she said.

“D-dunno.” He stared at her, concentrated, tried to compose the question on his tongue. “Where h-have I seen you before, Corinna?”

She shook her head.

“Nowhere.”

“When I saw you this morning…I was sure…”

She waited, patient, as he framed the words.

“Was sure,” he said, “I'd s-seen you before.”

“I know that.”

“Have I?”

“Course not. I have never been to Helmouth and you have never been out of Helmouth.” She toed the sawdust and hung her head. “But I thought it too.” She watched him from the corners of her eyes. “You don't know what it means, do you?”

“N—”

“When you recognize somebody you've never seen before, it sometimes means you were with them in another life.”

Joe breathed the dusty air. He looked down at his hands, which shone with a blue light that seemed to come from inside them.

Corinna laughed.

“Maybe we were tigers together,” she said. “Or elephants. Or a circus act way way back when it all started… Maybe we were each other's catcher, Joe. Maybe we were the greatest fliers the world had ever seen. Once, long long ago. You think it's nonsense.”

In his head, Joe leaped through empty air with his arms outstretched. He looked into Corinna's eyes, eyes he knew he'd seen before.

“No,” he said. “Not n-non—”

“Whatever we think doesn't matter. If it's true, that we were together before, then it means there are things to do together in this life as well. And there'll be nothing we can do about it.”

She giggled as one of the gray dogs in frocks scuttled under the edge of the tent and tottered to them on its hind legs. She scooped the dog into her arms and smiled.

“Mebbe we were pretty little dancing dogs like you.”

Her face fell.

“I could be brilliant, you know,” she said. “I could be as good as my mum.”

“I know.”

“She was so quick, so light. When she spun across the tent they say she moved so fast she disappeared.” She looked at Joe again, as if daring him to disbelieve her. “There were moments in her act, Joe, when she couldn't even be seen.”

Then she grinned, and turned the dog's face to Joe, and it yapped and bared its teeth.

“This is Joe,” she said. “He's nice. He looks little and weak and shy and words get tangled on his tongue but he's strong and brave, I think.”

The dog yapped again. Joe blushed.

“I think we've come to the right place, little doggie,” said Corinna.

She moved toward the door. Joe followed. She held the flap back and bright daylight slanted across them.

“Who l-looks after you?” Joe asked.

“After me?”

“If your mum's gone?”

“The others here. Wilfred and Charley Caruso and Nanty Solo and…Good kind folk. And Hacken-schmidt, of course.”

Joe looked out across the wasteland toward the Black Bone Crags. He wanted to point and tell Corinna to look. He wanted to ask her what she saw out there.

“Go on,” said Corinna. “You'll soon be back. If you're who we think you are, you'll soon be back.”

The animal children still played outside. There were children giggling, dogs yapping, clowns dancing. A potbellied pig snuffled at the grass.

“Tomasso!” someone called, from miles away. “Tomasso! Tomasso!”

Joe moved toward the village.

“Maloney!” someone barked. “Joseph Maloney!”

Bleak Winters, Joe's humanities teacher. A clutch of ninth graders were at his back.

“Mr. Maloney! How very nice to see you.”

Joe just stood there, eyes downcast.

“After all this time!” Winters said. “Thought our paths would never cross again!”