The Road to Gundagai (19 page)

‘First time she had written to me in nine years,’ said Fred. ‘I read it to Madame. Madame said, “Family’s family.”’

‘And so the circus came to Willow Creek,’ said Blue slowly.

‘You didn’t just happen to be there. You came for me.’

‘Too right,’ said Fred.

‘No.’ Mah looked from Fred to Blue. ‘They came for me. Fred thought I was finally going to join him. I slipped out the night they arrived, found Fred, explained it all to Madame.’

‘And Madame came up with a plan,’ said Blue slowly. They had risked so much for a stranger, all because Fred’s sister had asked them to.

Fred nodded. ‘Madame wouldn’t let me tell you about Mah though, not till she was sure you wouldn’t tell anyone. If you was really being poisoned, Mah didn’t need no police questioning her. Specially if their questions led them to me.’

‘I wouldn’t have told anyone!’

‘Yeah, but Madame wasn’t to know that back then. An’ if you’d got any crooker, we’d have had to take you to hospital. You mightn’t have known what you were saying. Best you knew nothing,’ said Fred. ‘Like Madame says: “What you do not know you cannot tell.”’ He imitated Madame’s tones well.

He squeezed Mah’s hand. ‘Anyhow, she’s here at last. It’s good to see you, sis. You belong here. With me. An’ I’m reformed, now.’

Mah gave what might have been a sniffle. ‘If I’d vanished at the same time as you,’ she told Blue, ‘the police might have thought I was part of the kidnapping. “Bad Chinese white slavers.” They might have found you too. So I stayed for a few weeks, while the police buzzed around looking for you, then your aunts fired me. I went back to the orphanage after that — they let me stay in return for working. But Madame says it is safe for me to be here now.’

So Mah had waited six months, first in that airless house and then in the orphanage, thought Blue. No wages, porridge and bread and dripping, when she could have been here, eating goulash with an elephant. And all for me. It was more even than saving her life in the fire. That had taken minutes. Mah had given her twelve months of her life, six while she had been at her aunts’, six months while Blue was with the circus. Pretending. Always pretending, at first for her own survival, and then for Blue’s.

‘Blue … did I do the right thing? Are you happy here? I kept wondering, should I have gone to the police, tried to get them to believe me?’

Was
she happy? Of course she was. Suddenly Blue realised something else too. She missed her family, a deep-etched scar that would never entirely heal. But this life stretched her in a way that would never have been allowed in the safe confines of her home. She’d never have felt a hundred eyes on her, marvelling and wondering and admiring. Never have felt the challenge that each new day an audience brought. Mum and Dad made me Bluebell Laurence, she thought. But I made Belle the mermaid.

‘Yes,’ she said slowly. ‘It was the right thing, Mah. So right I can never, ever thank you enough. I’m happy.’

‘We’re happy as pigs in mud, the lot of us. Belle too. She got me, ain’t you, princess?’ Fred gave her a quick kiss on the cheek, then laughed as she shoved him off. ‘Marj is gunna do the harem dance, an’ I can grow a real beard for the bearded lady. An’ show her what else you can do, Marj.’

Mah grinned. That’s why it’s such a familiar grin, thought Blue. It’s Fred’s too! Why had she never noticed the resemblance between her two friends?

Mah stood. Suddenly she was cartwheeling around the camp, over and over.

Sheba eyed them calmly, as though whatever humans did would not surprise her. Mah finished back where she had started. ‘I’ve been practising!’

‘She’ll do that in the Galah. I’ve worked out a bonzer magic act for us. I’m goin’ to saw Marj in half.’

‘You’re what?!’ Even Sheba looked up at the yell.

‘Nah, don’t worry. Marj is small-boned, like a sparrow. If we dress her up in lots of layers, she’ll look bigger. I’ve made this long cardboard box. She’ll lie down in it, then when I shut the lid she’ll curl herself up small into the top while I saw off the other half. No one’ll guess she could fit into just half of the box. Look better if it was wood,’ he added regretfully, ‘but that would cost too much, using a new wooden box each night. And I’m going to make her vanish from a pillar too. She’s gunna stand on the top of it with this great enormous vase, then I’ll cover her with the magic cloth and wave me arms and poof, she vanishes, and the vase too.’

‘Down into the pillar,’ said Mah. ‘The vase is made of rubber, like a ball. I bought it at a special shop in Melbourne, on my afternoon off. I just have to squeeze tight and let the air out.’

‘Ain’t it bonzer?’ Fred grinned at Blue.

‘Bonzer,’ she agreed. She should be happy. Mah was with her now, a friend her own age, a friend as Gertrude could never be. But she felt numb. My aunts really wanted me to die, she thought. Dead, like Mum and Dad and Willy …

‘Marj can bunk in with me tonight in the Freak Show tent. Tomorrow Ebenezer and Ephraim will move out of their caravan. They’ll sleep in the fortune-teller’s tent, and you and Mah can have their caravan, snug as a bug in a rug.’

‘I can’t take their caravan!’

‘Well, you’re goin’ to. Madame says so. Two girls your age can’t sleep in a tent. You need a door you can lock and solid walls. An’, anyway, Ephraim and Ebenezer are up half the night on watch or moving us.’

Blue suddenly woke up to what he was saying again. ‘But all their things?’

Fred shrugged. ‘What have any of us got that won’t fit in a chest? They can leave it under Madame’s table during the day.’

He’s right, thought Blue. Her own possessions would fit in a shoebox. Their costumes, even their shirts, the boots Fred had worn today, were all common property. At least Mah had a suitcase. Blue wondered if everything in it would be as familiar as the dress.

Fred chewed the last sandwich with satisfaction, then held the crusts out to Sheba. ‘I’ll show Marj the magic routine first thing tomorrow. All she’s got to do is lie there, or stand there, and then go “Ta da!” Mrs Olsen can fix her up with a costume while you’re showing off on Sheba. The blokes’ eyes will be hanging out on stalks when they see you in your seven veils up riding an elephant on the beach.’

The beach, thought Blue. But of course — the easiest way to get to Hope Town was along the beach. She shivered, not just at the bite of the southerly. Today had been too much: the young doctor, Mah, proof that her aunts had wanted her dead, the revelation that the circus she had thought eternal — or at least several generations old — was relatively new, risen from the ashes of fire, just like her own new life.

Tomorrow she had to face the sea.

Chapter 17

It was hard to lead an elephant along the main street of a susso camp when the camp didn’t really have one. The shanties clung to the edges of the dunes, wandering along as the sand allowed, rather than in the straight lines of an ordinary town. In some places sand had drifted down, half covering a tin wall.

The most substantial huts were nearest the tiny creek that meandered down towards the sea, edged with green scum now and thick with water weed. Further back, where sand became soil, small gardens shone green with tomato bushes still laden with red fruit despite the chill, cabbages and carrot tops. Pumpkin vines wandered over the allotments, even conquering the nearby sand hills.

But the lanes between the shanties were empty. Everyone, thought Blue, sitting sideways on Sheba’s back, had run to see the elephant, complete with Glorious Gloria and one of the harem girls on her back. Ebenezer marched beside Sheba, calling those who still lingered under the corrugated or tar-paper roofs to see the sight. Even Gertrude seemed friendly this morning, smiling and waving and enjoying the admiration of the crowd.

‘Hey, lady?’ A vaguely familiar small boy wriggled to the front of the crowd. He peered up at Gertrude. ‘Miss, could you give this to the mermaid?’ He held up a potted geranium. The pot was a rusty tin can, but the flower was red, the brightest colour in the whole faded shantytown. Except for us, thought Blue.

Gertrude’s smile grew fixed at the mention of her rival. She ignored the boy, turning to wave at the crowd on Sheba’s other side. Ebenezer tapped Sheba’s leg, the signal to stop. The elephant halted, her eyes flicking along the crowd. Blue leaned down towards the boy.

‘Ze mermaid is a friend of mine.’ She tried to make her voice exotic, as unlike the mermaid’s as possible. ‘Why do you want ze mermaid to have ze flower? Give it to your mama,’ she added, remembering the pregnant woman’s smile.

The boy shook his head. ‘Me mum had the baby last night.’

For one dreadful moment Blue thought the boy meant his mother had died in childbirth. But he was smiling. ‘It’s a girl. Ma wants to know the mermaid’s name. Me baby sister’s goin’ to be called after a mermaid!’ He jigged from one foot to another in joy at the thought of it.

‘Belle,’ said Blue softly. ‘Ze mermaid’s name is Belle.’

The boy considered this, tasting the sound. ‘Belle. Yeah. That’s a good name.’ He held up the geranium in its tin can again. ‘You’ll give her this? Ma said the mermaid’s kiss was real good luck for her. Took her a day and a night to have me. But it was like the mermaid helped her last night. The baby popped out as easy as swimming on a wave. So you got to give the mermaid this.’

Blue reached down and took the geranium. ‘I’ll give it to her.’ She hesitated, then slid off the simplest of the glass-beaded bracelets on her wrists, the one with the gold-painted chain and three small red paste gems. It belonged to Madame, but she couldn’t bear to part with her own bracelet. Madame’s had probably only cost threepence.

‘Ze mermaid let me wear some of her treasure today. You give your mama this from her.’ The faded woman deserved something bright, she thought. The bracelet might be just glass and painted tin, but it was pretty.

The boy took it as though it were worth a thousand pounds. ‘Are they real rubies?’ he breathed.

‘Real as ze mermaid,’ said Blue softly.

‘You tell your mum congratulations from all of us, all right?’ said Ebenezer. He tapped Sheba’s leg again. They began to move, climbing the sand hill towards the beach.

Blue looked back. The crowd followed them, all except the boy, who was still staring at the bright glass on its tarnished chain.

Sheba usually bathed in the privacy a female of her age expected, in whatever dam or creek was available. But there was no privacy here. It seemed the whole of Hope Town either sat along the sand hills watching, or helped Ebenezer throw buckets of water onto her back, taking turns to scrub her hide with the broom while Sheba dashed her trunk in the spray and let the waves run back and forth between her legs, then squirted sea water all over herself too. She seemed to be enjoying both the sea and the attention. Now and then she squirted the children, who squealed in happiness and pretend terror.

Gertrude/Gloria wandered along the tide line, her slippers in her hand, avoiding both salt water on her costume and the crowd.

Blue looked at the sea. The sea ignored her, the waves pushing in and pulling out. This was the water that had killed her family. But it was also the shore where the barefoot children played, the reason perhaps the camp had grown here, instead of back on more fertile land.

When you had nothing but rags and susso rations, the sea was your riches, the source of driftwood for your fire, fish for supper, or oysters or cockles or the wild spinach that Madame had told Ginger to gather yesterday. Here you could build sandcastles and pretend you were a princess, dive through froth-topped surf and know that even if poverty rode the wind outside your shanty, here you were ruler of the waves.

She glanced back at the crowd. There was still no sign of the little boy. She imagined him handing the bracelet to his mother, slipping it onto her thin wrist as she held the baby in her other arm.

Blue sat awkwardly on the sand, scratching absent-mindedly at a bite on her leg.

What had it been like, giving birth in a shack of corrugated iron or hammered-out kerosene tin, a hessian sack for a door? Had there been anyone to help? A nurse, perhaps, who lived in Hope Town too, even a doctor …

No, a doctor wouldn’t have to live in Hope Town, no matter how bad the times had become. She thought of the young man yesterday, Joseph McAlpine. I’m just a medical student, he’d said, but he drove a shiny green car that had to be expensive. Even if it was his brother’s, not his, he had driven it all the way down here, probably without even thinking of the price of petrol. His jacket looked almost new and his shoes were good. She smiled, wondering if they were from Laurence’s factories.

Well, at least his eight pounds would pay
their
petrol bill for the next little while.

She wondered how Mah and Fred were doing, back at the camp. Mrs Olsen had decided that Mah should stay in the harem pants for Fred’s new magic act — their soft billows would make her legs seem larger — with the harem camisole and several of the veils, as well as hollow rubber balls to create a bosom, all making her look bulky but possible to remove quickly, so she could squeeze into the hollow pillar and the end of the cardboard box.

It will work, she thought. Fred had instinctive showmanship and Mah was pretty enough to please the audience, especially when she smiled. And, of course, there was the rubber-ball bosom.

That was how she missed the resemblance between Fred and Mah. I wasn’t looking for it, she thought, just like the audience doesn’t look at us too closely, doesn’t see the darns and turned seams under the glamour. We see what we expect and want to see. I wanted to forget my past life, and so I did. All the anguish, all the fear …

She looked at the waves, gentle playmates for the children and an elephant. The wind came from the sea. It smelled of cold and salt and places far away.

And her terror of the sea fell off, as though it were one of the veils in the dance. The wind ripped another veil away, and there was the life she had shut away for the past year. Mum passing Willy to her, the day that he was born, and her holding him all small and wrinkled in his bunny rug, like the boy that morning would have held his new sister. Curled in Dad’s lap on the leather sofa in his study, listening as he read
Treasure Island
to her.