Gus opened one eye. Early-morning sunlight poured in through the caravan windows. He reached down to his knapsack and rummaged around in the front pocket for his notebook. Every morning he put a cross inside the front cover, and every night he’d recount them, the number of days he’d survived Zarconi’s.
Gus counted off sixteen crosses. It was his third Sunday. Nance had said he could phone his mum on Sundays, on the mobile. Last Sunday she’d said she was having a new treatment. Maybe today she’d tell him he could come home.
He got off the couch and gently pulled the cover off Lulu’s cage.
‘Silly bugger!’ she said, cocking her head on one side.
‘Silly bugger yourself,’ he said and he pushed a piece of stale seed cake through the bars. She unfurled her orange and sulphur crest and made a gargling noise in the back of her throat.
Gus jumped down the caravan steps. No one was around, so he made his way over to where Kali was tethered behind a makeshift electric fence.
‘Hey, Kali.’
She was swaying from side to side and paid no attention.
‘It’s me, Gus.’
She swept the ground with her trunk and scooped a small cloud of dirt across her back.
‘She’s never gonna pay any attention to you, kid.’
Gus turned and saw a pair of knees strapped to a pair of long green stilts. It was Pikkle, the tenthand, his spiky yellow hair making a jagged line against the morning sky.
‘She knows I’m here,’ said Gus.
‘Maybe. I reckon she wishes she wasn’t.’
Gus looked back at the elephant and for a moment he was sure she was staring at him.
‘I know how she feels,’ he said.
Pikkle laughed and strode away across the lot. He was a street performer and busker. Doc didn’t like the tenthands to get in on the performing side of things but the night before, he had finally relented and let Pikkle do a fill-in act on stilts. Now he practised dancing on his stilts, kicking his legs up in the air and wiggling his bum in Gus’s direction. A cloud of galahs swooped low over the circus lot and Pikkle fell flat on his face in the dry grass. Gus laughed.
Doc came storming out of his caravan.
‘You! Pikkle!’ he shouted. ‘What’s the story with your mate Gazza?’
‘He’s not my mate, boss,’ said Pikkle.
‘Well he’s done a right bloody job on us. He’s cleared off and taken Kylie with him. She left a note in the cash tin. Took their pays without asking and now we’re two hands down and meant to make Kimba tonight. We’ll have to start packing right now. Stop mucking about and hop to it.’
Pikkle shrugged, picked up his stilts and disappeared into the bunkhouse.
‘And as for you, boy. I’ve told you not to go bothering Kali,’ bellowed Doc, turning on Gus. ‘I’ve got enough to deal with. We could be shorthanded for weeks. I can’t waste my time checking up on you. You just keep clear of that elephant, you hear!’
Gus nodded and stepped away from the elephant enclosure. ‘That’s tough about Gazza and Kylie,’ he said, hoping to deflect Doc’s rage.
‘Tenthands, they’re scum.’
‘I thought everyone was like family in Zarconi’s,’ said Gus tentatively.
‘Everyone ’cept tenthands,’ growled Doc.
It was after lunch by the time the circus was fully packed up and ready to move. Gus was kept so busy he didn’t get a chance to phone his mum but Nance promised he could call as soon as they got to Iron Knob. He climbed into the front of Vytas’s old Dodge and sank low in the seat so Doc wouldn’t spot him. The last thing he wanted was to be stuck in the cab of the elephant truck listening to Doc cursing all the way to the next town.
Vytas smiled when he found Gus slumped in the front seat.
‘Little Gus! My most favourite travelling companion!’
Vytas loved a captive audience, especially if the captive was Gus, who happily listened to all his stories. As the truck pulled out of Whyalla and onto the highway, he started telling Gus about the day Hannah had arrived at the circus, a beautiful young acrobat who had worked with the finest circuses in Europe.
‘Vytas,’ shouted Gus above the roar of the engine. ‘Why do you reckon Doc won’t let me do stuff with Hannah? Why won’t he let her train me?’
‘Your grandfather says you are clumsy,’ said Vytas. ‘He says you would break your neck.’
‘I am not clumsy! I can do anything Effie does.’
‘No, your grandfather says you should be a clown. He is the boss of Zarconi’s and you should listen. Why won’t you try? You could be a fine performer. Don’t you know you are named after a clown?’
‘What? Gus? Who was he?’
‘No, the auguste. It is a type of clown.’
‘I thought Augustus meant great leader or something like that.’
‘Perhaps it does, but in circus, the auguste is a most important clown. He has sticky-up hair, just like you. You know him; the one who always does everything wrong, big shoes he is falling over and a big red nose – the one that gets picked on by the smart clowns.’
‘Sounds great,’ Gus groaned. ‘Just what I always wanted to be, the fall guy.’
‘You do not understand,’ Vytas said. ‘Beneath it all, the auguste is really the smart guy. Making people laugh – this is the hardest thing in the world. Zarconi’s big problem is it does not have a strong clown act. Pikkle, he could be okay alone, but together, you and he could do a spectacular slapstick routine. You learned how to do a pratfall like that,’ he said. He snapped his fingers. ‘You were born to be a clown.’
Gus wasn’t so sure. Vytas had explained how he had to bend at the knee and break the fall so the whole thing looked natural and was not so painful, but the first few times he’d tried it really hurt.
‘Well, the thing is,’ said Gus, ‘If I can do a pratfall that well, I can do acrobatic stuff just as easy. Seems to me that you have to be a pretty good acrobat to do good clowning.’
Vytas glanced across at Gus.
‘You are a cheeky boy. You are this keen to be an acrobat?’
‘Yup,’ said Gus, smiling at him.
Gus wanted to try the trapeze so badly, that sometimes his hands itched when he looked up at it. Late at night, after the show had finished, he’d sit on the bleachers in the tent and watch Effie and Hannah train together. Hannah never asked him to join in any more, but he’d do the warm-ups and then practise doing floor work. Hannah wouldn’t tell him to stop, but she didn’t help either – except sometimes when he was really struggling.
‘Like this, Gus,’ she’d say softly, and put a hand on his back to help him flip over in a handspring.
Gus looked out the window at the dry, treeless landscape and wondered why everyone tried to discourage him from doing acrobatics. Was he really that hopeless? When he thought about the chance of flying on the trapeze he felt a hard place inside him full of fierce longing. If he shut his eyes he could imagine flying under the big top, his body taut and swift, the caress of the air around him like an ocean without shores.
The streets of Iron Knob were abandoned. It was a small mining town, a cluster of buildings dwarfed by the flat expanse of desert around it, with the Flinders Ranges a blue shadow on the distant horizon. The circus convoy pulled off the road at the edge of town, onto a stony red stretch of ground.
Gus climbed out of the truck and peeled off his sweaty T-shirt as he walked back to his grandparents’ caravan. They were standing outside the door looking back at the township shimmering in the heat.
‘Are we gonna do a show here?’ asked Gus.
‘Not if I have anything to say about it,’ said Nance.
‘It’s too late to go to Kimba and set up,’ Doc snapped. ‘Last time we came through Iron Knob, we got a good crowd.’
‘There’s no point this time, Doc. Anyone can see we’ll only get five men and a dog. The town’s stripped bare. They’ve downsized the mine – you know that. There must have been five thousand here twenty years ago when BHP had the place working, but now there couldn’t be more than a few hundred left and half of them probably saw us when we played Whyalla.’
Doc waved his hand as if shooing away flies, dismissing everything Nance had said.
‘I’ll see if I can get us permission to set up on the footy oval. We’ll get a good crowd, you’ll see – right in the middle of town. Everyone will spot us straight up.’
Nance shrugged and climbed into the back of the caravan. Gus was glad that she’d given up before a full-blown row developed. Doc and Nance seemed to be arguing a lot lately. Sometimes at night Gus could hear the low rumble of Doc’s voice from their bedroom, interspersed with Nance’s light, sharp replies. As the argument dragged on, Doc’s shouts would become a steady roar that made the caravan shake. Somehow Nance would quiet him down and Gus would fall asleep listening to the uneasy ebb and flow of their voices.
‘Nance, can I have the phone now?’ Gus asked as he pulled the caravan door shut behind him.
Nance sat at the table flipping through a pile of paperwork. She didn’t look up, but pointed at the kitchen bench and went on reading the sheet of paper in front of her. When he’d first arrived, Gus had thought Nance was really tough, the way she’d give directions with just a look or a gesture. She didn’t smile much either, but slowly he discovered there was another look she had, where she gazed at him for a long time in a kindly way, that was as close to a smile as she could muster.
The line clicked and peeped as it made a connection across more than a thousand kilometres of terrain. Gus pushed the phone hard against his ear. The receptionist at the hospital transferred the call to Room 323 and Gus heard his mum’s voice on the other end of the line, faint but warm and familiar.
‘Are you feeling better?’ asked Gus. He lowered his voice and cupped one hand over the receiver so Nance wouldn’t hear him. ‘Can I come home now?’
He heard his mum draw breath and then she spoke slowly, as if she were speaking to a three-year-old.
‘Gus, darling, I’d love for us both to go home but I have to keep on with the treatment. You’ll have to be brave and wait a little longer.’
The phone line crackled and Gus knew she was waiting for him to say everything was okay.
‘Gus?’
‘Yup.’
‘Are you all right, darling?’
‘Yup.’
‘What have you been doing?’
‘Not much,’ he said.
The mobile felt slippery with sweat. Gus rubbed his hands on his shorts and passed the phone from one hand to the other.
He heard his mum sigh and then she started talking about the new people in her room and how Mrs Scully in the bed opposite had moved to another ward. When she told him how Pete Spanner and his mum had been to visit her, Gus suddenly felt tired.
‘I have to go now, Mum.’
‘I’ve written a big letter to you, Gus. Pete gave me something to put in it too. I’ve sent it to Esperance.’
‘Okay,’ said Gus.
He knew she wanted him to say more but he couldn’t make the words come out.
‘Take care, sweetheart. We’ll talk again next Sunday.’ Her voice was fading out.
‘Yup. Bye,’ said Gus.
He switched the phone off and laid it down on the benchtop.
‘What’s your mother’s news?’ asked Nance without looking up.
‘I can’t go back for a while yet.’
‘She’s not worse, is she?’ Nance looked at Gus, her face full of alarm.
‘About the same,’ he said sourly. ‘Don’t worry, You won’t be stuck with me forever.’
Nance put her pen down and stretched one hand out to Gus.
‘Come here, sweetie,’ she said.
Obediently, Gus stood next to her.
‘We’re really happy you’re here,’ she said.
Gus nodded. She slipped one arm around his waist and gave him a quick hug. She smelt of leather and ink and the scent of her pushed back the cold tide of unhappiness that swelled inside him.
‘You can stay with us as long as you like,’ she said.
Gus was silent. They both knew ‘liking’ had nothing to do with it. There was nowhere else to go.