Late afternoon sunshine flooded around Gus and a gentle sea-breeze lifted the hair from his forehead as he waited outside the Esperance post office. After a few minutes, Vytas came up behind him with a clutch of mail.
‘For you, little fish,’ he said, handing a thick padded post-bag to Gus.
Gus held it awkwardly, like a fragile remnant of his old life.
‘You suspect there is a bomb inside?’ asked Vytas.
Gus tried to laugh but only a weird coughing noise came out.
‘You sound like you need an ice-cream. You wait with Effie and I will bring you something.’
Gus walked past the row of tall Norfolk pines that lined the roadside. Up ahead, Effie was sitting on a bench, flipping hungrily through the pages of a National Geographic. She was addicted to National Geographic but Cas wouldn’t let her keep more than six at a time – he said it cluttered up the caravan too much. Whenever she found a second-hand bookshop, she’d trade a few of the old ones in and spend the next week reading them from cover to cover. Gus slumped on the bench beside her and turned the parcel over in his hands.
‘What’s the matter? Aren’t you going to open it?’ she said, without looking up.
Gus tore the stapled end of the envelope and a sheet of Star Wars stickers slipped out and was caught by the breeze. He just had time to catch a glimpse of Darth Maul before the stickers blew along the Esplanade, disappearing under a row of parked cars. He thought about chasing after it, but somehow, it didn’t seem worth bothering about. Next, he pulled out a crumpled postcard.
Hi Gus,
I hope you are having a good time. I have seen ‘The Phantom Menace’ six times so far. School is still boring. We thrashed St Bernards in T-ball again. When are you coming back?
Pete
Effie took it from him and read it. ‘Boring,’ she announced.
Gus snatched it back and reached into the envelope for the next item. There was a pair of socks with ‘Scooby-Doo’ on them and a long letter from his mum. He read it through twice but it didn’t seem to tell him anything new. She wrote about the weather and the hospital and how she missed him but it was the same sort of thing they talked about on the phone.
‘So what’s she say in the letter?’ asked Effie, peering over his shoulder.
‘Nothing much,’ said Gus, stuffing everything back into the envelope.
Gus felt relieved when Vytas came back with the ice-creams and they all walked along the beach, the white sand squeaking beneath their feet. Vytas told stories about the hundred small islands that lay south of the town in the Archipelago of the Recherche, like dark jewels in the turquoise sea. It was only when they got back to the circus lot, that Gus realised he’d left the parcel lying on the bench. Nance drove down to find it for him but the wind had picked it up and blown it away.
Gus woke with a shout. He couldn’t remember what he’d been dreaming. He had a vague impression of big black creatures opening their mouths to swallow him whole and of trying to swim through a wild ocean to reach his mum.
A wind was blowing across the Bay of Isles and the caravan rocked gently from side to side. Gus sat up and pushed the curtain back. The islands looked like gigantic sea monsters in the black moonlit water.
He burrowed down into his sleeping bag and tried to go back to sleep but the bad dreams were lurking too close. Every time he shut his eyes he had a terrible sensation of falling and of his mum being far away in the dark.
Gus lay listening to all the sounds of the circus lot at night. The rattle of Kali’s leg iron, horses cropping the grass, the dull rumble of the generator, dogs barking at shadows. And something else too. He could hear a low moaning sound, like wind in a tunnel or an animal in pain; a weird sound that made the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. He sat up and listened. There it was again. Gus reached for his jeans and pulled them on.
All the caravans were dark except Hannah’s. She always slept with her bedside light on. Gus strained to hear the weird sound again and realised it was coming from Hannah’s caravan. He ran across the lot in his bare feet, stood on tip-toes and peeped in. She lay curled up in her bed, clutching her pillow and moaning. Maybe she was ill? Maybe she was trapped in a nightmare? Suddenly she sat up, her hands clutched against her chest, her dark eyes wide and staring straight at Gus.
‘Gus!’ she cried in a hoarse whisper.
Instinctively, he ducked down. Before he could think what to do next, Hannah flung the door open.
‘Gus! You naughty boy! You gave me a fright. What are you doing sneaking around in the middle of the night!’
‘I thought one of the animals was in trouble, but it was you. I didn’t mean to scare you. I have bad dreams too.’
Hannah smiled sadly and stretched out her hand.
‘Come inside. We will have a cup of something warm and sweet to make us sleep.’
He loved being inside Hannah’s caravan. Of all the caravans in the circus, Hannah’s was the most like what he thought a circus home should be like – an Aladdin’s cave. She had framed circus posters and photos fixed to every wall but they weren’t just snapshots like the ones his grandparents had; they were beautiful pictures in themselves. She had lots of cushions and fancy fabrics on everything, and richly patterned rugs on the floors. She even had a little glass cabinet with all sorts of china clowns in it. The clowns were glued in place to stop them falling over when the circus was on bumpy roads.
‘What do you dream about?’ asked Hannah as he sat beside her on the built-in sofa.
‘My mum,’ said Gus.
‘You miss her very much.’
Gus nodded but he blushed with shame. How could he tell anyone that he didn’t miss her half as much as he thought he should? Everything was changing and moving so fast, there didn’t seem as much room in his head for her any more. He couldn’t even remember exactly what she looked like and that was more frightening than any dream. Tears pricked his eyes and he brushed them away with the back of his hand.
‘Everything feels so different,’ he said. ‘We used to do everything together and now all this bad stuff is happening to her and I’m not there. I didn’t want to leave her. She sent me away and now I don’t even know when I’ll see her again.’
‘She had to make a very hard decision, Gus.’
‘But it was her decision, not mine. I didn’t choose to come here.’
‘Choice is not always such a great thing, Gus. Sometimes it can be terrible, when you have to choose between things you love – between people you love. I tell you a story about choice and maybe you understand a little.
‘I was not born here, in Australia. You know that. I was born in Czechoslovakia in a refugee camp. These camps – they were crowded with people who had lost their homes, their families; their lives were all broken up by the terrible war and the fighting. For my mother, it was worse. She was Jewish – she had lost everything and everyone. So this is more her story than my story.
‘My mother, she was very beautiful – very black hair and white skin and big, sad eyes; even when she was a little girl, everyone wanted to look at her. When the Germans were coming to her town her mother, my grandmother, went to a circus and begged them to take my mama away. She was just a little girl then, like Effie. The circus people took my mother and they dyed her hair blonde to make her look like she was not Jewish. They took her out of Czechoslovakia, far away from her home and they trained her to be an acrobat. But all the time she carried this terrible sadness because her mother had chosen her to be the one to live, and her little brothers and sisters, they were all murdered.
‘When the war was over, my mama went back to Czechoslovakia to look for her family but she found none of them. She met a man and they had two daughters, my sister, and me. Then the man left and things were very bad. My poor mama with two tiny children – a very young woman in a refugee camp, waiting to be allowed to leave the country. Finally, she got permission to leave, but she could take only one child with her. She had to choose, as her mother had chosen; she had to decide whether to save me or my sister.’
She opened a drawer and took out a small photo in a silver frame. It was of a little girl, around four years old, in a flouncy white cotton dress. Gus turned it over and read on the back ‘Marta, 1950’.
‘Perhaps Mama thought Marta would not forget her so easily as me, her baby. Perhaps she thought I was more likely to be lost. I don’t know. But Marta was taken to an orphanage and my mama promised to come and get her as soon as she had a home to take her to. And my mama took me with her to France, back to the circus – because she had nowhere else to go.’
‘What happened to Marta?’ asked Gus.
‘I do not know,’ said Hannah. ‘When I was bigger – maybe five – my mama went back to look for Marta; but there was no trace. And worse, when she got back to Czechoslovakia, they would not let her come back to France. So for a while, my mother lost both her daughters. One day, when I was ten years old, she came back to the circus, but my mama who had gone to find Marta was not the same as the mama who came back without her. She was broken inside. She had nightmares every night. We came to Australia – she did not want to be with circus any more. She did not want to be in Europe. She did not want to remember, except at night she had to remember. At night, the terrible things would come back to her. She became old when she was still a young woman. She was old from the sadness and the hurt.
‘Now you think with this story, that it is me, Hannah, who is the lucky one, the chosen one. But you know, this is not such an easy thing, to be chosen. I always felt bad that I was with my mama, and Marta, she was lost. All this sadness that my mama had, I carry that sadness for her. She did not want this for me but now, her dreams are my dreams. When she died I went back to the circus, first in Europe and then here, with Zarconi’s.
‘My bad dreams are the dreams for my mother, for my grandmother, of their sadness. The sadness that is not my sadness but is part of me. But I know, I am the lucky one. Even though I did not choose these things, I can live with them just like you must live with the bad dreams you carry for your mama and for Doc and Nance.’
‘But Hannah,’ Gus cried. ‘I don’t know what their sadness is. Nobody tells me anything! I know something bad happened. Something so bad that my mum ran away and never wanted to come back. Something that keeps Nance from smiling and makes Doc get drunk, but what? What is it? My dreams are full of big black things and I don’t know what they are. How do you help carry something for someone when it’s just a shadow?’
Hannah folded her hands in her lap and looked at them. Her face was sunken and drawn. She looked like a little kid sitting hunched over in her Chinese pyjamas.
‘Who was the other Gus, Hannah?’ he asked softly.
She wouldn’t look at him.
‘I have told you before. It is not for me to answer these questions,’ she said. ‘I can tell you my secrets but not other people’s.’
‘But why does it have to be a secret?’
Hannah stood up and took the tea cups. She pumped some water into the sink and rinsed and dried them in silence.
‘All the time, you get me in such big trouble, Gus!’ she sighed.
‘Please, Hannah.’
‘Okay. I tell you one thing and one thing only. The more I tell you, the more trouble I make. Gus was your uncle. He was your mama’s big brother.’
‘Why did Vytas say he was a bird?’
‘For the same reason he said your father was a fish. You know this about Vytas, for him the world is full of magic and he sees many things in the ordinary world that we don’t. Your uncle was a trapeze artist, like your mama.’
‘Why did he leave the circus?’
‘I cannot answer everything, Gus,’ she said, covering her face with her hands. ‘He was not with Zarconi’s when I came. I took his place when I joined them.’
Hannah walked him back to his grandparents’ caravan. The moon was sitting low over the bay and the sea was a flat sheet of shimmering silver. For a moment they stood and watched in silence. Just before Gus climbed up onto the step, Hannah kissed the top of his head.
‘You know, Vytas is right about you. You are a slippery little fish, Gus. You swim very well in deep dark waters. But now, you must have sweet dreams, and don’t let those big sea monsters catch you.’
‘I won’t,’ he said. He watched her turn and walk across the moonlit lot. She looked translucent, her satin pyjamas reflecting the light, her small bare feet pale on the dark ground. Shadows danced across her path and she stepped lightly up the steps of her caravan, carrying her stories and the weight of her dreams.