Nance and Doc argued all night. Gus could hear Doc shouting about Hannah and the next morning, Doc was asleep in the sawdust of the ring again. Everyone packed and loaded up slowly without the usual talk and jokes. No one said anything to Gus. Even Effie avoided him. He felt that bad luck and clumsiness hovered around him like a cloud.
As it was Sunday, Nance handed him the mobile and he sat on a bale of hay and dialled the number of the hospital. Even though his mum was cheery on the other end, full of hope for the latest treatment, Gus felt numb. It was like talking to a stranger. He couldn’t think of anything to tell her. He answered all her questions politely but there was an empty place inside him which he couldn’t explain to her.
He climbed into Pikkle’s truck and slumped. Pikkle liked to turn the music up so loud that you had to shout to make conversation, and that suited Gus fine. He didn’t want to talk to anyone.
They drove through jarrah forests and set up camp near a river, not far from a town called Denmark. The afternoon was warm and still. The generator hummed lazily in the background as Cas unloaded the animals and set them out to graze. Vytas immediately went down to fish off a little jetty.
Doc slung a rope low between two trees and pulled it tight. He’d been quiet all day, as if the night of shouting had taken the roar right out of him. Gus knew the tightrope was a peace offering.
‘You kids, you should do some wire work. Maybe you could work something up to put in your clowning routine. Get rid of the buckets, eh boy?’
Doc glanced across to where Gus and Effie were sitting in the shade of a gum tree, winked and then laughed. Gus felt Doc’s laugh like an embrace.
Cas came out of his caravan and sat on a camp stool, watching Effie and Gus mucking around on the wire. After a few minutes, he went into his caravan and came back with a box of eggs and a skipping rope.
‘Here, kids,’ he said ‘I’ll show you a couple of things to help with this. First, you skip. If you can get tight control of your footwork when you are skipping, it’s good practice for the wire.’
Effie reached out for the rope, but he offered it to Gus instead. Gus tried it forward and backwards. He tripped occasionally, but it only took him a couple of minutes to get into a rhythm and skip really fast.
‘Here, give me a turn,’ said Effie impatiently.
‘Let Gus finish, Effie,’ said Cas.
Effie looked sulky and folded her arms across her chest. Gus didn’t like to hog the rope while she was watching with such slitty eyes. He handed it over and Effie immediately started to skip in a really complicated style – she crossed her arms, danced around while she skipped and sang skipping rhymes.
‘Can I have another turn?’ asked Gus. He’d worked out a few tips from watching her and was keen to try them.
‘I haven’t finished,’ she said.
‘Give Gus the rope, Effie,’ said Cas.
‘Just one more rhyme,’ she said.
‘Gus O’Brien is no good, chop him up for firewood
If he is no good for that, feed him to the old tomcat.’
Gus looked at her in disgust. She shot him one of those dazzling, superior smiles that always wound him up.
‘My name’s not O’Brien,’ he said.
‘Whatever,’ she replied, dropping the rope at his feet.
Cas knelt amongst the dry gum leaves that covered the ground and arranged the eggs in rows. Effie stood beside him, resting one hand on his shoulder as he laid a long rope in and out of the lines of eggs.
‘Now, Gus. You try this first.’
The trick was to walk on the rope weaving your way amongst the eggs without stepping on them. It was a whole lot harder than it looked, even in bare feet, and Gus felt little beads of sweat break out on his forehead. Effie followed him and he looked back at her and smiled nervously. It was like walking through a maze. Suddenly she reached up and shoved him in the back. Gus lost his balance and came down hard on one of the eggs.
‘Yuk!’ The sticky mess oozed between his toes. ‘What did you do that for?’
Effie said nothing. Cas glared at her.
‘Go inside our caravan, Effie. If you can’t work with Gus, you can go and do your schoolwork.’
Effie folded her arms again and strode off to the caravan, slamming the door behind her.
‘What’s her problem?’ asked Gus.
Cas just shrugged, and stared after his daughter thoughtfully.
Gus avoided Effie for the rest of the day but in the evening Vytas sent them both down to the river to retrieve some fishing gear that he’d left on the jetty. They sat on the end of the jetty and dangled their feet in the water.
‘I’m sorry about this morning,’ said Effie.
‘It’s okay.’ Gus was glad she was the one to open the conversation. ‘But why do you get like that sometimes?’
‘I don’t know. It just gets up my nose, the way everyone wants to show you how to do stuff. Everyone makes a fuss of you. Before you came along – well, it was different.’
‘But they don’t make a fuss of me!’ exclaimed Gus. ‘Doc won’t let me do anything.’
‘Well, Hannah and Vytas and my Dad do. Especially my Dad.’
‘No he doesn’t. He’s just nice to me because he feels sorry for me. Thinks I’m pathetic. That’s all it is. It’s not to do with you.’
‘Well, the thing is, I have to share him with so many people, it’s just really rough having to share him with you too.’
‘What are you talking about? You don’t have to share him with anyone. It’s not like you have any brothers or sisters or even a mum to share him with. He’s all yours.’
‘Oh yes I do,’ she said, ‘I have to share him with Kali and Buster and the horses – even with a bloody snake. I mean, I love all of them but he always seems more worried about them than he is about me.’
‘What a load of crap,’ said Gus. ‘And anyway – at least you’ve got a dad. At least he’s around. I’ve never even seen a picture of my dad.’
‘I have,’ said Effie.
Gus looked at her in amazement. ‘Where?’
‘Nance has a whole bunch of photos in a tin inside the safety deposit box. I went through them last week and there was this one of your mum with a bloke – kind of dark he was but I reckon he must be your dad. You can sort of see because of the way their faces are – if you mixed them up together, your mum and your dad’s faces, then you’d get you.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘’Cause I wasn’t meant to be looking at them. I’d be in big trouble if anyone found out. Nance sent me in to get a ledger that she needed when we were doing the take for the night, and I found the tin and had a quick flip through the photos. There were heaps of your mum – some of other acrobats who’ve been with the circus, but mostly of your mum.’
‘Do you reckon we could get into it again?’
‘I don’t know. We’d really cop it if we got caught.’
‘I don’t care,’ said Gus. ‘If it was a photo of your mum, you’d want to see it, wouldn’t you?’
Effie looked out across the river. It had grown dark and there was only a thin strip of orange light beyond the dunes on the opposite bank.
‘Yeah, maybe,’ said Effie in a flat voice.
‘What happened to your mum, anyway?’ asked Gus.
‘She died,’ said Effie.
Gus didn’t know what you were meant to say when someone told you something like that. It hadn’t occurred to him that she could be dead. He didn’t know anyone who had died or even about anyone who might have.
After a while Effie took another deep breath and said, ‘I’ve got a little picture of her next to my bed. But it’s kind of depressing, because now I can’t remember what she really looked like. I can only think of her as being like in the photo, but I have a bit of me that remembers her as more sort of lively than the photo can tell. Like the photo has got in the way of my remembering her properly.’
Gus nodded. ‘Yeah, I know what you mean. I can’t keep my mum’s face in my mind. She sort of floats around inside my head, which is good and bad. If I had a photo, it would really take over and maybe that’s all I’d be able to see.’
They were both silent for a while as the night settled down around them.
‘So what happened to your mum? Did she have cancer or something like that?’ he asked.
‘No, it was an accident, but I hate talking about it.’
Gus thought about this. It seemed everyone had something that was hard to talk about.
‘Let’s swim instead,’ he said. It was dark but the water that lapped around their ankles was warm and inviting. Gus didn’t even bother to take off his T-shirt. He slid off the end of the jetty and stood in the waist-deep water.
‘C’mon, Effie.’
She stood up, a black silhouette in front of him. Behind her the night sky was bright with stars, and the starlight glimmered on the river’s surface.
‘It’s a bit spooky,’ she said. ‘You shouldn’t swim in rivers at night – they’re full of snares and stuff, and up north they’re full of crocs.’
‘We’re not up north and it’s fine,’ he replied. ‘We won’t go in deep. C’mon.’
Effie splashed into the water and little white sparks flew into the air.
‘Whoa, weird,’ said Gus. ‘Did you see that?’
‘What was it?’
‘I don’t know.’ He slapped the surface of the water with his hand and sprays of light leapt into the air.
‘Look at our feet,’ said Effie in wonder.
When they moved, specks of light whirled in the water.
‘It’s some sort of phosphorescent stuff,’ said Gus. ‘Wow, wouldn’t you love to see Kali mucking around in this. She could blow it out her trunk – it would look fantastic.’
They scooped handfuls of the water into the air and shrieked as the silver light fell around them. Gus dived underwater with his eyes open. Flickers of bright light swirled around him. It was so beautiful it made him hurt with happiness.
It wasn’t until Vytas came down to the jetty and hauled them out of the water that they could bring themselves to stop playing with the magic stuff.
‘Look, Vytas,’ cried Effie.
‘What is it, Vytas?’ asked Gus. ‘Why is it happening?’
‘This is phosphorus – it gets in the water and it makes the light to shine in it. That is the magic, the real magic in what you think is the ordinary world. Like I tell you before – the world it is full of this ordinary magic.’
‘Yeah, right, Vytas,’ said Effie. ‘And Gus is a dolphin and I’m really a fairy. But you know, the sparkles are really my magic! Just watch this.’ She jumped back into the river, sending a spray of dazzling water into the air.
‘You are no fairy, Effie,’ said Vytas. ‘A fox maybe – a real little vixen, but it is mischief you make, not magic!’
Effie laughed and climbed back onto the jetty, her clothes dripping.
‘Magic, mischief, it’s all the same to me,’ she said, wringing the luminous water out of her long hair.
‘That’s the truth,’ said Gus. Vytas looked at him and winked and the three of them walked back along the narrow dirt track to the circle of caravans, glowing in the darkness.