The moon was low on the horizon when Cas’s battered four-wheel drive came roaring across the open field. Cas leapt out from behind the wheel and looked up at Gus with astonishment.
‘How long have you been up there, Gus?’ he cried.
‘I don’t know,’ he replied, his teeth chattering. ‘Seems like a while.’
Cas tapped Kali behind her knees and she knelt down low enough so Gus could jump into Cas’s arms. He was stiff and cold from the hours of waiting. Cas smelt of hay and resin and sawdust, like a warm afternoon in the big top. Gus shut his eyes and held on to him tightly, feeling warmth flow back into his aching body. Cas carried him to the car, gently laying him on the back seat. Nance was standing by the door, waiting. She laid a blanket over Gus and tucked it in tight around him. Gus felt like he was melting into the warm seat upholstery.
Cas took a length of rope from the boot and tied a slipknot around Kali’s leg.
‘I can walk her back from here,’ said Cas. ‘You take the boy home.’
Nance didn’t say anything as they drove back across the field. The sun was coming up, a huge golden orb rising over the bush as they crossed the bridge. It was the last thing Gus remembered seeing before sleep took hold of him.
Everything was nearly packed up by the time Gus woke. He stepped out of the caravan in his pyjamas and watched with bleary eyes as Cas loaded the horses. Someone tapped Gus on the shoulder and he turned around wearily, expecting it to be Doc, angry with him for last night’s misadventure. Kali loomed above him and Gus took a step back, startled. Very slowly, she reached her trunk out to him and rested it gently on his shoulder.
‘It’s okay, Gus,’ came Cas’s voice from behind. ‘She is being affectionate.’ Gus stared up into her eyes. There was a dark circle of moisture around them and her lashes were long and black. She opened her mouth and her breath was strong and sweet in Gus’s face.
‘She wants you to stroke her tongue,’ said Cas. ‘Gently, like this.’ He came and stood beside Gus and showed him how.
Gus reached into Kali’s mouth and slowly stroked her giant pink tongue. It felt like warm silk beneath his hand. Gus felt weak at the knees and a tingle of pleasure ran through his body.
‘She is a terrible flirt, our Kali,’ said Cas. ‘C’mon, old girl. Time to hit the road.’
Gus watched as Kali disappeared into the vehicle. She trumpeted, and the sound of her cry echoed across the river. All over the circus lot, engines were revving and the first trucks were heading out onto the highway. Gus walked back to his grandparents’ caravan, feeling warm and still inside himself.
The circus travelled north towards Mount Magnet, and the bush quickly gave way to a drier, scrubbier landscape, and then yielded to flat stretches of gibber plain and open desert. Gus could hardly believe they were in the same country. The soil grew redder as they made their way up the Great Northern Highway, stopping to play every small mining town and Aboriginal community along the way.
Curiosity drove the locals into the big top. So few travelling circuses made their way along the inland route, that people were glad of the chance to see spangles and sawdust. Every night, Zarconi’s pulled the big top down by the glare of the floodlights and then drove in darkness to reach the next stop. The days were searingly hot and Stewie and Doc tried to set the big top up in the early mornings, before the heat became unbearable.
‘We’ve gotta lay some fat on,’ Doc told Vytas, when he complained of the pace. ‘If we can’t top the coffers up a bit between here and Marble Bar, we’ll be in real trouble.’
Vytas wasn’t the only one finding the pace too much. Some mornings, Gus woke to find every muscle in his body aching. On top of everything else, Hannah was working him hard on trapeze. Effie had convinced her that if they could get a good act up and running, they could turn Zarconi’s fortunes around. Gradually, everyone except Nance and Doc was drawn into the web of secrecy. Vytas would keep Nance and Doc out of the way during the late afternoons while Cas guarded the entrance to the big top. Even though Stewie was disgruntled at the extra work it made, he helped keep the secret too.
Some afternoons, it was so hot in the tent, they’d have to abandon the training, their bodies slippery with sweat no matter how much resin they dusted on their hands. Outside in the blazing heat, the desert stretched in every direction like an ocean of red. On afternoons like that, Gus longed for the sea.
Late one morning, north of Meekatharra, Gus and Effie were sitting drooped over their correspondence work, sipping at glasses of icy cordial. Gus looked out through the flywire screen. The desert was completely still. Not a grain of dust moved on the lot. The heat lay like a weight, crushing the energy out of every member of the circus. Doc had rigged up a shade-cloth over Kali but she still seemed restless, shifting from foot to foot and pawing the ground. The horses made strange whinnying noises that unnerved everyone.
‘I can’t think in this heat,’ complained Effie. She lay down on the linoleum floor and stretched her arms out on either side.
‘Let’s skip or something.’
‘You’re crazy. It’s way too hot.’
‘Anything’s better than sitting in here, cooking,’ he said.
Gus hooked a coil of skipping rope over his shoulder and went outside. He raked an area of ground clear of stones and started skipping. The rope made a dull thwacking noise as it hit the red dirt.
The long column of dust was a thin line in the distance when he first spotted it. He stopped and stared hard, blinking and refocussing to be sure what he was seeing wasn’t simply a mirage. On the desert horizon, a narrow finger of red dust pointed up into the pale blue sky. For a moment, Gus thought it was fixed in one place, but as it grew thicker, he realised it was spinning across the desert towards him.
He dropped his rope and ran across to the big top. Inside Stewie and Cas were setting up the bleachers.
‘Where’s Doc?’ Gus shouted.
‘Here, sonny Jim,’ said Doc, looking down from where he was working, adjusting the rigging.
‘Doc, there’s something weird moving across the desert. Come and see.’
In the couple of minutes it had taken Gus to find Doc, the thin line had become a thick funnel of swirling dust, sweeping across the desert towards them.
‘Willy-willy,’ said Doc briefly. ‘Everyone, outside, NOW!’ he bellowed.
Doors slammed as everyone stepped outside to see what was happening. The willy-willy moved in closer, ripping up fencing and scrub as it twisted and writhed its way swiftly across the desert plain.
Doc started running towards the horses. ‘Cas! Set Kali loose. I’ll do the horses.’
‘What do I do?’ asked Gus, as he ran beside him.
‘Just keep out of its way, boy! You’ve just gotta outrun it.’
The humming breathy whirr of the willy-willy swept past Gus, heading straight for the big top. A cloud of grit blew into his face, stinging his eyes.
Just before the willy-willy swallowed it up, the sides of the big top blew out like a swelling balloon. The back wall was the first to rip, sending a shiver up Gus’s spine. In an instant the whole tent was sucked up the funnel of wind. Seats, rigging and lights followed. Gus looked across at Doc and saw him slap his forehead in despair. Kali trumpeted and charged out from under her shelter, trampling the poles and shadecloth as they collapsed around her. The horses bolted across the lot, over the twisted barbed-wire fence and away from the turmoil.
It was over in a matter of seconds. The willy-willy turned and quickly moved east across the gibber plain, past the settlement houses, flinging away bits of circus rigging as it went and collecting kids’ bicycles, sheets of corrugated tin, fencing wire, any paraphernalia that had been left lying around – even a tin shed was picked up.
As soon as it had passed, Doc leapt into one of the four-wheel drives and headed out after it. Cas unhitched his vehicle from the caravan and followed. Everyone else just slumped. Gus walked around the site where minutes before the tent had been. There was nothing left of it. Every peg and guy rope was gone.
Fifteen minutes later Cas and Doc drove back onto the lot.
‘It’s hopeless. There’s stuff everywhere. Bits of canvas and rigging scattered all over the place. The willy-willy’s dropped a piece of gear every three metres. It’s gonna take us days to gather it all up again.’
Doc took off his hat and ran his hand over the top of his head. His face was glazed with sweat and his eyes were more bloodshot than ever. He sat down on a camp stool and put his head in his hands.
He was still sitting there when a long, lean Aboriginal man walked onto the lot, his arms full of rigging, and laid the gear down on the site where the tent had been.
‘Thanks, mate,’ called Doc, getting wearily to his feet.
‘We’re looking forward to the show,’ said the man, stretching a hand out to shake Doc’s.
Doc shook his head. ‘I don’t reckon…’ he started but Gus interrupted him.
‘Doc, look!’ he said.
A crowd of people were straggling towards them, carrying things. Little kids were dragging guy ropes and tent pegs, and the grown-ups had armfuls of canvas, tackle and broken lighting. They came onto the circus lot and laid the equipment on the ground.
‘Well, I’ll be buggered,’ said Doc.
The people stood in a circle, watching Doc as he walked amongst the piles of tangled gear, picking it over and assessing what was salvageable and what was beyond repair.
He looked into the expectant faces of the crowd and suddenly he smiled and nodded.
‘Why not? Let’s give it a go,’ he said.
He squatted down amongst the gear, and started calling out instructions to the circus crew, but they weren’t the only ones to start working. The Aboriginal man who’d arrived first called out in his own language, and soon everyone was helping. The circus lot was bustling with activity. Cas and a crew of Aboriginal men drove off to get the rest of the tent canvas. People kept arriving with more bits of equipment. The excitement was contagious. In less than an hour all the gear was assembled. Hannah and a crowd of women set to work untangling all the cables and ropes for the rigging, separating the twisted ropes and laying them out on the ground.
The air was pungent with the scent of hot glue guns as Nance and Vytas patched and repaired tears to the canvas. Only one section proved beyond repair and Stewie and Doc rolled it up and loaded it into the back of a truck. Someone lent Cas a dirt bike and he rode out across the desert to round up the horses.
Even the kids pitched in, sorting pegs and scouring the desert for any stray pieces of equipment. None of them seemed to speak much English and they talked amongst themselves in their own language, watching Gus and Effie and laughing at some private joke every so often. Gus started to feel uncomfortable, but Effie whistled Buster to her and walked over to join them. She got Buster to do a few tricks and then snapped her fingers, signalling for him to jump into her arms. The other kids hooted with laughter and started talking to her rapidly in their own language. Effie laughed too and talked back in English.
Gus tried to concentrate on unknotting a long length of guy rope, pretending he was too busy to notice that Effie had just made a crowd of new friends, but when she started showing off her handstands, he dropped the rope and joined them, flinging himself onto his hands and walking amongst the crowd of kids with his feet stretching skywards. A boy, with skin like black coffee and golden tips in his hair joined him, and Gus found himself staring into the boy’s grinning upside-down face. Then they dropped to the ground and went back to work but every so often, the boy would look at Gus and smile.
The afternoon wore on. By six-thirty, the flags on the king poles hung above the big top in the still evening air. Gus sat on the bleachers and looked out at the desert sunset through the gap where the missing canvas should have hung. It was hard to believe that so much had happened in a single afternoon.
That night they played to a full house. Doc wanted to make it a free show – they couldn’t take money from people who’d just spent the whole afternoon salvaging the circus for them, he said; but the man who’d been the first to bring the rigging back into camp took Doc’s hat off his head and dropped a ten-dollar bill into it.
‘We’re gonna have to make this the best bloody show ever,’ said Doc.
Gus couldn’t work out if it was because the show was fantastic, or because the crowd was incredibly enthusiastic, but every trick met with shouts of approval. In the interval, all the local kids poured into the ring and began tumbling in the sawdust. Gus joined Vytas at the fairy-floss machine, taking the change while Doc gathered up the spun sugar on sticks.
Gus handed two sticks of fairy-floss to a woman and took her money but she stayed staring at him. ‘You want another one?’ he asked, uncomfortable at the way she was looking at him.
‘What mob do you come from?’ she asked.
‘Sorry?’ said Gus.
‘Who are your people?’
Gus blushed. Even though he understood the words she was saying, he couldn’t think how to answer her. The months spent mostly outdoors had turned his skin a deep golden brown. Sometimes he’d wondered if his father could have been Aboriginal but it was like everything to do with his father, a wisp of an idea that he couldn’t quite grasp. He stared at the woman with a blank expression.
Vytas leaned forward and intervened. ‘The boy does not belong to this land. His mother was white, a circus girl, and his father was from an island across the sea.’
The woman shrugged and walked away. Gus turned to Vytas.
‘What do you mean? What island? And what do you mean I don’t belong?’
‘These people belong to this land. It is different for us, we belong to the circus. We move across the land as a shoal of flying fish moves across the open sea. We skim the surface, but never do we dive down to the sea bed.’
‘But what about the island? My father’s island? Where was it?’
‘I have forgotten what it was called,’ said Vytas, dismissing the topic with a wave of his hand.
The lights were dimming and Vytas busied himself switching off the fairy-floss machine and fussing about the change. Gus sighed. He was used to Vytas’s tactics in ending conversations. They walked around the back of the big top in silence. Vytas hummed the accompaniment to his magic act, but Gus’s thoughts were elsewhere, skimming the surface of the Indian Ocean, looking for his father’s island.