At five-thirty, Gus combed his hair back and splashed cold water onto his face, ready to meet his mother. Doc said he was too busy to come and started fiddling with the rigging again, even though everyone knew that he’d already checked it twice. Gus climbed into the four-wheel drive beside Nance.
‘It’s twelve years,’ she said. ‘You’re going to have to point her out for me, love. Maybe she’s changed more than I know.’
At the airport, Nance stood behind him, resting her hands on his shoulders as the plane touched down on the tarmac. He could feel she was trembling.
His mother was much smaller than he remembered, with luminous green eyes above high, sharp cheekbones and pale skin. A shout burst out of him.
‘Mum!’ he cried, breaking away from his grandmother and running towards her.
She stood still, staring at him. He wrapped his arms around her and realised with a start how much he had grown. She felt little and frail and soft – not at all as he’d remembered her.
‘Your hair,’ he said, ‘I was looking for your hair.’
Annie smiled and ran one hand over her smooth crewcut.
‘It all went with the chemo,’ she said, smiling.
She held his face in her hands and stroked his cheeks with her thumbs.
‘You look like someone else. So familiar and yet so big and strong.’
They hugged each other again. Out of the corner of his eye, Gus saw Nance standing where he’d left her, her arms folded across her chest.
‘Come and say hello to Nance,’ he said. He felt a flicker of tension run through his mother’s body but she smiled and nodded. ‘Of course. Looks like she’s done a great job feeding you. You’ve turned into such a whopper!’
Gus stood between his mother and Nance.
‘Annie,’ said Nance.
‘Mum.’
Gus wanted to push them together, force them to touch each other. The space between them seemed like a solid block – something neither of them could cross.
‘It’s good to see you, love,’ said Nance.
Annie nodded in reply. ‘I’d better get my bag,’ she said.
Gus did all the talking as they drove back into town, about everything he could think of that had happened since they’d left Perth. When he got to the bit about Kali’s death, Annie interrupted.
‘Not Kali,’ she said with a catch in her voice. ‘Oh Mum, I’m sorry.’
Nance glanced across at her. ‘She’d had her day, Annie. Seventy-four years – not a bad innings – but hard on your father to lose his oldest friend.’
Gus squirmed in his seat between them. Couldn’t they do better than this? He decided to say nothing more, just to see if the two of them would pick up the conversation, but the three of them sat in total silence for the rest of the drive.
Nance dropped Gus and Annie off in Carnarvon Street in the middle of town.
‘You two have a lot of things to talk about,’ she said.
‘I’ll see you back at the lot.’
They sat in a restaurant and Gus ordered a Coke. Annie sipped green china tea and watched him with a half-smile on her face as Gus told her everything about the trip north. When he started talking about the different acts he could do, from juggling right through to wire-walking, two little frown lines formed between Annie’s eyebrows.
‘And have you been doing any aerial work?’ she asked, trying to sound nonchalant.
‘Doc won’t let me do any aerial stuff.’
She couldn’t stop a little sigh of relief escaping. Gus didn’t like lying but he figured it was a half-truth. He didn’t want to look his mum in the eye until they were past this part of the conversation. He took the straw out of his Coke and twisted it into a bow.
‘Gus, do you really have to do this show tonight? I mean, it’s been so long since I’ve seen you. Haven’t you had enough of the circus by now?’
Gus stared at her.
‘Not do the show? It won’t work without me!’
‘Fair enough. One last show can’t hurt, I guess. I’d like to see your clown routine, too, but I’d also like it if you’d come back to the motel with me afterwards. I’ve organised a hire car so we can head up to Derby in the morning for a real holiday. We have so much catching up to do.’
Gus felt like he was looking at a stranger. How could she be asking this of him?
‘Leave Broome? Why can’t we have a holiday here? This is a great place for a holiday.’
‘I’ve missed you. I thought you’d want to have some time alone together.’
‘Well, I do, but it’s not fair on Doc and Nance. They only came to Broome to meet up with you. They should have headed back down to Perth. Why are you so afraid of being with them?’
Annie frowned and cupped her face in her hands, resting her elbows on the table. She looked tired and Gus felt sick with guilt. She seemed to feel every word he spoke like a physical blow.
‘I’m not afraid, Gus,’ she said. ‘It’s just some things hurt too much to talk about.’
‘You sound just like Nance.’
Annie blanched.
‘What has she told you?’
‘Not everything. Not why you ran away.’
The waiter put a plate of spring rolls in front of them and Gus waited for him to leave before starting up.
‘At first I thought I understood. I hated it too. But things changed and I changed. I found out what circus is really like and I couldn’t figure out why you’d run away. I know it’s something to do with my uncle Gus and the trapeze and maybe my dad as well.’
‘Who told you about the accident?’
‘Everyone told me little bits and I worked the rest out for myself, but it’s like a jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces missing. Mum, you’re the only one who can finish the picture for me.’
Annie slumped lower in her seat and closed her eyes.
‘I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to have to carry all that unhappiness. You were too little to understand it and I didn’t want to burden you.’
‘Please, Mum. I have to know,’ he said.
‘I can’t talk about it in here,’ she said getting to her feet. ‘Let’s go for a walk. Do you know where the pier is? Take me there and we’ll watch the sunset together.’
They walked through town as the shadows lengthened and the light glowed gold. The tide was in at the pier and the sea was a mysterious blue. Fishermen lined the edges of the pier, their lines stretching into the deep water. Gus and Annie walked right to the end before they spotted a break where they could sit down together.
‘We were the Fabulous Flying Zarconis – Doc, Nance, my brother Gus and me,’ Annie began. ‘Doc trained me from when I was tiny, and I loved it. I loved flying, loved being caught by him. I was good, too, but your uncle Gus was the one who was really fabulous, he could even do a triple somersault. He was like a bird when he flew. The most beautiful man. You’re a lot like him, Gus.’
Gus nodded and took his mother’s hand.
‘It’s such a messy story. Your father’s tangled up in it too. Zarconi’s was playing here in Broome when I ran away. It was during the Shinju Matsuri festival – the Festival of the Pearl. They have it here every August, and the town’s full of people from all over. Your father was here too. He’d been waiting for us to arrive.’
‘What was his name?’
‘Kem. Kem Tarique. He was a sailor from Sri Lanka. I’d met him when we were playing Fremantle. I never thought I could fall in love with anyone who wasn’t circus. Kem wanted me to go back with him, but at that stage, I couldn’t imagine leaving Zarconi’s. Kem was gorgeous, but he just wasn’t circus.’
‘Vytas said he was a dolphin.’
Annie laughed. ‘Well, if he could have been anything other than a man, that’s what he would have chosen. He loved the sea – he worked as a pearl diver while he waited for Zarconi’s to come to Broome.’
Gus looked out over the ocean and thought of his dad diving under the surface of the sea, fishing for pearls. Annie’s heart a pearl, Gus the little pearl inside her.
‘Why couldn’t he have joined the circus?’
‘He would have gone crazy if he’d had to tour inland. But he did work for Zarconi’s for the Broome show and that was part of all the troubles. You see, I was pregnant with you, and Doc found out just after he’d given Kem work as a tenthand. He was really angry with both of us. Kem wanted to get married but Doc said he only wanted to marry me so he could stay in Australia. Doc was afraid Kem would take me away from the circus. The shouting went on for hours and finally Kem stormed off.’
‘Where did he go?’
‘I don’t know. I lost contact with him. Years later, when you started asking after him, when you were in creche, I tried to find him. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to get your hopes up. I put advertisements in newspapers in Sri Lanka but no one ever contacted me. I don’t know what happened to him. I’m sorry, Gus. I shouldn’t have let it happen, he should have tried harder too, but things just fell to pieces.
‘The night of the big fight, everyone was crazy with bad temper – but you know the show goes on no matter what. We were doing the flying Zarconis act. Looking back, I know I shouldn’t have been flying, but mum had flown when she was pregnant with me so I didn’t think about it. We were all up there, we’d just finished the act – Gus and I were flying and Dad was catching, when the platform we were on gave way. It was a fault in the rigging. It happened really quickly – Dad only had a split second to do something and he reached out and caught me. He could only save one of us and he chose me. He chose me, and so Gus fell.’
Gus looked into his mum’s face. She had half shut her eyes but her face was very still and composed. They sat without saying anything as the water turned gold and orange. The tide ebbed around the pylons of the pier. Gus looked down into the water and saw the shadow of a giant manta ray moving just under the surface.
‘But after all that, how could you leave Doc and Nance?’ he asked quietly.
‘When people die suddenly, like Gus did, everyone looks for someone to blame. I blamed Doc.’
‘But he saved you. How could you blame him!’
‘People aren’t always rational when they’re grieving, Gus. We all blamed each other. Every time I looked at Doc, I thought I could see him judging me. You see, I blamed myself too, and Kem. If we hadn’t met, if I hadn’t got pregnant with you, if Doc hadn’t been so angry and had checked the rigging properly – all those ‘ifs’ that could have changed what happened. All the ‘if onlys’ that could have kept Gus alive.
‘At one stage, I even thought Kem had sabotaged the equipment to force me to leave the circus. And I couldn’t bear the fact that Doc had chosen me over Gus. I was crazy with grief. So were Doc and Nance. Within a week of the accident, I decided I couldn’t see a life for myself in the circus without Gus. I didn’t do it to punish anyone. I did it because I thought I would go crazy if I stayed.’
‘But you didn’t think of me!’ said Gus. ‘What about me?’
‘Oh, Gus. You were all I thought about. I wanted you to be safe. I wanted you to have a different life – an ordinary life. I wanted to protect you from all that sadness.’
‘But you took the sadness with you and you took me away from where I belong!’ he said, his voice growing louder.
Annie’s face flushed deep red and she reached out and grabbed both of Gus’s wrists.
‘You don’t belong with the circus, Gus. You belong with me! I’m your mother.’
‘And Nance is your mother. So you belong to her.’
‘I’m not a kid any more.’
‘I won’t be a kid forever, either!’ He hadn’t meant to hurt her, but the words flew out of his mouth like weapons and she hunched over as if he’d slapped her.
‘Mum, Mum, please don’t cry. I didn’t mean to make you cry.’
He put both his arms around her and hugged her tightly. They sat for a long while without speaking, their legs dangling over the edge of the pier, their bodies close together. Annie wiped her eyes dry on the sleeve of her shirt.
‘It would never work, Gus. I’ve changed too much to go back to Zarconi’s.’
‘Mum, if I leave, Cas will take Effie away and Zarconi’s will die. Vytas says we’re the life blood.’
‘Gus, two kids clowning around can’t hang a whole circus together.’
Gus got to his feet and looked down at her. He had to show her, he had to change her mind. Two metres away, a seagull was perched on the top of a black bollard. Gus waved it away and put his hands on top of the bollard.
‘Watch this,’ he called to Annie.
He’d only just cracked doing a press-to-handstand. It was the hardest balancing trick he’d tried so far. He glanced down at the darkening sea that swelled nearly 10 metres below and put his weight onto his hands, slowly raising his body into a straight line connecting the bollard and the evening sky.
He heard Annie gasp as he held his position, his shoulders tingling.
‘Please, get down, Gus,’ she said breathlessly.
He sprang back onto the weathered timbers of the pier and did a fierce series of handsprings in rapid succession. Fishermen turned from their rods and watched as he flashed past them.
‘Gus, stop,’ called Annie.
He turned onto his hands and walked back along the pier to where she sat and sprang back onto his feet.
‘Will you talk with Doc and Nance?’ he asked, looking down into her upturned face.
‘I can’t promise anything would come of it,’ she replied, reaching up to take one of his hands.
He looked over the side of the pier, searching for the mysterious flying shape of the manta ray, but it had disappeared, winging its way out to sea.
‘You’ve told me the truth about the other Gus, about my Dad, haven’t you?’
‘You know everything,’ said Annie.
Gus was very still. All the yearning inside of him hadn’t gone away.
‘It still doesn’t seem like enough,’ he said.
All around them, fishermen were packing up or setting up, casting their lines out into the sunset.
‘We’d better go,’ said Gus. ‘It’s close to show time.’
Annie looked up at him. The sadness etched onto her face made her look so much like Nance. She didn’t say anything but he knew she wanted him to back down.
‘I have to do it, Mum. Effie and I have an act to do. The show has to go on.’