‘I have balloons,’ says Oscar, ‘all blue.’We’re on our way to the first circus class. Aunt Squeezy is driving.
‘What for?’ says Caramella.
‘A warm-up game.’ Oscar grins and taps his knee wildly, but he doesn’t explain further, not till we get there.
We arrive half an hour before the class is due to start, so we can set up the mats. Inisiya meets us there. Oscar holds out his unsteady hand to her and says, ‘Hello. I know you’ve had a hazardous journey.’
She looks perplexed, but shakes his hand and says, ‘Yes.’
Caramella is shy, as usual, and just manages a small ‘hello’, but as we all start unrolling mats we also unroll our awkwardness a little and I put on my Stevie Wonder CD, which always helps. And then I start talking.
‘So,’ I say, ‘do you think anyone will show up?’
‘Probably not Mohammed, but all the rest,’ says Inisiya.
‘Why not Mohammed? Is he a mountain?’ says Oscar.
Caramella laughs and looks at Inisiya. ‘Don’t worry, he’s always saying stuff like that, you’ll get used to him.’
‘Mohammed will not come because he is too serious. He is the only one in his family who speaks English, because he is the youngest. So he looks after them all. He has so much responsibility. He will only work. The family are afraid still.’
‘Oh, he’s grown up too early?’ says Oscar.
I feel sad for Mohammed, though I don’t even know him. He must be the serious boy I saw here when I first came. It makes me suspect that if you don’t learn to play when you’re young, maybe you never learn. Maybe you become dead-set about your beliefs.
Luckily, Oscar has started to dance. He always beams when he dances, and it’s a very contagious beam. The way he dances is more like a thrash than a boogie, and I notice Inisiya grinning as she watches him. He begins to scatter the blue balloons on the floor as if he’s sowing seeds. Then he suggests we blow them up. This is his game.
As people enter, we tie a balloon around their ankle. The idea is that we must all try to stamp and explode each other’s balloon while trying not to get ours stamped on.
‘But why are they all blue?’ asks Caramella, holding one up to the light.
‘Because blue is the sky’s reward; it has the largest promise,’ says Oscar as he performs a rather heavy pirouette, which makes him look like a Hills Hoist.
Whether it’s the promise contained in blue, or not, it works. They all come in together, about fifteen of them. Inisiya introduces us. The family of Hmong girls clump together; the older one, Mei, holding the hands of the younger ones. They all have round, soft faces and seem as timid as Caramella, only they’re so small and gentle I’m afraid they might snap like a twig if you pull at their arms. There are some African boys (Inisiya says they’re from Somalia and Sudan); also Inisiya’s little sister, Parisa, and Rashmi from Pakistan, wearing glorious pink sneakers; and Jarrah and Hussein and Mali and Layla and others whose names I can’t remember after the first round of introductions.
As soon as the class is set to begin, I feel like an impostor. I feel as if I’m a beginner acrobat pretending to be a teacher, which I guess is kind of true so it’s no wonder I’m panicking. At least I still have The Tumblers’ Manual that Ruben gave me. That’s my one piece of legitimacy. What if they ask me to do a round-off into a back somersault? And then what will they think when they see Oscar and Caramella – the two most unlikely looking acrobats ever to say, ‘I’m in a circus’. Will they think they’ve been had?
Of course it’s the other way round. The worse we are at it, the better they seem to feel. As soon as I try to demonstrate a very simple balance with Oscar, like this:
Oscar wobbles and makes such funny sounds that they all laugh, and Rashmi jumps up and down and claps. And when we try some rolling, the same thing happens. The first roll we demonstrate is called a sausage roll, at least I call it that, and it isn’t easy but it’s kind of stupid so you laugh when you don’t make it. Caramella can sometimes do it, but only in one direction. Oscar, however, just seems to fall on his side in a lump and then, to add to the lump effect, he cycles his legs in the air so he looks like a tortoise who can’t get up. This again sends them into outbursts of laughter and they all leap up to try. Hussein gets it almost straight away and astonishes himself.
So the hotchpotch accidental crew of Oscar, Caramella and me provides just the right mix of attitudes, abilities and inabilities. Oscar provides the light relief and keeps everything always potentially silly, Caramella shows how to be gentle but persistent, and I provide the excitement, just because I’m the eager-beaver jump-in-and-give-it-a-go type. So, though not one of us can do a back flip, or precisely because not one of us can do a back flip, we seem to pull it off. The younger ones love Oscar, and seeing him as a leader makes me realise that he’s really a naturally good clown. The shyer girls, like Mali and Mei and her sisters, are drawn to Caramella’s gentle way, and then the more adventurous of them, like Sali, Hussein, Inisiya and Nidal, have me to drive them.
After they’ve all left, Inisiya comes up and sits with us. She’s warm and beaming.
‘Hey, it is a great success, do you think?’
Oscar blows out a big breath and says, ‘Magic, I say. It was magic.’
Caramella nods.‘We all deserve an ice-cream.’
So the four of us walk up to Charmaines and treat ourselves to ice-creams, and it seems that The Acrobrats are really back on the road. It’s a different road but it’s still going, and that’s the main thing.