Inside, first there is a hallway lined with posters and photos, and then it opens up into a place with bright coloured benches. On one side there’s an office and a kitchen, and on the other a yellow change room and toilets, but best of all is what’s in front. To me it looks like a long, long, wide hall of heaven. Shiny wood floors covered in acromats, crash mats, trampets, vaults, unicycles, hoops. At the end there’s a circus curtain, and coloured rectangles of brick on the walls, like the outside. Hanging in the air are cloud swings, trapezes, webs, hoops and other things I don’t know the names of. And what’s most exciting of all is the action: kids everywhere, climbing up ropes, swinging in the air, somersaulting off the mini-tramps, tossing batons and burning round on unicycles.
As we walk in, two small girls in purple T-shirts, silver sparkly top hats and moustaches and glasses rush up to Ruben, grinning.
‘Hi Ruben.’
‘Nice moustaches,’ he says, and they giggle and rush back off.
‘They’re all practising for the auditions,’ he says to me. ‘Those two are doing a double act on the trapeze.’
‘Flying trapeze?’ I say.
‘No, just hanging. Too young for flying. They’re only nine or ten.’
He sits me on a bench so I can watch, and introduces me to a young man who walks by wearing a blue singlet and a pink tissue crown, and then Ruben goes into his office for a while.
As I install myself, I really feel like I’m looking at my idea of the best party in the world. I feel my legs twitching to get out there, but I hold myself on the bench and I watch.
Right near me there’s a young girl spinning on the web, which is a long rope hanging from the ceiling, and it has a small padded loop on the end that you can hang from, either by your ankle or your hand. Underneath her there’s a trainer: a young woman in a black T-shirt with long messy hair, lying on her back on the crash mat and using the end of the rope to spin the web. The trainer is yelling out instructions to the girl up on the web.
‘Hold your form, spin, don’t use your hand, where’s your hand spin? Don’t you do it? There’s room for it.’
Suddenly, some loud, heavy music comes on. There’s a small red-headed boy in black trackies, fiddling with the CD player. He then gets on his unicycle and calls out to another boy who’s older and who’s juggling clubs.
‘Hey, Adrian, you ready? Watch this!’ Adrian catches his clubs and watches as the small boy tries to do an advancing twist on the unicycle. When he falls, they both laugh and Adrian starts up with his juggling. Adrian is standing on the acromat. Behind him and above there is an Indian girl going through a series of positions on a hanging hoop. A young woman strides out of the trainers’ room and yells out towards the back of the room. She has a face like a pixie, and short, spiky brown hair.
‘Rich, can you have a look at Guy’s round-off somersaults? He’s giving me a heart attack. They’re this high!’ She indicates with her hand. ‘Get him to use his hands, for God’s sake.’
Rich, who’s the trainer with the pink tissue crown on, nods and leaves the kids on the mini-tramp to watch an older boy who is up the back on a long acromat. I try to watch him too, but then a girl about my age enters the hall from a side room. She’s wearing a full white leotard and a trailing white silky scarf, which she keeps twirling and flicking. She has straight, thick, glossy hair tied in pigtails and, horror of all horrors, she’s carrying a hoop.
My heart leaps.
Lola?
I know it’s her. She reminds me of a pony. A special, rare white pony in a field of horses. A pony who never stumbles or gets muddy. She holds the hoop above her head and then lets it slide down her body, catching it with spinning hips. Ruben taps me on the shoulder.
‘You all right here?’
‘I’m fine.’
Standing next to him is the pixie woman.
‘This is Sarah. She’s our head trainer. She’s one of the original Flying Fruit Flies.’
Sarah lets out a snort as if to say ‘big deal’, and then she grins at me.
‘Hi, Cedar. I’m going to be auditioning you tonight, so Ruben thought I should just give you a rundown of what we’ll be doing, and see if you have any questions.’
‘Okay.’ I budge over and she sits down next to me on the bench. Ruben bounces away to sit on the red vault and watch the training. Sarah tells me it will be just her and another trainer there, and that after a warm-up she’ll test my strength and flexibility and then acrobatics. I tell her I haven’t done any trapeze and she says it doesn’t matter. She asks me if I can hold a handstand. I nod.
‘You’ll be fine.’
I note that everyone is telling me how I’ll be fine. Maybe it’s a clue, I think. I don’t ask her any questions and after a while her attention drifts out to the hall, and she stands up and claps her hands at the girl on the cloud swing.
‘Hey, Alex, in between tricks you get like this.’ She makes her body all floppy. ‘You have to be nice the whole way. Think about where your toes are. Keep your legs nice.’
Form, I think, that’s what form is. When I can, I quickly turn my attention back to Lola, but she’s disappeared, as all mysterious and alluring white ponies do. Instead, there’s a girl on stilts with long shiny blue pants, twirling her arms to Kate Bush singing ‘Babushka’. Her arms, I’m thinking, as if I’ve suddenly become a trainer myself, aren’t always ‘nice’. Sarah suddenly plonks herself down beside me again. She looks at her watch.
‘This session will end at twelve, and the next group don’t arrive till after lunch, so, if you want to, you can go eat your lunch now and use the acromat during the break. Mish and Frankie might be in here with me for some trapeze, so I can supervise.’
She taps my leg and smiles. ‘Not that you need supervision, it’s just the rules here. No one’s allowed to train without a trainer on the floor.’
She hops up again and says, ‘Excuse me, that’s Mr Lee’s sister; she’s a new trainer here.’ She points to an old Chinese woman who has just entered.
I’m not quite ready to leave yet. For one thing, I want to wait and see if Lola appears, but also, I’m still watching and it’s making me excited. Who needs lunch, I think, when you’re sitting at the gates of heaven?