Up and up.
At first it was a long, slow drag, climbing steeply through paddocks of coarse grass broken at intervals by stands of timber, stunted and non-threatening. A thumping of rabbits as they broke and swerved, racing for cover; those apart, nothing stirred.
Further up the slope the real forest began: trees crammed close and dark across the slope of the hill. When Colin reached them, he turned and looked back. Far below him now, the silver-shining roofs of the town shone in the pre-dawn light. On the other side, beyond the green dream of paddocks, he could see along a hazed horizon the faraway blink of the distant ocean. Nearer, in a paddock on this side of town, he could see, tiny as the model he had studied once in a store window in Brisbane, the two-poler tent and scattered wagons of Corelli’s Great International Circus lying deep in its sawdust sleep. Looking down from the forest edge, Colin could sense, rather than see or even consciously imagine, the people with whom he spent his life.
In his wagon, smarter than the others — a Dallinger, no less — Gus Evans dreamt of packed houses, sensational acts and lots and lots of lovely money. On the far side of the paddock, in the stuffy darkness of the much smaller wagon that was home, Bruce Mandale groaned, pursued down the corridors of his booze-sodden sleep by fleeting images of boys and bottles that would never succeed in taking away his fear that one day, one day … The shadow of the trapeze, the doomed and falling figure that was himself, mocked him as they did every night. Jammed into the folding cot, Marge breathed her outrage at a world, and a husband, always beyond her ability to control.
Colin knew these things, not consciously but by instinct. They would continue to affect his life but, for the moment, up here on the mountain, they had lost their hold over him. He turned and plunged into the trees.
He couldn’t remember the last time he had been by himself; never, perhaps. It was a scary feeling. Now he had only the silence and the watchful trees for company. It was strange: everything should have seemed unfamiliar to him, yet was not. Deep within his head a thought chimed uneasily, repetitively: This was not the first time he had walked alone through the avenues of the silent trees. He had been here before. He knew that was out of the question, the circus had never been this far north before, yet the image remained. He placed his hand tentatively on the cool bark of one of the trees, seeking he knew not what, but nothing came back to him from the quiescent wood. He went on.
As he climbed, the slope grew steadily steeper but he was fit and strong and it did not trouble him. He was determined, too; he could not have said why he was so intent upon climbing to the top of the mountain, knew only that he was.
All about him the gum trees were hunched and secretive. He caught the occasional glimpse of a wallaby, loping soft-footed; from time to time a bird squawked; these apart, silence and solitude enfolded him peacefully.
He came to a succession of low cliffs, perhaps fifty feet in height. The rock face was crumbling, rotted by time and moisture; no way would he climb up there. Instead he scouted sideways across the slope until he discovered a defile leading upwards. He followed it, springing easily across unsteady piles of broken stone: there were advantages in a circus background, after all. Eventually he came out above the cliffs.
Now the nature of the forest had changed. There was dampness, a sense of perennial moisture that chilled the motionless air, leaving a gleaming patina upon rock and leaf. Between the interlaced tree branches the sky still shone in chinks of blue light but with a milkiness about it, now, that spoke of mist. The trees themselves, the undergrowth beneath the trees, had also changed. Everywhere there were ferns and moss; secret pools, spiked with stiff grasses, glossy brown and green, flourished in dampness. The lichen-rimed trees were unlike any he had seen before. Interspersed between them, the thin and wiry stems of plants broke open in a crown of feather-like fronds. Beneath them the earth was littered with the detritus of centuries. The forest was utterly still, even the air without movement, as though it had been lying here forever and he was the first human ever to have swum into its silent and invisible depths.
It was hard going now. There were no paths in this wilderness and everywhere lay the rotting hulks of fallen trees, of branches and twigs and piled leaves. A huge red toadstool provided an exclamation of brilliant colour in a green and muted world. He thought there might be snakes and trod more cautiously for the thought, but saw nothing.
Up again, sensing for the first time the bulk of the mountain looming high above him. He followed what might have been an animal track; came out upon the very edge of a cliff that plunged vertically into the trees far beneath. For a moment he paused to look down at the vista that lay below him. He had moved around the flank of the mountain and could no longer see the town or circus, the distant blue glint of ocean; it was as though these things no longer existed and he was alone in another world, another time. As far as he could see, the folds of the valleys were carpeted in a dense profusion of trees. They choked the depths, marched up the steadily steepening slopes and crowned the summits of the lesser hills before merging at last with the main mass of the mountain itself. Above the trees, the sky was white. Craning his neck, Colin could just discern around the shoulder of the ground ahead of him the place where the flat-topped summit must lie. He sensed it but could not see it, the upper slopes hidden behind a band of grey cloud, motionless save for the occasional spiral of mist, stirred by the breeze, that lifted and swirled and subsided once more.
He was determined to climb to that far, secret place. He would stand upon the summit of the mountain. The mist would be all about him and, for the first time in his life — standing above the swimming depths the realisation came to him — he would be truly free. His subconscious sensed that the cloud-girt summit would offer a haven profoundly different from the prosaic security of the circus, wagon and foster parents without whom, despite the blows and rows — how many times had it been chucked in his teeth? — he would never have survived at all. For the first time he understood what his unconsciousness had been telling him all along: there were degrees of freedom and the world up here amid the cloud represented something that would remain in his mind forever; the land of what might be.
He turned away from the high cliff and went back into the green depths of the trees. Once again he negotiated the steep slope that pointed the way upwards. Into the cloud.
A gush of streams ripped the silence as they plunged between dark rocks; animals moved away uneasily from the unexpected presence of the boy; clinging tendrils of mist thickened, bandaging the light and the watchful, silent trees.
Colin knew that he would have to watch his step. The slope narrowed as it headed towards the summit; more and more frequently he found himself balancing above emptiness, the rock face dropping vertically beneath his feet. One false step would be his last, but a circus boy used to heights had no fear of such places. Upwards he clambered, the trees thinning as earth and humus gave way more and more to stone. The mist grew dense, the world turned to shadows; it was hard to see where he was going, or should go. Still he went on, thinking not of danger, the long way back down to the valley or the reception that would be waiting when he got there, but of what he had come here to do: to reach the summit of the mountain, to stand upon it amid a secret isolation of rock and mist and stillness.
Through the curtain of mist he could see virtually nothing yet he knew, even before his feet and legs recognised the easing of the gradient, that he was there. There might have been vistas of the surrounding land but were not. There might have been wondrous plants, clambering in profusion like the fanged forests of fairy tales; there were not. There was mist, dampness and silence, and they were enough.
Colin stood, letting the mist and dampness and silence seep into him. He knew that this place to which he had come, so purposefully yet without understanding why, would remain with him always: a magic world, sacred and apart, to which he would one day return, in body or at least in spirit, which would give him then a renewed sense of the comfort and homecoming that enfolded him now.
He stood unmoving for a long time before turning to begin the return journey back into the valley. He had thought he would experience a sense of loss at leaving the secret place behind him, but it did not happen. The sense of magic and belonging accompanied him as he made his way down the scree slopes and into the trees, across the gushing tumult of streams. He skirted precipices where the air fell silently into the haven of the distant valley. The mist shredded and vanished.
He was thirsty and hungry. The bread and sausage nicked from the kitchen had been eaten long ago but his thirst he quenched easily enough, crouching down with his face in a stream. The water was cold and metallic-tasting but cut his thirst like a blade. He went on.
Between the trees he saw another glimpse of the lowlands stretched out beneath him. Down there the sun was shining but he saw how the ground was patterned with patches of elongated shadow and for the first time he realised that he had spent all day up here in the Cloud Forest. There was no way he would be able to get off the mountain before dark.
Bloody hell.
At least it was a Sunday, which meant there would be no performance tonight. Thank God for that: Mr Gus would have beaten him to death otherwise, and Bruce would have chewed up what was left. Even so, he knew there’d be plenty of trouble waiting for him. Momentarily he considered not going back at all but, if he ran away, where would he go? The circus was all he knew; they might leather him, but it was the only place he could be sure of getting a feed and a place to sleep.
No, he’d have to go back, but not tonight. If he was in for a thrashing, he might as well make the most of it. Besides, there was no real choice. He remembered the cliffs he had been so careful to avoid on his way up the mountain; no way would he find his way down them in the dark. Hungry or not, he would have to find somewhere up here where he could sit tight until morning.
It shouldn’t be too hard; if it came to the worst, he could simply sit down with his back against a tree, but it would be freezing later, and he’d be a lot more comfortable if he could find some sort of shelter. He’d seen no sign of a cave or anything like that on the way up here. It was worth a look certainly, but where to start he had no idea.
He worked his way precariously downwards until he reached the top of the cliffs he had avoided on the way up. He skirted a succession of faces, one after another. All were more or less the same height as though, long ago, the upper part of the mountain had been raised, like bread in an oven.
At length Colin left them behind, the slopes below him steep but no longer vertical. In their place he discovered a gorge, half concealed amid a dense tangle of scrub, that bit into the heart of the mountain. He wormed his way through the clutching fingers of bushes and peered into the amber depths but, with twilight, the shadows were rising like smoke; the gorge turned through ninety degrees and disappeared, and he could see no sign of shelter nor any way of reaching it if there had been.
Again he went on. Darkness was falling quickly now. Whether he found shelter or not, he knew he would soon have to put down roots for the night. He rounded a corner of the slope and stopped. Before him rose another rock face. In its centre, as though his thoughts had conjured it, he saw in the almost horizontal rays of the setting sun what at any other time of the day would have been invisible: a round opening, black against the lesser darkness of the surrounding rock.
Moving as quickly as he could, he scrambled across the slope towards it. At the entrance he paused. The hole looked too regular to be a natural cave. He inspected the entrance and thought he could make out the scars of chisels but, with darkness almost upon him, could not be sure.
He hesitated, thinking of snakes, then told himself not to be stupid. He’d been looking for a cave to shelter in; now he’d found one. Sure, there might be snakes — they were everywhere, in the tropics — but that didn’t mean they would be waiting for him just inside the entrance.
He took a deep breath and stepped through the opening. Inside the cave it was very dark. He stopped and looked about him, nerves pricking. There was a scent of dust and of something he could not identify: a feral smell, as though a wild animal had lived there once.
Or lived there still.
Heart beating fast, he looked about him, eyes probing the darkness, but nothing stirred. He picked his way over fallen stone until he was a few yards inside the entrance. The darkness pressed upon him but still nothing moved. He told himself it was safe enough. Probably. Cautiously, eyes still watchful, he first sat down, then lay down. He was hungry enough to have eaten the stones, had it been possible. Too bad; he’d just have to wait for morning and hope he didn’t die of starvation in the meantime.
Hunger didn’t kill him but something quite different came close; or that was how it felt at the time.
Within the forest it was almost dark. Beyond the screen of leaves, the blue sky had turned first to white and now to a tranquil apricot. There was no breeze, no sound, no movement at all. Suddenly all that changed.
There came a frenzied explosion as the roof of the cave erupted into violent life. Colin leapt to his feet, every limb trembling, while a colony of awakened bats swept out on membraned wings for their nightly forage. He saw a witches’ flock of shadows — fox-shaped heads, outspread wings in sharp and jagged profile against the darkening sky — then it was gone.
‘Bloody hell,’ he said over and over, as though repetition might build a wall between him and terror. ‘Bloody hell’
Yet, despite the bats, despite the terror of things real awakening further terror of things unknown, the night passed and Colin slept. At some stage during the night the mist descended to shroud the mountain’s lower slopes, smearing the details of tree and rock and fern with its wet thumbs. It boiled at the opening to what Colin had concluded was probably the entrance tunnel of an old and abandoned mine. Its breath would have woken an older man but Colin was ten and used to hard living — in hot weather in particular he had often escaped from the stifling wagon to sleep on the ground — and he did not move until roused by the first faint stirrings of light along the eastern horizon.
He opened his eyes. The mist billowed in the mouth of the tunnel. Although it had not ventured far inside, the temperature had plummeted in the night and Colin was shaking with cold.
‘Crying out loud,’ he told the stone gallery above his head. ‘Let’s hope this muck don’ hang around too long.’
And went out into it; to have a pee first off, and then to inspect what he could see of the day.
‘Freeze the balls off a brass monkey,’ he informed the mist. It was an expression he used whenever he could, especially since Marge had told him not to. There was no Marge to hear him, no anyone, but that no longer worried him. His night-time fears had vanished; even bats with foxes’ heads no longer terrified now that daylight was seeping back, however reluctantly, into the world.
He was bloody hungry, though. He told the mist so, which didn’t help. He could just about see his hand in front of his face, could make out the ghost-like pillars of the nearest trees, but for the rest … He’d just have to wait it out.
He hunkered down at the mouth of the mine, if that was what it was, his mind warming itself on images of hot eggs, a bit of fatty bacon on the side.
The bats returned, scything out of the mist in a chorus of hisses, squeaks and growls. They flapped and clattered inside the entrance until at last they settled. Cocooned in their folded wings, they hung from the roof of the tunnel like bunches of malodorous fruit. Silence returned.
It seemed a long time before anything else happened. Colin grew colder and hungrier by the minute. At last the curtain of mist began to swirl as though stirred by some gigantic and invisible spoon. The murky light brightened, turning from grey to silver, then to gold. Diamond sparks of sunlight appeared. The mist shredded and, all at once, was gone. Down the steep flank of the mountain the trees marched, dark and moist and still. Beyond them Colin could see the valley, warm and golden, bathed in sunlight.
Now he would be able to go back. A great prospect that was; he thought Bruce would half kill him. If he was lucky.
No way he could avoid it; all the same, hungry or not, he felt in no hurry to face it. First off, he’d have a poke around this mine — or whatever it was — he’d discovered.
He’d been lucky to spot it at all. The entrance was hidden beneath an overhang, with trees and bushes all around it. If he hadn’t caught it at just the right moment, with the setting sun shining on the entrance, he would never have seen it. He doubted many people knew it was here. That made it extra exciting: it was just the place a bloke could hope to find buried treasure. He imagined himself going triumphantly down the hill, pockets ringing with gold doubloons. There’d be no leathering then: Bruce would be over him like a rash. Or maybe he wouldn’t even tell him. Yeah, that would be more like it. Go right away, buy himself a big place somewhere, live like a nob, looking at the sea. Or buy his own circus, beat up the little kids whenever he felt like it, get his own back.
All he had to do was find the gold.
He went back inside the tunnel. Now it was light he could have a good squiz at the entrance. There were chisel marks everywhere, just as he’d thought. A man-made opening, sure enough. Which had to mean a mine.
He didn’t think the bats would have chosen it as a roosting place if there’d been too many snakes about; he took care where he was walking, all the same, but saw nothing. Unfortunately, nothing was right: the tunnel went straight back into the mountain. It was stark and bare, without the slightest hint of treasure or, indeed, of anything else. Nothing but solid rock; the last place anyone would choose to bury treasure. This was a place to take gold out, not put it in.
He told himself there was no harm looking, just to be sure.
He groped along the tunnel. It was pitch dark; Colin had to inch his way with outstretched hands. Finally he came to a blank wall: tunnel’s end, by the feel of it. He checked it out as thoroughly as he could in the dark, but if there were any hidden passages he couldn’t find them. Whatever the miners had been looking for, it seemed likely they’d never found it.
Disgusted, Colin turned round and had begun to work his way back again. He’d got halfway when he came on something he’d missed on the way in: another tunnel, heading off at right angles to the one he was in. He peered, undecided. He couldn’t see a thing. There was no saying where it might go. Get lost under the mountain, he might never find his way out again. A boy could die in there. No one would ever find him. On the other hand, if there was anything to find, that was where it would be. He’d have to be a brick short of a load to get so close and then miss out because he’d lost his nerve.
Give it a go.
Heart beating fit to burst, he edged his way slowly into the new tunnel. It was a lot smaller than the other one: he stretched out his hands and he found he could touch the walls on either side. He couldn’t see a thing. The tunnel jinked once, then again. Get lost in here …
Stop it!
In his imagination he could hear the sound of his breathing, his beating heart, echoing off the walls and the roof which came so low that in places it brushed against his head. He could feel panic, gnawing.
I must get outa here, he thought. And took a step. Go back. Another step. And paused. Ahead of him: blackness. And yet …
Was he imagining it, or was there the faintest hint of light somewhere ahead of him? Another step, and another. He came to a corner and edged around it, fingers brushing the tunnel wall. Relief surged. Definitely there was light ahead of him: very faint still, but undeniable. Cautiously he continued. Slowly the light grew stronger.
Another corner. The light, much brighter now, drew him on. The chisel marks in the tunnel’s roof and walls showed as shadows. Colin began to hurry. Stumbling in eagerness, he rounded a final corner and the opening was in front of him. Eyes screwed up against the light, he walked purposefully forward to claim whatever it was that he had found.
At first he could see nothing but a scintillating brilliance that splintered against his retinas. Then, eyes growing used to the light, he saw the sun striking honey glints from the rock wall of the mountain that rose high overhead. In front of him, a narrow ledge traversed a cliff above a vertiginous fall of air that, far beneath, plunged into the distant trees.
He knew at once where he was; the tunnel had led him through the earth and to the edge of the deep cleft he had discovered yesterday. He craned his head. Sure enough, he could see, far above his head, the bush-framed window in the rock through which he had peered the previous evening. Then shadow had blurred detail; now the honey light swarmed like bees in the depths and reflected in warm strokes from the silent and amber-coloured walls.
Ahead of him, the teetering ledge sketched a meandering path across the cliff before disappearing where the cleft itself turned backwards towards the mountain. The ledge was narrow — in places no more than a few inches wide — but Colin didn’t care about that. Careless of the drop, he hurried forward, eager to see where the ledge went. He reached the corner. The ledge continued, and he followed it. Soon it widened into a gallery several yards wide. Overhead, the overhanging rock formed a roof. Along the gallery, a succession of massive stones, each smooth-topped and six feet or more in length, were arranged like seats. In sheltered pockets in the gallery floor lay centuries, a thousand years, of dust, inches deep. Where moisture had at some time seeped down the wall, lichen showed in black streaks against the amber-coloured rock. Here and there, shallow-rooted, slender trees, as thin as whips, craned apologetic heads towards a sky that would be forever beyond their reach. Painted across the length of the wall …
Figures, one beside the other, overlapping in a confused multiplicity of shapes. A creature that might have been a kangaroo, coloured white. Behind it, a naked woman, pendulous breasts projecting from her armpits. Other images: of men and women and beasts, of creatures with tiny heads, their painted eyes menacing the sunlight, figures grey and brown and white. They faded one behind the other like a multilayered dream, as though it might be possible to step with them through the surface of the rock into another time, another world. Images behind images, so closely massed that in places it was impossible to distinguish one from another.
Open mouthed, Colin stared at what he had discovered. On the sun-warmed ledge, amid the rock seats and spindle trees, above the distant drift of trees swooning in a golden haze of sunlight, he had forgotten where he was and why he had come. He did not know what he was looking at, only that it was immeasurably old, immeasurably strange, a succession of voices calling out of a past of which neither he nor the world knew anything. The kaleidoscopic images drew him deep into themselves, into the rock and through the rock. It was as though he were somehow within the reality of the paintings and of the world of wonder and magic they depicted. From that safe and wondrous place he looked back at himself, the Colin Mandale who stood on the sun-warmed ledge, his feet trampling the aeon-old dust, his uncomprehending eyes peering in wonderment at the wall. In that moment all became one: the boy watching, the boy within the wall, the complexity of paintings that tied all — past, present and future — into one being and yet into nothing at all, all obliterated by a knowledge undefined yet absolute, extending even to the distant stars.
Colin was unable to put his feelings into words or even thoughts, yet he knew that somewhere deep within him a fundamental part of his being was responding to what he could see. It was another dimension of the Cloud Forest he had seen yesterday: the echo of worship and imagination rounding out and making whole his experience on the mist-blind mountaintop. Each complemented the other so that mountain and undergrowth and mist became one with this: the ultimate perfection of wonder, residing silently.
He waited, fidgeting on the ledge, not wanting to leave, knowing he must. He must return to the world he knew, but this gift would be a light shining within him forever: the realm of ultimate desire. The wonder, the glory and the dream would be with him always.
In the warm light of the North Queensland sun, Colin Mandale went back down the mountain into what had been his old life. He went in the expectation of a leathering, probably a very severe one; his action in running away, if that was what he had been doing, had after all been a gesture of defiance, a finger raised in the face of both his foster parents. To Marge it would have seemed nothing short of betrayal by the child she persisted in the face of biological truth in calling her son, whom she blackmailed by asking constantly whether he still loved her, inviting the honest response she dreaded. To Bruce, Colin’s disappearance would have been a challenge, to which only one response was possible.
So Colin went back expecting trouble and got it, but not in the way he had anticipated.
It was too much to hope that his adventure would be ignored altogether. Predictably, Marge screeched furiously, demanding that he tell her what he’d been up to, high on the mountain by himself. He couldn’t do it; not in order to shut her out of his life, as she claimed, but because he didn’t know. She wept, accusing him of keeping things from her. In part she was right: he told neither her nor anyone about the gallery he had discovered, the flame-eyed figures burning in his memory.
As far as Bruce was concerned, Colin got off a lot more lightly than he’d expected. Amazingly, there were no bashings; not because Bruce had suffered a change of heart but because old Gus Evans, who knew everything that went on in his circus, had told him that if he carried on the way he was going he’d be out on his ear. Had warned him specifically against bashing a child who, in Gus’s opinion, had the makings of a star of the circus ring, but only if his joints and limbs and confidence had not been rearranged for him in the meantime.
No, the trouble — if that was what it was — took an altogether different form, one that neither Colin nor anybody else might have anticipated. The boy who came down from the mountain was a different creature from the one who had gone up. What had caused the change — the Cloud Forest’s green sanctuary of fern and water and mist or the emotional impact of the ochre paintings that had drawn him not only into themselves but into another time and world — he never knew. Nor did it matter. What was important was the fact that the experiences, disparate or combined, had changed him utterly, making him question what he had previously taken for granted. The circus and his place within it were no longer the inevitabilities they had been before. He’d come back in his body because he’d been too young to do anything else, but in his head, at least in part, he had never come back at all. The Cloud Forest and the stone gallery of paintings remained as mute reminders that another world existed, in all its mystery and fascination. When the time came, if it ever did, he would go to it.
In the meanwhile, he went on with the daily rags and bobs of his life. He fetched water, helped with the tents, practised his routines, leapt and cavorted in a ring bright with the carbide roar of lights, kept out of Bruce’s way when he was tanked — some things would never change. Yet, in everything he did, he saw himself as no more than the two-dimensional shadow, drained of substance, of the being he had been before. The white and ochre figures of the stone gallery had seemed like ghosts yet now were of greater substance than himself, while the Cloud Forest peopled his memories with the texture of its moist and frond-populated silence.
Despite his experiences on the mountain, for years nothing in Colin’s life changed at all. The circus followed its path, meandering yet purposeful, through Australia’s outback. They stopped for a night here, two nights there, travelling round and round like a mule with bound eyes driving a whim. During the winter lay-ups, Colin went with the other kids to whatever school was handy; education was never destined to be a big deal in his life, but at least he learnt to read and write, even if he seldom did either.
One event might have made a difference. Bruce had the fall that had always haunted his nightmares, plunging from the trapeze bar one spring night into the front rows of the spectators to lie sprawled and broken across the benches from which a fat farmer and his family had miraculously extricated themselves just in time.
He was not dead, would have been a lot less trouble to the world if he had been. Day and night he lay on his back in the wagon, in the cot that had now become his, with his eyes fixed on nothing and his voice reduced to a series of harsh caws, like one of the flock of crows that followed the circus on its journeying. Marge cared for him, sat with him and cleaned him, but no one knew if he was aware of it, or of her.
She was careful of him, always, but angry, too, because what had happened she believed he had brought upon himself. And on her; in futile outrage she repeated, again and again, how Bruce’s punishment, which he so richly deserved, in practice lay far more heavily on her. She knew only too well the prison to which his endless boozing had brought them, whereas it seemed unlikely that he did.
Yet the accident and its aftermath, which might have been expected to have had a huge impact on Colin’s life, in truth made little difference to him at all. Only time, inevitably, brought change. He grew too big to be a topmarker so took Bruce’s place in the act, which kept Gus Evans happy, and they found another boy, Jinks Callaghan, to do the aerial somersaults the audiences loved so much.
Colin was twelve, fifteen, twenty. Now he, too, was one of those who slipped his hand into the blouses of the local girls when he had the chance. Once or twice did more than that, fortunately without consequences, or none that he knew of. Marge must have guessed what he was up to, but for once in her life kept her mouth shut. Since Bruce’s accident she had wailed less, perhaps because she had more to wail about. In particular, she no longer tried to shame Colin into loving her, with the result that it became easier for him to do so. Time had its impact on Marge, too. She was still able to carry her role in the act, but they both knew the day was coming when it would no longer be possible. Where did old circus performers go? She was frightened she was going to find out, although Colin had told her time and again that she wasn’t to worry, that he would take care of her.
‘And when you get married?’
He laughed. ‘Fat chance.’
Though that, too, seemed to come to even the gayest of bachelors in time. Jinks Callaghan grew up in his turn and was replaced as topmarker by Flora Evans, one of Gus’s granddaughters. She was a pretty little thing; if she hadn’t been related to the old man, Colin would have tried putting an arm on her long before he did. All the same, he’d have had to be barmy not to see the advantages of tying the knot with a member of the family that owned the circus, and he was taking the first cautious steps in that direction when three things happened, one after the other, to shatter the fabric of Colin’s life.
One morning they woke to find Bruce dead. Sometime between light and light he had stopped breathing, without either Marge or Colin being aware of it. It seemed wrong that there should be so little ceremony in the second most important step a man could take, yet that was the way of it.
They were working Willapan, a small town a hundred miles south-west of Brisbane — never again had they travelled north to Goorapilly, Gus decreeing the bridle tracks too poor, the audiences not big enough to warrant the journey — and there was a church and a priest. To whom Colin went, with Gus, and arranged the funeral that had to be carried out that day, because in the morning they would be on the road again, heading for the next place in their endless schedule.
Charley Jakes, the carpenter, made a coffin out of a few planks. Considering he was burying someone he had never laid eyes on, the priest did a good job. He visited Marge in the wagon that was now hers; he talked to her quietly; afterwards she said he had comforted her.
He would have talked to Colin, too, had he wished or even if he hadn’t, but Colin, in his own way, was finding it hard to come to terms with what had happened and gave him a wide berth.
From the first his relationship with Bruce Mandale had been a rough one, with a lot more kicks than ha’pence. Even after the accident Bruce had been a trial, less man than cabbage. They’d grown used to it, like you could get used to a bellyache, in time, but the priest had been right: his death had been a merciful release, and not only for Bruce.
Colin had thought he couldn’t wait to see him six feet under, be free of him at last. Yet he soon discovered that burying the man and being free of him were two different things. Indeed, Bruce dead seemed more alive than he’d been for years because Marge, rid of him at last, started to gab on and on, endlessly, about a Bruce Mandale whom Colin had never known: how caring he’d been, how gentle and loving and kind and strong and brave and …
Nothing he could identify with, there.
Bruce had already been two people: the drunken bully, the helpless cripple. Now a third man joined them: Bruce the hero, existing only in Marge’s imagination, who came to occupy so much space that Colin felt he could not breathe for the air stolen by this unlikely ghost that had taken over their lives.
Perhaps Marge felt it, too, or perhaps, despite her endless eulogy of praise for the man who had never existed outside her imagination, she was after all eager to seize the freedom that had been so long denied her. Within three months of Bruce’s death Marge, still praising her dead husband to the skies, was wooed and won by the owner of a vaudeville act that crossed their path during a week-long stopover in St George, halfway between hell and nowhere at all.
Dalby Keith must have been the fastest worker on record, Colin thought. With bemused eyes he watched as, within the space of one week, his foster mother was approached, wooed and bedded while Colin himself was banished to the backblocks. Marge, with a smile starting at her lips and ending God knew where, announced to him that she was leaving the circus to go with this new love of her life. In the old days she had pestered Colin to say that he loved her; now it was as though he had ceased to exist altogether. She chucked him the wagon and what it contained, carelessly, but only because she had no more use for it. She was spaced out, quivering when Dalby so much as looked at her; it made Colin nervous, as though love or at least infatuation were some kind of sickness that might infect him, too; but Marge, it was clear, had always needed to be someone’s slave.
So that was the second thing. And then, finally, came the third and final event. It had nothing to do with the circus or anyone in it but in its impact was immeasurably greater, on Colin and the world, than Bruce’s death or Marge’s elopement. On the other side of the world, in the European summer of 1914, a terrorist blew an Austro-Hungarian archduke into eternity and the world descended into the maelstrom of war.