The staging for the launch of E-Radiata Serum™ at Farm Cove was a design and engineering marvel that I’d contributed to in a small way. The runway emerged from between two enormous screens, intersecting a traverse stage and extending ten metres before encircling the pool. Viewed from the top of Fleet Steps, the whole stage resembled an elongated female/Venus symbol. The Venus shell was concealed behind a black curtain studded with Swarovski crystals that formed the logo for $KiNT, the designer who was involved with the launch. Pez and I, stoked to be given the ushering gig and a chance of meeting Vienna Voronova, had arrived early and joined the briefing session.
‘Absolutely no seating changes,’ Mum said. ‘I don’t care if it’s somebody’s third cousin twice removed or Anna Wintour herself – seating allocations are not transferable. Now, here are your shirts in requested sizes,’ she said, handing them out. ‘No modifications please.’ SANCTUS MINERALIS was written on the back and $KiNT on the front. Mum confirmed everyone’s duties then introduced $KiNT, who I instantly recognised from BigTown Gym™.
‘Thank you, Charis and Morgan, for a truly stunning set.’ He blew them kisses. ‘All models are now in hair and make-up. Our story today is dreamboats and shipwrecks, and I’ve instructed the models to move languidly – as if underwater. Please carry that into whatever you’re doing because you’re all part of the show, yeah?’ He demonstrated the desired motion. ‘Float and glide, people.’
‘$KiNT is showing thirty-five looks,’ Morgan said. ‘The show will run for exactly twenty-three minutes, including finale. Vienna will be concealed inside the shell ten minutes before start, over half an hour total. There’s no chance of suffocation, but I don’t want her in there a second longer than necessary, so stick to timings.’ He pointed to his very expensive watch.
Penny took orders for coffee and then came over. ‘Hi Elvis!’ she said to Pericles. ‘I saw you at the dance but this one kept steering me away.’
‘Penny Button, meet my buddy Pericles Pappas,’ I said.
‘Could you two please help me deliver the coffees?’
Waiting at the catering tent for the baristas to load our cardboard trays, I asked Penny if she’d seen Vienna yet.
‘I picked her up from the hotel this morning.’
‘What’s the most beautiful woman in the world like in person?’
‘No idea because she wouldn’t talk. Her mother said she must rest her face before an appearance. Lucky her directions don’t call for smiling.’
‘Where is she now?’
‘Make-up trailer. But don’t you dare go sniffing around. Charis wants you in position.’
After delivering the coffees we went sniffing around the make-up trailer and got sprung by Morgan. ‘Time to get to your post,’ he said, tapping his TAG®.
We went to the top of Fleet Steps to greet and direct guests. They all looked either important or beautiful, but Pericles and I recognised nobody until two famous swimmers turned up. Interesting, considering their job description didn’t actually involve clothing. Next was an NRL player and his model girlfriend followed by some exposure-starved ex-reality-show contestants, including Kimberly Romaine. She was on the very thick, brown, tattooed arm of Dad’s personal trainer Sergio, who was wearing a black shirt unbuttoned to his navel, a tonne of gold chainage around his neck and massive sunglasses perched on his forehead. ‘Hello, Lincoln,’ he said. ‘What a little world. Why are you here?’
‘My mum’s calling the show. And you?’
‘$KiNT is my partner and this is Kimberly. She wears one of his designs.’ He twirled her around. ‘You like?’
‘It makes tomorrow look like yesterday.’ I looked at my clipboard with the seating plan. ‘You’re in the second row on the garden side.’
‘Not in front?’
‘Seating allocations are final, but I don’t think anybody could stand in your way.’
‘I joke.’ He gave me a playful chest poke and walked down.
‘How do you know him?’ Pez said.
‘He’s my dad’s trainer.’
‘He’s built – but what a tosser.’
‘Spot on.’
Ten minutes before showtime we went to our second position, backstage, which was brilliant because we could check out the models. They were all wearing kaftans and most had frizzed hair, some matted with flotsam and jetsam. The dressers were adorning them with multiple strings of fake pearls, tarnished costume jewellery and plastic crabs.
‘I was expecting this to be glamorous,’ Pericles said. ‘But it’s already exceeded my wildest expectations.’
We were only five minutes behind schedule, despite the chaos of last-minute adjustments, when one of the model’s necklaces broke and plastic pearls went pinging all over the runway and into the water. Morgan slapped his forehead.
‘Boys, I need every single one of them retrieved,’ he said. Pericles and I jumped into action and Morgan radioed Jules to bring Vienna Voronova.
A few minutes later, a golf buggy arrived. Vienna stepped off and an assistant removed her robe. It wouldn’t be stretching the truth to say that Botticelli’s Venus came to life before our eyes, even more beautiful than in the painting. Her modesty was only protected by long golden hair extensions sewn onto flesh-coloured bands of sheer fabric. Morgan held Vienna’s forearm to help her across to the shell but she shrugged him off and said, ‘Don’t touch me.’
Everything would’ve turned out differently if Vienna had accepted his assistance – but she hadn’t. And when she slipped on the single plastic pearl left on the runway, she fell face-first onto the edge of the shell, making a loud and sickening crack, then slid into the pool. Morgan jumped in fully clothed to rescue her. Penny and Jules grabbed towels. Pez and I ran for first aid and when we returned with the officer, Vienna was sitting up with her bloody hand over her bloody mouth, surrounded by bloody people holding wads of bloody paper towels.
‘Hi, my name’s Norman,’ the first-aid officer said to her. ‘Everything will be okay now. Take your hand away and let me see.’
Vienna dropped her hand and tried to smile.
Both her front teeth were missing. Exactly like in my dream.
Perfection – so fragile and transient. And even though Vienna’s teeth were both retrieved and would hopefully be reinserted, I couldn’t take pleasure from her misfortune. No schadenfreude. Losing a key part of her identity, her beautiful smile – albeit temporarily – would’ve been deeply traumatic for someone as vain as Vienna Voronova.
Tonight I was lying in bed contemplating this and other more serious matters, like the imminent demolition of Bert’s house.
‘The door of opportunity is closing soon,’ Homunculus said. ‘There’ll be no more fascinating objects to discover. No more spurious connections to make. No profound meaning to extract from any of it. You’d better crack on with the book before it’s all gone.’
Melinkoff’s Astonishing Assembly of Freaks opened at San Francisco’s Palisade Theatre to a packed house, largely due to Serpentina’s scintillating preview performance with python Octavius outside on the bally stage. Following the act, a team of shills posing as ticket-buyers had stormed the box office, prompting the masses to follow. When every inch of standing room had been sold, a bell signalled the show’s commencement and I hid behind the wings.
The instant Ruthie Davis stepped onto the stage, the limelight transformed her into Baby Cakes the Living Doll. She recited ‘Ode to a Pudding’, skipped about while shaking a giant rattle, then performed a ribbon dance. Though the act hinged on the basic visual gag of a large woman dressed as an infant, Ruthie was nobody’s fool. The wiseacres cocky enough to heckle her with vulgar suggestions were shrivelled by her withering retorts. Roy Lister the Human Globe appeared next, moving through a series of poses that showed off his finely sculpted physique, then he performed a set of vertical rope stunts that culminated in a death-defying slack drop with his nose stopping barely an inch from the floor.
Each successive act exacerbated my concern that I’d developed no special talent since leaving Sydney. Even Paulo Penguino, the penultimate performer, had been trained in circus skills over the previous weeks. When he balanced a spinning ball on the tip of his nose, the enthusiastic applause was my cue to take to the stage, but as I looked down at my ridiculous costume, comprising scraps of cowhide sewn onto a flesh-coloured bodysuit, I was paralysed with fear. Worsening matters, the smell of leaking gas induced a flashback of my ignominious unmasking by Melvin Fletcher, which deafened me to Paulo’s coaxing as I gripped onto a wall ladder. A second of inactivity on the stage is a minute of tedium for the audience, so Roy Lister peeled my fingers away and threw me to the proverbial lions. The audience began a slow clap. ‘Hop!’ Roy called, so I hopped. I hopped and hopped in a mad circle around the stage, matching the tempo of the crowd until it broke into a crescendo of cheering and stamping.
When the applause died away, Melinkoff delivered the lecture and I played along, miming the actions of a feral child raised by kangaroos. It was highly improbable that anybody in the audience had ever seen one of the creatures, and they seemed convinced as I licked the back of my hand and groomed myself, gnawing at imaginary ticks. Melinkoff added unrehearsed and ludicrous details to his spiel, which I feared would only lead to a very disappointing reveal as my tail, though unique, was a tiny thing compared to the apparatus of a kangaroo. So I turned my back expecting laughter and derision – but there was silence, and when I unbuttoned the flap and let it drop, the tail drew a collective gasp. With great concentration I made it move, and the crowd roared their approval. And for the briefest moment, I believed that, like the rest of the performers, I too had undergone a metamorphosis of sorts. No longer Edwin Stroud the sawdust collector from Pyrmont, but Harold Hopkins, Kangaroo Boy.
I rolled onto my stomach and, with great concentration and trepidation, tried to make my tail move. I fooled myself into thinking something was going on back there until I realised that I was only squeezing my butt cheeks or tightening my ring. After a moment of relief at having no volition over the tail’s movement – that it only responded to emotional or external stimuli – I almost felt disappointed.
The Astonishing Assembly of Freaks had a rolling stock of six rail cars – paltry compared to P. T. Barnum’s sixty, but as the engine hauled our garishly painted carriages out of San Francisco, I felt part of something inconceivably grand. The journey to Sacramento was shorter than the ensuing walking tour that Paulo Esposito gave me of his hometown. A decade earlier, sections of footpath and many of the city’s fine brick buildings with arched and shuttered windows had been jacked up nine-and-a-quarter feet from their original placement to protect against future flooding. We visited Paulo’s humble family home, where he introduced me to his mother and eight brothers. His father had been killed two years earlier in a wheat-silo accident. When I shared the story of my own father’s demise he made a formal declaration that we would be friends for life.
We played three shows every day for a fortnight in Sacramento then rolled on to Denver, Colorado. The glory days of silver and gold were long gone and Denver had moved on to growing carnations. The ubiquitous pink bloom remains one of my fondest memories of the place, second only to the view of the majestic Rocky Mountains to the west. In Denver I found myself enjoying the thrill of performing, and surrendered to the role. I trained myself to squeeze out tears when Melinkoff reached the point in the story of my parents drowning in the shipwreck. Envisaging myself as the helpless infant, I felt the comfort of my adoptive mother’s pouch and the warm droplets of blood on my forehead each time she was speared by the native hunters. Motivated by the need for money, I’d calculated that the greater my engagement with the audience, the more photos and biography booklets I was able to sell after the show. And to my shame, I smothered any scruples I once held about the misrepresentation of my Aboriginal countrymen.
Omaha, Nebraska, in America’s heartland boasted some lovely boulevards yet seemed plagued by packs of wild dogs and quack physicians offering miracle cures. A representative from one shonky institute approached Paulo, offering to cure his deformed limbs using a program of cold baths and electromagnetism. Paulo’s unique form was his meal ticket, so he politely refused. On our third night in the city, great misfortune struck when Farbridge’s leopards escaped their unlocked cages. Samson mauled a stray hog and was shot dead by its owner, who was later quoted in the Omaha Herald saying, ‘He got off light compared to Joseph Coe.’ Joseph Coe had been a Negro man executed by a bloodthirsty mob and hanged from a trolley car wire only a few years earlier in Omaha. One could only speculate as to whether the farmer had been among them.
The troupe was restored to its original complement in Milwaukee with the addition of Hilda Groot, a young barmaid at Schlitz Park, the most popular beer garden in the city and our venue for a week. It boasted a three-level pagoda with views to Lake Michigan and a bowling alley – the first I’d ever seen. The mighty Schlitz Brewery itself occupied two city blocks and produced over half a million barrels of beer every year. I can still recall the posters I saw plastered all over the place: ‘Schlitz – THE BEER THAT MADE MILWAUKEE FAMOUS’. And, I should add, the beer that made Irving Melinkoff exceedingly drunk. Hilda had caught his eye in our merchandise tent and, like hundreds before her, shared with him her dream of joining the circus. Dazzled by her physical charm, he invited her to be his Circassian Beauty. She accepted on the spot and was renamed Zerodia Nashko.
I did some more googling, this time about ‘Circassian Beauties’. Apparently, women from the Caucasus region near the Black Sea were considered by some the ‘purest’ example of ‘white beauty’ and favoured by the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire for his harem. Then later the cosmetic industry latched onto the concept as a marketing ploy. In 1864, while the American Civil War was being fought over slavery, good old P. T. Barnum exhibited the first ‘Circassian Beauty’ – a white woman with a high-volume hairstyle like an afro – and all the fake Circassian Beauties that followed, like Hilda Groot, copied the look.
Interesting that a ‘beauty’ was displayed among all the ‘freaks’. Perhaps the contrast exaggerated the features of both. Perhaps my perception of my own ugliness had made me obsessed by Vienna Voronova – someone society deemed perfect. She’d been chosen for the campaign because she was flawless, to make women feel they were somehow lacking something, that they needed to buy the product to make themselves more like her. And really, I knew that was how the whole sorry thing worked.