8

I leave my ghostly perch in the sky above the thierpark to sit beside Bonny and Jurano on the dusty ground. I see that Jurano has notched the equivalent of two weeks’ worth of marks into his bar’gan since arriving. Bonny is making a repair to his own boomerang, damaged yesterday when it clipped a building. The thierpark crowds are growing rather than diminishing with each long day, during which Bonny, Jurano and Dorondera stage eight or ten performances. Every time Bonny is asked to throw the bar’gan, he hurls it harder and further, out across the tiled rooftops of the neighbouring residences. Yesterday, when the boomerang struck the building, it landed outside the grounds and I saw a German boy pick up the curve of wood, as surprised as if a wooden moon had dropped from the heavens.

I follow Bonny inside the hut and see him check how many coins he now has, hidden under his bed in a sock. The rattly bulge is already the size of his fist. Each day he waits until Herr Hagenbeck has moved on to the next act before calling audience members back to the fence for a turn of his boomerang, after which he discreetly extends his hand for payment. Sometimes, if Herr Hagenbeck is well away, Bonny performs one of the humorous German dances he was taught on the ship, to great laughter and applause. He is paid even more for those short acts than for a whole day of performing his own dances and songs.

Bonny thanks his Jun Jaree for guidance and whispers to it to make sure that Beeral knows of his success. But it is not the full story. I have seen Bonny’s smile fade in the evenings when he observes Jurano’s mood darken after drinking the firewater he is given by visitors. Bonny tried the drink only once, holding his throat after the first mouthful. He tells Beeral that there are many things here that he does not like – the food, the air, the taste of the water, the staring of people when he does nothing at all special, just eats his meal, or even when he tries to sleep sometimes in the day and audiences are allowed to peer through the hut’s windows to see. He says he endures such discomforts in the knowledge that each day that passes earns him money and takes him closer to visiting the Queen and pleading the case to stay on K’grai and for the killings and ill-treatment to stop.

I have seen Dorondera given coloured ribbons for her hair, handed to her by children or their mothers. Or fruit, either in baskets or as single polished items passed across the fence in gloved hands.

Herr Hagenbeck and Louis give Bonny and Jurano wood to make toy boomerangs to sell to children and their parents after the shows. For their efforts, Bonny and Jurano are allowed to keep half the money. Once the crowds have gone for the day, however, Bonny makes extra boomerangs, which he hides under his bed and sells through the thierpark’s perimeter fence at night. In the light of the gas lamps in the lane outside, he sells them for less than the price Herr Hagenbeck charges but keeps all the money for himself.

‘Does he think me a fool?’ he asks Beeral.

Day after day, visitors breach the stick fence and come into the hut without asking, carrying mud and elephant dung in under their boots. Dorondera is forever sweeping the filth out with the broom she found hidden behind a door in the wall. Herr Hagenbeck has tried to make Bonny, Jurano and Dorondera use the small hut they made on their first days in the thierpark, but Bonny refuses.

‘I warned him the leaves he gave us to keep out the rain would not work,’ Bonny tells Hilda, who sometimes comes to visit in the evenings with her father, and occasionally visits later in the night on her own. I have seen her call Bonny out of the hut when Dorondera and Jurano are asleep. Bonny and Hilda then talk alone between the hut and the back perimeter fence where no one else can see. They speak of K’gari and their memories of the times they swam in the island’s warm waters or met each other by chance on the beach and it was as if they were the only two people on the planet. I see the light from the gas lamps dance in their eyes, but never do they take each other’s hands or even touch.

Each evening Louis discusses ideas for the next day’s shows and pays the three performers with coins from Herr Hagenbeck. Louis wears new glasses, still wire framed but shinier, like those of the other men in Hamburg, and with uncracked glass. He offers them to Bonny to try.

I watch as Bonny puts the glasses on his face and looks about him at the dirt-floored hut, the bunks, the two windows and the thierpark beyond. I imagine that, to Bonny, the animals appear framed as if in one of the white strangers’ paintings. Finally, Bonny looks at the house where Hilda is increasingly spending her days.

‘I can see, but it is strange, and blurred,’ he says, taking off the glasses. ‘Why would you wear them? You don’t like what you see?’

Several times, in the early morning when everyone else is asleep, I see Bonny, dressed in his woollen trousers and jacket, climb the thierpark’s perimeter fence and walk Hamburg’s streets unnoticed by anyone but me.