Circus of Thieves and the Raffle of Doom Read online

  ‘Everyone.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  Billy shifted on the hump, his rump taking a bump from the jump and pump of the lump. ‘Sort of.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Oh, nothing! I’m only joking. Just messing about. Winding you up.’ Billy slapped himself on the thigh, like a dodgy panto actor let out an unconvincing laugh and turned back to face the road.

  Hannah who was good at sensing the subtle meanings that sometimes sneak out between the words people actually speak detected something strange in Billy’s tone of voice. She had an odd feeling that just as air pushes against the sides of a balloon that’s about to pop, Billy was struggling to hold in something important. His sort-of joke felt like a tiny leak of a secret that wanted to burst out of him. Hannah decided to take what is often a wise course of action when the person you’re talking to isn’t being entirely honest: she said nothing.

  ‘You shouldn’t take everything so seriously,’ said Billy, who happened to be good at sensing the subtle meanings that can be expressed by a few seconds of silence. He knew that Hannah suspected the true meaning behind his sort-of joke. Billy had never told any civilian about the secret of Shank’s Impossible Circus, and now, after knowing her for only a few minutes, he had already almost let it slip to Hannah, but he was surprised to find that he didn’t care.

  He’d never befriended a civilian before. It was a strange, exciting and slightly dizzy-making feeling.

  ‘So how do you get an audience if you never announce the show?’ Hannah asked.

  ‘You’ll see.’

  ‘Will I?’

  ‘Yup. Just keep your eyes and ears open, and if you hear anything that sounds like applause, follow the noise. But if you see me, and I look like I’m working, don’t come and speak to me.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘And when I am working, it may look as if I’m not working, but I probably am. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Hannah, though if she was being honest she would have said something more along the lines of, ‘No.’

  ‘I’m just saying I’ll find you. Don’t you find me.’

  ‘Are you trying extra hard to be mysterious, or does it come naturally?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, I practise in the mirror every morning. Do you want to see my mysterious face?’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘I have several, but I think this is the best one.’

  Billy swivelled on his hump to face her so he was now riding backwards. His mouth was half open, one eye was shut and his nostrils were flaring in and out. Hannah told him he looked like he was being attacked by a jellyfish, and he let out a big, throaty laugh. Or, rather, he let out half a big, throaty laugh, because in the middle of it he suddenly stopped and a look of terror overtook his face. This wasn’t fake terror, either. This was the real thing.

  Billy stared behind Hannah, his eyes wide and his mouth clamped shut.

  Hannah turned to see what had changed his mood so suddenly, and was immediately blinded by the headlights of the enormous lorry. These weren’t just ordinary lights, the kind that sit down near the bumper. The entire front of the vehicle, below, above and around the windscreen, was covered with huge lamps, and every single one was flashing, shooting dazzling beams into Billy and Hannah’s eyes. Even from a distance, even in daylight, this felt to Hannah almost like staring into the sun. She couldn’t see who was in the cab, but she could certainly hear, because from a pair of loudhailers on the roof, a voice so cold and steely you could have used it to slice a pumpkin boomed out.

  ‘WHO IS THAT . . . PERSON . . . ON MY CAMEL?’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Billy, in Hannah’s ear. ‘You’d better go.’

  ‘OK . . . er . . . how do I get down?’

  ‘Like this.’

  Billy lifted her off Narcissus’s hump and dropped her onto the road. She landed like a sack of potatoes, that is if a sack of potatoes was capable of twisting its ankle but immediately standing up again and smiling bravely as if nothing was wrong.7

  With the driver of the lorry watching, Billy seemed like a different person. All the sparkiness and humour on his face disappeared. As he nudged Narcissus back into motion with a click of his tongue, Hannah stared up at him, wondering why he was so scared of the man driving the lorry. It was as if just by looking at him, this person could make the real Billy disappear.

  Just before he slipped away around the corner of the narrow road, heading towards town, Billy turned and gave her a quick secret wink.

  ‘See you later,’ he called. ‘And don’t forget what I told you.’

  Hannah was not in the habit of forgetting anything (unless it was something boring, in which case she didn’t so much forget it as just go deaf while it was being said) but she didn’t understand what Billy’s instructions meant.

  While the caravan of caravans trundled past, before the lorry could get near, Hannah and Fizzer jumped over a hedge and skedaddled at top speed. (Well, Hannah’s top speed. Fizzer was somewhere between a stroll and an amble.)

  Whatever you do, don’t enter the raffle

  LATER THAT DAY, after the circus had rolled into the centre of Hannah’s town and set up camp in the park, after the animals had been settled and fed, after a huge stew had been cooked on an open fire in an iron pot the size of a witches’ cauldron and gobbled up in five minutes flat, the Shank troupe paraded along the high street to drum up some trade for the evening show.

  At the front was Maurice, the trapeze artiste, whose name is pronounced Murrggghhhheeece, as if you are gargling an espresso of pond water. If you said his name without enough pond water in your gargle, Maurice pretended not to hear you. Maurice was French. In fact he was so proud of being French that he actually became slightly ratty if any other French people came within range, causing him to increase his Frenchness in order to ensure that he was always the most French person in his immediate vicinity. This was why he’d been forced to emigrate. Living with such a high level of competitive Frenchness in France itself was simply too exhausting.

  Unconnected to this problematic patriotism, but at the very heart of his trapeze-artistry, was Maurice’s curious habit of smearing himself in baby oil from head to toe before every performance or public appearance. He liked the way the theatre lights glistened against his muscled chest, which he shaved every morning with a (whisper it) ladies’ razor. He just loved to be shiny.

  The effect of his baby oil shine wasn’t quite so impressive in daylight, but on the parade into town Maurice, more than made up for this by his unusual method of forward propulsion. He didn’t walk; he didn’t run; he didn’t saunter stride or march. He tumbled. Forward rolls and somersaults back flips and midair twizzles, cartwheels and swallow dives – these were Maurice’s moves, and he choreographed them with casual perfection, his face puckered all the while into a wonky half-smile which seemed to say, ‘Me? A genius of physical agility? The human form at its most exquisite? Masculinity raised to a superhuman level of perfection? Oh, no. You exaggerate. I’m just a humble Frenchman who happens to have been blessed with a few modestly dazzling skills.’

  The only person in the circus who agreed with Maurice’s opinion of his own genius was Irrrrrrena, his Russian assistant who only ever wore the world’s smallest bikini, except in mid-winter, when she added a dressing gown the size of a baby’s cardigan.

  Irrrrrrena ran alongside Maurice, spreading her arms wide in did-you-see-THAT! amazement every time he did a move, following up with a circular clapping motion, as if she was stirring a huge saucepan containing a clap casserole. This was supposed to generate applause, and it usually worked. Irrrrrrrena was Maurice’s trapeze assistant, choreographer, costumier, chef, bodyguard, driver, masseur, moustachier, talcum powderer, groomer-in-chief, personal trainer, psychotherapist, physiotherapist, aromatherapist and girlfriend. Like Maurice, Irrrrrrrena loved to glisten, except she had to settle for shine-free arms and legs, so she wouldn’t be too slippery for him to throw her up in the air and catch her. Once, he squeezed her a little too tightly and she shot up in the air and got stuck in a tree. That lead to a huge row, because he wanted her to stop using baby oil altogether, but she thought it was unfair for him to be shinier than her.

  Maurice was almost as competitive about shininess as he was about Frenchness. He was a very competitive man. On rare occasions that he met someone more competitive than himself, he even became competitive about being competitive.

  Apart from the occasional dispute about the oiling issue, Maurice and Irrrrrrena8 seemed most of the time to be deeply in love. This made for quite a contrast with the twins, Hank and Frank who were immediately behind them in the parade.

  Hank and Frank had been working together since they were zero years old, and were often said to be the best twin-clown pairing since Huupi and Duupi, the Finn twins who had been tragically wiped out when a frying-pan-in-the-face gag was so perfectly executed that the laughter had triggered an avalanche, which sent them, and their whole Big Top, to the bottom of a half-frozen lake from which, it was said, bubbles of laughter still sometimes rose up to the surface, giggling as they burst into the air. But that’s another story.

  Hank and Frank simply didn’t get on. They hadn’t said a kind word to one another since . . . well . . . since they’d learned to talk. Things had started badly, when Hank was half-way born and Frank had pulled him back by the ankles because he wanted to come out first. Since then, year after year, they had only become more argumentative, but as their comedy routine revolved around throwing things at one another, whacking each other on the head and tripping one another over, the fact that their whole lives had been one long, ongoing bicker just added extra sparkle and conviction to their performance. Fighting, for Hank and Frank, was both a job and a hobby. And who can ask for more from life than that?

  Behind the twins was Jesse, the Human Cannonball, in his trademark fur leotard. Following a crisis of conscience Jesse had recently switched to fake fur, but sadly he was allergic to polyester, and his new leotard made him one of the itchiest men in the world (which is an interesting claim to fame, but doesn’t make for a circus act). No one knew how Jesse had become a Human Cannonball. He hated loud bangs, suffered from terrible vertigo, disliked travel, endured atrocious stage-fright and was generally afraid of almost everything including cats, spaghetti and train tickets. He was, frankly, in the wrong job.

  There wasn’t much for him to do on the parade except prance, show off his muscles, and scratch. Some places, no matter how itchy, just can’t be scratched in public, so Jesse was often cross-eyed with the effort of keeping up a standard of appropriate public itching.

  Behind Jesse strode the entrepreneur, svengali,9 director, inspiration and ringmaster of the circus, Billy’s dad, Armitage Shank. He wore a pair of red trousers that were so tight you could read the date on the coins in his pocket. His shirt was white and puffy, made of fabric that billowed around him as if he was walking around in a cloud of icing sugar. In his right hand was a whip, which he cracked in the air with flicks of his wrist so subtle the whip seemed to be cracking itself.

  And behind Armitage Shank, seemingly not part of the parade at all, disguised in ‘civilian’ clothes, was Billy. He was walking quietly along with his hands in his pockets, scouring the ever-growing crowd with an intense and studious gaze, as if he was searching for something, or someone. The strange thing was, he definitely appeared to be pretending he was nothing to do with the circus.

  Hannah sprinted out of the house in her best (oldest) jeans and favourite (dirtiest) T-shirt, as soon as she heard the ooohs (of people watching Maurice’s backflips), the aaaahs (as Jesse weightlifted a passer-by in each hand), the occasional hmmmngg (from people who were unaccountably distracted by Irrrrrena) and a long, bubbling rise and fall of laughter (as Hank and Frank battered, bundled, beat, bruised, bonked, bashed and bamboozled one another with a variety of amusingly shaped implements).

  The minute Hannah saw the parade, she understood. This was what Billy had been trying to explain. Shank’s Impossible Circus didn’t need to publicise their shows in advance, because they’d perfected a way of selling tickets on the day.

  The leaping and weightlifting and whip-cracking and circular-clapping-in-a-tiny-bikini and bashy bamboozling soon drew a crowd that formed itself into a circle around a patch of previously unspectacular pavement space in the town square, which now realised with some excitement that it had become a stage.10 Irrrrena did a few laps of the pavement-stage, pulling some people forward, nudging others back, until she had a neat circle. Then she clapped one last time, and all the performers slipped rapidly away, leaving a large crowd of people staring at a circle of empty pavement.

  Just at the exact, precise and specific moment when anticipation started to dip, and people began to ask themselves why they were all staring interestedly at nothing whatsoever, like a regional conference of pavement-appreciators, Fingers O’Boyle leapt onto the stage.

  Nobody knew where he had sprung from, since he hadn’t been visible during the parade, and Fingers O’Boyle was clearly not the kind of person who could blend into a crowd. Why? Because he was dressed like a cross between a tramp and The Emperor of the Empire of Lurid Show-offy Clothes. Allow me to explain. I shall start at the bottom of his outfit. Yellow patent leather (i.e shiny shiny shiny) shoes with stack heels made of transparent plastic, containing a ring of bright green frozen-in-time beetles. Knee socks, yellow with red polka dots. White plus fours (i.e. long shorts) so baggy and extravagant they should have been called plus sixty-eights. Above this, a flowing ankle-length coat which was halfway between a spectacular festive gown designed to honour the Goddess of Rainbows and a bunch of lurid rags held together with dodgy sewing, bits of glue and smears of dirt. The coat had actually started life in a production of Joseph and his Technicolour Panopoly of Drippy Songs, which was so bad Fingers had decided to spare the world any further performances by stealing the costumes. Since then, whenever Fingers found a scrap of interesting fabric, he’d snip a bit off and add it to the coat using whatever thread, glue or dirt came to hand.

  Fingers’ idea of ‘finding’ things was slightly unusual. The concept of ownership was not one he strongly believed in. He once ‘found’ a piece of delightful purple paisley on the shirt of a woman standing in front of him in a bus queue. Being unusually dextrous, and handy with a pair of sharp scissors, Fingers had snipped out a square and skipped away before the woman had time to say ‘What’s that breeze on my back?’ This is basically a long way of saying Fingers was a thief. Not your bog-standard grab-it-off-the-shelves-and-run-for-it thief, but a true magician in the art of making things disappear in front of your very eyes before you even notice they are gone.

  It was this skill he used to hold the attention of the crowd assembled around him. His act, in short, went something like this: choose a volunteer from the crowd, chat to them, charm them, make them laugh, make everyone else laugh at them, do a couple of card tricks, then, just before you send them back to their place, casually say, ‘Don’t you want these?’ before handing back watches, wallets, credit cards, wedding rings, and once (his piece-de-resistance) a pair of knickers to the embarrassed guest star.

  Please cast your mind back roughly ten minutes or so in book-time. Are you there? Fingers O’Boyle is just stepping up onto the pavement-stage. A tiny line of ants is running away, screaming minuscule ant screams. Who do you think is his first ‘member of the public’ up on stage? Can you guess?

  I don’t know why I asked you that question, since I can’t hear you. But if your answer was Billy, then you guessed correctly. If you guessed someone else, we can all just pretend that you like to shout out names randomly while you read books. It might be best to shout out another name now, to make this more convincing to passers-by.

  Only one person notices that Billy isn’t who he’s pretending to be. Hannah. She has also noticed, with some surprise and horror, that while the other performers were gathering the crowd, Billy was working his way around the circle, slipping his delicate, fast-moving, not-very-clean hands into the pockets of the audience.

  If Hannah hadn’t become his friend earlier that day, she might have leapt out into the middle of the circle, stopped the show, and exposed Billy’s thieving, but she sensed this wasn’t what you should do to a friend, so she just watched anxiously as he pilfered items from the crowd.

  She wasn’t sure she was doing the right thing, since Billy had admitted the whole circus was on the run, and he certainly did not like the sound of the word ‘police’. There was definitely something fishy going on.11

  While everyone else enjoyed the beginnings of the show, Hannah wrestled with her dilemma. Should she trust her instincts and trust Billy, or trust the fact that stealing was stealing was stealing? Because putting your hands into other people’s pockets and walking away with their stuff – that’s stealing.

  Before she’d decided what to do, Billy was called up on stage as the first volunteer. During part of the act, at the exact moment when Fingers was pointing out that a missing ace of spades was stuck to a lamp post up above everyone’s heads, Hannah saw in the twinkle of an eye a small, not-very-clean hand slip a large clutch of shiny objects into Fingers’ pocket. These were the objects which in the course of the next half-hour were returned to their owners. While everyone else laughed and gasped with every new revelation, Hannah just sighed with relief.

  The show ended with more gymnastics and general circus hoopla while Mr Shank sat behind a velvet-covered table, selling tickets for the evening’s one-night-only performance. If he had been selling hot cakes to a town of cake-starved cake fanatics at the height of their annual Build A House Out Of Cakes Festival, he could hardly have sold tickets any faster.

  Every ticket came with free entry to the Shank Entertainment Empire annual charity raffle, and Armitage was such a charming and debonair salesman that almost everyone happily put down their name and address, usually without even asking which charity was involved or what the prize might be.12