Secret Heart (9 page)

“He used to lift me up and throw me through the air. He flipped me into somersaults and cartwheels. He held metal bars and told me to jump up and swing from them. Hoops to dive through, ropes to climb, rings to swing from. All the time: ‘Corinna, Corinna,
do it, Corinna. Now this. Now this. Jump for this, Corinna. Dive over this. Be graceful as the swallow, brave as the tiger, strong as the bear…'It was him that turned me into what I am.”

“Not your m—?”

She shook her head.

“I remember her standing at the tent door, standing still and silent and looking in at us. But mostly it's just me and Hackenschmidt.” She shrugged. “Mebbe she lost interest straightaway, once she saw I wasn't good enough.”

“But you're br—”

“Brilliant! I wish…”

She toed the dust with her bare feet.

“When you were little here in Helmouth, I was little in this tent, traveling and traveling. D'you think something linked us even then?”

“Eh?”

“There was always something missing. I could feel myself yearning for something. Like Nanty said—for a twin, mebbe. Somebody to be with that was like myself. You must've felt that, Joe.”

Joe nodded.

“Yes. I f-felt that.”

“This hasn't just happened,” she said. “We know each other from…”

“L-long long ago.”

She toed the sawdust. A potbellied pig shoved in through the door and wandered toward them.

“Hello, Little Fatty,” she said, and the pig snuffled and grunted.

“We had the unicorns then, when I was small,” she said.

“Unicorns?”

“You saw them on Nanty Solo's wall. They were secret.”

She reached out to the pig and let it nuzzle her fingers. Joe thought of his own unicorns. He'd known them since he too was small. He'd seen them in his dreams, roaming the Silver Forest.

“We couldn't let them out,” she said. “They used to wander about in here, jump on the seats, scamper about the ring. Lovely things, just like you, Little Fatty.”

“Where did you g—?”

“Get them from?” She shrugged. “Oh, they were lovely, but not real. They were white goats from Andalucía. When they were still babies, Hacken-schmidt took out their two horn buds and replaced just one at the middle of their brows.”

The pig licked and Corinna giggled.

“And they gr—?” said Joe.

“You saw them. They grew like the single horns of unicorns. Some of them were all twisted but a couple grew straight out just like they should. No teeth, Fatty! They were going to be an act. They were something to stop the circus going from bad to worse. But
the cruelty people found out. So we kept them hidden. Sweet as angels. Fatty!”

Joe looked around him, imagined gentle unicorns scampering there, heard their bleats and whimpers. Things that weren't supposed to be, things that lived just in dreams and stories. The pig nuzzled his little feet.

“Fatty!” laughed Corinna. She smiled at Joe. “There were tales that some circus somewhere had done it to children—put horn buds into the brows of babies to turn them into fauns. We had a clown once that said he'd seen them—the fauns—performing in a village in Romania.”

Fauns. Joe knew these as well. Half beast, half human, glimpsed as they crossed the shadows between the trees.

“Sometimes I dream that Hackenschmidt did it to me,” she said. “I wake up touching my brow, and expect to find horns there.”

She drew her hair back.

“See anything?”

Joe looked. He shook his head. He touched her brow tenderly with his fingers. Nothing, just smooth unbroken speckled skin stretched across her skull.

“Nothing,” he said.

“He put the unicorns down a couple of years back,” she went on. “Drowned them. Said it was better that way. They were out of place in this harsh
world. Mebbe their spirits would find somewhere better if he freed them.” She stroked the pig. “Mebbe there's a little lovely world close by that's filled with unicorns and fauns. What d'you think, Fatty?”

The pig licked, grunted and nuzzled her.

“Aye,” she said. “And with little fat pigs as well.” And she stepped up, arched her body, spun in cartwheels round the ring, while Joe closed his eyes, and fingered his brow, feeling for scars and ridges and lumps. He dreamed of horns growing there, dreamed of being a creature in another world close by, or of living in someone else's dream or story. This is me, he thought, a half-beast, half-human thing, a thing that can sprout horns or fur or feathers.

Corinna came to rest in front of him.

“Deep in the circus there's a secret heart,” she said.

Joe stared.

“Secret?”

“In the circus, and in yourself. That's what we're moving toward.”

Joe just stared again.

“We're moving toward your secret heart. I have to take you to it. That's why the tiger came.”

Joe kept staring at her.

“We'll need you all night, Joe. Can you stay all night?”

The kids at the Cut moved across the entrance to block the path. They held tins of lager loosely in their fists. They tilted their heads to the side and breathed out plumes of smoke. Mac Bly threw his arms about as if in panic. George Carr screamed about the tigers coming. Jug Matthews whistled at Corinna's legs and scoffed at her boots.

“Lock your kids up quick!” said Goldie Wills. “The freaks is out.”

Joe and Corinna kept on walking. They sidled through the group, through the shoving shoulders and jutting elbows. Voices whispered in contempt. Eyes leered and challenged. Scents of alcohol, tobacco smoke, dope. The song was sung, soft and threatening,

“Only Maloney, lalalala…”

The words were coarse and cruel:

“In with the Gyppos now, Maloney? In with the
wasters and wanderers and tramps and thieves? Found your proper place, eh? Only place where Only isn't Only, eh?”

But Joe also heard traces of wonder in the voices, traces of fear in the reeling eyes.

“Get—out—the way,” he stammered.

“Ooooh! Maloney's getting mad!”

“Yes,” hissed Corinna. “Get out our bloody way.”

“And the Gyppo fairy tart as well.”

Goldie danced around Corinna with her fists raised.

“Come on, then, Gyppo fairy tart,” she said. “Come on. Take us on.”

“Chicken, they're both bloody chicken!” laughed Plug and all the others, and they squawked and bobbed and pushed their elbows back like stupid stunted birds.

They got through. Curses and whispers and the song followed them.

Corinna brushed her body as if brushing off dirt.

“That's what all kids is like out here?” she spat.

Joe shrugged.

“That's who you live among?” she snapped.

“Lost souls!” she hissed. “Lost souls! Lost souls!”

She spat and rubbed her spit into the dust with her boot.

They entered the street of pale houses. Dust in the gutters and in the cracks on the pavements. Rampant hedges. Little kids played around a garden
gate, jumping an elastic band they'd stretched there. They stood in astonishment as the tiger-faced boy and the girl dressed for the trapeze approached them. Their wide eyes shone. They reached out to touch the pair as they passed by. Corinna paused, and reached down to tousle their hair.

“Mebbe not all of them is lost, then,” she said.

She jumped with them across their band, so graceful.

“Do this,” she said, stretching her arms wide as she jumped, pointing her toes, tilting her head. “Or this. Or this.”

The children watched, and the bravest of them copied her.

“That's right,” she said. “Oh, that's wonderful. Think of birds, think of fairies, think of angels. Let the pictures in your mind take shape in your bodies. That's lovely. Oh, that's wonderful! Wow, you're brilliant!”

They walked on, leaving their images to stroll for years afterward in the children's minds.

They paused at the gate.

“My h—” said Joe.

There was a long jagged crack in the pebbledash by the door. There was a single hawthorn tree that Joe's mum had planted when he was born. The garden was thistles and weeds and wildflowers where bees buzzed and a pair of red butterflies flew. This was where Joe used to crawl as a baby while his mum sat
on the front step watching. She used to hug him when he crawled back out with jabbered tales of rabbits and elves and fairies. She used to take him on her knee and laugh as she listened. “Is that right?” she used to say. “Is that really what you saw in there? Well, I never!”

Joe breathed deeply. She'd always wanted him to bring a friend home.

“C-come in,” he said.

To the back of the house, the back garden, an overgrown lawn with more weeds and wildflowers growing. At the center, Mum lay on a sun lounger and wore a swimsuit and sunglasses. Music poured out of a little radio, Tina Turner, her favorite. There was a tray with an emptied glass and plate. “Mum!” Joe said. “Mum.” But Tina Turner drowned him out. He remembered crawling here also, crawling as far as the high back fence, where he found real toads, real spiders, where he heard fairies and pixies whispering and singing into his ear. Then toddling quickly back to her open arms with his tales again.

Joe didn't move. She looked so lovely, so relaxed there, letting the sun pour down on her from the unblemished sky. Already he felt older, much older than he had last night.

“Mum,” he said. “Mum.”

Too softly.

“She looks lovely,” said Corinna.

“Y-yes. Mum!”

A breeze blew through the garden and she stirred. She brushed a wasp away from her face. She sat up and turned and lifted the sunglasses from her eyes. She looked at him as if there was no disguise, as if she saw straight through to her Joe.

“Hello, Joe. And Corinna, too. Come on, then, before I have to dash off for my shift.”

She wrapped a dressing gown around her and came smiling toward them.

“Now then, Corinna,” she said. “Come on. Come in. There's not a lot but what we've got you're welcome to.”

They sat on stools at the kitchen table. They ate bread and cheese and tomatoes and the sun shone bright through the kitchen window. Corinna looked around herself in fascination.

“Never been in a house before,” she said.

“Never?” said Joe's mum.

“No. Never. Just caravans and tents. Been in shops and pubs sometimes, but never a house.”

Joe looked at the room with new eyes, thought of all the rooms around them, the roof protecting them from the sky, the foundations dug deep into the ground.

“Always wondered what they was like inside,” she said. “The walls is thick, eh?”

Joe and his mum just looked at each other and laughed.

“Funny to be in something that never moves,” Corinna said.

She stamped gently on the floor. She reached out and tapped the flowered wallpaper. She shook her head at the strangeness of it. She chewed her bread and cheese. Joe's mum watched her with pleasure.

“You know,” she said, “you look lovely. Your costume and everything. Doesn't she, Joe?”

Joe blushed and nodded.

“I'd've liked to be something like you. Light and easy and free, swinging on the trapeze. I bet you're good.”

“She's brill—” said Joe.

“No, I'm not,” said Corinna.

“I used to do it in the garden when I was little,” said Joe's mum. Her eyes shone as she remembered. “Isn't that funny? I'd nearly forgot about that. We had a cherry tree and I swung and swung and swung all day and me mam used to yell out the house, ‘Are you never coming off that blinking swing?’ ”

She laughed.

“Kids, eh? Dreams and games and heads that turn little gardens into whole new worlds. And what about your mam and dad, Corinna?”

“Mum's in Russia. Dad…Well, nobody knows about my dad.”

“Ah, well, that's the way for many these days. No brothers, no sisters?”

“No brothers, no sisters.”

“But a tent full of friends.”

“Yes. And a new friend. Joe Maloney.”

“That's right. Here, Corinna. You seen his pictures?”

She pointed to Joe's pictures on the walls. Faded paper, dried out and curled. Faded paints. Pictures from the days he used to crawl away from her through the weeds, pictures from when he came running back from outside the village with tales of visions and wonders. Clumsy crayon pictures of creatures with wings and horns.

“They're good, eh?” said his mum.

“Brilliant,” said Corinna.

She touched Joe's hand.

“They're brilliant,” she said.

Joe shrugged.

“From l—”

“From long ago. They're brilliant.”

Joe's mum looked at her watch.

“Got to go soon,” she said. “Be selling booze in half an hour. So what's the plan for the rest of the day? You going to turn into a trapeze artist, Joe Maloney?” She smiled at his painted face. “Or are they putting you in a cage?”

“Tiger tamer.” He laughed.

“Starting at the top, eh? I thought you told me there was no tigers.”

“Oh, there's d-dozens.”

“Well, no putting your head in their mouths, at least for the first day.”

“OK, Mum.”

She stroked his head.

“You look after yourself over there. And no getting in anybody's way.”

“OK, Mum.” He licked his lips. “Mum…”

“Yes, love?”

“Could I st-stay all night?”

“So this is what you're plotting, Joe Maloney? This is why you brought your new pal?”

Joe shrugged.

“We've been showing him it all,” said Corinna. “The trapeze and the dogs and everything. It'd be great. Everybody likes him.”

Mum pondered.

“We're all right, you know,” said Corinna. “We're not what some folk say.”

“Oh, don't worry. I know that, pet. Not like some round here.”

She touched Joe's hair.

“It's what you want, eh?”

Joe nodded. She looked through the window toward the wall of the tent, the blue slope against the blue sky.

“I can see it's your kind of thing.” She smiled. “Should've heard some of the notions he had as a bairn. And still has.” She sighed and pondered and assessed Corinna. “You're a good lass,” she said. “Listen, Joseph Maloney. You listen to Corinna. OK?”

“OK.”

She picked up her keys from the table.

“Mum,” said Joe. “Eh?”