The Pilo Family Circus (28 page)

The country needed an injection of folklore, something grizzly and mysterious to take people’s minds off more imminent perils, like the war and terror always in their faces. People camped out, went for bushwalks in search of the fabled circus. Some came back with stories of finding it, which they tried to sell … and some succeeded in that. As rumour and superstition grew, the original witnesses stopped talking. Their accounts spread over the internet like wildfire and the tin-foil-hat crowd had a field day, somehow working it into the Illuminati’s grand plans for world domination. How could so many people, heads-on-straight farmers, as respectable as people get, swear black and blue to such bizarre sights?

Looked like a circus, they’d said, but there’d been blood everywhere. Bodies everywhere. Like a circus that had been dropped into a blender and tipped all over the ground. There were reports of a black man in a turban, some cheerful black man who’d done some pyrotechnic stunts you’d have to see to believe. Looked like he was shooting comets out of his hand …

Witnesses would tend to blank out here, shake their heads, shudder, forget what they were about to say and ask for the interview to finish, please.

It caused some to wonder: that other unsolved mystery that left nine people trampled to death — hadn’t that been at a carnival too? Was there some connection?

And what about that guy the police picked up at the Brisbane construction site wandering around in a clown suit? You know the guy, disappeared a while back, he and a friend of his. At the time it was thought to be some kind of gang thing — seedy characters those two, into drugs by all accounts. And here he was, weeks later. He was questioned at length by the police. Psych evaluations had him pegged as the sanest crazy man alive. He didn’t know where he’d been, he said, and it seemed he wasn’t lying. As for the other guy, the one he’d disappeared with, his ugly mug was all over the news for a week or so. Someone claimed to have spotted him in bushland with some strange woman, but the sighting was unconfirmed.

Once the fuss died down, the interviews with police, psychologists, and the incessant questions of family and friends — none of whom would ever look at him quite the same way again — Jamie’s life continued as though a great number of years had been wiped clean from his memory; he felt in his bones weariness from some great ordeal while his mind grasped at shadows. His sense of time seemed shot and the unemployed weeks stretched out like one long day as he busied himself around his parents’ house, attempting to learn again the trick of everyday life. He was vaguely troubled and
gnawed at by questions asked deep within as though by a stranger. Often he would pause whatever he was doing, shake his head and mutter something to himself in defeat, sometimes the words, ‘I don’t know’. Other times he would drift off, staring into space, his mind blank and snatching at thoughts like a hand fumbling for a switch in the dark, his mouth hanging open, a book lying open across his knee.

With a fascination bordering on horror he would read the newspaper articles his parents showed him, about those trampled to death, about the toothless priest who mumbled something about a circus then refused to speak another word, about how Jamie himself was found roaming the streets, dressed like a clown, unable to answer simple questions about the flecks of blood they’d found on his shoes.

His mind probed that night gently, looking for answers but not looking hard or long. He remembered staggering around like a drunk, falling face first into the roadside before the cops picked him up, but before that …? There was something there, there had to be. And at some level deeper than thought he knew it was best it remain hidden.

To forget, it had taken one last wish upon fiery stars, with the help of that small velvet bag he’d found in his pocket as he left the showgrounds for the last time. By the time the police picked him up, he’d already blasted the whole episode from his mind.

And the little velvet bag remained in his bedside drawer, half-full. Every so often he would hold it in his palm, a little too heavy for its size, making a sound like marbles clinking together. Then he would drop it as though it had burned him and wash his hands.

For all the forgetting, the nightmares still came. Intense merciless visions of hell, visions of a younger Earth fenced by
different rules, of fierce scaled warriors stamping the shivering ground with hooves and howling at the sky, howling from some hidden prison, banging on their cell bars …

And there would come a somehow familiar voice in the thick of these horrible caustic nightmares: ‘Your time ain’t up yet. Hear me, feller? Enjoyin’ your holiday up there? Liking these little horror flicks each night? Here’s a clue, my sweet, they’re
snapshots
, not dreams. Yeah,
now
you know somethin’ about the show.
Now
you know. The fun’s just started. Chuckles aplenty. You come get your chuckles whenever you’re ready, ’cause if they ain’t lettin’
me
go, they ain’t lettin’
you
go, best believe that. Show’s down but not out, you mark my words. We’ll be back in town, my pretty, and I don’t recall offering you a severance package …’

And always on waking was a feeling that overnight, something new had grown within him, then been plucked out and uprooted, tossed away, but was ready at any time to grow back. He would have to be vigilant, but he knew not for what foe.

And he knew there are strange places in the world. It seemed to him the world was a carnival, and that we’ve all got a free ticket.

And all shows get their curtain call. Eventually.