The Road to Gundagai (23 page)

‘You will all stay together. Do I have your word on this, Gertrude?’

Gertrude hesitated. ‘Yes.’

‘I want to hear truth in your voice.’

‘Yes!’

‘You will go straight to the show. You will not speak to anyone, especially men. Is that understood?’

‘Yes, Madame,’ said Mah.

‘After the show you will go back to the train station and stay in the waiting room where it is well lit until the milk train arrives.’

Milk trains ran just before dawn, to pick up the milk from the stations along the line. If the circus finishes at ten, thought Blue, we’ll have to wait about five hours.

‘Buy a return ticket at the station here. The station guards in Sydney will let you sleep in the waiting room if you show them your return tickets.’ Madame nodded to herself. ‘You three will all be girls this time. No wigs. Punters expect strange clothes and wigs in a circus, and greasepaint too, but in the city they attract the wrong attention. No rouge, no lipstick. What is respectable at the circus is not proper in the city. But tell Fred he is to put on the blond moustache. Mrs Olsen will give you dresses. Now off with you. And Belle?’

‘Yes, Madame?’

‘I do not know how much the Mammoth tickets cost. But whatever is left you may spend as you wish. Some supper perhaps. But take sandwiches too.’

‘Yes, Madame. Thank you!’

‘Enjoy yourselves,’ said Madame. It was an order.

The train rattled its way through the countryside, white steam and black smoke trailing behind it. Paddocks with horses, paddocks with sheep, apple orchards, the sudden darkness of a tunnel and then erupting into light once more.

It was strange to see so much country pass and change so quickly. Blue had travelled across south-east Australia in the past year, but mostly at night. She had seen little except the paddocks they camped in.

The train chuffed past a stationmaster’s house, stained with heat and years, limp garden beds of petunias and boxes of dusty geraniums, the children lined up along the fence, waving at the train.

Gertrude put her head out the window and waved back, as though she was Glorious Gloria waving to her audience. She flopped back onto the hard second-class seat opposite Mah and Blue, her eyes bright. ‘We’re going so fast!’

It was so obviously the first time she had been on a train. Maybe she’s never even been on a tram either, thought Blue. It was the first time
she
had sat in second class. ‘Careful putting your head out the window. You don’t want a smut on your face. Or your clean dress either.’

They were pretty dresses, white and trimmed with lace, though with old-fashioned waists instead of the new straight-up-and-down look. Blue’s had a high collar, to hide her scars. The three girls wore patent leather shoes too, slightly cracked with age. Blue’s shoes were a size too big.

‘Wearing the same clothes makes you look like sisters,’ Mrs Olsen had said, as she threaded a blue ribbon into Blue’s hair, then Gertrude’s and Mah’s.

Blue supposed it might, at a casual glance anyway. They all had black hair, though hers was dyed. Gertrude’s skin was naturally darker than hers and Mah’s, but they were all so tanned from days out of doors that no one would notice unless they looked carefully. Both Mah and Gertrude had brown eyes too. But their features were different: Mah’s fine face with its oriental eyes; Gertrude’s face broader and stronger.

Fred had been outfitted in a laboriously starched and ironed white shirt. Mrs Olsen had sweated over the fire as she heated up the iron again and again, but the smooth stiffness helped hide the frayed bits at the collar and cuffs. He wore the circus’s one good pair of men’s shoes, and pressed grey flannel trousers. His bleached-blond hair was neatly oiled. He could never have been taken for their brother, but Blue supposed he could easily be the boyfriend of one of them.

Gertrude patted her still-short hair into place. ‘What’s a smut?’

Blue took her handkerchief from her belt and wiped Gertrude’s cheek. She showed her the black soot. ‘This is. From the engine’s smoke. You can even get a burn from a cinder if you’re not lucky.’

Gertrude touched her cheek in horror. Thinks she might end up looking like me, thought Blue.

‘You look pretty,’ Fred said to Blue softly, as Gertrude shut the window. He always knew when she began to feel hideous again. He let his slow smile wander from her to Mah and Gertrude. ‘You all look bonzer. I’m goin’ to be with the best-looking girls in the whole of Sydney.’

Blue looked at Mah and Gertrude, staring out their respective windows. Both had the straight carriage that resulted from regular exercise, the sort of poise that teachers of deportment strained to teach the more indolent of their wealthier pupils. Yes, they’re beautiful, thought Blue. Maybe I am too, with my scars covered. And Fred is handsome.

She looked out the window again. They passed a factory, its smoke darker than the train’s. She thought fleetingly of Laurence’s factories. Mine, she thought, or partly mine. It hadn’t really sunk in till now. It had always been Willy who was going to take over after Dad. Blue rarely even saw the factories, except for the Christmas parties where she and Mum handed out presents to the workers’ children. Grandpa must be turning in his grave to think a girl might manage the factories.

Could she? There must be another manager now. Maybe she’d only ever get the income. Suddenly she wanted to see the factories again, and the offices too. They were a link to her family. But there was something more.

Factories were … interesting. A challenge like the circus, and for a well-brought-up girl, almost as foreign. Could she ever learn enough to manage them, like Dad had done? Would she even get the chance? Four more years, she thought. What then?

The houses out the window were closer together now. It was strangely fascinating to glimpse bits of other people’s lives through kitchen windows, the curtains open as though they didn’t realise that the train passengers could see in, as well as the dog panting on a back verandah, and vegetable gardens with cabbages, leeks, spinach, the tops of beetroots and carrots.

The houses huddled as though they were afraid, probably of the landlord demanding the rent, thought Blue, thinking of the stories of evictions she had read about in the paper. Then all at once, for a flash, there it was, just as she had seen in the newspaper photographs. Furniture, piled on the road, four policemen struggling against six burly men in the faded pants and shirts of the unemployed, a child, wide-eyed, sitting on the sofa, holding a doll, a woman’s face torn between anger and terror …

… and then the tiny tragedy was gone, the train huffing past a greengrocer’s shop, with boxes of cabbages on one side, and crates of apples on the other.

‘Did you see that?’ whispered Blue.

Mah nodded, her face white.

‘Bloomin’ coppers,’ said Fred. ‘Ain’t none o’ their business if poor sods can’t pay their rent.’

‘Not our business either,’ said Gertrude, as the train arrowed into another tunnel. The outside world vanished in smoke and darkness.

Central Station was — big, thought Blue. Even bigger than Spencer Street Station. Passengers walked purposefully to different platforms, women in fur tippets mingling with girls in faded floral dresses, barefoot boys with others in neat sailor suits. But the men here all wore suits, or at least a jacket, hat and tie. Blue supposed any able-bodied man who didn’t have the money for his train fare would be trying to sneak under the tarpaulin of a goods train instead of being in here, paying for a ticket. She was glad Madame had paid Fred’s fare. He might have jumped the rattler safely a dozen times, but almost every newspaper she was able to find and read spoke of men injured or dying as they jumped off moving trains before a station.

Guards blew their whistles; the rabbitohs yelled their wares, holding up roast rabbits in brown paper bags. Next to one wall a man juggled three oranges behind the sign
I’m doing this for my wife and four children
. Blue longed to give him a penny, or even sixpence, but she didn’t know how much the tickets to the Mammoth might be. Perhaps when we get back, she thought, if he’s still there.

For the first time since she had known her, Gertrude looked almost timid, gazing around at the sheer size of the buildings, the complexity of shops and streets outside. ‘How do we get to the circus?’

‘Taxi,’ said Blue.

Mah smiled. ‘We catch a trolley-bus.’

Three hours later they sat together in the cheap seats towards the back, clutching each other’s hands, all enmity forgotten. For the Mammoth was amazing. They had wandered for hours among the menagerie, the monkeys chattering in cages, reaching out for the peanuts that the customers bought in little white bags from the peanut cart, the lions with tangled manes, prowling back and forth, as though a hundred lengths of their tiny cages could make up for the loss of an African plain to roam on, a bear sitting in an even smaller cage, staring at nothing. Blue dashed tears from her eyes, thinking of Bruin’s ferocious gaze. That is how a bear should look, she thought. Fierce, or happy, or … or something. Anything but the dejected ruin before her.

The sideshows were better, although they didn’t waste their money on trying to throw a hoop over a block, or shoot the ducks that bobbed along in a line at the back of the marquee, or lob a ball at a coconut.

‘Fixed,’ said Fred shortly, then, as Blue looked at him enquiringly, ‘I worked the sideshows back before Madame got herself that new Big Top. Them shotguns have crooked barrels, and the blocks are too big for the hoop.’

Even the clothes of the people milling around them were fascinating. Most wore much the same as they did: faded frocks long out of fashion; trousers that had been taken up and let down; and shirts with collars turned to hide the frayed edges. But there were men in black or grey and blue suits too; men in satin waistcoats; women in silk or linen dresses that finished daringly just above their knees, showing silk stockings and good leather shoes that matched the colour of the frocks, long strings of dangling pearls, pearl earrings, gold bracelets … Blue smiled to herself, wondering if any of the jewellery would have caught Sheba’s eye.

The cheapest tickets cost three shillings each. A ringside seat cost a whole guinea. They found a spot in the front of the cheap seats, then moved when a woman in a big purple hat blocked their view, then moved again when a man built like a dunny sat in front of them. At last they found seats looking over the heads of children, and simply stared.

The ring was at least six times as large as theirs, thickly spread with fresh sawdust, with two hinged places on either side so it could be divided into two smaller rings. The barrier between the audience and the performers was painted alternately with cowboys and Indians and jungle scenes with an unlikely miscellany of tigers, hippopotami and giraffes, each scene fresh as if they were regularly touched up, not even a few of the inevitable scratches that happened when the equipment was regularly dismantled and put up again.

The circus began.

No dimmed lights to create an atmosphere here. The Mammoth Circus began with noise: a German marching band, distant at first, so the audience rose in the seats with anticipation.
Oompah oompah
, in they marched, the band all in formation, in blue shirts and flowered braces and dark brown leather shorts, with red socks and neat brown boots below.

A bandwagon followed, trimmed in green and gold, carrying Negro musicians in red-and-white-striped uniforms playing trumpets and trombones.

The ring was so big that the band and bandwagon were only halfway around when the first of the horses appeared: sixty of them, counted Blue, each one pure white, each with an equestrienne in a pink camisole and frilled pink skirt sitting sideways on its silky white back; then ten elephants, every one of them more than twice the size of Sheba; clowns, leaping and somersaulting, assorted small dogs with jewelled collars or ruffs at their necks cavorting around them; the ringmaster, his brilliantined hair and moustache shining in the footlights, proper footlights, not just four lights hauled up on pulleys …

Blue glanced at Gertrude. She expected wide-eyed amazement. Instead Gertrude’s gaze was intent. She is studying this, thought Blue. Mah and I are just enjoying it, and Fred too. Yes, Gertrude was truly circus, and they were not.

The Wild West horse act was first: four cowboys in leather chaps and tall, brimmed hats that somehow never fell off. The men stood on two cantering horses at a time, one foot on each rump, cracking their whips as the band kept playing.

Clowns in white overalls and red pom-poms ran out to divide the ring in two, then dragged out two big cages. One held a tiger, who lay down at his master’s command, opened his mouth, and let the man put his head between the giant teeth before being rewarded with a hunk of red meat. In the other ring the lion tamer yelled and lashed his whip till the cowed and resentful big cats finally crept up onto their stools in the cage, and sat growling at the crowd through the bars.

Three men on a tightrope with balancing poles; one on the slack rope (even harder to walk on a slack rope than a tight one, whispered Gertrude) walking slowly back and forth — and then a gasp as he steadied himself and somersaulted, landing somehow on the fine wire again.

That was when Gertrude clutched Blue’s hand. ‘It’s impossible,’ she whispered. ‘He can’t see the wire when he’s in the air. Except he’s done it.’ Her voice was full of wonder.

Intermission, with ice creams as well as peanuts, lollies and apples. Blue shook her head when Mah looked at her hopefully. ‘They’re all only half the price back at the station.’

They ate their sandwiches instead. One day I’ll buy us anything we want, thought Blue. Not just ice creams. An automobile for Fred. She bet he’d like that. And Mah … no, not an extravagant gift for Mah. Mah had lived on charity most of her life. The friend who had saved her deserved a share in her inheritance, to do whatever she chose with it.

Would that be the circus, if Mah had a choice? She glanced at the others, chewing their cheese sandwiches, Fred eyeing one of the young women in the next row, Mah gazing at the fashions, Gertrude silent, intent, waiting for the next part of the show to begin. Perhaps, she thought, but not forever, nor for me either. It’s fun. But it’s not the heart of our lives, like it is with Gertrude.