Circus of Thieves and the Raffle of Doom (3 page)

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.)

L
ATER 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 Irrrrrrena
⁸
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).