Circus of Thieves and the Raffle of Doom (5 page)

This is what he did at the weekend, anyway. From Monday to Friday he worked as an accountant, which basically means that he did maths all day, every day. Just the thought of this gave Hannah the
wollycobbles.
¹⁴
Hannah’s mum, by the way, was a Health and Safety Consultant, which means that she spent all day, every day, teaching people how to
be more cautious, unadventurous and fearful. I won’t go on about this topic, since I don’t want to be a gloombucket, but suffice to say, Hannah was something of a disappointment to her
parents.

Hannah decided that the only way to avoid getting told off again was to run back up to her room. She looked in the mirror and began to practise Billy’s mysterious-visitor/jellyfish-attack
face, inventing a couple of significant improvements, which she decided she could show him later if the conversation flagged.

She pulled down the skin under her right eye and examined the crescent of pink flesh this exposed.
I diagnose
, she thought to herself, in a doctory voice,
an advanced case of SHD:
Summer Holiday Disorder
.

SYMPTOMS:
Listlessness; boredom; more boredom; lack of ideas; inertia; apathy; feebleness of the imagination; dislike of all human beings;
disinterest in all objects; hatred of the outdoor, the indoors, and doors in general; sleepiness; insomnia; boredom, boredom and more boredom.

CURE:
There is no cure. Apart from teleporting yourself out of your boring life into the life of someone more interesting than yourself.

PROBLEM WITH THIS CURE:
There’s no such thing as teleporting.

At this moment, thinking about teleporting, thinking about other lives lived by other people, something went
pfffzinggg!
in Hannah’s brain. Her eyes darted
towards the clock beside her bed, on which she was ecstatic to see the numbers 1,1,5 and 3. Yes, it was 11:53. She stared, transfixed, and waited.

Several aeons later, the time was 12:01. That, technically, was the afternoon. She could visit Billy now, without appearing desperate or overkeen. In fact, she’d be at least one minute
late, which would seem kind of cool and easy-going.

On second thoughts, or six hundred and ninety-eighth thoughts, depending on whether you start counting at 12:01 or at the beginning of her SHD flopfest, Hannah decided that perhaps the best
thing would be to take a roundabout route to a hidden spot at the edge of the park, and just see what the circus people were up to. Then she’d be able to pick her moment and casually turn up
when Billy wasn’t too busy for her. If she was there, rather than in her room, at least she wouldn’t be bored. And if Billy really was too busy, she could always talk to Narcissus. With
this in mind, she loaded up her pockets with carrots (which looked like the best option from the fridge for a camel; better, at least, than Cheddar, taramasalata or leftover baked beans) and set
off.

It was a hot day. But that’s enough about the weather.

Moments after leaving the house, she heard the faint
click-clack
of dog claws against pavement. There, at her side, was Fizzer. His tail was up, in that perky but aloof fashion unique
to him, which seemed to mean, ‘What kept you? It’s 12:03 already.’

‘Where did you spring from?’ said Hannah.

Fizzer didn’t answer, partly because he liked to retain his air of mystery, and partly because he was a dog, and therefore couldn’t talk.
¹⁵

‘Let’s go,’ she said. ‘What do you think Billy’s up to?’

Again, Fizzer kept his opinions to himself.

Once she had reached the park, Hannah, who was a highly skilled tree climber, took up a perch in her favourite twisty oak, from which she had a perfect vantage point looking over the
preparations for the night’s performance.

Fizzer, who did not count tree climbing among his list of talents, stayed at the bottom of the trunk, which he proceeded to sniff with great interest.

The Big Top was already up, and it was, as you might expect, big. It was made of red and white stripy fabric which made the whole thing look like the world’s largest sweet. All the
performers were streaming in and out of the enormous lorry, carrying props and costumes and lights and microphones and cables and large wooden crates. Everyone moved fast and smoothly, seeming to
know exactly what should go where without any discussion. The whole operation was impressively efficient, which wasn’t a word Hannah had previously associated with circuses.

She stared at this ballet of heavy lifting, riveted. Not literally. I’m not suggesting that a ship-builder arrived and riveted her to the tree. It is illegal to rivet people to trees, and
for good reason. The point is that Hannah found this process, the setting-up of the circus, enthralling. In fact although other people might have seen it as just a line of weirdly dressed people
unloading a lorry Hannah thought it was one of the most beautiful and fascinating endeavours she had ever witnessed. There was something about that combination of anarchy and organisation, of freedom and togetherness, that looked to her like a vision of the perfect way to live.

Her life at the moment contained no anarchy, not much organisation, hardly any freedom and precious little togetherness. If she could have teleported herself into somebody else’s life, she
knew who she’d choose. Billy. Without a moment’s hesitation, without a shadow of a doubt, without a flicker of indecision. Billy’s life was the life she wanted.

Hannah was not the complaining sort, but if you had offered her ten words to describe the town where she lived, she would have chosen dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull and
dull. She didn’t know how she knew it, or why she thought it, or what it really meant, but for as long as she could remember Hannah had felt, in the core of her being, that she’d been
born into the wrong family in the wrong place in the wrong house with the wrong friends and the wrong clothes and the wrong bedroom and, oh, you get the point. Things just felt
wrong
.
Hannah loved life, but she’d always been haunted by a curious sense that the life she had was not the life she was meant to have.

Fizzer looked up at Hannah with a worried expression on his face, not because he thought she might fall out of the tree, but because he knew this was a momentous moment. He knew he was lookng up
at a girl who was losing her heart. Not in a soppy way, not in a romantic way, not even to a person, but to an idea.

Life is long and contains many twists and turns. Fizzer could see that Hannah, up in that tree, was in the middle of a particularly twisty turn. At this instant, she was seeing, for the first
time, where life was going to take her. (Or, if you prefer, where she was going to take her life.)

How did Fizzer know this?

Because he did. Because he was that kind of dog, and he understood Hannah better than her parents (which wasn’t very hard), better than her friends (which wasn’t particularly hard,
either), better even, perhaps, than Hannah understood herself (which was a significant achievement for a canine, but Fizzer, as you know, was special). He also sensed that this twisty turn was
something Hannah needed to discover by herself, so he wandered off to investigate a nearby bush.

When the lorry was fully unloaded, the unloaders disappeared into the tent, and Hannah turned her attention to Billy. He wasn’t part of the lifting and carrying operation. He was circling
around the Big Top, hammering in metal pegs with a huge mallet and attaching guy ropes, which he then tightened with something that looked like a crowbar. Hannah found herself wondering if he might
like some help, and also if there was such a thing as a Small Top.

She swung herself down from the oak and sauntered over. Sauntering was something she had been practising lately, and she felt she’d got rather good at it, but Billy didn’t seem to
notice.

‘Oh, hi,’ he said, sounding pleased to see her (but not too pleased, or not pleased enough).

‘You want a hand?’ she said.

‘Are you any good with a sledgehammer?’

‘Not sure. Doesn’t look too hard.’

‘Have a go.’

Hannah grabbed the hammer, gripping it tightly as she realised that it would take all her strength to lift it off the ground. Summoning every ounce of muscle-power, she swung her arms and raised
the hammer high above her head. It had looked easy when she watched Billy. But there was obviously an knack, an element of momentum that was crucial to the whole procedure, because no sooner did
the hammer go up, than it seemed to decide on its own to go down again, without any negotiation as to where it was going to land. The hammer crashed to the ground, behind Hannah, dragging her down
with it, flat on her back.

‘You OK?’ asked Billy.

‘
Hhhhh gggg khkhkhkh
,’ Hannah replied. It wasn’t easy to get words out when you’d just lost a wrestling match with a chunk of metal on a stick.

‘It’s harder than it looks. How about I do the hammering and you do the guy ropes?’

‘Good plan,’ said Hannah, standing and dusting herself down.

Billy swung and whacked, with easy skill, and Hannah followed him round the tent, tightening and tugging. They moved much faster than Billy had managed on his own, and he thanked her for her
help with a pat on the arm that almost knocked her over again. He was small, but stronger than he looked.

‘I brought something for Narcissus,’ said Hannah, pulling a pair of carrots from her pocket.

‘That’s very nice of you,’ said Billy, ‘except for one thing.’

‘What?’

‘He hates carrots. Detests them. Loathes them. If you so much as show him a carrot, he goes mental.’

‘Really? What does he eat, then?’

‘Pellets.’

‘Pellets of what?’

‘Don’t know. Stuff. They look almost the same as his poo, which is weird.’

‘Don’t you ever give him a treat?’

‘Oh, yeah. It sounds strange, but his favourite treats are Cheddar, baked beans and taramasalata.’

‘You’re kidding! But that’s . . . !’

‘That’s what?’

‘Never mind. Hard to explain.’

‘I love them, though,’ said Billy.

‘What?’

‘Carrots.’ With that, he took both vegetables from Hannah and bit the tops off with one double-carrot-biting munch.

‘I haven’t peeled them,’ she said. ‘Or washed them.’

‘Oh, a bit of mud never killed anyone. Adds to the flavour if you ask me.’

Billy swallowed, and was about to take another double-carrot bite, when his face suddenly froze. He doubled over, grabbing his stomach, then lurched upright again. His face was red, his eyes
squeezed tight shut, his mouth open in a silent howl of horror. He froze for a moment, then his whole body began to spasm, twitch, leap, flop, flip and flap, while his throat emitted a series of
splutters, gurgles and chokes. It didn’t take Hannah long to realise that Billy was dying.

Not really dying.

Pretending to die. It was an impressive performance, which came to a climax with Billy flat on his back on the grass, while each limb one by one shuffled off this mortal coil.
¹⁶

‘Not bad,’ said Hannah.

Billy didn’t answer, which perhaps wasn’t very surprising given that he was dead.

Hannah walked over and gave him a poke. He didn’t respond, so she lifted his carrot-holding arm, which remained limp, and took a bite from the carrots that he was still gripping.

‘Nice,’ she said, chomping noisily. ‘Delicious.’
Munch munch munch
. ‘Crunchy.’
Crunch crunch crunch
. ‘Chewy.’
Chew chew
chew
. ‘But a bit . . . a bit . . .’
choke, cough splutter
‘a bit . . . a bit . . .’
gasp spit, wheeze,
‘a bit . . . ’
pant, heave,
convulse,
‘a bit . . . MUUDDDYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!’

Hannah gave a full minute to her ‘I can’t breathe’ routine, before launching into a beached fish number which involved lying flat on the ground, flailing every part of the body
that can be flailed and a few that usually can’t. After this, she went into a kind of electric shock full-body breakdown that involved grunting, mouth-frothing, tongue-waggling, eye-rolling
and a fair amount of human pogo-sticking. When she felt she’d hit a dramatic peak she stopped, went rigid, and toppled to the ground like a felled tree.