Circus of Thieves on the Rampage (8 page)

H
ANNAH AND GRANNY WERE ALSO
heading in the direction of the middle of nowhere, though via a different route, which took them over
hill and down dale and through forests and along rivers and above crevasses and up cliffs and over mountains and between crags and across lakes and around sinkholes and beneath overhangs and down
ski slopes and past bogs and alongside quick-sands and into motorway service stations. Hannah and Granny did not have a satnav.

There was one other key difference between Hannah’s and Billy’s journeys to the Oh, Wow! Centre. Hannah and Granny didn’t travel in silence. They chatted and chatted and
chatted, in particular about one particular question (the one valued by market experts at £621,920) that had been bothering Hannah ever since the strange details of her origins had been
revealed to her.

As always, Hannah got straight to the point.

‘Granny,’ she said, from the back seat of the mountain tandem, ‘something’s bothering me. I need to know. Am I a civilian?’

As always, Granny’s answer started off heading towards the point before taking a serious diversion to somewhere else entirely. Yes, soon enough it was seaweed and old trainers time, as
Granny responded to what seemed like a simple question with a long and complicated rummage through events that happened way back in the olden days. This time, she didn’t go back to when
Hannah was born, and she didn’t go back to when Hannah’s mothers were born, she went even further back than that, to when Granny herself was a sprightly young thing, fresh and minty and
pure.

‘You see, back then I was a trapeze artist myself,’ she said.

‘You were WHAT?!!!’

‘I was an aerial artiste. And not a bad one, either. That’s where I met your grandfather, God rest his soul. You never even met him. He was a wonderful man.’

‘He was in the circus, too?’

‘No, he was an accountant. Like your father. Your father at home, I mean. Not the father we’re looking for. But he loved the circus, and when I did a fourteen-night run in Birmingham
he came every night and sat in the front row eating a truly enormous candy floss, and as soon as I spotted him I knew he was the man for me. And he was.’

‘What happened to him?’

‘Well, he was a very good accountant, but he didn’t really want to be. A few years after the twins started school, he decided to chuck in his job and reinvent himself as a tightrope
walker. Thing is, balance wasn’t his strong point. In fact, he could barely even ride a bike. Which is much more serious when you’re a tightrope walker than when you’re an
accountant. I can’t talk about it without feeling weepy and vomitous, but he died doing what he loved, so we must cling to that for comfort.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ said Hannah. ‘I never knew.’

‘We kept a lot of things from you, my love. Maybe we shouldn’t have. But we thought it would be too much for you when you were small. You see, I gave it all up when I was pregnant
with the twins. Until your mother came along, nobody thought pregnancy and trapeze artistry went together. And, of course, once the twins came, I knew I couldn’t go back. Part of me wanted
to, but it’s a hard life with children. Being on the road all the time. And your grandfather had a job. He had to stay put. So I walked away. Left it behind. Or, at least, I thought I did.
But when it comes to children, and grandchildren, things from your past have a habit of popping back up again.’

‘So Grandad was a civilian, but you’re not. You’re circus.’

‘That’s right. I’ve spent most of my life trying to be a civilian, but it’s not really me. In my heart, that’s not who I am.’

‘But what about your circus friends? Did you just forget about them?’

‘I tried to. A few of them visited sometimes, but we mostly drifted apart. They couldn’t understand why I chose what I chose, why I married out of the circus, and I don’t think
I wanted to be reminded of the life that I’d abandoned. There’s only one who I stayed close to. She was my protégée, and I still adore her, and you’re about to meet
her.’

‘What’s a protégée?’

‘It’s a young person who’s learning to do what you do, and you teach her. Nurture her. Pass down your knowledge to the next generation. It was so long ago, though, that my
protégée is middle-aged herself now. She probably has her own protégée. Or is looking for one.’

‘Is this . . . ?’

‘Queenie Bombazine. From the second I met her, I saw star quality. She hardly knew one end of a trapeze from another back then, but she already had something special. If there were twenty
people on stage, it was always her you found yourself looking at. She shone. It was as if she was lit up from the inside. You’re going to love her.’

‘You still haven’t answered my question. Am I a civilian?’

‘Strictly speaking, you’re a mix. But it always seemed to me it was Grandad’s genes that got through to your aunt and mine that went into your mother. Wendy was half civilian,
but you’d never know it. Wanda’s half circus, but you really wouldn’t know that, either. Maybe it hasn’t even got anything to do with genes. They just always wanted to be
opposites, both of them. The wilder Wendy got, the more cautious Wanda became, and the more cautious Wanda became, the more Wendy wanted to go wild. Siblings are often like that.’

‘And my father? I mean my fathers? I mean the one I thought was my father until yesterday is a civilian, but he’s not my birth father. And the other two who might be my real father,
whichever one it is, they’re both circus, aren’t they? So I’m circus! I’m almost completely circus!’

‘You can’t be cut and dried about these things, but I have to say it’s always looked to me like that’s what you are. Your mother – your aunt-mother – she
tried her best to raise you as a civilian, but frankly it was an uphill struggle. And it really didn’t take, did it?’

‘I knew it!
KERCHOO
it!
BAZOO IT! HULLABALOO
it!’ All her life Hannah had felt somehow
different
, in a way that always worried her. She found it hard to concentrate at school, hard to concentrate at home, and even quite hard to concentrate on walking from home to school and
back again. Nothing clicked. But now Granny had told her she really was different – different in the precise way she most wanted to be different – and this was the most joyous,
uplifting, thrilling relief.

In all the excitement of having her dearest wish confirmed, Hannah found it almost impossible to sit still.

‘Hannah, dear, why don’t you get down. I don’t think tandems are designed to be ridden by standing on the saddle,’ said Granny, patiently.

‘What about like this?’

‘That’s very good, but I don’t think standing on one leg makes it any safer.’

‘Safety shmafety. I’m going to try a handstand.’

Granny pedalled on wearily. She’d seen it all before, twenty or so years earlier, on this very tandem, with Hannah’s mother. It was following an unhappy tandem ride shared by the
twins, during which Wendy had insisted on attempting a tandem wheelie down a staircase, that Wanda had decided on a career in health and safety enforcement.

The twins, after that day, were never close. Even once Wanda was out of her casts, she never really trusted Wendy again.

But, of course, Wanda did raise her child. Because however hard it is to get on, however different you may be, a sister is still a sister.

So Hannah and Granny pedalled onwards, towards the Oh, Wow! Centre, Hannah’s heart beating to a new, jazzy beat now that she knew she was circus. It had been a quite extraordinary
birthday. She had learned that her mother wasn’t her mother; that she had an aunt she never even knew existed who was actually her real mother; that her real mother was dead; that her granny
was a former trapeze artist; and that Billy was either her brother or her half-brother. It was all rather a lot to take in.

‘This must be rather a lot to take in,’ said Granny, sympathetically.

Freaky.

‘Are you a mind-reader, too?’ said Hannah, who did not like the idea of this one little bit.

‘No, dear,’ said Granny, ‘I just know what you’re thinking.’

‘Then you are a mind-reader.’

Granny stopped the bike and turned to face Hannah. ‘I’m not, because I can only do it with you, and I can only do it sometimes,’ she replied, looking at her through those
penetrating blue eyes that Hannah suddenly realised were exactly like her own. Granny smiled, with lips that Hannah noticed were strikingly similar to her own lips, and the chunky tandem fell to
the ground as the two of them toppled into a big, soppy hug. In among all the crazy and exciting and weird and scary changes that had crashed into Hannah’s life today, the most important
thing she had learned was that Granny was still her granny.

‘Yuk!’ shouted the bike. ‘Hugs!!! I hate hugs! Stop it right now or I’ll do a big chunky puke on your shoes.’

They ignored the bike and finished their hug.

‘I’m all muddy now,’ ranted the bike, ‘but I don’t even care! I can’t even feel it. I could be ten times as muddy as this and I wouldn’t even feel a
thing!’

Granny then did something surprising. She dashed to the nearest tree, faster than Hannah had ever seen her move, scampered up the trunk, tiptoed to the end of a long, high branch, jumped off,
caught the branch with her hands, swung back, then forward, then back, then all the way round, before letting go, somersaulting through the air, and landing neatly in front of Hannah.

Hannah’s mouth opened, but no sound came out.

Granny picked up the bike and got on. ‘I’m terribly out of practice,’ she said, ‘but it’s fun to dust off the old skills once in a while.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you show me before?’ stammered Hannah.

‘Oh, the past is the past,’ replied Granny, casually. ‘No point dwelling on things.’

‘That was
incredible
!’

Granny shrugged, and off they went.

After a short while, the bike chipped in, sulkily, ‘I could do that. If I had hands. Easy. No sweat.’

T
HE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE PREPARED
carefully for Queenie Bombazine’s arrival. Kelvin Pype had ensured that no stone was left
unturned in getting everything perfect for the arrival of his heroine. As soon as he took the booking, he’d called a meeting for all the staff and said to them: ‘Big news! Queenie
Bombazine’s coming to perform! Go outside and turn over all the stones!’

After the mammoth stone-turning exercise, there were lots of other arrangements to arrange, preparations to prepare, plans to plan, measures to measure, fixings to fix and organs to organise.
The finest suite in the Oh, Wow! hotel was set aside and plumbed in with three extra baths; a football-pitch-sized area of car park was cordoned off for Queenie’s vans, caravans, vanacans and
vanacanavanacanavans; the seating was rearranged to point towards a ring in the middle of the arena; lighting was rigged up; sound was checked; and everybody went for a haircut, because they all
wanted to look super-good when they met the legendary aerialiste. Most importantly, of course, the Oh, Wow! Centre was flooded.