The Trapeze Artist Page 24

  He clears his throat.

  ‘Paul?’ he says.

  He returned to school the following week. ‘It’ll be good for you,’ declared his mum, in a voice that brooked no refusal. He didn’t refuse. Whether he was in his bedroom or the classroom it would make no difference. His exams were approaching, and he knew she was worried that he would fail them because of what had happened, and he knew that she was right to be worried because he probably would. Certainly he did not care about passing them. But the next morning he took his backpack out and got his books together, and went downstairs at breakfast time.

  ‘Oh – you’re ready!’

  She sounded surprised and pleased, and she smiled at him and hurried to pour him a cup of tea and put on some toast. Eat up, she told him brightly, and she would give him a lift on her way to work. He saw she was relieved, and had taken his readiness as a positive sign.

  At school he hovered for a few seconds in the doorway to the classroom, overcome with horror at the sight of where he used to sit with Edward, at the empty seats – the unthinkable knowledge that one of them would remain empty. But then the bell went and a press of bodies propelled him inside, and before he could sit there someone else had claimed the space, and he found himself instead forced to sit at a desk close to the back, not far from where Katy sat. He could feel himself being studied by the others – their eyes combing over him, awed into silence by the knowledge of what had happened even as they were galvanised by their curiosity.

  ‘Oi, gay boy,’ hissed a voice from behind him finally. ‘Who you gonna hang round with now your bum chum ain’t around?’

  The boy followed his comment with a giggle. He did not turn.

  ‘Shut the fuck up,’ he heard another kid say.

  The teacher arrived before the other boy could retort. He saw her looking at him and knew from her expression she had been briefed about how to handle him. The teacher did not pick on him once throughout the lesson, or ask him to do any reading out loud. He was the last to leave the classroom and on his way out she cast him a look and a sympathetic smile, and there was something so awful about it that he could do nothing but duck his head and hurry out of the room.

  In the corridor he ran straight into Katy, who had been told to stay behind along with two boys because they would not stop whispering while the teacher was talking. He tried to go past them but Katy stood in his way.

  ‘So,’ Katy said, stabbing his chest with her index finger. ‘We heard you killed your boyfriend. Nice work – murderer.’

  He stared at her.

  ‘How come they let you back to school anyway?’ she continued. ‘Shouldn’t you be in prison or something getting arse-raped? I bet you’d like that though, wouldn’t you? Is that why you did it? So you could go to prison and get arse-raped?’

  She wore a huge grin, the faces of the boys behind her had mirroring grins.

  ‘Fuck off,’ he said, sounding dead to his own ears.

  Katy shook her head from side to side in an exaggerated style.

  ‘Murderer!’

  ‘I do beg your pardon!’

  The teacher had appeared at the door with her arms folded and a scowl on her face. Instantly Katy lost her grin and looked at the floor.

  ‘Get inside – now!’ the teacher barked.

  He took off down the corridor before the teacher could give him another of her looks or say anything about how he should just ignore the others. He hurried up the stairs to the room where the first set, the brainy kids, were taught. They were just coming out, and he waited for Paul to surface, but soon everyone had gone and he had not emerged. He peered inside through the little window in the door in case Paul was still packing up his things, but the room was empty.

  He skipped the rest of school and went walking around town instead, avoiding the places where he might run into people who knew him. He came back towards the end of the day and waited on the climbing frame in the playground, watching the main doors intently. When the bell rang both doors opened and kids streamed out in a torrent. Soon it had slowed to a trickle and within half an hour nobody but the staff was leaving the school. Still there was no sign of Paul.

  Once Paul has got over the shock of seeing him and has accepted his vague muffled explanation, something that requires Paul to perform a sort of dance around him and prod him and then pinch himself, he tells him he can stay as long as he likes.

  ‘I just don’t believe it!’ Paul keeps exclaiming. ‘Blanket silence for months and suddenly here you are! I mean, talk about taking a walk on the wild side. You ran away and joined a fucking circus!’

  Paul’s flat is much nicer than the outside of it suggests. It is small but expensively decorated, with red fleur-de-lis wallpaper, leather upholstery and art deco mirrors etched with traceries of leaves and soulful Grecian women. As he shows him to a tiny guest room that contains nothing but a skylight and a single bed, Paul tells him proudly that he will be the owner by the end of the year.

  ‘Sorry,’ Paul apologises, as he sits down on the bed, ‘I haven’t finished doing it up.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he says. ‘It’s wonderful.’

  ‘It’s a dive,’ corrects Paul. ‘But you’re welcome. Hey – did you have a bag with you?’

  He shakes his head, and watches Paul’s mouth drop open again as he explains he does not have any belongings.

  ‘But . . . your clothes?’

  ‘I borrowed someone else’s while I was – on the road.’

  ‘OK,’ says Paul, obviously struggling with this concept more than the idea of him joining a circus. ‘Well, darling, those rags need to be darned, or else maybe burned. I’ll dig around my wardrobe and see if I’ve got some old thing that’s your size.’

  Paul vanishes and he sits down on the bed with a heavy sigh. He has all but forgotten the luxury of a proper mattress. He realises he wants nothing more than to lie back against the pillow and close his eyes again, to sink into blissful oblivion. He thinks about Big Pete and wonders what he is doing – if he is still there, in the big top, sitting huddled at the centre of the ring with a case of beer, getting drunk and reflective. Then he thinks about the clown and where he might be – already drunk no doubt, and probably getting drunker, perhaps in some bar, or else in his caravan parked at the side of a field on the edge of some obscure town. Finally he thinks about Vlad, imagines him in the air at that very moment, swinging back and forth on the trapeze, releasing his hands and catching the ropes with his ankles to breathless applause from below. He tries to imagine someone like himself watching the aerialist from a hole in the curtain backstage, waiting with water and to rub his sore muscles and assure him that he was amazing. The image is strikingly clear.

  ‘Here you are, my lovely.’

  Paul stands in the doorway brandishing two glasses of red wine, a bundle of clothing over one arm which he somehow manages to toss onto the bed without spilling a drop. Paul sits down on the edge of the mattress beside him and holds out one of the glasses.

  ‘Come along now,’ says Paul in the manner of someone taking charge of a situation. ‘Time for you to give Paulie the whole story.’

  The weak morning light created pale shadows over the carpet as he crept along the landing and then, very carefully, began to descend the stairs. From the sitting room he could hear static from the radio and the telltale sounds of Radio 4, and his mother chewing her breakfast and the local paper rustling as she turned its pages. He went to the table and opened the drawer for the phone book. Fumbling he opened it and ran his thumb down the list of names until he found the number he wanted. Then, with a shaking hand, he lifted the phone.

  It rang for a few seconds.

  ‘Hello?’ said Paul.

  Suddenly he couldn’t bring himself to speak.

  ‘Hello? Who is this please?’

  Paul sounded completely normal, as if everything was right with the world.

  ‘Paul?’

  There was a pause. It seemed to him he could almost feel the shock
settle over Paul as he realised who it was.

  ‘I’m not supposed to talk to you,’ Paul said eventually. His voice had changed to flat and mechanical-sounding – empty of any feeling. ‘Mum said.’

  ‘What are you on about?’ he cried. ‘Paul, where have you been? I waited for you at school . . .’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because –’

  He did not know. He only knew that there was something he needed, and that for some reason Paul was the only one who could give it to him.

  ‘I don’t go there any more. I’ve moved to St John’s.’

  ‘What?!’

  ‘I’m not supposed to talk to you,’ Paul repeated in his dull voice.

  ‘Why did it have to happen?’ he heard himself demanding. ‘Why?’

  He sobbed, and felt a stunned silence permeate the line. For a while the whole world seemed to have gone quiet, and all that remained was the sound of his own grunts and gasps. Then there was another voice in the background, one which said, ‘Who is it, Paul?’ He heard the phone being transferred and Paul’s mother came on the line.

  ‘Hello? Can I help you?’ she said.

  He sniffed, sucking back up his outburst, microscopic shudders running through his body from the effort of not collapsing.

  ‘Don’t call here again,’ said Paul’s mum quietly. ‘He’s got nothing to say to you and neither have I. You should deal with your own conscience and leave Paul alone.’

  With these words she put the phone down. He stood there in the hall for a long time listening to the dialing tone.

  ‘Sweet mother of all that’s holy,’ says Paul eventually, after he has given him a short rundown of all that has happened to him in the past four months. He smiles. It feels as though he has been talking about someone else, as if he is telling his story from an outside perspective. It is edited of course, does not and cannot contain all the information. The emotions have been censored, as if they were merely by the by and not the crucial underlying element that dictated the various chapters of his tale. He takes a sip of the wine and wonders if Paul believes him. It has all sounded incredible to his own ears, too incredible, and sitting there in Paul’s nice flat he could almost believe it never happened.

  ‘Darling!’ Paul declares. ‘You have outdone us all. I salute you.’

  Paul raises his glass and he raises his glass in return and they clink them together. He cannot help his face flushing, partly from pride and partly from the simple bolt of happiness that comes from being praised for his adventure.

  ‘So why, darling?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why did you do it? What was the straw that broke the camel’s back?’

  He is pulled up short by the question, and glances up to find Paul is not smiling any more but peering at him intently. Paul genuinely wants to understand, he thinks.

  ‘I suppose maybe I was having some sort of a nervous breakdown,’ he hears himself say, grinning stupidly at the words as they come out of his mouth, for they sound like a line from a play or a film, not something you openly admit to in an ordinary conversation. ‘I saw the circus and I chased after it. At the time it seemed like the only thing I could do.’

  Paul nods, but now he is frowning.

  ‘And what about your dear mama?’

  He swallows. The mere mention of her creates a fissure of guilt, one that threatens to become an abyss.

  ‘I haven’t spoken to her since I left.’

  Paul absorbs this information seriously. For a minute he almost expects Paul to start admonishing him, telling him what he already knows – that he is selfish and thoughtless and that his mother must be half out of her mind. But instead Paul lets out a short sharp laugh.

  ‘So you finally severed the old umbilical cord!’ he crows. ‘We must celebrate immediately!’

  He will pass the night badly, waking up in hot sweats and tearing off his T-shirt, only to find himself shivering and clammy just moments later. His breathing will become unnaturally heavy and stilted. Eventually he will rise and wander the house in the darkness, feeling his way from room to room like a blind man. When he comes to the kitchen he will reach out and take the rope and then, almost as if in his sleep, he will feel himself begin to climb, and then he will be sitting on the trapeze, swaying gently to and fro in the gloom.

  He will sit there for hours, adjusting his position now and then as the bar digs into his buttocks and thighs. The sun will begin to rise and with it will come the realisation that he has indeed been waiting for something, and that furthermore the time for that something has finally come.

  He will descend from the trapeze and pull the lid off the dustbin. There on top of the rubbish will be the torn fragments of the piece of paper on which Sue wrote her number, and he will fit them back together as if they were a jigsaw and lay them out on the table. Satisfied, he will go upstairs and sleep soundly until midday.

  When he wakes he will feel warm and contented, almost euphorically at ease. He will rise and go immediately downstairs and collect the pieces of paper. He will go through to the hall, plug in the phone and dial the number.

  She will pick up almost immediately.

  ‘Hello, Sue speaking.’

  At the sound of her high-pitched sing-song he will feel a spear of doubt, and will stand there deliberating over whether or not simply to put the phone back down again. Then, remembering his difficult night, he will take a breath.

  ‘I’d like to do it,’ he will say.

  Dusky orange lights swirl against dark walls, illuminating the people sitting around the various booths so dimly they are turned into ghostly clusters of moving shadow. Only when someone walks to the bar is he lit fully, a face flaring up out of the darkness as if someone has struck a match beneath it. He has an uneasy thought that the atmosphere is almost like being in an abattoir, surrounded by strung-up carcasses.

  ‘I think I’m going to call it a night,’ he says.

  ‘What?’ Paul stares at him, the whites of his eyes shining in the gloom. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, we just got here!’

  ‘I have a headache.’

  ‘Darling, that’s because you’ve hardly drunk anything.’

  ‘No – really,’ he says uncomfortably, but Paul is taking his arm, motioning to a friend over in the corner talking to a series of homologous shapes, a homologous shape himself.

  ‘Come along now,’ says Paul coquettishly. ‘We need to find you someone. You’re not getting any younger and a fact is a fact – no one loves a fairy when she’s forty.’

  He submits and allows himself to be led back to the bar where Paul orders two beers and two tequila shots, takes his hand and squeezes lime juice on the knuckle followed by salt and makes him lick it, do the shot and wedge the lime rind into his teeth. His mouth prickles, his head swims and his throat smarts – but it is a good smarting. Paul is right, he does feel better, like someone who has had the sense slapped back into them.

  ‘Over there. He’s looking,’ says Paul. ‘Show some teeth.’

  He does but it is a sheepish smile, and the man seems to be turned off by it because he looks away and resumes his conversation with the silhouette beside him.

  ‘Prick,’ Paul supplies.

  Paul leads him back to the table where his friend is and he finds himself inserted between the friend and a skinny man in a white vest with beautiful big eyes. Both ignore him and continue talking to one another, something he feels is just as well as he can hardly hear anything over the music, and is amazed they are even able to conduct a conversation. Every so often Paul catches his eye and smiles at him, and he is touched by his concern and tries to make an effort to look like he is having a good time. But really he wishes he was elsewhere, and if there was anywhere else for him to go, he knows he would leave.

  They are joined by more people and everyone squeezes up into the booth to let more bodies sit down. He finds his thigh firmly pressed against the skinny man’s, but the skinny man does not acknowledge that they are touching. He
concentrates on drinking his beer and before he knows it the bottle is empty and Paul’s friend is asking if he wants another. He nods and mouths the words ‘thank you’, and the friend glances at Paul, as if agreeing on something they have previously discussed. While the friend is gone the skinny man finally notices him and asks him something he doesn’t catch.

  ‘Sorry?’

  The man repeats himself.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m deaf, I didn’t catch that!’ he bellows.

  The skinny man nods, seemingly amused and leans over. For a second he thinks he is going to kiss him, but then the man cups his ear and says, ‘You’re the guy from the circus, right?’

  ‘Right,’ he says.

  ‘Cool. What was it like?’

  He is going to tell him but at this point the friend returns with their beers and the skinny man loses interest. He smiles to himself and looks away, and finds that he is being checked out again by the man who was looking earlier. This time the man grins at him. He is thickset and has a shaven head, and even at a distance and in the murk of the club his teeth look flawless and unnaturally white, almost like the teeth of a vampire. He ignores the instinct to look away and stares back. Then he nods at the man, and the man nods too. As if in harmony they both rise up from their tables.

  As the days went by he felt himself go through the motions of living – eating meals, going to school, doing homework, watching television, going to bed, and without it costing him any effort he gradually settled into a routine. In lessons he never spoke up unless spoken to first, and he avoided the other kids during break by staying inside. At home he ate his meals quietly while his mum chatted about the day as if everything was back to normal – and in a way it was. Not the normal it had been while Edward was around, but the normal as it was before he had met Edward, back when he had been the reticent and polite boy his parents had always intended for him to be. He listened to his mum’s bland talk about the old people’s home, about his dad who was due to come for a visit at the weekend, about the state of the garden or some slice of town gossip, and he discovered he felt no disdain or scorn. The mediocre details of the week ahead, the impending empty conversations with his dad over cups of tea, the overgrown hedges and the stories about childless old women whom nobody wanted to visit were even soothing. He understood finally why someone might want to shield themselves from the wilder aspects of life. It was comforting to pretend they were not there, that if you ignored violence and danger and death and anything that signified these things they would go away and leave you alone.