The Road to Gundagai

Chapter 1

WILLOW CREEK, VICTORIA, 2 NOVEMBER 1932

Blue stared at the monster in the mirror.

Her scalp showed through straggly red hair. Scars like patches of red clay on her neck. Eyes peered from smudges in a dead white face. Wrists like chicken bones, too thin for the silver bracelet Mum and Dad had given her on her fifteenth birthday, a year ago today.

The old house breathed heat around her. The only sound was the scrabble of mice in the attic.

‘Happy birthday,’ she whispered to herself. She ran the comb through her hair again. Even that was enough to pull more strands from her scalp. She’d be bald as well as crippled soon.

Aunt Lilac said that hair fell out when you’d had a shock. Blue supposed that losing her family, her home and the full use of her legs qualified as a shock.

Six months earlier she’d have cried if her hair had fallen out. Six months earlier she’d waited at home for Mum and Dad and Willy to get back from Cape Town. She still had tears to cry, back then.

And then the world had cracked into ‘before’ and ‘after’. Mum and Dad and Willy were drowned with all the other passengers who had gone down in the Southern Star. The night of the funeral their house burned down, like a bonfire marking the loss of its owners.

Blue had woken to smoke, the snicker of flames dancing through her bedroom wall. She’d run to the door. It stayed implacably shut. She’d pounded and yelled. She’d run to the window, but the shutters wouldn’t open either. She bashed them with a chair, feeling the heat sucking at her lungs. Another wall crashed open, a dragon lashing flames across the room. She felt the whiplash of fire across her neck.

Then suddenly a yell shredding the smoke: Mah’s voice, beyond the flames. Mah never yelled. She had that night.

Then nothing. Blue woke in hospital, with Aunt Daisy knitting a grey stocking on one side of her and Aunt Lilac rigid in her corsets on the other, reading from a book of sermons.

Her home was gone. Her neck and legs were no longer hers, but burns and blisters. And the pain. Always, from that time on, the pain.

Later, in one of the short intervals when the aunts left her side, a nurse had let Mr Jones the gardener in to see her. He carried a bunch of chrysanthemums, wilting in brown paper.

‘The little Chinese lass picked these for you,’ he muttered awkwardly.

Blue stared, trying to focus through the pain. Mr Jones never let anyone but Mum pick his flowers.

Mr Jones shifted his boots. ‘Reckon Mah saved you. Smelled the smoke, she did. Woke us all up in the servants’ wing. Ran up to your room with a wet blanket over her head. Covered me with one too, while I bashed in the door.’

‘Then you saved me too,’ whispered Blue. It hurt to talk.

‘Wasn’t me who wrapped you in that wet blanket. I want to say how sorry we all are, Miss Blue. We’ll all be in to see you, soon as your aunts say you can have visitors.’ He shrugged. ‘Me aunt’s one of the nurses here. She said if I came after visiting hour she’d make sure I got in to give you these.’ Mr Jones looked helplessly around the room, as if expecting to see a vase appear for the chrysanthemums. He put the flowers on the bedside table instead, next to the five-pound box of chocolates from Uncle Herbert.

So Mah the kitchen maid had rescued her. Funny little Mah from the orphanage, who Mum had let join some of Blue’s lessons. Without Mah and Mr Jones she’d be dead. ‘Thank you,’ Blue managed. It seemed too little to say to someone who had saved your life. ‘Thank Mah too.’

‘Tell her yourself,’ said Mr Jones, and there was Mah in the doorway, serious and silent. She hesitated as Mr Jones went out, kissed Blue on the forehead, quickly, as though she wasn’t sure it was the right thing for a servant to do, then sat in the chair by her bed. Mah was still there when Blue drifted back into the sleep threaded through with pain.

Mah was there when the aunts returned too, with a wheelchair to take Blue away.

‘To a lovely house in the country,’ said Aunt Daisy, too brightly. ‘Fresh air to make you well.’

A nurse appeared in the doorway. She looked at the wheelchair with alarm. ‘But Doctor said she has to stay till …’

‘I have no wish to hear what the doctor said.’ Aunt Lilac’s voice was rock. ‘My sister and I nursed our dear mother until she died. We can do whatever is necessary for our niece. We are all the family dear Bluebell has left.’

Except for Uncle Herbert, thought Blue. Uncle Herbert was her father’s uncle, just as the aunts were really Mum’s cousins. But none of them had visited often, and that only for stilted afternoon teas, or dinner once a year with Uncle Herbert.

Mah stood, slim in her black servant’s uniform, her black hair pulled back. ‘I come with Missee Blue,’ she said.

‘I’m afraid we can’t afford —’ began Aunt Daisy.

‘No wages. Me come with Missee Blue.’

Even through the pain Blue heard iron in her tone. Mah has no job now, she thought. Who’d employ a Chinese girl, when a quarter of Australia is desperate for a job?

‘Mah comes with me,’ said Blue, through blistered lips.

And at last she did, holding Blue’s hand through the agony of the trip from Melbourne, to this big bare stuffy house in its dusty garden and rabbit-cropped paddocks; helping Aunt Lilac wash her, and smooth lotion on the burns; teaching Blue to stand again, to learn to shuffle — that was the only way that she could walk, now the burns had melted the tops of her legs together.

And now her hair was falling out. She felt almost as ill as she had been back in the hospital. Blue shuffled away from the mirror and lay down on the bed again.

She should be grateful. Without Aunt Lilac and Aunt Daisy she’d be homeless. She remembered Dad’s solicitor reading Dad’s will, after the funeral. Everything left to his children, to be held in trust for Willy till he turned twenty-one, and in trust for her until she turned twenty-five, or married.

‘Everything’ was the house and its contents, and what the solicitor said was a few hundred pounds, after debts had been paid, but she wasn’t to worry her head about that now, it would all be taken care of for her, and Blue had nodded, numb with grief.

And now the house was gone. Dad’s income as manager of Laurence’s Shoes had vanished with his death. She supposed ‘a few hundred pounds’ might be enough to get a cottage somewhere, but it was a long time till she’d be twenty-five. If it wasn’t for Aunt Lilac and Aunt Daisy, she’d have had to find herself a position as companion or governess or maybe a typist, if she could somehow learn to type, because a girl who couldn’t walk properly couldn’t be a nurse, or even work in a factory or as a servant, and what other work could a woman do?

But who’d want to employ a shuffling girl with a scarred face anyway? She’d more likely have ended up in a home for cripples. Did homes for cripples still exist these days, when so many had so little?

The Depression was like a hungry bear stalking Australia, devouring laughter and prosperity. One man in four was unemployed, queuing for a hessian bag of food each week — just enough to keep him and his family from starvation. Women begged in the streets or stood with hungry children in silent lines of faded hope just to get a bowl of soup handed out by a church or charity.

Maybe Blue would have had to beg too, like the poor men near the railway station, with their signs that said Blind veteran, please give with a cap out for passers-by to toss pennies into.

Stop it! she told herself. She was in a solid house, even if it smelled of mouldy curtains, far from the sea that gave her nightmares of white drowned faces drifting in a land that felt no sun.

She should be glad of the small dishes of invalid food Aunt Lilac made for her, the liver custards and gluey rice puddings.

Instead she just felt tired, and a little sick. She always felt sick these days. Nothing mattered. Not her birthday, or the new nightdresses and embroidered hankies Aunt Daisy and Aunt Lilac had given her. Sensible presents, for what did a crippled girl want with dresses? Her world was this small high room, the narrow bed with the commode under it, the trays of tapioca or stewed apple and rice she didn’t want, and vomited up if she tried to eat, the pains that shivered up her legs and arms. Each day like the one before, consuming her life, unlived …

No! One day she would be well! She had to cling to that. She had a future beyond this room that smelled of mice.

A sudden sound shattered through the buzz of cicadas outside. It sounded like music. She had never heard music in this house before.

Blue shuffled over and opened the window. The heat slapped her face. She looked down at the quiet track to town.

Two men marched along the dusty road. Both wore evening dress and black top hats. Even their faces looked alike, solid and expressionless, with shaggy moustaches. One held a big embossed placard: The Magnifico Family Circus. The other puffed on a tarnished trombone — pom, pom, bleeert!

And between them paced an elephant.

It wasn’t much of an elephant.

She’d thought elephants were enormous. This one wasn’t much bigger than a large bull. It wore a sort of tablecloth in red with gold tassels, and a look that seemed to say, ‘I am old and tired, but I am still the biggest animal you puny humans will ever see.’

For a moment she wondered if she was dreaming, one of those too-bright dreams of pain- and fever-sleep that were now so familiar to her. But there was the elephant, large and gaudy and impossible, plodding between the parched paddocks and dusty thistles.

The man with the placard saw her at the window. He doffed his hat. ‘The Magnifico Family Circus! For one night only, just up the road! Come young! Come old! See the Tiny Titania, the fairy who flies! Have your fortune told by Madame Zlosky! Experience for yourself the House of Horrors! More chilling and more horrible than anything this side of the Black Stump!’

‘See the two-headed calf!’ The other man took up the cry, as though there were a bigger audience than one girl and the thistles. ‘The world’s largest grizzly bear! The Sultan’s Harem dancers! The Boldini Brothers on the flying trapeze! One night only! Fresh from a triumphant Melbourne season! Now on the road to Gundagai!’

Gundagai! She’d always loved that name, tracing the Murrumbidgee River it sat on in her geography book. Did they have typists at Gundagai? She never wanted to see the sea again. But the Murrumbidgee River! Even the name made her smile. She leaned out of the window and waved at the elephant.

The elephant seemed to look at her too. It raised its trunk, almost in a salute. Blue felt her smile grow. Silly, she thought. As if an elephant would really notice her. But it had been so long since she had smiled.

‘Bluebell?’ Aunt Lilac’s step had been so quiet Blue hadn’t heard her. ‘What are you doing at the window?’

Blue turned. ‘Aunt Lilac! It’s a circus!’

‘Is it?’ Aunt Lilac’s voice was gentle, though her eyes held worry, and what might be anger too. Aunt Lilac’s voice was always gentle. Only her black dresses were stiff, starched so they seemed to suck in all the light, high-necked with skirts almost to her ankles, just like the ones she had when she was young and Queen Victoria was still on the throne, and buttoned boots, the sort Laurence’s Shoes hadn’t made since the war. Times might change, Aunt Lilac said, but modesty and good breeding did not.

‘Please, can I go?’ If the aunts and Ethel and Mah helped her, she could manage it.

Aunt Lilac shook her head.

‘Please! It’s my birthday!’ She hated how forlorn that last plea sounded. ‘I … I’d like to see the elephant.’

The last postcard she’d had from Mum and Dad, posted at Cape Town, had had elephants on it. It had arrived weeks after it had been sent, while Blue was in hospital. It was the only thing she owned now from her old life, except the silver bracelet that never left her wrist.

Soon be home, the postcard said in Mum’s scrawl. (Mum said her governesses had never managed to teach her a ladylike hand.) Missing you so much. Hope you like elephants. We saw a man carving them in the market yesterday and bought you a set of them, all different sizes, from big to tiny. Dad says you can put them along your windowsill and pretend you are looking out at Africa. And then, in tiny letters, because she was running out of room, With love always, Mum. Dad had scribbled his and Willy’s names beside hers.

Her carved elephants had gone down with the Southern Star. But at least she could see — touch? — a real elephant …

‘Bluebell dear, you are not well enough.’ Aunt Lilac sounded preoccupied, as though life suddenly held a much larger problem than a niece who wanted to go to the circus.

‘I … I’m feeling better now.’

Aunt Lilac smiled, an Aunt Lilac wrinkled-prune smile of face powder and lavender water. ‘My dear, you know it is impossible.’

Because I am an invalid, thought Blue. Because I can only shuffle. Because everyone will stare at my neck, my balding head. Because now I am a family secret, to be hidden up in the top storey of the house and not seen, even by tradesmen, so I do not shame the family with my looks. Because …

‘Because your Uncle Herbert is coming to luncheon.’

‘Uncle Herbert!’ Blue hadn’t had a card from Uncle Herbert ever since she’d left hospital. There’d been no letters from anyone in her past life. It hurt, a little, that none of the girls from tennis or church had even sent her a get-well card.

‘For your birthday. He sent a telegram this morning to say he is arriving at half past twelve. You will be tired after his visit.’

Blue blinked at the edge in Aunt Lilac’s voice. She almost sounded nervous. But Aunt Lilac was never nervous. Ladies met life with a smile, and a back as straight as a ruler.

‘Do you feel well enough to come downstairs?’ Aunt Lilac’s fingers looked stiff, as though they wanted to pluck nervously at her skirt. But ladies never fiddled with their clothes. ‘I’m sure he’ll understand if you would prefer to have your luncheon here on a tray. We can give him your regrets.’

‘Thank you, Aunt Lilac, but I’ll come down.’

Suddenly, desperately, she wanted to see someone from the outside world. She looked at Uncle Herbert’s giant box of chocolates on the dresser. Mah had brought them from the hospital. They each had one a day. Mah liked the hard centres. Blue ate the soft chocolate creams. A nibbled chocolate seemed to stay down, when Aunt Lilac’s liver puddings just made her sick. But the chocolates were nearly gone.

Maybe Uncle Herbert would know how she could become a typist. He managed rental properties, so he must have an office, like Dad’s at Laurence’s Shoes. Women weren’t supposed to understand business, but Dad had taken her to his offices sometimes, he’d even shown her about the factories. Maybe Uncle Herbert might have a job for her. After she was well, of course. I will get well, she thought.

Aunt Lilac’s lips tightened. ‘Very well. I will send the girl up to help you get dressed.’

Blue glanced out the window. The elephant had vanished, leaving only an untidy pile of droppings in the middle of the dusty road. ‘Yes, Aunt Lilac,’ she said.

Chapter 2

Lunch was long, and dappled with silences, filled only by the chink of forks on plates and the bump of flies at the window.

The table was long too, and dark with carved legs. Uncle Herbert sat at one end and Aunt Lilac at the other, with Blue and Aunt Daisy facing one another across the middle. Aunt Daisy looked more like an ageing rose than a daisy, all faded pink cheeks and dressed in dusty grey, with fat little clutching hands that seemed to grasp her knife and fork as though they’d never let go.

Uncle Herbert was long as well, thin as a spider, wearing a black suit and blue striped tie and well-polished black shoes from Laurence’s last summer collection, with eyeglasses and three strands of hair over his scalp. Blue felt faintly jealous: a man could be bald and no one cared. A man could inherit at twenty-one. A man could run a business or be a lawyer. Then she felt sick again as the food on her plate stared up at her.

Long strips of roast mutton, long boiled carrots, long boiled beans, a long brown stripe of thin gravy …

Her stomach did a somersault. She bit her lip to stop being sick.

‘No appetite?’ asked Uncle Herbert. They were the first words he’d spoken since they sat down, except to ask Aunt Daisy to pass the salt. He glanced back at Aunt Lilac, as though aware he’d cracked the silence of the room.

‘Not very hungry, Uncle Herbert,’ said Blue, too hot in her long silk dress, its high collar rough against her still-tender neck. Why aren’t they talking? she wondered. Ladies always kept the conversation going. Ladies talked about the weather, or the state of the roads, or the flowers in the garden, to avoid silences like this. Never business, politics or religion, of course, but never silence either.

The aunts don’t want Uncle Herbert here, she realised. But the aunts couldn’t argue with a telegram. Nor could they have told Ethel not to open the door to him. For a moment she felt vaguely sorry for him, facing the aunts’ hostility, just to see his great niece on her birthday. He had brought her another box of chocolates, and a card with a ten-pound note.

Aunt Daisy stared at her baked potato. Aunt Lilac cut her mutton into small neat squares, adding a piece of grey bean before lifting each square to her mouth. Uncle Herbert gave Blue a worried glance.

‘I’d hoped you would be well by now.’

‘The fresh air will soon have her right again.’ Aunt Daisy looked like she wanted to gulp the words back into the silence.

Aunt Lilac’s prune smile was firmly in place. She reached over to pat Blue’s hand, the right one that was hardly scarred at all. ‘We are taking the best possible care of her.’

A hot bedroom at the top of the house where no one would see her. Meals on a tray. Blue looked away from her plate as nausea swept through her. ‘The fresh air isn’t making me well.’

Uncle Herbert met Aunt Lilac’s eyes. ‘What does the doctor say?’

Aunt Lilac ignored him. She rang the bell. Ethel appeared, sweat trickling down her cow-like face. Aunt Lilac would never have a Chinese girl wait at table.

‘Ethel, would you take Miss Bluebell’s plate away please? Bring her the liver custard. I make it myself.’ Aunt Lilac turned to Uncle Herbert. ‘So restorative.’

Blue closed her eyes at the thought of the liver custard. It was worse than wobbly blancmange or the tapioca that looked like someone had squashed maggots in a bowl.

‘And I’ve made tapioca for pudding.’ Aunt Lilac piled more grey beans and gravy onto her fork.

‘The doctor?’ repeated Uncle Herbert.

More silence. At last Aunt Lilac put down her fork, the silver polished into thinness over many generations. ‘There is no doctor at Willow Creek.’

Uncle Herbert flapped his hands, as though that might give his words more strength. ‘No doctor! Really! She has to see a doctor!’

As though I am a chipped vase, thought Blue, with no feelings to be hurt.

‘There is no need for a doctor. My sister and I can care for our niece perfectly well.’

‘Just look at her, woman!’

Blue blinked at the rudeness. But neither of her aunts answered. A lady does not notice rudeness.

‘Bluebell needs to come back to Melbourne. To a nursing home. I … I will make arrangements.’

Aunt Lilac ignored him. Her eyes were stone. Uncle Herbert bit his lip.

Ethel brought in the liver custard.

Blue stared at it, pale grey like congealed snot. The bitter tide rose in her throat.

She pushed her chair back from the table. ‘I’m sorry …’

Uncle Herbert rose politely to his feet.

Blue stumbled out the door. All at once Mah’s strong hands were there. Blue let Mah seat her on one of the upright hall chairs. She grabbed a vase for Blue to vomit in, scattering the roses on the floor.

Blue retched again, then gasped, trying to get her breath, hoping the spasms in her stomach would stop.

Words floated, half heard, from the dining room, as she vomited again, nothing to bring up now but the spasms kept coming.

‘… am shocked to see how ill she is.’ The rumble was Uncle Herbert. And then, ‘I fail to understand why you took it upon yourselves to take her from the hospital, much less bring her way out here …’

‘… better she be nursed by her own family.’ Aunt Lilac’s voice again. Iron had replaced stone.

‘At the very least you should have let me know where you intended taking her. It was by merest chance that one of my employees spoke to the chauffeur from the car hire company who brought you out here. What did you think you were doing, taking the girl away from everyone who knows her?’

More silence. Blue closed her eyes to stop the world fading in and out. ‘As Bluebell’s only male relative, I must insist she be brought to Melbourne to a nursing home next week. Tuesday.’ Announcing the specific day seemed to give Uncle Herbert courage. He spoke more firmly now. ‘I will pick her up myself on Tuesday. With a nurse. A proper nurse. It must be obvious to anyone that there is something gravely wrong with her. If she continues like this, then …’

Ethel dropped a dish, out in the kitchen. As the clang died down Blue caught Uncle Herbert’s final words. ‘… not long for this world.’

This world? What world? Were they still talking about her? Blue couldn’t think. The world was nausea, spinning around her. She could smell her sweat, bitter as her vomit.

At last Mah helped her up the stairs. She unbuttoned Blue’s boots as she lay on the bed, then helped her out of the silk dress into a nightdress.

Blue lay back gratefully on the pillows. ‘Thank you.’

Mah nodded. Mah rarely spoke. Once Blue had thought that she had little English. But slowly she realised that Mah just didn’t speak unless she had to.

Mah watched though, and listened. She’d seen enough today to be there at the door when she was needed, just outside the dining room. Now she knew that Blue needed a drink, pouring a glass of water from the big porcelain jug on the stand by the door, before Blue could reach for the Thermos of cold sweet milk that Aunt Lilac insisted she drink to build up her strength.

Blue sipped. The water tasted sour. Everything tasted sour these days, even Uncle Herbert’s chocolates. Mah must have put the new box by her bedside, as well as the card with the ten-pound note. Flies bumped at the window between the limp curtains, trying to get out. Even more clustered outside, trying to get in. Mah looked at Blue impassively, seeing everything.

‘Mah,’ Blue spoke impulsively. ‘Do you … think I’m dying?’

Mah looked at her silently. Then she shook her head. ‘No, missee. You not die. Not till you very, very old.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Sleep,’ ordered Mah. It wasn’t said kindly, like Aunt Lilac might have said it. It was just — obvious.

Blue needed to sleep.

She did.

It was dusk when she awoke. Shadows clung to the wooden furniture. Outside, the trees rustled as though relieved of the weight of the sun’s heat.

Somewhere, from far off, came the sound of laughter. Blue sat up, blinking. She had never heard laughter in this house before. Like Queen Victoria, Aunt Lilac was rarely amused.

Nor, she realised, did the laughter come from the house. The circus, she thought. The elephant! ‘For one night only, just up the road!’

Mum and Dad would have gone to the circus, Willy up on Dad’s shoulders and Mum in a new hat. Mum always said that the best things in life deserved a new hat.

One night only. She thought of the elephant’s small dark eyes, the strangely flat pad of its feet. She was glad her brother had seen an elephant before his tiny life was lost in the cold ocean.

One night before the circus took the road to Gundagai.

What would it be like to follow the road, and see where it led? One day, she thought, I’ll travel, like Mum and Dad did, just for the joy of it, even though they used the excuse of looking for new sources of leather for Laurence’s Shoes — crocodile skin from Darwin, Persian lamb from Christchurch, ostrich leather from Cape Town. She’d have been with them on that last trip, if she hadn’t caught chickenpox two days before the ship sailed.

If she hadn’t caught chickenpox, she’d have seen the elephants and the market place. She’d have slid down into the cold water with her family, away from the world of light.

‘… not long for this world.’ Uncle Herbert’s words floated back. Did Uncle Herbert mean that Blue might die?

She didn’t feel sick enough to die! She had been burned, but the burns had healed, even if the scars were still ugly and made walking difficult. She grieved, but you didn’t die of grief, or only in books.

Sometimes she felt hardly sick at all. If you were well enough to want to go to a circus, surely you were too well to die.

Why shouldn’t she go? The thought seemed to come from that far-off life when everything had been possible, from loving arms and ice cream (indigestible, said Aunt Lilac) to white and pink spotted dresses with flounces at the knee and pink straw hats, instead of the dark clothes of mourning. Why shouldn’t a sixteen-year-old girl go to the circus?

And if she was going to die (but I won’t, she thought — not till I am a hundred and four and have seen the pyramids and flown an aeroplane and gone to Timbuktu) she would have at least met an elephant, and visited the circus that would leave the faded houses of Willow Creek, still and dusty, behind, and travel up the road, the breeze at their backs, to places with strange names like Gundagai.

Money? She looked at Uncle Herbert’s ten-pound note poking out from the birthday card. Blue didn’t know how much it cost to go to a circus, but ten pounds should be more than enough.

But I’m hideous, scarred. People will stare. She bit her lip. Not in the high-necked dress, the long strands of her remaining hair carefully arranged, the velvet hat the aunts had brought her to wear back from hospital pulled down to cover her bald spots. The growing darkness would hide her shambling walk and, anyway, no one here knew her, only Ethel and Mah, and Aunt Lilac wouldn’t be letting either of them go to the circus.

Mah could help her downstairs …

No, not Mah. A girl of Blue’s class — even an orphan, dependent on her aunts’ charity — had every right to go to the circus. Blue could risk Aunt Lilac’s angry smile for herself, but a servant like Mah was vulnerable. If Blue was going to go to the circus, it had to be alone.

Strength seeped back into her, despite the nausea. If she felt faint, she could sit down. If she wanted to be sick, she’d find a bush.

She found her dress again, and slipped it over her head, buttoning it high up to her throat. No underwear: impossible to pull it past her scar.

She had no writing paper or inkwell, or even a pen and blotting paper. She’d had no need, with no letters to reply to. But Mah had brought up a pencil a few weeks ago with one of those new ‘crossword’ things from the newspaper. She used the back of Uncle Herbert’s card to write a careful note, propping it on her bed.

I have gone to the circus. I will be back soon.

Love,

Bluebell

She didn’t love her aunts. She was reasonably sure they didn’t love her either. But they had upset their lives to care for her. It might not be accurate, but they had earned more than Sincerely yours.

Buttoning her shoes left her dizzy. Blue waited till the room steadied, then shuffled to the door. The big house creaked as the day’s heat seeped from its crevices.

Down one flight, down the next. She paused, hearing Aunt Daisy’s voice briefly from the living room below. Uncle Herbert must have left, not trusting his automobile headlights to get him back to Melbourne in the dark.

The clock boomed in the hallway. She counted the strokes. One, two, three, four, five, six …

Six o’clock. The aunts dined at six, keeping early hours in the country. Dinner should keep them occupied for at least an hour, with their small ladylike bites, cold mutton and reheated potatoes left over from the lunchtime roast, then sipping the tea that Ethel would bring them on the silver tray. Ethel would be having her supper now too, in the kitchen, and Mah eating hers on the kitchen steps. (‘I’m a Christian woman,’ Ethel had informed Aunt Lilac. ‘I’m not eating at a table with no heathen.’) It would be at least an hour before Ethel gave Mah the tray to take to Blue’s room. Perhaps Mah might even say Blue was asleep, and she didn’t want to waken her.

What time did the circus start?

She was going to find out.

Blue shuffled through the dust and thistles at the side of the road. The scar that glued her thighs together was no bigger than the mouth of a teacup, but it was still enough to stop her taking all but the most ladylike of steps. Carts and sulkies and their hot horses passed in a dusty trickle, heading to the circus paddock. Here and there lamplight or candlelight flickered from farmhouses across the paddocks.

Only one light glowed, a universe of brightness in the twilight ahead of her: electric light, powerful enough to beat back the night. She felt as well as heard the beat of the generator.

It was more light than she had seen since she’d gone to the Royal Show at night the year before, just with Dad that time, as Willy was only two months old, too young for Mum to take him to the Show with people coughing polio or whooping cough germs all over the place. That light had almost eclipsed the moon and so did this, though on a much smaller scale.

‘Hurry, hurry, hurry! The Magnifico Family Circus! Tonight only!’ the voice boomed from the paddock gate.

More wheels sounded behind her. She melted back towards the barbed wire as a farm cart passed, two giggling couples in the back. The women wore bonnets — bonnets! In 1932! The cart stopped at the paddock gate so its driver could hand money to a shadowed man, then veered off to an area marked out for vehicles: carts, sulkies, a few shabby automobiles.

On the other side of the paddock the light spilled from a not particularly big Big Top with gently flapping canvas walls. Three smaller tents sat to one side with billboards out the front: a House of Horrors, its sides painted with ghosts and skeletons; the Freak Show tent next to it, its walls showing badly sketched dragons and sea monsters that Blue thought were unlikely to be inside; and there was a small queue in front of the one that said The Amazing Madame Zlosky.

A dwarf with a hunched back stood on a platform outside the Freak Show. ‘See the world’s biggest grizzly bear! Sixpence a time!’ His voice squeaked on the word ‘sixpence’.

Blue shuffled up to the gate, adorned now with a poster of a young man flying through the air towards a dangling trapeze. The ticket-seller was the man with the trombone she had seen earlier. He looked sharply at her dark silk dress, her velvet hat. Blue suspected she would be the only audience member in silk tonight.

His face became carefully blank again. ‘Three shillings for a front-row seat, two shillings for the high seats, a shilling for the stalls. Sideshows are extra.’ His voice was high and gruff as he gave her a practised grin under his salt-and-pepper moustache.

‘A seat at the back please. Not a high one.’ Blue held out the ten-pound note.

‘A shilling seat then.’ The man stared at the note, making no pretence now. ‘Blimey. Ain’t seen one of them for a while. I ain’t got change for ten quid, not yet anyhow.’

Blue calculated quickly. She couldn’t carry a hundred and ninety-nine shilling pieces without a handbag. ‘Could you give me five shillings now, and the rest of the change after the show?’

The man looked at her strangely. ‘You’d trust me to give it back then?’

‘Yes.’ Blue didn’t care if he was trustworthy or not. She had nothing else to spend the money on. ‘Never, if you’re going to die,’ said a whisper. Blue ignored it. She peered into the shadows behind the