Circus: Fantasy Under the Big Top (7 page)

The office was still locked when I arrived. I let myself in with my key, locking the door behind me, knowing I had a couple of hours before anyone else was likely to arrive.

I went straight to Archives and pulled every registered patent on steam-engines I could find. I searched for variations on Sterling’s thermal-engine, and even found a rejected patent for a dangerous sounding “internal-combustion” engine. I piled them all on my desk and started to read.

My problem was one that had plagued the best engineering minds for a generation. How to build a smaller, lighter, more portable engine? A steam-engine that did not need continual stoking and feeding? I was a patents clerk! How could I hope to find an answer where other, greater minds had failed?

None of the patents before me could answer the questions either.

But were they the questions Kally needed answering? As the morning wore towards lunch I realised that they were not. She had her Belgian engineer. She didn’t need me to build a vehicle for her escape. But I wanted to be the one to emancipate her; I wanted to be the hero, to earn her gratitude and adulation.

I was being selfish and not thinking of Kally at all.

I felt in my jacket pocket for the bundle of paper I’d stowed there earlier. There were the details of our accounts at the Bank of New South Wales. A small pile of Gold and Wool Bonds, already browned and torn at the edges. Our Mortgage.

I took two of the Wool Bonds and one of the Gold and stuffed the rest into the bottom drawer of my desk. The pile of patents, useless to me, I placed onto a trolley for someone else to file.

The Bank was in Macquarie Place and I chanced through the doors at a time of relative quiet. I was able to walk right up to the cashier and present my Bonds without waiting. The cashier took them without a word and stalked off through a side door, returning after a short while with a ridiculously large pile of banknotes.

I did not hear the amount and I do not remember signing whatever was presented for me to sign. I was too busy looking at the money before me: five pound notes stacked an inch thick. Surely that was enough to buy Kally her freedom?

With renewed enthusiasm I bounded back to the office, every stride a joyful step closer to Kally.

The afternoon passed quickly as I leapt around the office annoying everyone, not accomplishing a scrap of work. I joked and danced and sung merry tunes. I waxed lyrical on the beauty of women, of music, and of freedom. When they’d endured enough of me I tidied my desk and shuffled papers, humming to myself, cheeks sore from grinning.

As I rearranged the desktop for the fifth or sixth time my grin widened further, widened until it burst open with a laugh I’d no chance of containing. Everyone in the office looked up, wondering if I’d lost my mind, but no, I most definitely had not! Before me was the very patent I’d been examining all week: a radium powered steam-engine, scalable, without the need for coal, and with a fuel supply that could theoretically last many, many years.

I waited until the rest of the office had returned to their work and folded the blueprints into a tight square. With barely controlled glee I slipped them into my jacket pocket beside the money.

For the rest of the afternoon I twiddled my thumbs, grinning my painful grin at all who looked my way.

Five o’clock came and I was out the door, hat in hand, before the bell had even finished ringing. I skipped the streets to Surry Hills and through Chippendale, whistling as I went, the distant sounds of the circus my beacon.

The girl at the ticket-carriage passed me a ticket without a word. At the Big Top I did not even need to produce it, the usher letting me pass with a nod of recognition and a smile.

Kally’s performance was both ecstasy and agony. The ecstasy of her playing, her voice. The agony of waiting, of knowing that her salvation resided in my coat pocket. I closed my eyes and soared with her, shutting out the clowns and jugglers, the acrobats and animals. I heard only her sorrow, and a longing to be free, and knew that tonight I would deliver her dream.

When the show was over I moved immediately towards her gilded carriage, bold and full of purpose. McKenzie saw me and wandered across the ring.

“Ah, you’ve returned,” he said. “I was wonderin’ if our Kally’d entranced y’enough to warrant a second visit.”

He took me by the elbow and led me towards the back of the carriage. A young roustabout was there, pulling on rigging and tightening knots. He glared at me as McKenzie led me to Kally’s door and I felt his jealousy like a baleful fire. Kally’s grace and sophistication would never be for the likes of him and he knew it, hating me for being someone he could not. McKenzie gestured for me to step up to the door and knock and so I did.

“Come in, dear sir,” came Kally’s voice from inside, as sweet as honey poured over sadness.

She sat as she would always sit if she remained in that place: fingers resting lightly on keyboard, skirts arranged around her in a bell of pleats and folds. The gas-lamp lit her face with soft, warm light, flickering shadows across the walls of the carriage.

I closed the door and took the stool beside her, not daring to say a word until I’d given McKenzie a chance to leave. We sat like that for a while, in silence, me simply staring into her eyes and waiting for the right moment to speak.

“Kally,” I said eventually, never taking my eyes from hers. “You don’t need to stay here any more. I’ve found a way.”

A twitch of gears, and a smile appeared on her face. Her eyes glowed with a fresh light:
hope
, I thought,
hope is what I see in her eyes
.

“I knew you could help me,” she said, one hand reaching out to rest on my knee. A hot flush rose through me at her touch. I could not speak, only nod and smile the same grin I’d worn all afternoon. “You, sir, are my knight in shining armour, my Galahad. With your help my Belgian friend’s tasks will be so much shorter, my release so much swifter. Maybe years instead of never. I don’t know how to thank you, sir.”

I found my voice then, spurred forward by my desire to make her even happier than I’d already made her.

“No, Kally. It’s so much better than that. You won’t need your Belgian friend anymore. I have something better! The plans for a new engine. A smaller steam-engine that doesn’t need coal. Doesn’t need anything except water and some radium and it will run for decades!”

She looked at me curiously then, as if this was not at all what she had been expecting. On a woman I would have called that expression “concealed disappointment.” On Kally, it marred the perfection of her features so severely that I sat back, startled and confused, and took a very deep breath.

“This is a way out for you, Kally,” I said. “I thought . . . I thought it would please you.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, her hand leaving my knee, voice filling with sorrow. “I do not mean to seem ungrateful. You have done so much for me, and your plans sound wonderful, but I have no money to build an engine. Those plans would only be a false hope to me. To know they exist . . . to not have the means of making them a reality . . . it would be too cruel to me, sir.”

She had turned again to face the Calliope’s keyboard. Her hands rested lightly on the keys, head downcast, eyes closed. I sat there for a moment in the silence, wondering if McKenzie had turned off her boiler.
Not yet
,
not yet,
I thought.
Please not yet! I haven’t told you everything yet.

“Kally?” I said softly. “Kally, are you still there?” I reached out and touched my fingers to her cheek, caressing its contours gently, slowly. I sensed movement beneath the surface, machinery turning, ticking away like the workings of a clock. If she were real I believe she would have been crying.

“I have money. Enough money to build the engine. Enough money to get you out of here,” I said and her eyes opened. Her head turned to me on well oiled bearings, slowly, and a smile returned to her face.

“You do?” she asked and I reached into my jacket pocket. I first laid the plans out on the keyboard and placed the bundle of notes atop.

“I do. I haven’t counted it, but I guess there’s five hundred pounds there. That’s more than enough for someone to build an engine from those plans, Kally.”

She stared down at the money: more, I was sure, than she had ever seen. It was more than I had ever seen.

“You must tell me your itinerary,” I said. “I’ll organise an engineer while you’re away. Get things started.”

Kally laughed, a sound like a tree full of twittering birds.

“Yes, yes, it’s wonderful,” I said. “By the time you return to Sydney it will be done. You will be free of McKenzie. Free of all this . . . all this . . . ” and I gestured around the carriage, unable to find the words to describe the horror she had lived.

She laughed again and I laughed too, with her and for her, happy that I’d fulfilled my promise. Happy that I was truly her knight.

“I knew it,” she said between laughs. “You had me worried for a moment there. Plans indeed! But in the end you came through. I knew it the minute I laid eyes on you. I can always spot a dupe.”

Her words did not register with me at first. I was too caught up in her laughter, in my own puffed pride. I saw only her smile. Heard only the trill of her laugh. It was not until her hands came down hard on the keyboard, a roar erupting from the Calliope’s pipes, that the words finally registered in my mind. By then it was much too late.

The door behind me burst open at her signal, its edge catching me in the small of the back. I toppled forward off the stool, Kally still laughing as I fell beside her. The curtains parted and the grimy roustabout and a companion dived through. They landed on top of me, forcing the air from my lungs. My face crunched into the rough floorboards of the carriage and I felt my nose break, warm wetness spreading down my chin, soaking the carriage floor.

I stayed that way, unable to move, unable to talk, two fat ruffians sitting on my back. Pain raced up my spine and throbbed across my face. Kally sat motionless on her stool above me and I heard a third person moving around near the door.

“You alright, Kally?” I heard McKenzie ask.

“Fine, Boss,” Kally’s sweet voice curdling to poison in my mind. “Just like the rest of them in the end. Turns out he had money after all. Told you I can pick them. You worry too much.”

“Must be five hundred pounds here,” McKenzie said. “That’s a damn good haul, Kally. Better than California by far. You’ve outdone yourself this time, me girl.”

“You taught me well, Boss,” Kally said and they both laughed. The roustabouts on top of me laughed too, squeezing more pain through my body. Finally I must have managed a sound because their attention turned to me.

“May as well dump him somewhere, boys,” McKenzie said.

Dump me
? I was sure then that they meant to kill me. I tried to struggle, thrashing frantically in a vain attempt to unseat my unwelcome passengers. Every movement brought fresh pain searing through my lungs, pounding in my back, hammering in my head.

“Get him out of here,” McKenzie said and something hard came down on the nape of my neck, shooting darkness up into my brain, stopping the pain.

I awoke with my face resting in a bed of moss, cool and moist. My body ached from crown to toe. My dignity hurt more.

I crawled, though with some difficulty, from beneath a bush that grew against a large fig tree. Early morning sunlight stabbed through the green canopy overhead, blinding me until my eyes adjusted. I heard the horn of a steamer in the harbour, close by. I could hear a voice in the distance calling to allow women the Vote. Another voice cried of Daniel and the lion’s den. The Domain, they had dumped me in the Domain.

My wallet was gone, as was my watch. My shirt was stained brown with blood. I covered the stains as best I could by buttoning up my jacket, which was still relatively clean, and headed slowly, painfully, in the direction of Moore Park.

By the time I arrived,
McKenzie’s Universal Circus & Museum of the Bizarre
had gone. The grounds where they had been were a dry and trampled mess. Only piles of horse and camel dung, ticket stubs and peanut shells, remained to mark their passing.

I found the blueprints, scuffed and torn and covered with dirt, between the wheel ruts where the Calliope had stood. I stared at the plans for a while, opening them up and spreading them across the ground. She could have taken them. She could have hidden them from McKenzie and found a way to use them. A way to escape.

A part of me knew, knew I’d been taken for a fool, knew that Kally had never wanted to escape. And yet, the memory of her music played on inside my mind. The wonder of what she was—a marvellous thinking, feeling machine—would not leave. I loved her and despised myself for my weakness. Love and hate, lust and loathing, gold and lead transmuted within my soul until I ached with a pain born of their union. Ah, Eros, you are a capricious child!

I had no idea of where the Circus was headed next. North or South? Inland to Parramatta and settlements west? Whichever way they had gone, they had a half-day start on me. And who was I trying to fool anyway? The walk from the Domain had nearly killed me. I could go no further.

I folded the blueprints and placed them carefully in my jacket pocket. I would keep them, just in case.

For the rest of the afternoon I sat there, under a tree, watching children play cricket in the fields. The children ran, and laughed, and their competition was fierce but, even above the crack of the bat and their raucous cheers, the haunting strains of Calliope music still pricked at my heart.

Welcome to the Greatest Show in the Universe

Deborah Walker

The flexible metal wallings shrouding the Circosphere wavered as the shuttle craft drew too close. In the control booth, Jinkers Morrell sighed. “Shuttle craft . . . ” She checked on her computer for the name of the vehicle and sighed again. “Shuttle craft
Coco the Clown
. You are in violation of the space boundary of this facility. A repeat offence will result in immediate cancellation of your free circus passes.”