Circus of Thieves and the Raffle of Doom (4 page)

The minute Hannah saw the parade, she understood. This was what Billy had been trying to explain. Shank’s Impossible Circus didn’t need to publicise their shows in advance, because
they’d perfected a way of selling tickets on the day.

The leaping and weightlifting and whip-cracking and circular-clapping-in-a-tiny-bikini and bashy bamboozling soon drew a crowd that formed itself into a circle around a patch of previously
unspectacular pavement space in the town square, which now realised with some excitement that it had become a stage.
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Irrrrena did a few laps of the
pavement-stage, pulling some people forward, nudging others back, until she had a neat circle. Then she clapped one last time, and all the performers slipped rapidly away, leaving a large crowd of
people staring at a circle of empty pavement.

Just at the exact, precise and specific moment when anticipation started to dip, and people began to ask themselves why they were all staring interestedly at nothing whatsoever, like a regional
conference of pavement-appreciators, Fingers O’Boyle leapt onto the stage.

Nobody knew where he had sprung from, since he hadn’t been visible during the parade, and Fingers O’Boyle was clearly not the kind of person who could blend into a crowd. Why?
Because he was dressed like a cross between a tramp and The Emperor of the Empire of Lurid Show-offy Clothes. Allow me to explain. I shall start at the bottom of his outfit. Yellow patent leather
(i.e shiny shiny shiny) shoes with stack heels made of transparent plastic, containing a ring of bright green frozen-in-time beetles. Knee socks, yellow with red polka dots. White plus fours (i.e.
long shorts) so baggy and extravagant they should have been called plus sixty-eights. Above this, a flowing ankle-length coat which was halfway between a spectacular festive gown designed to honour
the Goddess of Rainbows and a bunch of lurid rags held together with dodgy sewing, bits of glue and smears of dirt. The coat had actually started life in a production of
Joseph and his
Technicolour Panopoly of Drippy Songs
, which was so bad Fingers had decided to spare the world any further performances by stealing the costumes. Since then, whenever Fingers found a scrap of
interesting fabric, he’d snip a bit off and add it to the coat using whatever thread, glue or dirt came to hand.

Fingers’ idea of ‘finding’ things was slightly unusual. The concept of ownership was not one he strongly believed in. He once ‘found’ a piece of delightful purple
paisley on the shirt of a woman standing in front of him in a bus queue. Being unusually dextrous, and handy with a pair of sharp scissors, Fingers had snipped out a square and skipped away before
the woman had time to say ‘What’s that breeze on my back?’ This is basically a long way of saying Fingers was a thief. Not your bog-standard grab-it-off-the-shelves-and-run-for-it
thief, but a true magician in the art of making things disappear in front of your very eyes before you even notice they are gone.

It was this skill he used to hold the attention of the crowd assembled around him. His act, in short, went something like this: choose a volunteer from the crowd, chat to them, charm them, make
them laugh, make everyone else laugh at them, do a couple of card tricks, then, just before you send them back to their place, casually say, ‘Don’t you want these?’ before handing
back watches, wallets, credit cards, wedding rings, and once (his
piece-de-resistance
) a pair of knickers to the embarrassed guest star.

Please cast your mind back roughly ten minutes or so in book-time. Are you there? Fingers O’Boyle is just stepping up onto the pavement-stage. A tiny line of ants is running away,
screaming minuscule ant screams. Who do you think is his first ‘member of the public’ up on stage? Can you guess?

I don’t know why I asked you that question, since I can’t hear you. But if your answer was Billy, then you guessed correctly. If you guessed someone else, we can all just pretend
that you like to shout out names randomly while you read books. It might be best to shout out another name now, to make this more convincing to passers-by.

Only one person notices that Billy isn’t who he’s pretending to be. Hannah. She has also noticed, with some surprise and horror, that while the other performers were gathering the
crowd, Billy was working his way around the circle, slipping his delicate, fast-moving, not-very-clean hands into the pockets of the audience.

If Hannah hadn’t become his friend earlier that day, she might have leapt out into the middle of the circle, stopped the show, and exposed Billy’s thieving, but she sensed this
wasn’t what you should do to a friend, so she just watched anxiously as he pilfered items from the crowd.

She wasn’t sure she was doing the right thing, since Billy had admitted the whole circus was on the run, and he certainly did not like the sound of the word ‘police’. There was
definitely something fishy going on.
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While everyone else enjoyed the beginnings of the show, Hannah wrestled with her dilemma. Should she trust her instincts and trust Billy, or trust the fact that stealing was stealing was
stealing? Because putting your hands into other people’s pockets and walking away with their stuff – that’s stealing.

Before she’d decided what to do, Billy was called up on stage as the first volunteer. During part of the act, at the exact moment when Fingers was pointing out that a missing ace of spades
was stuck to a lamp post up above everyone’s heads, Hannah saw in the twinkle of an eye a small, not-very-clean hand slip a large clutch of shiny objects into Fingers’ pocket. These
were the objects which in the course of the next half-hour were returned to their owners. While everyone else laughed and gasped with every new revelation, Hannah just sighed with relief.

The show ended with more gymnastics and general circus hoopla while Mr Shank sat behind a velvet-covered table, selling tickets for the evening’s one-night-only performance. If he had been
selling hot cakes to a town of cake-starved cake fanatics at the height of their annual Build A House Out Of Cakes Festival, he could hardly have sold tickets any faster.

Every ticket came with free entry to the Shank Entertainment Empire annual charity raffle, and Armitage was such a charming and debonair salesman that almost everyone happily put down their name
and address, usually without even asking which charity was involved or what the prize might be.
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Hannah did as she was told and didn’t approach Billy, but as the crowd began to disperse, he suddenly appeared by her side.

‘I saw you,’ said Hannah.

‘I know,’ said Billy. ‘I saw you seeing me. Thanks for not spoiling the show.’

‘I was worried. I thought you were stealing. Especially after what you said.’

‘What did I say?’

‘You said you were on the run.’

‘I told you that was a joke,’ he said.

‘But what if you telling me it was a joke was the joke?’

Billy narrowed his eyes and peered at Hannah as if he was examining her through a microscope. ‘You’re clever,’ he said, ‘but you think too much.’

‘I don’t think it’s possible to think too much. Thinking’s good.’

‘Maybe you’re right. Narcissus thinks all the time. But only about food.’

‘Are you on the run or not? I want to know.’

‘It’s complicated. One day I’m going to get out, but I can’t just yet.’

‘What do you mean?’ Hannah asked, feeling very confused.

‘It’s too difficult to explain. Do you want to come to the show tonight?’

‘How much is it?’

‘It’s free.’

‘So why are people queuing up to pay?’

‘Because they’re not you. Look in your pocket.’

Hannah slipped a hand into her jeans and pulled out a small square of card. A ticket! She unfolded it. Two tickets!

‘It says it costs twenty pounds,’ she said.

‘I know. But to you, zero pounds. It’s an apology.’

‘For what?’

‘For being shouted at earlier.’

‘It wasn’t you who shouted.’

‘Well, you can give them back if you don’t want them.’

‘Of course I want them! Thanks very much. How did you get them in my pocket?’

Billy shrugged, grinned, and walked away. After a few steps, he turned back and casually said, ‘I might be free later this afternoon, if you’d like to pop over.’

‘OK,’ she answered, and was about to ask him what time, but she sensed this wasn’t how Billy thought. He didn’t seem like a clock kind of a person. She’d just have
to guess, and amble along when the time felt right.

‘And whatever you do,’ he whispered, ‘don’t enter the raffle.’

Then he was gone.

H
ANNAH TRIED TO PLAY IT COOL
. She really did attempt to convince herself there was a way to fill the rest of the morning with
something other than her new friend and his circus, but no dice. Since meeting Billy, even her most interesting possessions looked boring. She could find nothing to do. Nothing.
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She shlumpfed round her room, feebly flopping on flat feet from one farcical fandango of fruitless futility to the next. A brother or sister might have helped to
distract her, but Hannah was an only child, so the only person keeping her company was a voice in her head which spent the whole morning shouting, ‘VISIT BILLY! VISIT BILLY! VISIT HIM
NOW!’

Hannah got so bored she spent more than twenty minutes watching TV, which was a strange thing to do, since the TV was off. This was a house rule. No TV before that mysterious tipping point at
the end of the afternoon when parents basically give up.

‘Are you watching TV?’ Hannah’s mum yelled from the kitchen.

‘Sort of,’ said Hannah.

‘What do you mean, “sort of”? Either you are or you aren’t.’

‘Well, I sort of am and sort of aren’t.’

‘Are you being cheeky?’ shouted Hannah’s dad from the cupboard under the stairs.

An obvious reply popped into Hannah’s head: ‘Sort of.’ She knew she’d be in trouble if she said this, but she could feel the words bouncing around her mouth like two
kittens fighting in a paper bag.

Hannah’s Dad spent a lot of time in the cupboard under the stairs. Nobody knew why. It was where he mended things and broke things, and tried to mend the things he had broken, but more
often ending up breaking the things he had mended.