Circus of Thieves and the Raffle of Doom (9 page)

Once they were up on their trapezes, they began to do the jazzy stuff that trapeze people do, swinging and flinging, swirling and twirling, crossing and tossing, somersaulting and eating cakes.
(One of those is a lie. Just checking your concentration.)

Meanwhile, Jesse was crowbarring open the dining room window at 17 Scunge Crescent. He did a swift circuit of the house, grabbing money, jewellery, a laptop, two credit cards and a tin of
sardines. Jesse liked sardines. In Jesse’s opinion, sardines were the chocolate buttons of the ocean. You may disagree, but since this is not a book about seafood, perhaps we should focus on
the more important point, which is that he was burglarizing 17 Scunge Crescent, nicking everything small and valuable (or sardiney). Jesse didn’t like stealing – he truly hated the idea
of taking things that didn’t belong to him – but it was not possible to keep a place in Armitage Shank’s circus without playing a part in his dastardly plans, and without this
job, Jesse had no possibility of finding another one. There isn’t much call for neurotic, allergic, shy, vertigo-afflicted human cannonballs. Without this job, he’d have nothing to do,
nowhere to live, no money, and nothing to eat (apart from this one tin of sardines).

Jesse hated himself for stealing, but he also hated himself for being neurotic, and shy, and itchy, and having vertigo, and for being a human cannonball when human cannonballing was his least
favourite activity. Jesse suffered from what you might call low self-esteem. If you ever meet Jesse, please be nice to him, unless he is robbing you at the time, in which case – be mean.

‘I wish I was a zoo keeper,’ he muttered to himself, as he finished his circuit of the house, shoving a last handful of valuables into his pocket, ‘or a deep sea diver, or
astronomer, or speleologist. I don’t even know what a speleologist
²⁴
is, but I know it would be better than this.’

He slipped out of the window, pushed it back into place, and ran to the Big Top, carrying a baggy brown bulging bag of burgled booty.

By the time he got back to the tent, Hank and Frank were already on stage. Hank was carrying a ladder, Frank was standing in front of a paddling pool, next to another stepladder, on which was
balanced an open tin of paint. He was trying to choose whether to eat a banana or a custard tart. He asked the audience’s opinion, and everyone shouted, but with no conclusive decision. Frank
decided to put the custard tart up high, next to the tin of paint, and to eat the banana, which he peeled slowly, tossing the banana skin aside. It landed just in front of where Hank was taking his
ladder.

‘HANK!’ yelled Frank. ‘Watch out!’

Hank stopped dead, moments before his foot planted itself on top of the banana skin, and turned round. His ladder swung, almost whacking Frank in the head, but just in time, Frank ducked and
stood up again.

‘What?’ said Hank.

‘I said watch out for the banana skin.’

‘Oh,’ said Hank, turning round again, swinging his ladder and bashing it into Frank’s ladder, which was now holding a tin of paint and a custard tart. The ladder wobbled, but
Frank leapt forward and steadied it, just as Hank said, ‘What banana skin?’ and swung his ladder once again, causing Frank to leap back from the just-saved custard tart and tin of paint
and duck down as the ladder swooshed centimetres above his head.

‘Over there,’ said Frank.

‘Where?’ said Hank, swinging his ladder. Frank ducked, stood, told him to be careful, ducked again as he turned back round, then ducked yet again as he swung once more in response to
his warning that Hank’s shoelace was undone.

This was Billy’s favourite moment, as he waited in the wings with Narcissus, listening to the audience laughing and laughing, waves of mirth crashing towards him, the sound of hundreds of
people he’d never met and never would meet, having a good time. For minutes on end, Hank and Frank drew this out, a whole performance of awful accidents almost but not quite happening.
Eventually, when it seemed as if the audience wouldn’t be able to take it anymore, the teetering tower of near-disaster that had been hanging over them since the moment they took the stage
began to topple, and in a more spectacular way than anyone had imagined, chaos swept in.

Billy listened with relish to the roars and yelps of glee plunging towards him from the audience, waiting for his cue. He heard the laughter peak, and moments later Hank ran past him, wearing
nothing but a pair of red and white underpants, soaked to the skin, his face covered in custard, his back smeared with paint, his front with sawdust. Frank was close behind, wedged into a ladder, a
half-broken chair jammed over his head, with his shoes on backwards and his clown-hair hanging in a dark singed lump from one side of his head. They both had the look on their faces that you see on
long distance runners as they cross the finish line in last place.

‘You ate the banana too fast!’ snapped Hank, to Frank.

‘You swung the ladder too slow!’ barked Frank, to Hank.

‘You threw the custard pie too far!’ yapped Hank, back to Frank.

‘You lit the match too close!’ yelled Frank, back to Hank.

As the sound of Hank and Frank’s bickering receded, Billy heard the high wail of a clarinet fill the auditorium. This was his cue – the moment his whole day built towards. He took
three deep breaths for calmness, one more for concentration, then another one for luck, and rode out into the ring, with Narcissus’s body swaying and lurching underneath him.

As the warmth of the spotlight hit his face, two entirely contradictory thoughts popped up in his brain. This was not a good moment to start having Thoughts, but Thoughts are like that –
they are mischievous things that have a habit of turning up when you least expect them and demanding instant hospitality.

Thought One:
You can’t risk being thrown out of the circus. If you didn’t have this moment each day, you’d shrivel up like a plant
without water, or like a camel without taramasalata.

Thought Two:
Right is right and wrong is wrong. This evening might be your only opportunity to turn yourself into an honest person – to find your way
back to being an Espadrille, not a Shank. If you don’t go for it tonight, the chance might never return.

As Billy circled the ring on Narcissus’s back, building towards his first trick, Thoughts One and Two wrestled and tussled and tumbled and fought, rolling back and forth inside his skull.
This was really quite distracting.

It is hard to see out beyond the glare of a spotlight, but for a brief moment, shielding his eyes using a movement disguised as a salute, Billy looked up at the seats he had given to Hannah. She
was right there, perched on the edge of her chair, smiling the most wonderful smile he had ever seen. Their eyes met, Hannah gave a huge two-armed wave, and at that moment Thought Three crashed in,
smashing Thoughts One and Two to pieces.

Billy had decided. Whatever the consequences, wherever Hannah’s plan led him, he was in. Tonight was the night.

At this very moment, Maurice and Irrrrena finished scaling the drainpipe at Houghton Mansions and clambered onto a narrow concrete ledge. Maurice somersaulted over a railing and pranced across
the terrace (some habits are hard to break), then, with little difficulty, jimmied open the glass doors of the penthouse, the poshest apartment in the whole town.

But back to Billy. Everyone knows you can’t train a camel. Well, maybe not everyone, but people who know anything about camel training know it can’t be done. Narcissus, however, was
unique, and not only for the accuracy with which he could spit camel goo.

Narcissus did two circuits of the ring with an expression on his face somewhere between aloof and patronising, as if to let the audience know that entertaining humans was beneath him, and only
worth doing in exchange for a pre-negotiated quantity of pellets. Then, prompted by a secret signal from Billy, Narcissus pirouetted (as much as a half-ton animal with four legs, two humps and a
boy on its back can be said to pirouette) and ran in the opposite direction, while Billy did a similar pirouette (as much as it is possible to pirouette while wedged between a pair of jouncing
camel humps), so he was now riding backwards, going in a different direction, but facing the same way as before. This generated a ripple of applause.

Maurice and Irrrrena were meanwhile emptying the Houghton Mansions penthouse of everything valuable and portable, without even pausing to look for sardines. By the time they got back to the Big
Top, carrying two huge bags of loot, Billy was at the climax of his act, standing on Narcissus, facing sideways into the ring, being trotted round in circles while firing a bow and arrow with
unerring accuracy into a pile of balloons, which he was bursting one by one.

Narcissus got extremely cross if he ever heard anyone saying he’d been tamed, because he hadn’t. He simply chose to co-operate, of his own free will. He was still very much his own
camel, and if anyone other than Billy ever asked him to do anything, he took great pride in his unshakeable determination to remain resolutely unhelpful, independent, obstinate and, frankly,
downright rude. I shall leave it up to your imagination as to what happened to anyone who tried to force Narcissus to do anything against his will. Let’s just say that camel goo is involved,
and nobody had ever crossed him twice.