Circus Solace (7 page)

“Then we can,”
Pa said, the old strength returning to his voice as he spoke. “We can do this,” he said and patted the box, as if for good luck. It stayed there and Matt reached over and put his hand over it too.

“We can,”
Matt said and smiled.

             
                            *

For the rest of the day, after lunch and before their guests arrived, Matt and
Pa spent the afternoon putting photos up on the walls. They didn’t bother with frames, but simply tacked them up where they saw fit. Even though it was hap-hazard and unplanned, each picture seemed to fit the spot they chose and after a while it became hard to imagine the walls without the photos on them. It was as if they centred the house, making it seem sturdier and more grounded. It was a simple thing they did, but Matt hadn’t felt at peace like it for a long time. It felt right, what they were doing and good. Each time one put a picture up, the other approved it. Matt looked around from time to time and wondered if the house itself was not at work somehow and making sure everything they did fitted just right. Ideas like that should have sounded crazy but since they had set out in the car all that time ago, he didn’t put much stock in things like that anymore. Maybe crazy wasn’t such a bad place to go, once in a while.

             
                            *

Matt saw Lucas and Marcus walk up the driveway and felt disappointed to not see Max join them. He felt sad for him, sitting in amongst the shadows of the caves and wished he had felt comfortable enough to come to the house.
Matt was just about to say hello when his jaw dropped at the sight of Lucas. Gone was the mossy, petal- heavy Lucas of last night. It had been replaced by a Lucas with clear, tanned skin and ruddy, colourful cheeks. Even his nails seemed to glow and his hair was shoulder length and almost silver in tone.

“This is what I get for spending a day in a kitchen baking cakes,” he said cheerfully, pointing to himself and making light of Matt’s shock.

“You look…good,” Pa said as he stepped onto the back porch.

“Let’s see, I’ve got cookie complexion,”
Lucas said, pointing to his face. “After that, I got icing sugar nails,” he went on, wiggling his fingers. “Lastly, I’m looking at some flour in the hair.” For a finale, he swished his hair spectacularly along his shoulder.

“More importantly,” Marcus interrupted, rolling his eyes at the performance, “I’ve brought the cakes.” He flipped
the box he had been carrying and the lid flew up to reveal a dozen multicoloured pastries.

“We’ll
weigh this place down if we’re not careful,” Pa said, ruefully patting his stomach, even though his eyes zoomed straight to the cakes.

“Nonsense,” Marcus went on
. “All the work you do with the house, you’ll need to keep your energy up.”  Pa waved them up and both of them began to walk towards the house and then stopped for a moment.

“It looks straighter,” Marcus said, matter-of-factly.

“Hmm,” Lucas said, as a way of agreement. The two of them bounded up the steps even as Matt and Pa stopped to peer at the house.

“It does look straight
Pa,” Matt said after a few moments of stunned silence.

“Hmm,”
Pa said, as a way of agreement.

Setting down the cakes and brewing a fresh pot of coffee, the four of them sat in the room and laid out the remaining boxes
, one by one. Marcus looked briefly at the photos on the wall but said nothing, instead nodding agreeably at what he saw. Lucas grinned broadly, clearly delighted and winked at Matt.

“Love what you’ve done with the place,” he drawled, as he tugged the latch of the second box open. For a moment, Matt thought he looked like a gingerbread man, just about ready to explode with excitement.

“Now, gentlemen, what we have here are the four keepers of Moon-Dip Falls. You’ve already worked your way through the memory box, the heart of the show, so now we have three. Box two, is costumes-the eyes of the performance. Every fabric of clothing is the best quality, every colour the clearest and most defined shade.” Lucas began to pull one free of the box and gently tugged the silk wrapping away. A ruby red dress spilled out over his arms and Matt almost winced at how bright the colours appeared. It lit up the room and Matt thought it looked like fine wine, the way it flowed along the space in the room.

“The colours came from crushed raspberries and rose petals,” Marcus said quietly, reaching out to run a finger to feel the dress. He encouraged Matt and
Pa to do the same with a nod of his head. Matt put his thumb to the fabric and noticed how close it was to the tips of the grass blades in the fields.

“You made all these?”
Pa asked. Even as he spoke, Matt noticed he couldn’t take his eyes off the dress.  

“We had a dressmaker, Emily Scullery, who made all these
.” Marcus’ eyes were wistful but then turned hard as he continued. “The clown pronounced her a witch. She was the first one to flee because she was in the most danger.” He held the cloth up to his face and studied it, as if he was seeing the woman in the fabric.

“Emily was no such thing of course. She just had a way of tying things together and making more of them. She could take a simple cut of cloth and weave in fruits and sand and a hundred things no other person would think of and make
it something beautiful.” Matt looked at Marcus and thought how similar it all sounded to the way he used ingredients for his recipes. He wondered if he had been in love with Ms. Scullery. As if on cue, Lucas reached over, all joy gone from his eyes and patted Marcus on the arm.

“She was a genius,” Marcus said and then nodded, making an end of it.

“She was,” Pa said and prised his eyes away from the costume to meet Marcus’ eyes.

“A hard-worker, too,” Lucas said, a hint of
the former excitement returning to his voice. While they had been admiring the one outfit, Lucas had pulled out what seemed to be three dozen more wrapped garments, piled high on the floor.

“Don’t let the size of the box fool you,” he said brightly. “These things have trap-doors and secret compartments and things I don’t even understand
.”

“It’s true,” Marcus said, sensing the bewilderment in Matt’s eyes. “I once hid in that box for two nights and I still didn’t find every section of it.”

“You managed to climb inside that box?” Matt said.

“Quite roomy, all things considered,” Marcus said, with a straight face.

“How did you-” Matt began to ask but then caught Lucas pulling a scarf from the box; it was the same scarf he’d been pulling at for the last minute or so and showed no sign of ending. “Never mind.”

By the time the first box was almost half empty, they decided to stop. The living room was already high with four sets of costumes and each of them was almost pulsing with energy from the colours. It was like they were almost alive, Matt thought. There was something else about them that Matt noticed, too; each of the outfits displayed a different pattern. No two garments were alike and nothing matched. It was as if the dressmaker, this Ms. Scullery, had too many ideas in her head to waste on repeating anything. Matt imagined her with a sketchbook, flipping each page, every thought different and every design nothing like the one that went before. The room itself practically glowed with the energy from the clothes, as if they had harnessed a rainbow and dragged it inside.

Over a fresh pot of coffee and a milkshake brought fresh from Marcus’ diner, the four of them carefully packed the clothes back into the box. It was strange, almost funny, how many times they went back and forth to the small crate until it was full. By the time they were done and ready to move onto the second box, the room was crackling with energy. Lucas, who had been quiet while admiring all the clothes, started to shift from one foot to the other; from taking out and re-packing the clothes, his skin had changed in tone slightly, his skin flecked with more crimson and aqua-blue, as if he had leant against a newly graphitized wall.

“If our last box was meant for the eyes, this one is for the senses. This box is the lungs of the show, the mechanics that kept things working and pumping, the pistons and hammers.
”

“And a lot of hot air,” Marcus said, shaking his head at the theatricality of his friend a
nd everyone giggled. Lucas took it in good humour, pointing his hands to his chest in a ‘who-me?’ gesture. Marcus responded by waving him on and Matt saw ruddiness in his cheeks that belied his grumpy words: he was enjoying himself.

“
In here, we have every prop known to man and a few that are not; bits and bobs and odds and sods that fill the ears, touch the nose and brush the skin.” As he snapped the latch off and flipped the lid, Matt felt another fizz of expectation in the air. As if on cue, Lucas hoisted a silver sword high above him that gleamed and sparked. Matt thought he could almost hear the air being cut, as it glided left to right.

“Fully retractable,” he went on, pressing it down on his foot, while raising his leg, so in a moment, all that was left was the hilt and no sword.

“Made from ground salmon bones; the most stretchy fibre outside elastic,” he said to Matt, his tone conversational. “All that flipping and wiggling up and down the streams makes them bendy as all hell.”

Every item that came out of the box was out of this world but made perfect sense inside the world of a circus performance. Matt tried on a tiara made entirely of soft drink ring-pulls; he slipped it on carefully, weary of being scratched but was amazed at how soft it
felt. Marcus leant over and explained how each ring pull had been scooped up off of Mexican side-streets and almost smelted by the intense sun. Pa stood holding a pair of shooting pistols fashioned out of bookmarks and lost earrings. Lucas made him pull the trigger and a cartoon flash of gunfire popped out. A flame appeared, with a
BLAM
written in the middle, made entirely from stale penny sweets; foam bananas for the flames and cola bottles for the smoke.

On and on it went, Marcus slipping on handcuffs fashioned from tin foil and bus tickets
, Lucas twirled a walking stick that doubled as a baton made from paper clips and honey. Matt could barely keep pace with what passed through his hands; ear muffs made of lily petals, flight goggles chiselled out of avocado skins and pine cones; the horse’s saddle made from discarded playing cards and air-mail envelopes. It seemed as if everything came from what other people threw away or didn’t care enough about. In a strange way, Matt began to understand the logic of how all the props could fit inside a small box-everything seemed to sway and bend and was pliable to the touch. Nothing was too brittle, precious or easily broken. Everything had its place and was made to feel useful.

The four of them stopped well before halfway, as much out of exhaustion as anything else. Over food brought from Marcus’,
Pa asked questions but nothing managed to cover what they had seen. Lucas and Marcus told them what they could but Matt had the idea that they knew only knew a part of the story, too. Matt supposed he could have felt disappointed but instead was happy to not know everything. It was okay, he thought, to sometimes only know a part of the story, as long as it was a part that mattered. Matt felt sure that the circus and the show mattered, perhaps a great deal.       

Matt watched
Pa with the other men as they ate. Lucas was animated, his skin rippling and changing again with the last props he’d come into contact with, while Marcus sat quietly, monitoring and adjusting the stories that were being thrown out and shared. Matt watched Pa and saw how alive he looked then, listening and following, always looking out for a mention of Matt’s ma. His whole face lit when her name cropped up, no matter how briefly. He also noticed the atmosphere of the room had changed, buzzing and sparkling with the contents of the boxes and the stories that came attached with them. The colours, the photos and the noise, made Matt feel as if the house was alive, too, eavesdropping in on the conversation, or maybe even overlooking them, like a proud parent watching over children.

By the time it came to the last box, Matt was surprised to see Lucas, the showman, stay in his seat and Marcus step up to the centre of the room.
He crouched down to the box with little fanfare and gently prised open the catches and flipped the lid without any fuss. He set the deeds to one side and to Matt’s surprise he scooped up the scripts and put them aside, too. The last set of papers he drew up were a clutch of magenta trimmed letters. Beside him, Matt heard Lucas sigh and wondered what could be in them to make a showman lost for words. Marcus gently unfolded the first letter and all of them froze as something remarkable happened. Matt saw the letters in each word hum and pulse on the page.

“Today was a fine day with the show. The small tricks and buffoonery was a splendid success and one more fine idea by that daughter of mine!”
Marcus had remained silent but somehow a voice was somehow making itself be heard. Matt glanced over and saw Pa and Lucas both hypnotised.  It wasn’t that the letters were speaking out loud, not quite, but they were somehow communicating, whispering and carrying in the air on a frequency level only they could make out.

“Is that…”
Pa couldn’t quite finish but Marcus was already nodding. He had folded the page slightly to hush down the words.