Flying Tips for Flightless Birds Read online

  The whole of the Easter holidays I sit on the sofa, watching them all creating new routines, practising old ones, writing notes, making mistakes, falling, laughing, applauding each other. The whole warehouse is ringing with voices, music and energy, just like it’s meant to.

  Janie flops onto the sofa beside me on the Thursday before we go back to school, shiny-eyed and breathless, and says, “I think it’s really coming along, don’t you?”

  I look at her. “What’s coming along?” I gesture at the various routines going on all over the warehouse. “What’s the point?”

  Her face falls, and I get up and go back to the hospital.

  “You know, I’m getting sick of these one-way conversations,” I tell Birdie peevishly.

  “Really? I’d have thought they’d be right up your street.”

  I almost leap out of my skin for a second before I realize the voice is coming from behind me.

  “No one to interrupt or contradict or tell you to shut it? Just an unfiltered stream of Finch. If I were Birdie, I’d wake up just to ask for earplugs.”

  “Helpful, Hector. Anyway I don’t think she can even hear me.”

  He comes in and sits on the chair next to the bed. “Hiya, SB.”

  “What’s SB?”

  “Sleeping Birdie. Like Sleeping Beauty but—”

  “Yeah, I get it.”

  “She can hear you. People in comas can hear everything going on around them.”

  That’s what Tony says too. But it’s getting harder and harder to believe, because if Birdie could hear Mum and Dad sitting by her bed crying, she’d have woken up by now.

  “I thought I could read to her, if you like?” Hector says.

  “What, books on the First World War? She’s already in a coma, Hec.”

  “How about a new biography of Buster Keaton?” He produces the book from his bag.

  “Oh. Well, that might be OK. And can I borrow it after you?”

  “No, you’re behind in history – it’s First World War for you.”

  “Great, two comas in the family. Franconis’ is in trouble.”

  He laughs, but stops when he sees I’m not laughing too.

  “No, really. Mum says the rent’s going up and the income’s going down. We’re going to have to close. Permanently.”

  “What about the show, won’t that help?”

  “What show? There’s no show without Birdie – the trapeze was our big act. Anyway, we’d need more routines, rehearsals, equipment. It’s a lot of work, and Mum and Dad just don’t have the energy at the moment. No one does.” I gesture at Birdie and say, a little louder, “You hear that, Bird? You’re ruining everything.”

  “She can’t help it,” Hector says reasonably.

  But I don’t feel like being reasonable.

  “I knew this would happen someday,” I say. “That we might have to close, I mean. I just thought Birdie would be here to help me do something about it. It’s like she’s given up on us. Whatever, I don’t even care about Franconis’. I just want her to…”

  I gulp and blink furiously because I am not going to cry in front of Hector, and he says quickly, “Hey, the trapeze isn’t everything. You’ve still got Py and Janie and the Juggulars. And Wren and Jay and the Acrobats. And me.” He looks away and shrugs. “I mean, I can make the pizza and stuff.”

  “Your Four Cheese and Peanut Butter Surprise is pretty special,” I admit, getting my face under control again, and he smiles.

  “It’s not hopeless,” he says. “Birdie would want us to try.” Then he hands me the Buster Keaton book. “Here, why don’t you read this to her. She’d like that.”

  “Life is on the wire, the rest is just waiting.”

  – Karl Wallenda

  Posted by Birdie

  I’ve been reading about the Wallendas and discovering there’s much more to them than a tragic accident.

  What makes a person decide to devote their life to walking on a wire 1.5 centimetres thick, six metres (minimum) in the air? For the teenage Karl Wallenda, it started with a job advert asking for “A hand balancer with courage”. How often do you get to apply for a job that specifies “courage” in the ad? IT skills, yes. Courage? Not so much.

  The job turned out to be doing handstands on the shoulders of his new boss while the boss walked a high wire, which was all very well but not dangerous enough for Karl, and he soon created his own act. By 1928 his high-wire human pyramid involved four people, three tiers and two bicycles. The two men on bikes would ride across the high wire with two planks of wood between them on their shoulders. Karl would sit on a chair balanced on the planks and his future wife, Helen, would stand on his shoulders. They got the name the “Flying Wallendas” when they fell one night. All four of them managed to catch themselves on the wire, no one was hurt, and people in the audience said they fell so gracefully, they looked like they were flying.

  That act became the seven-person pyramid that kept going until the fatal accident in 1962.

  The accident was shocking. But not as shocking as the fact that the surviving Wallendas performed again the very next night.

  Today, five generations on, there are still performing Wallendas, but now they are skywalkers, which means high-wire walking outdoors, between skyscrapers and over rivers and canyons, using highly sophisticated equipment to monitor weather conditions and construct their rigging. Nik Wallenda trains six hours a day, six days a week, and in 2011 he successfully made the walk between the two ten-storey buildings in Puerto Rico that, in 1978, killed his great-grandfather, Karl.

  That’s the nature of circus acts – they have to get bigger and better all the time because otherwise the audience will get bored.

  But the story about the Flying Wallendas that impresses me most is a very simple one. When the Wallendas first performed in Madison Square Garden, New York, in 1928, they did it without a net. They weren’t trying to impress anyone, they weren’t being brave and they weren’t being cocky. They’d just managed to lose the net in transit.

  They could have cancelled the act or postponed until they got a new net, but there was a show to do, a crowd with tickets, and Madison Square Garden was their big break.

  You can plan a trick for months. For years. But you can’t control everything. That’s where courage comes in; sometimes you have to just go for it.

  The crowd in Madison Square Garden had no idea that the Wallendas hadn’t planned to do their act net-less. They just gave them a standing ovation.

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  We’ve only ever tried one trick without a safety net.

  It was last winter and Dad had decided the net was looking tired, so he ordered a new one and we took the old one down the night before it was due to arrive. Birdie and I were in the warehouse alone, tidying up after the Tuesday Acrobats, when I noticed her standing under the trapeze and looking up, chewing her lip.

  “The Franconi Twins did everything without a net,” she said as I came to stand beside her.

  “Yeah, and look what happened to them.”

  “We don’t know what happened. It might not have been an accident at all, it might have been deliberate.”

  “And that’s better?”

  She shrugged. “It would mean they didn’t make a mistake.” Then she turned and raised an eyebrow at me. “Dare you,” she said.

  I raised my eyes to the top of the rigging. Without the net hanging halfway between it and the ground, it seemed higher than ever. “Mum would murder us.”

  “She won’t know. Just a simple catch. When was the last time we missed a basic catch?”

  “Exactly. We’re probably due.”

  “Rubbish. And we’d be able to say we’d performed without a net, just like the Franconi Twins.”

  “Not too like them, preferably.”

  “Go on, Finch, it’ll be me in the air anyway – all you have to do is catch.”

  “Yeah, so it’ll be my fault if you pancake!”

  She was already heading for t
he ladder. “It’ll be fine,” she called, and I followed her, because that’s what I do.

  Before I reached the top, she’d already swung out and landed on the far platform. She sent the bar back to me, I caught it and we stood facing each other. She seemed very far away but I could make out her grin.

  “Wait!” I called as she lifted the bar on her side. I applied a hefty amount of chalk dust to my hands, which were beginning to sweat like a beginner’s. She did the same. “One catch,” I yelled. “Basic knee-hang grab, no funny business, no somersaults. I’m serious, Birdie!”

  “OK, Dad!”

  I swung out on the bar.

  I don’t look down when I’m up on the trapeze, there’s no need. But I couldn’t help noticing that something was missing from my peripheral vision as I flipped over to hook my knees around the bar: that blurred expanse of white hovering below us was gone, and the concrete floor looked grey and hard and very, very far away. All at once I realized how big a psychological effect the net has. It keeps you calm. It doesn’t just stop you from hitting the ground, it stops you from falling in the first place, because you’re not worried, you’re not sweating, you’re not thinking about the distance beneath you. So you perform flawlessly, and you think you don’t need a net. You don’t need it because it’s there.

  Birdie was swinging faster and faster, hanging by her knees, and we were starting to synchronize. If I had a penny for every time we’d done this catch, I’d be loaded, but suddenly it felt like the very first time. My arms felt weak, my hands like boneless dough. I started to second-guess the position of my knees, which way my palms should face. I wanted to call it all off but Birdie was hurtling towards me, stretching out her hands, and this was the one. I reached out automatically, saw her legs unfold, her body start to drop. As she left the bar, there was a huge bang as every light in the warehouse went out and we were plunged into darkness.

  I had a split second to find her.

  It happened so fast, but I remember thinking, or just knowing, that there was no point in trying to see her. There was no point in waving my arms around hoping to hit her. The fact was, if she wasn’t where she was supposed to be, then it was all over.

  Instead I closed my eyes, stopped questioning myself, held my arms out exactly as I’d done a million times before, and when the small dusty hands landed on my wrists, I grabbed hold, tight enough to crush them.

  We just swung for a bit, until our eyes adjusted to the smudge of moonlight at the dirty windows and I could see enough to deposit Birdie back on the platform and then swing onto it myself. We sat on the edge, trembling and cursing the fact that everything in the warehouse is ancient and dilapidated, including the electrical wiring.

  For a second I’d lost her. I had no sister. No twin. No Birdie. I put my arm around her. “Love you, sis,” I whispered.

  She put her head on my shoulder. “Big softie,” she said, her voice still shaking.

  After my shift at the hospital, I go back to the warehouse but it’s deserted. All the lights are out except one, a big spotlight pointed at the empty trapeze platform. There’s something lonely about an empty spotlight, like a big white hole in the world.

  “Hi, sweetheart.” Mum is sitting on one of the sofas in the dark. No, huddled on one of the sofas. It’s even sadder than the spotlight. I huddle beside her and she wraps her arms around me.

  “I should never have started this,” she says.

  I look at her and realize she’s been crying.

  “The circus. I should never have put you up there. Who puts their child ten metres in the air and says, ‘Have fun, honey!’?”

  It hadn’t even occurred to me that Mum might be blaming herself for the accident. “That’s silly, Mum.” I try to imagine life without Franconis’, try to imagine being plain Finchley Sullivan, but I can’t even picture him.

  “I’m a terrible parent,” she says.

  “No, you’re not. I’ve always thought you’re a pretty cool parent.”

  “Well, that just proves it. You’re not supposed to like your parents, you’re supposed to hate them because they stop you doing dangerous things.”

  “It’s not like we didn’t know the risks, Mum.”

  “You’re children; there shouldn’t be any risks.”

  But that’s rubbish, there’s risk everywhere. Sometimes you risk everything just stepping through the school gates. At least Birdie and I are used to having our hearts in our mouths. This isn’t Mum’s fault. I’m Birdie’s partner and I wasn’t there. If anyone’s to blame, it’s me.

  “It’ll be OK, Mum, we just have to wait. And … and in the meantime, we have to focus on the show.”

  “Show? We can’t have the show now, Finch.”

  “I know, but, Mum, we have to! You said yourself, it’s our last shot at keeping Franconis’.”

  “I don’t care about Franconis’. I don’t care about anything except…” She can’t finish because she’s crying again.

  “But Birdie cares. Mum, we can’t let her wake up and find Franconis’ is gone, can we? What would she say? She’d be furious.”

  Mum cries for a while, then she takes a few shaky breaths and dries her face with her sleeve. “She would. OK, Finch. But you have to know, even if we do the show, it might not make any difference. We might lose the place anyway.”

  “I know. But at least we can tell Birdie we tried.”

  We’ve got until the end of term to make this happen. I try to imagine Birdie standing up there in that spotlight at the show, but all I can see is her tiny body falling in the dark.

  Sign up for Franconis’ Dating Service Circus!

  Posted by Birdie

  If you google “famous circus double acts”, you’ll be surprised to discover how many of them were husband-and-wife partnerships.

  Clyde and Harriett Beatty were both lion tamers, Karl and Helen Wallenda were high-wire walkers, Nik Wallenda proposed to Erendera Vasquez on the high wire (who could say no?), Elizabeth and Martin Collins performed the Wheel of Death together, and Texas Slim and his wife, Montana Nell, were a knife-throwing Western act.

  I could go on; the list is long.

  But when you join a double act and discover just how many hours you have to spend with your partner, how many fights you have to have and times you have to make up, you’ll be less surprised. Basically, if you don’t like your partner enough to at least marry them, your act won’t survive. A circus partnership is based on trust, loyalty, devotion, commitment, long hours and not minding the smell of each other’s sweaty tights. Marriage sounds pretty casual in comparison.

  Which is all very romantic, but the other reason for all these husband-and-wife teams is that if you’re spending seven hours a day, seven days a week training together, you might as well get married too, because you will have exactly zero free time to meet/date/kiss/marry anyone else.

  Sibling acts are also common, for all the same reasons. In fact, they’re even more guaranteed to succeed long-term because you can’t divorce your brother or sister (believe me, I’ve looked into it). You’re stuck with them, so you might as well make an act out of it.

  The upside to sibling teams is there are no romantic hassles. The downside is there are no romantic hassles.

  So if you want to join Franconis’ and you’ve got a sibling handy, bring them with you. And if you’re a Single Pringle, come along anyway. Maybe your double act awaits!

  < < Previous Post

  “You and me, Finch, how about it?” Hector says as we sit together on the yard wall the first day back after Easter, eating lunch and reading Birdie’s blog. I almost choke on my sandwich.

  “Wawmph!”

  He frowns at me while I brush crumbs off myself, then he says, “Why don’t we put an act together?”

  “Oh,” I say. Then, “Oh! You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because falling off stilts is one thing, falling from a trapeze is another. If you don’t believe me, let me introdu
ce you to my sister. Oh, that’s right, she’s not here, she’s in hospital. In a coma.”

  He twists his lips at me. “There’s more to the circus than the trapeze, Finch. I meant, why don’t you join my act?”

  “Your act?”

  “Yeah, why not? You’re good at coming up with stuff. I thought we could design a comedy routine. And it’s OK, I’ll be the funny one, you can be the straight man.”

  I bite my lip. It’s that or literally growl at him.

  “I’m not saying it’ll be easy,” he says, “but if you work hard, I think we can pull it off. And it would give you something to do in the show. I mean, without Birdie.” He shrugs apologetically. I’d quite like to kick him.

  “I do not need a charity bit part in the Hapless Hector Show, thanks all the same. Birdie will be fine by show time and if she’s not, then … then I’ll do something on my own! And I won’t need to make an idiot of myself either; I can upstage the likes of you any day!”

  Infuriatingly, he’s trying not to smile. “The likes of me? Snob. What happened to we’re all people on the fringes?”

  “Shut up, Hector.”

  “Oooooh, did someone dare insult the Famous Flying Finch Franconi?”

  I pick up my bag and start to walk away but he’s still laughing and calling after me. “Hey, don’t worry, I’ll teach you everything I know!”

  I wave over my shoulder, but not with all five fingers.

  “What’s with all the tragedy on the blog, Bird? It’s getting morbid. Why were you reading about all those accidents? Why am I asking you all these questions when you can’t answer back?” I grin at her, but she can’t grin back either. The monitors beep instead.