Flying Tips for Flightless Birds Page 9

  There’s still a rumour that I tried to kiss him at a sleepover. Not true.

  Friendships break up all the time. Kitty’s always surrounded by the same Bond Girls, but her Best Friend seems to be decided by rota. Jay (the only Franconi who’s ever been popular, mainly because everyone wants to see which bone he’ll break next) brings home different friends all the time. And there’s always some scandal at school about friends fighting, or making up or breaking up. It’s normal and you’re supposed to get over it. “I don’t know why you care so much,” Birdie said one day when I’d been moaning about James again. I shut up about him after that, but the whole thing irked me for months. Years. It still irks me. Why did I care so much?

  I suppose it was the fact that it was so unfair. I didn’t do anything. I’d understand if I’d slagged him off on Facebook, or wrecked his bike or kissed his sister or stolen his position on the football team, but I didn’t. I think that’s why I can’t let it go; he didn’t ditch me because of something I did, he ditched me because of something I am. And that’s a sucky thing to do to someone.

  Spots and shadows

  Posted by Birdie

  Someone recently told me that you can’t take a day off from who you are. I suppose that’s true in a way: people expect certain behaviour from you and there are consequences if you don’t deliver. But for circus people I think it’s often the other way round: you can’t take a day off from the person you’re pretending to be.

  Sometimes I think about being someone other than Birdie Franconi. Some kids run away to join the circus, but when you live there, it can be tempting to run away and join the real world. Being someone else, even boring old Bridget Sullivan, would be a kind of holiday. I am Birdie Franconi so often that I’m starting to think she’s real.

  But the person in the spotlight isn’t real, that’s what you have to remember. She or he is just a shiny surface, a collection of polished tricks designed to entertain. And where there’s a spotlight, there’s a shadow. Another self that the girl on the high wire or the boy on the trapeze is trying to distract you from. Few people notice. Even fewer think to ask why.

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  I read Birdie’s latest blog on the way out of school. Weird one today. I don’t know what she’s on about sometimes. Not that it matters, since no one reads it.

  She’s already at the warehouse but I had to stay behind to study with Hector before going to meet her. Birdie and I try to keep at least one night of the week for just us. If Hector’s around, I’m too distracted to practise. I’ve always got one eye on him so I can yell, “You’re overreaching!” or “Drop your shoulders!” or “Look out for the Tots Acrobats!” When it’s just me and Birdie, I can get some work done.

  I decide to walk to the warehouse. It’ll be a good warm-up, and anyway, I feel too bouncy to sit on the bus. I had a great day at school, and I never have great days at school. I got a B for my history assignment, sixty per cent in a maths test (Miss Allen did a victory dance – it was kind of embarrassing), double chips at the canteen because I was the last person served and they were left over, and sustained no bruises from team juggling practice with Hector (even though we were practising in the disabled loo, thanks to Kitty Bond’s War on Fun). And I’ve finally finished working out the new trapeze routine. It took me the whole of Spanish and I failed my vocab test, but it was totally worth it.

  I’m playing out the routine in my mind as I walk, my muscles twitching with every turn and flip and grab, so I don’t notice the figure walking towards me from the direction of the creepy old biscuit factory until he’s quite close. It’s getting dark and he’s hunched over, chin tucked into his collar, and by the time I see who it is, it’s too late to cross the street. I start my usual inner debate about whether or not to say hello.

  On the one hand, we used to be best friends. And although his girlfriend is a happiness-sucking vampire, he doesn’t go out of his way to torture me or Birdie personally. OK, he’ll look me over and shake his head, but my own father does that. And we were close; I still have the Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt he brought me back from Paris.

  But on the other hand, we used to be best friends. And he chose the happiness-leech over me. And he doesn’t go out of his way to stop anyone who feels like torturing me or Birdie. And he gave away his Ringling Brothers pencil case the day after he punched me and then let his mates pile on.

  You can’t really say “Hi, James” in a tone of voice that encompasses all that.

  He blanks me, as usual. But before he does, just as he passes, he narrows his eyes, like he’s daring me to even think about being friendly.

  As if.

  “Hi, James, good to see you too!” I shout after him, as sarcastically as I can. “Nice talking to you!”

  I don’t know why I do this to myself, but I’m annoyed that he’s still being a josser three years on. We’re on a deserted street and he’s ashamed to say hello to me.

  I expect him to keep walking but he stops, and after a second or two turns back. I can tell from the way his jaw is clenched that it’s not to say hi.

  “You’re a jerk, Sullivan, you know that!”

  “Me?” I look around like he might be referring to some other Sullivan. “I’m sorry, are you still sore from where I punched you in the gut? Oh no, hang on … that was you!”

  He holds his hands out incredulously. I notice his T-shirt and coat are filthy and streaked with dust; I guess he’s started hanging out in the biscuit factory with the Year Twelve wasters, breaking windows and drawing genitalia on the walls in spray paint. I wouldn’t be surprised.

  “That was three years ago!” he says. “Get over yourself!”

  “Me!”

  “You! You, you, you. You know, everyone’s sick of hearing about you. Do you ever think about anyone else?” This from a guy I did nothing but think about for a year after he dropped me like one of Hector’s beanbags.

  “We can’t all be as perfect as you, James. You attract such nice people. Where’s Kitty, off looking for people to scratch? Didn’t think you were allowed out by yourself.”

  He takes a step towards me. I’d forgotten how tall he is. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Um, that your girlfriend’s an evil cat? It’s a metaphor. A play on her name? Too sophisticated for you?” I am pushing it now.

  But he doesn’t hit me. Instead he snorts down his nostrils, like I’m not even worth a proper laugh, shakes his head and looks disgusted. “You know, it amazes me that you don’t have any friends,” he says.

  “Hey, I have friends,” I say, but I instantly regret it because I know what’s coming next.

  “Oh, yeah, your little circus-freak shadow! Finch and the Holy Ghost! Bet Saturday nights are a riot with him. Bet the study fun just never stops!”

  “Yeah, he’s smart and he reads a lot. Is that the best you can do for an insult? You should take lessons from Kitty – she’d have managed to get his hair, clothes and face in there. He has a very slight squint if it helps. And his smile is crooked. And his teeth. His nose is all right though. In a certain light.” James is looking at me like I’m cracked. He might be right. “But I’ll tell you something,” I go on, ignoring him, “he’s a better friend than you ever were.” I have no idea why I’m sticking up for Hector. If he’d heard what I just said, I’d have died of embarrassment.

  “Yeah? Well, then the poor guy deserves better than you,” James says. Then he walks off.

  What a nutjob! I’ve had conversations with Lou that made more sense. What have I ever done to him? I stomp off towards the warehouse but I’m not thinking about the trapeze any more. Suddenly I’m wondering if we should introduce a knife-throwing act. I could have a big target with James’s face on it and practise being a really, really bad shot.

  The thought has almost cheered me up by the time I get to Franconis’. I run the last few metres, bursting to tell Birdie what a complete tool James Keane is, the words bubbling up already, but when I get inside she’s
not there. The lights are on, there’s music playing, but she’s nowhere in sight. I glance towards the kitchen area but she’s not there, either. Or on any of the sofas, or at the big table. I even check the safety net to see if she’s lying on it.

  And then I realize I’m looking in the wrong places. As I shrug my bag off and bend to set it on the floor, I get a view under the net, to the space beyond it. Sometimes we stack the foam mats there but today they’re elsewhere. There’s just the floor. And a small figure in white leggings and a white top, her body crumpled like a scrunched paper ball, lying motionless on the concrete.

  “Birdie!”

  She’s as white as her clothes. And cold from the floor. I want to move her somewhere warm but I’ve been told often enough never to move someone who’s hurt. Dad gives us first-aid classes every year in case one of the students has an accident, but now all I can remember are the injuries, not how to deal with them. Words like “concussion”, “spinal injury”, “internal bleeding”, “head trauma”, “paralysis”. As I take my hands away from her head to dig my phone out of my pocket, there’s blood on my shaking fingers. When the emergency services answer, the words come out of me like machine-gun fire – no hesitation, no panic – and I wonder who’s pulling the strings, because inside I feel like a rag doll. I give them the address, tell them how far she fell, that she’s breathing and that her head’s bleeding. I tell them to hurry.

  I’m not sure I blink, never mind sleep, for the next three days. None of us do. Instead we sit on a row of plastic chairs in a corridor outside Intensive Care and flinch every time the door opens.

  No one says much. No one wants to eat. Jay lies with his head in Wren’s lap, watching the knees of the doctors and nurses whisk by his face, and Wren strokes his hair and tries not to cry on him too much.

  I get obsessed with replaying it all in my head, trying to figure out what happened. A safety net doesn’t mean you’re safe: people have broken their necks falling in the net. You can fall awkwardly, get disoriented, you can miss the net, catch the edge. You can bounce out.

  For three sleepless days I visualise every possible scenario over and over in my head. I’m exhausted, we’re all exhausted, but sleep just doesn’t come.

  Because it’s all in that little room. Every time the door opens, I can sense it, sleep, like a suffocating bird hovering over her. While we sit there, not talking, not eating, not sleeping, Birdie doesn’t open her eyes once.

  After three days, Dad drags me home and forces me to go to bed. And by then it’s not sleep; it feels more like death.

  At 9 a.m. on Monday, I’m woken by a bing on my phone.

  “Sodding junk mail,” I mutter, pulling the duvet over my head. I don’t want to get out of bed. Because once I get out of bed, today is going to happen. And if it’s anything like yesterday, I want nothing to do with it. Ideally I’d like to sleep through today – and tomorrow and every day until Birdie is finished sleeping through todays and tomorrows – but the internet has other ideas.

  I snatch my phone from its charger and scan my emails. The last one, the one that woke me, is the automatic notification I get when Birdie puts a new post on the blog.

  I sit up in bed, wide-eyed. Is she awake? I scrabble at the link until it takes me to Flying Tips.

  There is a new post. But it doesn’t say, “Hey, Finch, I’m awake, get out of bed and come visit me, waster,” which is what I’m hoping for. It’s just a standard blog post, something about the Franconi twins. It takes me a minute to realize what’s going on, and then the disappointment hits me like a slushy snowball in the face. Automatic scheduling. She wrote this post days ago and set it to appear automatically today.

  It’s weird, seeing her words appear on the screen when she can’t even open her eyes and speak to me. And it seems inappropriate to post stuff about trapeze artists, considering the accident. If there are more posts lined up, I should cancel them.

  I try to log in to the blog account but it’s password-protected. I’m pretty sure I know all Birdie’s passwords and I try them one after the other – RinglingBros, BusterK, GetLostFinch – but none of them work and Mum’s calling me to go to the hospital. I give up. Maybe there was just the one post anyway.

  Everyone makes mistakes

  Posted by Birdie

  The big acts at the circus are big precisely because they allow the least margin for error, and risk the biggest consequences. Lion tamers, high-wire walkers, human cannon balls, flying trapeze artists – they’re the ones on the posters. Along with the words “death-defying!”, because they are.

  Circuses tend not to talk about their worst accidents – it’s not exactly good for business. So I wasn’t going to mention Franconis’ most infamous act, but if you google “Franconi” you’ll find it anyway, probably in a list of “Ten Worst Circus Disasters!” that includes an elephant being hanged for murder (seriously, google it, it’s bizarre and horrible) and a fire that killed hundreds of spectators.

  I’ve already written about our great-granny, Evelyn Franconi, and her twin sister, Avis, but I left out the bit about how their act came to an end.

  They were performing with another trapeze artist, a man called Carlo Fellini. The details are sketchy; all we know is that they were performing without a net and at some point Avis fell and was killed instantly. This was in 1930 so there’s no film of the event, no photographs, no CCTV, no YouTube video taken on someone’s phone. Even though there were four hundred people watching that night, including a couple of journalists, we’ll never know exactly what went wrong.

  But that didn’t stop people speculating.

  It got around that Carlo was engaged to Evelyn but in love with Avis, and that was the birth of a dozen conspiracy theories. The newspapers, the spectators, the police, the circus owners, friends of the Franconis – everyone had a different take on it: Evelyn hated Avis; Avis felt guilty and jumped to her death; Avis was plotting to get Evelyn out of the way, and Evelyn knew it and took action first; Carlo wanted to get rid of Evelyn but dropped the wrong girl; Carlo had to get rid of Avis before Evelyn found out. It was murder. It was an accident. It was sabotage. It was suicide.

  What was Avis’s mistake? Letting go too soon? Trusting the wrong person? Falling for her sister’s boyfriend? Did she make her mistake in the air, or on the ground, long before she even got up there?

  Evelyn ended up marrying Carlo, and they performed for a while with their kids, including our granny, Lou. But the story followed them around and eventually they had to leave the circus to escape it.

  Whatever happened, I think it was brave of Evelyn to get back up there after losing her partner, her twin. But I’m not surprised it became too much for her. I think you’d get very tired of instinctively reaching out for someone who’s no longer there.

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  For the first few days, Birdie’s room is chaos. Strangers race in and out – doctors, nurses, specialists, consultants – adjusting machines and scribbling on charts. Orderlies wheel Birdie up and down the long corridors, day and night, rushing her to different departments for scans, X-rays, blood tests. Here we go again, Bridget! The doctors are constantly frowning and shaking their heads, taking Mum and Dad aside, giving each other instructions, and I feel like crawling under the bed so I can stay close to Birdie but stop being in everyone’s way. They all talk over my head as if I’m not there anyway.

  One day they stop using the word “concussion” and start using the word “coma”. It’s a heavy word, and it falls at my feet like a bird shot from the sky.

  And then, like a TV being switched off, one morning it all just stops. The doctors vanish and the machines settle into a slow, regular riff of beeps that I come to know so well I hear them in my sleep. The little room goes still and quiet, swallowed up by a fug of waiting. The doctors say there’s nothing else we can do.

  So I take two buses to the hospital every day and sit silently by her bed, waiting, doing my “shift” on the family visiting rota, like
Birdie is our job now, and feeling useless.

  One day a new nurse comes in and starts doing all the checks the nurses do.

  “All right?” he says.

  “Hi,” I say. Then, “I’m her brother,” as if I have to prove my right to be there.

  “I know, I was talking to your dad. Twins, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m Tony.”

  “Finch.”

  He goes on taking readings from the machines and writing numbers on Birdie’s chart. I’ve been tempted to look at that chart many times. It just hangs from the end of the bed. I could pick it up, but I haven’t. I’m not sure I want to know what it says.

  “It’s OK to hold her hand,” Tony says, and I realize I’m sitting with my hands through the metal rails around the bed, a few centimetres from Birdie’s fingers.

  “You won’t hurt her, but stay clear of the wires and tubes. We put the rails up because people in comas sometimes move around and she could fall off the bed, but while you’re here you can lower them.”

  He finishes his checks and looks like he’s about to leave, but he’s the first person I’ve met here who’s talked to me like a human being, so I say, “Tony?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What’s wrong with her?” He walks back into the room, slowly. “OK, I know what’s wrong with her, she’s in a coma. But what does that mean?”

  He lowers the rails himself and sits on the end of the bed. “It means her brain is trying to fix itself. She’s gone offline for a bit. That’s normal for a serious head injury.”

  “Oh. How long will it take?”

  He shrugs. “It varies. She’s also got broken ribs and a shattered fibula. Calf bone,” he adds. “But we’re treating that and she’s not in any pain. It’s just like sleep. Deeper than sleep. We’ve taken the breathing tube away because she’s stable now and breathing for herself. The machines tell us what’s going on inside her body, and the tubes in her arm are feeding her because she can’t eat or drink.”