The Slightly Bruised Glory of Cedar B. Hartley (14 page)

‘What for?' says Caramella.

‘A warm-up game.' Oscar grins and taps his knee wildly, but he doesn't explain further, not till we get there.

We arrive half an hour before the class is due to start, so we can set up the mats. Inisiya meets us there. Oscar holds out his unsteady hand to her and says, ‘Hello. I know you've had a hazardous journey.'

She looks perplexed, but shakes his hand and says, ‘Yes.'

Caramella is shy, as usual, and just manages a small ‘hello', but as we all start unrolling mats we also unroll our awkwardness a little and I put on my Stevie Wonder CD, which always helps. And then I start talking.

‘So,' I say, ‘do you think anyone will show up?'

‘Probably not Mohammed, but all the rest,' says Inisiya.

‘Why not Mohammed? Is he a mountain?' says Oscar.

Caramella laughs and looks at Inisiya. ‘Don't worry, he's always saying stuff like that, you'll get used to him.'

‘Mohammed will not come because he is too serious. He is the only one in his family who speaks English, because he is the youngest. So he looks after them all. He has so much responsibility. He will only work. The family are afraid still.'

‘Oh, he's grown up too early?' says Oscar.

I feel sad for Mohammed, though I don't even know him. He must be the serious boy I saw here when I first came. It makes me suspect that if you don't learn to play when you're young, maybe you never learn. Maybe you become dead-set about your beliefs.

Luckily, Oscar has started to dance. He always beams when he dances, and it's a very contagious beam. The way he dances is more like a thrash than a boogie, and I notice Inisiya grinning as she watches him. He begins to scatter the blue balloons on the floor as if he's sowing seeds. Then he suggests we blow them up. This is his game.

As people enter, we tie a balloon around their ankle. The idea is that we must all try to stamp and explode each other's balloon while trying not to get ours stamped on.

‘But why are they all blue?' asks Caramella, holding one up to the light.

‘Because blue is the sky's reward; it has the largest promise,' says Oscar as he performs a rather heavy pirouette, which makes him look like a Hills Hoist.

Whether it's the promise contained in blue, or not, it works. They all come in together, about fifteen of them. Inisiya introduces us. The family of Hmong girls clump together; the older one, Mei, holding the hands of the younger ones. They all have round, soft faces and seem as timid as Caramella, only they're so small and gentle I'm afraid they might snap like a twig if you pull at their arms. There are some African boys (Inisiya says they're from Somalia and Sudan); also Inisiya's little sister, Parisa, and Rashmi from Pakistan, wearing glorious pink sneakers; and Jarrah and Hussein and Mali and Layla and others whose names I can't remember after the first round of introductions.

As soon as the class is set to begin, I feel like an impostor. I feel as if I'm a beginner acrobat pretending to be a teacher, which I guess is kind of true so it's no wonder I'm panicking. At least I still have
The Tumblers' Manual
that Ruben gave me. That's my one piece of legitimacy. What if they ask me to do a round-off into a back somersault? And then what will they think when they see Oscar and Caramella – the two most unlikely looking acrobats ever to say, ‘I'm in a circus'. Will they think they've been had?

Of course it's the other way round. The worse we are at it, the better they seem to feel. As soon as I try to demonstrate a very simple balance with Oscar, like this:

Oscar wobbles and makes such funny sounds that they all laugh, and Rashmi jumps up and down and claps. And when we try some rolling, the same thing happens. The first roll we demonstrate is called a sausage roll, at least I call it that, and it isn't easy but it's kind of stupid so you laugh when you don't make it. Caramella can sometimes do it, but only in one direction. Oscar, however, just seems to fall on his side in a lump and then, to add to the lump effect, he cycles his legs in the air so he looks like a tortoise who can't get up. This again sends them into outbursts of laughter and they all leap up to try. Hussein gets it almost straight away and astonishes himself.

So the hotchpotch accidental crew of Oscar, Caramella and me provides just the right mix of attitudes, abilities and inabilities. Oscar provides the light relief and keeps everything always potentially silly, Caramella shows how to be gentle but persistent, and I provide the excitement, just because I'm the eager-beaver jump-in-and-give-it-a-go type. So, though not one of us can do a back flip, or precisely
because
not one of us can do a back flip, we seem to pull it off. The younger ones love Oscar, and seeing him as a leader makes me realise that he's really a naturally good clown. The shyer girls, like Mali and Mei and her sisters, are drawn to Caramella's gentle way, and then the more adventurous of them, like Sali, Hussein, Inisiya and Nidal, have me to drive them.

After they've all left, Inisiya comes up and sits with us. She's warm and beaming.

‘Hey, it is a great success, do you think?'

Oscar blows out a big breath and says, ‘Magic, I say. It was magic.'

Caramella nods.‘We all deserve an ice-cream.'

So the four of us walk up to Charmaines and treat ourselves to ice-creams, and it seems that The Acrobrats are really back on the road. It's a different road but it's still going, and that's the main thing.

Chapter 24

I decide to walk with Inisiya back to the flats where she lives. I'm feeling all brave and big and bold, because giving a circus class is so much better than giving some old things that now I don't need to so feel useless in the face of all that she's been through. Maybe Inisiya feels it too, because suddenly, without me even trying, we're talking about her life in Afghanistan. It started because I asked her about her parents.

‘You know, in Afghanistan my father work in the post office and my mother is a teacher before the Taliban. When the Taliban come to rule, they lose their jobs and my dad has to go out on the streets and sell sugar. Mum could not work at all.' She leans forward and kicks an ice-cream stick on the ground, then she twists round to face me, her eyes dark and large.

‘They take my cousin and they torture him. After many weeks they leave him on our doorstep. He is almost dead. That is when my uncle tells us we must leave Afghanistan or we also will be killed.'

I close my eyes and I'm shaking my head as if a very sharp rock had just entered it. Something inside me shrinks in the face of it – of torture and danger and death – as if it's too distant, too disturbing for me to understand, but I am looking back at Inisiya in a huge and wild way because I'm shrinking and stretching all at once. I want to be big. I want to say the right thing. I want to make a difference even though I know I can't.

‘I can't imagine how terrible that must have been. Were you scared?'

‘Of course.' She jerks her chin up, and to me she looks proud and brave. ‘I am really scared. We sell everything to pay a smuggler to get us out, and then we have to travel for a very long time, always moving at night and then locked in hotels in the day. Sometimes we do not even know what country we are in. It is exhausting, you know, always always moving. Never going outside in the day. My mum, she is crying a lot.' She paused and then shuddered. ‘The worst is when we are on an island somewhere, and we could not sleep at all because of these bugs that bite us all the night. I cannot tell you how bad it is to be sore and itchy all over.'

I take a big breath in. ‘How long did you travel like that?'

‘Four months. Then we are in Indonesia and there is a small boat to take many families like ours to Australia. The boat has two engines. Half way there, the main engine stops and the captain of the boat says we will have to turn back because the boat cannot make it to Australia with only one small engine. But all the families on board say that since we will be sent back to Afghanistan if we return to Indonesia, we will all die or be killed anyway, so we take our chances to make it to Australia. The captain has to go on with one engine, moving for two hours then stopping to give the small engine a rest. That is when we have to throw all our belongings in the sea. But still the small engine also dies and then we are left in the middle of the ocean, thinking that now for sure we die. You know, people start to pray. It is awful.'

‘Did you think you would die?'

‘Yes, we all did. But maybe the prayers are answered because then there is a helicopter and you should see how happy we are. We wave and stand up and shout and the helicopter has sent an Australian naval ship, which takes us aboard. It is so great. They have a big crate of green apples. We are so hungry, we are all so excited, we crowd round the apples, eating, crying…And then I have my first shower for many months. There was even shampoo and soap.'

When she described this, she was so alive and intense that it seemed the relief was still inside her. It made me feel it too and I suddenly wanted to cry.

‘What happened then? Where did the ship take you?' I said, trying to steady myself.

‘Oh, after that, they put us in Baxter detention centre. We are there for a year and then we are released into Adelaide. No one helps us there, and we do not know anybody. So we move here. Mr Abutula picks us up from the bus station and we stay with him until we are allowed to move into the Housing Commission flats in Collingwood. You know he is a good man, Mr Abutula. He is always helping new refugees from Afghanistan who arrive in Melbourne.'

‘But where was your dad?' I say. ‘When you arrived I only saw you and your brother and mother. Did he stay longer in Perth?'

She looks down and shakes her head.‘No.' Then she looks at me and all the excitement has vanished from her face. It's as if a window that was once open and bright has suddenly slammed shut. ‘He is killed by the Taliban before we left.'

‘Oh God, I'm so sorry.' I feel it hit me in the chest. It makes me close my eyes. ‘My father died too,' I say, ‘in a car accident.'

She looks at me and her eyes are sad and wide, and for a minute we both stop walking.

‘I am sorry for you too,' she says.

My heart starts to wobble and then there are tears in my eyes, which I blink away. I can't tell if I'm sad for her or for me, but I feel as if the sore part inside me has opened up because I can join Inisiya there and she can join me, and even if it's only in a small way I feel we have leant our hearts together; made a sheltering place in which we can both be together for a minute.

In fact, looking back, I guess that moment was like the first firm stone laid in a house that friends build to shelter their friendship, because somehow it seemed there was a reason that we had met, and we could, after all, share something that was huge and hard and real.

Chapter 25

The classes just get better as we go along. Watching everyone practise, I work out why circus is the best thing to learn. For a start, it's not serious. Let's face it, you can hardly be too serious about rolling and bouncing, so you can get out of your seriousness and into your floppiness. You absolutely have to discover the part of yourself that's willing to try and fumble and learn a little at a time without any of it really mattering. Because it's not as if you're disarming a nuclear bomb. Secretly, I wonder if it matters to do things that don't matter. Especially for kids who've had to worry a lot, who've never felt safe; kids who've lost family and home and all their belongings, including best friends, dogs and the right to play; kids with thoughts that are heavier than a small person can carry. It's better to carry another kid on your shoulders than that kind of weight.

There's Sali from Sudan. He's got no parents. He lived in a refugee camp for two years. He's only ten, but he's fearless physically. From the start, he was hurling himself around. Sometimes I was afraid he would hurt himself, but by the third class he could already do a dive roll. Aunt Squeezy says she's never seen him come to life like that. He laughs all the time. He's even showing off, asking me to hold the hoop higher.