Black Juice by Margo Lanagan Read Free Book Online

saved me was, he didn’t once look my way. He played to some other audience. I heard them laugh as he pratfalled and pretended pain; they cried and blew their noses as he sat alone in the sawdust-moted spotlight with the solo fiddle curling its tendrils among the tentpoles; they screamed with love of him when he recovered at the sight of the Pretty Girl and exploded in feathers. I knew that crowd; they’d watched me, too, as I rose and rose; they’d applauded and delighted and shouted, ‘Yes!’ They weren’t real—a crowd like that can only exist in your head. The loudest voices in my crowd, for example, were the dead ones. Which didn’t stop me always trying to
show
them, to fix things up with them
once and for all
.
    Jelly stood spread-eagled the final time. The hiss of rainon stone was like distant cheers, and he bathed in them. His hair was all bedraggled, but his orange frills were of such stuff that the rain balled up and rolled off him, in sprays like beads wired to his costume.
    He must have heard me not clapping, my absence of delight. ‘What was your name again?’ he said, his face pushed into the light-bruised rainclouds.
    If it’s got a red nose, never tell it your true name
, said Frik-knuckles before he went off to the tram-station to lay his head on the rail.
Or he’ll call you it, and call you it, until the sound of it in anyone’s mouth will just about make you chunder. Call yourself Billy or Tommy or anything that’s not your name. That way it can be happening to that other kid, and you can keep your own name for yourself
.
    I peeled my arm off the stonework. It was a travesty of movement after Jelly’s act; it wonked and groped towards the Fiore. But,
thunk
, she said anyway—
she
was certain, even if I was wobbly.
    Did Jelly spring as well? I don’t know how much of that last back-somersault he intended. Or whether he did actually stop a moment, out past the broken lip of the balcony, and catch my eye, through the rain, before he dropped.
    The rain hissed. The merry-go-round jingled and groaned below. Slowly my body came out of the twitch. The bouffon would fall in the churchyard mud, inside the safety fence. No one would see him; no one would have seen him go down, if I was lucky.
    And I was lucky. I was always lucky. I put the Fiore to bed, and my hands weren’t even shaking. Not now, with that thing out of sight.
    I stepped over the strewn bunting, the grouped sticks and coshes. I was balanced, even with the case; I could glide its weight down the stairs with my speediest tippy-toeing. All the way down, I took care not to think of that bouffon struggling bloodied round the tower, to meet me at the shotaway door with another spurt of ghastly tumbling.
    And of course he didn’t. I was lucky.
    I ducked through the fence into the markets, the Fiore like a tiny heavy coffin in my arms. No alarms were sounding; nobody was running; nobody paid me any mind at all. I walked through the markets, sober and dark as a shoeblack or an electricity man, as a man carrying his work case, going about his business.

sweet pippit
     

 
     
    W E SET OUT IN THE DEPTH OF NIGHT , having held ourselves still all evening. Hloorobnool was poor at stillness, being only in her fifties. But our minder was a new man; he likely thought she rocked and puffed and raised her trunk like that every sunset. We could all have reared up and trumpeted, no doubt, without alarming that one. But our suffering was close to the surface; better to keep it packed into a tight circle than to risk rampage and shooting by letting it show.
    With the man gone to his rest, Booroondoonhooroboom set to work. She used her broken tusk on the gateposts, on the weak places where the hinges had been reset after Gorrlubnu’s madness. Pieces pattered to the ground as softly as impala dung. She worked and she sang, drawing the lullaby up around us. Before long we were all swaying in our night-stances, watching Booroondoon with our ears and our