Secret Heart by David Almond Read Free Book Online Page B

said. “There are no tigers, Joe.”
    She gave him toast, saturated with butter.
    “Eat this.”
    He sat up and ate the food and drank the milk. Her skin was so smooth, so speckled, just like a skylark's eggshell. Her eyes the deepest blue. She wore the tightly fastened coat over her spangled costume, black tights, spangled slippers. He peered at the trapeze. He imagined jumping, spinning so fast that he disappeared. She handed him some neatly folded clothes, black satin shirt and trousers.
    “Put these on,” she said. She sniggered, turned round. “Go on, then.”
    He quickly took off his jeans and T-shirt, and put the new things on. She giggled when she turned round.
    “Those boots, Joe! We'll have to see about those as well!”
    He stood there awkward, blushing beneath histiger stripes. He looked up again. In his head he leaped through empty air.
    “I'd l-like to go on that,” he said. “That rope. I want to d—”
    She grinned.
    “Oh, Joe. You'll have me strung up.”
    “I'd like—”
    “It's against the rules. It's against the law. You'll get me sacked and us shut down.”
    “N-nobody'd know.”
    “You break your back and nobody'd need to know?”
    He looked down, thought of falling from thin space onto the solid earth, thought of his back cracked in two, thought of lolling stupidly in his bed for a lifetime.
    Corinna giggled.
    “It's OK,” she said. “Just joking. Course you can have a go. But not in those boots. And anyway, first we go to Nanty Solo.”
    “Nanty S—?”
    “She told me to take you to her if you came. Don't worry. She won't eat you up.”

Two
    She led him from the tent. The paint on his face made the skin tight, inflexible. His dark satin clothes flowed and flapped, allowed the air through, so cool. Helmouth's windows glared in the early-morning light. He looked across toward the motorway, but Stanny and Joff would already be far gone, probably already climbing through the Silver Forest.
    Someone called, “Tomasso! Tomasso! Tomasso!”
    The man with the goatee beard stumbled out of a caravan. He wore a grubby white dressing gown. He threw scraps of bacon to his little dogs. He smiled and waved at Corinna.
    “Lovely Wilfred,” she said. “He'll not go away from us.”
    They moved toward the back of the tent. Caravans and trucks were coated with dust. Many tires were already flat, and the vehicles slumped into the long grass, as if they'd never move again.
    “Tomasso! Tomasso! Tomasso!”
    “That's Charley Caruso,” said Corinna. “Greatest knife thrower the world had seen. Then his son died in the Ring of Fire. Tomasso. He was only five years old.”
    “He called me T-Tomasso.”
    “He thinks every boy might be Tomasso. And maybe one time he'll be right. Maybe his Tomasso will come back to him one day.”
    “But if he's …”
    “They threw him through the blazing ring. It had always been dead safe. He'd done it every night since he was three. But that night the spinning fire caught an edge of his clothes. It burned so quick. Burns and shock, and he was such a tiny thing.”
    “Tomasso! Tomasso!”
    “They wanted to take him away from us. But he wanted to stay, wanted to keep on traveling with us. Said it was the only way he'd see so many boys, the only way he might find his lost Tomasso again. Now he stares at the audience every night, stares into the face of every boy. He's another that'll never leave.”
    They wandered on across the stony earth.
    “Maybe you
are
Tomasso,” said Corinna. “Maybe you are and you don't know it. Maybe we're all something else and we don't know it.”
    “Mebbe,” muttered Joe.
    “What do
you
think you might be?” she said.
    Joe screwed up his face. He knew that others sawa small scared thing. He knew that he was a quiet awkward thing. But he knew that this awkward thing called Joe Maloney could be many things: a lark, a fox, a bat, a snake. He watched Corinna. He wanted to tell her what he knew and dreamed about himself. But the