Ring Master, K.J. Packer
‘Born in blood,’ my father used to say of us, his words dripping with blame and resentment.
To begin with, the only sense we could make of his judgement came from what we
scavenged out of the second-hand stories of our birth, told beside the encampment fires by
our uncles and older cousins. But later, we would relive our beginning a hundred times over,
dubiously embellished by the penny theatres and dioramas of the Boothe and Broome
Travelling Shows.
Our ruinous coming into the world had happened in my father’s absence, a fact that
crippled him with guilt for the rest of his days. On the night in question he’d been leading the
convoy at speed to Blackheath Fair, with my mother travelling several hours behind, in the
wagon in which Mary and I would live for the next fifteen years. My aunt had ridden up front
handling the reins, and Katharine, who had been like a midwife to the showfolk for as long as
could be remembered, rode behind in a tiny bowtop carriage pulled by an ageing grey. With
the sun already set on them, they’d made just seven miles progress from Dartford Hill before
my mother had started to cry out.
‘Come too early, you did,’ my aunt told me some years later, when I was barely old
enough to understand.
A month too early, and twins to boot.
The story goes that within an hour of stopping on the grass verge, before the moon had
even had time to rise, my mother’s lifeblood had drained from her into the cotton sheets that
Katharine then tore from the deathbed and tossed from the window in a fit of despair.
Mother’s eyes didn’t even fall upon our slippery forms before they closed for good. Nor did
they watch my aunt stumble from the candlelight into the July evening, and set aflame the
sodden bedding in a sad heap at the roadside.
The endless cycle of the summer fairs returned us to that place every year, always
around that time. Perhaps that was why my father never celebrated our birthday. Yet each
year he stopped the wagon train and led us in a short prayer; and whoever was travelling
with us would leave gifts in my mother’s memory. As a small child I joined in with the ritual,
tearing fragments from my skirt and arranging them on the grass. Later my offerings were of
dried flowers that I’d picked during the previous spring. But eventually I stopped leaving
anything at all, once I’d come to realize that my father walked a tightrope between loving us
and despising us for taking his wife from him.
The day I first met Walter, I awoke before it was light, long before the others, which was
unusual for me.
I’d been put to bed the previous evening in a cocoon of blankets, after complaining of the
shivers. It was more than just cold I’d felt though. My breathing had become laboured and
my belly too sore to touch. But worst of all was the fear.
‘Lie still and you’ll sweat it out,’ my aunt told me, pulling the coverings under my arms and
tightly across my chest before tucking them beneath the mattress. She handed me a draught
then, which she’d sweetened too much to mask the bitter taste. And Mary, my sister, looked
down at me from her bunk with a pained expression, before turning away beneath the thin
sheet that was the only covering she’d needed on that balmy night. Perhaps she’d also been
wondering whether I would make it through to our twelfth birthday.
© K.J. Packer 2012