The Road to Gundagai Read Online Free

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    Buttoning her shoes left her dizzy. Blue waited till the room steadied, then shuffled to the door. The big house creaked as the day’s heat seeped from its crevices.
    Down one flight, down the next. She paused, hearing Aunt Daisy’s voice briefly from the living room below. Uncle Herbert must have left, not trusting his automobile headlights to get him back to Melbourne in the dark.
    The clock boomed in the hallway. She counted the strokes. One, two, three, four, five, six …
    Six o’clock. The aunts dined at six, keeping early hours in the country. Dinner should keep them occupied for at least an hour, with their small ladylike bites, cold mutton and reheated potatoes left over from the lunchtime roast, then sipping the tea that Ethel would bring them on the silver tray. Ethel would be having her supper now too, in the kitchen, and Mah eating hers on the kitchen steps. (‘I’m a Christian woman,’ Ethel had informed Aunt Lilac. ‘I’m not eating at a table with no heathen.’) It would be at least an hour before Ethel gave Mah the tray to take to Blue’s room. Perhaps Mah might even say Blue was asleep, and she didn’t want to waken her.
    What time did the circus start?
    She was going to find out.
    Blue shuffled through the dust and thistles at the side of the road. The scar that glued her thighs together was no bigger than the mouth of a teacup, but it was still enough to stop her taking all but the most ladylike of steps. Carts and sulkies and their hot horses passed in a dusty trickle, heading to the circus paddock. Here and there lamplight or candlelight flickered from farmhouses across the paddocks.
    Only one light glowed, a universe of brightness in the twilight ahead of her: electric light, powerful enough to beat back the night. She felt as well as heard the beat of the generator.
    It was more light than she had seen since she’d gone to the Royal Show at night the year before, just with Dad that time, as Willy was only two months old, too young for Mum to take him to the Show with people coughing polio or whooping cough germs all over the place. That light had almost eclipsed the moon and so did this, though on a much smaller scale.
    ‘Hurry, hurry, hurry! The Magnifico Family Circus! Tonight only!’ the voice boomed from the paddock gate.
    More wheels sounded behind her. She melted back towards the barbed wire as a farm cart passed, two giggling couples in the back. The women wore bonnets — bonnets! In 1932! The cart stopped at the paddock gate so its driver could hand money to a shadowed man, then veered off to an area marked out for vehicles: carts, sulkies, a few shabby automobiles.
    On the other side of the paddock the light spilled from a not particularly big Big Top with gently flapping canvas walls. Three smaller tents sat to one side with billboards out the front: a House of Horrors , its sides painted with ghosts and skeletons; the Freak Show tent next to it, its walls showing badly sketched dragons and sea monsters that Blue thought were unlikely to be inside; and there was a small queue in front of the one that said The Amazing Madame Zlosky .
    A dwarf with a hunched back stood on a platform outside the Freak Show. ‘See the world’s biggest grizzly bear! Sixpence a time!’ His voice squeaked on the word ‘sixpence’.
    Blue shuffled up to the gate, adorned now with a poster of a young man flying through the air towards a dangling trapeze. The ticket-seller was the man with the trombone she had seen earlier. He looked sharply at her dark silk dress, her velvet hat. Blue suspected she would be the only audience member in silk tonight.
    His face became carefully blank again. ‘Three shillings for a front-row seat, two shillings for the high seats, a shilling for the stalls. Sideshows are extra.’ His voice was high and gruff as he gave her a practised grin under his salt-and-pepper moustache.
    ‘A seat at the back please. Not a high one.’ Blue held out the ten-pound