The Road to Gundagai Read Online Free Page B

Top, broken by the performers’ entrance, completed the enclosure.
    The elephant looked larger closer up. It peered out from behind a pile of hay topped with a big shabby teddy bear. All at once its trunk came up, as though it were smelling her.
    Blue hesitated, then made her way past the nearest caravan into the courtyard. A voice inside snapped, ‘I don’t care what Madame says! I want to grow my hair long!’
    A woman’s voice muttered something placatory.
    The elephant dropped its trunk, curling it around a biscuit of hay. It lifted it into its mouth, and chewed. Blue edged closer, next to the straw. The elephant swallowed its hay. Slowly, very slowly, the big animal stepped forwards. The massive trunk rose again. Suddenly its pink tip stroked the fabric of Blue’s sleeve.
    Blue held herself as still as she could. Elephants could be dangerous, couldn’t they? They could charge you, or gore you with their tusks. But this elephant didn’t have tusks. It didn’t even have a chain on its leg to stop it wandering into the crowd.
    She should walk away now, in case it got angry because she didn’t have a carrot to give it. If she had to run, she’d fall.
    But the elephant didn’t feel dangerous. The tip of its trunk gave her hand a final nudge. It felt moist and warm and friendly. The elephant stepped back. The trunk curled around another mouthful of hay.
    Blue stared at it. ‘Were you shaking hands with me? You were, weren’t you?’
    The elephant gave a long low snort. It sounded amused.
    She’d shaken hands with an elephant!
    ‘What are you doing?’
    A girl a year or two older than Blue scowled from the doorway of the caravan. She was beautiful, her dark eyes large, her smooth skin deeply tanned, her black hair as short as a boy’s. A long silk shawl hung from her shoulders to her knees, showing white silk stockings and small gold slippers. Only her fingernails were ugly, short and cracked as though from hard work. ‘No one’s allowed back here.’
    ‘I … I’m sorry.’ Blue turned. She shuffled as fast as she could towards the sideshow tents and the crowd.
    Was the girl still staring at her? No one else was going into the Big Top yet. She hesitated, then handed the hunchbacked dwarf at the Freak Show a sixpence.
    ‘See the grizzly bear,’ he told her, his face peering at her from between his shoulders. He lowered his voice conspiratorially. ‘Me dad found it as a cub. It was brought up like one of the family. Blokes from the zoo have offered us a thousand pounds for that bear. But we wouldn’t part with it. Not old Bruin.’
    ‘You told the girls earlier your grandpa caught it.’
    The dwarf looked at her for two long seconds, then grinned. ‘Well, it’s like this. It went savage when it grew older, see? Toothache, that’s what it was. That’s when it terrified the village and Grandpa caught it.’
    ‘I see,’ said Blue. The hunchback had obviously decided she’d like a story about a loved little bear cub, while the girls before preferred to scream at the thought of a savage bear. She lifted the tent flap and went inside.
    It was hot, crammed with objects and filled with shadows. The only light came from a high kerosene lantern attached to the tent’s central pole. A young man and woman peered into a cracked glass cabinet. Blue wondered what story the dwarf had told them.
    And there was the grizzly bear. It reared above her, its claws out, its jaws open, just as the dwarf had promised. It was also extremely dead and had been for at least half a century, if the worn patches on its coat were any guide. She peered up into its jaws. Those teeth were fake too: carved ivory, she thought. The poor dead mouth wouldn’t have been able to shut if it had really contained teeth like that.
    She looked more closely. Two lines around the bear’s suspiciously long midriff looked as if they had been sewn together; two bears, or at least one and a half bears, had been made into one.
    The young couple stood