The Boy Who Taught the Beekeeper to Read by Susan Hill

an hour the crowds would be in for the show. I wondered what Rosa would do, whether she had ever missed an evening before. At the start, and in the interval and again at the end there were always one or two waiting to see her, sometimes a lot more. She had a reputation.
    ‘You read your book,’ she said suddenly. ‘Yes.’
    I didn’t need Rosa to tell me that. I read my books in preparation for my own particular future, when I would get away from the racket and the smell and Little Midge’s whistle-whisper, and the prospect of marrying one of the Morrises or Alfie the fire-eater.
    ‘Don’t you get into trouble . . .’
    ‘Ma knows where I’ll be.’
    She always did, and complained about it bitterly. I thought she was jealous of the time I spent with Rosa.
    ‘Shouldn’t I fetch someone?’
    But she rolled her bald head fretfully to and fro on the pillow.
    In the end, I got a cup of water and set it by the lamp on the ledge behind her bunk, and made her promise to call if she needed anything.
    ‘I’ll hear,’ I said, though I never would once the show had begun. I could hear the drum roll practice starting up, and then the sudden blaze of the trumpet. Then the horses began again.
    I didn’t want to leave her. I hated it. This. It wasn’t how things should be in Rosa’s van. We hadn’t talked, there had been none of her quiet murmuring over the tea leaves. I hadn’t sat with my hand, palm up, resting in her dry one, listening. I hadn’t told her any stories about the day. We hadn’t had a laugh.
    She fed off me, I sometimes thought, for a taste of the world outside.
    And I didn’t want to go out in case Little Midge was here, silkily whistle-whispering. If I waited a bit longer he’d be gone to get ready. I hated him in his spangles and make-up, his old man’s face more peculiar than ever, but in the ring he was away from me, under the floodlights, fully visible.
    I waited as long as I dared. It was peaceful in Rosa’s van, but I didn’t feel right, the sense of ease wasn’t here. I was jumpy, as if something was about to happen.
    Rosa was asleep now. I didn’t want to kiss her but I touched her hot forehead. It was dry as a moth.
    When I stood up her wig brushed against my face.
    The site had that buzz there always is before a show. Van doors opened in your face and people came flying out, in macs and boots over their costumes, trying to dodge the mud and puddles, the horses were all wound up, and Mario’s dogs were yapping. The warm-up magic started. This was the time I liked it, the only time, but it churned you up too. It was the danger. There was always that. People could fall. People broke their backs. People had died. I’d heard the stories often enough – ropes giving way, platforms in the roof not secured. The stunt rider who went round and round two feet up, until the day his engine cut out.
    Little Midge wasn’t there, but I was still jumpy, so that I went up to my calf in muddy water when I heard a whistle behind me, but it was a normal whistle from Johnny Mahoney, carrying his whips under his arm. If there was one person I liked better than any, apart from Rosa, it was Johnny Mahoney. When I was young he used to sit on the top step of his van and tell me Bible stories. He used to say there was always the Boss looking out for me. I had only to give him the nod if I had a problem and he would sortit out. It was something I tried to remember when Little Midge was out there somewhere whistle-whispering.
    Johnny Mahoney’s wife had died of cancer years before. I hardly remembered her. He kept a shrine to her memory in his van, her photograph among plastic flowers, with a candle in a little ruby-red glass. Her funeral was still talked of as something wonderful to behold – with her name, and a full-size trapeze in white flowers carried on one of the lorries, and every horse and pony wearing black wreaths around their necks, and black ribbons.
    ‘Toodle-oo,’ Johnny Mahoney said.
    I