A Petrol Scented Spring by Ajay Close

challenge. He has to make the right choice, distinguish himself from this crowd of country bumpkins, justify his teacher’s faith in him. So he takes his time, breathing in the smell of gingerbread and frying sausages and the sweetness of trampled turf, filling his eyes with the gaudy painted booths, the striped canvas, the flashes of gilt on the steam carousel’s prancing horses, the wee monkey in his red jacket collecting pennies from the crowd around the hurdy-gurdy. What a din! Like a fiddle bred with the bagpipes. And all tangled up with it, a dozen bands playing different tunes, and bells ringing, and girls on the sea-on-land screaming, and barkers calling through speaking trumpets, promising three murders and a ghost in the theatre tent.
    He passes boxing booths where bookies’ runners and tailors’ apprentices are queueing to shed their jackets and take a swing at a chisel-faced professional. Thimble-riggers slide cups to and fro across fold-up tables. The stereorama tent promises views of Venice and Paris. A moustachioed dwarf in a chimney-pot hat beckons him in to meet the amazing bloodless man and the world’s strongest woman. Daft laddies hurl wet sponges at their pal in the Aunt Sally. There are jugglers and tumblers, coconut shies and shooting galleries, cages of goldfinches and canaries, a menagerie with leopard and tiger and laughing hyena. And, tucked between the Cabinet of Curiosities and Doctor Darwin’s Missing Link, a dancing booth with a fiddler sawing away inside, and a barefoot lassie tossing her long black hair, her skirts changing colour when she turns her hips to the music, swinging her arms to make her chest shoogle.
    â€˜Hello there,’ she calls in her foreign-sounding lilt, ‘will you take a turn with me?’
    He looks into her laughing eyes. His heart is racing. ‘Kitty,’ he says.
    The laughing look turns confused, and wary.
    â€˜It’s me,’ he says, ‘Hugh Watson from Cawhillan Farm.’
    And now she knows him. ‘Hugh,’ she breathes, ‘you’re a ways from home.’
    Kitty, the tinker lassie who calls at the farm twice a year with her father and half a dozen raggedy weans. It’s one of his earliest memories, the painted wagon drawing up with a rattle of tin cooking pots, and the weans with their snottery faces and their black-soled feet, and all the farm dogs barking. For years Kitty was just another urchin, the oldest like him, but they’d join the rest in a game of tig, shrieking as they chased round the farmyard. Until the year Kitty turned up with a clean face and her hair brushed, and gave the wee ones a telling when they startled the hens. He was shy of her for a couple of minutes, until he got used to the idea. Her father never changed: that brown and grey beard, the fleshy pink pearl on his cheek. Ma always bought half a dozen bone buttons, and a pair of boot laces, and his father got the sickles sharpened, and if any of the aunts had a birthday coming up, the tinkers left the lighter by a string of glass beads and a yard or two of ribbon or lace. But before they went, they’d sit down to a plate of stovies, and pass on the gossip from Cumnock or Sorn or whatever place they’d been last, and the tinker da would take up his fiddle and the red-headed wean his penny whistle, and Kitty would sing a mournful song about men who lose their sweethearts in her surprising singing voice. Like a heartbroken old woman elbowing the girl aside. This happened not four months back, and will surely happen again in another few weeks. Hugh doesn’t care for the tunes, but he likes to watch the throb of her smooth white throat as she draws out the keening notes. And there’s always the moment when she gathers up the plates and passes them across to him, looking into his eyes as he takes their weight. She’s a year or two older and used to be taller but, as he closes the distance between them, he finds