Pastworld by Ian Beck Page A

life.
    .
    Jago seemed pleased, and surprised enough with my progress as we packed the stuff into the wagon. He allowed me to help harness up the skinny horse. ‘Where did you learn to do that? You’ve obviously done it before,’ he said.
    ‘I’ve never done it before, I told you so,’ I said. ‘I just somehow felt that I could.’
    ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I really think that we might make something of you.’
    ‘What’s the name of the horse?’ I asked.
    ‘She’s called Pelaw,’ said Jago. ‘She’s the same colour as Pelaw wax shoe polish, so that’s what I chose to call her.’
    ‘Pelaw,’ I said, and the horse snorted a little and showed her teeth, shook her mane from side to side. ‘She knows her name,’ I said.
    ‘Oh yes,’ said Jago. ‘She knows her name.’
    The woman with the cat collar was warming herself at the brazier. She walked over to me.
    ‘I know just who you are now, dear, I’ve worked it out. You’re the girl that sometimes walks with poor Jack, near my lodgings,’ she said. ‘You’re his daughter, surely?’
    ‘I think you are confusing me with someone else,’ I said brazenly, blushing in the cold air.
    ‘Sorry, dear, but I could’ve sworn,’ she said, and looked at me hard for a moment while she stroked her cat’s neck.
    She knew that I was lying.
    .
    I stayed happily with Jago and the family of other travelling players. For Jago my mystery was not where I had come from and why, but my mysterious ability to balance on the rope. Where had that come from?
    I began to perform with the harlequin troupe in market places and on street corners. We travelled together on our routes around the fringes of the city and I began to recognise the extent of the gulf between the ‘official’ beggars and the hordes of pinched-looking illicits that we passed and played to every day. I knew I had to continue my new life, my real adventure. I had a strange natural instinct for the tightrope. Within a few short days I could run and skip the narrow rope, for it now really did feel as wide as a road to me. My inner confidence was complete and Jago was pleased.
    A few days later the woman with the cat found me again. ‘It is you, my dear, isn’t it? I was right before,’ she said. ‘I know it is you because I saw poor Jack in the street and he said you had gone, run away, and he was in a terrible state worrying about you.’
    I had no reason to treat Jack cruelly, even if he had hidden me away and hidden the truth of my situation from me as well.
    ‘You are right,’ I said. ‘I did run away. I can’t tell you why, but I am happy and safe and want to stay here with Jago. Perhaps I might write a note that you could give to Jack from me to reassure him.’
    ‘I think that’s the least you could do. It would be a nice thing, dear, for poor Jack.’
    So I wrote him a note of reassurance and gave it to the lady with the cat, and she said she would deliver it to Jack. I felt a clear conscience. Jack had brought me up in ignorance. He had never spoken of my father and mother once, and for whatever reason of his own had denied me almost any truth, as well as letting me live in the belief that the world around me was all there was, when it was an illusion, an imitation of life.
    Soon I was performing in front of bigger crowds. I remember one afternoon I was wearing a flowing white dress. I often felt moments of real fear, standing at the top of the support pole, the crowd all gathered below me. Jago was at the bottom of the ladder wearing his one-man-band kit, banging on the bass drum with a foot pedal and playing his quivery little tune on the cornet. That afternoon a harlequin from one of the other wagons was balanced half-way up the ladder looking up at me, and holding the balancing parasol in case I felt I should need it. As usual I wanted to show Jago that I could dazzle on the rope. My feet just fitted neatly on to the little platform at the top of the striped pole. There was no safety