Free The Bullet Trick by Louise Welsh Page A

her ankles in an act of obsequiousness that seemed sure to kill its gyrations, but was merely a prelude to a snaking dance up her body and onto her right arm. Her hand snatched a second hoop, rival to the first, which proceeded to do its own dance around her curves. It seemed this girl couldn’t get enough of the hoops. She lifted them one by one from a pile as high as herself until she had screwed her little body into a spiral of weaving plastic. The small audience went wild and my tiny tin duck clacked like there was no tomorrow.
     
    I was hoping for Kolja, but the hula girl was followed by a trio of juggling clowns. They cavorted onto the stage dressed in bright baggy shorts and outsized shirts. The tin duck drew me a sad stare, I took a sip of my drink and nodded back at him. The crowd were clapping them on but the jolly jesters looked too wholesome to amuse me. I’ve always preferred Kinky the Kid-loving Clown, a hard-drinking funster who has his full makeup tattooed on.
     
    Somewhere a violin started to play a waltz and onstage the trio began tossing their batons gracefully in time to the music. I could see where it was going. The tempo increased and so did the speed of their pitches until the music sounded like a fiddler devil’s crossroads challenge and the clowns were flinging their batons like missiles, ducking to put their partner in the frame, turning the cat’s cradle of their throws into a crisscrossing sequence it was impossible to anticipate. The speed increased, a baton or two was lost, after all a trick must never look too easy, then, just when the audience were getting used to their expertise, the entire volley was turned on the smallest of the three, who caught the batons with his hands, arms, legs and feet, looking askance at the final club before catching it deftly in his mouth. The audience cheered. The troupe acknowledged the applause with a series of synchronised back-flips, then the runt ran offstage and returned brandishing three buzz-saws and a manic smile. I got up and made my way back to the wings. I left the duck on the table. It would be nice to think that someone in the audience was rooting for me.
     
    The clowns finished their not-so-funny business then flip-flopped offstage accompanied by music that was an improbable mixture of oompa and punk. The crowd clapped and stamped to the rhythm and the irrepressible funsters cartwheeled back on for an encore, throwing buzz-saws at each other with calamitous abandon before finally running unscathed into the wings.
     
    The little one buzzed his saw at me as he sped past. I muttered, 'Buzz off’. And he flashed me a wicked grin saying something in German that might have been Good luck or Fuck you.
     
    Two stagehands dressed like ninjas jogged on to clear the clowns’ debris and deposit my equipment. The mysterioso music I’d given Ulla reached its fifth bar. I took a deep breath and strode out from stage right as the stagehands exited stage left. The clown’s applause still trembled in the air. I measured it, gauged the warmth of the crowd, pretty hot, and realised that for once I wasn’t the warm-up.
     
    I lifted a flimsy transparent perspex table above my head, twirled it like a baton then waved my hand Mephistolike below it and snapped a set of oversized playing cards into view. Beyond the edge of the stage there was nothing but black punctuated by the candle flames glowing out of the darkness. God looked out into the firmament and saw nothing. Then he snapped his fingers and created the world. I gave the slightest of bows, and got on with it.
     
    Have you ever seen a film of an ocean liner ready to embark on a long voyage? People were so loath to leave their loved ones that they stretched streamers from the decks to the quayside. The nearly-departed held one end, the soon-to-bestrangers on the shore, the other. As the ship moved off the streamers would grow tense, taut, then break.
     
    That was the image I had of my audience’s