Free The Road to Gundagai by Jackie French Page A

like you, instead of someone like Mah, who did, especially someone who wasn’t a servant. Blue shut the door again, and looked at the bread and cheese.
    The bread was fresh, cut in big white doorstops and slightly doughy, with a pale brown top instead of a black crust. There was no butter. Of course, she thought, a circus wouldn’t have an ice chest and maybe not even a Coolgardie. The cheese looked hard and moist, but tasted good.
    She ate slowly, waiting for the nausea to come. But apart from a few faint spasms of pain after the first few mouthfuls, her stomach felt better for the food, not worse. She drank some water even more slowly. And then she waited.
    It wasn’t as boring as she had expected. There were no books or, if there were, they were hidden under clothes and shawls or in the chests under the narrow bed, and she didn’t like to forage too much among a stranger’s possessions.
    I should have brought the crossword puzzle, she thought, then remembered with a pang that she had left Mum’s postcard behind too. All she had was her bracelet. And my life, she thought.
    The caravan’s windows looked out onto more brown grass and thistles. She was wary of lingering in sight though. If she could see out, then someone could maybe see in.
    She listened instead: the creak of timbers, the flapping of canvas that she supposed was the tent being erected again, hammers, the swish of rope, voices yelling and laughing, someone shouting, angry. Gertrude, she thought, as the angry voice too became a laugh. But there was no sound that might be Sheba.
    A man yelled in the distance. It was the call she’d heard yesterday: ‘One night only! The Magnifico Family Circus!’ and the blare of the trombone. The calls drew closer. She focused on the sound, waiting for the heavy plod of elephant feet.
    And there they were, the rhythmic thud, the flapping of ears, the rumbling murmur that was almost too low to hear. A man’s voice — or was it a woman’s? — said, ‘There you are, old girl. Lucerne hay today and, look, a bag of carrots.’
    The elephant gave a snort, an about-time-too sound. Suddenly the sound of crunching just outside the caravan overpowered the other sounds, and the plop! of what must be dung.
    Blue grinned, despite the heat, the strangeness. She was sitting next to an elephant. She couldn’t see it, couldn’t touch it. But it was there. And she was on the road to Gundagai …
    No, the old woman they called Madame had said not Gundagai, anywhere but Gundagai. But it didn’t matter. Nor did the possibility that the aunts and Uncle Herbert might be worried matter either. They wouldn’t be very worried, she told herself. It wasn’t as though any of them really cared for her. She was a duty. And if the aunts were really trying to kill her …
    It should have felt impossible. The fact that it didn’t frightened her more than anything else.
    Time passed. The sounds changed — the splash of buckets of water now and, all at once, a giant ‘Arggg hoo’ that she knew had to be the sound of an elephant laughing.
    The door opened. Madame Zlosky stood in the doorway. She wore a black dress that did not look at all like the respectable mourning dresses of Aunt Lilac and Aunt Daisy, the neck too low, showing a glimpse of wrinkled bosom between the fringes of her shawl, the cloth faded till it was almost rusty. Her hair was covered in another shawl, tied in a triangle across her forehead and hanging down her back. She shut the door behind her, then sat on the edge of the bed. She looked almost straight at Blue as she said, ‘We must talk.’
    ‘How did you get in here?’ asked Blue, then realised how stupid it sounded. ‘I mean, no one showed you the way.’
    Madame gave a faint smile. ‘It is fourteen steps from the Big Top to Sheba’s hay, which I can feel under my feet. It is five steps from the hay to my caravan. It is twenty-one steps from the hay to where I must stand in the ring, and fifty-two steps and then