Free No Stars at the Circus by Mary Finn

got a puppet theatre, with kings and queens and a Puss in Boots.”
    She forgot to say d’Artagnan.
    Then La Giaconda said, “But you don’t have this one.”
    She opened her hand. Everybody except those in the front row had to stretch their necks to see what she had in it. We could see it really well. It was a tiny wooden puppet, a marionette with yellow strings, wearing a beautiful Pierrot costume. It looked exactly like Signor Corrado.
    La Giaconda made it walk in the air and do the splits just like him.
    “This is for you, Nadia,” she said. She looked at the audience, row by row. “My muse, the famous lady in the painting, has just let me know that today is your birthday and you are eight years of age.”
    That was another weird thing. I hadn’t told La Giaconda Nadia’s age so I don’t know how she got
that
right, as Nadia is so small. But she did.
    One girl behind us started to cry, I suppose she was jealous about the puppet, but everybody else clapped and cheered. Then Signor Corrado made everybody sing “Happy Birthday” and he bowed Nadia back into her seat, clapping away himself. Her face was bright pink but really happy, you could see that, and she had the puppet held tight in her hands.
    I was a bit jealous too, but I knew that puppet was the best present Nadia would ever get in her whole entire life.

THE REST OF THE SHOW
    “Now put your hands together for Madame Fifi and her canny canines!”
    Signor Corrado started the clapping again.
    Madame Fifi came out of the yellow van. She bowed. She had a set of red buckets held up against her chest and a big silver hoop looped around her neck. She was small and fat but you should have heard the whistle she made. Even Georges Leclercq couldn’t do better, and he was the best whistler in our school.
    The old woman sitting beside me started to shake when the poodles came out after the whistle and began to do their tricks. She was trying not to laugh but that was impossible because the dogs kept falling off the buckets. Or else they pushed them over and stuck their heads inside. One wore his bucket like a hat and he kept bumping into the others because he couldn’t see. Only one of the dogs made it through the hoop properly. The others just stuck their heads through it and shook themselves and turned away as if they were saying, “Thanks but no thanks.” Everyone was laughing at them. I looked towards the trees again and this time I saw Papa. He was laughing too!
    Afterwards I found out that Madame Fifi’s dogs were really clown dogs. They were supposed to make us laugh, not do everything right. But one thing they were all really good at was walking on their hind legs. That reminded me of Jean-Paul’s dog, Whistle, and I wondered where he was. Somewhere in France, I suppose. Unless the Germans carried him off back to Germany to give to Hitler as a spoil of war.
    Then Signor Corrado came back. He said he had a special treat but people would have to make a proper queue like a shop queue and come up close, one at a time, to see it.
    “Because, ladies and gentlemen, this is a very tiny piece of genuine magic.”
    Everyone groaned but they weren’t cross, not really, you could tell. Signor Corrado pointed at me.
    “I’ll need my young friend from the front row. He can act as my adjutant.”
    I didn’t know what that meant but later I found out Signor Corrado liked to use strange words when he was performing. Adjutant means a kind of helper.
    Anyway,
that
is how I got to see the best part of the show really close up, and for all the time it lasted, not like everybody else who had only a minute or so to look.

THE VERY, VERY SMALL CIRCUS OF LUIGI CORRADO
    Signor Corrado went back into the van and brought out a tiny theatre. It wasn’t like Nadia’s, it was more like the puppet theatre in the Luxembourg Gardens, because it had legs. Only it was much smaller and not as brightly painted. The top came up as high as his chest.
    Then he brought out a yellow