Circus Soleil and The Empress Card

She meets the balloon sculptor at the lido where the water is black and salted. When the tide comes in, the swells slop and jive her towards his exhibition of domestic animals. She buys a silver sausage dog, a white cat, straddles them on the sea wall, pretends they are debating horror in contemporary revisionist fairy tales. He tells her she is a right card: she asks if she is a spade, a diamond or a club? Have this unpredictable bird on the house, pet, he says, offering her a metallic green macaw. It can buddy up with your flamingo-print tankini.

By midsummer, she becomes his sidekick at travelling fairs, relishes the rubbery fragrance of him. By autumn, she launches as Ms. Aerial Silk and swarms of folk wasp up to hear her satin voice as she turns his animals into fiction. She is macabre, a Queen at subtext. The clown comes to listen after his show whilst dusk purples cauldron skies, and he looks at her wan faced, a tear or two tattooed on fell cheeks.

By winter, she is fatigued with latex and the god-awful squeaks of the sculptor’s balloons. All the animals start to develop tics. She starts to despise seeing his stereotypical dogs and cats, his singular draw to the domestic. One orangeade-skied dawn, after a standing ovation where the clown bowls up by the bins and asks to kiss the orator’s hand due to the lull of her stories, the sculptor mutters something about her stealing his thunder and she tells him there can be no thunder without lightning, and surely a balloon without air, she reminds, is nothing but skin?

The sculptor leaves that morning, and swiftly, his meagre pile by their bed: a pump, some violet hand cream, one valise full of balloons but only in the one colour. Within days she learns how to twist golden frogs, canaries, yellow warblers, crimpy-maned lions. Her stories glisten ripe as butter, old paper, lemons, and always there: the clown stood by the bins, his patchwork outfits turning from mosaic bright to amber, bisque, blond, chrome, saffron until he too is all shades of yellow.

By the first snogs of spring, she falls ultra hard for the clown and his loyal threads of neon. She longs for his rare smile, the way laughter is his alien. She pictures them performing mime together in primrose-motif dungarees: starts to plan their first act, begs the dancing bear not to split to a soul.