as unique. She would sit for hours and watch the circus beasts in their cages. She could read their moods so well that before she was even ten years old she was being trusted to care for the tigers by herself. While the other performers shrank back in fear of their snarling jaws and razor-sharp talons, Valentina thought nothing of taking hefty, meaty bones and thrusting them through the cage bars. Her favourite tiger, Mischa, would even take meat straight from her hand, though she rarely fed him like this when Sergei was watching.
“You are no good to me without hands!” he would admonish without any humour. It was never too late to be dropped off at the orphanage, according to Sergei.
The tigers padded up to the bars of their cages and smooched and preened like pussycats whenever she came near, and it was clear to Valentina that they would never harm her. All the animals in the circus adored her, but it was Sasha alone that she truly loved. She had known the horse all her life.
He had been an ungainly-looking colt, with a huge head attached to a long neck, and an even longer body, legs like a giraffe and great slabs of knees and dinner-plate hooves. But when he began to move, there was something completely mesmerising about him. He was trainable too. Valentina had taught him to bow by taking a carrot and passing it down between his forelegs until Sasha dropped to his knees and lowered his head to reach the tasty treat. It had taken him one day to master this.
By the time he was three, Valentina’s stallion had been able to rear and pirouette on cue. Soon, it was Sasha and Valentina whose faces appeared on the circus posters. Sergei understood the allure of the tiny blonde girl and her gigantic pink horse, and he made them his headline act.
“The stars of the circus,” Valentina murmured as she led Sasha back to his tiny yard. “How lucky we are.” The pink horse shook out his mane and blew through his wide nostrils as if in agreement.
Valentina had a long night ahead of her feeding the other animals and cleaning out the trailers, but first she took care of Sasha. She mucked out his yard, gave him fresh hay and refilled his water. Then she mixed his feed, oats and chaff and barley, giving the horse twice as much as Sergei permitted. The ringmaster kept all the animals on starvation rations to save money. “Your horse eats my profits!” he would often tell Valentina. “And still its ribs stick out.”
Valentina hated the way Sergei spoke of the animals as if they were nothing more than props for his circus performances. She did the best she could to protect Sasha and the others, to make their miserable lives better than they were. Sometimes, when she saw the shackles on the elephant’s ankles, or the frustration on the faces of the poor monkeys cooped up in their tiny cages all day, she found herself weeping.
“You are too soft. They are just animals,” Irina would say when she found Valentina in their caravan, her cheeks wet with tears.
A scrawny waif with hollow eyes and grey skin, Irina had the rare ability to be double-jointed in both her elbows and knees, which made her a brilliant contortionist. She had been ten years old when she ran away from the orphanage to join the Moscow Spectacular.
“I have fallen on my feet here,” Irina would often say. It was an ironic turn of phrase because in fact Irina never fell on her feet – she usually fell on her backside. This was why Sergei would not let her even be Valentina’s understudy on the high wire. The girl had no poise or balance, so that even the clowns held their breath with concern every time she went up the trapeze.
Sergei had put Irina in Valentina’s caravan and they soon became best friends. Irina, however, was not an easy room-mate. Valentina would often find her practising her contortionist’s tricks, curled up like a pretzel on the floor, or walking on her hands and using her feet to make a cup of gypsy tea. At night they slept in twin beds side by side and Valentina would often be woken by Irina whimpering in her sleep. The whimpers would grow more intense until their caravan echoed with Irina’s sobs, growing louder and more panic-stricken until suddenly the girl would sit bolt upright and start screaming. Then Valentina would hurry over to her friend’s bedside and hug her, rocking her from side to side until her night terrors subsided.
Once, after a particularly bad episode, Valentina had asked her friend what it was that she dreamt about that was so frightening.
“Oh, but it is not a dream!” Irina said. “That is the problem, don’t you see? I am not dreaming. I am remembering. In my mind I am back at the orphanage. I can smell the stench of the babies in their dirty nappies. I hear the hungry cries of the other children and I see the sickly ones lying in their cots alongside me. That is when I wake up and thank God that I escaped and found my way here.”
Irina thought the circus was the best place in the world and never understood Valentina’s urge to run away from it.
One night, Valentina had shown Irina the sheet of paper that she kept hidden beneath the loose floorboard in their caravan. On it there was a picture of a horse, a very beautiful creature being ridden in a grand arena. The rider wore a top hat and tails, and the horse had its mane braided. Beneath the image there was writing.
“What does it say?” Irina asked.
Valentina could not read the words but she knew what the sheet of paper said – she had memorised it long ago. “It is the application form for the Federation Dressage Academy,” she said. “This is the greatest dressage school in the whole of Russia. The Olympic team train here. This is where Sasha and I are going to go.”
Irina looked at her, totally baffled. “But you do not ride dressage! You are circus!”
Valentina shrugged. “I taught Sasha how to stand on his hind legs and dance; how much harder can these dressage tricks be?”
“Sergei would never let you go,” Irina looked worried. “Oh, Valentina, please do not have such dreams! They will only disappoint you.”
Valentina loved Irina and felt terribly sad that the fear of ending up back in the orphanage was enough to keep the girl at the circus. Sergei’s clever manipulations meant Irina had lost all hope of any other kind of life. And Valentina could not persuade her friend to think otherwise. When the time to leave came, it would be only her and Sasha, and she dared not tell anyone else.
That night when Valentina got back from cleaning up the tigers’ cages Irina was already asleep. She snored loudly, snuffling and wheezing like an old man. Valentina worked quietly, so that her room-mate would not waken, as she jimmied up the floorboard beside her bed and pulled out the treasured piece of paper. She traced her fingers over the words, remembering how her mother had read them out to her, with Valentina on her knee.
“This is your destiny, milochka,” she had told her daughter. “You will have a big life, a grand life! You will go to places and see things that will astound you. You cannot even imagine the world that is out there waiting for you, Valentina. You are going to be a superstar far greater than this circus has ever seen.”
Valentina put her hand beneath the floorboards once more and this time she lifted out a velvet bag with a tasselled drawstring. Inside was the only other memento she had of her mother, the gift she had given her before she died. Apart from Sasha, the contents of this bag meant more to her than anything else in the world.
In the dim light of her bedside lamp, Valentina sat down on her bed, clasping the velvet bag to her chest. On the wall by her pillow she had hung a small mirror, slightly cracked in one corner. She looked at her reflection and saw a dirty, unloved circus girl. Then, from the velvet bag she withdrew the necklace. She raised her hands behind her neck and fastened the silver filigree clasp so that the black teardrop-shaped stone fell at her throat. In the cracked mirror, the
