the most surprising item was the empty photo frame Ned kept by his bedside. So that was what his dad had run up the stairs for when they’d made their escape.
This was not the freedom Ned had wanted. This was the kind of bag you prepared if you knew you weren’t coming home. It made his eyes prick with tears. He took his phone from his pocket and laid it by the photo frame. A pictureless frame and a powerless phone; even Ned’s pet mouse wasn’t real. He had never, in all of his life, felt more alone.
“Room for another?” came a polite grunting voice from the doorway. It was George the giant gorilla.
His attempts to fit his enormous bulk into the small cabin made him look rather clumsy and much less intimidating. Despite everything that he’d seen that day, Ned still had no idea what to make of him.
“Err, sure, but I don’t think I’m allowed to talk to you. Or anyone else.”
“I think that’s over-egging it a bit, old bean. I’ve been fully briefed on your situation along with the rest of our inner circle.”
“Oh. Right …”
“And on that note,” George rumbled gently, “I made you some angel cakes. Had a feeling our resident josser might need a smidge of cheering up.”
The oversized ape opened a bag and beneath a pile of books and his favourite reading glasses, were four of the ugliest cakes Ned had ever seen.
“Wow, err, George, I don’t know what to say. You, err, you really shouldn’t have?”
“My pleasure, laddie. Of course, as far as I’m concerned, nothing beats these little gems,” said the gorilla, pulling out a banana. “I could write an entire book of sonnets about the joys of this yellow beauty. There’s baked banana, creamed banana, puffed, boiled and fried banana. Caramelled, salted, barbecued, even pickled. Of course my favourite is sushied,” he added, before gulping it down whole.
Ned couldn’t help smiling.
“There now,” said George, “a smile, that’s more like it.” He beamed – revealing his huge teeth – but somehow still managing to look friendly.
“George?” asked Ned. “What’s a josser? Only Benissimo’s been calling me that a lot, amongst other things, and I don’t know what it means. I don’t really know what any of this means and the only thing I thought I knew, is, well … not what I knew at all.”
“You mustn’t take it personally, old chap. The boss has a few rough edges, but he’s a decent fellow under all that bluster. Jossers are what we also call outsiders, folk who are unaccustomed to our ways.”
Ned was used to being an outsider, but in the Circus of Marvels he was something else, something way beyond average. Half of the troupe weren’t even human and even those that were had powers of some sort. Ned was average by tradition, because that’s what the Waddlesworths were, or so his father had led him to believe. But being average in the Circus of Marvels did not mean slipping through the cracks – it was like strapping a flashing light to your head and asking people not to look.
“I don’t fit in here, George. What if, even without me talking to anyone, someone figures out who I am, or why I’m here?”
“Don’t fret, dear boy, I have your back while you’re with us, and no one will bat an eyelid. Being lost with nowhere else to turn is something of a requirement before the Circus of Marvels will have you.”
“Is that what happened to you? Were you a josser?”
George grinned again. “Between you and me, I think I still am, but then I’ve got my books and my bananas.”
Ned suddenly felt far less alone.
“What about Benissimo? What is he, besides being … well, obnoxious?”
George looked over to the doorway, before lowering his voice.
“We are not all the creatures we become by choice, old bean, and the least said about it the better. When a chap tries as hard as the boss to hide what he is, it’s considered rude to ask.”
Ned took George’s hushed tones as the warning they were meant to be. Whatever Benissimo was or had been was clearly not a topic for discussion.
The towering ape talked late into the night and turned out to be a living encyclopedia on the creatures and places that the Veil kept hidden. He told Ned about the Grand Duke of Albany, Viceroy to St Albertsburg; the last hidden city of Queen Victoria’s old empire; the Norwegian library city of Aatol, buried deep underground, which could only be accessed by solving a series of impossible riddles; Gearnish, the city of Tickers where almost everything was run by metal machines; and Shalazaar, the trading city and ‘jewel of the desert’, where they were currently heading.
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