Read Black Juice for Free Online

chairs. Plus the eating and networking part of the game didn’t grab me. Although, I’ll give you, it was better than
not
eating.
    I followed Jelly down the corridor, pushing through the dusty crimson interval-curtains, glimpsing rooms that were hardly trashed at all, the flocked gold paper still on the walls, the corners still fitted with honeywood prie-dieux, which one bad winter would turn into someone’s firewood. The troupes had been through just after the torch, defacing the place. Now, instead of the nuns’ Holy Man, the biggest bouffon of all, the Weeping Yay-Zou, mawked down on us from frame after curly-gilt frame, his red nose sometimes a plastic blister, sometimes lovingly painted red with a white dot of shine, sometimes a big cabochon ruby, almost worth pinching. Nah, hot rubies didn’t fetch as much as they used to—besides, what was I thinking? My thieving days were over; I was on the greener side of the fence now, eh?
    We went to the Puffin. It was pricier than the Spectacled Eider—we were paying for all the mirrors and chandeliers and plaster dolphins on the walls—but the food was better and we reckoned we deserved it. We had good soup and cod, and fine glasses of fizz, toasting our morning’s work and the days ahead of us. All around us were the people who keep the world running: riggers and sweepers, ticket-sellers and physiotherapists, with a sprinkling of top hats and tailcoats.
    ‘How about you, then?’ said Jelly. ‘Dogleg said you were a lone ranger.’
    ‘I’m no party-man.’ I toyed with a flake of cod. ‘Always wanted to be a Hectic, and do it with a knife, and say something. But I couldn’t stomach being so close. Couldn’t put on the pancake, even pretending.’
    I put down my fork. Jelly saw me do my twitch, which is everything pressed tight, lips and fists and toes in boots, to get the feeling of white-muck off my skin. A twitch like that could come from several kinds of pasts, and he waited, until I could pick up my fork again.
    ‘I got brought up in homes,’ I said, starting on the potted version I could tell without too much trouble. ‘State ones, not nuns’. The stars, they could walk in after a show and have their pick of us.’
    I could read him like a matinee poster. There was some sympathy in his shudder, but his look said,
And they picked you? Pull the other one
.
    ‘I never got properly done over,’ I assured him. ‘It cameclose once, that’s all.’
That’s all you need. You don’t need more than that
. ‘But other kids did. Every Thursday and Saturday night, for years. All those buffoons, the Grand Old Men of the Ring, they’d be dead now—Barley Charlie and the like. Jiminy Grinshine. Too late to go whacking them. But all my life the kids they buggered up have been dropping off roofs and throwing themselves under elephants’ feet. And you’ve gotta do something.’
    He sipped his fizz. ‘Ah, yes. You do, too.’ His conviction was there, as intense as mine, though it came from quite some other place. Well, he could keep that place to himself; I wasn’t curious.
    We were just umming and ahhing between the passionfruit mousse and the chocolate salami when a woman called out, ‘Gerald! Darling!’ in a true Big Top voice.
    Jelly looked past me and wilted. ‘It’s my mum,’ he muttered. ‘Act classy.’ He put on a weak smile and stood up. ‘Mother! You shouldn’t come into a place like the Puffin.’ Ew, the accent on him.
    ‘Saw you through the
win
-dow!’ She kissed Jelly on both cheeks. She was quite a sight in her stage-pancake and tutu and her auburnised croquembouche hair. And she smelled, too—one of the clean, old, bottled scents, magnolia or something. Jelly stood in the cloud of it, very much the shaggy son.
    ‘I just heard, and I had to tell you, darling: Freddy and Felix won the
Blouson d’Or
at the Jeux this morning!’
    ‘The what?’ said Jelly.
    All eyes in the Puffin were on the mother now. Except Jelly’s—he looked at