Disappearing Act by Beatrice Colin

The name on the package is Miss Wing Ringling. It is my name. Ringaling for short, Sting Ring by childish acquaintances and Miss Jin Plum by my admirers. I live on the top floor of a tower block opposite another and once walked the tightrope between them. For that I was fined £30 by the council. I never liked floors. Ceilings, ladders, platforms, balconies are fine. But floors are dull, grounded, sort of earthily earthy. That's why I asked for floor 36. It was the least floorish they had.

I was a child circus star, born in a caravan somewhere between Troon and Dunoon. I could swing before I could walk; fly before I could say my own name and was an experienced trapezist and horse acrobat by the time I was six.

Gallop, gallop, hup, tumble tumble, thud, round of applause, thank you.

As I grew, I graduated from spitting sawdust to sweating glitter. Higher and higher, faster and faster and quicker and quicker I jumped as the cheers boomed until they surrounded me like a huge soft cushion. And then I sparkled like a galaxy as I flew shooting-star-style through the spotlight into the dark, darkness of the night sky.

I lied about the tightrope. It's true about the tower block and although I've dreamed about it I could never do it, not since I lost the use of my legs in the accident. The pony was heavy, as ponies are, and it was an awful long time before they managed to lift him off. As I lay on the ground quite crushed by his weight, I thought that I was outside and the stars on the tent ceiling were real and that the pony was in fact a silver unicorn. Your mind plays funny tricks on you like that sometimes, something to do with natural highs. Shame I had to come down...

The package is grubby and has been re-addressed many times. I remember the noise it made this morning, the way it thumped the carpet in a promising kind of way as I lay in bed just waiting to hear the special sound of the post. I receive a lot of mail every day. I answer advertisements in newspaper lonely-hearts columns and send them a photo and write them a letter. They always reply. I am a beautiful nineteen-year-old with the face of an angel, so they say, and the kind of chinked blue eyes that catch the light and look as if they have electric bulbs inside. I arrange dates in expensive restaurants or for the opera. Of course I stand them up. They would only be shocked and that would be embarrassing.

I rip off the brown tape, pick out the staples and pull out a covering letter. It is from a lawyer representing my mother. I ought to explain that I never knew my mother. She joined my circus when she was already pregnant, had me and then promptly died. I was brought up by the Great Barrissimo and his wife Elsie who took the tickets. They're still on the road. Thurso this week, I think. They told me my mother's name was Helena Heliotrope. She did tricks with mirrors. Inside the package is a manuscript with two ancient brown coffee rings on the fly page. The lawyer writes that he has spent many months tracking me down through the social services and wishes to inform me that his client, my mother, had instructed him to contact me and pass on my inheritance when I reached eighteen. I shake the padded envelope in case there is anything else hidden inside its velvety brown depths. But there is only the badly typed stack of paper all fastened together with a bulldog clip.

It's hard to explain how I feel. I suppose I am a little disappointed. Diamonds would have been nice. A house by the sea even better. Since I had barely met her, I have no feelings whatsoever about my mother. I am not a sentimental girl, not the type to gaze for hours at old family photographs - if there were any - to see if they held some sort of clue.

I read my admirers' letters before I go anywhere near the manuscript. I look at passport booth snaps of Julius, Rueben, Louis and George and stick them beside the rest in my scrapbook. And only then, after I have skimmed through the letters which are of the usual humdrum variety along the lines of this-is-the-first-time-I've-answered-an-ad and do you like walking, laughing, eating, breathing, nonsense, I turn the first page.