This is a work of the author’s imagination, an alchemy of memory and soul’s longing.

Beth joined the turn-lefters, pulled off the highway, and found a park beneath a giant fig tree before the twins even registered. Then heads turned like open-mouthed clowns. Confusion; at last, the dawning.

They’d been restless, constrained by seatbelts and resigned to weekends of bushwalks, caves of glow worms, and low-ropes courses. Today, they were expecting the waterfall trail in the hinterland. Physical activity. When the inevitable had occurred—“Muuuum, he’s being mean to me.” Lucy-Ann kicked at her brother. “Am not,” Jack cried back, slumped in his seat with a huff, rubbed at his scrunched nose—Beth hadn’t intervened. She tried not to exercise her power too often, not since the mums at the school gate had asked how she managed to get the twins to listen and do: the first time, every time.

“Unnatural,” they’d muttered, envious. “Considering . . . ” Marking Beth as different on two counts.

“Are we there yet?” asked Lucy-Ann, blinking rapidly at Jack, her glass-green eyes a mirror for his. She sucked the ends of her fringe into spikes.

Beth nodded, smiled. She’d made one of each. They were seven years old and she still had to pinch herself. Mainly to stop staring at the twins in a manner that bordered on obsessive. Was this normal? There were only two names Beth could have bestowed on a boy and a girl with red hair and freckles—though Enid Blyton’s Jack and Lucy-Ann weren’t twins, but siblings, adopted by the Mannerings in the Adventure Stories.

The striped tent on the oval was unmissable, unmistakeable.

Jack flung off his seatbelt. “A circus? I can’t believe it!”

He was out the door before his words sank in. Had Beth done the right thing? Yes, she decided as she scrambled from the car. It was the trickery, the set up. They’d watched that documentary about children in family circus troupes, witnessed the behind-the-scenes grind of mucking out animal cages, washing leotards, endless rehearsal and injury. The hardened faces under paint.

She caught at a twig-thin arm of each child. “Let me fix your hair.” She spat in her palm and smoothed down Jack’s wayward curl, ran anxious fingers through Lucy-Ann’s matted locks.

Beth had never been to a circus. And she would let nothing dint her excitement. Better late than never. The childhood she’d wanted back when she devoured her Enid Blytons. Big Top adventures. Outdoorsy pursuits. Picnics. Hiking, camping, rowing. Midnight feasts.

The twins wouldn’t feel they’d missed out. No blanks to fill in later on. Life experience overcame the risks of an imagination.

When her parents’ yelling started, Beth would slip out her bedroom window along the branch that scratched at the glass. In the cradle of branches, she’d hidden a metal trunk. Inside, the poppets—and books. Each a self-contained world, so real she tasted the ginger beer, smelled the kerosene lanterns of smugglers, and heard the steady drip, drip, drip in secret tunnels. Worlds more real than her own. Even there, adults couldn’t be trusted.

When crockery smashed on the tiles, downstairs, Beth had made vows to the bound-stick poppets, dressed in feathers and leaves, sitting obediently against the bark. She’d not always imagined twins. Sometimes she would have four, or five, or seven. And a dog.

But never an only child, a lonely child. When she grew up, she’d promised them, hers would have adventures.

As a child, the author sketched detailed character studies of her future offspring. Names, birth dates, hair colour, temperament, interests. By age sixteen, her eldest’s name was set in stone, especially when—much later—she made her bargain.

Ringside seats. Blue plastic barriers. Tacky silver cardboard stars on the spangly curtains beyond. Not what she’d imagined.

Smells of fairy floss and popcorn wafted through the tent flaps,