The first time I watched Marion perform CPR was on the fuzzy, gum-stick floor of the induction room. Plastic ribs did their soft clicking. Marion is breaking the sternum of a latex torso called Tom. I was assigned to Tom’s infant, entire body still intact and gummy. Name’s Rose, one of the first-aiders tells me, biting a corner off an egg sandwich. Marion made direct eye contact with Tom while she hummed Staying Alive. Pretty insensitive song, for something like this, she said. I shrugged. Rose clacked politely under my middle and pointer, all four limbs convulsing inward with each compression. Always ask the patient questions, egg-sandwich said, crumbs falling into the hollow well of Tom’s mouth. Marion rolled her eyes, lashes sweeping anticlockwise. 

Marion told me she works for a travelling circus, so she needs to renew her first aid certificate every year. I nodded, understood. I could imagine shrieks warbling the striped tarpaulin tents, trapezists howling their emergency, gymnasts like corseted waterfalls. She described it to me betwixt 120BPM – the abacus of lacquered tents strung into the distance, the Victorian cash registers rattling with each purchase of popcorn and giftable fripperies. I’d never been to a circus. The thought of it made me dizzy, like my head was stuck inside a kaleidoscope. 

Marion’s face was fingerprinted in eyeliner and rouge. Perhaps she had just come from work, I thought. She was a circus bartender, she informed me. Not even a performer, not with these bones, she paused her assault on Tom to gesture towards her thighs. Her nails were painted neon flamingo, chipping near the crusts. Piano hands. I remember wanting to take one of her fingers in my mouth, read my pulse through my gums. Her favourite drink to make was an espresso martini, because of the frowning clown-face dusted into the froth. Melpomene, she said, a bulb of her sweat dripping onto the carpet, where Tom’s pelvis should have been. 

Marion told me she has four bachelor’s degrees. Assess the area for hazards. Tertiary for fourteen years, she huffed. What was it like, I asked her. Pistol grip under the chin. Like learning how to swim without ever touching water, she replied, more to Tom than to me. There was a call for morning tea break, and Marion used Tom to push herself up, his chest lightly oiled in the spot where her palms were. I knew he craved her touch again, even though she was concaving him, pressing down so hard she could’ve passed clean through, and out the other side. 

Across the room, a gaggle of teenage boys performed obscenities with their mannequins, the squeaks of their bodies pulling me taut, like a drawstring. I mean look at that, Marion flicked with index and ring fingers clenched together, so inappropriate, men. Those aren’t men, I replied, squinting at their chequered school uniforms, their acne-frosted cheeks. True, Marion said, equably, but if you stuck them all together they’d probably add up to one. 

*

A stands for airway, she whispers, check the mouth for any obstructions. I am already out of breath. Our lips all pinned-and-needled, blurred by kiss. The air oozed butter, my lungs were waxed over with salt. There were calligraphed signs for corset fittings and organic soaps, a flapper punched tickets for a steam train. Cinnamon nuts, fog machines, toffee apples. It was a sore-boned night, balmy, the tent entrance flapping its wings with each entering patron like gluey elephant ears. 

We’d taken to poltergeisting under the Big Top bleachers, the muffled thumps of patrons pattering above our heads like thick rain. Marion in her uniform, a barber-pole vest and matching bowtie. One tail of her Barrymore collar was upturned. She was standing stiff and oblong, like an origami crane. Check for breathing, I recited in my head, by looking, listening, and feeling for signs of life. 

People pay to come to the show to be manipulated and deceived, she says. Those are usually the experiences people avoid at all costs, but under a tent, it’s all pleasure. She removed the glove on her left hand, peeling it off slowly like surgeon, putting two bare fingers into the hollow under my Adam’s apple. I rippled. Just checking for proof of life, she said. Up close, her mauve lipstick was starting to crackle in the corners of her mouth. I went to kiss her collarbone but her eyes darted behind my head, her usual Cheshire grin pruning. I raised my brows in enquiry and whipped around to find her target, a man with a crewcut, wearing a match to her striped uniform. Just some coworker creep, she said, before ordered herself away to buy cherry cokes and a box of peanut brittle with the money from her tip jar. 

A mustard yellow curtain hid the main ring until showtime. I waited for Marion on the glistening silver benches. A man sporting a velvet top hat sat next to me, his forearm dusted with popcorn salt up like a gauntlet. I sifted the crowds for Marion, and I thought I caught a lick of her inky hair between the neon stage signs and mirrors. The man next to me waved at someone in the distance, dusting his lap with crumbs. 

The candy-cane tent was whipped by some invisible shriek, foamed by gasps. Probably a false alarm, the man next to me said. I growled at him, heart thumping under my ribs like a dog-tail. If unconscious and not breathing normally, start CPR immediately. I throttled out of the risers, searching for a source. People were drinking yellow wine from Styrofoam cups, turning everything hectic and shrill. I tried to follow the gazes, the gaping mouths, the green eyes wide like church windows. Between legs I caught a slice of a bowtie, a peppermint vest like a pastille. He was scrawled on the floor like a crime scene silhouette, a mulberry stencil of a kiss pressed into the nook of his elbow, marking the spot where a splinter of bone was getting its first taste of the spun-sugar air. 

I looked up at the trapezes. Only then did I notice that the underside of the tent was covered in faint twinkling stars – tiny lights, in constellations that I didn’t recognize. It took me a moment to realize half the bulbs were broken. Hardly anybody looks up at the ceiling during a show, but when they do, there is a surprise. The words belonged to Marion, who had apparated behind me, out of breath and bowtie uncurling like a neck slipped out from a slackened noose. She looked like a child without her lipstick, teeth glowing neon in the dark, like hills of pearls. 

Like hills of pearls, I wrote. It was true.