Visits to the Flea Circus [Paperback]

Quiet magical realism and poignant character studies go hand in hand in Nick Jackson’s first collection of stories. His understated style and meticulous prose lead us into situations from which reality is the only escape.

Obsessed with the minutiae of life, Jackson’s characters explore the meaning of self within society’s constraints. Often afraid to take that transformative step they become trapped like insects in amber; caught between decision and indecision, with the reader becoming an uncomfortable, yet fascinated, voyeur.

Cover art is by Mark Mothersbaugh.

"Enviably lucid…the pictures he paints are potent enough to thrive without metaphor or narrative trickery…the characters live on in the reader’s mind" – Neil Ayres, author of Nicolo’s Gifts

Nick Jackson grew up in Stockport and rural Norfolk, and lived in Portsmouth, Mexico, Cambridge and Belize before settling temporarily with a tank full of tropical fish in Norwich. His work has most recently appeared in "The Alsiso Project", "Whispers of Wickedness", and "Fragment Magazine" and he is working on a novel.

They slid in, the black and banded ones, at the corners of my imagination. It was their foetal fingers and curling wisps of tails and their permanent smiles which fascinated me and populated the bestiary of my young mind. They moved magically between water and air. They transformed from a translucent fish-like blob, scarcely able to do more than drift with the current, to a creature with legs that could walk on land.

It was Bevan who started it. He told me that when he was a boy he used to catch them at the brick pits. I didn't believe him at first. I was old enough to know that adults seldom meant anything they said. Besides, how could Uncle Bevan, who wore dark shiny suits and had squared-off fingers yellow with nicotine and a proper watch with a heavy metal strap, know anything of the secret habits of amphibians?

He had a girlfriend called June, who was almost as beautiful as Helen Shapiro and had more hair. Once, when they came to visit my mother and June, as usual, stayed in the car, I peeped at her from behind the bedroom curtains. I liked her so much I couldn't look her in the eyes and words were a glutinous gum in my mouth.

Uncle Bevan promised to take me to the brick pits. That was in September, and it seemed that years passed until it was spring.

One Saturday morning they turned up in the car. June was sitting in the front seat with a white see-through scarf tied over her mound of hair. She had folded her legs elegantly under the dashboard so that her high heels were lying on their sides – her ankles looked very frail. She was wearing a polka-dot dress with straps that came over the shoulder and fastened at the front with large black buttons like glistening eyes and I wondered if they undid or were just for show.

She half turned in her seat and asked me if I'd like a Murray Mint. Uncle Bevan ate his, but I kept mine because its diaphanous wrapper reminded me of June's silky scarf and it seemed to smell like her lipstick.

June seemed to be a little strange with me. She didn’t try to ruffle my hair or arrange the set of my collar or use a spit-moist hanky on my eyebrows as my other aunts did. But her coolness suited me, it made her all the more alluring.

When we reached the brick pits June stayed in the car with the radio on, so that all the time we were there we could hear Cilla Black or Dusty Springfield or Frank Ifield. It was a cold April day with the faintest mist of rain. The clouds were in layers of sepia and grey, urging each other across the pan-scrubbed sky.

"You're not going to be hours are you?" June was picking tiny pieces of lint off her skirt.

"It'll not take us long."
"You said that when you went for our Susan's embrocation. 'I might pop in at the pub', you said. Three hours later and there's Susan in agony and me sitting there."
"Well, just listen to the radio," Uncle Bevan shouted as he followed me down to the ponds with a backward glance at June.
At the first pond we stirred the water with our sticks and wished the shapes of newts into the chocolate swirls and weedy blurs. There was nothing. Bevan trailed with me from pond to pond determined to prove his childhood memories correct.
Finally, in a small, deep pond with sides of slippery clay we saw them, treading water. Peter, Paul and Mary were singing 'How High The Moon' in the distance. Uncle Bevan was trying to hold on to me by the waistband of my trousers and avoid slipping into the reeds himself.
Perhaps it was their affinity with dragons; the beautiful emotionless eyes, suffused with gold and their grinning lips, shut tight on some alembic secret. I wanted to possess one, not yet understanding the elusive nature of wild things. They were completely aloof and continued to float dreamily in my jar when caught, pacified by the curving green-tinted walls of glass that enclosed them, oblivious to the vague movements of eyes and hands on the outside.
"What did you get?" June was bored when we got back but she tried to hide it from us. "Oh! Snakes!" She gave a small playful scream at the sight of their sulphurous bellies and black-tongued tails.
"They're not snakes, they're not a bit like snakes."
June’s powers of observation were limited; you could see their infinitesimally small hands and feet pawing the glass, testing the confines of their prison. Besides, snakes didn't live in ponds.