We started fucking not long after I joined the club. Circus Society met every week in the biggest room on campus – a converted gymnasium used mostly for exams and graduation ceremonies. On Monday nights Jay and Elisa would haul down two huge plastic tubs of circus toys from the storage room on the floor above and spread it out around the room, ready for club members to play.
There was a tightwire on a frame. A bunch of juggling equipment. Diablo. Clubs. Hoops and staffs. Even a unicycle. I was terrible at all of it, but that was what made it fun – forcing myself to learn something that didn’t come naturally to me, and that called on all the balance and timing and co-ordination that, as an English Lit student, I never otherwise used.
Jay was a long-haired hippy, vague and soft-spoken. People joked that he looked like Jesus. On first meeting he seemed entirely harmless. He never said a harsh word to me, but was surrounded always by a cloud of rumours. He could be mean, people said. Bad, people said. You didn’t want to be around him, people said, when things didn’t go his way.