Jack knew Barbara was annoyed with him the instant he set foot in the trailer. He’d tried to tell her the outline of the idea. He’d drawn some sketches to show her how it’d work, and she’d pushed herself away from the table with a sigh, and in her irritation, flung open the trailer door and shouted at the twins as if it was their fault, as if every bad thing that had happened in her life was their fault.

     He was going to have to work hard to convince her about it otherwise she’d thwart him at every turn. ‘What d’you want to go working on a new act for now, Jack Barry? We’ve had a good run this season with the fire. Besides that, you can’t even swim good.’

     ‘Swimming isn’t involved Barbara. There wouldn’t be any room in there to swim.’

     ‘Where the hell are we going to keep an oil drum? The lorry’s bursting at the seams anyway with all your junk.’

     He could see her bottom lip jutting out and quivering as she started to peel the chip potatoes with the bread knife. ‘I’ve thought about that,’ he said, ‘we can store things in it while we’re on the road.’

     ‘Yeah, and unload everything before each show. You’ll soon get tired of that.’

     Barbara still wasn’t talking to him two weeks later when he rolled the oil drum across the ground at Clacton and stood it upright outside the trailer. He grinned at her through the window. She pretended she hadn’t seen him, then, when Ricky and Marty started banging on the side of the thing with sticks, she was out and on them in a second. ‘Shut the bloody noise up you two, or you’ll get us chucked off the ground.’ She glared at Jack. ‘Where’d it come from?’

     ‘Scrap yard, the one we passed on the way in.’

      Barbara wiped her hands on her housecoat. ‘How much?’

     ‘Swapped it for the old generator.’

     She spat then, and the gob landed close to the oil drum but not on it, a medium insult, Jack estimated, meaning she wasn’t that angry with him. ‘Full of holes, I’ll bet.’

     ‘As sound as a drum,’ Jack laughed at his joke, and looked at her face eagerly. ‘Sprayed silver on the outside it’ll come up a treat, very modern. Bit like a space ship.’

     ‘So, you’re giving up the fire for good?’ Barbara asked when they’d settled the twins down finally, and gone to bed themselves.

     ‘I’m coughing all the time. I think it’s the paraffin.’

     ‘Well, you should drink wine instead,’ she retorted sharply.

      There was a lot of shrieking coming from the Francetti’s trailer a few doors up. ‘Ugly couple of mongrels,’ Jack whispered, reaching his hand out and placing it cautiously on the soft cushion of Barbara’s hip. She moved a little, but he persisted, and she let him rest there. She’d been searching for her old silver shoes all morning, and sewing sequins on an otherwise ordinary pink tee shirt in between. She’d cuffed Marty around the back of the head for insolence when he told her one of the footballing dogs had eaten the silver shoes at Margate after she’d had a fit and thrown a lot of stuff out. Jack had found her crying by the candyfloss machine between shows and she pushed him away when he tried to hold her. ‘We’re not going to the Francetti’s. I heard them saying the Barrys only drink paraffin and wouldn’t know what Liebfraumilch was.’

     Jack had worked with explosives once in a double act, but dealing with Barbara when she was annoyed with him as well as hurt by the world was a far worse thing. He moved closer to her warmth and slid his hand up her back. ‘Nobody could make jokes about paraffin if I stopped the fire and took up the water,’ he murmured into her hair.

     ‘And then I ’spose they’d say the Barrys only drink water,’ she whispered, jerking his hand off her back savagely.

     He promised not to mention the water act again until the season was over - three more shows, Felixstowe, Lowestoft and Skegness and then to the winter grounds up past Peterborough, and the best thing about it was there was a swimming pool not too far away where he could practise. Because Jack was cheerful and whistled a lot, Barbara was less peevish than normal, and gave him the extra pork chop on Wednesdays instead of dividing it up between the twins.