Bigot Hall

VIOLENT ACTING OUT

‘Coming to the circus, laughing boy?’

‘Not while I live.’

Why was I so surly as a child? On this occasion I was in the hothouse watering the brain tumours. The moment Snapper said ‘circus’ I was propelled like a crash dummy to an earlier year when I had run away to that establishment like the kid I was. Always of a serious disposition, I was also possessed of a resentment at having to grow while the world was losing its flavour. What little I’d surmised of it from a bedroom full of meathooks had led me to believe the last bastion of colour and integrity was sheltered by the big top. So before anyone noticed my absence I was sat in the audience watching a parade of cages circle the ring.

Bernard the Living Merchant. Old Scaly Gorgon. Terry the Human Constable. These are the sights I saw. I didn’t know what other circuses were like but this one was teeming with psychotics. Gabbling men in makeup riding round and round on bicycles which were evidently too small for them. Git in a leotard, biffing along a high-tension wire. Bloke dressed as the Joker, telling us everything was dangerous and real. As if I of all people didn’t know. One fool struggled into a giant cannon — it was clear he had a deathwish and wasn’t waiting for the gods to deliver. Nevertheless he gave a yell of surprise as he flew through the air. Meanwhile someone stepped into a cage with a lion. For me a lion is like any other situation — if you’re going to whip it and push it away with a chair, why get involved in the first place? In my opinion the bloke was just doing it for show.

The true horrors, however, were the clowns. Ashen and demented, they shambled out of the wings like victims of an over-zealous bloodbank. Only the coldest of souls could watch their exploits without screaming. Car crashes, drownings, fires — you name it. Even the laughter was exaggerated. Some of them were carried off on stretchers which collapsed. The entire affair was meaningless, the stuff of nightmares. I had to get out.

So I was recovering outside when the tent sheet flapped like the blowing gown of an overworked surgeon and a strange, dilated clown lumbered out, hollering with laughter. It appeared that the fiend’s trousers were filled with liquid. ‘Hello, spuddling,’ he roared. I remember I sank my teeth into his belly and a damburst of water flooded out, shrivelling the clown as he tried to staunch the flow. And to think I had considered joining these people.

Within minutes I was legging it through a maze of trailers and cages, pursued by a caterwauling bedlam of circus freaks. A clown on stilts told the rest where I was. I opened a trailer door, bursting in on a naked clown and a seal. Backing out, I overturned a trunk which vomited an avalanche of Masonic regalia. I set off through the animal boxes, panting steam and flipping catches as I went, and hearing screams behind me. If I hadn’t the presence of mind to shove a juggler from a unicycle, would I be here today? Several clowns were injured by lions, a fact I have spent my life trying to regret. And arriving home, I found I had not been missed. I dismissed the episode as I would a slave.

Until Snapper entered the hothouse to tell me the circus was in town. I had no desire to get back on the horse and re-endure this particular trauma. If lightning doesn’t strike twice we can dance in a storm in iron underwear. But Adrienne said it would be therapeutic and I allowed her to influence me. Off we all went to the circus.

Part of the reason was to get rid of our dog, Nelson, whose peculiarities were causing distress and would yield more money than war as a circus attraction. So while the others were elsewhere accosting the manager, me and my friend Billy Verlag were watching caged freaks circle the ring and I knew something was very wrong. Bernard the Living Merchant. Terry the Human Constable. And the clowns — here they were to remind us life was quaint and temporary. Thanks.

Billy was the only village kid who ever ventured onto the Hall grounds, being the only boy small and spherical enough for the other kids to boot over the perimeter wall. I think he looked up to me because I had told him about Hume’s principle of unverified causality — that B follows A does not prove that A caused B. He had actually used this to get away with tripping an old woman. Now he regarded the book I was holding. ‘What’s that?’

‘Dostoevsky.’

‘Can I have a go?’

I handed him the book, my eyes on the cavorting clowns. They were looking horribly familiar — because they were the same ones as before. It was the same circus. And at that instant, they saw me. Miniature cars squealed to a halt. Painted faces stared out of a madman’s universe. The ringmaster’s whip wrapped around my neck and, in an explosion of popcorn, I was dragged like a cur into the ring. Elephants were circling and I had to roll to avoid being trampled as the ringmaster ordered the clowns to ‘terminate’ me — that was the word he used. I pushed a clown out of its miniature car and led the others a merry dance until I crashed into a barrel and they pounced, two clowns holding me by the arms while a third beat the bejesus out of me. The audience loved this. Maybe they thought I was a midget. The applause was deafening as I was loaded into the cannon, which stank of gunpowder. I don’t remember anything between then and the moment I awoke in an adjoining field. Everything was totally unreal — I felt like a statistic.

When the others got home with Nelson in tow they asked me where I’d disappeared to. It turns out Billy Verlag had been so absorbed in The Idiot he hadn’t noticed my ordeal — thought I’d gone for a slash or something. Even Adrienne was sceptical. What about the bruises?

A wound heals slower than a kiss. When I’m advised to cheer up because it may never happen I’m reminded that it has and may again. The most amusing thing about a pantomime horse is the necessity of having to shoot it twice. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.