Nights at the Circus (19 page)

The grunts of the Strong Man began to accelerate.

Walser presently understood the Professor wanted him to speak to them, that his speech was of surpassing interest to them. The Professor continued to perch on the bucket, gazing ardently within Walser’s mouth at play of tongue and uvula, as Walser hesitantly began:

‘What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty!’

The Strong Man accomplished his orgasm in a torrent of brutish shrieks, such a hullabaloo that Walser stumbled over his recitation but, in the midst of the Strong Man’s ecstasy, Sybil burst into the ring as if shot from a gun, at a remarkable turn of speed for a pig. She sent the desks and scholars flying. Her white ruff was ripped and askew and she was screeching as though it were sticking time.

She cleared the barrier in a mighty bound and promptly went to earth in the royal box, never letting up her hellish racket even as she burrowed deep down under the velvet carpets for safety.

The Strong Man bellowed; Sybil shrieked; there rose up the desolate cry of the Colonel, whose pig was in danger; and, from the menagerie, suddenly, came an immense fugue of roaring, as if all the cats were stops on a gigantic organ that was being played flat out. Then, a fearful shout:

The Professor kicked over the clanking bucket in his haste. His pupils leapt over the overturned desks and shinned up the poles to the orchestra platform, to crouch in a huddle among the music-stands, big-eyed and twittering with agitation, full of atavistic, jungle terror. The lovers on the plush banquette rose up, white-faced and shaking.

Walser, naked, abandoned by the apes, thought: ‘I shall
not
meet Death in a dunce’s cap!’ And snatched it from his head.

He ran. He vaulted the barrier and was halfway up the amphitheatre towards the main exit when, Lot’s wife-like, he could not resist a backward glance.

The tiger ran into the ring, hot on the scent of Sybil.

It came out of the corridor like orange quicksilver, or a rarer liquid metal, a quickgold. It did not so much run as flow, a questing sluice of brown and yellow, a hot and molten death. It prowled and growled around the remains of the chimps’ classroom, snuffing up its immense, flaring nostrils the delicious air of freedom fragrant with the scent of meat on the hoof. How yellow its teeth were; the festering teeth of carnivores.

The Strong Man tore off the woman’s clinging arms, clutched his loincloth round his privates and made for the auditorium door. He was a fine specimen, in prime condition; he swung from tier to tier of the seating, past Walser struck like a pillar of salt, up and away. The exit banged to behind him. Walser heard the sound of the shooting of the bolts.

Now the only way out of the ring was that by which the tiger had entered it.

I am in a perfect death trap, thought Walser.

The Ape-Man’s woman, her ankles as securely trapped by her dropped knickers as if the garment had been a pair of bolas, let out a blood-curdling scream.

We are in a perfect death trap, thought Walser.

When the tiger heard the woman scream, it knew that something better than pork was on the menu. It arched its back. Its tail stood to attention. It raised its heavy head. Its yellow eyes went round and round the ring like searchlights, seeking the source of the scream.

The terrified woman scrambled out of her underwear and ran along the circular bank of seating.

The tiger’s swivelling eyes caught sight of her. The tiger scratched with its hind paws, raising little puffs from the sawdust. It laid back its round, disingenuous ears. Her wrapper, flapping like a sail, caught on an ill-hammered, jutting nail and tripped her up. She fell forward on her face in the gangway.

Walser recovered the use of his limbs. Before he was aware he had made a decision, he hurled himself down the amphitheatre towards the amber-eyed brute just as it was about to spring. Involuntary as his heroics, Walser let rip a tremendous, wordless war-cry: here comes the Clown to kill the Tiger!

Kill it, how? Strangle it with his bare hands, perhaps?

THREE

Then there was a room hissing with greenish gaslight, in which Walser opened his eyes to see a looming figure dipping lint into a bowl of pink water powerfully redolent of carbolic acid. He lay on some kind of day-bed. It was his blood tinged the water pink. He closed his eyes again. Fevvers reapplied the damp lint to his shoulder without gentleness. Now he was conscious, he howled.

‘Easy does it,’ advised Lizzie, tilting the rim of a mug of hot, sweet tea to his lips. Tea with canned, condensed milk in it. English tea. Fevvers did not release her pressure on his dressing. She wore a stern, white shirt secured at the throat with an emphatic necktie but this did not render her in the least masculine. Upholstered in the snowy linen, her bosom looked as vast as its mother’s does to a child as she bends over its bed in sickness. Her displeasure was palpable.

‘So you’ve run away to join the circus, have you, love?’ she asked, not quite pleasantly. Evidently she no longer felt the need to call him ‘sir’.

Walser twitched between her ministrations, disturbing the shawl in which they’d wrapped him. This shawl was made from dozens of little squares of knitted wool sewn together to form a patchwork and its workmanship had the touching incompetence of that of children, first
real
evidence, he noted, of the existence of the tribe of Cockney nephews and nieces they were always talking about. His wig was gone and his hair was sopping wet.

‘Tiger took one swipe at you and then the Princess turned on the hosepipe,’ said Lizzie. ‘Whoosh! Blast ’em with water, that’s the trick. Knocks the breath out of the buggers. Knocks ’em backwards. Then you scoop ’em up with a net.’

There were comforting, familiar things in Fevvers’ new dressing-room. A gilt clock topped with Father Time, stopped at twelve. A dog-eared poster on the wall. A puffing spirit kettle. Lizzie made him drink more tea.

‘Course, it isn’t a
tiger
, exactly!’ Fevvers informed him. ‘Didn’t give you a chance to check out its privates, did it. Tigress. Female of the species. Deadlier than the male, and all that.’

‘Charging a bleeding tigress!’ exclaimed Lizzie. ‘What the ’ell got into ’im?’

‘He was having it off with the Ape-Man’s missus, wasn’t he,’ said Fevvers in a flat tone. She pressed too firmly on the compress, so Walser howled, again.

‘No use denying it.’

‘Quick work,’ said Lizzie.

‘She’s a pin-cushion,’ said Fevvers.

‘I take it,’ said Lizzie to Walser, ‘that you wish to remain incognito.’

‘We’re the only ones that
know
,’ said Fevvers, in the tones of one pondering blackmail.

‘But what the ’ell’s his game?’ Lizzie asked Fevvers, as if he were not there.

‘I’m sure
I
don’t know.’

‘I’m here to write a story,’ he said. ‘Story about the circus. About you and the circus,’ he added in as conciliatory manner as he knew how.

‘That involve screwing the Ape-Man’s missus, does it?’

She eyed the compress narrowly and let it alone, tipped the bowl of water into the slop pail under the wash-stand and wiped her hands on her pleated skirt with a dismissive air. Yet, as if obeying a scenario that predated their disappointment with him, the women treated him with rough compassion. A frock-coated doctor soon arrived to bandage his scratches, whom Fevvers paid.

‘Settle up with me later,’ she said in the accents of a tart with a twenty-four-carat heart.

A female chimp (wearing a green hair-ribbon) delivered a pile of neatly folded clothes, and wig and school cap, too, and they dressed him up again before they sent him back to Clown Alley. Fevvers even slapped a hasty coat of wet white over his features, to preserve his disguise for him, since his right arm hurt far too much for him to do it for himself. All the same, he felt himself much diminished in their eyes and was glad to get out of the dressing-room.

As he closed the door behind him, Lizzie said thoughtfully to Fevvers: ‘How do you think he gets his dispatches through the censor?’

In some pain, and painfully aware that, by the very ‘heroicness’ of his extravagant gesture, he had ‘made a fool of himself’ just as the Colonel had predicted he would, Walser made his shaky way through the courtyard, where the mittened and mufflered children of the wire-walking Charivaris were now playfully teetering along the Princess’s empty washing-line. It was already dark. From the monkey house echoing on the night air, came a rhythmic thud as the Ape-Man beat his woman as though she were a carpet.

FOUR

Clown Alley, the generic name of all lodgings of all clowns, temporarily located in this city in the rotten wooden tenement where damp fell from the walls like dew, was a place where reigned the lugubrious atmosphere of a prison or a madhouse; amongst themselves, the clowns distilled the same kind of mutilated patience one finds amongst inmates of closed institutions, a willed and terrible suspension of being. At dinner time, the white faces gathered round the table, bathed in the acrid steam of the baboushka’s fish soup, possessed the formal lifelessness of death masks, as if, in some essential sense, they themselves were absent from the repast and left untenanted replicas behind.

Observe, in his behind-the-scenes repose, Buffo the Great, the Master Clown, who sits by rights not at the head but at the magisterial
middle
of the table, in the place where Leonardo seats the Christ, reserving to himself the sacramental task of breaking the black bread and dividing it between his disciples.

Buffo the Great, the terrible Buffo, hilarious, appalling, devastating Buffo with his round, white face and the inch-wide rings of rouge round his eyes, and his four-cornered mouth, like a bow tie, and, mockery of mockeries, under his roguishly cocked, white, conical cap, he wears a wig that does not simulate hair. It is, in fact, a bladder. Think of that. He wears his insides on his outside, and a portion of his most obscene and intimate insides, at that; so that you might think he is bald, he stores his brains in the organ which, conventionally, stores piss.

He is a big man, seven feet high and broad to suit, so that he makes you laugh when he trips over little things. His size is half the fun of it, that he should be so very, very big and yet incapable of coping with the simplest techniques of motion. This giant is the victim of material objects. Things are against him. They wage war on him. When he tries to open a door, the knob comes off in his hand.

At moments of consternation, his eyebrows, black and bushy with mascara, shoot up his forehead and his jaw drops as if brow and jaw were pulled by opposing magnets. Tsking his tongue against his yellow, gravestone teeth, he fits the knob back on again with exaggerated care. Steps back. Approaches the door, again, with a laughably unjustified self-confidence. Grasps the knob, firmly;
this
time, he knows it is secure . . . hasn’t he just fixed it himself? But –

Things fall apart at the very shiver of his tread on the ground. He is himself the centre that does not hold.

He specialises in violent slapstick. He likes to burn clown policemen alive. As the mad priest, he will officiate at clown weddings where Grik or Grok in drag is subjected to the most extravagant humiliations. They do a favourite ‘Clowns’ Christmas Dinner’, in which Buffo takes up his Christ’s place at the table, carving knife in one hand, fork in the other, and some hapless august or other is borne on, with a cockscomb on his head, as the bird. (Much play with the links of sausages with which this bird’s trousers are stuffed.) But
this
roast, such is the way of Buffo’s world, gets up and tries to run away . . .

Buffo the Great, the Clown of Clowns.

He adores the old jokes, the collapsing chairs, the exploding puddings; he says, ‘The beauty of clowning is, nothing ever changes.’

At the climax of his turn, everything having collapsed about him as if a grenade exploded it, he starts to deconstruct himself. His face becomes contorted by the most hideous grimaces, as if he were trying to shake off the very wet white with which it is coated: shake! shake! shake out his teeth, shake off his nose, shake away his eyeballs, let all go flying off in a convulsive self-dismemberment.

He begins to spin round and round where he stands.

Then, when you think, this time, Buffo the Great
must
whirl apart into his constituents, as if he had turned into his own centrifuge, the terrific drum-roll which accompanies this extraordinary display concludes and Buffo leaps, shaking, into the air, to fall flat on his back.

Silence.

The lights dim.

Very, very slowly and mournfully, now strikes up the Dead March from
Saul
, led by Grik and Grok, the musical clowns, with bass drum and piccolo, with minuscule fiddle and enormous triangle struck with back-kick of foot, Grik and Grok, who contain within them an entire orchestra. This is the turn called ‘The Clown’s Funeral’. The rest of the clowns carry on an exceedingly large coffin draped with the Union Jack. They put the coffin down on the sawdust beside Buffo. They start to put him in it.

But will he fit? Of course he won’t! His legs and arms can’t be bent, won’t be bent, won’t be ordered about! Nobody can lay out
this
force of nature, even if it
is
dead! Pozzo or Bimbo runs off to get an axe to hack bits off him, to cut him down to coffin-size. It turns out the axe is made of rubber.

At long, hilarious last, somehow or other they finally contrive to load him into the box and get the coffin lid on top of him, although it keeps on jerking and tilting because dead Buffo can’t and won’t lie down. The clown attendants heave the coffin up on their shoulders; they have some difficulty coordinating themselves as pall-bearers. One falls to his knees and, when he rises, down goes another. But, sooner or later, the coffin is aloft upon their shoulders and they prepare to process out of the ring with him.