The Nonesuch and Others (5 page)

“Woofy, come
back
here!” the girl, maybe nine or ten years old (God only knows what she was doing out on her own—or with the dog—so late at night!) cried after him. But Woofy wasn’t listening. Excited, and like myself fascinated, he was going to get as close as doggily possible to these peculiar people.

I detected an odour. But…there are smells and there are smells. And sometimes they’ll bring back memories of events you thought were long forgotten. Like that time when I was a little kid and my lips were chapped. A girl I fancied at school loaned me this clear lip-salve in a propelling lipstick-like tube; its smell was not quite peppermint, and I’ve never come across that smell again. But the moment I think of that little girl, everything comes back to me as clear as yesterday—especially that smell.

That was a nice thing; other things aren’t. For example:

I remember another time from my childhood, and in fact from another fairground, but this one in the spring when I was maybe as young as the girl with the dog. It was the year of the cockchafer, the May bug. At least I think that’s what they were. Me and my lot, the kids I knocked about with, had our own name for them: we called them shit-beetles, because of the stench if you crushed one. And they were big, nasty,
flying
shit-beetles.

I had this friend, Stanley. Even as a child and long before pubescence he was plagued with acne, pimples, boils, whelkiness in general. And Stanley had some money! We penniless kids could only look on in envy while Stanley whirled on high, flung round and round in his Flying Chair. But as the ride began to slow he was crying; and as the centrifugal force lessened and his chair fell from the near-horizontal to the vertical, where Stanley’s feet touched down on the ride’s boards, he was disgusting!

He must have flown through a cloud of the things—because he had shit-beetles splattered all over him. And Stanley stank! I remember someone remarking, “Hey, don’t worry about it, Stan. Let’s face it, you don’t look any worse than before!” You know, kids can be cruel like that.

But there you go: I only have to recall that fairground, on that day, and poor Stanley, and I remember the smell, the shit-beetle smell. In fact
this
smell, or one very much like it. Too much like it.

I looked around. Close by, the pink face of a child-in-arms was half lost in a huge ball of sticky candy floss. And another was licking a toffee-apple that was about to fall off its stick. So was that it? A combination of stinks? And the kid in diapers—the one with the toffee-apple—had he or she just shat? God, I felt ill!

The smell went away, drifted in another direction, and once again I focused on the clown on stilts. The Tattooed Man, still on his box, was looking up at him, talking to him. “What’s your outfit, my friend? I mean, I hate to poach, but we could definitely do with someone like you!” But then he frowned and curled his lip. “Or maybe you’re here for another reason—not to lend a hand but to lure the crowd away! Well, what do you say?”

The clown looked down, shrugged, and shook his head. He was either dumb—or playing dumb, like other clowns I’ve seen—or he simply didn’t understand. What, a foreign clown?

And waddling closer, the Fat Lady piped up, “Hey, give the man a break! Maybe he’s in that Russian circus. They’re playing in Sunderland. It’s odds-on he’s come to catch our act, see how we perform.” She held up a pudgy hand. “How’re you doing, pal?”

The clown on stilts cocked his head on one side, gazed down at her upturned face, bent over and sniffed at her. It was part of his act, obviously. First he played dumb, and then he played daft. The Fat Lady laughed and said, “I smell good, right?” And she held up her hand higher yet. He took it, she shook it, they slowly let go; and looking oddly puzzled—jerking his head in an almost robotic fashion—the clown straightened up again.

But that amazing bending action! How in hell had he managed that? His stilts must be the most marvelous contraptions, that he could bend as low as that without toppling over. And if this fellow was typical of his comrades, well that Russian circus in Sunderland must be one very class act!

Meanwhile, Woofy was having the time of his doggy life. In and out like a mad thing; up on his hind legs one minute, down on all fours the next; his front legs stiff and jerking in time with his barking, and his hind-quarters stuck up in the air. It was all in fun, though, for his tail was wagging fit to tip him over. Then, a mistake. Someone trod on his paw and Woofy, overexcited, snapped much too close to an ankle.

A cry of outrage, followed immediately by a swift kick that grazed Woofy’s rump, causing him to yelp. In a flash his little mistress was there to snatch him up out of harm’s way.

Someone yelled, “Get that bloody dog out of here!” And flying to the back of the crowd, the young girl (who for the first time I saw to be a scruffy, raggedy child with a stubborn, pouting mouth) turned with Woofy in her arms and shouted, “Fuck you, shit-face!” Ah, childhood! Ah, innocence! Ah, bollocks!

Someone cried, “Smile, please!” And a flashbulb went off in a brief, brilliant starburst. I blinked in sympathy; and on his stilts, waving his arms before his face, the clown backed off a pace. He’d had his picture taken, but
my
after-image was one of the Fat Lady looking distinctly nauseous, pulling a face as she wiped her hand on her taffeta tutu.

My vision cleared. The crowd had thickened. A man was holding his obese child—the one with the toffee-apple—up to the clown on stilts. The child was giggling, kicking, and trying to lick all at the same time. The apple fell off its stick and the child quickly sobered. Deprived, its expression changed, became anxious; its mouth trembled, puckered up, shaped a grating wail of distress that rapidly built to a shriek.

Oh no, no, no! Tut-tut-tut!
The clown took the child in two hands, bounced it in mid-air, a gentle vertical shaking motion, almost as if he were weighing that small, fat, crappy bundle on a pair of sprung scales. Then, cocking his head at that curious angle again, he leaned forward and returned the screaming child to its father; while a woman—the mother, maybe?—scrambled to grab up the now filthy apple and ram it back on its stick.

The smell—
that
smell—hit me again, stronger this time, and suddenly, out of nowhere, a whole string of pictures, vivid as life, went flashing across my mind:

Ploukie Stanley, head down and sobbing into his pullover as his Flying Chair slowed to a halt; the mole cricket’s squirming as it emerged from its burrow; Barmy Bill’s flattened face on a perfectly compacted eighteen-inch cube of flesh.

And again I felt sick as a dog, a volcanic surge of liquids rising in my gut, threatening to erupt. Out of the now thinning crowd I stumbled—out between a pair of wagons vibrating with the rumble and roar of their generators—out into the darkness and the night and the open field.

I lurched against a fence; the top bar was hanging loose; I sat on the center bar and leaned forward, knowing from my heaving guts exactly what was going to happen—and exactly
why
it would happen. It was my pills, of course! It wasn’t just that I
shouldn’t
drink, but that I
couldn’t
drink! For eighteen months now I had been taking this medication, just one pill each morning, to prohibit my drinking. There are no side effects, unless you drink. If you drink you throw up, horribly! But in eighteen months it had become a habit in itself—and I’d forgotten all about it. This morning, as usual, I had taken a pill, and right now I was about to pay for my forgetfulness, for having drunk a forbidden drink. What, just one little drink? Hell no, at least four pints of beer! On top of the pill and the day’s meals…and everything burning like acid, searing my insides as it came surging for the surface. Oh, joy!

Diary, I’m not going to describe the next fifteen minutes. It was probably no more than that, but it felt like an hour and a half. And the fairground throbbing away to match my throbbing head; and halfway through, something at my feet that wagged its stumpy tail and sniffed tentatively at the mess that lay steaming on the grass down there.

And I thought,
God, don’t
eat that, little fellow
!

Time passed unnoticed…

And while I sat there on the broken fence—propped against a post with my head down, shoulders slumped, and hands dangling—wishing I was dead, I sensed him there. The tall fellow. The clown on stilts. I tried to look up, but my vision was blurred, made misty by reason of my watering eyes. In the near-distance the fairground was like some foggy Xanadu, like a luminous pavilion floating on a black velvet sea. And silhouetted darkly against its soft glow, this tall, tall figure, as motionless as some freakish scarecrow in the night.

I saw him there, however dimly, but even without seeing him I would have sensed him, would have known his smell. And my pal Woofy knew it, too. Off he went, zigzagging and yapping, stiff-legged and bouncing, making more noise than you’d believe possible from such a small creature, into the darkness. And as for me: I threw up again…

Something brought me out of it. I don’t know what it was; a sound, perhaps? A cry, a yelp, a brittle snapping, the sound of crunching bones? I can’t say, but something.

I still couldn’t stand, and so clung to my post. And there in the night I saw a strange thing. No, let me try that again—I
thought
I saw, and heard, a strange thing: a shadow, flitting on high, whirring as it passed overhead. A winged shape, like a great dragonfly, clutching a small still bundle in its weirdly-jointed appendages. Then a sudden, sharp swerve—the plangent sound of plucked telephone wires where they were strung between tall poles—and silence. But not for long.

“Woofy! Woofy! Where
are
you, Woofy?” The rude, ragged girl-child, running under the stars, sobbing, searching in some kind of frenzied desperation. She raced across the field, her shrill voice gradually fading into the distance, until I was left with my thoughts where I sat shivering, but no longer from sickness, and certainly not from any physical chill. And the thought uppermost in my mind, which even then I couldn’t or didn’t want to pursue or explore or explain, was this:

You’re not going to find Woofy, you snotty little girl. No, I don’t
think you’re ever going to find Woofy…

And Diary, that’s just about it. We’re almost done.

Eventually I was able to stand up again, by which time the fairground’s lights were going out, its main generators silent. Then, remembering—things—I looked across the field. Darkness, nothing, now. But in my mind’s eye pictures were forming, and they were such that I knew I’d never rid my memory of them:

The stilt-clown’s too long tail-coat, with its stiff, shiny-black swallow-tails. The way he had handled his stilts,
if
they were stilts. And the way he’d smelled…for surely the stench had been his? Worse still, the picture in my mind of him weighing that overfed, shrieking infant…which he might well have considered too heavy for his fell purpose. For even poor little Woofy had proved to be a problem,
weighing him down and causing him to run afoul of the telephone cables
!

Those last two were the thoughts that did it: chilled me to the bone and sent me running, stumbling to the roadside where I flagged down a taxi to carry me home. But I couldn’t sleep. And yet—just like that earlier episode in Barrows Hill—neither could I be sure, not even then, not one hundred per cent
sure
, that it wasn’t the drink or my warped imagination or…or…or I didn’t know what else!

Which is why, Diary, I called in Monday morning to tell my boss I was ill but I’d be in a.s.a.p., then went out and caught a bus back to the fairground. And wouldn’t you know it? It was raining, and the place was as drab and unwelcoming as any fairground in the rain. But far more so to me. Frighteningly so, to me.

Hands in pockets, I wandered among the rides and stalls and wagons, just me and a bunch of urchins who must have been playing truant from the local schools. The only thing that was open was a slots arcade, where two tiny old ladies were arguing over whose go it was on one of those claw machines, though what they would do with one of the hideous fluffy toy prizes—if or when they won one—was anybody’s guess.

Eventually I made my way to the Freak Show tent, closed for the day, whose sodden eaves dripped rain on the flattened grass and whose gangway floorboards oozed mud. I looked through a gap in the tarpaulin door but there was no sign of the Freaks themselves.

And finally I did what I had to do—what I’d come here to do—and walked out between the perimeter wagons into the empty field. Over there, the fence with the broken rail; and there on the grass, a slimy looking solidified soup which I no more than glanced at because that might set me off again.

And nearby, there on the ground under the looping telephone cables, something limp and wet and furry. At first I thought it might be Woofy, but it wasn’t. Six or seven inches long by four wide, it had fur or hair of a sort, yes—but nothing that ever came from a dog.

For the fur, set on a backing of thin chitin or pearly grey overlapping scales, was striped grey and green…horizontally, I believe. And it stank like poor Stanley when he came down off those Flying Chairs.