The Pilo Family Circus (3 page)

Jamie crumpled the note in his fist and dropped it to the floor, wondering what kind of sense it was supposed to make.

According to the clock — which, somehow, was still working — he had an hour to get ready for his shift. Passing the downstairs toilet he saw the rest of his clothes had been stuffed into the bowl. Another wet drop slid through the
floorboards above and landed on his head. Again he wiped it away, almost without thinking, but it had brought a new smell which caught his attention. On the back of his hand was a brown streak across the knuckles. Baffled, he stared at the ceiling. Through the gaps in the floorboards above, sewage was trickling like melting snow.

Jamie managed to walk calmly outside and run his head under the laundry tap before he keeled over and was silently sick.

Upstairs, the house was the stuff of nightmares. It seemed the clowns had somehow rigged the plumbing to reverse and expunge everything that had been put down the tubes in recent memory. The mess had spread over the floor in the kitchen, bathroom and hallway, and was creeping gradually towards the bedrooms like a slowly rising tide.

With the resilience of a postman, he made it to work. When he got to the club, other staff and a couple of the members asked him if he was all right. He told them he was fine as he stared 1,000 yards into the distance. After the 6pm rush of suits, he took two phone calls. The first was from Marshall, calling from a public phone, demanding an explanation. Jamie hung up on him. The second call was also from Marshall, only his tone had changed to hysterical panic. He begged for an explanation. Jamie hung up on him again, then unplugged the phone.

He was barely able to respond to anyone he came across. Gradually the thumping pain in his head dimmed down to something tolerable. When the clock struck two, marking the end of his shift, he grabbed the master keys and made for one of the spare rooms, hung a ‘do not disturb’ sign on the door, and fell onto the bed.

Moonlight poured through the window. Jamie savoured the quiet as the thick granite walls kept the city noises out. Metres away the streets were teeming with the last round of nightclubbers looking for more booze and a mate, just a normal summer Saturday night in Brisbane. The women, dressed up like glazed hams and glistening in the heat, were trying to look like they belonged on the set of
Sex and the City
. Watch them closely and you could see the mannerisms of the American starlets they idolised; the gestures, the nuances of speech, grabs at being
sassy
. Meanwhile the menfolk, oblivious to it all, were squeezed tight into denim and sweat-soaked collared shirts, each one primed for a rodeo, staggering around in horny packs. The curse of the working class was in full swing. It was a comforting thought for Jamie as he lay there, just to know things were in order. There are times when even the most insipid environments can be a comfort — knowing they’d never change meant at least there was
something
you could count on.

He had not expected sleep tonight, but he found himself drifting close to it, and gladly closed his eyes to take the hour or two of respite that came his way.

Something was digging at the back of his neck. The room was still dark. He woke like someone coming up from under water, gulping for air and clawing at the blanket. His dreams had been unkind again — more clowns, this time interrogating him for his whereabouts.
See you soon
, the thin one had promised.

It was half past four. Jamie reached behind his head and grabbed at something that felt like plastic. He fumbled about for the bedside light. As he’d guessed, there was a red clown
nose in his hand. He had to fight back an urge to burst into tears, because this felt like the last straw. But he knew it wasn’t. They weren’t done yet.
The clowns could still be here, you know
, he thought.

He jumped to his feet, suddenly wide awake as it hit him: the clown nose was not just a natural extension of his nightmare.
They had been in here
. They were almost certainly still in the building. Maybe still in this bedroom.

He stared about wildly, under the bed, in the wardrobe, in the ensuite. All clear. He straightened the covers, but as he turned to leave saw something on the inside of the door. Another dead bat, of course — what else? It had been stuck in place with a nail through its skull, its vicious little face locked in a snarl. A piece of paper was lodged in its mouth like a cigarette. Jamie winced as he took the paper out, unrolled it, and read:

Jamie stuffed the note in his pocket and opened the door, grimacing at the dead bat which grimaced right back. Out in the hall all was quiet, with the faintest of dawn light trickling in through the high rafters. There was no trace of movement in the gloom. He could faintly hear the sound of vacuuming coming from one of the bedrooms. He ran to the elevator, pressed the button, and as the doors slid open he heard a distant voice yelling: ‘It’s not
funny
!’

He froze and made a choked sound, but after a second or two passed in silence, he supposed the voice had been in his mind alone; the thought was not comforting. The lift took him down to the lobby, where the front doors were shut and locked just as he’d left them. There was no sign of life in the arcade outside, its gates locked at either end. How did the clowns get in here if not through the front doors? He thought of the door by the kitchen, which opened out to a small alley used for garbage pickups. They could have scaled the fence and somehow broken through the door, but a street full of people would have seen them. The only other way he could think of was to scale the side of the building, like Spiderman, and climb through a high window.

At the front desk he sat for a moment and listened. All he could hear was the somehow peaceful sound of muffled traffic outside as a fleet of taxis carried drunk night-clubbers home. He switched on the two security monitors beside him, the little screens casting a thin greyish light in the dark lobby. The camera showed a black and white view of the kitchen, which was deserted. After a few seconds the view shifted to one of the hallways, also empty. Next, the back alley, the rows of black bins. All quiet out there. Next, the basement.

And there they were.

It took a few seconds for the scene to truly chill him. Goshy the clown was staring up into the camera, right at Jamie, and the sense of eye contact was quite real. Goshy’s arm was extended and in his hand was a cigarette lighter, its little flame dancing around like an extension of his thumb, flaring in the grey screen, distorting the picture around it. Behind Goshy were … one, two,
three
other clowns — they’d brought a friend along. Those three were busying
themselves in the background. Jamie saw the thin clown swing an axe before the monitor’s image shifted to show another empty hallway, then the kitchen again.

Why the basement?
Jamie thought.
A lighter. Fire. Why? What are they …?

Then the chill set in. Built into the basement walls were three giant wooden vats, attached to pipes that led up through the club walls like veins, into the kitchen, bar and utility rooms. Sloshing around in those vats were many, many litres of cleaning products, isopropyl alcohol, turps and ethers. All of it highly flammable; all of it set to blow.

A moan escaped Jamie’s lips and he clutched the front desk with both hands. The fire would spread up through the tubes, igniting the walls from within on each floor. Before any fire crew could get here, the club would become a spectacular blazing death trap. They would be too late to save the Brisbane Personalities charred in their beds.

Jamie grabbed the phone. His hand was shaking. The monitor did its rounds again, showing no sign of other people. He dialled for an outside line and called emergency services. It rang three, four times. The monitor switched views to the kitchen. Finally a female voice answered: ‘Police, fire or ambulance?’

The monitor shifted to the hallway. ‘Police,’ Jamie whispered hoarsely.

‘Police,’ said another female voice.

‘Hi. I got a problem with some clow— some guys. I think they’re going to …’ He trailed off as the monitor switched back to the basement. There were no clowns. In the background, the wooden vats sat embedded in the walls as normal.

‘Yes?’ said the voice in the earpiece.

Jamie stared at the monitor until the picture shifted back to the kitchen, where one of the chefs was ambling over to fire up the ovens, yawning.

‘Yes? What is your location?’

He hung up. He sat staring at the monitors as they did their circuit twice more: no clowns in the basement. Maybe there never were.

Out the door he went, through the arcade, unlocking the gate and striding away in quick steps. Ringing in his ears was the question,
Where were you on the night of Saturday, February tenth?
He checked back over his shoulder twice to make sure the place was still standing, then jogged to a taxi rank on Edward Street, eyes peeled for puffy flower shirts, striped pants and painted faces.

He waited in line for a cab with the last wave of drunks to be rounded up and sent home to their hangovers and rude awakenings. A few could be seen staggering determinedly to the casino, the only place in Brisbane selling cocktails at breakfast time. Jamie felt as bleary-eyed as the drunkest of them.

It was a while since he’d been here in communion with the tribe, waiting for a cab as the sun came up, liver struggling with the backlog. With the sounds and smells about him now, he wondered what appeal it had ever held. It was just the done thing in this town … A person’s twenties were the drunk years — or the drug years, if you swung that way. A year ago he’d been up to ten beers a day on weekdays, the top shelf for weekends. No one noticed a problem — people made approving noises,
praised
him for Christ’s sake.
Looking back, it almost defied belief. Every home he visited was adorned with collections of empty bottles, posters that read
Tequila: have you hugged your toilet today?
, pub humour, pub knick-knacks, bottle caps glued to the walls, entire shrines to binge drinking. It was everywhere you looked, so no one noticed.

In the taxi rank the drunks jostled around him, a danger to themselves and others, playing out their slurred melodramas. No flower-printed shirts, striped pants, red plastic noses. Out here, the clowns did not even seem possible.

A cab pulled up in front of him. A drunk couple jostled with him for it. Jamie shoved past them with a rare show of backbone and closed the door before the male could try to butt antlers. He told the driver New Farm, patted his pocket for money and found the note he’d pulled from the dead bat’s mouth — material proof in his hands that the clowns existed.

Thirty hours to pass your audition. Make us laugh, feller …

The cab headed down Brunswick Street, through quiet traffic made entirely of other cabs. The breaking dawn pulled the night away like a blanket from an unmade bed, showing the last of the clubbers and street girls slowly wandering home.

They pulled up beside the house, a big wooden Queenslander atop a hilly street. Jamie paid the cabbie and tried to muster enough energy to be curious. Marshall was standing on the back steps with a hose in his hand. This was a first: the boys were cleaning up. Marshall’s face was frozen in shell-shocked bewilderment — and who could blame him? Water ran down the back steps, leaving nasty streaks of crap down the side of the house.

Jamie shook his head in disgust and went around to the front door. Water trickled slowly past him down to the
gutter. There was an awful stink in the air. At the doorway he caught sight of the neighbours staring at him through their window, heads shaking. There was not much he could say. He waved apologetically, shrugged and went inside.

Most of the debris had been cleared from the living room and hall. Someone had broken out the air freshener in a futile attempt to cover the smell. P
OLITICAL PIGGIES
had been washed from the wall. From Steve’s room came a muffled cry of alarm as Jamie passed. The door opened and out popped Steve’s head, eyes wide and panicky. ‘Jamie? Thank God.’ For a moment he thought Steve was going to hug him; there was a strange light in his eyes. ‘Jamie, they were back.’

Jamie watched him in a tired way and waited for the rest.

‘The
clowns
were back,’ said Steve by way of elaboration. ‘You know?’

‘I didn’t think you meant Jehovah’s Witnesses. What happened?’

Steve grabbed his arm and pulled him into the bedroom. Steve sat on the bed, Jamie on a chair, the only two objects spared from damage. Steve’s round pink face looked to have been thoroughly scrubbed, but a faint tinge of colour remained from the face paint.

‘They came back when I was sleeping,’ Steve said, leaning forward and talking in a whisper. ‘They want me — both of us, I think — to pass some kind of test. If we don’t, they’re going to keep coming back. I don’t know what they are, but they’re serious. I think maybe they’re part of a — what do you call ’em? Religious …’

‘Cult.’

‘Yeah. You know, like that serial pest guy who’s always on the news, interrupting grand finals? Maybe there’s a
hundred
guys like that, all organised, you know?’