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The world wore a blank expression.
We traipsed the cold mile from the car in silence. It was supposed to be a treat. They said it would be a treat. Nobody dared to contradict them.
Is it a proper circus, Joe asked, with animals and that? Ryan kicked snow at him. What other kind of circus is there, numbnuts? Joe goes how sometimes its all acrobats: trapeze artists, plate spinners, human pyramids. That ain’t a real circus, Ryan says, you can see that on the telly.
I try to disappear down inside my coat. The thought of a circus with animals fills me with dread. I got taken to the zoo at Newtownabbey once, and that was bad enough.
We walk with our heads dipped, giving the chill wind due reverence. It is like going to church.
Only Ryan is excited. When he catches sight of the big top he whoops and throws up his arms. He says there’s going to be a lion, maybe two. I feel sad.
The tent is lashed to the earth, like a living thing seeming to struggle. There is the burnt blood smell of blackened popcorn and a terrible din from inside. I’m getting chips, goes Ryan, can I get chips uncle Jim? You just ate, says Big Jim. But he give Ryan a pound anyway.
You buy the tickets from a clapboard booth. They come in coils. A bald man with a fat lip tears off a whole strip of them, one long pink paper snake. They are just raffle tickets really, nothing special.
I touch the tent. Its waterproofed rubber is cold and clammy, something amphibious, or recently deceased. The entrance is a dark dissection wound, two flaps of skin pulled back to reveal a pale red glow, and things with faces, teeming.
Come on with you boys, says Big Jim. We go inside.
We sit at the front. That’s part of the treat. You could lean forward and touch the side of the ring. But you wouldn’t want to. It’s too bright to see in to the sawdust circle. The lights are hot and they make your face itch. Your neck gets stiff, looking up. The smell is pretty bad. The rubber walls crackle and strain in the wind, like an umbrella trying to turn itself inside-out. The sound of it makes me wince.
It’s okay, goes Sunny, don’t be scared.
Ryan eats chips. Joe has peanuts but he makes himself thirsty ‘cause they’re covered in salt. He goes on and on how he wants a drink, but Frankie says he should have thought of that.
Everybody sits on rows of low wooded benches. They are very bowed, and list when anybody gets up. There is not much leg room. The knees of the boys behind you dig in your back. Big Jim says that’s all part of the experience. Like the popcorn and the peanuts. Like the smell and the cold and the too loud off-key organ music that is starting.
When the lights go down I have to fight the urge to run away. I grip the underside of my seat. I feel a splinter go in under my nail. I stare at the sawdust circle, because that is the only bright spot. When people start applauding it sounds like gun fire. It is like they are shooting at the fat man in the huntsman’s red jacket. I am surprised this thought does not seem to occur to anybody else.
The fat man talks like Pa. He has the same accent. He tries to make himself look Italian. He has given himself a moustache with grease paint. He tries to make himself sound Italian, by drawing his words out, putting an a on the end of them. Welcome-a to-a the show-a. You wouldn’t catch Pa pretending to be from Italy or putting an a on the end of his words. It lacks dignity. It is beneath him.
I do not like the fat man. Somehow I feel like he’s insulting my grandfather, by insulting himself. Insulting my grandfather, and by extension all Irish men, and by extension me.
Everybody else cheers. Then the fat man goes away and out come some scruffy old lunatic dossers. Clowns, goes Joe.
The clowns come limping and leering. Ryan shouts out, egging them on in their flat-foot slapstick. They fall down and get up, fall down and get up. They fight each other, swing and miss. It is like drunks. You feel pity and disgust. You know they are only pretending, but what a thing to pretend.
They throw water at each other. Or they squirt each other with foam. They throw confetti in to the audience. They have weird, white lepers’ faces and ugly red smiles that make them look like burns victims. I do not like the clowns. They are shabby, sad. They are too like too many other things. They make me think of times when it is wrong to laugh, when it isn’t funny at all.
I try and smile. Because Mammy said that it was nice of Ryan’s uncle, and that we boys never get to go anywhere. She seemed to be so pleased. I felt that if I didn’t smile I was, in some vague way, letting her down. I put my teeth together and made myself look.
When the clowns are gone there are ladies on horses. The horses have feathers on a strap which they wear on their heads. When they come past they kick up clouds of dust. I am sorry for the horses. The ladies stand on their backs. They wear sparkly costumes. If you look closely you can see the goose-bumps on their legs. The ladies do handstands, or they hang upside-down. They balance on one foot, or with a ball on their chins. The horses just go round and around. Desperate, it is. Horses in the hot light. It doesn’t seem fair. It makes me dizzy.
After the horses come the tumblers, and then they put the lights on so people can piss or buy more peanuts. Frankie comes and squats down in front of me, squeezing between the bench and the ringside. You say if you’re feeling sick, he goes. He’s trying to be nice. I nod my head but look away.
Joe turns to Ryan and asks when the lions are coming on. Tsk, goes Ryan, they’ll be on last, that’s called a grand finale that is.
…
I try not to look at the animals. It is very cold, and while the bear is deep in to its drugged swaying, Sunny nudges me. Look, he hisses, pointing through a tear in the tent. Shanna, look, it’s snowing again. So I stare at the snow instead. I think about it making everything white. The tent, all the cars in the top field, all the houses back on the estate. The barracks, the flat blocks, the shops, the school, the cemetery. All white. Shush, the sky goes, I can keep a secret. Everything white. Better, that is, than dancing bears.
But it is very cold. I know I am shivering ‘cause Joe gives me a look where I’m jolting him in his seat. You can have my coat, Shanna, goes Sunny. But it doesn’t help. If I look along the bench I can see some people have got blankets and flasks with tea in. They must have been to a circus before, they knew what to expect.
My face is hot from the lights but my hands and feet feel blue. Before the next act comes out Frankie jogs down the aisle and under the flap. Off to check the car, Big Jim explains, to make sure it will start. Frankie’s breath is a blue banner than unfurls behind him and hangs in the air, hypnotic.
When the bear has been dragged away there are fire eaters and sword swallowers and boy in a basket of knives, part of some kind of a rope trick. The bursts of flame and the sound of steel make me cringe back a bit in my seat. I try to see Sunny’s face, or Ryan’s, or Joe’s. I want to see if it just me. It is like I am the only one to see the true nature of things. Everybody else seems enchanted. Enchanted by stabbing and burning.
At home there are fires and knives. I don’t see what is so special about these. I don’t understand how you can be excited about something once you’ve seen its true nature, when you know how it really works, what it really means. It isn’t being grown up, this feeling, not exactly. It’s being old, being too old, without being grown up. It isn’t a nice feeling. It is a little like car sickness.
Then there are magic tricks.
It is the same fat man from before. But now he is wearing a conjurers’ cape and a top hat. He talks differently so that we won’t recognise him. I think he is trying to be French. He says he is a master of the magical arts. He makes some flowers appear from up his sleeve, and a number of silk handkerchiefs come out his ears. Ryan pulls a flat sort of face because he is impatient for animals. These sorts of things do not impress. We have all seen better tricks. Big Jim once made fifty car stereos disappear.
Awe never strikes us, something else usually gets there first.
But the master of the magic arts is building to something. There are rabbits, then there are white mice, then there are doves. He cuts a lady in another sparkly costume in half. He makes another lady levitate and passes a wooden hoop over her. Then a kind of cabinet is wheeled out and he asks for a volunteer from the audience.
When he comes towards us I freeze still. I can hear my own heart beating and not a lot else. When he leans forward I can smell the sweat and the grease and see the dandruff from his slicked hair on the black nap of the conjurers’ cape.
Then he has Sunny by the hand, and Sunny is standing in the sawdust circle taking a bow, and Sunny is being shut up inside the cabinet.
…
I didn’t scream, not exactly. I didn’t cry either. But I made a kind of noise, a sort of high-pitched keening sound, or something strangled from the throat.
Maybe I sort of wailed, and it go louder and louder as the fat man stuck each successive blade in. It was the look of them more than anything. The look of supple steel bending and flashing as he flexed them. I didn’t want to watch but I couldn’t help it. Yes, it was the look of them, and the idea that inside that box Sunny’s body was slowly coming to bits.
I knew, in my head, that it was just a trick, that there was a false panel or a trap door or whatever. But I couldn’t convince myself. Just the idea, the suggestion that he was in there was enough to turn my stomach over and over and over. It was perverse, fucking horrible. It was wrong. That’s the true face of the circus, not spectacular, but grotesque.
When the fat man opened the cabinet up and Sunny was not in there something in my head switched itself off. I kind of slumped and slid down half on the floor. I stayed like that until it was time to go.
The fat man made Sunny reappear. Elephants came out, and pretty much just stood there. There was a snake you could touch, and a man whipped a lion and put his head in its mouth. I saw but didn’t see any of it. Everybody claps. The lights come up. In the blue red glow peoples’ faces resemble brutish woodcuts. Ryan’s uncle is talking to me. Frankie is talking to me. Ryan is digging me in the ribs with his elbow. Sunny is talking to me. It’s okay, he goes, see, it was only a trick.
Outside I am sick in the snow.
…
All the way back Ryan talks about lions. I go in and out of sleep, dreaming about knives. I can’t quite pull the world into focus. I loll with my head pressed against Sunny’s shoulder. He is saying words but I don’t know what they are. I try to tell what he is saying from the movement of his lips, like in films. It doesn’t work, I get lost, I fall asleep.
I hear Ryan’s uncle saying I had a bit of a funny turn. Somehow I am out of the car and stood in the hallway. Mammy goes I’m peaky from being out in the cold. She says I want a hot bath and bed. She says but did I have a good time.
I make my face do smiling again. I lean against the banister and nod. Yes, Ma.
------
The human race, the only race I know where everybody loses.
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Christie
