(2003) Overtaken Read Online Free PDF Page A

considered that
the acts in this one were pretty standard, not up there with Cirque du Soleil
or the show at the Millennium Dome with music by Peter Gabriel, but not down
there like the performers outside the Pompidou Centre in Paris . Excepting that the one extra
element a night at the cirKuss had was the horrible intimacy. The cirKuss
performers weren’t as close as if they were in a crowded lift, say, but I felt
I was really much closer than I had ever wanted to be to anyone performing
anything. There was juggling, there was clowning, there was acrobating, the
black-eyed girl did some juggling then performed on the trapeze, the wind rumpling
the audience’s hair as she somersaulted past only centimetres above our
upturned goggling heads with a shower of glass beads slowly raining down into
our eyes.
    So
close were we to each other that it was possible to see the extraordinary
effort it took to perform each of these tasks: the groans of the strongmen were
uttered in our ears as if for us alone, the sweat of the acrobats drifted in a pungent
mist on to the skin of the crowd, the smell of the clowns sizzled in our noses
and the closeness, the intimacy, the nearness, made it all seem to me
completely and utterly pointless. With a start I thought, Where’d that come
from? I felt ashamed of myself as if I’d been caught out dreamily contemplating
the long legs of a girl in a wheelchair, because it was an unspoken rule of me
and my friends that we tried very hard not to dislike things: we had a feeling,
one of those dangerous ones that hovers just below the surface of ever being
articulated, that once we started not liking things we couldn’t know where it
would end; better to assume that by and large if somebody had gone to the
effort of putting something on, or if they were famous and could fill a big
venue then they had something that was worth saying. Yet the thought was there
now and I couldn’t dislodge it that these performers were going to such effort,
such exertion, such rare skill to what end? There didn’t seem to be any story
that was being told. I looked around, not at the cirKuss folk straining in the
centre of the ring but instead at the rest of the audience: were they enjoying
it themselves? It was hard to tell. I had been in so many audiences that I knew
they can be liars to the performers and to themselves; it was always very hard
for them to admit that what they had come to see was a terrible waste of time,
so each new routine was greeted with greater applause than the one before,
building to an actual standing ovation at the climax of the first half.
    Sage
Pasquale liked us to stay in our seats during the interval and discuss what we
had seen so far but in one of my many acts of petty rebellion against her I
always insisted on struggling out, clambering and trampling over people. I
pretended to have a mild case of claustrophobia which somehow only seemed to
affect me during the intervals of shows.
    I told
my friends I only stood in the foyer or on the pavement outside but really it
was a little secret pleasure of mine to get far away from my mates for a few
minutes: to leave the venue entirely and to visit a pub or bar as distant as I
could safely run to and still get back in time for the second half. While in
the pub or bar I indulged myself in fantasies of aloneness: that I was a
mysterious stranger refuelling my mud-streaked Camaro in a dusty Mexican border
town or a man with frightened eyes and forged papers changing cross-continental
trains at some sinister Balkan rail depot under the obsidian eyes of
Kalashnikov-toting paramilitaries. While in reality I was in a hotel cocktail
bar in Wigan .
    On this
occasion as I stepped down out of the banked seating area and into the tiny
foyer of the tent, wondering whether I was still fit enough to sprint to the
Yates’ Wine Lodge on Lord Street in my personal best time of two minutes and
eighteen seconds, I saw standing by the entrance to the big mouth the