The Nonesuch and Others Read Online Free PDF Page B

velvet darkness between the tents.
    The barker was still shouting the wares of the Freak House; his “gang” were doing their strange things; a girl with a small yappy dog was dodging in and out and around the legs of parties come to observe, trying to find a better viewpoint. And without warning, suddenly the clown was there…but he was surely the crowned King of Clowns!
    I don’t know where he came from…he could only have come from outside—probably from the night-side of the tent, where some other member of the Freaks had helped him up onto his gear—but the way he appeared was like magic. Which was only right; for fairgrounds and Freak Shows and such, well they’re supposed to be magic, aren’t they? But whether or no, there he was, this clown on stilts, as colourful as the circus he belonged in, his head as high as the tent’s ridge-pole.
    The crowd oohed !and aahed ! as he stilted carefully between groups. And a curious thing: the other performers—all four of them—they seemed equally taken aback by his presence.
    “Wow!” I said, moving close to the Strong Man. “Surely he’s too tall for the tent?”
    “Eh?” The huge fellow cast me a frowning glance. “What, our tent? Oh, no, he’s not one of ours. In fact I didn’t know there were more of our kind here.” He nodded his great, bearded head. “He’s from one of the other fairs, for sure. But hey! He’s welcome if he helps draw in the crowd! Absolutely!”
    And as the Strong Man moved off, I stood there admiring the clown on stilts; stood there swaying just a little, still dizzy with drink and fairground motion, as the people seemed to swirl around me, occasionally jostling me aside.
    Apart from his great long stilts the clown was more or less typical of his breed…more or less. He effected a great red beak rather than one of those squashy noses; his tall, pork-pie hat sprouted green feathers; he wore a shiny black swallow-tail coat, its ridiculously long, stiff, curved tails hanging almost to where his feet must be situated inside narrow, horizontally-striped, green and grey pipe-stem trousers. The trousers seemed gathered at the “ankle” of the stilts, whose “feet” were three-clawed triangles of black plastic or painted wood…whichever, they were as shiny as patent leather shoes. And large? It could only be that these size fifteen pontoons helped him to balance.
    The clown was blackfaced, hugely white-lipped under the beak, and wore red goggle-eyes that reflected the rotating, near-distant lights of the rides. His thin neck was enclosed in a green collar of some furry material, and he wore green gloves on slim, long-fingered hands. At his hips his trousers bulged awkwardly, “clownishly,” of course, and I assumed that these bulges hid or disguised the upper extremes of his stilts and whatever mechanism allowed him to bend his legs where his feet (now his clown knees) would be. Without doubt his was a clever get-up, despite that his jerking movements must be hellishly difficult to orchestrate.
    The young girl with the yappy dog was one of the main jostlers. “I can’t see, I can’t see!” she was muttering, tugging at my elbow. “Mister, can I get in front?” But as I let her get by me she dropped the dog’s lead. And off he went, straight as the proverbial arrow to his target: the Freaks where they clustered around the new kid on the block.
    “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