The Nemophile (10)

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Continued from HERE.
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Gregory and Suzie decided to celebrate his first day out in the world after hospital by going to the circus. This had been a childhood pleasure as a child. And conveniently a new circus had just hit town, as advertised by the tilting airship over the park - where the big tent had been erected and surrounded by a congeries of caravans. And a menagerie of lows, roars, yaps and squeaks.

They left the flat, then headed towards the park via his Mum’s place where he reclaimed the bank book he’d left in her safekeeping. She hardly said a word. In fact, she may not have been there at all, and Gregory possibly helped himself by using the front-door key that was kept in the porch under the slipmat.

They first visited a smaller tent with a board saying ‘Friques’, a sideshow beside the main attraction. This contained many creaturely curios that had been collected around the world, living, breathing, usually silent. One enclosure contained a creature so far into its own death, it must have been there and come back again, by the look of it, because it was extruding a substance that had become itself: a substance that was nothing any creature could have produced short of having died and become its own excrement with, in turn, its own excrement, i.e. an excrement’s excrement quite fouller than its origination covered by an effigy-skin of itself to make recognition possible. Padgett Weggs, however, did not recognise it was himself. For one thing, there was no mirror in the enclosure.

Usually in such shows, one is not allowed to talk to the exhibits. Suzie was quite aghast at the sight of this thing but soon realised it was the remnant of a war veteran, someone who had helped fight fires during the blitz, before being dossed out into modern times. Or so the poor blighter claimed through a series of glottal stops. It was always good to listen to the stories of old-timers, turgid in tone and register though they may have been. Humouring old-timers was an art in itself. Reliving their highs and lows of life. Encouraging them to prattle on about this, that and the other. Learning, where you could, aspects of life that were dying out with the people who had lived them for real rather than fictionally. While Suzie held this conversation with living history, Gregory left the stifling tent for a breather outside.

The park was a strange one and shimmered in the heat. So hot this summer, the grass had yellowed over and the distant church spire – beyond the boating-lake – was a reminder of times beyond reality. That was what heat could do. Make things tenuous. Less simple to understand. Almost providing a protection against the dark implications of transgressed time. Proustian, without the necessity of understanding what the word meant.

The airship was a mere speck on the horizon now, where the gasworks squatted. Obviously to land elsewhere in the conurbation. The Big Top was just opening its doors, if tent-flaps could be credited with such a description. A beady eye in one of the nearby caravans followed Gregory as he prepared to fetch Suzie from amongst the Friques. She liked somersaults. And tonight there would be acrobats, as well as clowns. And a ringmaster with a whip for the circling performers on hooves and claws and slimy long bellies.

CONTINUED HERE.

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