The Nemophile (15)

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Continued from HERE.
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Despite interferences, Gregory’s life rather entered a plateau stage where mundane matters continued to prevail. He sorted out his mother. He loved her dearly but wept buckets at how thoughtless she was. She was ever the sucker for the con man with a fast buck business scheme needing investment. But this last one was the last straw. A fat man who wanted to set up a series of fattening food outlets all over recently tariff-free Middle Europe took the ticket. He wasn’t even good looking and hid all his defects under a jolly confidence in the ways of business … and of love. He had absconded with all Gregory’s savings which Gregory had entrusted to the ‘power of attorney’ of his mother whilst he was non compos mentis in hospital. Why had he entrusted them to his mother of all people? He had nobody else. And, despite all the examples of why he shouldn’t trust her, he did trust her. Mothers were like that. She had brought him up on a pittance and, despite exposing him to all manner of drunken step-fathers and the intermittent periods of her ignoring Gregory completely, she had seen them both through. Gregory was Gregory because he was his mother’s son. She deserved trust even if she couldn’t be trusted.

Suzie couldn’t be trusted. He often doubted she existed at all. Just wishful thinking that he could hold down a relationship. Yet she was there most of the time. Proof was in the eyes, both their eyes. He should have given his bank book to her, no doubt. But she didn’t have his blood, his provenance. She and her own mother were pawns in a bigger game they didn’t understand. A game which even Gregory himself, at the moment, didn’t understand.

Gregory shrugged. He almost preferred it when he wasn’t being sensible. Sensible meant worrying, having concerns, form-filling, lying awake at night with no possibility of dreams, linear plots of life, practicalities, no imagination, no risk taking, no vision sharing, no circuses, no clowns...

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The clown with a black rosette in his flirty lapel was removing the masking cream from his face. Tomorrow they would be lowering the rigging of the Big Top ready for trundling away from this caravanserai to another. He was deeply honourable, deeply serious, yet acting the fool made him feel that he was ever plotting against the unplottable or representing a ‘clandestiny’ that made him a spy amid the frighteningly absurd existentialism around him – and, in the end, it was not laughs he was after, but sobs. Maybe not even sobs, but cries of terror and despair. And that need in him to hurt, of course, hurt him more than if he wasn’t honourable, wasn’t serious.

Nevertheless, he took no blame for the pretty trapezist’s fall, because he had earlier retightened the loose pinion in the airy gods of the tall wide tent. He had done this primarily, however, because he knew there was no point in booby-trapping himself. You see, soon after the original business with disabling the props, he was told by the Weirdmonger to act as replacement ringmaster (instead of being clown) for that evening’s performance …

There was nothing worse for a clown to be. Tears were in his eyes like wobbly transparent snailshells. Let’s hope (he hoped) that, in the new catchment area for the Circus, real ringmasters would not be too thin on the ground.

CONTINUED HERE.

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