When it was over, he scooped tap water into his mouth with two shaking palms and tried to rinse the taste out. Little white lights were dancing behind his eyes. He stared at his reflection in the kitchen window. Now what? he wondered.
Now the clowns were coming. It made no sense at all, but somehow he knew it: they were on their way.
Which, as it turned out, wasn’t entirely true. They were already there.
Jamie was in the bathroom rinsing his mouth with toothpaste when he heard a faint noise from his bedroom below. He paused and cocked his head, hoping he’d imagined it. Half a minute of silence passed, then the clowns announced themselves. Bump, scrape, mumble, kettle sound, SMASH.
It came from his bedroom below. He groaned and sprinted from the bathroom, into the kitchen, slipped on the puke and crashed to the floor. It hurt and it was noisy. Below, the sounds of demolition ceased and a watchful silence followed, to be broken by a muffled voice crying out, ‘Gonko, it’s not funny!’, then the sound of wood being ripped apart.
Jamie got to his feet and dug around in the drawer for a nice big knife, but the best he could find was a rolling pin. That in hand, he barrelled out the back door, feeling ridiculous; it was probably not a weapon Genghis Khan ever used to take care of business. Once down the steps he stopped and listened. ‘Gonko, please!’ said the whiny clown in an impassioned voice, right before a huge crash, then a quieter and more ominous woof, the noise of something bursting into flame.
Jamie gave a panicked whimper then ran for his bedroom. An orange glow flickered through his bedroom door. The three clowns had their backs to him. The whiny one with black bristling hair was carefully lifting the pillow from Jamie’s bed; he seemed to be rescuing the mound of shit from the flames spreading over the blanket, as though he held a sleeping infant. Next to him was Goshy, who turned to give Jamie a view of his profile. That surprised look was still on his face, still seeing it all for the first time. He shuffled around further, spotted Jamie, and his gaze narrowed into something utterly calculating. His mouth gave a mute flap.
The thin clown turned too, squinting at him with a face of sharp creases and lines, demonically lit in the dancing shadows of the fire. ‘Ah, hello sport,’ he said with false cheer. ‘We were just talking about you.’
All three rushed him; Goshy with his arms out like a three-year-old in need of a hug, the thin one like a British soccer thug, the whiny one stumbling and tripping as he came. Behind them the fire spread out over Jamie’s bed; planks had been torn from the wall and tossed onto the mattress to feed the flames.
Jamie took a step backwards and raised his hands for combat, but he knew he was doomed. He had never been in a fight with anyone — the closest he’d ever come was an exchange of death threats in a traffic jam. His knees buckled in fright and he hurled the rolling pin as hard as he could. Surprisingly, his throw was on target; the rolling pin spun end on end, straight at Goshy. The rolling pin hit his sagging belly then, rather more surprisingly, rebounded and flew straight back at Jamie — a flash of wood rocketing at his eyes. He turned to protect his face and the rolling pin belted him on the side of his head. He fell to the floor and blacked out, completely at the mercy of the clowns.
As consciousness returned, Jamie remembered only that the waking world was an unpleasant place, and he willed himself back into the blackout. It worked for a minute or two, but it was hard to stay there when someone was pounding a tent peg into the side of his head at a steady 4/4 rhythm. He clutched at his head and moaned pitifully, then felt there was something wrong below the waist, too. Something was lodged in his rectum — God help him, there was. With a shaking hand he patted his backside and felt something stiff jutting out. He pulled it free, grunting at the nasty scraping pain. It was a rolled-up paper note.
Bam, bam, bam. The spike being hammered into his head beat faster as he sat up. Next to hit him was the smell, an utterly putrid reek of old beer and garbage. He peeled his eyes open and saw his room had been redecorated. The wall had gaping holes of torn wood; it looked as though the clowns had been working at ripping some kind of pattern — there was the beginning of what may have been a smiley face — but the job must have proved beyond them. The bed was now a pile of ash with a few springs and wires sticking out. Someone had dragged the recycle bin in from outside and spread its month-old contents of smashed bottles over the floor.
He stood up, swayed on his feet and sank back to his haunches. His eyes fell on the light switch; nails had been hammered into the wall around it from the other side, so their tips would jab any hands fumbling in the dark. He almost admired the effort the clowns had gone to.
Over on his desk was something that made no sense: a vase of daisies, undamaged and as pretty as a picture in the middle of the carnage. And there, on the charred mess that was once his bed, was what looked to be a greeting card. He staggered over, shoes crunching broken glass, and picked it up. It was in the shape of a red heart and said ‘For a Special Guy’. A kiss had been smudged on it with lipstick.
Like a failing engine, his mind’s gears ground and squealed. Why these niceties amidst the ruin?
He looked at his wardrobe, which was now empty. On top of it was a neatly folded pair of work clothes, ironed and pressed ready for his next shift at the club. On the rear panel of the wardrobe, someone had nailed a dead possum in a parody of crucifixion.
Something wet dripped from the ceiling and splashed on his head. He brushed at the damp spot, headache thumping in time with his pulse. On the floor his outline was engraved in the broken glass and garbage. Next to it was the paper he’d pulled from his rectum. He unfolded the note and read the neat handwriting in gold ink.
I dig the rolling pin gag. We could use that. We could use YOU, too. You have two days to pass your audition. You better pass it, feller. You’re joining the circus. Ain’t that the best news you ever got? The fuck it ain’t. You’re just lucky the new apprentice ain’t working out. I will kill that sonofabitch, you see if I don’t.
Gonko, on behalf of Doopy, Goshy, Winston and Rufshod Clown division, Pilo Family Circus
PS Steal from me again and I will cut your balls off.
Jamie crumpled the note in his fist and dropped it to the floor, wondering what kind of sense it was supposed to make.
According to the clock — which, somehow, was still working — he had an hour to get ready for his shift. Passing the downstairs toilet he saw the rest of his clothes had been stuffed into the bowl. Another wet drop slid through the floorboards above and landed on his head. Again he wiped it away, almost without thinking, but it had brought a new smell which caught his attention. On the back of his hand was a brown streak across the knuckles. Baffled, he stared at the ceiling. Through the gaps in the floorboards above, sewage was trickling like melting snow.
Jamie managed to walk calmly outside and run his head under the laundry tap before he keeled over and was silently sick.
Upstairs, the house was the stuff of nightmares. It seemed the clowns had somehow rigged the plumbing to reverse and expunge everything that had been put down the tubes in recent memory. The mess had spread over the floor in the kitchen, bathroom and hallway, and was creeping gradually towards the bedrooms like a slowly rising tide.
With the resilience of a postman, he made it to work. When he got to the club, other staff and a couple of the members asked him if he was all right. He told them he was fine as he stared 1,000 yards into the distance. After the 6pm rush of suits, he took two phone calls. The first was from Marshall, calling from a public phone, demanding an explanation. Jamie hung up on him. The second call was also from Marshall, only his tone had changed to hysterical panic. He begged for an explanation. Jamie hung up on him again, then unplugged the phone.
He was barely able to respond to anyone he came across. Gradually the thumping pain in his head dimmed down to something tolerable. When the clock struck two, marking the end of his shift, he grabbed the master keys and made for one of the spare rooms, hung a ‘do not
disturb’ sign on the door, and fell onto the bed.
Moonlight poured through the window. Jamie savoured the quiet as the thick granite walls kept the city noises out. Metres away the streets were teeming with the last round of nightclubbers looking for more booze and a mate, just a normal summer Saturday night in Brisbane. The women, dressed up like glazed hams and glistening in the heat, were trying to look like they belonged on the set of Sex and the City. Watch them closely and you could see the mannerisms of the American starlets they idolised; the gestures, the nuances of speech, grabs at being sassy. Meanwhile the menfolk, oblivious to it all, were squeezed tight into denim and sweat-soaked collared shirts, each one primed for a rodeo, staggering around in horny packs. The curse of the working class was in full swing. It was a comforting thought for Jamie as he lay there, just to know things were in order. There are times when even the most insipid environments can be a comfort — knowing they’d never change meant at least there was something you could count on.
He had not expected sleep tonight, but he found himself drifting close to it, and gladly closed his eyes to take the hour or two of respite that came his way.
Something was digging at the back of his neck. The room was still dark. He woke like someone coming up from under water, gulping for air and clawing at the blanket. His dreams had been unkind again — more clowns, this time interrogating him for his whereabouts. See you soon, the thin one had promised.
It was half past four. Jamie reached behind his head and grabbed at something that felt like plastic. He fumbled about for the bedside light. As he’d guessed, there was a red clown nose in his hand. He had to fight back an urge to burst into tears, because this felt like the last straw. But he knew it wasn’t. They weren’t done yet. The clowns could still be here, you know, he thought.
He jumped to his feet, suddenly wide awake as it hit him: the clown nose was not just a natural extension of his nightmare. They had been in here. They were almost certainly still in the building. Maybe still in this bedroom.
He stared about wildly, under the bed, in the wardrobe, in the ensuite. All clear. He straightened the covers, but as he turned to leave saw something on the inside of the door. Another dead bat, of course — what else? It had been stuck in place with a nail through its skull, its vicious little face locked in a snarl. A piece of paper was lodged in its mouth like a cigarette. Jamie winced as he took the paper out, unrolled it, and read:
Sleep tight? Thirty hours to pass your audition. Make us laugh, feller. That’s the assignment. We don’t care how. We don’t care who gets hurt or killed. Make with the chuckles, you pass. Ditto for your friend. He has twenty- two hours to pass his audition.
Gonko, on behalf of the Pilo Family Circus
Jamie stuffed the note in his pocket and opened the door, grimacing at the dead bat which grimaced right back. Out in the hall all was quiet, with the faintest of dawn light trickling in through the high rafters. There was no trace of movement in the gloom. He could faintly hear the sound of vacuuming coming from one of the bedrooms. He ran to the elevator, pressed the button, and as the doors slid open he heard a distant voice yelling: ‘It’s not funny!’
He froze and made a choked sound, but after a second or two passed in silence, he supposed the voice had been in his mind alone; the thought was not comforting. The lift took him down to the lobby, where the front doors were shut and locked just as he’d left them. There was no sign of life in the arcade outside, its gates locked at either end. How did the clowns get in here if not through the front doors? He thought of the door by the kitchen, which opened out to a small alley used for garbage pickups. They could have scaled the fence and somehow broken through the door, but a street full of people would have seen them. The only other way he could think of was to scale the side of the building, like Spiderman, and climb through a high window.
At the front desk he sat for a moment and listened. All he could hear was the somehow peaceful sound of muffled traffic outside as a fleet of taxis carried drunk night-clubbers home. He switched on the two security monitors beside him, the little screens casting a thin greyish light in the dark lobby. The camera showed a black and white view of the kitchen, which was deserted. After a few seconds the view shifted to one of the hallways, also empty. Next, the back alley, the rows of black bins. All quiet out there. Next, the basement.
And there they were.
It took a few seconds for the scene to truly chill him. Goshy the clown was staring up into the camera, right at Jamie, and the sense of eye contact was quite real. Goshy’s arm was extended and in his hand was a cigarette lighter, its little flame dancing around like an extension of his thumb, flaring in the grey screen, distorting the picture around it. Behind Goshy were … one, two, three other clowns — they’d brought a friend along. Those three were busying themselves in the background. Jamie saw the thin clown swing an axe before the monitor’s image shifted to show another empty hallway, then the kitchen again.
Why the basement? Jamie thought. A lighter. Fire. Why? What are they …?
Then the chill set in. Built into the basement walls were three giant wooden vats, attached to pipes that led up through the club walls like veins, into the kitchen, bar and utility rooms. Sloshing around in those vats were many, many litres of cleaning products, isopropyl alcohol, turps and ethers. All of it highly flammable; all of it set to blow.
A moan escaped Jamie’s lips and he clutched the front desk with both hands. The fire would spread up through the tubes, igniting the walls from within on each floor. Before any fire crew could get here, the club would become a spectacular blazing death trap. They would be too late to save the Brisbane Personalities charred in their beds.
Jamie grabbed the phone. His hand was shaking. The monitor did its rounds again, showing no sign of other people. He dialled for an outside line and called emergency services. It rang three, four times. The monitor switched views to the kitchen. Finally a female voice answered: ‘Police, fire or ambulance?’
The monitor shifted to the hallway. ‘Police,’ Jamie whispered hoarsely.
‘Police,’ said another female voice.
‘Hi. I got a problem with some clow— some guys. I think they’re going to …’ He trailed off as the monitor switched back to the basement. There were no clowns. In the background, the wooden vats sat embedded in the walls as normal.
‘Yes?’ said the voice in the earpiece.
Jamie stared at the monitor until the picture shifted back to the kitchen, where one of the chefs was ambling over to fire up the ovens, yawning.
‘Yes? What is your location?’
He hung up. He sat staring at the monitors as they did their circuit twice more: no clowns in the basement. Maybe there never were.
Out the door he went, through the arcade, unlocking the gate and striding away in quick steps. Ringing in his ears was the question, Where were you on the night of Saturday, February tenth? He checked back over his shoulder twice to make sure the place was still standing, then jogged to a taxi rank on Edward Street, eyes peeled for puffy flower shirts, striped pants and painted faces.
He waited in line for a cab with the last wave of drunks to be rounded up and sent home to their hangovers and rude awakenings. A few could be seen staggering determinedly to the casino, the only place in Brisbane selling cocktails at breakfast time. Jamie felt as bleary-eyed as the drunkest of them.
It was a while since he’d been here in communion with the tribe, waiting for a cab as the sun came up, liver struggling with the backlog. With the sounds and smells about him now, he wondered what appeal it had ever held. It was just the done thing in this town … A person’s twenties were the drunk years — or the drug years, if you swung that way. A year ago he’d been up to ten beers a day on weekdays, the top shelf for weekends. No one noticed a problem — people made approving noises, praised him for Christ’s sake. Looking back, it almost defied belief. Every home he visited was adorned with collections of empty bottles, posters that read Tequila:
have you hugged your toilet today?, pub humour, pub knick-knacks, bottle caps glued to the walls, entire shrines to binge drinking. It was everywhere you looked, so no one noticed.
In the taxi rank the drunks jostled around him, a danger to themselves and others, playing out their slurred melodramas. No flower-printed shirts, striped pants, red plastic noses. Out here, the clowns did not even seem possible.
A cab pulled up in front of him. A drunk couple jostled with him for it. Jamie shoved past them with a rare show of backbone and closed the door before the male could try to butt antlers. He told the driver New Farm, patted his pocket for money and found the note he’d pulled from the dead bat’s mouth — material proof in his hands that the clowns existed.
Thirty hours to pass your audition. Make us laugh, feller …
The cab headed down Brunswick Street, through quiet traffic made entirely of other cabs. The breaking dawn pulled the night away like a blanket from an unmade bed, showing the last of the clubbers and street girls slowly wandering home.
They pulled up beside the house, a big wooden Queenslander atop a hilly street. Jamie paid the cabbie and tried to muster enough energy to be curious. Marshall was standing on the back steps with a hose in his hand. This was a first: the boys were cleaning up. Marshall’s face was frozen in shell-shocked bewilderment — and who could blame him? Water ran down the back steps, leaving nasty streaks of crap down the side of the house.
Jamie shook his head in disgust and went around to the front door. Water trickled slowly past him down to the gutter. There was an awful stink in the air. At the doorway he caught sight of the neighbours staring at him through their window, heads shaking. There was not much he could say. He waved apologetically, shrugged and went inside.
The Pilo Family Circus Page 3
