Bingo

1.

He’d been over to Melanie’s farm, picked the sturdiest ram they could find, one with wide thick horns and powerful legs. It had been a brute of a thing. Adam had wrestled it to the ground where it writhed and protested in the mud next to a dry stone wall, and all the time he had been whispering, ‘Ssssh, easy big fella, I don’t want to harm you, sssssh,’, but the ram kicked and protested and it had taken the strength of the two of them to get it on the trailer.

‘You’ll have a strong blood line with that one’, Melanie had said, wiping the sweat from her brow. ‘Good choice. You can tell by the horns’.

‘Thick horns’, Adam said, panting, bent over. The ram had kicked him in the goolies. ‘Powerful legs . . .’

‘I’ll send an invoice. And be careful with it, mind. That’s a special ram, that is. Comes from good stock. One of our most popular, in fact, though this will be his first year’.

Adam could hear it kicking and thrashing around inside the trailer. It didn’t sound terribly happy. It had that fighting spirit which demonstrated good breeding and a fierce warrior-like tenacity.

‘Any . . . Advice?’ he asked.

‘Just let it settle in before you introduce it’, Melanie said, lighting a cigar. ‘Let it find its bearings. Build up the suspense. So that when the rutting begins, it’s good to go. And another thing’.

‘Yes?’

‘It’s name is John’.

2.

A cool mist was descending from the hills by the time he got back to his farm. The lazy swipe of his windscreen wiper blades were a philosophical renewing, he thought, a mind clearing itself in order to concentrate on the chores to come. He pulled into the field adjacent to the one where he kept the ewes, closed the gate, then opened the trailer for the ram to come skipping out, still angry, a little disorientated and, it has to be said, sheepish. He watched as it ran to the far end of the field, then began investigating the periphery of the enclosure as it came to terms with its new surroundings. Looking for a weak link, Adam told himself, a place in the hedgerows where it might plot its escape.

He drove on to the farmhouse. My now, the mist had completely descended, the headlights of his vehicle illuminating fine drops as they fell and swirled around on unseen currents, which made him think of the myriad of thoughts constantly swirling around his head, ideas and suppositions, vague philosophies, unkempt desires. He paused for a moment and took in the splendour of the disused chicken coop, a ramshackle outline in the failing light, and he thought about the ram and how the fine rain would be making its woollen coat all damp. But John would be okay with this. John would be thinking about other things, such as the ewes in the neighbouring field. John would be too preoccupied.

Adam let himself inside, turned on the lights, and started warming the oven for dinner. He sat on one of the chairs around the table and re-read a letter he had received that morning from a former colleague. He enjoyed reading about the circus, and what’s they’d been up to, and the towns that they had visited, and he wondered what would have happened if he had never left and continued his career as a clown, but the countryside had been calling, nay, the countryside had been bleating, and he’d felt that same old pull to give up everything and become a sheep farmer, that urge common to many who work in the circus, particularly in the clown department.

His mobile phone then sprung to life with a social media notification. This in itself was unusual, because it was usually turned off having to preserve his data for dire emergencies, but the WiFi had kicked in and now various notifications were coming through. His phone buzzed and purred and the screen flicked. He couldn’t understand why this was happening, what with having no WiFi at the farmhouse, and in any case the oven was almost warm enough for him to put his dinner inside and start cooking. Yet still the phone buzzed and purred and flickered with all of the notifications from the last week or so since he’d been in WiFi range. All of this had distracted him from the last paragraph of the letter which explained the impending visit of the head clown.

‘So where on earth is this WiFi coming from?’ he asked nobody in particular.

According to his phone, the network was called John. And he really didn’t put two and two together, what with just having picked up a ram called John, because there seemed no reason to connect this with the bizarre behaviour of his mobile device.

3.

There’d been shouting, of course. The Head Clown had been an utter bastard. What romance there is in the life of a circus clown, what prestige there might be in such a position, was soon drilled out of him. The Head Clown had insisted on a certain method of acting and when you fell flat on your arse for the umpteenth time that day during rehearsals, you damned well had to make it look like you were actually enjoying it. And if your pants weren’t sufficiently baggy, then there was trouble. The Head Clown ruled with the iron fist and the other clowns soon used to tremble at his name. Just the word Bingo could reduce a hapless clown into a gibbering wreck and Adam had spent many a long hour in his shared caravan, hidden away from the others, trembling and shaking and fighting back the tears.

‘The cloud of dust’, Bingo had said that morning, ‘Which comes up from the sawdust in the middle of the circus ring, must be just the exact dimensions for maximum comedy effect. Think of an inverted mushroom. Go on, think of an inverted mushroom. That’s what you should be aiming for’.

‘But Bingo . . . Aren’t these sort of things just left to nature?’

‘You are in control of your own destiny. And your own body, am I right? Do you need anyone else’s support to go to the toilet? No. Then you must have at least some control over the manner in which you fall flat on your arse.’

‘Bingo . . .’

‘Or maybe I should offer this opportunity to someone who actually deserves it?’

It didn’t help matters, of course, that Adam’s clown name, the name that he had chosen to accompany him through his career as a circus performer, was Adam. The other clowns had said that this was a symbol of a certain lack of artistic merit on his part but Adam said that there was something fundamental and philosophical going on.

‘Does it not magnify my tumbles and pratfalls if I am not layering these with some concocted nonsense name?’

‘Absolute bollocks’, Bippo had replied.

‘I agree’, said Flappo.

And that night Bingo, Bippo, Flappo and Adam had entertained a big top full of audience members who laughed at their antics and howled in amusement until Flappo had whacked Adam over the head with a novelty giant mallet, at which Adam, instead of falling flat on his arse with a well-timed boing on the big bass drum and a proportionally-dimensioned inverted mushroom cloud of sawdust, had just rubbed his head and shouted, ‘That fucking hurt’.

Adam knew then that it was time to give it all up and open a sheep farm.

4.

A slow knock on the door late in the evening seldom heralds good news. Adam was half asleep, sat up in front of the television with his feet on a pouffe, a documentary about existentialism only half-enthralling him due to the usual fatigue. At first he had thought that the knock had been imagined, or a part of the documentary, some artistic flourish insisted on by the director perhaps in order to demonstrate existentialism’s fascination with the absurd, but then the knock came again and he realised that it was real. Sleepily, and assuming it to be one of the neighbouring farms coming late to ask for help with something sheep-related, he shuffled over to the front door and opened it wide.

‘Just let me get my coat . . .’

Bingo.

Bingo was there, in full make-up. And the shock of seeing him again, even after all this time, drove a spear of ice deep into Adam’s heart. He let out a feeble scream and began to close the door.

‘Please . . .’ Bingo said.

His first instinct was to prepare himself for a berating, some magnified slight with which Bingo would manage to extrapolate every conceivable character-flaw even now, even here, away from the circus and away from the other clowns who would gaze on shivering in their oversized shoes, yet still somehow with a dominion over his daily life, his character, his actions.

But there was something in his tone.

‘Please . . .Let me in, I will explain . . .Please’.

Adam looked at him for a few seconds. His bright clown make-up contrasted with the murky farmyard scene, low mist writhing in the glare of the porch light. And while to an outsider the exaggerated smile, the painted grin on Bingo’s face forced through a manufactured lightheartedness, it took on such sinister overtones when combined with the memory of all that it was capable. And now, here he was . . .

‘Just let me in’.

Adam held the door open and Bingo entered. He stood in the hallway and waited as Adam closed the door, and only entered the kitchen when Adam had gestured for him to do so.

‘I suppose you’ve come to criticise’, Adam said, as he filled the kettle and lit the stove. ‘Or tell me again how worthless I am, and make me regret being alive because I can’t possibly measure up to your impossible standards’.

Bingo lingered in the kitchen doorway.

‘Or have you become an expert in sheep farming now? And you see this as another avenue to assert your personality and bugger me up for life?’

‘None of those things’, Bingo replied. ‘To be honest, I have a problem, and I really need your help’.

5.

In the swirling mist, the ram loomed, a dull shape in the dark with eyes aglow, it peered through the gate across the lane to the field where the ewes were kept. Static fizzed in the atmosphere.

6.

Early morning at the circus, Adam liked to go and meditate as the sun came up. One of the first things he would do whenever the circus arrived anywhere was to work out which direction the sun would come up. Invariably they would be pitched on some village green, or a field just outside of a small town, but every now and then the circus would be based on a bit of wasteland in a town centre where the surrounding tall buildings hid the sun as it poked its way over the horizon. On this particular morning Adam had woken in the caravan he shared with the trapeze artist, and the first thing he’d remembered was that he’d had a furious row with Bingo the night before, because Bingo had wanted to call him Plopsy, and Bingo had insisted that a clown’s name is something that a clown has to grow into often with input from people on the outside, and whenever he’d seen Adam, he’d actually seen Plopsy.

Adam sat on the edge of his bed and he held his head in his hands. He could feel the emotions whirring around inside of him, thoughts and doubts and suppositions and the idea that maybe, just maybe, clowning wasn’t for him. All of the romance and the prestige of being a clown had slowly evaporated the more that he had come under the spell of the demonic Bingo, and he felt no more joy in throwing a custard pie than he did in filling out his tax return.

The Amazing Jacques was still slumbering in his sleeping bag as Adam let himself out from the caravan. Two days previously they had pitched the big top in a piece of waste ground between a multi-storey car park and a leisure centre next to the ring road of a medium sized provincial town, and Adam had worked out the day before that he needed to look between the leisure centre and the steep roof of a ring binder factory to see the sun rise. The loose dirt ground crunched underfoot as he crept through the caravans and tents, stepping over guy ropes in the darkness and running his fingers along the gaily painted metal walls of the box office. He stopped for a while and closed his eyes, and felt the spirits of the other performers, acrobats and performers, the ringmaster, the jugglers and the tumblers past and present lift up around him, swirl around his shoulders like ghosts, like demons, like spirits willing him on.

But none of them had ever had to deal with Bingo, the Head Clown. None of them had been prey to his bullying, his sarcasm, his controlling manner which stemmed, Adam thought, from a deep-seated psychological need to be heard, to be feared, possibly masking an upbringing in which he was never the centre of attention. Adam shivered as the sky lightened. And those from other departments, they saw in him a genial soul, exchanging jokes in the queue for lunch or sharing witticisms with the strongman as they shared a cigarette next to the giant novelty cannon. They didn’t know. Nobody knew how much the clowns quivered and flinched. They just thought that clowns, naturally, were nervy and clumsy and jumpy and downright weird.

He found a quiet place near the gate where he could sit on a wooden bench and watch the sun rise. And as it did, resplendent as ever and fiery like the sequin dresses of the tightrope walkers in all their ethereal glamour, he watched the surrounding buildings become silhouettes and attain their shape through the morning gloom, find their bulk and their vehemence and become solid objects again rather than memories, and there, as the sun poked its nose over the horizon and the first rays sprung forth with a heavenly zeal, he saw the words, ADAM IS A NOB, painted on the roof of the ring binder factory.

7.

Bingo the clown was being distracted by the notifications he kept getting on his mobile phone. He wanted to say something, that much was obvious. But the moment he went to speak, his phone would buzz, or hum, or vibrate, and instinctively his hand would move towards it before deciding that perhaps, at such a moment, it was best not to appear to be so willing to let go of the situation.

‘The thing is’, he said.

Adam had his back to him. He was preparing two cups to make some tea. He was taking a very long time to prepare those two cups as the water boiled, because he didn’t want to face him. He didn’t know what to do with his face, now that it wasn’t covered in clown make-up.

‘The thing is, I set out today intent on apologising. That was my honest motivation this morning. We are pitched ten miles from here, and it was like I could sense you were nearby. I don’t know . . .’

‘Well?’

‘So here I am’.

‘To apologise?’

‘That was my intention’.

‘Well?’

‘Well, what?’

‘Go on, then’.

His phone buzzed again.

‘You’ve got good WiFi here. You don’t even need to log in. I’m very impressed. I thought, you know, what with it being rural . . .’

‘Hmmm’.

‘Lots of notifications from the other clowns. We have a WhatsApp group. We’re working on a new routine. You know the old classic, lots of clowns climbing out of a car?’

‘I remember’.

‘I’m trying to update this. We need to use a more up to date car. But cars are bigger, these days. It’s just not working. Two of them wrenched their shoulders. One of them had to be hospitalised. But they just don’t understand. We have to do things properly and we can’t remain stuck in the past.’

Here we go again, Adam said to himself. He hasn’t learned at all.

‘But we’ll . . . We’ll get to the bottom of it’.

‘So you were saying . . .?’

‘About what?’

‘I believe you were about to apologise’.

The kettle stopped boiling and now there was silence. Adam still had his back turned to the Head Clown. He poured the water on the teabags that he had placed in each cup and he started to let them brew.

‘Only if you turn around’.

‘I’ll only turn around if you . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘Take off that make-up’.

‘You know that I cannot do that’.

‘I want to see you properly, for the first time. I want to see the human being underneath the make-up. Is that at least possible? Isn’t that what you owe me? Well, that and the apology, of course’.

‘Plopsy . . .’

‘Adam. My name is Adam’.

Several more notifications came through. Bingo looked down at his phone. There was a message from someone called John. It said, I’M COMING.

‘Mind if I use your toilet?’

8.

He’d only ever known the tufted grass of his home field. Penned in his dry stone walls, he’d felt as if he knew what his purpose in life should be. He knew it as well as he knew the crow which came with his black wing crawing, the mist which rolled in from the craggy hills. Certain chemical lusts and seasonal stirrings felt as common as feeding and defecation. The brute force power he’d felt butting horns with nameless rivals who couldn’t possibly experience life the same as he, for how could he ever enter their minds, experience their own motivations? Without them, without these rivals with their inferior coats and their stumpy legs, transposed to this new place where the grass was ever so slightly longer and the air less thin, where he had a whole field to himself in which to curb the seasonal rage inside of him, he was the undisputed alpha.

But his brain buzzed, and he didn’t know why. When he rubbed against the metal pole of the surrounding fence, a static discharge lit the gloom, a bright shock which arced between his copious fleece and the metal poles. And soon he could feel the bleats in his head which he wanted to give voice to, he could feel these bleats, these obvious sentiments, flying away from him out into the ether, and he didn’t really know why. But it was like they were being understood. It was like he was being understood. And he rather liked this feeling.

Shame about the mist, though. And the usual anger inside of him. He nuzzled the gate and there was another bright flash, which must have done something to its mechanism. For then it swung open, and he was free, which meant he had a choice, now. He could go to the farmhouse, which he could see dimly through the drizzle, where there were lit windows and the promise of understanding the world a little better, or he could go to the field full of ewes and satisfy whatever lusts were causing these new feelings which were coming from deep within, where he might tire himself, and immerse himself in throbbing sheep ecstasy.

He decided to go to the farmhouse.

9.

‘Plopsy, see me in my office’.

Was what Bingo had said right at the start of clown practice. Which meant Adam had to go through the whole afternoon training session knowing that this meeting was due to take place, and meetings with Bingo were never a joyous affair. They were feared by the other crowns, and seen as some kind of badge of scorn or disapproval, for each one knew that whoever entered Bingo’s office would never emerge as quite the same clown. The sweat rolled down his face and took away some of the make-up with it, and he just couldn’t concentrate on his usual pratfalls and slapstick routines because he was imagining all kinds of possible scenarios. Bingo’s demeanour throughout rehearsal gave nothing away as to what the subject of this meeting might be.

Bingo’s office was a small tent located next to the strong man’s caravan.

‘Bingo . . ?’

He opened the tent flap just a fraction. Bingo was sat at a desk, a towel around his neck. He looked up.

‘You may enter’.

‘You wanted to see me?’

‘Take down your pants’.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Your trousers. Take them down. Can you not understand simple instructions? Undo their button and let them fall’.

Nervously, Adam did as Bingo had asked. He was conscious that the tent door was open behind him and anyone passing might see him in front of Bingo’s desk, minus his trousers. He felt them slowly slide down and land in a crumpled heap on top of his novelty oversized shoes.

‘Hmmm’.

‘What is it?’

‘Therein, Plopsy, lies the problem’.

Bingo stood up and walked around his desk, then looked at Adam from several different directions.

‘You feel the way they fell to the floor? Your trousers?’

‘Yes’.

‘You’re a clown. It should have been instantaneous. Instead it took a few seconds, did it not?’

‘I suppose . . .’

‘A clown is all about being bigger, being more immediate. A man should not wait for a clown’s trousers to fall down. They should do so promptly.’

‘Are we here to talk about my trousers?’

‘How would you describe them?’

‘Baggy . . .’

‘THEY’RE NOT BAGGY ENOUGH!’

Bingo shouted, and slammed his palm flat on the desk surface. Adam bent down to pick up his trousers.

‘Don’t lift the bloody things back up again! At least have the decency, the courtesy, to stand there with your trousers around your ankles as I berate you! For goodness sake, man, have you absolutely no comedic talent? Which brings me onto something else. This afternoon, when Jimbo hit you with the slapstick during training. It really is not clowning etiquette to then turn around and threaten to punch him! Do I make myself understood?’

‘Perfectly, Mr Bingo’.

‘It’s Bingo! Just Bingo. There’s no Mister! I’m not a performing horse, am I? God forbid. So here’s what I require from you. You must write me an action plan, okay? This document is a Comedic Recovery Plan, and it really is the last resort for a clown who, quite frankly, is about as funny as e-coli and just about as painful. And in this plan you will look at every aspect of your clowning abilities from your reaction to stage violence to your woefully poor timing. This afternoon it took you a good five seconds to tumble backwards after being struck by that giant novelty inflatable kipper, during which time you actually turned around to make sure that you weren’t going to land on anything. I’ve never seen such a woeful display! And at the end of this Comedic Recovery Plan you will explain, in precise and coherent detail, exactly why your trousers just aren’t baggy enough, do I make myself clear?’

Adam stood there for a couple of moments. He could see everything draining away from him. The circus, in all its neon-lit gaiety, he now saw, was possibly not the working environment that he had assumed it to be. The professionalism he’d always sought from whatever avenue of employment he’d wanted, he now saw, ran so deep as to be a way of life in the circus and he was being outclassed by the other clowns, whose grasp of physical comedy was, evidently, greater than his own. But there was something else going on.

‘Bingo’, he whispered, as he bent down and pulled up his trousers. ‘You are, and always have been, a complete and utter tosser’.

He could already hear, in the background chatter of his psyche, the distant bleating of sheep.

10.

With fire in its eyes it came in the night, banging its horns on the farmhouse door, that two souls who previous to this had been at odds now clung together in sheer fright, hearing its growling and its heavy breathing and knowing that whatever was the other side of that flimsy wood might devour them completely.

‘What is this?’ Bingo asked.

This was probably the wrong moment for Adam to realise just how physically small Bingo was. He wondered where he thought the menace had come from, all those months ago when the circus was everything, when Bingo seemed to loom so large in his psyche as to be almost a giant. But now he cowered, and cringed, the two of them pressed flat against the wall of the kitchen and he realised that Bingo offered no protection at all from the wider world. How could a man of such small stature possibly have caused his world to crumble with innate fury and psychological damage? What on earth had he been afraid of?

‘What kind of beast . . .’

‘I . . I don’t know’.

‘What kind of beast would make such a noise?’

‘Something . . . Something supernatural’, Adam replied.

And then began a rhythmical thudding as the door was rammed by its horns, rammed by the ram, with all the fury of the ages. Malevolent spirits have a knack of owning the night, and this one more so than most.

‘Is this the end?’ Bingo asked.

The circus big top lit from within. Acrobats in their glitzy costumes. The music, the laugh of the crowd, the lone clown hiding between caravans excluded, cheek pressed against the cool tin sides and the tears streaming down his face, palms flat against the sheet metal, those same palms now pressed against the stone wall of the kitchen as the mysterious beast kicked and scratched and roared and thudded against the kitchen door.

‘Get out of it, you bastard! Go on, get out of it!’

A familiar voice from the yard. At once the clawing and the kicking stopped. Bingo and Adam could hear their hearts beating, but the world was now quiet save for a snorting sound, receding into the night.

‘That’s it, you beast. Go on, now’.

There followed a knocking on the door.

‘Who is it?’ Adam shouted.

‘Leave us alone!’ Bingo added.

More silence. They could hear footsteps, now, and the tapping of a cane, followed by the flick of a lighter.

‘Are you going to open the door, or not?’ Melanie asked.

She stood in the farmyard dark, her face lit by the glow of her pipe. She held a length of rope, on the end of which was the ram, looking even more sheepish than even its species implied. The last time Adam had felt such relief was the day that he had left the circus, turned around one more time to see that big top glowing from within as if it were intent on stamping that image on his imagination for the rest of his life, a life which, he had known, would now be devoted to the keeping of sheep.

‘Melanie!’

‘Turn off your electric fences, you fool’, she said. ‘Can’t you see? It was reacting to the tracking chip installed in its neck. Electrical currents, neural pathways, and all that hoo-hah. Driving it slowly mad’.

‘I’m so glad to see you’.

‘Plays hell with the local telecommunications networks. Interfering with my television, too.’

She puffed on her pipe. She surveyed the two of them and sighed, letting out a cloud of smoke which lifted up into the dark sky. Amateurs, she thought. Imbeciles. But it wasn’t their fault. It takes a lifetime to accumulate such knowledge. You can’t just go into these things and hope for the best. There are some things which you pick up along the way.

‘I’ll take it back to the field. Go on, turn off the fences. Not unless you want it coming for you in the night again’.

And who was she to question why one of them was dressed in full clown make-up? What people got up to in their own homes was none of her business. She only cared about the sheep.

‘But . . How did you know?’ Adam asked.

‘It sent me a text’.

‘How . . .’

‘Electrical circuits. Neural pathways. I’ve just explained, haven’t I?’

She looked at them again.

‘Clown?’ she asked.

Bingo nodded.

‘Seems to be a thing, around here. I’d say half the sheep farms in this area are run by ex-clowns. I don’t know what’s going on and I’ve never understood it.’

‘It’s a compulsion’, Bingo explained. ‘A part of circus folk lore which, you might describe as a self-fulfilling prophecy’.

‘Or just a joke which becomes less and less funny with every telling’.

‘Just like clowning itself, then’, Melanie suggested.

John the ram twisted and convulsed, bucked and scrabbled. Melanie grabbed the beast by its collar.

‘Mind you, the baggy clothing can be comfortable in summer. That’s one advantage, I suppose.’

She turned. ‘I’ll put him back in your field. But remember, turn the electric currents off until he’s had a chance to settle in. I’m missing my soaps because of this.’

11.

Adam spent an awkward night thinking of the past. Sometimes the clowns would talk about what they’d rather be doing. Clowning never seemed like a passion to them. Adam could never work out why, because clowning was everything to him. They’d sit around the small backstage area in the big top, smoking and drinking or holding their heads in their hands and wondering how much it would cost to start up as a sheep farmer and move somewhere rugged, somewhere misty and dank and very serious. Adam wondered when it was that all of the excitement and the enthusiasm had worn off and he reasoned that it was probably when it all became so very humdrum, so very ordinary. He could tumble with the best of them, but the thrill of learning to do so had long ago receded, and even the bruises didn’t seem quite so painful, so throbbing as they once had been.

He and Bingo had spent an hour after Melanie had left discussing the finer points of a routine that the present crop of clowns were having difficulties mastering. And when he woke the next morning, Bingo was gone.

He walked down to the field where John the ram was expecting his breakfast. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. A new mist was falling, fine droplets again which clung to his coat and clung to the scraps of wool caught in the fences around the enclosure. He then walked across the lane to the field where the ewes were also expecting their morning feed. He stood on the bottom rung of the gate to gain a bit of height, and he watched as the ewes moved, slowly, as if choreographed, spelling out the word PLOPSY, which was just about visible from where he was perched. He then slipped off the bottom rung, fell backwards onto his arse and effected the most flamboyant backwards roll.

Article © Robert Garnham. All rights reserved.
Published on 2024-01-01
Image(s) are public domain.