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JAKE'S FAIR
First published 'Roisin Dubh' 1995
His mother's goodnight kiss upon the down of Jake's lifted cheek was a tender, if slobbery, one. He offered his arms to return the kiss, but she had already departed to her own room next door. He forthwith stumbled between dreams.
The high season's fair teetered on the brink of full swing. The helter-skelter, the sprung linch-pin of the proceedings, towered so tall no child of even the strongest blood would care to slide along its coils. The heavy-duty scissors snicker-snackered as the local dignitary made several false starts at cutting the ceremonial fair-ribbon.
Despite a patchwork greyness swagging the sky, the cheeky hide-and-seek of the dipping sun helped the townsfolk enjoy its day away from the seaside.
Toward evening, the Ferris Wheel was cranked into fitful stirrings by a sluggish sputtering engine and became an earthbound spacecraft of illuminations. As the crazylooking stall-holders shrieked their games over competing tannoys, Jake threaded his way between complete (and some incomplete) strangers to reach his favourite bell-tent: THE FREAK SHOW. Multi-spotlit in a solemn sun's last twirling shafts, the tent-flap keeper flung the trip-switch to the sign bulbs, as if in anticipation of serious darkness and hopeful that punters' eyes would travel faster than legs. The tent-flap keeper sighed. He knew that Jake would be the first.
"Hiya, Jake." "Hiya, back." "It don't seem a year--never does, but bet you've been breaking sweat, muck-raking." "Yep, it's not fair."
The tent-flap keeper laughed at Jake's joke. The boy was indeed one year nearer manhood. Almost big-boned enough for ribbing. But not quite.
Jake could count on a nod through. He had been mucking out the menagerie since dawn: his ears still ringing with the outlandish music of snorts and brays. Free entry would be his reward. He wondered what new exhibits would be waiting for him inside.
Today, he was confident of seeing even 'under the stone' specimens.
The tent-flap keeper, whose name he kept even from himself, did not accompany customers to the inner sanctum. The beauty of the adventure was its unguided nature. A stench of beast permeated. The straw on the ground stuck to Jake's boots, till he felt he was a living scarecrow, stiff-limbing it past the cages. At first, some of his old favourites were mooning him: huge rubbery heads, better here than locked away in those large-chimneyed Victorian asylums. At least they served a purpose in a Freak Show. Others were more normal: a middle-aged man in a business suit, his mouth wrapped around an iron bar; women in floral frocks, picking and prodding at themselves; ingrowing children whose looks could kill; torch-eyed cats prowling between the cage-bars; large, bullish dogs worrying at the large bones (littering the sawdust) for their marrow rich and brown; shaggy creatures on their hindlegs with genitalia like innards sticking out of low belly-wounds.
Jake was then enticed into a region where he had never dared step foot in previous years. Here it was quieter. The darkness was constituted of a series of swaying, overlapping shadows. The silence, sown with currents of heavy murmuring and piping chitterchatter, was either too low or too high to be otherwise. Then, among the striations which a fast rising moon cast through the mast-pole's top rigging, Jake saw the insect people. They swarmed like running stitches across the swelling insides of the tent and he closed his eyes and dreamed of the stubbled cheek of one Lemuel Gulliver.
He had seen enough, but not quite enough. From some force far stronger than coincidence, he picked off one of the tiny wriggling creepy-crawlies, placed it on his eyeball and watched for its face to unsheathe from black armour. It looked like his mother's, just as he remembered it when he was smaller than her. He felt it nibble its way behind the eyeball. He had seen more than enough. He ran for the exit--only to find it an entrance. People still dizzy from the helter-skelter swept him into the mirror-maze, where they jeered and pointed at the snorting, braying features of other more freakish freaks by far--until, in mindful hysteria, they audibly ripped their faces from the heady rawness which lay rippling in seed-beds beneath. Complete strangers, however, had indeed grown incomplete. Jake saw them swimming in their own blood, the husks of their left-over bodies crackling as they back-stroked like empty glove scarecrow-puppets: pip-boned prunes steeped in their own juices.
He abruptly found himself back in the bed, where the spacecraft moon cast barred cot-sides around him. "Jake, are you okay?" He heard his mother's call from next door. "Yes, Mummy, I'm only having a bad dream." He knew when she had fallen asleep again, from her arrhythmic snickering snores. There would be a lot of mucking out of the brobdingnagerie for Jake tomorrow when he stopped dreaming.
8:37
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