And yes, there are broad-shouldered, termagant women, swinging a pick with the boys, and slender, spiritual men rolled around compassionate hearts waiting at home for them, or for some macho fellow with a lumberjack moustache who prefers the physical company of men to the alarming recesses of the female anatomy. There are boys who like boys and girls who like girls and all the variations in between. This world being what it is now, no one gives a pinch of orange tummyfluff who shares whose bed, as long as the whole thing is done in the appropriately formal style and nobody gets hurt.
We arrive, and there is a careful exchange of assurances. Folks in places like Rheingold are not careless in welcoming new people. There are rituals and testings to be observed, earnests of security and mutual humanity to be given on both sides. Rheingold does not wish to vanish, and K and his friends have no intention of ending their days as the gristle in a cooking pot. K goes out in his best sarong and his most unthreatening sandals, and with him goes K (a slender accountant with pale eyes) and K the batik sceptic, and they explain carefully that they are just passing through, carnival players, and they’d happily set up outside the town on the north side and maybe a little trade and respectable good times might be available to such of the good people of Rheingold as might wish to enjoy them. If (and only if ) this meets with the approval of the elders of Rheingold, K will summon one or two other persons of his persuasion and acquaintance, who might add colour and verve to the show.
The Rheingolders, for their part, emerge slowly, open-handed, respectful. They smile widely so that we can see they don’t file their teeth to cannibal points, and they all find excuses for taking off their shoes (small stones, itches, hangnails, broken soles and such) so that we will know they have toes instead of talons. There is a great deal of nodding and handshaking and back-slapping, and it is gradually established that no one has reversible knees or double-jointed thumbs or dorsal fins. At that point there is a certain amount of beer.
While the amber peacemaker flows among the men, K (the sceptic) wanders off and goes shopping, and chatting to the old women and young mothers of the town and getting a haircut, in a performance calculated as an earnest of intent: See, I need grooming products. Yea, indeed, I need grooming. Will none among you style me? I am a mammal, just as you are, and I need close contact and the nits picked from my fur. And after a while, the ladies of Rheingold take her in and give her cakes and ascertain that she is stepping out with a (quite fictional) young man named K (although she goes as far as to confide that his real name is Clifford, and that he is a recent arrival in the caravans) and that she intends to marry him as soon as time and decent convention permit, and that she is very much in love and not a little frustrated by the delay, because of course she cannot move into his Airstream, nor he into hers, until the formalities have been observed. This display of monogamy and right-thinking behaviour gives the lady Rheingolders an opportunity to wax earthy, to giggle and primp and to suggest in low voices that there must be ample places in a caravan where two young people of good character might divert one another to at least a degree of satisfaction, surely? Teehee and yes, says K, there are, but it’s hardly the same and one so wishes, etc., and yes, the ladies of Rheingold reply, quite true, and how desperately romantic it is, and the only person, my dear girl, quite the only person to cut your hair is Dame Lisa, and it so happens she will be here at four and why don’t you stay and have some more cake until then?
Dame Lisa arrives amid great ceremony and is ushered in, and pronounces K’s hair just lovely, of course, but my poor child the ends, but my, how daring that cut! Just splendid on one so young, thank goodness you’ve no chest to speak of or I should feel all outshone, and K, howling with inner hilarity, avers that a woman of Dame Lisa’s proportions need never be concerned that anyone, anywhere might ever be more feminine than she, and for good measure she goggles wretchedly at Dame Lisa’s formidable cleavage. This display of abject beta femaleness results in K’s immediate adoption as chief temporary protégée of the klatch, and she is eventually sent back to her Airstream reeking of three different perfumes and with her hair arranged to give her a rakish yet classic frontierswoman look. She has, along the way, secured promises from every matron, maiden and crone to come along and see the circus, and bring as many male relatives as they can legitimately muster. Indeed, there is already competition among the younger girls as to who will bring more young men and thus impress the wild, romantic, respectable, comfortably flat-chested, soon-to-depart and monogamous gypsy. As a consequence of this absolute female enthusiasm and the accompanying opportunities for respectable-yet-steamy-boy-Rheingolder-on-girl-Rheingolder-action, the issues of permissions and debates in council become moot. And thus the circus comes to town.
We have circled our wagons and made camp at a convenient yet non-intrusive distance from Rheingold, and it is morning on the day after our arrival. From out of the shady purple in one quarter of the sky comes a lonesome bus, ancient and sputtering diesel, with metal showing where the paint has flaked away. It is something of the order of a twenty-six-seater, and it is about as far from the smooth contours of K’s Airstream as you can get and still have wheels. Saggy tyres skid and squirm on the road, bulging perilously because there’s hardly enough air in there to keep the rims off the asphalt. The engine pops and bangs and little clouds of soot emerge, still burning, from an exhaust pipe which hangs pathetically between the rear wheels on a length of what appears to be stocking elastic. This wreck-in-waiting draws level with us, and almost everyone scurries back from it. The bus is painted a patchy blue, rusted away around the edges, and it has been savaged and snapped. This is not so much a bus as a dying warrior. And in each starred, dusty window a weird white face is pressed against the glass, white of skin and black of eye, contorted in a spooky sneer or a wild grin or an open howl: Munch’s painting replicated over and over.
The doors open, and the driver hops down from his seat. He waves and grins.
“Hi!” says Ike Thermite. “I’m Ike Thermite,” in case anyone has forgotten, “and we are the Matahuxee Mime Combine!” He springs lightly to the ground, and behind him come the mimes, all popping joints and pins and needles from the journey. A moment later he is whisked away by K and K and carried shoulder-high around the buses. I am alone with the mimes.
We look at one another. No one says anything. It’s like sharing a lift to a funeral. After a moment I wave at them, a bit hesitantly. One by one, they wave back in a perfect imitation. My uncertain wave starts with the nearest one, is picked up by the next before it can fade, and ripples away to the back.
And then, just as the wave starts its return journey, there is an odd little commotion. The mime on the far side spots something on the horizon, shudders and hides behind the next one in. The mime being used for cover looks sharply in both directions and dashes for K’s bus. The revealed mime scurries behind the next in line, who also declines the honour and hurries away, leaving the little man crouched, bandy-legged, peering around an obstacle which isn’t there. He spins and dives behind mime number four, who stares in horror into the haze and remembers a pressing engagement elsewhere. And so too with the next, and the next. A few seconds later the petrified mime is peering into my face and we are the only two people around. Slowly a single shaky finger extends, and then an arm, and the mime points back along the road. Huge, round eyes like a puppy’s make a silent appeal.
Okay, already. Hide behind me.
I look in the direction indicated by the pointing finger. There’s a small dust cloud now, and at the business end of it another vehicle: a covered military surplus truck which has seen better days, with a couple of bullet holes painted on the side and some weird scratches, and dings pretty much everywhere. The canvas section has been replaced with wood, panels reclaimed from some old-style restaurant or stately home, and a sort of caravan has been constructed. Daubed in foot-high letters along the side is magic of andromas. The painter knew more about carpentry than pigment, because the pigment h
as dribbled, and the whole thing looks less like a gypsy wagon than a scary melted waxwork. I glance around at my concealed mime, and find him gone. The Magic of Andromas stops exactly parallel to K’s Airstream. The driver’s door opens, and grey dust like graveyard sand trickles out onto the ground. A scuffed black patent-leather shoe touches the ground. It makes no noise.
Dr. Andromas gets out of the truck. He wears a top hat with a fine piece of gauze or mosquito net dangling lankly to his neck. Beneath it his face is white, with a tiny villainous moustache, and he wears a pair of aviator goggles over his eyes. His entire body is wrapped in a black cloak, which makes him look like a mummy or a sickly giant bat. For all that, he’s not as tall as I am. It feels very odd, and somehow dangerous, to be looking down on him.
“Dr. Andromas?”
The doctor looks at me for a long moment, and then shrugs past on business of his own.
You have to worry about someone even mimes find creepy.
IT IS lunchtime, but the mimes are not eating. They are standing in a long, regimented line, absolutely still. They are not rigid, they are relaxed and ready, but motionless. Corpse quiet, expressions painted on, they attend Ike Thermite’s commandments. Ike walks along the line, serious for the first time in my brief experience. And then he turns his back on them and spreads his arms like a bird. The Matahuxee Mime Combine follow suit, slowly. Ike brings his arm around and opens an imaginary door. He steps forward into an imaginary world. He tucks a non-existent chair under an intangible table. He invites them in.
The mimes cross the threshold one by one. Not one of them touches the door frame or puts a hand through a wall. There are too many of them to fit into the first room, and they get stuck, crowding around the entrance, jammed up together. Ike opens another door and goes farther into his imaginary space, brings the front half of the Matahuxee Mime Combine with him. The rest of the mimes fall into the first room, which is apparently a kitchen. They do the chores. They wash. They clean up. They step around one another, vault over nonphysical furniture. They cook. In the next room there’s some heavy DIY going on. Mimes saw and chop, scrub the floor, clean the windows. They dodge flailing arms, lift bowls of soup in either hand, tightrope-walk along the edge of sofas, squabble, fight, duck and dive. Straight-backed and fluid, they do all these things in utter quiet, save for the occasional group sigh. Ike watches. This is the kata of the greatest mime in the world.
I am hypnotised, sad, thrilled and suddenly terribly homesick. I came here to talk to Ike Thermite, say hi, talk about old times, but suddenly I am not sure that I want to. I am very glad when K comes to give me a job. As I depart, the mimes are starting to practise their clown work: mops, umbrellas and plantain bananas are being passed out in solemn stillness.
Five minutes later I am swinging a sledgehammer to knock metal pins into the ground. These pins will hold up the main tent, so there are quite a few of them, and this task is vital and important. A lot of other people are doing the same thing, but these pins are given to me. It is a pleasantly percussive task.
There is a method to the execution of the task, a technique. The hammer is wickedly heavy and hard to control. Only a strongman could lift it and hammer in a series of separate actions for longer than a few moments. Only an idiot strongman would actually do it, and there are surprisingly few of these. The process of building a body which can lift a vast amount in an unscientific way is most often also the process of learning that the other way is easier. The trick is in Newton’s Laws, of course: move the hammer and let its momentum carry it up, then divert it when it has the maximum kinetic energy but the minimum momentum, and bounce it off the metal pin or stake in such a way that the re-action can be used to complement the initiation of another upward arc. Much the same principle applies to the single-edged sword-form of Master Wu’s Voiceless Dragon style.
In any case, I have familiarised myself with the heft of the hammer, with its balance and bounce, and with its pitfalls—it becomes slippery in the heat, it does not always bounce true, and unlike a sword it is heavily biased towards the business end. I have set up the pins in a long row. And now, prepared and quiet in my mind, I move along the line in a single unbroken motion. It begins with Snake Concealed (the weapon hangs behind the trailing leg, so that it cannot easily be seen, and the enemy must either accept this or seek to alter his position accordingly—the pins unwisely take the first option) and moves on to Stirring the Cauldron (a twisting motion which starts the weapon moving, preparing the first attack).
I flip the hammer up (Horse Rears at the Moon), and then I step forward. Parting the Hair (downward strike) followed by Cloud Hands (rolling motion) and back to Stirring the Cauldron. There is a little shuffle here which Master Wu insisted was called Walk Like Elvis, but Elisabeth asserted, not without some justification, that this was unlikely to be the original name. Still, I Walk Like Elvis. After three or four spikes have gone in smoothly, I add Cut Across a Thousand Troops (a swirl where the weapon makes a full one-hundred-and-eighty-degree arc, positioning me between two pins and at ninety degrees to my starting vector) and follow it with Wheels of the Master’s Cart (rolling the hammer on one side, then the other) before taking the last six in quick succession (Babbling Brook and Parting the Hair bound together in succession), and then turning (Monkey’s Dance), hammer still in motion, and driving them all another six inches into the hard ground. Thus returned to the beginning, I stop. My arms are not tired, but my heart is beating quickly, and my scabs are hurting. There are lines of pain aching through my chest, and little globes of heat inside the flesh where the bullets were. Still, job done—in perhaps three minutes. K told me it would take half an hour. Hah! See how my skills are transferable!
As I turn to go in search of pies, I see a figure standing by the canteen tent. Ike Thermite is watching me. His eyes are round. Of course his eyes are always round. They are painted on. Still and all, somehow he is broadcasting considerable surprise, or so it seems. By the time I reach him, he is grinning.
“Tent pegs?” he says.
“Yeah.”
“Usually,” says Ike Thermite, in the tone of one imparting a secret, “usually, we put the ropes around the pins before we hammer them in.”
Bugger.
But at least he does not want to talk about Matchingham, or ask me about my wife, and for this I feel an overwhelming gratitude.
THE CIRCUS is a thing of many parts. It is a cakebake, a display of acrobatics (and mime), a sheepdog trial and a magic show. The sheepdog trial is something of a surprise. Amid the noise and haste, a lanky black Scotsman with a voluminous beard hurtles up on a quad bike; two Border collies, dappled, eager and curious, sit on the platform at the back. In a wheeled chicken-wire box are several Indian runner ducks. The collies are called something like Mnwr and Hbw, and the man himself—another K, of course—speaks for the moment only in sharp, irritated growls and yaps. The Indian runner ducks have no names, or at least no names they share with us, and are here to represent sheep. They have many of the characteristics of sheep without actually being sheep. They are fabulously stupid. They cannot fly. They gather together and, given the opportunity, dither and fall over each other. They are protected from moisture by a natural oil which permeates their outer covering. A short amount of time spent in their company is enough to make you want to kill them all out of frustration.
K (the Scotsman) flings wide his arms.
“Hello, ladies and gentlemen, my name is K, and I will be your ringmaster this evening!” (Except it is actually “Hah-lo, leddies ’n’ djentlemenn, ayem yer ringmasster thus evven-ung!”) And he launches straight into an explanation of the strong-eye and the weak-eye dog (the first being a dog whose face implies that he is a duck-eating psychopath, a creature of action who will stop at nothing to achieve his goals, suitable for starting animals moving at speed and cowing them into stillness, and for lethal action in the heat of battle; and the second being a gentle-hearted creature doing a job, friendly and mostly nonviolent, g
ood for repairing rents in the flock, precise manoeuvring and charity work), then shows a few bits of black-belt duck herding, before segueing into a ringing denunciation of the Highland Clearances. Impressive that rage at this ancient political sin can survive the disintegration of the Highlands themselves, and pass, unmitigated, into the new world.
The mimes take their turn. In empty air they create a house, a street, a town, a nation under a capricious god. They rush around the world (backdrops depict ancient Gone Away places of mystery, like Venice and Delhi) in great confusion, an endless parade of slapstick and acrobatics against a scenery of sorrow and loss. The Matahuxee Mime Combine share a universe with us. They are mesmerising; they flip, bend, whoosh and custard-pie one another in a kind of restful quiet. They are sort of anti-Nietzschean clowns, who restore the ordinary simply by existing; a gentle remedy for the insidious forgetting which afflicts us. And then, out of nowhere, they create Dr. Andromas.
One moment Ike Thermite is engaged in a slapstick routine in the middle of the stage, and the next the mimes have apparently grown tired of him, and carry him off. There is a great clap of thunder, and everything goes dark, and there is Dr. Andromas, like a beggar king-in-waiting. He is dressed in a dusty tailcoat, a pair of disreputable trousers and fine, pointed shoes. His topper turns out to be an opera hat, with a folding skeleton inside which can be compressed for ease of carriage. One side of the skeleton must be loose or broken, because every so often Dr. Andromas’s hat flinches and sinks on the left, and the good doctor removes it and punches it back out and flops it once more into position. His face, unveiled for the occasion, is white and startled, and he has waxed his preposterous moustache into tiny, pinprick points. He has fine androgynous features, the kind you look at and immediately think you recognise. I try picturing him without the moustache. I don’t know him.