This fair, however, was unusual. It came annually, in late August or early September, and was as big as any three standard fairs rolled up in one…because it was three fairs joined up and working as one, creating what the proprietors knew would be a big local attraction on one of their last gigs of the season. Big, garish and very noisy, yes. Flashing lights, tubular neons and coloured balloons; the rumble of generators versus a calliope; the smell of grease, friction, sawdust; the hoarse-voiced Loreleis at hoopla stalls and coconut-shies, all of them vying with each other to lure you to financial doom; the penny slots, Ghost Train, Freak House, Hall of Mirrors—the whole bit.
I say the fair was “in town” but in fact it was in a field on the outskirts, the same field every year. For several weeks I’d been noticing (barely) the big bright posters. They hadn’t made much of an impact; wrapped up in my work, everything else was peripheral. But last Friday morning on my way into town on the bus, as I passed the field in question, I saw the first of the artics starting to arrive. Down the road there was a long string of them. And not a cloud in sight. It made a change.
Saturday morning, a friend of mine called me. Just out of bed, I answered the phone. “It’s George,” he told me. “Haven’t seen you in a month of Sundays! Watcha doing these days? Still tied up with your big-deal, high-pressure job? Still doing the cub reporter bit—that ‘Superman’s pal, Jimmy Olson’ sort of thing?”
“If you mean am I still a journalist? Yes. No big deal; I just like to write, that’s all.”
George was an interior decorator…that’s what he called himself, but all he did really was patch over cracked ceilings with wavy-patterned, quick-drying cement stuff, and then paint it to make it look good.
“Me?” George answered. “I’m free this weekend, and I wondered if you were, too.”
As it happened, I was. “So what do you have in mind?”
“There’s this girl I’m seeing,” he said. “She’s really sort of nice. Has a nice friend, too. So what do you say to a double date? The big fair’s in town, out my way, and I was thinking we could get together with the girls. Maybe have a few drinks, buy them some candy floss, win ’em a fluffy toy on the rifle range, maybe take ’em for a ride, and then—who knows? Take ’em for another ride? Know what I mean, nudge, nudge?”
I knew George and his girls of old. “You want to fix me up with a girl? Does she wear a collar? Is her bark worse than her bite? Has she won a prize at Crufts? Know what I mean—nudge, nudge?”
“Hey!” He tried to sound hurt. “That’s not nice. Gloria’s a really sweet girl. Also, a little bird told me she does a terrific horizontal snake dance.”
“What little bird?”
“My little bird, Gladys.”
I had seen George’s Gladys, and she really was quite a good looking girl. “So how does this Gloria compare—with Gladys, I mean?”
“They could be sisters.” (The liar!) “So, what do you say?”
“As to the girls: why not? As to the drinking: you know I’m off it.”
“So drink something non-toxic! I mean, it’s not like you’re a genuine, died-in-the-wool alcoholic, now is it?”
I still liked to pretend I wasn’t, or hadn’t been, and so I said okay.
We all make mistakes, Diary. And you know me. I make really big ones…
Sunday the fairground was all set up, ready to roll that night. I met George and the girls at eight o’clock at a little pub not a quarter mile from the fair. Pausing on the street just before I entered the place, I could hear a low near-distant rumble and the shrill squeals of people on the rides. The fair’s rotating, zigzagging, strobing lights were plainly visible in the gathering dusk.
Apart from George and the girls the pub was almost empty. I joined them in a small booth at a grubby table where a pint was sitting waiting for me, the froth still fresh and deep. No good to reproach George; after all, I was the one who had told him I could take it or leave it, that I was only a social drinker. In fact it was something of a relief to take that first sip and to lick the foam off my upper lip. And despite that they knew they shouldn’t, my spirits were lifting even as I sighed a paradoxically reticent yet appreciative oh-what-the-hell sort of sigh. What was it Barmy Bill had called me that weird night in Barrows Hill? A “daft young sod?” He wasn’t so Barmy, poor Bill…
After that…well, things just got sillier by the minute. I don’t know why I let it happen; maybe I believed in that old saw about girls getting more desirable the more drunk you get; which where this Gloria was concerned was going to take a whole lot of booze, believe me! But before I knew it, it was my round, then George’s, then mine again, and so on. Stupid, really. And Gloria didn’t get any prettier.
Diary, I’m not going to describe George, Gladys, or Gloria, (let’s just call them the Three “G”s) because that’s not what I want to write about—they were simply the reason why I visited the fairground that night—so excuse me if they get left in a remote part of what has since become my rather blurry memories, and instead of trying to fill in all the blanks I’ll simply cut to the chase, okay?
The fairground:
Now this year it was really big, and probably bigger in my slightly altered perceptions. Only slightly altered, yes. See, Diary, when I’ve got drink in me I don’t start raving—I just don’t think very well, that’s all. I can still walk a straight line…approximately. And I can still speak properly…well, more or less; so that folks who don’t know me too well probably wouldn’t know the difference. But I know it: that dull-numb-stupid feeling inside my head, that sure knowledge that I’m no longer in control, and that I don’t care. And I also know that if I go on not caring, then sooner or later I’ll do something, or something will be done to me, that will land me in a whole lot of trouble. It’s the reason I don’t drive a car. Though I intend to, one day, when I’m sure…
And then there’s the other side of it: the fact that once you’ve fallen off the wagon, it’s no easy job to climb back on again. Which in me leads to anger, because I like to think I’m stronger than that. And I am, I bloody well am! It’s just that everything seems to go wrong, seems to work against you, until you’ve put it all back to rights again.
So that, too: I was angry. Not so much with the Three “G”s as with myself. And there I was “suddenly” in this fairground, my head spinning just a little—and pissed with myself, with that weak area in my psyche which had failed to stop me at the first pungent whiff of a good brew—and the whirling lights, hurtling machines, clinking slots and jostling crowd not doing me a hell of a lot of good either. I think I remember thinking to myself, “Thank God it isn’t raining!”
The Three “G”s tried to lure me onto a gut-wrenching, whirling dervish of a ride. I knew that I’d throw up, and then that I’d feel wretched; so when they went aboard I made off, breathing as deeply as I could of the smoky, trembling air.
I remember burning my mouth and fingers on a plastic cup of coffee at a hot dog stand. And shortly after that—
—There it was in front of me: the Freak Show tent.
The freaks (they weren’t freaks really, just poor misshapen or peculiarly strange and ugly people—which on afterthought pretty much qualifies them as freaks, right? Oh, well!) weren’t drawing very much of an audience, so a handful of them had come out to parade in the night air and chat up the crowd. There was a Fat Lady who truly deserved the title; she was several inches wider than she was tall, which was around four feet six. Swaddled in diapers that were once tablecloths, under a frilly tutu of a dress, the wobbling slabs of flesh that depended from her thighs and buttocks hung almost to the ground. I could see she was feeling peckish, because her shining, vastly pouting Cupid lips were sucking on a whole stick of butter dipped in sugar.