by Alexei Sayle
The atmosphere in the tent was starting to sink into the sawdust; even the band who up to that point had been sawing away at some Silesian funeral march clanked to a ragged halt. There was no knowing what might have happened next but in the embarrassed, imploding silence the red velvet curtain below the band suddenly stirred and a girl stepped through.
‘Oh,’ I remember saying out loud, for she was ever so beautiful. I guessed that she was in her mid twenties with absolute black hair tied back in a ponytail. She wore a white one-piece body suit which ran from long slender neck to pubic bone, she had white skin and black eyes the shape of a cat’s, and on her long legs were white tights and on her feet white ballet shoes. If that didn’t make enough of an impression, hundreds of glass beads had been sewn to the suit she wore and the powerful stage lights danced off them so that she sparkled and glinted. For a second this girl stood taking in the scene as electromagnetic radiation in the visible spectrum pinged off her, then she called out to the clown in a foreign language and, hearing her voice, he turned to her, a big soppy smile spreading over his countenance. The girl had been holding both hands behind her back; now she brought one arm out and held it aloft, her hand holding the shape of an imaginary ball. The clown eagerly cupped his hands in front of him and, seeing this, the woman drew back her arm and pitched the ball in a clear and powerful arc towards the clown; he leaped high in the air and caught it, provoking a storm of relieved applause to break out from the audience, mixed with many an angry and resentful glare in my direction. The clown, now happy and smiling, capered off tossing his invisible ball, the girl gave an elaborate bow and skipped back behind the curtain, the band began again with a new tune which sounded like the Schizophrenia national anthem, the lights dimmed and the show began.
Like my friends I was no stranger to the modern animal-free circus, and considered that the acts in this one were pretty standard, not up there with Cirque du Soleil or the show at the Millennium Dome with music by Peter Gabriel, but not down there like the performers outside the Pompidou Centre in Paris. Excepting that the one extra element a night at the cirKuss had was the horrible intimacy. The cirKuss performers weren’t as close as if they were in a crowded lift, say, but I felt I was really much closer than I had ever wanted to be to anyone performing anything. There was juggling, there was clowning, there was acrobating, the black-eyed girl did some juggling then performed on the trapeze, the wind rumpling the audience’s hair as she somersaulted past only centimetres above our upturned goggling heads with a shower of glass beads slowly raining down into our eyes.
So close were we to each other that it was possible to see the extraordinary effort it took to perform each of these tasks: the groans of the strongmen were uttered in our ears as if for us alone, the sweat of the acrobats drifted in a pungent mist on to the skin of the crowd, the smell of the clowns sizzled in our noses and the closeness, the intimacy, the nearness, made it all seem to me completely and utterly pointless. With a start I thought, Where’d that come from? I felt ashamed of myself as if I’d been caught out dreamily contemplating the long legs of a girl in a wheelchair, because it was an unspoken rule of me and my friends that we tried very hard not to dislike things: we had a feeling, one of those dangerous ones that hovers just below the surface of ever being articulated, that once we started not liking things we couldn’t know where it would end; better to assume that by and large if somebody had gone to the effort of putting something on, or if they were famous and could fill a big venue then they had something that was worth saying. Yet the thought was there now and I couldn’t dislodge it that these performers were going to such effort, such exertion, such rare skill to what end? There didn’t seem to be any story that was being told. I looked around, not at the cirKuss folk straining in the centre of the ring but instead at the rest of the audience: were they enjoying it themselves? It was hard to tell. I had been in so many audiences that I knew they can be liars to the performers and to themselves; it was always very hard for them to admit that what they had come to see was a terrible waste of time, so each new routine was greeted with greater applause than the one before, building to an actual standing ovation at the climax of the first half.
Sage Pasquale liked us to stay in our seats during the interval and discuss what we had seen so far but in one of my many acts of petty rebellion against her I always insisted on struggling out, clambering and trampling over people. I pretended to have a mild case of claustrophobia which somehow only seemed to affect me during the intervals of shows.
I told my friends I only stood in the foyer or on the pavement outside but really it was a little secret pleasure of mine to get far away from my mates for a few minutes: to leave the venue entirely and to visit a pub or bar as distant as I could safely run to and still get back in time for the second half. While in the pub or bar I indulged myself in fantasies of aloneness: that I was a mysterious stranger refuelling my mud-streaked Camaro in a dusty Mexican border town or a man with frightened eyes and forged papers changing cross-continental trains at some sinister Balkan rail depot under the obsidian eyes of Kalashnikov-toting paramilitaries. While in reality I was in a hotel cocktail bar in Wigan.
On this occasion as I stepped down out of the banked seating area and into the tiny foyer of the tent, wondering whether I was still fit enough to sprint to the Yates’ Wine Lodge on Lord Street in my personal best time of two minutes and eighteen seconds, I saw standing by the entrance to the big mouth the girl from the trapeze, dressed now in a short blue skirt, blue high heels, stockings and a low-cut blue top with a tray strapped to her front on which I could see were arranged tubs of some kind of snack food.
Nobody else was buying as, coldly, she watched me approach. ‘Ah, the funny man,’ the girl said when I got up to her, speaking in a thick foreign accent. ‘You know you really upset Valery, trowing his ball away like dot.’
I was hoping she hadn’t noticed I’d been the one who’d messed with her friend’s head but I still said defensively, ‘Well, it wasn’t a real ball.’
‘It was to Valery,’ she sniffed.
I didn’t really want to get into an argument with a woman whose friend was a very strong clown, who had the muscles of a decent middleweight herself and who up close was the most blistering-looking fucking bird I’d ever seen, so I thought it best to put on a contrite voice. ‘I know, I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I was just showing off to my friends. It’s not my fault, it’s the group dynamic, honest. For a minute there I thought Valery was going to kill me.’
‘Wouldn’t be first time,’ she said, refusing to bend to my apologetic tone.
I thought a change of subject might come in handy. ‘Hmm. What is that, is it food that you’re selling?’ I said in a stiff voice that suddenly sounded odd to my own ears. Unable to stop myself, I realised what I was doing, taking on her accent. Anybody with a strong inflection could have me talking like them in no time at all. In Chinese restaurants I would often get nasty looks from the waiters because I had suddenly acquired a Chinese accent, though I thought in all fairness that they should appreciate it was not a crude one. I didn’t do any of that ‘velly solly’ stuff but rather spoke in the accent of the indulged only son of wealthy traders from Xi’an Province who had been educated at a Western private school and then had gone on to USC in San Francisco to study mechanical engineering or something like that.
In answer to my question about her tray the girl looked down as if surprised that she was holding it. ‘Is Khabapchivi,’ she said.
‘Dah, I see. Vat is that dat exactly?’ I replied.
She thought about it hard, screwing her face up and staring towards the roof of the tent. ‘Umm, dar … Well… is like Gobubchaki but slightly less vortery.’
‘bat’s hard to reeseest,’ I said, handing over two pounds for a small polystyrene tub that had a plastic spoon sticking straight up in the food. Smilingly I put a small globule of Khabapchivi into my mouth and chewed. It tasted like Birmingham. ‘Hmm…’ I said. ‘There’s cer
tainly sometink—’ Before I could say anything more the girl interrupted.
‘Show starting again. You better get back to your chair, funny man.’ Then she darted through a flap in the canvas and was gone, leaving me to dispose of my Khabapchivi in a council rubbish bin. Just as I was going back in to the show I saw a stray dog go up to the bin, sniff it then run off whimpering.
In the second half of cirKuss there was a lot more tumbling, flying through the air and knife throwing, pretty much what would be happening outside in the centre of town by now, I thought. Then the band got out of second gear for the first time that night and clanked into ‘Last Train to Clarksville’, by the Monkees, for what was obviously meant to be the climax. The girl came on again dressed in an orange boiler suit, carrying three nail guns of the type I knew they used on American building sites. By the girl’s side was Valery, also an orange boilersuit, carrying a huge gas cylinder on his shoulders which he dumped in the centre of the ring, raising a cloud of sawdust.
As the band played he took a packet of different coloured balloons from his pocket, selected one, filled it with gas then ;twisted it into the shape of a bird. All the while the girl had % been juggling with the nail guns; she was amazingly adroit, ;pinning and catching the unwieldy objects with effortless ease then sending them flying back up into the dome of the tent. As he created each bird Valery tucked it under his arm till he had quite a flock there. Also during all the juggling and the balloon folding the rest of the cast had come on, slithering along the ground clad in skin-tight, multicoloured outfits with their faces painted, possibly to resemble lizards — it was hard to tell.
Now that he had a lot of birds Valery released one into the air and when it got about ten feet high, without missing a beat, the girl shot it down with a nail, causing the lizards to emit a low moan and to writhe about; another bird went up to meet the same fate as the first. Each time the girl nailed a balloon bird the lizards would wriggle around in simulated agony and plead with her to stop her destruction of rubber bird life but she carried on, doing a little dance of rejection while still tossing the nail guns about. I was familiar with those nail guns myself and reckoned the girl had them set on hair trigger, for though I didn’t think anybody else noticed quite a few of the nails went flying off into the darkness, and finally I was certain I saw a lizard take one in the thigh, though fair play to the fellow he kept on dancing and didn’t flinch for a second. Another reptile pulled the nail out quickly and a dark stain began to spread under his costume. After the show we left our cars parked where they were’ and walked down to the dark beach. We were going to eat at a restaurant which was on a boat anchored out in Southport Bay. The restaurant was called the Gravy Boat and it was reached by a World War Two amphibious landing craft which was waiting for us on the sands, its diesel eng . chuntering blackly to itself. We climbed a ladder into the open back of the olive-green wheeled boat.
‘To me the birds represented hope, which was destroyed by the West’s failure to act in Bosnia,’ said. Kate as the machine sped across the sands and plunged into the black waters of the Irish Sea.
On the way back Colin said, ‘My prawns were a bit tough.’
When we got back to the car park it was 1 a.m.; my car in the moonlight looked low and sinister, like some kind of half-glimpsed sea monster. We all said goodbye and the others drove off. I was just about to get into my vehicle when I saw the girl from the cirKuss who was leaning against a sea-rusted balustrade sucking on a cigarette in a continental fashion.
‘Nice karr,’ she said to me in a friendly manner, the previous frostiness seemingly having melted. ‘I not seen before, what is?’
‘TVR Cerbera,’ I replied, then pointed out to the bay. ‘You see that next town up the coast, where the lights are twinkling?’
‘Yah.’
‘That’s Blackpool, that’s where they make these TVRs.’
‘Blackpool, is that where you come from?’
‘No, I’m from Liverpool — that’s the other way,’ and I pointed. ‘East.’
‘Oh yah, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, dey are from Liverpool.’
‘Well, Birkenhead actually, but yeah that’s close. So where do you come from?’ I noticed that for some reason I was talking in my own voice and not imitating her accent. ‘Luzhney,’ she replied immediately.
‘Right,’ I said. ‘And where would that be exactly?’
‘Ermm,’ she said, thinking hard, ‘is near Lake Lucik, on de eastern side by da big boatyard.’
‘Right,’ I said again.
Then there was a long pause until she said, ‘Maybe one day you take me for drive in your nice karr.’
‘Erm, yes, one day yes, maybe I will one day, yes I will maybe,’ I said, hurriedly unlocking and wriggling into the driver’s seat.
‘Well, goodnight,’ I called as I closed the door and started up the big clattery straight six.
‘Goodnight, funny man,’ I heard back through the imperfectly fitting canvas roof.
As soon as the hands-free was connected I told Siggi about it. She said, ‘So you think she was coming on to you?’
‘I guess.’
‘And you ran away despite the fact that you’ve seen for certain that she can put both legs behind her head?’
‘I know but … I just thought a girl like her was too …’
‘Beautiful? Talented? Exotic?’
‘Serious … I don’t want to get involved with somebody who’s seen whatever it is she’s seen. You know my motto: a few bob, a few larfs and nobody gets hurt.’
‘Maybe you’re ready to give serious a try.’
‘No, I don’t think so, I’d have grown a beard or something if I was.’
‘You think there’d be some outward sign?’
‘Yes, there’d be some outward sign.’ Changing the subject I asked, ‘So when are we going out again?’
‘Saturday,’ she said. ‘Frank Skinner at the Manchester Evening News Arena Manchester.’
‘Oh yeah.’
‘Oh yeah.’
Saturday was not usually a big out night for us, firstly seeing as that was the night every idiot went out, the ‘Bridge and Tunnel’ crowd; secondly because nearly every other Saturday in the season Liverpool FC would be playing at home. If Liverpool FC had been playing at Anfield then me, Colin, Loyd and Siggi, who all had season tickets, would certainly have gone to the game. We would have watched the match from our seats, seventeen rows back to the left of the main Kop entrance, then we would have gone on a crawl around all the pubs that were still standing from our school days, then we went to our own homes, had a takeaway and went to bed early.
However this weekend it was an away match. The Saturday before had been the first game of the new Premiership season and the Reds had been up against one of those London teams composed entirely of Frenchmen or Africans who spoke French. The cockney supporters sang:
In your Liverpool slums
In your Liverpool slums
You look in the dustbin for something to eat
You find a dead cat and think it’s a treat
In your Liverpool slums
In your Liverpool slums
In your Liverpool slums
Your mum’s on the game and your dad’s in the nick
You can’t get a job ‘cause you’re too’ fucking thick.
I said to Loyd, ‘That year when I was in London I remember once I was standing on a corner in Mayfair or Kensington or somewhere and every stopped car at the traffic lights was a Porsche 911 or a Ferrari, or a Bentley.’
‘That’s because there’s so many rich people down there,’ said Loyd.
‘Exactly. Here in Liverpool if you’ve got a smart car it’s a rare sight, other people notice you, it means something.’
Loyd said, ‘In the country of the blind the GTi’d man is king.’
‘Exactly.’
Just then the teams came running on to the pitch. I loved the colours you found at the football match, colours of a purity y
ou never got in real life, the acid-clear reds and blues of the shirts the players wore, the impossible green of the grass on which they ran, the total black and whiteness of the balls they kicked and tossed and bounced off their heads. The only other time I had seen colours of such otherworldly purity was on the tunics of a troop of Horse Guards that had suddenly come riding out of the dawn mist in a street in St John’s Wood when I was down in London for that year.
Then after that for ninety minutes plus a fifteen-minute break I had no independent thoughts at all, for I became part of that huge animal which is the crowd. As if falling into sleep I let myself sink into the mass so that my individual thoughts and movements were only one component in the bulk of a gigantic beast. I was freed from the responsibility of conscious thought; I believed what the crowd believed: that the penalty against us was unjust no matter how clear the foul was, that the forward was onside no matter how great the gap was between him and the opposing defenders, that the other supporters were a pack of lying cockney cunts and their players were a bunch of untalented, shiftless, cheats until the day when they came to play for Liverpool FC when they were somehow transformed into the best players in the world.
2
The original plan for the trip to see Frank Skinner at ‘the Manchester Evening News Arena had been for me to go with the others in the van; if I’d gone in the van I would have been able to have me a few drinks. Though in general I liked to drive myself in my own car to things, I did think that seeing a comedian was miles better if you’d got a few drinks inside you. The alcohol gave you more courage to shout stuff out, which definitely made the whole show go better for everyone present. I knew for absolute certain that comedians really loved it when they had somebody like me in the audience, someone who talked back to them and yelled out witty comments and took the piss out of their appearance and shouted out the punchlines to their jokes a split second before they said them.