great british carnival (1 of 2)

1

The carnival was British in spirit and aesthetic. It travelled the breadth of the isle desperate for petty cash. They set up the medium-sized top, a large gazebo really, in retail park car parks and the patches of waste ground that fringed dying local industrial estates where the work had been outsourced, or the sites of past failures – of business, community, whatever – or in the spaces ordinarily reserved for burger vans or similar in the paved forecourts of DIY superstores. It sagged like a tired scrotum under the weight of its own canvas, its metal skeleton compromised by age and neglect, puffing in heaves in even the slightest breeze, in failing-lung gasps, as though the very essence of the carnival was asphyxiating beneath a carrier bag in the throes of urgent and terminal coitus. It was a sorry sight, sun-beaten and drained of colour, patched with duct tape or left flapping like open wounds the length of vast tears to the material that frayed at the edges and felt greasy to touch. The strung lights around the entrance flickered dimly in the still-bright sun of the afternoon with odd bulbs dead, yet still their decadence and promise lured crowds in their tens to the spectacle and show at which the carnival excelled, its acts myriad and rousing. 

2

The economic downturn had done little to hamper the carnival’s meagre income and ticket sales, in fact had helped them, as increasing numbers of desolate patrons aching for cheap fun and fresh out the door of B&Q or similar were drawn to the graphic marketing posters and low entry fee for a hassle free night or late-afternoon out. The carnival had little need for much money, its existence transcending the merely material. The performers performed by necessity, their bodies or skill sets demanded it, and the troupe as a whole needed only diesel for generators and to shift the gear from venue to venue. They kept overheads down by having none. Guests were offered no refreshments, and the show was only set up in places where burger vans and trailers could – and did – do likewise (which is why the car parks adjoining certain types of retail outlet were so successful, griddled oily cuisine gravitating as it did to the change-heavy jeans pockets of weary blokes disoriented by carpet costs or shelving strategies and left weak kneed by the smell of unspecified meat cooking, wafting through the traffic with the force of pheromones), urging punters to bring their own cans of lager in supermarket bulk to get things in the mood, and rather than paying to rent the space – which was after all but dead concrete in forgotten corners of car parks lined with huge recycling bins and flanked with stark shrubs, the tarmac sticky with old plonk spilt from improperly recycled glass products – the ringmaster made arrangements with shop managers based on promises of increased footfall and positive publicity for all businesses involved, mutually beneficial parasitism, he termed it, and the like. The shop managers found the ringmaster an intelligent, complex and persuasive man and he was all of these things and told them so.

3

The acts were many and varied but all were tainted with the singular kind of sadness and hopelessness that was the prevalent emotion in many of Britain’s smaller cities and towns, the kind of frowning, angry, xenophobic, antagonistic, aggressively bland acts almost entirely devoid of the showmanship or flair one might ordinarily associate with carnival folk and that focused instead on the mundane normalcy that offered less “escapism” and more “complete submergence within a peculiarly morose and loathsome subculture”. They each revelled in the banality of their performances, in the cheap production values of the show – the stench of sweaty plastic seat backs streaked chalky white with dried salts and unwashed testicles (it was a predominantly male staff and audience) almost sulphurous in the stagnant vinyl air that churned heavy like guts beneath the limp tent canopy – and in the blind arbitrary incomprehensible shitluck chance that had given them the physical deformity or psychological abnormality that bore their act where applicable. No cunt’s special, least of all us, you, I. It could have been anyone and no one and is. Exhausted by cheap booze and their own sneering rehearsals the show worsened with the passing season and the season ran without question or end. The audience listened dutifully with the attentiveness of shitting men waiting for the punch line to a joke shared across public toilet cubicles over the sound of pressured release and creaking anuses and echoed wind amplified hilariously by the porcelain. Although little of interest was said, the audience hung hungrily on every word, and forged a great and paradoxical sense of community out of their subtextual isolationist agenda, invigorated by a call to arms in defence of the realm as envisaged by fools.

4

Parson Grünther was ringmaster, a man dark and shadowy and devoured by past, and heavily angular like expressionist cinema. He ran the carnival real tight. They said he suffered some terrible trauma as a child that not a soul dared speak of. His eyes spoke retributive threats in their vacancy. He bore corvid representations in careful inks beneath the vestments he wore religiously, their mythology, that of the crows, at one with his own body. The spiritual counsel he offered had like a universe forged the carnival from nothing, uniting the disparate acts within a shared dependence. It had started as a vehicle for his incomparable preaching, the tent becoming gradually ever larger to accommodate the growing congregation that swelled with the desperation of the times, seeking solace in narrative as was humanity’s wont, until the sheer size of the crowd demanded more than Grünther alone could offer. The carnival acts were footnotes, addenda to scripture, some light relief to Grünther’s fatalistic if doctrinally inspiring sermons, precursors to the main event, to God’s Fenland Roadshow, as the carnival had been locally known. As time passed and the spiritual self-identification of the population declined with the self-absorbed clichés of the high-capitalist ethos prevalent in millennial economic thought, the focus of the carnival evolved until Grünther’s verbose soliloquies were themselves but fragments, occasional punctuation to the more serious business of carnival mediocrity. The acts grew in each town, as more defectives sought salary and friendship in exploitation of their singular – and only bankable – “adaptations”. They built incoherent webs of structure around unrelated occurrences in the attempt to construct some grand narrative, and while this routinely failed the audiences lapped it up regardless, torn in both pity and awe at the utter stoic determination of these poor bastards with nothing but a self-imposed and celebrated otherness to their names.

5

The infant carnival’s first act was among Greece’s worst and least successful recession magicians, of which there were an abundance when the reality of the crisis hit, turned to illusion for a buck or more when reality proved a burden too great to bear. The Great Moussaka was grotesquely fat, an entertainer in the loosest sense of the word. Stretched into a vivid bejewelled waistcoat he’d won in a card game some years before – in better days, yards of synthetic fabric still too small, his oily skin bulging in odious hunks around the arm holes, his deep stench a weird cultural mishmash of vinegar-strong pickled onions and mezze –  Grünther had come across him dragging himself graceless about makeshift stage areas in bars and social clubs with ever-dwindling audiences, dropping his lucky deck in fat-fingered error, half-blinded and blinking the sweat out of his eyes, the smell of warm beer and puke as one and corrosive in the stifling air. His tricks were primitive at best, Christmas cracker stuff really, but his commitment to them was inspiring; during a routine performance he had some poor prick pick a card any card, and Moussaka proceeded to guess through every single one of the 52 cards in the deck without losing face or quitting before he picked the right one, all in the name of magic, and it was a process that had lasted so long and that retained such a degree of showmanship throughout – he really thought, like visibly thought, about all of his ‘guesses’ – that the small audience had gone through a whole host of emotions with him, first laughing at his failure, then despising him for the same reason, before eventually, after about thirty guesses, really rooting for him, cheering like hooligans with every effort. By chance alone it was a failure so great it became in itself an achievement. While the quality of his illusions did not improve during his long tenure with the carnival – his attempts at levitation were perhaps the only on record that resulted in an actual and observable descent, in which by way a poorly constructed performance area and generalised fatigue Moussaka ended up lower than his own starting point – his devotion to his own futility warmed him to people, and he remained among the most popular of all the performers Grünther assembled.

6

Oaf Boy and Troubadour were a double act in number if not unity. Oaf Boy had been born a lump and remained so into manhood, but the “boy” moniker felt altogether more valid in consideration of the simple-mindedness that dogged his more conventional employment prospects. They called him retard at school, peers and faculty, not out of cruelty or as a nickname but as a statement of fact; the thick fucker was just that. He had some kind of obesity issue which left his face and hands, notably, wrapped up inside great duvets of his own fleshy mass that hung heavily around him like swathes of draped positioned meat in rolled cuffs at the wrists, his little face set in fat like the heart of a folly peering back from an unimaginable aspic abyss. Troubadour was a selective mute who spoke only in chants. Oaf Boy’s entirely genuine attempts at public self-reflection were uproariously comical to the malicious British mentality that comprised the audiences, and the more pitiful or absurd these attempts became the greater the response they elicited, tempered only slightly by Troubadour’s evocative and sonorous repetition, which made the whole act resemble more of a bizarre avant-garde art installation rather than a fat male admitting a lifetime of personal, financial, and sexual failure in crushingly obscure detail before a tent half-filled with laughing drunks. They always brought the house down, other people’s real shit lives being the only thing funnier than carefully scripted comic routines.

7

The Bint and Ms. Mons were the box office girls. They took payments and provided information and programmes and passed out ticket stubs to punters and were women of a certain age, the remnants of a past attractiveness still written into the lines of their faces and the careful structure of their hair. Their breasts were suitcase brown and heavy and their cleavages had lengthened with time and they wore them barely concealed beneath their clothing for they were a major draw that men would cross car parks specifically for. They took their work seriously and were proficient at it. As younger women they had been performers themselves, noted for the elasticity of key areas of their bodies, but they were now content to work the box office, where the taking of payments and provision of information and programmes and the passing out of ticket stubs was appended with a remarkable, seemingly inexhaustible range of sexual invitations to the paying customers, invitations so effective that an increasingly common sight just outside of the tent some minutes prior to show time was a self-enclosed grouping of males attempting to subtly stimulate themselves to completion. Something about the conflict between the words said and the apocalyptic indifference expressed, and by The Bint and Ms. Mons’s striking interplay between correct cash-handling, bored facial expression, known elasticity (the vaginal accommodations of their histories were famed around the fens) and vast sexual-euphemistic vocabulary was incredibly potent and left even married men – although the majority of the carnival’s customers were unmistakably single – profoundly disoriented and craving the kind sensual release that demanded even public satisfaction, a service unfortunately not offered by the box office girls (not that kind of box office girls!). “Come on you fucking coward,” The Bint would say, drawled behind a smouldering Rothmans. “Hooch me up the hole with your slug dick. Slip me up the slice with your tenderloin. Ponce me up the pussy with your hot dog. Fuck me up the flump with your deadwood. Tweak me up the twat with your yardstick. Bam me up the bingo with your bishop. Curse me up the clam with your dingus. Grease me up the gash with your goober. Cleave me up the cunt with your dork. Maul me up the minge with your jackhammer. Ravage me up the rosebud with your plug. Split me up the snatch with your roundhead. Tear me up the taco with your microphone. Haul me up the hoo-ha with your hookah. Come the shit on, Jimmy John Johnson! Fuck me till my eyes cry spunk! Fuck me till my meat lisps French! Make something feel something!” On occasion these exchanges would last for some hours, for so long that the words became threats, accusations of a profound inadequacy. Grünther would listen from the darkness.

8

Desperate Parson Grünther unbuckled himself, his vestments, felt the pinched flesh ease, the breeze about him, the spiritual void. He could hear minimal muffled applause from maybe a handful of people through the van doors.