The Death of an Anti-Clown

Short story

The Death of an Anti-Clown

“Not a team player.” That's what his boss had said before “letting him go.”

He hadn't said goodbye to any colleagues. He'd just snatched his coat and left. On the bus home he lit a cigarette. Fuck the rules. That old and too familiar feeling burnt in his gut, but he didn't know why. He'd hated the job and everyone in it. It was no shock to be fired either; he'd seen it coming, yet he felt like his heart was being held over a flame. An old woman in a nearby seat tutted loudly and made a show of fanning the smoke away. Turning round to face her, he snapped, “Oh, piss off, you miserable old bag. I've just lost my job!”

Fucking hell, nothing ever goes right, does it? He thought dejectedly, staring at the rain-streaked window at the drab grey buildings of the industrial estate, Oh well, at least now dad's dead. I can use the money the old git left me to get out of this shithole town.

Suddenly something whacked him on the back of the head. He turned. An old man was glaring at him through thick glasses with a rolled-up magazine in his hand. “What's the matter with you, talking to a lady like that?” he shouted angrily. “Lost your job? Lost your manners too, did you? You'd better apologise, mate; otherwise, you and me are gonna have a problem, son!”

Just a scrawny little bus nutter, unbound by societal norms, unpredictable, and capable of anything.

Gavin looked at the old woman. “Sorry,” he grumbled resentfully.

A group of young girls at the back of the bus were laughing at him. His face flushed red. His heart burnt hotter.

Gav wasn't someone you'd take to immediately, nor was he the sort you'd warm to over time. His school and college friends had gradually dropped him over time due to his habit of pointing out their negative aspects at every opportunity. Most people found him unlikeable because inside his thick Welsh skull an unnamed, untamed resentment raged, burnt, and screamed without regard for him or the world.

It was this interminable enmity that caused him to view everyone with a dark and jealous suspicion, a paranoid conviction that it was him vs. the universe. Gav emanated a seriously bad vibe. An intense cloud of resentment seemed to cling to him like smoke on a statically charged cigarette.

He was self-conscious about his looks, aware that there was apparently something unsettling about his face, something unreasonable and belligerent about the configuration of his features, and from studying himself in the mirror, he'd discovered that, irrespective of his mood, his small eyes could convey nothing beyond hatred.

He'd almost resigned himself to a life as the unrelatable outsider, the creepy weirdo, feared and ridiculed in equal measures. But now, listening to the harsh cackling and aflame with shame and rage, he saw an opportunity to change. To start a new chapter. To make friends with the world by becoming someone different—someone loved. Not just subject to laughter but in control of it. He knew there was only one profession open to him.


“A clown?” His mum was incredulous. “You? Why?”

Gav nodded and pushed the prospectus across the table towards her.

“Vasserjinx International Academy Of Clowning,” she read from the cover.

“It's the best,” said Gav.

“What makes you think you'll get in? You're…well… I'm not being funny, love, but you couldn't be funny to save your life!” said Mum.

“They're not looking for funny; they can make you funny. They're looking for different. I've sent in a video and been accepted.”

Mum shook her head dubiously. “Well, you're different alright,” she said.

*****

He used his inheritance to pay for the full three-year course and a plane ticket to Albania.

After the flight from Gatwick to Tirana, there was a long, hot bus journey to the port of Yugz, where he had to stay overnight in a crummy cockroach-infested hostel because he'd missed the boat to the college.

He boarded the boat the next day with a degree of trepidation at its apparent lack of buoyancy. Adding to the anxiety was the nagging feeling that he was ill prepared, not having found the time to read most of the correspondence from the academy.

His first sight of Vasserjinx Island made everything very real. The sand-coloured cliffs that rose high above the azure sea were topped with pine trees and verdant vegetation, amongst which nestled brightly coloured buildings with oddly angled roofs and irregularly shaped doors and windows.

He was greeted on the jetty by a very tall black man with a whitened face wearing a tuxedo jacket and bow tie twinned with a coarse grass skirt and flip-flops.
“Hello!” He cried in a deep African accent as Gav stepped off the gangplank, “What is your name, sir?”

“Gav.”

The man widened his eyes in an expression of mock horror, looked around as if to check no one else had heard, and whispered, “Your clown name, sir. You have read the initiation pack, no?”

“Oh, it's…” He blanked for a moment, trying to recall what he'd written on the registration form: “Chester Chuckles.”

The man held up both hands, fingers spread wide as if drawing the words in lights across the air in front of him. “Chester Chuckles!” he proclaimed. “Oh, it is so wonderfully beneficial to my heart to make your acquaintance, sir. I am Jambo, professor of the Vasserjinx International Academy of Clowning and your personal mentor for the first phase of your journey to clowndom.” He performed a little bow. “It will be my pleasure to induct you into this prestigious institution. We shall become fast friends, I feel it!” said Jambo, beaming a big open smile.

“I doubt it,” muttered Gav, not smiling back.

Jambo showed no recognition of the slight.

“First, I will show you your digs and let you settle in. This way, my friend.”

“Not your friend,” said Gav under his breath.

“What type of clown do you harbour ambitions of becoming?” asked Jambo politely as he led the way up a flight of stone steps cut into the hillside. “Whiteface? August? A hobo, perhaps? Rodeo or a Pierrot?”

“I dunno,” said Chester Chuckles. “Maybe a creepy one?”

Jambo negotiated the steep steps with an easy grace, his head occasionally brushing at the overhanging jasmine, sending its sweet scent wafting through the hot air, while Gav huffed and sweated, his rucksack sticking to his wet back.

The steps led on to a winding sandy path that snaked between the painted plaster walls of the mysteriously shaped buildings.

“Very good!” said Jambo, pushing open the bright green door of a peach-coloured circular building with a bell-shaped roof. “This is you. What do you think?”

Gav walked in and dumped his rucksack by the door. He was clammy from the hot climb, and the windowless interior was cool and dark. Mounted on the wall in front of him, a large TV screen glowed with a grid of twelve faces, all bored-looking Asians.

“What's that?” he asked, pointing.

“That is your audience, of course,” said Jambo with a deep chuckle.

The rows of people were staring disinterestedly from the screen into his room.

“Where are they from?”

“The other side of the island,” said Jambo with a grin.

“How do I turn it off?”

Jambo shook his head reproachfully and smiled. “I think you know the answer to that, Chester Chuckles,” he said as he slammed the door shut, leaving Gav alone with his audience. As the lock clicked, a red ‘on air’ sign lit up over the door, and the show began.

A spotlight shone down from the middle of the domed ceiling, throwing a pool of intense warm light onto the centre of the floor.
As he stepped into the light, some of the viewers clapped halfheartedly.

“I don't know what you're expecting,” he said defensively. “I've not been taught anything yet, and I've got nothing prepared. I guess this is just some initiation exercise in learning how to die, right? Deconstruct the ego? Oh well, fuck it, here goes.”

From his rucksack he pulled a browning banana, and standing in the spotlight, glaring stony-faced at his audience, he ate it. As he swallowed the last bite, he looked around as if searching for somewhere to dispose of the skin, which dangled from between his thumb and forefinger.

He furtively looked left, then leaning back, he looked to the right; he scratched the back of his head as he stared at the ceiling. He carefully inspected the floor around his feet. Then, without looking at the audience, he marched up to the screen. “Sayonara, bitches,” he said.
as he plonked the banana skin over the camera above it.

He grinned as he watched their reactions. The old couple in the top left looked confused. The bald guy with glasses stood up and shouted something angry. A few started typing on keyboards or adjusting their cameras. A young girl in the bottom row was frantically asking questions of a person off screen, and the tattooed guy in the middle nodded and smirked.

Gav lit a celebratory cigarette; he was feeling pretty pleased with himself. Not bad for a beginner, he thought as he reflected on the performance, but before he'd half finished his smoke, the door burst open, and a huge muscular fellow with slicked-down hair, sideburns, and a curly moustache wearing a leopard's skin marched in and picked him up by his armpits.

“Woah!” exclaimed Gav. “Who the fuck are you?” He suspended Gav at arm's length with no apparent effort. The strongman didn't give his name. “You are in breach of contract,” he said in an accent somewhere between Bristol and Budapest.

Gav began protesting innocence, but the strongman wasn't listening. He hefted Gav outside and dumped him unceremoniously on the ground, where half a dozen clown policemen arrested him and poured custard down his trousers. They bundled him into a jalopy of a van, which backfired repeatedly and lost a wheel on the twelve-yard journey to the police station across the road.

In the cell next to Gav’s sat a sad and repentant-looking little monkey, easily small enough to fit through the bars. “What are you in for?” asked Gav after the door clanged shut. “Bananas? Yeah, me too.”

The monkey gave him the finger.

After a couple of boring hours watching the monkey mope, a clown with long pink hair and yellow and black dungarees entered, pushing a trolley with plates covered by shiny silver cloches. He stopped outside the monkey’s cell and uncovered a large plate of spaghetti. The monkey sat up hopefully. The clown delicately pinched one end of the spaghetti and handed it through the bars to the monkey, who snatched it eagerly and began sucking it up as quickly as he could. The clown pulled from the pocket of his dungarees a large pair of scissors and positioned the open blades around the strand of pasta. The monkey stopped sucking and looked imploringly at the clown. As the monkey slowly began to draw on the strand, the blades of the scissors closed on the spaghetti. The monkey stopped sucking just in time to prevent the spaghetti strand from being snipped; the jaws of the scissors relaxed. This process repeated for some time, the hungry monkey walking a delicate tightrope between getting fed and losing the connection with his food. When its self-restraint gave way and it could no longer resist sucking it in as fast as possible, the clown severed the strand and artfully ducked the handful of turd the monkey flung at him.

Moving the trolley on to Gav's cell, the clown presented a dish to the bars and signalled with his face for Gav to remove the cloche, which he did to reveal the skin of the banana he'd eaten earlier.

Gav curled his lip into a sneer. “Funny fucker, aren't you?”

The clown held his tummy with his white-gloved hands and shook his shoulders up and down in a silent mockery of laughter, then in a microsecond reverted to his former deadpan expression and wheeled away his squeaky-wheeled trolley.

After a sleepless night of buyer's remorse, Gav was visited by the grinning Jambo bearing a cake box. “For you, my friend,” he exclaimed, pushing the box beneath the bars and giving an exaggerated wink. Gav opened the box; inside was a garishly iced cake.

“I bake especially for you!” said Jambo with exaggerated magnanimity.

“Cheers,” said Gav, looking and sounding unimpressed.

“Very special ingredient,” said Jambo, nodding at the cake.

“What? Like a file or a weapon?” said Gav with an unmasked scorn. “You do love a trope here, don't you?”

He thought he noticed a twitch in Jambo’s eye. “Happy eating, my friend,” Jambo said cheerily as he waved enthusiastically from the doorway and made his exit.

Gav stuck his finger into the cake and tasted it. It was fishy and soapy with an aftertaste of petrol.

Digging his fingers further in, he located what he assumed must be the secret ingredient and pulled out an uninflated orange balloon.

“Brilliant,” he said, stretching it out and flicking it at the monkey.

“Prends garde, crétin. Tu marches sur des œufs.” Growled the monkey.

Gav did the first double take of his life. “What?”

The little monkey then said in a thick French accent and a voice that spoke of cheap French tobacco and pastis, "I said, be careful, fool; I will fuck you up!”

Astounded, Gav pushed his face to the bars that divided them to get a better look. “What the hell are you? A hologram? A robot? A taxidermist’s science project? I'm not buying this shit!” He'd expected an unorthodox educational experience, but the French monkey spooked him. “Enough with the mind games. This has gone too far. I've got rights! I wanna see the principal now!” he yelled at the walls.

The monkey sat impassively on its bed during the rant. When it was over, he took a pipe from under the pillow, packed it with tobacco, and lit it with a match he struck on the wall. He puffed noisily until he had almost disappeared in the cloud of smoke. “Rights,” he chuckled, shaking his head.

The metal door to the room containing the cells squealed open as a ruggedly handsome man in a sharp suit entered. He nodded at the monkey as he passed. “Claude,” he said as if acknowledging an old acquaintance.

The monkey grimaced. “Mon dieu!” He groaned.

“Relax, my furry little French freak, I'm not here for you but for Mr. Chuckles.” He placed his briefcase on a counter running along the wall facing the cell doors.

He extended a well-manicured hand through the bars toward Gav. “Good to meet you, Mr. Chuckles. I'm Landon London. I'll be your advocate at the trial.”

He was far too good-looking for his own good; it drew attention to Gav's own unappealing appearance.
“Landon London?” said Gav, raising an eyebrow, “Whose idea was that?”

Landon gave a patronising smile. “Down to business then, shall we? I'll need you to describe for me the entire incident in as much detail as you can”.

“What incident? The thing with the banana skin?” He shrugged. ”I put it over the camera. So what?”

“Why? Were you trying to be funny?”

“Not really trying,” said Gav, “it just turned out that way.”

Landon frowned as he wrote something in his notes.

“I don't think you realise the seriousness of the situation, Mr. Chuckles. The penalties for the charges against you—disrespecting an audience, performance abdication, and humourlessness—are very severe. Clowning is a serious business, as I'm sure you're aware.”

“Severe? How severe can it be? I've already had custard down my trousers,” scoffed Gav.

“You're looking at death by hanging,” said Landon flatly.

Gav shook his head. “No! They can't do that. I'm a British citizen.”

Landon leaned forward. “You're a clown, Mr. Chuckles. Clowns have no nationality.”

“Oh fuck! How do I get out of this?”

“You'll go to trial; your fate will depend on the verdict of the jury.”

“What kind of trial?” asked Gav.

“A trial by clowning, of course,” said Landon.

“Better get your funny on,” said Claude.

Gav's mum's words echoed in his head, “You couldn't be funny to save your life.”

*****

‘What is funny?’ was the question rebounding around the interior of Gav's skull as he lay in his bunk that night. Surely there's a formula, some simple trick to making people laugh. I've watched it happen every day, all my life, but how do you make it happen? It's something to do with the unexpected, is it? Or is it to do with failure or maybe, maybe cruelty? Laughing at the misfortune of others is a thing, isn't it? Oh God! I need a guaranteed laugh. Is that possible? I'm pretty sure comics test out their material because what people laugh at is, by its nature, unpredictable. And the people at the trial? I don't know anything about them? Will they even speak English? I can't do this. I just can't do it.

“I'm going to die.” The realisation came unbidden from his mouth.

“For sure,” said Claude, who was playing Patience. “and more than once.”

Something inside Gav registered humour. “You're a funny guy,” he said. “You couldn't help me out with something I can use in the trial, could you?”

Claude snorted, “Why should I ‘elp you English?”

“You can have this cake.”

Claude put down the playing cards. “The whole cake?”

“Sure,” said Gav. “If you can make me laugh.”

The monkey narrowed his eyes. Cake first,” he demanded.

Gav shook his head. “Nah, laugh first.”

Claude gave a Gallic shrug. “Your funeral,” he said, picking up his cards.

“Aw, come on, you've gotta be hungry. What have you eaten in the last two days?”

“Approximately twenty centimetres of spaghetti,” said Claude, “but I am accustomed to hunger, whereas your trial begins tomorrow.”

“You promise you'll make me laugh, no matter what?” said Gav desperately.

Claude drew a cross over his heart with his finger.

Reluctantly Gav pushed the cake box under the bars with his foot. “Enjoy,” he said.

Claude immediately rushed over, snatched up the box, and climbed onto his bunk. Pulling open the lid, he grabbed a handful of cake and greedily stuffed it into his mouth. As he chewed, his nose wrinkled, and his eyes grew wide as the flavours developed. He juddered, heaved, and spat out the cake, spitting ferociously to rid his mouth of any remaining morsels. "Merde! C'est dégoûtant!” He yelled angrily.

Before he realised it, Gav was laughing.

Claude smiled slyly. “Let me ask you a question,” he said. “Do you think I've never tasted one of Jambo's cakes before?”

“Ok, you're good,” said Gav, “but how does that help me with the trial?”

“Think carefully. What were you laughing at? Was my reaction unexpected? No, of course not. It was no surprise that I found the cake revolting; I am French, after all. So why did you laugh, English?”

“It was just funny,” said Gav.

"Oh là là là!” Claude rolled his eyes. “Because?”

“I saw it coming.”

Claude nodded. “And?”

“I don't know; I really don't know,” said Gav.

“What did you feel?”

Gav’s brow furrowed with the challenge of identifying his feelings. “Relief, maybe?”

“Voila!” said the monkey. ”C'est bien ça! Exactement ! For one moment you were relieved! From your situation, from yourself even. I gifted you with one second of escape when you forgot that you die tomorrow. It is a miracle, no?”

“I guess so,” said Gav. “So what did you get out of it, apart from a nasty taste in your mouth?”

“Now that is a question,” exclaimed Claude, raising an index finger into the air. “Do you think I did it as a philanthropic act of altruism?”

“I doubt it,” said Gav.

"Bien sûr, I am helping you for my own purposes, English, but I am helping you”.

“So all I have to do is temporarily relieve a crowd of strangers of their own anxieties tomorrow. I still haven't got a clue how to do that”, said Gav despondently.

“I have a plan,” said the monkey.


*****
Jambo turned up at first light. “Hello, my friend!” He carried a large suitcase and was accompanied by the jailer clown with long pink hair who unlocked Gav's cell. “It is time for your transformation!”

He placed the case on the bunk and opened it eagerly. “Of course under normal circumstances you would choose your own makeup and costume, but as you are a penitent, it is predetermined.

Gav sat patiently while Jambo applied the makeup and wig. “Big day! Oh yes, a very big day for you, my friend. Are you excited? I'm very excited!” He applied the greasepaint liberally with deft hands. “I just know in my heart of hearts that you will be absolutely sensational today!”

“Thanks,” said Gav dryly.

When he'd finished, Jambo stood back to admire his work. He pursed his lips, tilted his head to one side for a moment, and then clapped his hands together while giving a little jump of excitement. Then somehow pulled a full-length mirror from the suitcase and held it up to Gav.

The suit was orange satin with big, bold, black, upward-pointing arrows. His face was a hot pink with a yellow bulbous nose and large black crosses painted over his eyes. The tufty wig jutted spikes of green hair in all directions.

“That's great,” he said. “I look fucking ridiculous. Thanks, Jambo.”

“You are most welcome, Chester!” Said Jambo with a beatific smile. “Yoo-hoo! Tomislav, our star, is ready for the spotlight!”

The strongman came in and clamped a massive hand around the back of Gav's neck. “Move,” he said, steering him out of the cell and through the exit.

Gav was guided up a flight of stone steps to a door leading out to the morning sunshine and on to a parapet walk atop a great wall with Vasserjinx on one side and sandy-coloured cliffs dropping vertically to the sea below on the other.

As his eyes became accustomed to the brightness, the first thing he noticed was a solid wooden structure standing on the wall and projecting out over the sea, a thick beam with a noose dangling ominously beneath it swaying in the sea breeze.

“Oh fuck no!” He said, stopping to take in its meaning, but Tomislav roughly pushed him onwards. “You'll get a closer look at that later,” he growled.

The parapet led to an arched doorway in a wide circular tower. Standing sentry on either side were two skeletons wearing ruffs and red noses.

Inside, a spiral staircase led downward. Gav could see brightly coloured lights below. Music and shouting echoed upwards and seemed to carry the sickly smell of candy floss with it.

Suddenly Tomislav forcefully shoved him aside; his body crashed against thin metal bars that clanged loudly in the echoey stone tower. He was in a cage, swinging in the darkness. As it descended, the voices and music grew louder. As the cage dropped into the light, a raucous uproar of jeering, hissing, and booing erupted. I'm gonna shit myself, he thought as his bowels loosened. His wet palms slipped against the bars as he looked out at the riotous crowd. Hundreds and hundreds of clowns of all kinds packed into steep banks of wooden seats lining the tower walls. Their inhuman faces twisted in expressions of malevolence and hate. Suddenly a calm overcame the anxiety. I know this, he thought. I can deal with this shit. I've been doing it all my life.

He stood up straight. Staring down the crowd with a ‘fuck you’ expression. The cage jolted to a halt adjacent to the dock. Its doors concertinaed open, and Gav stepped out onto the raised platform with the demeanour of a king accused of treason.

He surveyed the scene. Immediately below him, standing at a lectern, was Landon London wearing a powdered wig. To his right atop a towering judge's bench sat a chihuahua in a sombrero, a glove puppet made of an old sock with button eyes, and between them a large theatrical prop sunflower, at the centre of which a young child's face peered out, petals radiating outwards.

Across on the other side of the judges bench was what Gav assumed was the witness stand, and beyond that sat the twelve Asians from the other side of the island, presumably the jury.

Beneath the judge’s bench a small pit of musicians dressed as ladybirds played a discordant and lively tune on a euphonium, a ukulele, an accordion, and a marching bass drum.

A loud honk cut through the clamour as the glove puppet bit down on the rubber bulb of a horn affixed to a stand in front of it. The commotion subsided. “The court is in session!” Yelled Tomislav. “Call the prosecution!”

Everyone in the room responded at the tops of their voices, “No, you call him!!”

A tall dark figure in a judicial gown and a powdered wig climbed the steps to a brightly painted and glitter-adorned podium opposite Gav. “Hello, my friends!” came a deep, familiar voice. It was Jambo.

“Fuck me, not you again!” gasped Gav.

Jambo produced from within his gown a pair of glasses with round lenses as thick as the base of a champagne bottle and put them on and addressed the row of Asians.

“Members of the jury, before you stands Chester Chuckles, who, as I shall demonstrate, has disgraced our noble profession in the most egregious manner by disrespecting his audience, abdicating a performance, and…” he paused dramatically, “he's just not funny.”

A sharp intake of breath by the crowd was heard.

Jambo raised his hands as if to quell an imminent riot. “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the first witness for the prosecution, the defendant’s own mother, Margarita Chuckles!” He extended his arm towards the witness box, where stood a pig in a bonnet and a gingham dress.

“Your honour, permission to treat the witness as hostile?”

The chihuahua yapped and wagged its tail.

“Thank you, your honour,” said Jambo. He pulled from his cloak an oversized knife and fork and ran up the steps of the witness stand and poked the pig in the behind with the fork. The pig squealed and fled away into the crowd. Jambo turned back to the jury. “The prosecution rests, your honour,” he said triumphantly.

Gav was gripping the rail of the dock so hard the veins on the backs of his hands bulged. So far he'd just about kept it together as per Claude's instructions, but he wasn't sure how much more of this banal bullshit he could take.

Landon London cleared his throat. “Our great institution owes its success and worldwide fame to the principles laid down by our esteemed founder, Basil Vasserjinx. According to him, the most fundamental of those hallowed tenets is, as you all know—”

A brightly coloured macaw wearing an eye patch fluttered down onto the judges' bench. “Stop talking and bring out the monkey!” It squawked.

“Bring out the monkey!” chanted the crowd. The musicians struck up a rollicking accompaniment, and multicoloured fountains erupted from the floor and danced to the rhythm of the chant, soaking everyone in court.

The diminutive monkey appeared as if from nowhere to a thunderous roar from the spectators. As he climbed the steps to the witness stand, Gav noticed that his little black face had been smeared with white greasepaint to resemble a skull; he was wearing a long black hooded cloak and carrying a scythe.

On reaching the stand, he laid his scythe against the rail and lit his pipe. He drew the stem across his throat, and the crowd went quiet, the music died a discordant death, and the fountains sputtered out. The air was thick with vapour from the steaming bodies. The only sound was a gentle sploshing as the excited crowd fidgeted their feet in anticipation.

Gav was losing confidence in Claude's ‘plan.’ Was it just another of the monkey's deceptions? He raised his head defiantly as Claude pointed his pipe in his direction.

“Take a look at the new face of clowning.” His rasping voice reverberated around the tower walls. “Regardez vous! What do you see? An agent of metamorphosis? A cancer eating at our culture? Or perhaps just another bad joke?”

Shaking his head, he turned to the jury. “It is a great responsibility you hold for us, ladies and gentlemen. You are the arbiters of our work and our worth. You are our guiding star. Without you we drift without direction or purpose. Our lives are meaningless without your laughter. Yet, of late, we have failed you. It is a fact unspoken but universally recognised. We're not as funny as we used to be.”

Claude let his words hang among the mist over a stunned silence. Gasps, then, as mutterings and murmurings emerged. Claude silenced them by stabbing at the clowns with his pipe. “You! All of you are guilty! For decades our cultural relevance has gradually eroded. Why? Because the world changes, yet we do not. In a world of memes, clips, and self-generated content where everyone can find an audience and be a star, we cling to our failing traditions.”

He paused to take a puff of his pipe and allow his audience to digest his meaning.

“We face a stark reality, colleagues: change or die! The big unanswered question is, what change? Who, amongst us, can show the road forward to the success we once enjoyed? Away from the stale artifice of contrived gags and formulaic, trope-laden routines?”

He spread his empty upturned hands as he asked the questions. Then with effortless grace transitioned the gesture into a theatrical presentation of Gav.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Chester Chuckles!”

Gav's peripheral vision blackened, leaving only a spot of light where Claude's amber eyes twinkled with his own amusement.

Gav's face was burning with rage. The little shit had betrayed him. He was in the playground again, crying as the big kids punched and kicked and shrieked, “What’s the matter, spazzie? Don't you like being soft as shit? Aw, poor soft Gav. He can't help it if he's a puny little prick with a puny little prick, can you, Mummy's boy?”

That vulnerability, that burning hurt, flashed through him like a searing flame before his magical pachyderm skin flapped back into place. Like an impenetrable blanket of leather protecting his soft pink innards once more.

His molten liquid core crystallised into smooth, shining obsidian.

Leaning casually on the rail, he raised a bemused eyebrow and in a clear, confident, conversational tone said to Claude, “You're a cunt.” The c word slipped easily from his lips; it carried no emphasis or emotion, just a statement of fact.

The puppet parped its horn in protest. “And you can shut the fuck up before I drag you out from under that desk and kick your teeth in,” Gav barked at it. The puppet disappeared beneath the desk.

Having used the wig he snatched from Landon London’s head to roughly smear the greasepaint from his face, Gav presented a ghastly apparition to the carefully painted faces of the crowd.

Resuming his address to Claude, he continued, “You're a cunt, but you're right; these sad fucks”—he indicated the clowns—“are as funny as infant deaths. I'm thirty-two years old, and no clown has ever made me laugh.”

The audience was notably quiet.

“Look at yourselves! You are ridiculous! You're delusional. You tell yourselves you're special, something different, but from where I'm standing, you all look the same. You've got one job, just one fucking job: to make people laugh, but the truth is you're all fucking shit at it! Call yourselves professionals? Don't make me laugh. Oh no, I forgot, you can't, can you?”

The sound of Claude clapping distracted him. “Bravo English! But when are you going to be funny?”

“I'm not even English, you retarded, mangy little prick; I'm Welsh.”

“Kif-kif,” said Claude. “Same difference. I remind you that the jury has to choose between two verdicts: funny or not funny. Time is running out for you English.”

“You want me to play your pathetic little game, buffoon? It's not happening. I'm not sinking to your level. I'd rather die as myself than live as a performing monkey like you!” As he said the words, he knew he'd lost on his own terms.

“C'est la vie... ou son contraire,” said Claude with his characteristic shrug. “The defence rests, your honour.” He bowed to the bench and gave a sly sideways wink at Gav.

The flower-child gave the judge’s summing up, which consisted of a made-up-on-the-spot song about an elephant with a bad cold. The final line, “How do you find, funny or not funny?” was tunelessly delivered and directed at the dozen Asian jurors.

No more than half a dozen words were spoken in the deliberation. The man with the tattoos looked down the row of his fellow jurors, who were all nodding in agreement. He stood up, “Not—.” The crowd erupted.

Clowns spilled down the tiered seating like a cataract. Jostling and yelling, whooping and elbowing each other to get to Gav. A hundred hands seized all parts of his body simultaneously. He was hoisted overhead and carried unceremoniously up the spiral staircase that climbed the tower wall.

As they dragged him towards the gallows, Gav noticed Jambo climbing down from the structure. A hinged platform jutted out over the sheer drop beneath the rope. Gav was prodded on to the narrow deck, and the noose tightened around his neck.

“Any last words, English?” shouted Claude above the excited hubbub.

“Fuck you!” mouthed Gav as the platform supporting him disappeared. He watched as the faces of the jury flew upwards rapidly, followed by the cliff's edge. The terrifying acceleration of free fall, the anticipation of the violent, neck-breaking tug of the rope, but it never came. Instead the rope gradually tightened, exerting a soft resistance to his fall, which slowed at its gentle pull.

As he gradually stopped descending, the rope bungied him back upwards. At the apex of his ascent, he got a close look at the crowd and the jury. They were laughing—all of them, uncontrollably, cheering gleefully and wiping tears from their eyes.

As Gav began another descent, the man with the tattoos said something to the flower-child who nodded in agreement, but by the time they'd pulled him up, Gav had either suffocated or died of shame.

“Kif-kif,” said the monkey.