I watched the child’s face like a man following a tense football match.
Go on kid, I willed at the five-year-old, ignoring the minor glimmer of guilt hovering at the edge of my consciousness as I framed the thought. Scream. Run away.
In the garden, separated from me by the kitchen window, the little boy’s confused and apprehensive expression began to give way to a tentative smile. I sighed, switching my gaze to look over at Tommy, my own four-year-old, also sitting cross-legged in the garden wearing his little paper party hat. Tommy was beaming jubilantly, practically bouncing up and down with excitement as the hideous creature in brilliant gold and garish red capered around in front of him.
A clown. A goddamn, honest-to-goodness clown. In my garden. Invited there at my own wife’s request to entertain my son and the random collection of similarly aged kids from the pre-school. Kids who were now sitting outside, enraptured by the bizarre spectacle of a grown man behaving like an insane, drunken child. It was all I could do to not shudder and look away, torn as I was between revulsion at the clown and the protective instinct it arose in me towards the kids.
It is a strange, primal hatred I have for clowns and not something easily explained. I’d tried on many occasions to discuss it with Sonya, but she’d almost always given me that ‘I’m indulging you now but storing this up for future reference’ look. Many times I had imagined myself on trial for the accidental murder of a brightly coloured lunatic who’d made the mistake of jumping out at me, and seeing Sonya take the stand to repeat all the crazy explanations I’d tried to give over the years. I felt strongly that the only people who’d acquit me were similarly clown-hating members of the public, and some research had demonstrated to me that they only made up 4% percent of the population. Or at least only 4% admit it.
It even has a name. Coulrophobia. Fear of clowns.
To me, even before it all happened, it was all simply common sense. Or almost all.
Any grown man who considers it both a viable and rewarding path through life to dance and caper around children, dressed in playful colours and outlandish outfits, conveying expressions they don’t mean and emotions they don’t feel, surely has a screw loose. But that’s just a rational analysis.
Far more debilitating, far more primal, is the soul-chilling horror I feel at the mere sight of one. It’s a fear born of the deepest and most common human instinct; the fear of the unknown. And not the distant unknown, like the fear of death or disease or even terrorism. The fear of an unknown that takes care to hide itself, that purposefully outfits itself in distracting dizzying colour and hops and twirls towards the beholder, its every effort bent on winning the confidence of those whom it approaches for some dread purpose known only to itself…
That’s the stuff of nightmares. A being whose intentions are concealed beneath an impenetrable disguise, but which tries its utmost to be appealing. A being given licence to glide through society beneath a mask of congeniality, its true nature shrouded beneath garish costume, free to approach the innocent at will and dazzle them to some unknown end.
I took a sip of my tea. It was cold, the liquid having long since stopped steaming as I had stood there watching the clown entertaining my child, and those of seven other trusting sets of parents, through the window. I chuckled to myself, shaking my head at my attempts to put a reasoned spin on what was in the end an emotional, baseless dislike.
I reasoned that I didn’t really have coulrophobia. I’m not afraid of them necessarily. I just hate them on a deep, primal level. Seeing one is like a huge spider suddenly landing on my shoulder; like any right-thinking person I’d jump and possibly scream. It doesn’t mean I’m afraid of spiders, only that I find their presence spine-chillingly unpleasant, especially when unexpected.
I turned and placed the cup down, thinking idly of Miss Moffet. She of the curds and whey fame. She probably detested clowns too. Perhaps she was sitting on a tuffet having left a birthday party like the one outside my window, where no doubt some gibbering fool was pirouetting around dressed in motley or whatever old-timey clowns did. And then to cap it all the damn spider ruined her afternoon.
Of course, she could have squashed a spider without doing life in prison. Not so the clown in the garden. More was the pity.
‘Hi honey,’ Sonya called from within the house, just before the door slammed. I hadn’t even heard it open, so lost had I been in my musings. She came bustling into the kitchen from the hall, setting down a heavy sounding plastic bag and rustling around in it with a sigh. Grateful to have something to look at besides the grotesquely capering clown I reached for a can of tomatoes.
‘How’s the party?’ Sonya asked with a wry smile, as I balanced the can on the three others already sitting in the overhead cupboard.
‘Did we need more tomatoes?’ I asked, eying the growing stash. She ignored me, handing me a packet of spaghetti. I wedged it behind some potatoes.
‘It’s ok,’ I said, in response to her question. ‘Really hate that clown though.’
She gave me a glowing smile and rubbed my back before returning to piling up groceries we didn’t need on top of those we hadn’t used.
‘I think you’ve done very well,’ she said with mock-seriousness, her head inside the lower cabinets. The clang of pans being moved punctuated her muffled curses as she searched for somewhere to hide the three-pack of tuna she’d bought.
I turned to glare at the clown. It was now making shapes out of balloons, its bright blue hair flapping in the light breeze. It happened to glance at the house, and I hastily looked away, as though the thing could see right into me with its red-painted eyes.
‘Considering you’re so terrified of them I’m impressed,’ Sonya said, finally extricating herself from the cupboard. She gave me a grin as she started loading up the freezer.
‘I’m not terrified of them. I hate them.’
‘You are. You scream when you see them on TV.’
‘That was an insurance advert! It had nothing to do with clowns. I wasn’t expecting it.’
She giggled to herself, shoving a pack of frozen sausages between two bags of chopped onions.
‘Frozen onions?’ I said flatly. ‘We have knives you know.’
‘Ooo don’t let the clown know that,’ she said, not glancing up, ‘I hear they’re deadly with a blade.’
‘Shut up,’ I muttered, looking outside again. The clown had a bright white face, red smudges around the eyes and was now smiling a garish, horribly exaggerated blue smile. It looked like a child’s painting of a happy face come nightmarishly to life. The billowing, golden outfit rippled in the breeze as it twisted the balloons, wrapping them around its gloved hands with an unseemly frenetic jubilance. All around it, the children stared up in wide-eyed hope of receiving a balloon. So innocent, so trusting. The clown glanced up, and I could have sworn it grinned at me. I looked away.
‘Why do you hate them so much anyway?’ Sonya asked, shaking me from my increasingly creeped-out staring. I looked round. She was sitting by the freezer, having apparently decided it was jammed too full for the fish fingers she was holding.
I sighed and looked into my teacup, at the ice-cold liquid sloshing about inside.
‘I don’t know. I remember the first time I saw a clown though, and I hated it pretty much on sight. I was about five, six maybe. I was in the department store near where we lived, with my mum and my brother. He would have been two or three I suppose and I was meant to be watching him for mum. Thinking about it this is probably all her fault.’ I laughed, lost in the memory.
Outside, the children laughed. So did the clown. It was a deep, raucous laugh. The sort of laugh you expect from a shaven headed man in the pub, not a bouncing children’s entertainer. I shuddered.
‘Anyway he wandered off, so I went to find him. I was scared of course, because I was six. I saw him on an escalator, which I remember thinking was huge. A massive, moving staircase going up into the sky. I was definitely scared of that. I remember looking up, watching him disappear, and then he was gone.’
‘So how come you don’t have a fear of escalators then?’ Sonya chuckled. I gasped in mock-outrage.
‘Are you making light of my debilitating personal tragedies?’
‘No, no heaven forfend. Please do continue.’
‘Right,’ I said in my best indignant tone, ‘well some lady in a black dress with white spots appeared out of nowhere and picked me up. She carried me up the escalator – and this is why I hate your mother’s spotty dress by the way –’
‘Sure it is.’
‘–and there he was.’
‘A clown?’
‘My brother. Watching a clown.’
‘How shocking.’
‘It was!’
She stood up, grabbing a bottle of white wine from the fridge and making her way over to where I stood. She reached behind me and opened the overhead cupboard; I just managed to avoid being smacked on the back of the head by squirming out of the way.
‘So this is your traumatic story? That you found your brother watching a clown once?’ She took out two glasses and started to pour the wine, glancing out at the clown who was now dancing in a faintly disturbing way, as though his limbs were nerveless appendages flapping around his body. She frowned.
‘I admit they are creepy,’ she said, taking a sip of wine.
‘Thank you.’ I picked my own up and gulped a large swig, looking pointedly away from the window.
‘It wasn’t that he was watching a clown,’ I added, somewhat defensively, ‘it was that he had wandered away to watch one. Up an escalator that even I found scary at the age of six.’
‘You said five.’
‘Whatever.’
She turned to face me, grinning that gently-mocking grin of hers.
‘So you’re saying you’re scared of clowns, because they make you feel like a scaredy-cat big brother frightened of escalators.’
‘Shut up.’
‘Aw sorry honey,’ she said in a syrupy voice, enveloping me in a hug which did not conceal the laughter she was ineffectually suppressing.
‘Still,’ she said, standing back and raising her glass in a short salute, ‘I am impressed with you for conquering your fears.’
‘Hardly,’ I returned, taking another swig of wine and daring a glance out of the window. It was strangely silent out there. The clown seemed to be bending low, talking in a whisper perhaps. The kids were leaning forward intently. ‘I just about managed not to freak out when he appeared but I’m not sure that counts as brave.’
She smiled, looking outside again. The clown was leading the kids in a dance.
‘Where did you even find him?’ she asked, ‘is there a check-a-trade for clowns?’
I stared at her, feeling the blood drain from my face. Outside, the dancing children had passed beyond the view of the window, following the clown.
‘What?’ I said sharply.
She looked at me.
‘What?’ she said back.
‘Don’t joke with me,’ I said flatly, ‘that is not cool.’
‘Seriously what?’ she said, a note of fear entering her voice.
‘You didn’t hire him?!’
‘No I thought you did!’
‘Why the hell would I hire a clown?!’
Sonya was already moving, shouting for Tommy at the top of her lungs. The wine glass smashed to the ground behind her running feet.
Outside, the screaming started.