Getting Used to It

After that, the adjustments commenced. By chemical means his skin was lightened in phases, until its whiteness was as chalk; his once thin lips were inflated, puckered, reddened, as if stung by hornets, and his smile widened by scalpel and repaired with paper sutures that dissolved back into his cheeks. Under heavy sedation his larynx was modified until his voice reached a pitch known to draw laughter. His thinning hair was shaved to the skull and a frizzy bloom of bright blue curls was stitched into his scalp. Bones were shaved, and joints subtly altered, in his right leg and at his hip and pelvis so that his gait became a merry roll, the left leg a little longer than the right, each step propelling him forward with a jolt of pain that could be seen in his eyes but not the muscles of his face.

The man no longer named Cade never saw the surgeons who worked on him, only the nurses – brisk and unspeaking – who staffed the prison-hospital, easing him under and then, later, welcoming him back. After a time he began to wonder if the nurses were human: in the blank machinic efficiency of their movements they seemed anything but. Afterwards, he would never be sure if he had been in a hospital in a prison or a prison in a hospital, or if the difference even made a difference. Before long such questions would belong to what might have been someone else’s life.

Out of surgery, the new clown was dressed – seemingly at random, in a room stuffed to its narrow, high windows with disarrayed costumes – in multicolored pantaloons, an over-sized white shirt, and red bow tie, and his feet shod in curling bright green shoes as long as his arm. Dispatched from that grey institution, a mismatched bray of colour on an overcast morning that someone, he wasn’t sure who, had told him was a Tuesday, he wandered back into a town he no longer recognised as home.

Of course his housing situation had changed. He could no longer make the rent on his flat, a one-bed attic in a Georgian townhouse – issues with rent, specifically the payment thereof, had been a part of the problem in the first place – and in the absence of private accommodation he was condemned to sleep in a yellow car alongside twenty-one others consigned to the same fate. The space was tight and there was always some noise going off – a horn or trumpet, a squeak or honk or maudlin wordless song, the spray of forced laughter or the weeping of a child sentenced as an adult to lifetime harlequinade – but, the clown told himself, he would get used to it.

The man no longer called Cade could get used to anything – that was his view. He had chosen to see the upside, the silver lining, the opportunity in the disaster he had made of his life. But it wouldn’t be easy: he had been debanked, barred from employment, rendered invisible to the automatic doors of supermarkets, made to clown for his supper, to dance and sing, that he might glean a little loose change from a public already grown tired of clowns.

The clown gazed up at the building, its cream frontage made golden by the setting sun, and felt a swell of emotions he did not have the vocabulary to name. A man was standing with his back to a second-storey window. As if he could feel the weight of the clown’s gaze pressing on his neck, he turned around, then stepped to the window with his hands cupped around his eyes, peering down into the street. After a pause, the man started to laugh. With some effort, he lifted the sash. His laughter was terrible, uproarious, full of savage disbelief.

Cade! the landlord called.

Or was it the son of the landlord? The clown who had once been called Cade didn’t know. He wasn’t sure who ‘Cade’ was, but he knew full well that the man meant him: the fellow was, after all, pointing at him.

Cade! Dance for me, Cade. Dance!

Unwittingly, the clown began to tap his foot.

Jack was okay. That was what mattered. I told myself: Jack is okay – that is what matters. That’s what I’ll focus on.

But my focus drifts.

We didn’t watch much TV in those days – there was never the time, or never the right time – but on the few occasions I turned it on, I saw them there, too, staring out from the screen. Once, when Sally was napping Jack, or trying to nap him, I put it on low, for company, I suppose, as I tidied the house, and I felt the hairs on the back of my neck prickle up, and there he was when I turned around, eyes following me across the living room.

I switched the television off and told myself I needed to rest. Nap when he naps, everyone said. And Jack was napping.

So I lay on the sofa, closed my eyes, then immediately shimmied round onto my side and pulled my phone from my pocket, and there in the stream of content swam their faces.

(By the entrance to Prince Regent’s Swimming Pool. By the toilet in the Basketmakers’ Arms. In the stairwell of our building. In the car park seen from our window. On the beach down from the Bandstand, tended by the lapping of the waves. In the grass at Devil’s Dyke. By the public toilet in Hove Park. On the back seat of the top deck of the number 49 bus on Western Road. In one corner of our bedroom, just beneath the ceiling. On top of one of the driers in the laundrette. In the basket of a bicycle as someone cycled past me down Trafalgar Street.)

Yesterday, bouncing Jack on my lap, enjoying the bright delightful whoop of his laughter, I saw them reflected in his eyes. Behind me, behind the sofa, against the living room wall. I turned at once, suddenly cold in my bones, in my gut, but of course there was nothing there. There never is.

And Jack was still laughing. It’s the most joyous thing. I bounced him up again, up again. You can get used to this, I told myself. You can get used to anything.

Jack, happy and unknowing, continued to laugh.