Send In The Clowns

My desk is positioned across a bay window which looks out on the street. The segment left by the square and the curve will be full of dead flies, powdered moths and shredded dust, because I haven’t pulled it out in a while. I could hire a cleaner, but I have never enjoyed the idea of a woman on her knees before me.

I shall live with the dust I cannot see. After all, beyond that which blows in through the open windows, the most of it is all mine.

I was a published author before I lost my right leg to vascular degeneration. It irritates me that it wasn’t caused by a louche lifestyle but a car accident that was all my fault. I held onto my limb, in intense pain, for as long as I could until they eventually told me that it was time to ‘whip it off,’ as they jovially put it. I also have a heart condition, due entirely - again - to my poor driving skills. When you suffer multiple bone breakages, your unqualified brain sends a signal to the body that it must produce more calcium. It’s understandable, almost clever, but a side-effect is that it furs your arteries, like limescale in a kettle. Or to abuse another metaphor, my heart is like a healthy foetus entombed in a diseased womb. Tick tock.

The brain is like a parent. It means well, but it knows fuck all. It just does what it thinks is best.

After the amputation, my self-induced purdah made the process of writing more difficult than before, when I was whole. My publisher had largely given up on me, so, cynically, I wrote poems and sent them off to competitions under a pseudonym. I can only assume they were bad, as most poetry is. It’s submitted on a whim and judged on a whimsy. In fact, the only truly breathtaking poem I have ever read is ‘All The World’s a Stage,’ by Shakespeare. It’s so damned good that the poets don’t like to call it a poem, but dismiss it as a ‘speech’, which tells you all you need to know.

So distracted, I spent much of that barren time looking at my neighbours across the street. Because their bay windows faced my own equivalents, they became my proscenium arch - their main living room and their master bedroom providing an element of vicarious entertainment to my difficult days. They rarely closed the curtains, and so I observed the danse macabre, as she pirouetted in the glory of her brilliant celebrity, and he silently watched the show, much like myself. She was the lead cellist in the London Philharmonic, an occupation which requires otherwise elegant women to open their legs wide and gurn at the audience. If Jaqueline du Pré had never existed, Claudia might have been a household name - at least in those households that talk about cellos. She was a parody, of course, a send-up of a type, who wears greasepaint and layers of perfume so liberally applied it ends up smelling cheap. Her hair was dyed a brilliant red which perfectly matched her lipstick. She was stick-thin and had a pronounced bone structure which marked her out as handsome rather than beautiful. She didn’t walk but glide, and all her kisses went airborne.

They partied. A lot. Or rather, she did. He just mixed the cocktails and smiled thinly at the grazing fawns. I’ve no idea what he did for a living, but it would have been something rooted and solid, like banking or insurance. It was all stylish and low-key. They didn’t spill out on the lawn and shriek at the peacock dawn, but I often heard the plangent notes of her instrument, which must have been requested by her adoring, invited audience as a codicil to their canapés. So unequal did their marriage seem, I found myself waiting for her to play You Are The Wind Beneath My Wings while he suffered the backslaps of her intimate crowd. Good man, Johnnie, don’t know how you put up with her …!

(Indulgent chuckles).

She had a spare cello which I kept in an empty room. She said they didn’t have the space, and would you mind, darling? I still have it, in fact. Sometimes it catches me by surprise when I go to the bathroom in the night, when a fleeting, nocturnal panic convinces me that a legless, pear-shaped man with an implausibly long neck has broken into my house.

They lived opposite me for a long time, before and after my accident and the aftermath. I always had a little crush on Johnny, although we never spoke. Claudia never visited my home in any social context, except on occasions when she would come to tune her second cello. My missing leg was clearly an affront, and the void was never mentioned. She would demand tea, as I recall, but I never made it. Fuck her.

And then, once upon a grim time, when I was writing a poem called Everything’s a Fabergé Egg With You, I heard something smash outside. The sound a crystal glass might make if it hits the windscreen of a car. And Johnny was at the wheel of that car with his face wearing a look of quiet resolve. He didn’t raise an eyebrow, but slipped into gear and drove sedately away. There was an air of permanence about it.

Claudia’s reaction was hard to describe. She looked down at her empty hand and went inside to refill another glass. There was a galactic silence, one which precedes a meteor strike. I found myself holding my breath. And then she returned to the garden and began stroking a rusting Camellia, swaying to some internal symphony. Wouldn’t you just DIE without Mahler …?

I buckled on my prosthetic, took my cane, and crossed the empty suburban street. Claudia was really stewed, and I’m not judging, but it was ten in the morning. Maybe she’d been up all night, having it out with the wind beneath her wings, who’d clearly decided that living in a permanent draught was not for him. And as she caught sight of me, she started gabbling like my mother used to do when the pressure cooker was going off. Blind panic, starting off slowly and getting louder and louder until myself or my brother, (in bike helmets), turned it off at the mains.

She started to scream, and babies began crying and dogs began barking and all I was really thinking, as I composed my face into a sympathetic set, was that she bloody deserved it - whatever it was.

I led her back into the house, where she swallowed too many tablets chased down with gin. My writer’s mind, capable of detachment, wondered how many times she had done this before. Your classic drama queen, who was so practiced in making herself vomit in the downstairs toilet that it was all over and done with in a moment. I noticed that when she returned, she had reapplied her lipstick.

I felt no compunction at all to offer practical advice or comfort, and that’s not as hard-hearted as it sounds. I just have a rude disrespect for the performative arts.

I don’t doubt that Claudia went through the mill when Johnny left her. She moved away shortly afterwards, and I don’t know where she plays the cello these days, but it’s not at the Philharmonic. Twenty years they’d been together, second marriages for both of them, and she didn’t bounce back like I thought she would. I keep in touch occasionally, and in the background there is always human hubbub. It sounds courser and less respectful than in previous times, like she’s in a rough bar by the sea. Like she’s paying for the drinks.

She can’t bear to be alone. That’s the diagnosis. All her life she has courted company, never once considering that if she missed a beat, the crowd would leave. Never once thinking about Johnny and the life-giving sap of his tolerance. Never once realising that to suffer loneliness is a misery but to make peace with it is a strength. It is not for the faint-hearted - which in my case is ironic.

My brain has imposed a death sentence on me. Claudia’s brain felt an empty space that the ringmaster had once occupied. It saw that the audience was getting restless, and so it sent in the clowns.