May Your Nose Be Red and Shiny

Look there Mama, there goes the good tramp, the happy tramp. See that red spotted handkerchief at the end of his stick? It is full of shit. I mean, actual human shit. But not tramp shit, not his shit. Clown shit. The shit of a clown.

Binko Constant, leaping between bushes, darting behind grey boxes of electrics and bits, follows his friend the tramp as he follows his calling toward the horizon, treading neatly the rotting wooden slats that sit between endless parallel lines. That is, following the railway line towards the horizon’s new sunset, as tramps often do. And yes, he is but a small silhouette against the dazzle of the sun. But what wood, out of interest, the sleepers? Ah, Teak, Cape Iron, Mahogany and Panga Panga.

This Binko Constant, better known as Binko the Clown, is a notorious shitter, the art of which he often incorporates – depending on the audience – into his act. A tent full of kiddies? No shit. A tent full of braying middle class city boys who may as well be at the dog track for all the fucking difference it makes? More shit than you can poke a stick at. (And for each of these city boys later, at home, a discovery of unlimited pocketfuls of shit that just keep on giving.)

As for magic shit. The gift from Binko to his friend the tramp is a handkerchief full of magic shit that, depending on how it is used, will protect him from danger and even, possibly, bring him a good degree of good fortune. It is Binko’s vanity that causes him to follow his friend, to see how the magic of his magic shit will pan out. And to be there for when the gratitude, the plaudits, and the expressions of undying love come his way.

But first.

Ah my wife, our boy has disgraced himself yet again with his disgusting toilet habits and pooping. Why the newspaper all over the floor? Why does he still refuse to take the toilet? Do I not pay good money for that toilet? Already six-years-old and he poops like a drunken pig. I should give him to the circus. But no, wait, don’t cry, I too love him. Together we will make him change. We will not abandon him or kill him as my father tells me to do. We will sort him fixed, I swear. We will sort him fixed and then once again we will hold our heads up in the street.

What Binko’s parents failed to spot was the sheer magic of their boy’s shit. Quickly flushing it away or screwing it up in newspapers, they didn’t see the small cities of wonder that sprang up in the sewers, on the beach, at the processing plants, or wherever Binko’s shit happened to land. Or how everything in those crumpled newspapers sprang to life: the advertisements, the stories, the cartoons, the editorials - each one of them taking on brief existences on small, unnoticed stages.

Binko, Binko, where yer gonna go-e-o? as his playmates used to shout, referencing Jim Reeves’ 1956 hit song, Bimbo. To which Binko would of course reply: I’m going down the road to see a little girl-e-o. Except he wasn’t doing that at all. He was going down the road, more often than not, to see a little shrink-e-o. Whose job it was to cure him of his extraneous shitting activity.

The short of it was: the magical properties of Binko’s shit soon became apparent to the psychiatrist who made false claims about the boy’s sanity in order to have him taken into care - whereupon the psychiatrist abducted him, faked his death, and took him on the road as the major attraction in his brother’s travelling freakshow. Surprisingly, Binko was treated very well by the psychiatrist which, naturally, led to the inevitable father and son type bond growing between them. But then, wouldn’t you know it, the psychiatrist’s crooked (as it turned out) brother snatched Binko away one night with the intention of selling him to a Russian circus. And while the psychiatrist arrived just in time to save the boy from the evil clutches of Ringmaster Rompiski, he met his own end at the hands of Lempulio, the circus strongman. Binko, now fully aware of his shit’s magical properties, restored the psychiatrist to life just long enough to tell him how much he loved him. And moments before the psychiatrist’s second, and final, death, Binko promised that he would return to his parents. Of course, it later transpired that Ringmaster Rompiski was, in fact, his father in disguise, while his mother was the bearded lady. Trapped by his promise to the psychiatrist, as well as by his understandably confused familial feelings, he eventually decided to stay with his parents’ circus and become – as he most certainly did – the greatest shitting clown the world has ever known.

And his friend, the tramp? He marches on, red spotted handkerchief dripping with shit. But what does he wonder, this pathetic old tramp? From where does he come?

The origins of the tramp, as a recognisable cultural force, are by no means contentious. They are, however, before we become too complacent, fraught with all manner of small difficulties. The most obvious arises when we consider the popular image of the tramp: the gentle, big-hearted, down on his luck loner who would never, for instance, stuff his hands down the pants of a twelve-year-old girl. Neither for him, this product of popular contemplation, the drugs, the blowjobs for drugs money, the violence, the alcoholism, the mental illness, the aggressive begging, the torture, the thieving, the animal abuse, the vandalism. But rather the helping hand to the damsel in distress, the befriending of crippled kids, the revelation that he is, in fact, the wealthy, handsome son of a ruthless industrialist who he, the tramp, has helped to uncover and expose. Our tramp, as it happens, is none of those things. Fade.

Cut to:

Park. Exterior. A beautiful summer’s day. It is full of people, all enjoying the sun: kids playing football, young couples strolling hand in hand, families taking picnics, old people feeding the pigeons etc. It is a postcard picture of a perfect day. This idyllic scene is suddenly disturbed by the appearance of a gang of around thirty clowns, all brandishing guns. The clowns quickly run through the park, terrorising people and demanding cash and valuables. Everyone, of course, is much too scared and much too sensible to do anything but what the clowns tell them to do - everyone, that is, except Big John Martin who, when approached by one of the clowns, simply pulls out a gun and shoots him in the head. The rest of the gang quickly rush over, firing their guns. Amazingly, Big John stands his ground, the bullets bouncing off him. He picks off the clowns one by one, smiling to himself every time they go down. In a matter of minutes, all of the clowns are dead. Cut to:

Park. Interior. Shed. Through the dusty window we can see the commotion in the park. People are running and screaming while Big John steps over the clowns and makes his way towards the gates. Moving into the foreground, and blocking the view through the window, shuffles a certain Charles Blakely. Admiring himself in the mirror, he adjusts his scuffed bowler hat, straightens his wilting yellow carnation, taps his cane against his right leg, lifts his feet one after the other, touches his tie and smiles.

CHARLES (to himself):
Perfect. Now I can truly call myself a tramp.

He lifts his hat to the mirror, winks and heads out of shot. We can tell, by the way the sunlight floods in and quickly disappears, that he has left the shed. We see him a few seconds later, through the dusty window, heading down towards the park gates, a spring in his step. Fade.

What happened was this: Binko was part of that clown gang but was there as a mole, an undercover agent. But, of course, he hadn’t reckoned on Big John Martin. Luckily for Binko, Big John’s bullets hadn’t reckoned on Binko’s magic shit which, oozing out of his arse as he lay there breathing his last, slowly began to restore him back to life. And because it was Binko that the shit was working its magic on, the life restoration thing - instead of being a fleeting shout - was permanent and fully effective. And as Binko lay there, slowly recovering, Charles (who had, as you may recall, just decided to become a tramp) lifted him up and carried him back to his shed. Over the course of the next few days, he helped to nurse Binko back to full health.

Firm friends then. With a whole cavalcade of crime-fighting adventures. The years pass.

Until the day came when Charles, too old and too tired, decided to give it all up and, at last, hit the open road. Just like a proper tramp. The indication to his good friend that this journey would be his last (i.e. I’m going off somewhere to die) was enough for Binko to press upon him the red spotted handkerchief full of magic shit. Because he knew – because he knew his friend well – that when it came to the actual business of facing death he would want to reach out for life. Even if it meant reaching out for a handful of shit.

Crumbs Into The Shallow

Consider the mass, the rise of his twelve daily checks. Consider, no, instead, his obsession with pornography, his pathological aversion to cigarette smoke, his whole checklist, in fact, of contrived oddities and singularities that he imagines mark him out, by some degree, as a man to be wholly reckoned with. Yet he’s the sort of fellow, as they say in those kinds of circles, who would happily let the spilt juice from a bowl of baked beans simply dry on his thigh. Rarefied circles, that is.

One of his dictums: How to avoid becoming the victim of a road rage attack. Don’t drive like a cunt. Don’t drive like a pussy.

You know, a dictum for victims. Or, rather, potential victims. Such as you and I.

Wait though. So there he is, moving in his circles, making certain names for himself, and he’s spreading himself so thin and so wide that there will, at the end of it all, be no such thing as the complete picture of him. You would have to press him together, slice by slice, to get the full measure of the man. Like a jigsaw puzzle, also. Or a brick by brick wall. A set of encyclopaedias, lined up in line, volume by volume, so we can dip into him from time to time, look him up etc.

To one group, then, he appears as something removed from the way he presents himself to another group. He is a man of many faces. He is a complex gathering of small mysteries tied up inside a bag of discarded magicians’ handkerchiefs. Stick your hand in and it’s a different selection every time.

Okay. So he’s a mass of this and that. Who isn’t?

Actually, he isn’t. Not really.

The flow of the river beneath the bridge was enough, at last, for his mother to decide to drop him into the warm rush that she hoped would carry her baby boy to a future she knew she couldn’t provide. Oh, the things she imagined. A doctor maybe, a footballer or a pop star, a writer, an architect, a saver of souls, a lawyer, a shopkeeper, a lover of women, a father to children, a man about town. But what would she have done had she known that he would become merely who he is now, with his pornography, his cigarette smoke aversion, the baked bean juice dry on his thigh? With nothing, that is, that could dress him up as the man she might have envisioned. Envisaged. She would, what, have snatched him from the water, cut him off at the next bridge? Or drowned him, body and soul?

Had she known that, caught in the bulrushes mere yards from his water entry, he was fished out, so to speak, by a kindly, elderly couple who took the boy in, raised him as their own, taught him the folky virtues of simple middle-class people, of piety and goodness and all that nauseating countryside villagey, churchy, bourgeois bullshit, she would, maybe, have hung on to him. But as it was, there he was, raised in the ways of the countryside and thus removed from anything that might have led to a development of character or personality. Which explains why the baked bean juice on his thigh makes it as one of the few things to say about him. There really is nothing much else to add. Except for the public school thing and how he, like so many others like him, confidently took a place at university that should, by rights, have gone to some smart working-class kid who could have, well. You know.

The Moses allusion, such as it is, is quietly apt. Because they love all that don’t they? The Old Testament stuff with the lessons delivered and the lessons learnt. Have a look down the country lane or in the church car park the next time a Sunday service is in session. You won’t see any horse-drawn jalopies or rusting pram wheels there. No sir. It’s the money that does it, the reward for their goodness. And gosh, they really do go for that whole richness of the soul bit.

Anyway.

So yes, he was brought up by Ma and Pa Kent out in the country somewhere, the shimmering fields of wheat, the setting yellow sun, the rhythm of the crickets. It was heaven on earth for a while, those distant planets be damned. Metal plates of piping hot beans burning circles into bare beshorted thighs. No wonder the juice, to cool them down. Ah, take him back. Take him back.

A Broom Against The Clouds

Except when he’s walking. Through the rain. Or through a whole (drunken) pit of validation: Hello, please love me. He is no different, he says, from all the other schmoes out there, all looking for love. He uses the word schmo, neither knowing nor caring whether his hearer is familiar with its meaning. What’s a smo? she asks, later, as they dance upon the balcony.

Too frequently these days he finds himself addressing the ceiling. Or talking to the walls. He would, as he often used to do, talk to himself through the mirror. But he can no longer stand to look at what insists on talking back.

And here. A terraced street in grey, black and white, a train somewhere in the background, a flick of chimney stacks, a cobbled street or two. You know. A wash, a smell, of obvious decay. Corners curled and picture frames cracked, the obligatory ticking clock on the mantelpiece, a collection of brass below. On the arm of the armchair, a mug of tea, and he leaning forward, fag in hand, cocking an ear to the radio which is, of course, speaking the shipping forecast. What, he cares about the ships now does he? He cares about the sea?

A crowd gathers as he lies on the ground, straddling the kerb and the road, somehow twisted within his bicycle. The driver of the car stays behind his wheel, gently shaking his head, weeping. The man trapped within his bicycle is, as it happens, the leader of the local Green party. He is known far and wide for his unswerving opposition to the motor car. Which is why, despite the pain, he is estimating the mileage he might be able to wring out of what could, in fact, turn out to be a very useful incident. Until, that is, he hears somebody say: That’s that twat from the Green party - I hope he dies.

He hangs around cemeteries sometimes. Especially in the summer. He steals the flowers and spray paints the grave stones. Today he has added the word ‘paedophile’ to George Trellis, loving father, grandfather and friend who fell asleep on January 23rd 1986 and who will be very greatly missed.

Religion had nothing to do with him. Had no part to play in him. It was an absence he was always glad of. But all of the other atheists seemed to have stories to tell about religion, of religious parents maybe, of spiritual inclinations, Sunday schools, church services, childhood fantasies. The point of these stories, of course, was to showcase the uniqueness and bravery of these now enlightened atheists who courageously stood up for themselves, finally saw the light, refused to be fooled any longer, took on those inner demons. He always said to them: But you shouldn’t have been there in the first place.

Somebody called for an ambulance. They pulled him up, laid him flat on the snooker table, cushioned his head with his jacket. He lay there for a while, oblivious to the panic around him, staring into the light, wondering why nobody could see to turn off the light. Did they want him to go blind as well?

Blake’s legacy, he started to say. But stopped when he saw the look of derision on her face. What? he asked. Nothing, she replied, quickly checking herself, removing that look from her face. Blake’s legacy, he repeated, is here for all of us to see, especially here, now, in the very streets of contemporary London. Is it? she said, is it really? Oh please, please tell me more.

Thick fog. Howls of some kind. Swirling thick fog. A distant tapping getting closer. He has been here, at the railway station, for well over an hour. He is waiting to be collected by his new employer, Lord Gaslight, international explorer and good vampire. His duties will include assisting in the making of a new television programme with the working title of: How I, a typical public school cretin, travelled the world many, many times and how, now that I am too old and enfeebled to travel any longer, want to spread the message that it’s not okay for you to travel the world in the same way, what with the damage to the environment that you and your fellow oiks would cause. At the same time, however, I also want you to marvel at all of the great things I did and saw.

His karaoke wife, notorious rule bender and fag hag, withdrew the few remaining scraps of their savings and treated herself to all of the things that women tend to treat themselves to. You know, a massage, a facial, bags of chocolate and make up, clothes, party hats, chips, peas, gravy, jewellery, flowers, fine wine, cheeses, vodka, orange juice, tonic, dildoes, pasta, tequila, herbs, spices, cookery books, dopey novels, crystals, spiritual thingies, mushrooms, cigarettes, bread makers, pepper grinders, handbags, carrier bags, candles, sea salts, bath salts, perfume, melting balls, lorry drivers, fortune cookies, blueprints, gargles, mouthwash, eventides and bowling balls. At the end of the day, with all of their money gone and all of her needs (as she called them) satisfied, she returned home to tell him what she’d done. Can you imagine how unhappy this made him? Can you not guess the levels of dismay to which this pretend wife drove him?

Wistful, past his old house, the top left window the site of activity that would now, now that he has become who he is, cause him a relative degree of shame and discomfort. But ah, he thinks, you can’t turn back the clock and who would want to, after all? Behind him, in the shadows, his old nemesis The Black Fog, chuckling, loudly enough for him to hear. The Red Streak, quickly off his toes, turns, rises slightly, and treads the cool night air.

His father, the cure for dyspepsia. A barrel of ice, a clatter of rusty saws and a touch from the mysteries of electricity. Blam.

His repertoire of boxing stories ran the whole gamut, from the few victories through to the many crushing defeats. His days in the navy, during the war, when he fought and beat the soon-to-be world champion. Leaving work at five-thirty on a Friday evening, travelling miles to make the seven o’clock bell and the promise of a five pound purse. The prison battles, plus earning a few guineas in the boxing booths, pretending to be a gyppo.

How many more times would he be forgotten, erased like the dead? The fact of his existence, here in the Blodent Field, was often taken for granted and he was required, like so many others before him, to will himself to life, to make the right noises, to be noticed and catalogued, to be much more than himself. For out here, where even the wind seeks to avoid you, there is no room for those that sink.

He moves in mysterious ways. Is what she often says to excuse him of the terrible behaviour that has caused unimaginable pain and anguish to at least four other girls. Women. And also, of course, to sprinkle upon him a kind of God-like quality that might offer an explanation as to why she continues to stay with, and excuse, this ridiculous little man.