Day 12

Channel 22

- OK, and now it's that part of the show where we ask our celebrity guest to tell us a story. So, Penny Velle, will you do the honours?

- I most certainly will, Vinzel. OK, this tale may or may not have concerned my grandmother, who may or may not have worked as a ring hand in the Beckettini Circus around the turn of the century. Bear in mind that I could have taken this straight from an out-of-copyright fairytale collection. Or yesterday's paper. But anyway.

The winters of other countries, unlike the citizens, make no allowances for foreign visitors. After a forty-pitch European tour, the purple and green tents of Beckttini's Circus Spectacularo found themselves hammered with much difficulty into frozen Baltic soil.

Being a small if vibrant circus, the cities were not an option for these particular twisters, leapers, bending girls, musclemen and tomato-cheeked acrobats. For now, the pitch was a small market town hammocked between two snow-scarfed mountains. Gas lights burned like magical guides as the hurrying ring-rakers busied themselves trying to prepare the Big Top for opening night.

Ahead of its time, Beckettini's was a rarity in its lack of animals. Insistent on an all-human show, the ringmaster held sway and oversaw the slavish work behind the smiling faces compensating for no tigers.

The circus hands, who had no doubt dreamt as children of running away with the circus, having top view of the tumblers every night and rolling about in stitches with the clowns till daybreak, were up every morning at 4am, checking guyropes, treble checking trapeze wires, pressing costumes and rattling miscellaneous supplies from pillar to post.

My grandmother was 16, and only a couple of years into the realities of circus life, when they found Mystique Magnifique's body, face down in her trailer.

Mystique was that essential part of the circus canon ' the pretty lady who rides the white ponies. White ponies that are named greys because of their black skin, hidden beneath the hair. Dressed in pink and white satin, with a face heavily made up to match, she was a miracle doll, flipping noiselessly from rising white back to falling white back, head feathers bending in the breeze, as the ponies (horses really, at a handsome 16hh apiece) circled her starting pink name-flashed podium on an invisible track. As her sparkles reached starwards, Mystique became herself a star, sailing through the air, brushing the nightsky canvas of the Big Top roof as she launched herself from tight-wound trampolines up, up and down onto a different unblinking steed every time. Smiling, smiling, waving, dropping every jaw like a drawbridge. At the end, a perfect dismount, a flick of the wrist and a neat, dolly bow. You could see her every night forever and never tire of her act.

Kiko never tired of it. Every night, before the other clowns came in, Kiko could be seen peeking round the entranceway curtain at the raspberries-and-cream marvel bounding with horse to horse. Sometimes, dreamily, a hand would wander up a white cheek to itch at the clay nose in its centre, in which case a sharp hiss would wake Kiko from daydreams and Becko, an older clown, would hurry his apprentice, utting, to make-up to touch up the smear before the troupe went on.

"Remember this! Becko would say, wide-eyed and deadly serious, to Kiko each time. "You are your face. As a clown, it is your fingerprint, your weapon, your tool. Behind your make-up, you can be screaming like an animal in a trap, ready to duel at dawn the following morning for your life, but the children need not know that when you caper, as long as the white stretches from here, - he smeared grease from the right cheekbone's summit to the left's ' "to here.

And with that, Kiko would be bundled into the ring, laughing and capering and falling over like a sparking clockwork dream, as Mystique Magnifique strode by, lost in another kind of dream, in which clowns were background entertainment, their make-up permanent, ever-bright and ever-smiling.

One night, after washing off the various gloops and goos the clowns had skittered about in, Kiko tacked together the various scraps of courage saved up from nights upon nights of desperately wanting to speak to the pony girl. The trailers reserved for the higher-billing acts were parked at the opposite end of the showground to the more rickety, flaking clowns' quarters, and Kiko made it only three steps towards Mystique's lodgings before running back into trailer 33 and standing, panting, against then back of the slammed door.

Kiko looked in the mirror. A small grey face stared back. How could she love that? MM was a creature of colour and shape.

Just then, a few stubs of face paint lying by the glass set Becko's voice playing in the young clown's head. Shivering, a tentative hand picked up the white stick, licked it and set to work.

An hour later and the transformation was complete. Before the glass stood a perfect stranger. The once-grey cheeks were now dazzling white. The intricacies of the make-up's design, however, did not belong to Kiko. Every clown's face was their own, never copied and never trademarked. It was a point of honour that clowns recognised the faces of others and kept a respectful distance.

Becko had designed Kiko's face when the young clown first began as his apprentice. A clay nose, painted blue, a blue cloud on each cheek, blue lips and tiny red raindrops here and there on the forehead, cheeks and chin.

Tonight, however, Kiko broke the code. With deft sweeps of the red and blue stick in alien directions, the apprentice became a master, donning the face of the greatest performer clownkind had ever known ' that Jove among jokers, the magnificent Fuzzo.

Standing there in Fuzzo's stolen face, Kiko tried to channel the confidence of the great clown, borrow the wisdom that only came forty years of merrymaking and horror.

A moment longer, then out into the snowy night.