great british carnival (2 of 2)

9

Of considerable appeal to the mainstream chocolate-eating working classes, Them Living Bars! were a troupe of but four blokes, though were perhaps the single biggest draw beneath the canvas: Brits fucking love a freak, love gawping at them even more. The Human Selection Pack! The Sentient Multipack! These were straplines no one with guts could ignore. Like the freakshows of yore, these were limp folk with bona fide physical deformities and little else to them, and the conceit was they bore a vague physical resemblance to UK chocolate bars. Meet your favourite bar – it talks! There was “Caramac” Cunninghayme, so called because of his waxen epidermal hue, because of the yellowish pigmentation to the skin and conjunctival membranes, riddled as he was with a jaundice he hadn’t shifted since infancy; in a red suit fringed in yellow detailing he was amongst the most resplendent living representations of confectionary the UK carnival culture had produced. There was Krist “The Picnic”, who was studded with a near body-full of prominent cysts, abscesses and swellings that gave him the kind of lumpy appearance associated with the peanut and raisin interior of the eponymous bar; he was tattooed, quite badly, with the slogan Deliciously Ugly, the text squeezed onto odd patches of flat skin across the middle of his back, in homage to advertising. There was The Milkybar Bloke, so-called because of his lifeless blonde thatch and his remarkable (i.e. excessive) ejaculations, that poured from him in cupfuls like guilty revelations; despite his ejaculatory plenitude he’d failed to make it in the adult industry due to an ironically insubstantial genital, and so settled for a custom made cowboy suit with a glory hole carefully seamed in the crotch for the public emission of his pun-rich showstopper, “the Milkybars are on – in! out of! – me!”, for circular plastic (non-corrective) glasses and Parson Grünther’s Fenland roadshow. Then there was Mick Twix, the poor prick who only had two fingers across two hands, a birth defect, a life defect, who fumbled his way through excruciating audience greetings and handshakes but was unable to do a great deal else (although word-for-word his typing speed was excellent and – despite obvious physical limitations – his typing technique identical to the majority of home computer users of his generation). Their performance was in itself minimal, consisting mostly of the four Living Bars inciting the audience into communally remembering the pertinent confectionary product of their respective naming (to wit: “Remember the Caramac do you? I present – fuck, I am – ‘Caramac’ Cunninghayme, ladies and gentleman! Coloured like a Caramac!” &c.), but they went wild for it. Thing is, no one ever forgets a decent bit of confectionary, or the companionship that lies within their familiar wrappings, and there’s nothing like mass memory amongst the nostalgia hungry post-30s. So while there might be short interludes in which Them Living Bars would ‘perform’ their disabilities (“Caramac” expressing the sheer and intimate scale of his jaundice; “The Picnic” squeezing whole-handed at primed abscesses shooting for the kind of rich pus gush people searched the internet for; The Milkybar Bloke popping off, left spent and sodden in his own white sauce; Mick Twix pouring burning liquid caramel over his two fingers in horrible tears, etc.) the performance didn’t demand it. The performance had a momentum and grace and life of its own.

10

Johnny Winchester was a high-functioning sodomite, his recorded intro assured the baying gathered. “A life lived as normally as yours or yours, or yours, even yours, of theirs, or anyone’s, a normal life lived within normal parameters and maintained to accepted social standards. Except for one monstrously abnormal proclivity! A proclivity of devastating deviance! A proclivity toward genito-anal insertions of a sexual nature!” The horror! The gagging gathered! The canvas of the medium top puckered loudly inward with the intake of breath like turbulent hyperventilation. Could such a thing as a high-functioning sodomite really be possible? A job, a car, musical preferences, culinary appetite? How could any one of these normalities be commensurate with deliberate buggery? It was insane, madness, terrifying. You could be a sodomite! Shit, I could! THE CARNIVAL WAS – IS – AN EDUCATION! Opening (some) eyes to possible truths! “All! We present – not proudly but obligingly, a presentation – as it is – of national import, a stark warning, a moral defence against the possible – we present: Johnny Winchester and his incredible buckshot rectum!” The insertions, the impressions, the versatility, the trick shots, the accommodations, the putting, the slam dunks, the respirations, the standard functions, the adaptations, all were remarkable and all part of his extensive floor show. On one occasion a teenager was blinded by an ornate glass marble blasted out from Winchester’s own anus but no one, least of all the teenager, his family, or the gathered crowd, had objected, as the trajectory had been so masterfully controlled, its curves and angles so precise that pain or righteousness soon fell prey to awe at the miracle of the human form. The rectum curdled sordid in prep of what.

11

Pietro was Grünther’s acolyte. He had, they said, all of them, the head of an apostle, although its meaning was unclear. Pietro: head of an apostle. He carried texts and prepared areas and performed duties without conversation. They sang turnaround small eyes to his passing frame, though his eyes were black as a crows and not small. The terrible blackness of his eyes feasted on their observable dimensions, their size devoured by the vacuum of their own terrible dark. Black bastard eyes, they said as men scarred. They said much of Pietro. His closeness to Grünther aroused suspicion. His corvid resemblance spoke of great evils. He was a quiet man.

12

Vestments shed, Grünther’s skin flexed and rippled in the half-dark. A carnival raged inside him. He felt the birds within.