Clown by Bea Smith, piña colada

 

Jessie was confident and ready.
“You seem nervous”, said Jessie’s Dad, as her trembling hand spooned coffee granules into a tea-stained mug.
“Just be yourself and have fun.”
What was she, twelve?

As she walked to the station, Jessie realised she was very unwell, and she was going to throw up at any moment. She wouldn’t be able to go, she’d have to drop out and do it next year, if there was a next year, because she might be dying. As she started to cross the road a Lime bike whipped past, narrowly missing her, its Airpodded rider barely registering her latest brush with death.

She held a lump tightly at the back of her throat as she continued across the road, her eyes nervously jittering as she scanned for more danger, her new Doc Martens scraping a layer of skin off her heels with every step. She must not vomit on the tube. Might even get a few looks for that – other commuters, wrenching their eyes away from the hair regrowth ads to shoot some disgust in her general direction.

How she’d so longed to be part of the choreography of the quotidian 9 to 5. Now it was here, it was kind of gross. Alongside spillages of H&M-workwear-clad professionals, she boarded the train.

Four stops till she could get off. She was trying not to gag on the big ball blocking her oesophagus. Three. Such a lot of people in a tiny space. Two. She wished that old mole-y man would stop knuckling and kneading his groinal-region. One. Why’re so many people reading self-help books? Should she be reading a self-help book? As the train lurched to a halt, she picked her moment to stumble towards the doors, trying her best not to fall onto the groin-kneader-at-large.

It was (or would be, if she wasn’t dying of a mysterious illness) the first day of the rest of her life. Big day. She was going to clown school. By some fate written in the stars, the legendary Christine DeLoonay was over from Paris teaching a clowning course at RADA. Jessie’s Dad had sensibly agreed to invest through the £900 fee.

She’d tried other things. Temping hadn’t worked out because there was just too much phone-picking-up involved, which was pretty traumatic for Jessie, given her phobia.

“I can turn my hand to any task”, she’d explained on her first placement.
“You’ll basically just need to answer the phone,” replied the stone-faced office clone.
“I’m afraid I won’t be able to do that.”

After a bit of back and forth, Jessie was left alone at the reception desk with nothing but the phone, ringing, like a crying baby trapped in a tin can. She got her bag and left.

Then she tried waitressing at a posh restaurant, but it seemed that the ideal employee was a weightlifter with thick reptilian arms on which they could balance countless burning hot plates. Unfortunately, Jessie had the bones of a sparrow with a low pain threshold, and so the role wasn’t really suited to her abilities.

All she’d ever wanted to do was be a clown. Sometimes she looked at baby photos and wondered if she’d been preparing for it all her life. She wasn’t the class clown at school or anything. In fact, she could rarely control when people laughed at her. Sometimes they’d laugh at things she said and she couldn’t work out what was funny, and when she tried to be funny they’d just stare at her and then change the subject. She knew she was a clown though, deep down. There was just something in her that deeply wanted to harness that magic. And this passion, it needed to work, or she was out of options.

It all started at Sophie Monroe’s sixth birthday party. The matte orange curly hair, the colour of American cheese. The cherry-red plasticine smile, contorting and contracting like a water balloon. The wide eyes that made you feel the show was just for you. She wanted the clown to follow her wherever she went, like a colourful shadow. She wanted her there when she went to school and watching over her when she fell asleep. She wanted the clown to be her mum, her dad, her best friend and her own reflection. If this wild, delirious obsession could be pinned down with a word, it would be dream. That was the day it was born.

So there she was, on her way to Christine DeLoonay’s prestigious class. A chance to prove to herself, and the world, that this was what she was supposed to do.

DeLoonay was a master of mime. Her movements were so precise, it was like she existed in a plain of matter entirely separate from everyone else. In the air she saw objects, and in her performances, she brought them into the ordinary, so ordinary, world. A large white feather, tickling a man’s chin, or a step, tripping her up. Or shoelaces, neatly tied into a bow. Everything she saw, for a few moments, she let you see it, too. That was good, thought Jessie. Did she make that up? She should write it down anyway.

Off the tube at Euston Square, she walked weirdly along Gower Street, checking her map every second second. She felt ugly in the eyes of the West London commuters and the splendid Georgian houses. Her hair looked greasy, she should’ve washed it. And her top, tucked into her too-tight waistband, was all lumpy and uncomfortable. She wanted to unzip her skin and flop out of it like a pond creature.

She eventually came to the RADA entrance, awkwardly checked in at reception, and followed a young woman with blue hair along the corridor and into the lecture theatre marked CLOWN. She found a seat somewhere near the back. DeLoonay was already there, at the front of the room, like a morose, queenly giraffe, all dressed in black. She was elegant, pale and unimpressed by the gormless young people sat gawping at her. Her tight, simple clothes revealed large joints and a long, knobbly spine. She observed them one-by-one, grimacing.

Eventually, she spoke, her deep French voice like a crack of thunder.
“I was just five years old when entertaining saved my life.” Jessie scribbled this down in her notepad. “Ze Nazis, they adored my clown.” Silence fell.
“Art,” she meandered, “art is survival.” She paused, looking round the lecture theatre.
“Ç’est ca.”

Jessie was transfixed. She’d read about DeLoonay’s childhood growing up in the Warsaw ghetto. After DeLoonay’s father was killed, she was solicited by Nazis, who made her perform for them. It was true, art really was survival. But wasn’t clowning supposed to be funny?

DeLoonay stood sternly in silence, her mouth firmly closed as she continued to inspect every face in the brightly lit lecture theatre. Suddenly, she tipped her head to the side thoughtfully and raised her forefinger, as if something had just occurred to her. She walked slowly back towards the lectern and crouched down behind it, looking for something.

After what felt like forever, DeLoonay stood up, her hands out in front of her, holding a heavy, large, imaginary box. Carefully, she brought it round the front of the lectern where everyone could see it. She placed it carefully on the ground and Jessie swore she heard the click as it met the floorboards. Slowly, DeLoonay undid the invisible latch and raised the lid, and she took in its contents for a second or two. Then, fear spread across her face and suddenly, she began to scream. A primitive, hellish scream. Loud, so loud, that Jessie had to cover her ears as she processed what was happening. As she screamed, DeLoonay’s eyes followed some imaginary thing with horror as it rose out of the box and began swarming her, all around her head. Before Jessie, or anyone, knew what to do, the thing, whatever it was, retreated back into the box and DeLoonay lurched forward to clap it shut. She stopped screaming. Her face went blank and she closed her eyes, taking a sharp breath.

“When you open your box,” she said, before opening her eyes and looking directly at Jessie, “what do you see?”

Jessie’s heart shoulder-barged her ribs, trying to get the fuck out of there. She thought they would at least start slow, but this was intense. DeLoonay had just channelled, and in fact was always channelling, a lifetime of trauma through her art. Every expression, every movement, the difference between life and death. How could Jessie match up to that? And, perhaps more importantly, how would she ever get DeLoonay’s praise once she found out that Jessie wasn’t being driven by some deep, traumatic sadness? Jessie felt like a total failure already, and she couldn’t help but feel it was all her parents’ fault.

Thankfully, DeLoonay moved her gaze to a boy, no more than twenty-three, in the front row.
“You,” she demanded, “tell me.”
Jessie could see his ears turning red as he hesitated for a few moments.
“I…Uhhh…I suppose, well…” He paused. “My father. He left me when I was twelve. I’ve probably been trying to make myself worthy of his love ever since.”

Bastard got lucky with that one, thought Jessie. DeLoonay, satisfied, moved onto the young woman sitting a few rows back from the first boy. She knew exactly what to say.

“Well, I struggle with depression,” she said, self-righteously. “And I suppose performance and clowning gives me a way of escaping myself.”

What the actual fuck? Who were these tragic, poetic arseholes? Was it a crime to just want to put on some white face paint and act like an idiot? Desperately, Jessie’s mind wracked through her options, as DeLoonay’s pointing, knobbly finger edged closer and closer.

Jessie didn’t get into Cambridge – that was pretty devastating. She’d cried loads when that had happened, and her Mum said she definitely deserved to get in. Maybe it had made Jessie more driven to pursue greatness?

Or, one time, her year ten Physics teacher, Mr Povey, said her short skirt made her “look loose”. It was really degrading, actually. She hadn’t thought about it in a while but she was sure it had somehow probably played a part in shaping her into the underconfident woman she’d become.

But was it enough? It wasn’t even close to having an absent father or actual, real mental health problems. If she screwed this up, if she couldn’t earn DeLoonay’s respect, if she couldn’t make this work, it was over. She’d have to go back to her parents and tell them this wasn’t it. What would she do then? 

Fuck it, should she make something up? Surely it didn’t really matter. What mattered was the performance, the art itself, right? They hadn’t even got to that, and Jessie was kind-of-okay at mime. Perhaps inventing a story would be the most genius, method thing she could do. Like Bruce Springsteen, he was always singing about being a blue-collar worker, but her Dad told her that Bruce had never worked a day of hard labour in his life. She could never have imagined it would come to this, but could she do it, could she be like Bruce Springsteen?

After eeking some trauma out of a now-tearful young woman two seats away, DeLoonay, finally, turned to Jessie.

She was up.

About the Author:

Bea Smith is a writer and advertising copywriter from South London.