He pulls open my costume at my waist while his other hand steadies the brimming bucket. I know what's coming, though my face has to say, 'Whatever's next?' as he looks around for encouragement. 'Dare me?' A wall of laughter cheers him on. Yet he doesn't do it. Instead, with a mime crude enough for the back row to take in, he grabs away my waistband for a second time - not just to my trousers but to my underpants, too. This isn't planned, yet the laughter redoubles. And then he pours the paste right down inside.


................................................................................................................................................


Colin rummaged in his duffel bag. Surely, somewhere, there was a pair of swimming trunks or Y-fronts that weren't wringing wet. He'd been here for most of the year now, and three weeks before the finish he'd at last come to realise that what mattered most each day was trying to stay clean, dry, and warm for as long as possible. That was pretty much all he was focusing on. As soon as the illuminations were over the show would close and his contract would end. Yet since the start of October the weather had turned wet and chilly - one rainstorm after another beetled off The Irish Sea, or sea-frets rolled into the town to penetrate an overcoat while you waited at a bus stop, and latterly Colin felt he was soaked through always, not just at his job, where it was sort of expected, but out of hours as well - and what had always been a hard engagement was becoming even harder.

'Hey, Collo'.

Paolo called into the dressing room from the corridor. He was already in costume for the first performance of the day. Turning, Colin's immediate vision was of Paolo's bulge jutting multi-faceted from his silver-white tights. Rumour was a local matron had written in to complain about its prominence, but young girls in the front seats would only ever titter behind cupped hands, so the management probably reckoned the display was good for business and never intervened. Besides, what were trapeze artists supposed to wear?

'You gonna do Olympia?'

'Don't think so,' Colin replied. 'Seppy hasn't said.'

Paolo lingered in the doorway, smacking chalk-dust off his hands, uncertain whether to commiserate. He and his two cousins performed their act bare-chested - indeed Paolo mostly wandered around backstage shirtless - so Colin had a few seconds to enjoy the sight of his taut physique and the symmetry of the obviously trimmed jet-black body hair that rose upwards in a spreading line from his grooved stomach to splay across his chest muscles. Later this day, the two of them would have a peculiar encounter in the shower, but for the present Paolo replied with 'Oh,' and sauntered off.

Yes, by early November Colin would be free to leave this town. But where then? And to do what?



Baths were available Tuesday and Friday evenings between six fifteen and a quarter to eight. Colin had explained to Mrs Chadwick when he first took the digs that this was when he'd be at his job, and would it be possible, please, to take his bath at another time, perhaps on his only day off? Mrs Chadwick had affected outrage. The very notion!

'No, Mr Spilman. I couldn't countenance it.'

The arrangement suited her other lodgers, and anthracite was costly. Did he really expect her to entail the expense of the boiler especially for him? And on a Sunday?

'But Mrs Chadwick,' he'd pleaded, '- Your bath times are when I'm working.'

'If you call chucking buckets of slop around work,' she'd shot back.

He'd retold this in the dressing room, complaining he'd never get a hot bath, but received no sympathy from Giuseppe.

'You not do slosh act in tent like me,' he said. 'See how you like zat. I work in tents forty years till I get job here. Tents, you come out ze ring, slosh on you all over, zey hose you down like ze elephants. It cold - too bad! No fire in caravan - nossing. Always you cold. Here, even zey has le docce. Is good.'

'What's ... uh, laydotchay?' Colin had asked.

'Shower, showers!' Biggy had butted in. He was perched up on a normal-sized chair and wriggling excitedly, '- Didn't you know that, Goofy? Italian for showers. Cor! What a great fat ignorant cunt you are.'

At this, Vince, peering into the mirror to apply whiteface carefully against the border of his Brylcreemed hair, gave out a snort of laughter.

'Si, si - showers,' Giuseppe had continued, ' Here we indoors nice, warm. Sgood.'

Colin had wanted then to point out that this was the only purpose-built, permanent circus building now operating in Britain; that its unique feature was a ring designed to flood for water spectaculars; and that only here was it possible for clowns like them to get wetter and colder than they ever would elsewhere. And it seemed the management had made sure they did.

Only a few days before the show opened during Easter week the producers realised they needed a fill-in to cover a scene change before the finale. They'd told Giuseppe that on top of their usual slapstick entree, he and his troupe must crazy around for several minutes and find comical ways of falling - fully-dressed - into the tank. Colin still recalled the frantic rehearsals that followed this dictate, as well as his feelings when he'd watched the ring flood for the first time.

The circular steel disk that formed the entire diameter of the ring's underfloor began to descend, and water bubbled up through tiny apertures in its surface. The process took around a minute, and as soon as the mechanism had stopped a body of water stood in the space where the circus ring had been, four feet six inches deep, quickly subsiding to a glassy, uninviting stillness. Giuseppe had noticed Colin peering apprehensively over the edge and had put a hand on his shoulder.

'I know,' Giuseppe had said, in a tone of resignation, '- but Producer Bernie say audience want see people splosh in water. Ozzerwise won't be happy.' He sighed. 'We ze poor ones gotta do it.'

The show's finale followed this extra routine they'd hastily devised, so it meant that afterwards all four of them had to spend the eternity of the curtain-call on the ring-apron waving bubbye to the audience in saturated costumes. Once they'd opened, their dressing room game was to repeat the best remarks they'd overheard from the front rows. Biggy could mimic a Lancashire grandma with eerie precision: 'Ooh, they'll catch their death, the poor noddies! They're proper witchett!'

But with the colder weather it was rare now that they'd peel off their sopping show-attire and not be shivering. Only Giuseppe - despite continual griping about bronchitis or chronic chest infections - seemed immune from the immediate effects of the dunkings they endured. It was as if his bulk, or a lifetime's intake of olive oil, had insulated him.

Sometimes Colin would observe the veteran clown after a show. While Colin and his two colleagues would pull on dry clothes as soon as they could, Giuseppe would still be standing there in just his swimming trunks, the ones he always seemed to wear beneath his costume, a black pair with white piping down the sides that rose an astonishing distance up towards his nipples, and which now of course were soaking, and he would unhurriedly shuttle the same frayed, dingy towel back and forth behind his shoulders, unselfconscious about either the unignorable presence of his vast arse, or conversely about the disproportionately tiny packet that budded beneath his massy belly. And Colin would look on with a mixture of respect and apprehension. He was impressed by Giuseppe's resilience, but wondered why a man of his age - over sixty, it was said - would still put himself through such treatment. Is that how he himself would end up as he neared retirement - earning his living by getting wet and cold?

Yes, only in this town could clowns do an act in a water-tank.

The four of them would wait for this second routine behind the curtain that drew across the entrance to the ring while Leo and Erik - stage name Les Caryatides - performed their slow-motion balancing act in gold body paint and sparkly briefs on a raised dais in the middle of the pool. Recently, when Colin heard the hiss and sprinkle of the encircling fountains that played throughout this turn he'd feel a mild dread. The chill of the corridor he stood in would set him shivering, since the top half of his costume consisted only of a stripy singlet, and then he couldn't stop himself counting-down to the moment when he'd be in that water there, in the all-enveloping cold, where Vince would be spitting mouthfuls into his face for extra laughs. Two minutes to go ... one minute ... ten seconds ... and then ...

... with the applause at its crest, and on the instant Leo and Erik, sweating, pushed past through the curtain, there'd be a bish on the cymbals, the band would pick up the clowns' jaunty intro, and the four of them would maniacally re-enter the auditorium.

They'd each be carrying some item of fishing tackle, or comedy prop versions of it: Giuseppe a folding stool; Vince a long fishing rod (whose line reached behind him with its hook pre-attached into the back of Biggy's shorts); Colin a tiny scooping net and an empty jam-jar on a string; while Biggy lugged an enormous box and also a net that was twice the size of his body.

Their routine began on the ring apron that now formed the edge of the pool. Each time Vince tugged on his fishing line Biggy leapt in the air; Giuseppe got into a muddle trying to open and sit down upon his too-small stool; and Colin lay on his front, pretending to fish with his tiny net.

Biggy would disentangle the fishing line from his shorts, but then gave the line a tug which would jerk Vince, almost pitching him into the tank. Enraged, Vince would chase Biggy around the ring apron, nearly catching up with him when they reached Colin lying on the ground. Biggy would pick up Colin's jam-jar and hurl the water it now contained at Vince's face. Vince would be halted briefly, but - acting even more angered - he'd resume the chase only to trip over Colin's legs, fall, and almost end up in the tank again. Though instead of continuing his pursuit of Biggy he'd turn back and take out his rage on Colin, and in a swift movement that always caught the audience by surprise, he'd lift Colin up at his ankles and shove him headfirst into the water.

The shock of it.

The water - how Colin was reminded of this at every show - wasn't heated. It was seawater. A leat led out from beneath the building, crossing under the Promenade to reach a valve below the low-tide mark.

No matter how many times he'd had it done previously, for Colin it still felt like an assault. One moment he was lying full out on his stomach, dry, and a second later his head would be beneath the surface as he turned a full somersault to flop onto his back into the tank, the all-penetrating cold stinging his naked arms, before spreading through his baggy costume trousers to nip at his balls. And all the while he was underwater he had to focus on preventing the comedy props in his trouser pockets from floating away. Even in the summer it was a shock when he took the first plunge, but in recent weeks the water had slipped back to the punishing temperature it had been when the show had opened at Easter, and once again it was all he could do not to gasp.

When he'd surface he'd hear the last of the Ha! Ha! Ha!s - adults' chuckles, kiddies' screams - but Colin's immediate job was to put on his comedy expression. He had to feign outrage, yet not in any way betray the actual discomfort he was feeling. Giuseppe had told him it would kill the comedy.

When they devised this extra act it was soon clear that Colin would be in the water first and stay in there the longest. Giuseppe never spelled it out, but he excused himself the worst of it on account of his age, and Biggy was spared too, in case the audience became disturbed to see a person of his size receiving prolonged mistreatment. Vince had craftily taken Giuseppe to one side and made up some story about a weak lung, thereby negotiating a shorter immersion. All of which meant Colin was in the water for around four minutes at every performance.

At first he'd clamber out of the tank, emerging with a large prop fish (made of rubber) that he'd kept hidden in his pocket. Vince would grab this and whack Colin in the stomach with it, sending him plunging into the water. Colin dragged himself out once more, producing a second rubber fish which Biggy took hold of, and then both he and Vince would take turns to wallop Colin with the fishes, culminating in a volley of slaps on Colin's bum that apparently propelled him back in the tank.

After this, every attempt Colin made to clamber from the water would be frustrated by some piece of comic business or other on the ring apron. Biggy would open the huge container he'd carried on and a giant prop worm would jack-in-the-box out and scare Colin into taking sanctuary underwater; Giuseppe would get entrapped inside Biggy's gargantuan net, and as the older man turned from side to side the net's handle behind him would whack Colin around the head. Together, Giuseppe and Vince would grab Biggy by his arms and ankles and swing him to and fro, making as if to hurl him over the edge ('Shall we?!), but instead would collide Biggy into Colin just as he was making a further attempt to get out.

Here, Colin was required to disappear beneath the surface, prompting Vince and Giuseppe to drop Biggy on the ground, and peer over the rim to investigate. Colin had to hold his breath underwater until Biggy had aimed a retaliatory kick at the tempting target of Vince's backside, and at this Vince would tumble in. Colin needed to time his moment for breaking the surface precisely until Vince was close enough to spit a mouthful of water into his face.

From that point it wasn't long till all four of them ended up in the tank. Biggy would take a flying leap at Giuseppe and be held by him in a back-to-front piggy-back, and all Giuseppe had to do was simply pitch the small man into the water, then laugh and point. Biggy's revenge was to clamber onto Colin's shoulders and lasso Giuseppe with a fishing line, yanking him into the tank too with a mighty splash.

This usually got a gasp from the audience, because despite his stick-on red nose and the dilapidation of his clothes, nobody expected the portly older man who'd tried so hard to look respectable in his black suit, white shirt and tie, and two-sizes-too-small bowler hat, to get completely wet through like the others.

One at a time, Giuseppe, Biggy, and Vince would then manage to clamber from the water and head out of the ring, but Colin would still be shaking water out of his trouser bottoms when his three colleagues would suddenly re-appear at a run, and in an echo of the finale of their earlier act with the paste, they'd each hurl the bucket of water they were carrying straight at Colin - Giuseppe's full-on from dead centre, then a split-second later, at exactly the same time, Biggy's and Vince's from three-quarters left and right - and Colin would act as if this deluge had the force to knock him off balance. (This wasn't far from the truth: three full buckets packed a real punch.) Windmilling his arms, he'd plunge in backwards.

His team-mates disappeared again, and then, just as he'd levered himself out to stand on the ring apron once more, he'd perform a double-take to register he'd lost his baggy trousers. And so, pinching his nose, he had to jump back into the tank to retrieve them. Out of the water finally, he'd hold the trousers daintily and swap them rapidly back and forth between his front and his backside, vainly trying to protect his modesty while he ran off to follow the others.

In the corridor behind the curtain at the finish of this scene the four of them would take their position amongst the rest of the company awaiting the farewell parade. There wasn't time to get back to their dressing room.

Colin would need to put his soaking trousers back on, but with the cold of the past few weeks he'd been leaving doing this till the last possible second before their cue to move forward. As a result, he'd be standing there in the semi-darkness in only his wet singlet and swimming trunks. And lately it seemed that Paolo would often find some excuse to break away from his position in the queue alongside his two cousins and come over to Colin to make some silly remark or other:

'See you got wet pants on,' or, 'You got soaked right through tonight,' -

- and sometimes he'd give Colin a playful little pinch or slap as he said these things, smiling, joshing, until his cousins - like Paolo, fine athletes with muscled torsos, also dressed only in silver tights - would be on the point of making their entrance -

'Venire, Paolo!'

'Paolo! Sbrigati! la nostra stecca!'

- and Paolo would have to trot to make his entrance with them in time.

By then it would be the last moment Colin could step into his clown's trousers and slip their gaudy braces over his shoulders. He'd feel the soaked material clinging coldly against his thighs, the same way his dripping singlet clamped to his chest, and he'd attempt to suppress his shivering for the upcoming re-entry to the ring. There were few other circuses anywhere, he'd think, where you'd have to go through this.

And yes, it was true, as Giuseppe had said, hot showers were available backstage, and the four clowns needed them after their earlier, main routine with the slosh - but there were only two showerheads, and for the same reasons that they spent the shortest time in the water-tank, Giuseppe and Biggy took precedence here, leaving Colin and Vince to wait their turn coated in gloop and getting cold. Plus the showers only dribbled. But Colin never said any of these things - Giuseppe was the Giuseppe of Giuseppe & Co., the face on the posters, his boss, and Colin was just one of the Co.



It could all just about have been okay, but the job encroached into everything. For instance, the to-do with the sheets.

'A word if you please, Mr Spilman.'

Mrs Chadwick had intercepted Colin on the stairs one morning once the show was running.

'I believe it's you turning my bed-linen yellow.'

Colin couldn't deny it. His skin was becoming indelibly stained by one of the colourings Giuseppe put in the slosh. Blotches in varying shades of ochre now covered him, resisting being scrubbed away in the shower but transferring all too easily onto shirts, sheets, and pyjamas.

One night, after the second show was down, he'd got lucky and made a pick-up under the North Pier. As soon as the man struck a match for his cigarette, he'd clocked the colour of Colin's forearms, growled, 'God Almighty - jaundice!', and stomped back up the beach.

Mrs Chadwick extracted a fortnightly surcharge of six shillings and sevenpence ha'penny to have Colin's bed-sheets boil-washed at the laundry.



The curtains didn't reach the sill. Below their thin material - whose once-cheery pattern of the Italian Riviera had bleached to monochrome - there was a gap of about five inches. Light would burgeon in Colin's room after dawn, and he'd lie in bed, stubbing cigarettes into a souvenir ashtray, trying to think of nothing.

The town's North station was only two streets away. Couplings would clank on the day's first departure, the driving wheels shrieking while stuttering, syncopated snorts of steam and smoke gained force with the engine's gaining speed, and then - the noise denying any chance of resuming sleep - Colin would picture riding on that train, escaping. Preston, Crewe: if the service connected with an express he could be in London by lunchtime; he could be anywhere.

He'd try to stop his mind racing. Or if he couldn't manage that he'd try to stop reflecting on what had brought him here, to this town, to this job. Or at least he'd try not to agonise over why Giuseppe hadn't mentioned Olympia. No, he no longer wanted to be a circus clown - he was certain of it. And despite the prestige of playing Olympia, he'd turn down the Christmas season in London. Definitely - he wouldn't go. But what had he done wrong that he hadn't been asked?

Holding back these thoughts was hard in the early morning half-world, and if he failed at staunching them, as the very minimum he'd try not to think of the day to come.

Saturdays were the worst. Too often, half-awake, his mind's image was of the primary-coloured bills that were pasted all over the town, splashed with a breezy announcement - 'plus extra matinee on Saturdays!' - and he'd recoil at what this advertisement meant for him: the prospect not just of two shows, as on the other days, but three, and a working period of twelve or thirteen hours stretching dauntingly ahead. It would mean unremitting labour: cleaning, rinsing, hauling buckets; mixing and re-mixing gloop; washing costumes; checking props; putting on make-up; taking it off; as well as the unequal effort to secure clothes that were clean and dry - all this on top of the performing. On a Saturday, Colin woke knowing that by the end of the day he would be soaked or messed-up six times over. He'd be hopping out of the circus ring in front of an audience on half a dozen occasions completely sodden with either water or gunge, his costume clinging to him, feeling sticky or wet right through to the skin.

'Mon to Fri at 4.45 & 7.45 - Sat at 1.45, 4.45, & 7.45'. The posters had the power out to haunt.



No matter how early Colin arrived at the circus building, Giuseppe would always have got there first and be complaining the others hadn't turned up. Today, briefly, Colin thought he'd beaten his boss - until he saw his raincoat over the back of his chair. Just moments after Paolo had sauntered away Giuseppe bustled into the dressing room.

'Where zat Biggy? Where Vince? Say, Coleen, you see Vince?'

'No, Seppy. Not yet.'

For the second of at least thirteen times this day, Colin was changing clothes - for now out of his ordinary clothes into overalls. The dressing room the four of them shared was a scene of disarray. Drying costumes spread across every available surface. Zany trousers, luridly patterned jackets and titchy vests hung damply from water-pipes or from coat hangers that had been suspended in ingenious ways. A clothes-line - improvised out of cabling and sagging forlornly - stretched diagonally just above head-height: even the light fitting was festooned with dank garb. Socks lay on the floor where they'd been dropped after the previous night's show, a rickety clothes-horse leaned over under the weight of wet aertex Y-fronts, struts on the chair-backs were strung with clammy swimming trunks, and a couple of vests were looped over the handle of the mangle that took up much of one corner. Beneath the washbasin was a zinc bath brim-full with a fetid marinade of cold soapy water and some costume or other. The room smelled of wet plimsolls and mould. Colin hadn't yet mustered energy: he crumpled at the prospect of sorting out his stuff from this midden.

'Uh, Seppy, it's not yet half-eleven.'

'Yeah, but we got tree shows. Lotta work. Lotta work to do.'

Giuseppe kept gripping the bottom of the trousers of the suit he wore for the water tank routine as if his clutch might miraculously induce them to dry, and then he placed his hands against his lower back - 'Ouf! - and winced.

'Sort out your costumes, si?' he said. '- Zen you come help me meex.'

Giuseppe was leaving the dressing room just as Biggy arrived. There was a typical exchange:

'Where you been?'

'What?'

'I say where you been?'

'Give over, Seppo. Not even half-eleven.'

'Come help,' Giuseppe said to Biggy, and disappeared.

Biggy shrugged and hoicked himself onto his chair.

'Kommelp-uh,' he said, mimicking his boss. 'No fucking point asking me to fucking help. I'm a fucking midget.'

He watched Colin prod the clothing in the zinc bath.

'Got to be some advantage, eh, Goofy? Wotcher reckon?'

And he leant behind his chair and whacked Colin on the bum with a rolled-up copy of The Daily Herald. Colin turned and raised the back of his hand - not wholly in play.

'You can't fucking hit me,' Biggy whinnied, '- In case it escaped your attention, I'm a person of restricted growth.'

Colin resented the power Biggy had to un-nerve him. Biggy was fuelled by fearlessness, provocation, and utter lack of inhibition. There'd been the time when, wearing only his vest (product of St. Michael, for five to seven year-olds), he'd run up and down the dressing room corridor with a lighted Roman candle firework jammed between his buttocks, setting the showgirls screaming and scattering - as much as at the sight of the jiggling bobble of flesh that was his cock as at the blazing incendiary up his behind - and later earning a formal reprimand from the ringmaster for the potential damage to the girls' costly head-dresses.

And then there was the trick he'd often pull during one of the gags towards the end of the troupe's main act. By this stage the tarp was deeply slicked with gloop, and Vince and Colin were supposed to pick Biggy up - a leg and an arm each - and launch him headfirst to slide on his front across the width of the ring through the slop. Sometimes Biggy would have deliberately riled the two of them beforehand in the dressing room, needling them, harping on about the things that most made them insecure. He'd mock the boasts Vince made about sexual conquests with the showgirls:

'Know what? It's fucking make-believe. Gloria's never gonna go with a beanpole like you. She's after that Paolo. Wants a decent looking man.'

And it never took much to aggravate Colin.

'Oi, Goofy, know something? You're putting on weight. Not the champion gymnast any fucking longer, are you? No going back to your glory days now. You're stuck doing this lark for ever.'

Then Biggy would repeat one of these jibes under his breath right there in the ring as they were manhandling him: 'Doing this lark forever, matey'. And one or other (or both) would snap, and they'd throw Biggy too fast, too forcefully, so that he overshot, causing his head to collide with the raised surround of the ring apron, provoking the audience - who'd till then been laughing - to a communal 'Ooh!' of alarm. Afterwards in the dressing room, Giuseppe would only admonish the full-sized pair for their lack of judgement and professionalism, but on those times when Colin and Vince needed to rush across the ring in the suddenly silenced hall to help Biggy to his feet, in the split second before he re-assumed his jolly clown's expression, Biggy would shoot them a look of pure victory.

He'd treat the world contemptuously so as to goad the world into treating him contemptuously back, and every time it did, he was vindicated. When they were first rehearsing the troupe's main routine, Colin was surprised by the plainly gruelling things Biggy proposed should happen to him. Even Vince, not naturally predisposed with concern for other people's welfare, would express misgivings:

'Sure about that, Bigs? Not gonna be nice.'

'Yeah, do it,' Biggy would urge. 'Hold me upside down and stick me head in the bucket. Then take a leg each and run round in circles. A full bucket, mind, so they see the gunk spilling over the top. It'll get a laugh. Won't it, Seppy?'

And Giuseppe would hum and haw, and say, 'Okay. Try.' And more than six months later at every performance Biggy was being suspended wrong way up and rotated, having to hold his breath while his face was fully submersed in cold paste.

It had been Biggy's own idea that at the end of the troupe's slosh-throwing entree, when the ring-boys ran on to strike the slimy tarpaulin, he should trip and somehow get rolled up to be carried off inside it. Back then Colin had felt disquiet at Biggy's appetite for maltreatment, and even now, after half a year's familiarity of the manoeuvring backstage that allowed Biggy to be released from the innards of the dirty tarp, Colin still felt uneasy at seeing this small, vulnerable body emerging so utterly mired.



'Looks like one of your suits in here,' Colin said to Biggy, referring to what was soaking in the zinc bath. 'Want me to rinse it for you?'

'Yeah. Would you?'

Biggy was leaning back with his eyes closed. He'd taken his first drag on a cigarette and had put his feet up on the dressing room table.

'You can touch the hem of my garment, if you want ... oh, and you can share me cigs.' He nudged the packet in Colin's direction.

Colin flopped the wet costume from the tub to the sink and began running the tap over it. It was a stripy all-in-one, like the baby's romper-suit the puppet Andy Pandy wore on television, with a ruff at its neck. As he tried to rinse the material, Colin had the sensation - for the first time this day - of touching the gunk that later he would have thrown over him in far greater quantities: oyster-sized gobbets of cold, gluey jelly lay trapped in its folds.

'Three hundred and sixty-two,' Colin mused to himself, almost involuntarily.

'You what, Goofy?' Biggy had overheard him.

'This next show is our three hundred and sixty-second,' Colin said, jolted into a reply.

'You having me on? Been counting? So how many will we do by the finish?' Biggy demanded.

'Four hundred and three.'

Biggy blew out his cheeks. 'No wonder we've all gone fucking nuts,' he said.

Colin got as much of the muck out as he could out of Biggy's suit, gave it a rinse, fed it through the mangle, and hung it on a hanger.

'It's never gonna dry in time, Biggy.'

'Oh, listen to Mr fucking cheerful.'

They were each supposed to have three complete sets of costumes for their two routines, but even if there weren't repairs to be made or items gone missing, this meant that the costume they wore for the first show on one day needed next to be worn for the second show the following night. And on Saturdays, with three shows, all their costumes saw service, and what they put on for the third show was frequently still damp or even still dripping.

'We'd never have wet costumes if they were all made of -'

'All made of nylon.' Biggy finished Colin's sentence, imitating him. 'You've said this before, you know, Goofy. You're like a bleedin' record ...'

'But they'd dry quickly. They make everything in nylon nowadays.'

'... When the needle's got stuck. Say that to Seppy, not me. Try getting him to spend money on new cozzies.'

Just then Vince swung round the door to the dressing room, continuing an exchange with someone out of sight along the corridor.

'Tell you, sweetheart,' he said, deliberately loud enough for his colleagues to catch, '- you're something really special.'

They heard a woman's voice sneer: 'Heard that line before,' and a door closing firmly shut.

Vince ambled in, smirking. He nodded his head from side-to-side in a display of self-satisfaction and flashed the thumbs-up sign against his hip when Biggy and Colin glanced up at him via the dressing room mirror. He'd slumped into his chair and exhaled a stagey sigh before he said anything.

'That Patsy. Cor!'

'Don't have us on,' Biggy scorned. 'You never.'

'Reckon?' Vince smirked. 'You know she's staying with her aunt in Lytham? Well, last night, auntie went over to her cousin's in Burscough. All I need explain, I think.'

'You're a fucking fantasy-merchant,' Biggy said.

Vince jabbed a finger in Biggy's direction. 'Getting more of it than you're ever likely to,' He turned quickly to Colin. 'And how's you?'

Colin moved away without answering.

'No speakies cos of my little improvisation?'

'Don't be soft,' Colin said, busying himself with the search for his costumes (a reason not to look Vince in the face). 'I'm talking to you. But I'll say again what I said first time. I don't think it's necessary. And you should have warned me first.'

'I told you,' Vince replied, '- it just came to me on the spot. And blimey, you've had enough time to get used it. We done that gag all week now. And be fair - the audience friggin love it, don't they? Didn't think they'd cotton on, but they bloody well do. Got to admit - gets a good laugh.'

Colin didn't respond. He picked a pair of orange and pink spotted braces off the floor.

'It's your fault, mate,' Vince said. 'You sell it too well. I'll give you that - all the hopping up and down you do after - you're proper funny.'

Colin compared two pairs of pantaloons, one striped in magenta and mustard, the other in teal and puce, for dryness.

'You're only miffed ' Vince continued, '- coz Seppy thinks we should keep it in. Where is he, by the way?'

The singlets Colin needed could be anywhere. He started looking.

'And you thought ' Vince went on, '- you thought he'd take your side when you complained.'

Colin said: 'I don't know why we have to change stuff now. It's only three weeks till the finish.'

'You heard Seppy,' Vince responded. 'He likes to keep things fresh. He here?'

'In the alley already,' Colin answered, '- Mixing.'

'In one of his states?'

'Uh, he was asking if I'd seen you.'

Colin chose a moment to challenge his colleague while plucking a chequer-patterned vest from off the mangle: 'So this gag - when I get hold of my bucket, why don't I do it to you back?'

Vince couldn't answer immediately, but then came out with: 'Wouldn't be funny if we did it twice over. Would it now? Seriously.'

Colin laid out his costumes in silence until Vince sneered: 'I don't see why you've made such a fuss about it.'

'You're not on the receiving end,' Colin muttered.

Vince concealed his derision by attempting to sound reasonable. 'Either way you're getting a bucket of slosh on you. That's the gag,' he said, '- What's the difference it goes down your trousers or goes down your pants? You'll need the shower any road. Oh, and speaking of showers, gents, know the one that was dodgy last night? Well, it's completely fucked now.'

'What?' Biggy mewled. 'You are sodding joking.'

'Yeah. Just seen Wilf,' Vince turned to Biggy to explain, '- not even a dribble, he says, and they can't get a plumber till Monday.'

Biggy sought clarification: 'So only one working?'

'Yup.'

'I'm not fucking waiting around in that draught,' Biggy said belligerently. 'Telling you, I'm first in the queue.'



Colin went to help Giuseppe. The corridor outside the dressing room encircled the building, so with its disorienting curvature, and its walls of cast iron coated in ox-blood paint, and the restricted openings that had to be stepped through at each of the structure's bulwarks, it felt more like the inside of a ship's hull than an entertainment venue.

Giuseppe had commandeered a wedge-shaped alcove for storing props and for preparing what was needed for their act. It was open on one side to the corridor and hemmed above by the raked floor of the auditorium. You could bump your head on the sloping ceiling if you stepped inside too far, and to reach buckets that were placed in the furthest recess you had to lie full out. But through circus tradition this cramped area was known as 'Clown's Alley', as it would have been at a tenting circus.

The clangour of the mixing machine was dying away to a shaky rattle as Colin arrived. Giuseppe had just finished making up a six-gallon load of gunge.

'Bring zose buckets,' he said to Colin, waving a hand towards a teetering stack of galvanised metal pails. 'And turn off ze kettle, si?'

There were in fact four kettles on the floor, all boiling away with their lids rattling, and every one of them connected to a hodgepodge of brown Bakelite two-pin plugs that carbuncled out of a single socket.

Giuseppe levered out the paddle from the mixture, and Colin helped him lift the weighty mixing bowl and pour the gloop, dividing it as equally as they could between three of the pails. The mixture was dense, sticky, and tepid.

The machine that had stirred it was Giuseppe's obsession, a constant source of either pride or consternation, and attended to as if it were an unpredictable pet. It was an early model of a dough-kneading machine, intended for commercial bakeries, which Giuseppe had somewhere managed to buy second or third hand, then persuade a metal workshop into making adjustments to its paddle so that it would be suitable for churning the slop for his act. It was probably forty years old, obsolescent and temperamental and thunderously noisy, yet because any breakdown would mean the four of them having to do all the mixing by hand - a gruelling task, almost impossible in the time available - the machine was treated with delicate reverence.

'Make anozza load, yes,' Giuseppe said. 'I put ze colour in zees ones.'

Colin turned on a hose to fill the mixing bowl part way with water, but as soon as he tipped in the dry powder that made the gloop, Giuseppe interfered.

'No! No! Is too much!'

Giuseppe was a decent man, but he made a terrible boss. He continually complained he never got the help he needed, yet whenever any of his team assisted he'd be finicking over every detail and end up doing whatever it was himself. If Giuseppe hadn't said Colin had put in too much powder, he'd have said he'd put in too little.

Colin topped up the mixing bowl with the boiling water from the kettles. This wasn't to make the gunge pleasantly warm for when they'd be throwing it over each other: the mixture would have long since cooled by the time they were in the ring, and besides, comfort was never a consideration for any of the circus' performers. The hot water was needed to help completely dissolve the powdered chemical that Giuseppe used.

Most other slosh act troupes relied on soap for their gunge. They'd whip up flakes of shaving soap with small amounts of water and make a light, foamy paste that was easy to throw, and easy to clean up, but Giuseppe dismissed this.

'Huh,' he'd tut when asked why he didn't use soap flakes, '- No look right. Audience - zey see it is nossing. It clean away too quick. But wiz my stuff zey see is ze real zing, but still we go crazy and no care.'

Giuseppe's chemical was methyl cellulose, a constituent of wallpaper-paste and a thickener in manufactured foods. When added in correct proportion to warm water and beaten, it created a weighty slime. However, without any additives this was an unattractive, semi-translucent grey-beige. The next stage was to turn the mixture white. Colin didn't risk another reprimand. He turned off the machine, picked up a packet of white powder paint, and indicated it to Giuseppe.

'How much?'

'I do it,' Giuseppe said, taking the paint himself and streaming some into the bowl. 'So keep going,' he added, baffled and a bit testy when Colin didn't immediately re-start the mixer.

Perhaps now wasn't the moment for Colin to raise the matter that was troubling him, so instead he switched the machine back on and monitored the contents of the bowl as they turned uniformly white. For several minutes he and his boss worked as a well-drilled team, but despite Colin's diligence, Giuseppe still wouldn't trust him with the critical task of adding the final colours. In addition to the white powder paint there was red and yellow pigment, too, and according to strict formulae, Giuseppe alone spooned tiny amounts of these into the white mixture so as to turn out buckets of gunk in three prescribed shades: a pastel pink, a pale orange, and a custard yellow.

This limited palette was the result of Giuseppe's long experience. Once the slosh was thrown or spilt and been trodden into, different colours quickly combined, and if you added a contrasting primary colour to the pinks and yellows - a blue or a green, say - you soon had an unappealing sludge. Perhaps audiences were subliminally reminded of the sewage works, but whatever the reason, Giuseppe claimed their laughter faded if the gloop turned brown or grey. Yet even when his trio of colours mixed together the slop remained an inoffensive peachy hue, which was why Giuseppe insisted on these shades and no others.

Each time Colin helped with the mixing at the start of the circus day, he'd have two reactions.

One of these was unceasing wonder at the sheer amount of gunge that was needed. But this was because Giuseppe's selling point was excess. Every performance of his main routine required thirteen whole buckets of gunge, meaning 26 gallons - far more than was used by any of his peers and rivals.

And a consequence of this extravagance was that a large part of the fee that Giuseppe negotiated with the circus management had to be spent on materials, which in turn explained the notoriously stingy wages the rest of his troupe received. For performing thirteen times a week, Colin was earning less than a local bus conductor.

Colin's other reaction when mixing the paste - and this was a thought he could never suppress - was identifying which of the loads were going to be poured over him. Of the thirteen buckets they got through at every show, Colin was the target in some way or other for half of them. Perhaps this was due to appearing the youngest and most agile of the quartet, for whom the audience had no qualms seeing messed-up. In comparison, Giuseppe looked too old, Biggy too defenceless, and Vince, with his gangly frame and hollowed-out chest, too unfit.

As he took up a wooden spoon to beat speckles of carmine powder paint into a pail of white goo, Colin knew he'd be the one on the receiving end of the pink mixture he'd create. In their act, this was the first time an entire bucket was emptied over one of the performers in a single go. It always earned a roar.

On the pretext of trying to reach up to a suspended square of stage scenery - intended as a ceiling - that the troupe was supposed to be decorating, Biggy would climb up a ladder that only balanced against Vince's lanky back. He'd be handed the full bucket by Giuseppe, but would have trouble balancing it, so that as soon as Giuseppe tried to pass him a paintbrush he was overwhelmed and would spill the bucket's contents backwards over his shoulder just as Colin, hopping in order to dislodge a half-empty pail he'd got his foot stuck in, arrived underneath.

During rehearsals, Giuseppe had made Colin do the manoeuvre over and over again till his timing came as second nature. But when at last Colin got it right, Giuseppe would rebuke him if he went to wipe his eyes.

'But Giuseppe - I can't see.'

The slop streamed down from his forehead, blinding him.

'No matter,' Giuseppe had replied. 'Audience - zey wanna see you get messy ... zat what zey pay for - no wanna see you get clean. If you can't see you gotta learn do zings wizzout you look.'

And from then on, at every succeeding rehearsal and performance, along with the sensation of the cold wetness and the sheer weight of the paste as it first thumped over him, Colin would perceive a veil of this gloop drawing down over his face, pressing against his lips (he'd struggle not to part them), plugging his nostrils and covering his eyes, so that for a while he couldn't breathe and - for even longer - couldn't see. With the hubbub of an audience encircling him, it could be a disorientating experience.

Six-and-a-half buckets at every show, meaning that today, in total, he'd be the target for nineteen-and-a-half of them.

The half bucket he'd get was one whose mixture had been kept white. This was the bucket Colin would act as if his foot were stuck in. For now, it was full, but before the comedy business that required Colin to step backwards off the stepladder and into it, Biggy, Colin, and Giuseppe would have slopped out some of its paste for the stock gags of a wall-papering routine.

Giuseppe & Co.'s main act started with the time-worn visual jokes of cackhandedly setting up a trestle table and trying to roll out wallpaper that refuses to lie flat. During the opening minutes the only messy action was when Vince dragged a paste-laden brush over Giuseppe's fingertips, and Biggy - holding down the paper at the end of the table - got the brush flicked in his face.

While this was going on, Colin didn't have a lot to do, except for the times when he was knocked about. He was the butt of a repeating joke when in turn the other three swung around either the stepladder or one of the planks for the trestle table, appearing to catch him in the face or across the shoulder blades, sending him flying preposterous distances. He'd land full out on his back, straight on his bum, or flat on his face, because tumbling was one of the skills for which he'd been hired. Colin could fall down without hurting himself - or at least, not usually hurt himself.

The remaining contents of the foot-sticking bucket got emptied over him once he'd received the entire load of Biggy's backward-tipped pail. Soon afterwards Biggy would drop down on all fours directly behind Colin, and Vince would give Colin a shove in the chest, toppling him backwards to another crash landing, so that his legs shot up in the air, and the bucket - now upturned - emptied its contents over his prone body. Colin had only to look at this white paste beforehand here in Clown's Alley to know what it would feel like in the ring when it splattered over his face and streamed inside his baggy culottes.

Next up, he mixed a consignment into which Giuseppe had let fall a few pinches of ochre pigment. This would become the bucket of yellow paste that Vince poured down Colin's trousers - the bucket there'd been all the fuss about this last week. The gag was the pause-point climax to an escalating slop-battle between the four clowns: Colin would have accidentally removed a chair that Giuseppe was about to sit on, causing the older clown to crash down onto a stretch of pasted wallpaper; Biggy would laugh at him and point; Giuseppe would grab a pasting brush and swipe it everywhere over Biggy's body, finishing by stuffing it in the small man's mouth; in return Biggy would be on the point of hurling an entire bucket of orange slosh at Giuseppe when Colin would bodily swing Biggy round so that Vince took the force of it instead, thereby giving Vince, dripping all over with the slime, a pretext for revenge.

'Whatever's going to happen next?'

Colin put on a guileless expression all the time Vince was leaning in towards him with the full bucket. Vince would be grabbing open Colin's waistband with his free hand, threatening to tip the gloop, yet milking the moment, gurning to the gallery, delaying, stalling - 'Shall I?' - till the whole crowd was roaring back 'Yes!'

Of course it made a difference. Why hadn't Colin said so in the dressing room just now? Okay, so up to a point Vince was right: you'd need a shower and a change of underwear whatever happened. Yet only getting the stuff down your trousers - the way it had been rehearsed - was nowhere near as bad as having it inside your underpants, when with a shocking downforce the cold liquid jelly suddenly streamed against your balls. It was yucky. One look at the bucket he was stirring at this moment was enough to evoke the sensation he'd have out there in the ring, in front of everybody. Yes, he sold the gag well. 'All the hopping up and down you do, you're proper funny.' Colin didn't need telling he did a good job with his reaction. But it wasn't play-acting. The feeling was disgusting, and his discomfort was for real.

Giuseppe had sprinkled both red and yellow powder into the next bucket for mixing. This would be for Colin, too. The orange gunge he himself was now creating was going to end up over him as the pay-off to a daring stunt. If there were any part of the act that Colin was proud of performing, this was it. No-one else had the capability or the nerve to bring it off, and it brought him satisfaction knowing he was putting his previous skills to good effect.

The set-up for the sequence was that Colin had to try to paper the 'ceiling', the others having failed. Giuseppe would indicate that he should climb up to it via the ladder, paste it with a brush, and he would then pass up a length of paper for him to stick on. But how to secure the ladder? Of course, against the trestle table. Biggy and Vince would rest the ladder against the table's end - at a slight angle off the vertical - and buttress it by holding on to it at either side. Colin would then ascend, carrying the full bucket of pale orange paste over his arm, reaching to within touching distance of the prop ceiling.

At this point, in order to catch the pasting brush and roll of wallpaper that Giuseppe was due to hurl up to him, Colin would turn fully on the ladder, leaving him facing the opposite way, outwards from it, with his heels balancing on a rung and his back towards the table beneath. Giuseppe would throw the brush and the wallpaper in quick succession up towards Colin (though deliberately too wide for him to reach out and catch) and when they fell on the ring floor behind, Vince and Biggy would instinctively run to pick them up. But they'd let go of the ladder.

So, the ladder would fall. And on it, Colin - cradling the full bucket of paste in his hands.

Most audiences gasped. Here, live, in front of them, a man was falling backwards from a risky height.

Because of the angle at which Biggy and Vince had been holding it, the ladder would crash down against the table, and then because of Colin's position on the ladder - calculated so that his head and torso would land beyond and clear of the table's further end, and because of the weight of his body against it - the ladder would topple, see-sawing over, so that what had been its top end would now hit the ring floor first, coming to rest on a diagonal, thereby causing Colin to slide on his shoulders downwards over the remaining distance. And as he slid, he'd unavoidably empty the paste all over himself.

The conclusion to the stunt was that Colin would turn a full backward somersault as soon as he touched the ground, and finish, sitting splay-legged on the floor, with the pail over his head. The gag would always provoke a storm of laughter and most usually a round of applause.

Colin would stay without moving in his final position, leaving it to Biggy and Vince's instincts to judge when whatever ovation there had been was reaching its peak, at which point they'd come over to help him to his feet.

The fourth, fifth, and sixth full buckets of paste for which Colin was the target were always orange, pink, and yellow respectively. Here in Clown's Alley he started mixing these, and while doing so he envisioned the near-simultaneous moment when all their contents would hit him.

Beforehand there'd have been some nonsense with a paste-filled stirrup pump that Colin would grab to squirt at his colleagues in revenge for their carelessness with the ladder, and this would lead to a childish chase around the ring. And for their retaliation, Giuseppe, Biggy, and Vince would each pick up a full bucket of paste and threaten Colin with it.

'Shall we?!'

At almost all performances the public would bay, 'Yes!'

Directly in front of Colin, from about ten feet away, Giuseppe would pitch everything out - and an arc of liquid orange would flash, tendrils of slime splaying in every direction, but its bulk flying directly towards him. Giuseppe always aimed for the head.

'Must not duck!' he'd shouted to Colin in rehearsals, '- Never try get out of way! Audience, zey wanna see get ze splodge in your face.'

After this, Colin did as he'd been commanded and always took the load full on.

Thump!

All over him at once: the cold, the weight, the wetness - mouth and nostrils blocked again, eyelids rammed shut, the sensation of the chilly gloop against his scalp and in amongst his hair.

Thump! Thump!

Two seconds later the buckets each from Vince and Biggy, thrown from diagonals right and left, pink gunge and yellow gunge: Vince's load - also from less than ten feet distant - hurled high above so that most of it would splatter onto Colin's head; Biggy's thrown from closer in (and from necessarily lower down) and splashing against his abdomen.

Gasps of astonishment - most of the audience would have never seen so much gunk thrown in one go, let alone over just one poor victim - and then the honks and brays and hoots of laughter. Colin was supposed just to stand there, letting them look, letting them laugh. By this point he'd be so coated he'd scarcely appear human.



'Ouf!' Giuseppe straightened up, wincing, and pressed his hands against his lower back. 'Ow many we meex now?'

Colin did a count-up. 'Enough for the first show,' he said.

Giuseppe was puffing. 'Hokkay. Queek break, zen we carry on.' He exhaled: 'Fouf!' but then he changed his mind. 'No, no. You go get Vince. He should come help now. Please, Coleen.'

Colin didn't move.

'Giuseppe?'

'Si?'

'Can I ask you something?'

'Si.'

Colin was nervous. It still took him a beat or two before he came out with what he wanted to say.

'You've not told me about Christmas at Olympia.'

'Zat right,' Giuseppe said, '- I 'aven't.' The older man didn't speak again till he'd let out a long sigh. 'Coleen - what you do before zis job?'

'I was in a trampoline act '

'Trampoline?'

'Yes, you know - bouncing, acrobatics.' Colin performed a mime to illustrate.

'Ah, si, you tell me, I remember. Where you do zis?'

'On the halls - the music halls. All over. Week here, week there. With my partner. It was a double act.'

'Ah. So you no work in circus before?'

'No, never. I told you at my audition.'

'Si. Maybe.'

Giuseppe regarded Colin for a second or two, quizzically. 'You see ... what it eez, Coleen, eez like zis,' he said. 'You good in ze ring. Yes. You work good. All ze fall you do and ze roll around. You do well. I no can do zees sings any more. Ouf! I old. You ze only one can do zees sings. And you look how a clown suppose to look - funny face, happy face, silly face. Yes, even you got ze real red hair. And si, yes, you help me all ze times, here - meex, wash, clean - you work hard. Not like ze ozzers. But Coleen ... '

Giuseppe sighed again

'You see - what it eez - I don't sink you wanna be a clown.'

'Why do you say that?'

'Because you angry.'

'Angry?'

'Like zis week, you know. You angry over ze paste in your trozzers.'

'I didn't mind it just in my trousers,' Colin said, ' Only, you know, we never rehearsed that Vince should pour that bucket right down my -'

'Si, si, si,' Giuseppe interrupted him. 'You said zis already. Many times. All ze sings you complain, ozzer sings - always you complain. You not happy. I sink you no like being ze clown. You no like getting messy, no like getting all mess over you and people watch you. But Coleen, Coleen, you got understand - zat is ow it is to be a clown in ze circus.'

There was a difficult silence. Colin looked pained.

'I need the work, Giuseppe,' he said quietly, before he'd recalled the countless contradicting times he'd vowed to himself he'd sooner be a road-sweeper than carry on doing this.

Giuseppe looked at him not unkindly. 'Si,' he said. 'Si. I seenk about it. Now please, go ask Vince to come help.'



As always, the remaining hour till the first performance of the day was filled with pressing tasks: the checking of the props and the tarpaulin and the onstage furniture; the lugging of the empty zinc bathtubs and soap powder to the shower-room in readiness for when they'd need to wash their costumes through; the application of their clown make-up; the putting-on of their costumes; and after that, once the backstage tannoys crackled into life to relay the sound of the band's first number - 'Entry of the Gladiators' - signalling the show was starting, and thereafter while the opening acts were performing, the marshalling of the thirteen buckets they'd need from out of the 'alley' into as close a position as possible to the ring entrance, where each bucket would need to be given a final stir.

And, at some juncture, in the diminishing time available before this point, getting something to eat. After seven months of subsisting on hasty snacks Colin never wanted to see a sausage roll again.

When Colin went to put on his costume, he caught sight of himself in the dressing-room mirror. He stood there in only his underpants. The next time this day he'd go to change his clothes and be stripped down like this, he'd be plastered with gloop, shivery and enfeebled, and the white cotton Y-Fronts he had on at this moment would be soaked right through. Now, on the table in front of him lay a small pile of yet more underpants and swimming trunks he'd somehow managed to retrieve, every pair due to be worn today and fated for the same treatment. These were the auguries of the messings with paste or the soakings with water he was due to receive before the day was out. Six in all. What was it he felt at this moment? Distaste? Self-disgust? Or just plain exhaustion? He couldn't quite tell.

Then, as he waited with his colleagues for their cue in the backstage corridor, he looked down at the loaded buckets lined up alongside, and a familiar unease enveloped him. In just a few minutes time, in front of the public, he was going to be their target.

'What's the house like?' Vince whispered to the Ringmaster as a bright red coat passed by them in the semi-darkness.

The Ringmaster sniffed a reply: 'Just Mr and Mrs Wood this afternoon.'

'Serious?' Vince groaned. 'How many?'

'Thirty per cent if we're lucky,' the Ringmaster mumbled. 'They're all staying home these days, aren't they, to watch the wrestling on their new televisions. Johnnie Kwango's on.'

There was a minute more of biding time while Abdul ('The Great Gyrator') concluded his hula-hoop act, but this was the cue to load the ladder, the trestles and the A-frames onto Biggy's small body for their imminent entrance, because seeing the littlest carrying the most always raised a laugh.

The bish on the cymbals, and the band on the balcony overhead struck up their frolicking entrance music.

''Ere we bleedin go,' Biggy moaned, as the four of them capered out into the ring.

'Three hundred and sixty-two,' Colin hissed through closed lips.

'You can just fuck right off,' Biggy ventriloquised back.

It was a mechanical performance. Colin did what he had to do. He got paste thrown over him. The audience laughed. He got more paste thrown over him and the audience laughed some more. Nothing out of the ordinary this afternoon. Except ...

... when they got to the gag where Vince emptied the bucket down inside his clothes, Colin thought he saw someone looking - not an audience member, but someone from backstage - standing to one side of the entrance tunnel, just in front of the curtain, on the spot where, out of costume, circus people often slipped unobtrusively to watch something their fellow performers were doing in the ring. He only glimpsed the figure, and it was difficult to see anything at all with the goo that was already in his eyes - but were they there specially to look at him?

The next time Colin had an opportunity to glance towards the ring-exit the person had disappeared, and from then onwards everything was normal and soon they were near their finish.

Giuseppe may have directed this routine to begin slowly (too slowly was the criticism), but the veteran clown knew that an audience derived most pleasure from anticipation, and he had sufficient skill to pace the activity, so that from a deliberately leisurely beginning he built towards a frenzied, anarchic, rumbustious climax.

By the time all thirteen buckets had been flung about - and the target for the last three of them, Colin, was standing there, unrecognisable under his coating - paste lay everywhere over the tarpaulin in sufficient quantity for it to be possible for the clowns to slide around in, either on their feet, as if they were surfing, or on their stomachs. So the turn concluded with some delirious knockabout from which any last pretence of narrative logic was absent: the three younger performers simply hurled themselves across the width of the ring through the accumulated gunge, getting even more soaked as they did so.

This was the sequence in which Colin and Vince grabbed Biggy on either side and launched him headfirst. This was the part of the act when Colin got the chance to show off his gymnastic and timing skills, taking a running dive across the ring through the muck at right angles to his colleague just milliseconds after Vince had dived likewise, avoiding a collision with him by a fraction of an inch. Despite that by now Colin would be soaked through with the paste, it was exhilarating to perform. Even this afternoon, despite having felt dejected beforehand, Colin was buoyed by energy and activity, and by the small audience's appreciative response.

Once Giuseppe had amazed everybody by himself taking slide on his belly to pursue the others out of the auditorium, the act was over.

'Giuseppe & Co!'

The Ringmaster called their sign-off into the mic above the applause, and with a sweep of his scarlet arm encouraged the messed-up, dripping troupe to toddle back into the ring for a breathless bow. And then their exit.

The adrenaline continued coursing only as far as the backstage corridor. Here, out of the lights, cold reality struck, and any feeling of thrill Colin may have had fell away faster than a thermometer's mercury plunged into ice-water. His status, too, was immediately downgraded: a ring-boy handed him a mop and bucket, an instant demotion from featured performer to backstage auxiliary. It was Colin's designated task to be the rearguard to his three colleagues - who were slipping along the corridor towards the shower-room - and clean the floor of the drips and splashes and sticky footprints they were all leaving behind.

Despite now being free to wipe his eyes clean of the paste that had been half-blinding him, he made slow progress swishing his mop as he backed into a counter-current of earnest ring-boys manoeuvring equipment for other acts and disinterested showgirls patting their beehive hairdos in advance of their cues. No longer the subject of special attention, Colin was just another component in the big circus machine who'd served his purpose. Who cared that he was wet through and coated in cold gunge?

In the shower room, once he'd rinsed the mop, the usual post-performance sensation overcame him. Every thread of his costume was soaked with paste to saturation point: the too-short baggy trousers were flattened and sheeny against his thighs; his singlet clung to his chest. He felt wet, cold, and uncomfortable.

And today, there was only one shower working, and Colin knew he'd have to wait the longest to get under the hot water. There was no point in standing around getting even colder - it was best to keep active - so he took off his clarted costume trousers and singlet, and, after having flicked off the worst of the gunk from his arms, legs, and torso with an improvised scraper (a child's school ruler), and in just his paste-mired Y-Fronts, he knelt beside a zinc bath to make a start on hand-washing his own and his colleagues' costumes.

Giuseppe helped with the work while Biggy was in the shower - or rather, interfered ('No! No! You put too much Daz!') - and even Vince pitched in with the laundry for a time, but Colin worked at this the longest; washing, rinsing, and wringing; until one by one his colleagues had all showered, and, either cocooned in towels or wrapped in dressing gowns, they'd padded out of the humid room, leaving Colin alone, finally able to get himself fully clean.

For a moment there was quiet backstage: it was the interval - the perpetual distorted background of the show-band's squawky brass and artless percussion had fallen silent, and what few faint sounds leeched through from the public side were only children's pleadings in the ice-cream queue.

Paolo must have been keeping watch close by because he timed his moment perfectly. He appeared just as Colin was about to peel off his underpants and step into the shower.

'You never said ... ' Paolo purred.

'Huh?' Colin turned round.

'You never said you'd changed your spot. Somebody mentioned it. Just been watching.'

He advanced into the shower room. Although neither a big nor a tall man, Paolo had a powerful physical presence. He was wearing a short dressing gown in thin, silky, Paisley-patterned material. It came to less than halfway down his thigh and was open to his waist, exposing much of his chest within the open vee.

'Beautiful!' he smirked.

Paolo had come right up to Colin and stood there grinning. He gave out an appreciative short laugh. 'Wow! He pours it right down inside now! Beautiful.'

Colin appeared perplexed.

'Mind me being here?' Paolo asked quickly.

'Uh -'

'Just look at you,' Paolo snorted, blatantly eyeing Colin from head to toe, grinning again. 'You get totally messed-up out there, don't you?'

'Well - yeah,' Colin said, '- I do.'

Paolo leant in even closer. 'Can I watch?' he murmured.

'Sorry?'

'Watch you take your shower?'

'What?' Colin spluttered.

'Let me,' Paolo urged. 'I wanna see just how messy you are.'

Colin broke away from Paolo's gaze, confused between being flattered by the attention and baffled at the reason behind it.

'Take those off,' Paolo said.

For a second Colin looked back at him, uncertain, and then some instinctual wildness made him loop his fingers into the waistband of his underpants and slip them down. But the instant he'd shuffled out of them and was fully naked he spun away to work the shower, leaving Paolo only able to see his smeary buttocks.

'Turn round,' Paolo instructed. Then, more softly, he added, 'Please. Let me look.'

Tentatively - shyly, even - Colin partially complied and turned back.

'Your hand,' Paolo nodded, making an abrupt demonstration with his own to show he wanted Colin to stop splaying his fingers over his private parts and remove them out of the way.

Colin was excited by the interest being shown in him by this handsome athlete, the circus's alpha daredevil, the one all the showgirls were trying to snare, the man on the flying trapeze - yet part of him felt like a rabbit being hypnotised by a snake. Maintaining eye-contact, Colin obliged, and slowly drew away his hand. Paolo made no pretence. Unabashed, he stared directly at the young clown's genitals for several seconds.

'Wow,' he sighed admiringly. 'You really go through it out there.'

Colin glanced down at his own body. His pubic hair was entirely snarled and matted with congealing paste, and his cock - whose size at even the best of times was a source of disappointment to him, but which now was retracting into wrinkled insignificance - was sticky with the same parti-coloured goo; drips of it ran off his balls and down his thighs. What he saw gave him no pride.

'Yeah,' Paolo exclaimed. 'I love it that you get this messy.' He slipped apart the loose knot on the belt of his dressing gown and the robe fell open.

Colin was prepared for him to be naked underneath, but in fact Paolo had on the supporting dance-belt that he and his cousins all wore beneath their tights. The rubberised material of its pouch strained outwards, and Colin noticed that from above the centre of its waistband the purplish bulb of Paolo's glans extruded, visibly engorged.

Paolo moved in towards Colin even closer still, and before Colin had registered it was happening, Paolo's tongue had slipped inside Colin's mouth and their lips were pressing against each other's: hot, moist, and urgent. Colin had never, ever thought that he and Paolo would kiss, and the transgression was an overwhelming, wondrous thrill - despite that Paolo tasted of tobacco smoke and Murray mints, plus a trace of onions and something even sourer, staler, and less pleasant still; yet there was a perverse appeal even in this.

Colin could have gone on kissing Paolo forever, but he didn't allow himself to be entirely swept away. He kept his eyes open and focused on the door in case someone walked in on them. They were risking being targets for blackmail, and you could get two years for gross indecency.

'I'd better - '

After what had seemed like a dangerously long time, and once they'd at last drawn their faces apart, Colin indicated the shower. He was breathing hard, smiling involuntarily, his eyes bright with pleasure.

'Yup,' Paolo smirked. 'You ought to wash off.'

The water made a splat against the concrete floor. Never shifting his gaze, Paolo observed while the young clown began dragging a block of carbolic through his tangled body hair.

'Do you like getting messy?' Paolo asked. He had to repeat the question due to the noise of the water.

Colin halted soaping himself and looked straight at Paolo. His grin had vanished. 'No,' he said solemnly.

'No?'

'No.'

'That's a pity,' Paolo said, '- When it's your job.'

Colin returned to sluicing the paste out of his hair.

'Why don't you like getting messy?' Paolo asked.

He'd had to shout the question because of the shower, and at first it looked like Colin either hadn't heard or wasn't prepared to answer, but then, in between twisting this way and that to position his limbs advantageously under the erratic flow, and punctuated by moments when his head was directly under the nozzle and he couldn't speak, or by interruptions when gouts of water splattered to the ground, Colin began giving a staccato response.

'Well - for a start,' he said, '- With having this muck over me every day, I get things, you know all the time - eye infections, ear infections, skin infections ' (Colin pointed to a patch of psoriasis below his elbow). 'They never clear up. And look - my skin's turned yellow permanently. See? Blotches all over me and I can't ... wash them off.' (He moved his finger over to one of several darker patches that were evident on his wrists, his upper arm and shoulders.) 'And bruises. Always got bruises - from the metal pails. They slip out of the others' hands ... in the ring, you know, once they've got paste on their fingers - they can't help it, but those pails - they're heavy, and painful if an edge ... catches you, and ... I mean, it's - well -'

Paolo never interrupted. He stood still, watching steadily, as Colin gathered his thoughts.

'I mean people - the audience - they laugh, don't they?' Colin continued, '- They laugh at me. They think ... it's funny, seeing paste thrown ... all over my body, or to see me ... pushed in the tank. But what I'm trying to say - it's real, isn't it? It's not faked. They're laughing at someone get wet through or having sticky gunk all over them ... but, well ... it's me there, thank you, another human being - and I actually am wet right through and cold. For real.'

Cocking his head from side to side, in turn he pushed his index finger into each ear to winkle out paste that had seeped inside.

'What's funny in that?' Colin added. He rinsed his mouth, and spat out some faintly coloured water, before continuing.

'Like today, I'll be even colder in an hour's time when we do the water tank routine. And ... I'll be sodden through once more with paste right down to my pants in the first half of the five o'clock, and back in the tank in the second half then, and after that ... it's the same all over again third time round for the eight o'clock. Messed-up, soaked. Messed-up, soaked. Messed-up, soaked. That's my day.'

Not letting Paolo explicitly see, behind his back Colin was washing the gunge out of his arse-crack.

'There's no magic to it,' he carried on, '- no trick. When I get the stuff in my eyes it stings. It gets right in my mouth and under my foreskin. I shiver for half an hour after each performance. It might make people laugh, but ... I really am uncomfortable. And I think that's a bit degrading.'

Colin lathered soap into his pubic hair.

'I mean the bit where Vince pours the paste inside my trousers,' he said, '- well, of course some of it runs down my legs and out over the floor. And I hear little boys in the audience - no more than ten years old, eight years old even ... going eurgh! Looks like he's wet hisself. It's as if -' (Colin positioned his cock under the flow of water and pulled back his foreskin) ' - we're just there to be humiliated in public for other people's amusement.'

He ran his thumb around the head of his penis, clearing it of any residue of gunge.

'Take Giuseppe, for instance,' Colin went on,'- Is it nice - honestly - to watch a sixty-five-year-old man crawl around on his hands and knees through gunk that's spilled on the floor, with his trousers falling down and a scrap of wallpaper slapped on his bum? I'd say it was demeaning for a man of his age. What do you think?'

Colin rinsed his hair, turned off the tap, and stepped out of the shower. Paolo passed him a towel, and Colin thanked him. Paolo hadn't answered Colin's question, but instead he coolly watched the young slapstick artist drying himself. After a few moments, he said: 'Collo, uh, what was it you were doing before this?'

'Before this show? I was out of work.'

'And before that?'

'Doing a trampoline act.'

'Oh yeah,' Paolo muttered. 'I remember - you told me. Where?'

'In variety. Music hall,' Colin replied. 'What was left of music hall.'

'Tell me again,' Paolo asked. 'How did you start doing that?'

'Been a gymnast as a kid, doing competitions,' Colin explained, '- county champion for Nottinghamshire one year. And then the first trampolines started coming in, and me and a mate, Trevor - who'd also done gymnastics - got good at them, and someone suggested we should work up a double-act together, a comedy act, and try our luck on the halls. So we did. Went well for a time, bookings all over - Glasgow, Hull, Worthing - you name the place.'

'And then?'

'Trevor went and broke his ankle.'

'Ah.'

'Couldn't work for six months. It never healed well enough for him to return to the act, and there was no-one else who could do the stunts he did. And I was getting a bit desperate - living on the dole in Warrington. And then this job came up in The Stage, and I got an audition with Giuseppe.'

'So you're not from a circus background?' Paolo asked.

'No.'

'And you'd never worked in the circus before?'

'No.'

'Okay,' Paolo nodded, and weighed up his approach before speaking. 'You know, Collo,' he said carefully, '- it's different in the circus. Now look,' he added quickly, '- I'm not saying you didn't have to work hard on the halls, too.'

'Telling me,' Colin expostulated. 'Twice nightly, plus a matinee on Saturdays. Just like here.'

'Of course,' Paolo said, '- but what you do there's not quite the same. Most circus people - people like me - our families have been in the business for generations. It's in our blood. We know it's going to be hard. We're tough on our own bodies, and we just accept it. We entertain the jossers by doing things they'd never do themselves - or would ever be prepared to do themselves. And yes, like you say, it's for real. What we do isn't faked. Often it's actually fucking painful.'

Colin held off from drying himself, and stood still, listening, holding the towel round his shoulders.

'Take Abdul,' Paolo continued, '- you seen the burn marks on his body?'

'Yep,' Colin said. 'I have.'

'Sets a bloody hula-hoop alight, doesn't he? Climax of his spot, and he's rolling a hula-hoop round his naked waist and it's on fire! But that's his speciality - the reason he got the booking. I asked him, Abdul, I said, are you made of asbestos or something? You make it look like it's nothing. And he told me. Paolo, he says, "I'll let you in on a secret. The trick is I pretend it doesn't hurt." See? Every time he goes out there he knows for certain he's going to be in pain afterwards.'

'Get your point,' Colin said. Paolo was making him feel ashamed for having complained so much.

'Now I've been lucky so far, thank the Lord,' Paolo continued, crossing himself, '- I've never had a fall. Well, never a bad one. But my uncle ... in a wheelchair.'

Colin winced. 'Seriously?'

'Uh-huh. Alessandro and Gianni's father - used to be in the act, too. Then one night he fell from the trapeze.'

'Wasn't there a safety net?' Colin asked.

'Yep, there was a net, but he was unlucky - bounced out of it. Landed on the ground in a sitting position from ten feet up. Compressed his spine. He was only thirty-nine, and now he's paralysed for life. What I'm saying is, Col, we all do stuff out there that's risky - or nasty. But that's what the jossers expect to see, it's what they've paid to see. Wouldn't come otherwise.'

'So, you're saying is it's my job ' (Colin struggled to formulate his sentence) '- to go through humiliating treatment in public.'

'Well, what I'd say, Collo,' Paolo replied, '- is that if you can't enjoy getting messy yourself, at least you might enjoy knowing that o t h e r s enjoy seeing you get messy - and that includes me, by the way. And - who knows? - you might even get some satisfaction acknowledging you were tough enough to take it.'

Colin smiled sardonically and rubbed his hair with the towel.

Paolo took a step closer to him once again. 'It's a shame,' he said, '- if you really don't like getting messy, because ... ' (he tapped his fingertips playfully one by one across Colin's upper chest), '- I thought you and I might have some fun.'

'Oh?' Colin looked straight back; amused, intrigued, but wary.

'Yes,' Paolo continued, grinning wickedly. 'I was hoping you might give me a little private performance. In fact, I was wondering ' (he reached out and gave Colin's cock a quick squeeze) '- if you'd like to come round to our caravan tomorrow?'

'But, won't -?'

'Alessandro and Gianni are off to see The Guns of Navarone. They'll be out for hours - long film. Our caravan's in the site at Cleveleys. Know where I mean? We're plot number 52. Get there one o'clock? Yes?' He pinched Colin's left nipple. He only did it swiftly, but it was hard enough to produce a spasm of pain. Colin yelped and jumped backwards, though he was laughing at the same time.

'What I had in mind, you see,' Paolo said cautiously, '- was ... well, I was hoping you might let me mess you up.'

Colin stopped laughing. So that's what Paolo was after.

'What do you say?' the trapeze artist demanded.

'What with?' Colin asked. 'How will you mess me up?'

'We'll find something,' Paolo replied. 'Or make something - some goo or other. Can't be difficult. Have a bit of fun with that first. You on the receiving end, that is - and then ... '

'And then?' Colin enquired wryly.

He got his answer in a flash, but couldn't comprehend the speed or the sleight-of-hand by which Paolo had managed it, because they'd been facing each other the whole time and he'd not even seen Paolo's hand move, yet there was no mistaking the sensation of a finger running deftly up and down his arse-crack and of ever-so-quickly penetrating his anus. Blip. In-out / all-over-back-to-normal-nothing-said.

'I mean,' Paolo growled, 'I wouldn't half mind finishing off by spunking into your face. But come to think of it, I'd also like to watch it dribbling out of your bum-hole - though only after I've pushed a pie into that inviting mush of yours. What do you say? Would you let me?'

He gave Colin another kiss, only briefly this time. Colin kept desperate watch on the door over Paolo's shoulder.

'What do you say then?' Paolo cajoled after they'd moved apart.

'Uh '

Colin was balancing the appetising prospect of full sex with the god-like Paolo against the price he'd have to pay for it: the dispiriting thought of getting messed-up, wet, and cold all over once again on his only day off, the time he'd been looking forward to all week, when at last he could bundle in a chunky sweater and remain warm, dry, and fully-clothed from morning till night like any other civilised person.

And then there was the issue of Paolo's penis. Paolo had made it plainly clear what he wanted to do to him. Did he really want to be sodomised by that infamous cock whose rumoured phenomenal dimensions were right now in front of him being verifiably revealed? It would hurt like hell.

'Alright then,' Colin said - before he knew he was going to say anything.

Paolo grinned broadly and wrapped Colin in a bear-hug before jerking his head to one side and rocketing his tongue deep into Colin's mouth for a third time. Colin submitted totally to the experience and closed his eyes. He even relished the scratch of Paolo's bristles as they kissed, kissed, and kissed, tonguing into each other as far as they could reach.

Although Paolo had had his back to the door, it was he who reacted first. He'd sensed the intrusion.

'Well, I never did,' Vince said archly when Paolo turned around. Vince was leaning against the lintel, watching.

Colin sprang away from Paolo and made a poor show of concealing how flustered he was.

'Oh, hallo there, Vince,' Paolo said nonchalantly.

'Sorry if I'm intruding on anything, gents,' Vince said with treacly sarcasm, advancing into the shower room. He nodded towards Colin: '- only Seppy's been wondering what's happened to you. There's the props to sort out for the tank routine.'

'I'm ... just coming,' Colin muttered awkwardly.

'Funny,' Vince sneered, '- because that's exactly what it looked like you was about to do.'

'He'll be there in a moment,' Paolo said. He walked directly up to Vince till he was standing absurdly close to him. Paolo was quite a bit shorter than Vince, but Vince reacted as if he were menaced and took a step backwards.

'Now look, Vincey,' Paolo continued in a low, firm voice, '- I don't actually give a cup of wank either way, but it'll probably be for the best if you don't mention what you may have seen just now to anybody, because if you do, I'll come round and squeeze your balls so hard children'll be out of the question.'

Vince fluttered a hand in protest. 'You can depend on me,' he said. 'It's your business, not mine. Lips -' (he mimed a zip) '- sealed.'

He appeared to be leaving, but he turned back at the door. 'Say this though, Goofy - not much of a surprise. Wasn't just your red hair, I always knew you was a ginger.'

Paolo didn't speak until Vince had finally gone. And then all he said was: 'Let him.'

Colin was still shaken that he and Paolo had been discovered. 'Let him what?' he asked, nervy and distracted.

'Next show - let him pour it down your underpants,' Paolo urged. 'I want to see him do it. I want to see you take the lot. I'm going to be watching - at the five o'clock. And at the eight.' Paolo looked Colin straight in the eyes. 'Let him,' he said. 'For me.'


..............................................................................................................................................



He reaches for my waistband. In his other hand he holds the paste. His fingers grip the rim of a pudding basin filled with the flour-and-water mixture that he and I have stirred, snickering, in his galley kitchen. He's already dolloped some of it onto my nose and it's dripping down my chest. We're standing close together in the tiny shower stall. He's fully clothed, apart from his shoes, but I'm just wearing a pair of string Y-Fronts. There's only a small paraffin heater in the caravan, and it's raining outside. I'm trying not to show how cold I am, and that I haven't yet got an erection when he clearly has. 'I love it,' he hisses, '- the amount of punishment you can take.' He pulls open my underpants. And then he