Welcome to the Freakshow [for lals & chaos]

Act I: The Coldest Flames

Welcome to the freak show. This is where Death comes on his nights off to smoke a blunt and laugh at those more unfortunate than himself. Tonight, the air smells like brandy and orange peel and dissatisfaction, and the lights glint like judgmental eyes. Don’t worry though, I ain’t judging you. Well. Not much.

Listen for just a second. Laughter peals like vitriolic bells, played at the funeral of a hated mayor of a dying town. The tent domes high above the audience’s heads, and if they were to close their eyes, they could imagine being inside the Sistine Chapel of a post-apocalyptical world, as if nuclear bombs had been dropped, and deformed all of the bodies and hearts and minds. I always have to ask myself what makes an audience come to such a place as this, where the performers are sad and their stories sadder. But this is where the audience comes when they are too scared for adventure, but too crazy to be locked in their straightjacket bedrooms. Despairing enough to be alive and happy enough to die: this is where they come to remind their manic brains that they are normal. They think that amongst lion-wrestling boys and two-headed sisters and girls who tie themselves in knots, they have no right to call themselves a freak. But I know better, you see. I live with these people. They’re much more normal than any of you are.

Tonight is just an ordinary night. The bell rings once, twice, and the lights start to dim. Acrid smoke licks nostrils, screams danger, cries wolf. I can hear hearts tremble in anticipation as the tent goes silent. I am always amazed at how quiet an audience composed of delinquents and the dejected can be. You’re all very impressive.

When the lights are out completely, I walk out onto the stage. There’s a special walk I do for the audience, a sort of skip on the balls of my feet. They love it. They love me, for my lack of clothes, for the over appearance of sequins, for how they feel as if I’m flirting with them. I should let you know that right now. I’m not flirting with any of you. The only person I’m flirting with is Death.

And he loves it.

I saunter up to some grimy man in the front row, the sort of person who shaves infrequently and bathes even less. A cigarette is found in my shallow pocket, and I dangle it precariously between my fingers

“Got a light?” I ask, gesturing to the smoke, and he obliges, handing me a gold-plated lighter. The crowd murmurs, leans forwards, try to see what I’m doing in the dim. I take my time. They will see soon enough.

I grab my hipflask from the waistline of my underwear, take a swig, and then put the lighter to my lips. It tastes like blood as I kiss it, with all the tenderness a mother uses to kiss her child. One spark is all it takes.

The plume of flame erupts from my mouth like an angry thought. It is the beast that has escaped from under your childhood bed. It is a tiger, its forest burn, still running for its life. Destroyer conjoiner savior celebrant; it is my life. On my last night on earth I will hear the sound of fire and adrenaline and applause, and I will know that I am home.

As the lights come up, I hand the lighter back to the man who, after having his stubble tickled by flame, looks to be somewhat in shock. The shirtless men who come in through the back curtain swinging flaming pois come from some water-kissed island where fire dancing is a right of passage, but I have danced between flames since I was an infant. I had not yet bled before I burnt down my first house, was not yet a woman before I resigned myself to this jail cell of a circus so I could stay aflame without burning out.

Grabbing my batons off the floor, I light them effortlessly and throw them in the air, letting them spin dangerously close to the ceiling before they begin their descent. I fish them out of the air and begin to juggle, the flames painting an arc above my head. What sort of fire-haloed angel does the audience believe me to be? Certainly, it is something more than human. I often think that perhaps this is true; perhaps my fiery obsessions stems from the fact I am a two-legged Salamander, hatched from November bonfires. Maybe my mind is simply sick. I’m not complaining though; my life is much more interesting than any of yours.

Truth is, I don’t really care. I’m numb to all the trivial things that people seem to care about, to deaths and births, to trying to trim relationships like hedges into shapes they were never meant to be. Fire is something I never was able to control, and perhaps that’s why I like it so much. It never does pay any attention to me.

Act II: The Messiest Escape

My act is composed of six stages.

One. My assistant cuffs my hands behind my back. The straightjacket is laced, tight, so it feels like a strangers ribcage grabbing around mine. My legs are bound with leather straps, tying me down. When he takes a step back, I tell myself that I cannot escape. The whispers start. ‘This is what you deserve. Tonight will be the night. Tonight, you won’t be able to escape. Tonight the water will claim you, as it claimed her. The audience will hear you scream, and they will laugh. They know you don’t deserve to be alive.’ These whispers claw at me, lay their fingers against my spine, talk truth. There is little truth in my life anymore.

He ties the blindfold. In the dark, the whispers are all I have.

Two. He picks me up effortlessly and turns me upside down. When I am in his arms, I am a winter twig, rotten through the center. I wonder if he knows that I do not trust him, though he carries my life on his palms like a dirty dinner plate. He is a man, after all.

He attaches my legs to the meat hook that dangles from the roof of the tent. I do not pay attention to the murmurs that the audience emits, or to the blood rushing to my head. The pain pulsates numbly, like a dumb girl’s mutters, and I wonder if this is how she would have felt. I wonder what pain she felt in her final moments, my hand cradling her head.

Three. The water tank is winched up, the top locked with the same types of lock you would use to secure your luggage, or your house, things far more valuable than my life. Already, my breath holds tight in my lungs, as if even oxygen feels it does not deserve to touch me. It is probably right. But it left her lungs too, my daughter’s lungs, and more than any soul on this earth she deserved to breath the sweetest of airs. It’s why I did it, you know. Why I killed her. She deserved to breathe sweeter air than I could have given her.

Oh, how the water hates me. It is as soon as she and I dance together that the flashbacks begin.

It is our wedding night and instead of making love he makes my face into an impressionist artwork of floral bruises and blood. He calls me scum, but at school I learnt that there are bacteria that can survive without oxygen and around him fear makes me breathless so maybe he is right. I think of escaping, of learning how to pick locks and untie laces and of running far away. It is my mothers face, weighing heavy on my thoughts, that keeps me from leaving there and then. The way her eyes became swollen with tears when she looked at me in the white dress she never got to wear. It is the pride she has in validating the child that was never real to her. I am sacrificing my happiness for her, because she did the same for me, raising me a sad bastard child. I cannot help but taste the irony of such a vicious cycle.

Four. I cannot tell you how I do it, because that would ruin the act. There is no magic involved, though. It is not a fantasy game, because if I had occult powers I would not waste them on entertaining an audience drunk on other people’s adrenaline. If I was involved in some sort of mythical fantasia, I would be able to let myself die.

I would very much like to drown down here, you know. With just a thin veil and three inches of glass separating me from the audience. I would like to know how it is to have the last three bubbles of air dance through the water, halo my face, break at the surface. I want to know what she felt as I held her head under the water. I don’t want it to hurt; to have hurt her, but on the other hand I deserve the pain. But the cuffs slide off my bony wrists, the leather straps unlace themselves. Perhaps it is because I am made of skin and bone, but not of substance or soul that I cannot help but escape. Perhaps it is that no sensible thing would want to touch my scarred body.

It is the start of my third trimester and my belly is swollen like an autumnal apple and he is happy. We glow together, as if the spreading city of child in my stomach will fix a world of problems. He wants to name her after a virtue: Halcyon, Patience, Amity. Though I do not dare disagree with him, I hate the reason behind this: he wants this child to give him something that he has never had. He lays a hand on the cocoon of skin and warmth which she is wrapped in, and I immediately flinch, my subconscious confirming that I do not want him to touch our daughter – my daughter. For though he conceived her, he will never deserve the title of father.

Five. I unlock the top of the box and climb quietly down until my feet light on the stage floor. I do love how the audience still thinks I am some sort of wonder child, how a thin veil of cheap material can cheat them out of all the laws of their sad little worlds. I do not break their rules, I bend them; bend my body out of shape, bend their beliefs, bend my story so it looks as if I have a soul. I stand there for just a moment, and consider how lucky I am to live in such a world of idiots. But it is the idiots that can hurt you the most.

It is the idiots that I continue to think about, though the water has once again claimed to take me.

I do not remember how he came to be lying facedown on the kitchen’s wooden floor, but a bloodstain grows like cancer across his back. Red dots freckle my best blouse, and I think of the church service that I should already be driving to. A carrot cake sits on our finest china on the counter, and Clarity cries for her bottle. I should wake up now. But the water scalds my hands as I wash the blood off my hands, and as I slide the now-clean meat knife back into its specific spot on the rack, I realize that this is real. He is dead. The blood may have washed off my hands but the smile does not wash off my face and I feel dirty. After all these years of keeping myself prim and pristine for him, it is a good feeling.

My child is screaming now, and as I approach her crib, I notice how ugly she is for such a beautiful thing. Her face is contorted, the same colour as a bruised apple. Her mouth gapes like a market fish on ice, and I cannot help but notice how her eyes look so much like his. It strikes me that now she is fatherless too, as I was and as my own mother was. It is as if this contorted gene is inherited, as if the vicious cycle is carried in the wind and the seasons. Has it really taken me this long to realize that she will never be happy? Perhaps until now, I have refused to acknowledge it. In this moment, I know, with all the clarity that her name suggests, what I must do.

Six. The audience is quite happy to ignore my footsteps and I disappear behind the curtain into the night. They will not see me again. They will not recognize me as I walk past them in the street as just another fucked up girl and not some measure of magic. I feel bad that I am what they believe in, because I am the opposite of a God. But I don’t feel bad enough to stop. Drowning myself is the only way I stay alive.

My daughter giggles as I bathe her in the kitchen sink. Right now, the church mums will be gossiping about why I am not sitting in the sermon, wondering why my Nightingale voice does not chirp along with the sparrows. If only they knew that I am the cuckoo, living as a parasite in someone else’s nest. But in this moment, I am in a church of my own, practicing religion with something far more efficient than breathless prayers. The only way I can prevent the smoke from suffocating her is extinguishing the flame, and so I cup her head, its scull bones still not hardened, in my hand. It is a series of motions in a silent film: I press my lips to her forehead, flash a wordless thank you across my face, put her under the water, do not let our eyes break contact, watch the emotions on her face change, mutate, stand still. I watch the last three bubbles of air dance through the water, halo her face, break at the surface. It is over. No man will hurt her now.

But I? I cannot escape.

Act III: The Wildest Tamer

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Tonight, I am just like my father. Though he will never know, I have grown to look like him: tall and thick like the baobab, able to out run any other man I know. Mostly, though, I am like him in the fact that the audience believes that I am brave.

The stage lights are no hotter than the savannah sun, and the feeling of sweat wilting on my forehead squirms like nostalgia. The performance platform stretches out in front of me like plains, and when I close my eyes to blink in the bright lights, I can translate the miscellaneous sounds of the audience to the wild whispers of my childhood.

I whistle once, and Makani trots lazily in through the curtains. To the audience, he is of course the most powerful of beasts, galloping out to reach the scent of my flesh. The truth is, he is nothing more than a bored house cat that I have taught a handful of tricks. A flick of my wrist equates to him jumping onto the table in the center of the stage, an upwards jerk of my hand tells him to stand on his haunches, the spreading of my fingers like a vultures wing asks him to roar. Really, it is nothing more than a pitiful meow, but for some reason white fellas are obsessed with the noise a lion can make. I don’t think they fully understand that they are far more dangerous than this golden bearded boy could ever be.

I whistle again, and the tigers come in. Shahkti and Rex, their names are, and I have much more fear of these two beasts. Perhaps it is because I did not grow up around their black stripes, but I can never pick quite what they’re thinking. Their body language changes like American seasons, and I feel like it is better that I respect them through my fear than I risk being complacent. Still, they are trainable creatures, and as I wave my hands like an orchestral conductor, they take a synchronized running leap over Makani’s back.

When the white fellas with their suits and cash-money came to our village to find lion cubs to train, my father told me to go with them. He told me that cubs had not yet been taught brave, and that if I went, I would be able to teach them. He put his palm-frond fingers on my shoulder, and told me that I was the bravest boy he had ever known, so I would be safe. I know now, of course, that he was the brave one. He had seen the way the new city burnt up our hunting grounds like grass fire, and he knew there was no future for another generation there. I read about it in the papers sometimes, about corruption in Nairobi, or about the Rhinos going extinct. This is all the white fellas know my country for, for those killed by the government and for skin-and-bone children they see crying on their telly-screens. They do not hear of brave men like my father, who gave away his happiness to give a better life to his son.

Makani and I make our way through a series of tricks together, as a team. I always laugh a little when he struggles to leap through a hoop or balance on a ball, because it is so similar to my own struggles. But now I can drive a car made in Japan and read a book translated from Russian along with the worst of men, and my lion eats Kentucky racehorse and sleeps in a pen stuck together in China. Perhaps we prove to the audience that African boys are more than advertising campaigns.

When the lights go down and the audience stands to clap for us, I am reminded that it is here, in a city where motorcars kill children and fathers throw themselves off buildings so tall, you cannot see the top of them, that I have built a life for myself. It is here, ten thousand miles from the hut in which I was born, in a show full of freaks and rejects, that I have made myself at home.
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