She was a full minute replying. “I’ll think of a way, Lovejoy.”
I took a further minute. “Ta, love,” I said.
That day I slogged harder than I’d ever done. Illusion’s my main problem. In fact, it’s the one main problem for us all, because illusion does us down. It’s true: Blokes are narked that their bosses turn out to have feet of clay. Birds go sour realizing their lover isn’t exactly the handsome film star they’d imagined. Sometimes an illusion becomes an essential part of life; I’ve told you about Lily loving Patrick. She pretends that his womanlike behavior is just a passing phase. Illusion. It catches you out.
My own illusion in joining the fairground was multiple-wrongth. I’d assumed that a traveling fair is jolly, colorful, gay—wrong. It’s a million laughs a minute—mistake.
Being with Francie meant free journeying… oh dear. Very wrong.
We hit the pitch midafternoon, a big grassy field rimmed by hedges. I was woken by Betty shaking me and saying to come and help. The fair had to be up by seven. After only a cup of tea I slogged with a gorilla called Big Chas and his mate Ern erecting boardwalks and canvases, hauling generators and winching struts and wooden walls. I fetched and carried. Francie wrapped my hands in oily cloths to keep me going. As the fairground took shape I began to peter out, so they put me on netting the dodgem cars. God did great making mankind, but He was all thumbs when He came to antique dealers. I felt useless.
By seven o’clock, parts of the fairground were in action. Customers were strolling among us. Lights came on as generators throbbed. The sideshows were first off, rifle stands, darts for goldfish, chestnuts, hot dogs, an eastern fantasy show with burning torches and seductively moving bellies, quoits for ringing mystery prizes, the whole gamut. Then children’s carousels, opening hopefully to tinny organolium music ninish.
Dodgems, the Giant Caterpillar, the Giant Wheel, and the Great Cavalry Ride (wooden horses) began about eleven.
“Bylaws make us close at midnight,” Big Chas rumbled when I scraped enough breath to ask if we ever pack in for slumber. He was grinning at me with poisonous good cheer, the moron. He and Ern were pestilentially happy, singing hymns while we worked. “Quite a decent crowd, Lovejoy, eh?”
Meek with exhaustion and self-pity, I reeled obediently on, toting dat barge and liftin dat bale among the fairground’s bright pandemonium. Once Betty brought me a bowl of mushy peas when I was halfway up a perilous wooden structure trying to bolt some huge planks to something else, God knows what, among a tangle of great wet ropes.
The din of these music engines sounds positively melodious from a distance, but you try dangling among their pipes screwing bits together and you’re deafened and blinded.
That Big Chas and Ern were alongside happily warbling Sankey’s Sacred Songs and Solos did little to ease my bitterness.
Oddly, you miss hell when it stops. I was spread on a rain-soaked canvas a million miles up in the night sky near Andromeda when silence struck so suddenly I nearly slid off from shock. Blearily I looked around. Our Zoom Star had stopped careering through its demented ellipse. Whole banks of bulbs plunged painfully into dark. Quietness returned to the land. Thank God for bylaws.
“Finish that rope and we’re done, Lovejoy,” Ern called up, flashing a krypton lamp and warbling, “Lead, kindly light, amid th’ encircling gloom.” Bloody maniac.
A few minutes later I clambered down. Betty was standing there, neat and prim under her frilly yellow umbrella. “It’s dinnertime. I came for you, Lovejoy.”
“Shouldn’t you be in bed?”
She pulled my hand. I stumbled down the trampled lanes between the booths to Francie’s caravan. It seemed full of steam. Dan was wolfing a Matterhorn of spaghetti, his elbows flying. Try as I might, I couldn’t quite see how he managed his with that enormous mustache. We said hello. Francie dished up for me, and a littler mound for Betty, who prattled all during dinner, telling Dan and Francie how well I’d done.
“Lovejoy’s trouble should soon be over, Dan,” Francie said. “He’ll sleep in the wagon.”
“What job’ll you do, Lovejoy?” Dan managed between yards of spaghetti. I was narked.
Had I been resting?
“I shouldn’t put him selling tickets,” Betty said. “He swears all the time.”
“Shut it, you,” I said coldly.
“Big Chas said he’s not much use,” the little pest reported.
“I’m the world’s greatest antique dealer,” I informed her.
“You’re hiding from the bobbies. Daddy said.”
Dan thought all this was hilarious, the nut, and fell about laughing. “Do the Wall of Death with me!” Another roll in the aisles. I quite like Dan, ever since he got me that tricycle for Three-Wheel, but you can go off people.
“Stop it, all of you,” from Francie.
So, amid Death-Riders and Sky-Bursters, I was relegated to collecting pennies rolled down a groove in a wooden peg.
Big Chas and Ern laughed themselves stuporous when they heard I was second string on the Roll-a-Penny. Dan kept guffawing as he did his bikes. Ashamed, trying to look like a gruff-voiced lumberjack, I helped with the boards on his Wall of Death.
At noon I thought, sod it, slipped away and phoned Tinker at the White Hart, cascading coins into the greedy slot. Mercifully he’d managed to get only slightly paralytic in the first hour. Tinker’s cough quivered the receiver. I held it a mile away till his voice recovered.
“Where the hell you been, Lovejoy? Everybody’s asking.”
