At last all three are expelled from the shop. The manager is so exhausted that he locks up early, hanging a sign that says CLOSED BECAUSE OF BANANAS on the door. We next see him preparing for bed. As he ducks to the sink with his toothbrush Tubby's face is revealed in the bathroom mirror, grinning at the audience. Mark's giggle sounds eager but a little nervous. The manager emerges in his nightshirt from the bathroom and, having climbed into bed, tugs the cord above him. The film gives him time to settle into restfulness before his brow twitches and he reluctantly opens his eyes to peer down the dim bed. Between his feet is a lump under the blankets. As he sits up, it rises too. The bedclothes sag away from it, exposing Tubby's delighted face. A change of angle shows it emerging upturned from beneath the mattress, and another finds it as it pokes up from behind the pillow. Did the cameraman intend to light each appearance so that it glows like the moon? A shot of the frenzied manager fighting the blankets dissolves to a close-up of him as he wakens. That's reassuring only until a long shot reveals that he's wearing a straitjacket. As he begins to thrash about rather more realistically than comically, three attendants converge to restrain him. I suspect who they might all prove to be, but that's the end of the film or at least of the clip. 'And now here's a solo by that graceful pudding Oliver Hardy before he met his mate,' says the commentator.
'Can we see it again?' Mark crouches towards me, and his chair gives an injured creak. 'I want to see it again,' he begs.
'Don't smash the place up, Mark.' He's far more demanding than usual; perhaps he feels he can be now that we're alone. 'I take it you liked it,' I say. 'What did you like?'
'It was funny. Can we see it now?'
'Anything else you'd care to say about it?'
'No,' he says, and even more impatiently 'Yes, I want to watch it again.'
I wonder how common his reaction would have been when the film was released. It struck me as a little too disturbing to be popular, but perhaps it was ahead of its time if Mark is so taken with it. 'We don't want to be late for the circus,' I say and switch the tape off. 'I'll lend it to Natalie when I've finished with it. Let me grab a coat and we'll walk over to the park.'
The slap of waves against equally non-existent rocks greets me on the landing. A poster for a muscle-bound computerised heroine called Virtuelle is guarding Joe's door. As I shut my computer down the last shrill flurry of water sounds like giggling, which seems to be echoed downstairs. A trumpet is chattering in the front room.
Tubby is back in the toyshop. The head that fills the screen is his, unless it's the contents of a box. I retrieve the control from my chair and extinguish him. 'Now, Mark, I said we hadn't time. Maybe we can have another look at it when we come back.'
He giggles nervously as a preamble to saying 'I didn't touch it.'
'I'm sure you didn't touch the tape.'
Is he testing my limits or demonstrating his skill with words, or both? I eject the cassette and replace it in its cover, abandoning the other tape on the mantelpiece. How could I have been so thoughtless that I left Tubby in the player while I went to my room? I run to leave the tape on my desk and hurry downstairs. 'Time to move, Mark.' He's still in the chair, and so wide-eyed with innocence that it could almost conjure up Tubby on the screen. 'I truly – '
'Don't say it. I shouldn't think your mother would like you telling fibs, and I'm certain your grandmother wouldn't.' I switch off the television and wait for him to jam his feet into his trainers. 'Come on,' I say to make friends with him, 'and we'll have another laugh.'
SEVEN - TOTEMS
We're nearly at the bottom of the street opposite the petrol station, beyond which the night sky is trailing a crimson hem, when I call 'We're not in quite that much of a hurry, Mark.'
He carries on as if the enlarged letters in the middle of the Frugoil sign are urging him, and barely glances back to protest 'You said we were.'
'No, I said we shouldn't get caught up in the video again. The show won't be starting anything like yet, don't worry,' I say as I join him at the kerb. 'I'm not an old film, you know. I feel as if you want to speed me up.'
He looks at me over his shoulder. 'That'd be funny,' he says, continuing to watch.
This isn't what jerks me forwards. 'Mark,' I shout or quite possibly scream, but I haven't even completed his name when he steps into the road.
His small body flares up as if spotlights have been trained on him. They're the headlamp beams of the lorry that is bearing down on him, horn braying. I'm too far away to snatch him out of its path, and what can I shout that will help? I'm terrified that the glare and the uproar and the sight of his imminent doom will freeze him like just another species of roadkill. Then he dodges the vehicle with at least a yard to spare and dashes across the road.
By the time I reach the opposite pavement he's trotting uphill past the petrol station. 'Mark,' I say, folding my arms and gripping my fists with my clammy armpits.
He halts but drops into a crouch that suggests he's preparing for the next leg of the race. 'What?'
'Come back here. We aren't going anywhere till you listen to me.'
He trudges along the pavement between the entrance and exit of the petrol station. 'What?' he mumbles.
'Do you want to see the last of me, Mark?'
He blinks at me and risks a giggle. 'You're like granny saying I'll give her a heart attack.'
'You damn well near did, but I don't mean that. Do you want your mother and me to split up?'
'You aren't going to, are you?' Apprehension or the light from the forecourt has turned his face so pale I'm put in mind of greasepaint. 'Don't you like me?' he pleads.
'I don't like what you just did, but that wouldn't be why. If Natalie trusts me to look after you and then you behave like that, she isn't going to want me around.'
'You won't tell, will you? We swore we wouldn't tell on each other.'
'I'll keep this one incident between us so long as there aren't any more like it, ever. Agreed?'
'Promise,' Mark blurts and looks hyperactively eager to be on his way. Shahrukh is gazing at us through the window of the Frugoil shop, and I wonder if he's going to make an issue of my letting Rufus in. Perhaps he feels inhibited now that I don't work there. Before he can accost me I follow Mark uphill.
In a minute we're alongside the Royal Holloway campus. Beyond the gates the long five-storey red-brick turreted facade is illuminated so brightly that it resembles a cut-out against the night sky, an image of a French chateau patched into the landscape. A long-legged shadow as tall as the chimneys stalks across it, but I haven't located the owner of the shadow when the wall blocks my view. Mark has forged ahead, so that by the time I reach the end of the wall he's already past a side road. As I cross it, two clownish faces swell out of the gloom ahead of him. One is closer to the ground than anyone's should be, and I might have noticed more immediately that it isn't human if the wide-mouthed faces weren't so similar. Its companion shuffles into the light of a streetlamp, and I see that her mouth is surrounded by lipstick like a child's first attempt at painting. I can't quite shake off the notion that it's the woman who is panting and snorting, not the bulldog. I've dodged around them after Mark when a hoarse voice behind me mutters 'Hurry up.'
I could take that personally, because I don't know where the circus has been set up in the park. I was expecting crowds to show us, but none are to be seen. Mark's shadow and mine play at giants and dwarfs beneath the streetlamps as we hurry uphill. The closest section of the park stretches away between the main road and a lane, and I'm suddenly aware that the place may be as vast as the visible sky. Mark halts, and I think he's about to ask which road we should use until he says 'There's one.'
He's pointing at an entrance from the main road. At first all I can see is the shadow of a figure on the thickness of the wall. A substance appears to be bubbling out of its cranium. It steps into my view to reveal that it's a clown with a presumably artificial mass of white curls crowning its scalp. It cocks its blanched extravagantly wide-mouthed head to watch us with a kind of dismayed glee. I pull out the tickets – one for Cwlons Ulnimited, the other for Cwnols Nutilimed – and flourish them. The clown beckons while its white-gloved fingers scuttle in the air, a gesture so eloquent of lateness that I grab Mark's shoulder in case he's tempted to dash across the road. As soon as the traffic relents I usher him to the gate.
