tiger, tiger coffee bar

The People that Grinned Themselves to Death

by Braydon Harriss

There is a story that goes something like this: a stretch of Nepean Highway in Rosebud, where the Fair stands in the Summer months, was illuminated one night by a laughing clown sideshow; as cars passed the darkened Fair the lights of the Laughing Clowns could be seen spilling out onto the worn cooch grass, spilling light into the dark of the other sideshows and rides; the revolving heads and their painted po-faces moving in silent motion, the movement unhinged from the usual music accompaniment. The silence exacerbated the Clown's eerie misplacement - or so the story goes - amongst the moored Pirate Ship and tarped-over Lucky Wheel. The Clowns stayed that way until after dawn. Perhaps forty cars passed in that time, each of them slowing and noting the sad unusual sight. Some were unsettled for, if their timing was right, their travel was followed by the blank gaze of the Clowns and their painted smiles, confusing in the dark like grimaces.

*

After the pub closed, we'd occasionally find ourselves back in Changi's van at the southern end of the Fair, tossing around the arse-end of our pays over loose piles of dog-eared cards.

It was always country and western when we played cards, and if we were crammed into his van, we were usually too pissed to care what music he put on. So to Merle Haggard we'd swear and play and hang shit on each other, always with a bottle within reach. And Changi would always go quiet whenever Bird on a Wire came on, becoming maudlin and holding up the game, cards suspended halfway between his chest and the table, as if on invisible wires.

We were pissed, but we knew to hold our eyes down, allowing the old bloke his privacy, his wobbly crooning mixing with the acrid stench of chump meat, sweat and tobacco. And when the song closed, he became active again, the Changi we all knew, throwing down his pairs and flushes and Makers Mark and cokes that he served himself in a grubby Vegemite glass of which he had many.

(I had watched him once at feeding time, spooning the black paste into the cat's mix.

‘Vegemite? You mix Vegemite into their meat?'

He looked up, thin rolly pursed between his lips. ‘Well, you wouldn't eat the shit, would ya?' His gruff reply couldn't mask his joy in the interest I paid his ritual.

Queenie and Lady Cocksucker circled the cage languidly, rubbing the spiny patch of their tongues across their coats, making a rasping sound like a file does.)

He was shithouse at cards, but he was good company. He'd yell and bluster and tell us all about the cats, pronouncing their species pissed and reverent, Acinonyx jabatus, an invocation from his withered lips.

‘Come on, ya old cunt. Ya playing cards or not?'

‘Just wait, you impatient young prick. Southern Africa; the wide open plains...that's their home.'

‘ Well, if you fucken' get on with this card game,' Harold would sneer, tucked into a chair in the corner, one eye on his paperback, the other on our game, ‘you might win enough to buy ‘em a coupla fucken' plane tickets back...'

(The Viceroy of Misogyny never played cards with us, or never drank with us at the end of Fair's close; materializing instead out of the dark to sit in at Changi's van - concerned, it seemed, lest he miss something. Terawara Terry confided in me while re-stocking the stuffed toys after the Beechworth show that he never liked Harold.

‘Don't trust the prick.'

I wondered whether this was an instruction or a statement, and I pressed him about why.