Facing the fair

A rabble of drinkers congregated around the dreary Montpellier bars in the usual manner for a Friday night, but the hocus pocus of the fun fair across the street drew some of the more heavily dowsed revellers away from their tables. It was a solemn sight. As I made my way back from the corner shop I was compelled to venture inward and lose myself to the whirling mass of psychedelia and somehow capture its true essence.
I entered the park through a kink in the hedgerow only to step into a dark maze of giant trucks parked haphazardly across the field behind the pavilion. Eventually I emerged from a corridor of vehicles to bear witness to a platform of breathing angular apparatus. Dry ice gushed from the base of a large pneumatic arm that slowly leavened a wheel of shackled carnival-goers toward the surrounding canopy of sycamore leaves. The whole scene was suffused with a whooping and shrieking and grating grinding steel - a crackling energy of audible machines and hidden flesh like the living creation of a thunder god. Human faces journeyed upwards panic-stricken in the phospherence as the wheel gained speed, their minds suddenly entertaining the possibility of being set free from a frayed harness and a turgid plastic life and sent careening through the treetops to a better existence.

I moved on to the haunted house and immediately my interest lay not in its dismal facade but the rear wall and the face. I snuck behind to confront the protruding head, only to be surprised by its relative tameness. Was I missing something? Was this the wrong clown? Definitely not, as I could see the window I had peered out of the previous night simply by turning and looking beyond the park limits. An intoxicated tramp stumbled into the clown's immediate line of sight and for a brief lunatic moment I was palpably concerned for his safety.
'It's all a bit too much for a Friday,' he grumbled.
'Isn't it just,' I replied, wondering to myself how his Fridays could be so different to his Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and for that matter, his Thursdays, each of them an invariably perfect reprise of the previous night, dragging his homeless drunken carcass from one park to the next, scrounging for the next premium four-pack to ail the bleak canals of his withered intestines.
'Isn't it weird,' I said pointing to the clown, but also referring to the situation generally.
He grunted in delirious assent. 'Nothing I haven't seen before...Got any spare change?'

Once the drunk had slunk between two hulking juggernauts I moved to where he had stood to better assess this neutral response. True, the perspective was different, but my reaction was the same. The pervasive horror of the painted face was completely absent and the slow cycle of colours from the gondolas on the ferris wheel presented the image to me in a multitude of innocent refractions as if to mock my now tenuous conviction that something malignant remained hidden beneath its ridiculous glee-smile. Pondered sufficiently, I returned to the flat. But when I stared out the window for one last time that night the view confounded me moreso because the wretched grimace of the clown had returned and the focus of its intent appeared to swerve across the empty field and direct itself squarely on my presence, hunched cold and alone in the darkness behind the dissolving obscurant veneer of a dusty curtain net.