The Laughing Clowns

by William McInnes

Genres: General Fiction; Cultural Heritage; Humor & Satire; Sagas

Synopsis

When a developer asks Peter to assess a prime piece of Queensland real estate ? the Pickersgill Peninsula Showgrounds ? he jumps at the chance. It will give him time out from having to be with the family he loves. And it will take him back to his childhood home; to his parents, his twin sister, Pearl, and his brother, Gary, the TV weatherman. Over these few days, he will come to realise that sometimes when you go back to where you came from you find out how much you actually have, and how much you could lose. He just has to make his mind up, and listen to the advice that?s given by, of all people ? the King of Hot Dogs. But will he? 'For a novel that has so few pretensions, this is a skilfully constructed story that manages to be insightful, understated and very funny simultaneously' - Sydney Morning Herald 'William McInnes is insightful, thoughtful and funny. He has a flair for fiction as much as memoirs and non-fiction, as The Laughing Clowns will attest' - The Daily Telegraph

Release date: September 25, 2012

Publisher: Hachette Australia

Print pages: 304

Sample

A group of strangers pushed together for a short time usually ignore each other. Think of a lift: even a happily chatting couple’s conversation dwindles to silence in the confines of a shared space.

Most trams are filled with people doing just that: not connecting. But some seem actively to repel it – showing a grumpy face, headphones or intense concentration on a book or magazine. Others don’t necessarily want to connect, but do show an interest – staring at someone’s outfit, listening to phone conversations. Others still, though glancing through the window, seem to be more open, even willing their fellow travellers to connect with them in some way – meeting someone’s eyes, offering a small smile, showing recognition of those getting on and off and whether they need a seat. And then there are those people who are neutral and seem to have almost no awareness of where they are or who they’re with.

David, a tall Anglo forty-something, grips a hanging strap as he stands on the crowded tram. He scans the carriage and its occupants, noting people’s movements and their subtle indications of their intentions. A gentle inclination of an elbow and shoulder from an older woman hints towards a preparation to stand; she moves her bag to her left hand so she can pull the stop buzzer.

Sometimes, he thinks, sometimes, the way a person holds themself really gives you a glimpse of the kind of person they might be – like the young man with the iPad. David regularly sees him on this tram; always dressed neatly in fitted suits, his hair styled and his beard as carefully-kept as his clothes. Always on his iPad, his thumb sweeping across the screen, skimming through whatever it is he usually reads. But today his behaviour isn’t the same. He’s looking at something on the device, yes, but David can see his thumb moving more slowly across the screen, scrolling back and forth, to and fro. An image or words? The way the man’s head tilts slightly, almost imperceptibly, implies to David that it’s probably an image. A photograph, he thinks. He watches as the man’s hand stays still for a few seconds and then moves back and forth again. Every few minutes he looks away from the screen and sighs, turning to the window, and almost always his left hand comes close to his face, his thumb gently touching a gold band on his ring finger.

Another deep breath. He’s upset.

If David cranes his neck and leans forward he’ll be able to see the image on the screen. He holds his position, uncomfortably contorted but in an inconspicuous way. Good practice, David thinks to himself.

A shuffle of feet as the other passengers holding the hanging straps move, like birds adjusting their perches on a branch to make room for another, and David sees the iPad screen. It shows a photo of the man on the tram with another man, almost as neatly styled, embracing on a beach. Then an arm covers the screen and the neat young man on the tram sighs again, clearly upset. The passengers in the aisle revert to their original positions.

David resumes his relaxed stance and gently swings on the tram strap. I was right, he thinks. Well, I hope something good happens for you today, Neat Beard.

Then a flash as something passes by outside the window. David looks out; a seagull. His eyes dart, his attention drawn away from his fellow passengers. Two ravens sit on an electric power pole, before one drops swiftly onto the garbage bin below. Imported birds – sparrows and starlings and blackbirds – are everywhere, increasing in number with the density in housing.

A strip along the tramline has been planted with flowering eucalypts. David looks carefully as they pass; honeyeaters are raiding the gum-nut flowers, while red wattlebirds and galahs fly above them. David leans forward to look after them, not noticing his invasion of the seated passenger’s space until it’s too late; he pulls back clumsily.

‘I’m sorry.’

The passenger shrugs. ‘No worries.’

David explains. ‘Galahs.’

The passenger looks back at his book. David hesitates, about to say something else, before being distracted by an Indian myna bird flying past the window.

The tram approaches its next stop. David lets go of his standing strap and pulls out a very small notebook with attached pencil. The tram comes to a standstill with the familiar jolt so many Melburnians no longer notice, but which can easily hurl an unsuspecting tourist to the floor or, perhaps worse, into one or more of the less approachable locals.

As he waits for the half-dozen people in front of him to get off, David has a last look through the windows and, seeing nothing, writes in his notebook.

Stepping down from the tram, his awareness of other commuters finally kicks in. Some people almost leap off, some take it one step at a time, looking around carefully for cars, while others are already mentally elsewhere, darting quickly across the road. One action, same intent, so much variation.

David joins the city workers on the footpath, taking his usual route. Though long-legged, he walks slowly; a country man’s mooch – steady and deliberate. He sees a crested pigeon, four spotted doves, some blackbirds, a thrush, some white-naped honeyeaters and a seagull. He watches the seagull as it takes flight from a garbage bin, following its path against the blue- and ochre-tinted sky. He slows down even more as he walks through a small park, the lawn dappled as the sunlight filters down through the trees and bushes. The grevilleas are blooming, the orange, pink, yellow and red spikes beautiful against the blue–green foliage.

Hearing a sound, David veers away from the path and pauses below a tall tree. He looks up and checks a pair of tawny owls – frogmouths – their nest almost invisible. David smiles, as he does every morning that he sees them; a good day.

Catching a movement in the grevillea, David turns to see what it was: small birds – honeyeaters? No; too small. Silvereyes? He’s never seen them here before. He moves to the side of the footpath, letting people go past him, but trying not to unsettle the birds. He watches them flit about. Even though they are only twenty feet or so away, he pulls out a pair of small binoculars, and focuses on the birds. Silvereyes. They are definitely silvereyes; apricot-sized in shades of green feathering into grey, with white rings around their eyes. David continues to watch them for a while, seeing what they are eating. Insects or seeds? Nectar?

Passers-by take notice; David’s tall, relatively young and, though not wearing a suit, is clearly dressed for work, so his using binoculars seems out of place, making him look like a private detective, a spy or a creep, rather than a birdwatcher. But people walk on by anyway, as he pulls out a battered notebook. He turns to a page marked ‘30th Aug’, where there is already a list of birds. David jots down the ones he has seen while walking from the tram stop, then adds Silvereyes (5). East William St (park).

•

Some time later, David walks upstairs and into an open-plan office. It has various desks – drafting tables – as well as computer stations. He heads to his own seat and dumps his coat, nodding to Rosie, working nearby. She smiles at him.

‘Hi, David. There are a few messages for you on your desk.’

David lets his nod be his reply and sits down, turning on his computer. He looks at the screen and after a long moment of nothing happening, sighs.

Go on. Just die.

The computer finally flickers to life, like a fluorescent tube light when it’s first switched on.

I don’t hate my job, David thinks to himself. I don’t. I am on the side of good.

‘Have a nice weekend?’ Rosie puts a pile of envelopes on his desk.

David shakes his head, shrugging. ‘So-so.’

‘Did you go away?’

‘No, I went to the football. We lost.’

Rosie is ready to speak but David raises his hand in a stop signal.

‘I don’t want to talk about it. How was your weekend?’ Rosie smiles. ‘Lovely. We saw that new movie on Friday night, on Saturday it was Stephanie’s dance final plus Pete’s step-mum’s brother’s fiftieth, which was actually a hoot, even though I was dreading it.’

David doodles on the paper in front of him: a bird, it has an amazing sense of character to it, though sketched in just a few lines.

Rosie watches as she continues, ‘Then on Sunday Josh had football; of course he has to play in the under-thirteens and the under-fifteens so there goes half the day, but then we –’ She pauses. David’s vague attention has been completely diverted from her to the window, where a bird outside has flown into a tree.

Rosie follows his gaze then looks back to her colleague, waiting. After a full minute, David faces her again. Realising the list of weekend activities is over, he offers up what he knows is a completely inadequate reply.

‘That’s a lot. Pretty busy.’

Rosie smiles, nearly forgiving.

David adds, ‘I don’t know how you do it.’

Rosie looks back out the window. ‘What bird was that?’

‘A black-faced cuckoo-shrike.’

‘How can you tell that from here?’

‘The way it shuffles its wings when it lands.’

Rosie looks out at the grey-and-black bird and shrugs; unim-pressed, dismissive. ‘It’s never just a blackbird with you, is it?’

David forms a small, apologetic smile until Rosie disappears behind their divider, then sighs and pulls the pile of envelopes towards him.

Then he says, very softly, as he looks out the window at the bird, ‘It’s a blackbird if it’s a blackbird.’

And he smiles.

•

The phone rings and David picks it up.

‘Vic Land Care, David Thomas speaking.’

There is no response for a few moments and then, just as he is about to hang up, he hears a call in the background: a crow call; a Torresian crow – Corvus orru, only found in the northern parts of Australia. The caller must be a birder.

David’s heart leaps a little. Someone has seen something! The crow’s call was sharp and harsh: ar-ar-ar; an aggressive call, probably defending food from a rival. If it were in a city it would have been picking at something dead by the road. But it sounded too close to the caller to be in a tree and there was traffic noise as well. He can hear the sound of a heavy truck in the background, and remembers when he last heard that particular bird call and type of engine at the same time; it was when he’d passed a troop carrier filled with young soldiers in camouflage uniforms, with short tight haircuts and wearing wraparound sunglasses. And guns. Army. Army town.

Townsville, David thinks. No, wait …

He hears another call, though this time not a bird’s. It’s a man, making a faux bird-call sound, like a mix between a ringing phone and an old ham actor rolling his ‘r’s as some form of voice warm-up exercise.

It’s Noel Barrellon. And if anybody should have been a ham actor, it was Noel.

He ran birding boat trips out to the continental shelf off Wollongong and David had known him for nearly fifteen years. Even when they first met, Noel wasn’t simply a large man with a large beard and a large personality; he had always been more than that. He was someone who played Falstaff while wearing an old Illawarra Steelers Rugby League jersey and track pants and who spoke with an accent as broad as his stomach.

But Noel wasn’t only a character, he was also real and so was his love affair with birds and his knowledge of the creatures. He had taken to David, because David was very good at listening and if there was anything that Noel loved more than birds, eating, wine and the sound of his own voice, it was being listened to.

His bird call was a signal he gave when he had seen something he thought was special and wanted only a few of his favourites to know about it early.

The first time David had heard it was via a phone call from Noel when a wandering albatross had drifted in from the other side of the world. Even now, he thought it was odd that a living creature would fly from the other side of the world to come to Wollongong. Not that he would ever tell anybody that, though – least of all Noel. Just as he never told Noel that he had seen the wandering albatross a fair while before Noel had given David his bird-call signal.

David doesn’t wait for Noel to speak now. ‘Noel, what’s that crow doing?’

There comes a chortle that sounds like the fat old actor who used to sell Heinz tomato soup in television commercials.

‘Well, what do you think he’s doing, Dave?’

‘It’s hopping about by the side of the road over … a dead possum.’

There’s a pause, then a crow call and then an abrupt, ‘Well, bugger me! It is a possum. I thought it was a cat. You’re on form, Dave.’

‘Noel! Long time; how’ve you been? What are you doing in Townsville?’

There’s a disgruntled sigh from Noel before he speaks again. ‘Well, now, nobody likes a smart-arse.’ Then he laughs. ‘On very good form. I’ve been good; good and busy. Listen, I’m just giving you the nod on a sighting of a pale pygmy magpie goose up here, north of Port; I’m driving up to see it now.’

‘A what? Really? Sure it’s not a green-freckled?’

‘I dunno … Thought that at first, but it was Bill Matthews – he brings the minibus up every year. From Adelaide. Bunch of oldies, but they know what they’re doing usually. They saw it this morning, halfway to Mossman. Jeanne Gallie was up there and she just called me. And David – they heard from Neill.’

‘Neill?’

‘Yeah. He left any messages for you?’

David pauses a moment. He reads the sticky notes before him. David – PPMG here. Neill – call. ‘Shit.’

‘I thought you didn’t have a tick on it. ’S why I rang.’

‘Shit,’ he says again, incensed. ‘Shit.’

There is a pause. Noel begins to sign off, ‘Call me if you get up here.’

‘Call me if you see it,’ David gets in just before Noel gives his bird call again and hangs up.

David stares at nothing. ‘Shit!’ Louder this time.

Rosie tentatively pokes her head up over the divider. ‘Are you all right?’

David doesn’t hear her so she repeats the enquiry, louder. David hears.

‘Fine,’ he says dismissively, picking up a filled-in form, at first trying to decipher it, then just pretending to decipher it.

Shit, he thinks. Then shakes his head firmly. He brings up a graph system on his computer screen.

David looks at his watch then back to the form. At his watch. At the clock. At the screen.

He logs into his bank account online. It’s a pretty sad sight, but there is some credit available. He looks up a travel-agency site and starts typing: Origin: Melbourne. Destination: Cairns.

There’s a flight at eleven to Sydney and one at two to Cairns. He could be there before dark, or at least for first light tomorrow. Thinking, he looks up car hire for a four-wheel-drive. Bloody expensive; ridiculous.

He goes back to his envelopes and pulls out another form but, like a man with a persistent itch, he can’t settle. He looks at the calendar and remembers something.

Shit, he thinks. He kicks the table in frustration. Quickly lowering his head before Rosie can respond, he picks up the telephone and dials.

‘Hi, is Genevieve Forti there, please?’ David swivels on his chair, keeping his back determinedly turned away, but he can almost feel Rosie’s stare. He hunches closer to the phone receiver.

‘Hello?’

‘Hi, Genevieve. It’s David. David Thomas.’

Genevieve laughs. ‘Hi, David Thomas. And I do know which David. Didn’t we sleep together last week?’

David winces. ‘Well, yeah. Of course. And, um, yeah. It was lovely. You were lovely.’

‘Were?’

‘Are, of course. You are. Um … This thing on Thursday night, with your friends …’

‘Yes …’

Genevieve doesn’t give much away in her tone.

‘Is it, um … ? I know it’s important to you.’

‘Yes.’

David struggles through the silence and the building tension. ‘I just might have to go away. Only might.’

Another pause, then Genevieve says, ‘Only might. So, is there a choice here? Have you got appendicitis or something? Not sure if it’s going to perforate? Or is your mother on her deathbed somewhere?’

David pauses, a bit taken aback by the neutrality of the voice combined with the sharpness of the words. ‘My mother’s already dead,’ he says, without thinking.

There is a pause. ‘Oh. I’m sorry.’ There is an apology in the tone, but one that only admits fault knowing the other is at greater fault. Then there is another pause. Genevieve breaks first. ‘So?’

‘So. It sounds like I should come.’

‘No, you shouldn’t come; it would have been nice if you had wanted to come. What is it you “might” have to do?’

David screws up his face as if knowing his mother will belt him, knowing he is immature, knowing he is wrong, already hating himself, but unable to stop. ‘There’s a bird I want to see.’

‘A bird.’

‘I haven’t seen it before.’

‘What – it only shows itself on a Thursday night?’

‘It’s in Cairns. Well, north of Cairns … I’ll be back on Saturday.’ ‘Cairns? A bird?’ Genevieve is incredulous.

David lets his words sit, still grimacing.

‘God. The scary thing is I actually believe you!’

David waits, hopeful.

‘Well, hey – don’t come back on my account. There might be a possum you need to check out. Or an island resort. I mean, if you can just fly to Cairns for a weekend, why wouldn’t you want to get out on the reef? Have a strawberry daiquiri or two, find Nemo. It’s meant to be beautiful. I wouldn’t know myself.’

‘Nemo’s a fish,’ he responds, idiotically. ‘Why would I want to go see a fish?’ It sounded pretty ordinary to him as soon as he thought it and when he hears the tone of exasperation at the other end of the phone he tries to back-pedal. Or at least buy some time. ‘I haven’t decided whether to go or not.’

‘So you rang me for what? To take me with you? That doesn’t seem to have come up.’

David is silent.

‘Then why? To give you what – permission? For me to say, “No, that’s fine. I don’t mind what you do, don’t worry about my dinner and my friends,” who I told about you because I thought I might have actually met someone halfway fucking decent and reliable?’

David lets her words wash over him, wincing and not unsympathetic. He’s heard similar before.

•

David knocks on the thin divider meant to delineate boss from worker, private from public. Being slightly lower than David’s height, it does neither.

‘Yep?’

Maggie, a middle-aged woman, is going through a mass of papers on a table with a keen young intern, Daisy.

‘Hi, Maggie. When does this job have to be finished again?’ Maggie looks at the papers all around her. ‘This job is never going to be finished. What you mean is, “When are they going to stop paying us?”’

David offers her a vague apologetic gesture. ‘Well, yes.’

‘Maybe when everything is extinct, or everything is GM whether we like it or not, or when some sound bite or election bribery transforms our crap amount of money into something decent, or maybe even tonight when I have to submit this yearly funding application report I can’t finish writing because my stupid computer that they said they’d “upgrade as soon as possible” three months ago crashed and the technical department has been outsourced and –’ She glances at Daisy, all lipstick and eagerness, then stops, sighs and looks at David. ‘Why, David?’

‘I just need a couple of days off. If I leave now, I could be back on …’ David mentally calculates, ‘Friday. By lunchtime. Leave without pay.’

Maggie gestures towards the papers everywhere.

David pleads. ‘It’s barely two days … There’s a bird I’ve got to see.’

Maggie sighs again, almost defeated already. Then she makes a little jutting movement with her chin.

David knows she’ll turn to her laptop.

She turns to her laptop. ‘A bird, huh?’

He nods.

‘What’s it called?’

‘Pale pygmy magpie goose. PPMG.’

She nods. ‘Sounds like an accounting firm. Wikipedia okay?’

‘It should give you an idea.’

‘So sure of yourself, David.’ But she’s smiling. It’s a game and it’s obvious she likes him – or something about him, something she’s interested in trying to uncover. But she realises she hasn’t got that much time and she juts her chin out a bit further. ‘This thing better be special …’

David sits down. He gives her a look that says, It is.

‘It is an accounting firm!’ Maggie laughs. ‘And some other silly bloody thing: a media management group in Beverley Hills and a …’ She clicks onto something else and gives a hoot. ‘A nice big blackfella with bad ears. Good suit, though. Oh, the joys of a browse on the web.’

David stares at her.

‘He’s a boxer and he’s had his fiftieth birthday and your PPMG have hosted it for him. Na, they hosted the official after-party for his fiftieth. Wanker. Oh well. Evander Holyfield. And he’s even got a foundation named after him. His ears – his ears really are bad.’

‘One was bitten.’

‘What?’

‘One was bitten in a fight.’

Maggie stares at him.

‘Another boxer called Mike Tyson bit his ear.’

‘True?’

He nods.

‘You blokes. A fella bit my ear once. Well, he nibbled it. On a date. Thought I should return the favour.’

David looks at her pen. She twirls it a bit. Not the whole way around. She’s thinking.

‘Thank God I had a bit of a look down his ear. Wasn’t pretty – put me off custard for a while.’

David makes a face.

‘Oh yeah, it’s all right for you. You blokes want us girls to go all Star Trek on your bits and pieces. Boldly go where no girl should ever go. Here’s your bird.’

They stare at each other.

Maggie twirls the pen between her fingers. Still not the whole way around.

‘It’s rare.’

‘Very rare. Endangered.’

‘Can see that. What makes it different from the pale pygmy goose?’ She’. . .