Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Once upon a time there lived a little boy called Aristide Delhomme;
Aristide after his grandfather. He was born in St Véronique on the coast of Normandy, in the spring, and he had red hair. His grandfather owned an iron foundry near Caen and his father was a farmer. Aristide, above all else, wanted to be a circus clown but he had never spoken about this to anyone.

   It was August and Aristide was happy because that was the time
the circus came to the village and his grandfather came to the house, both on their annual visit, and his grandfather always took him to see the single performance.

   Aristide Delhomme senior was a man who understood the mystic link between boys and circuses and he knew, to his own sorrow,
that this was not so with his son. So every year he would make a point of spending the latter half of August with the family and of taking the young Aristide to see the itinerant show.

   It had come already to St Véronique that year, no more than a
tawdry caravan with six people and as many dogs. The workhorses that pulled the shabby cart were the same that, at dusk, must convince the spectators that they were fresh from the sands of Arabia. In daylight this did not look possible. But then Aristide never saw them in daylight.

   The diminutive size of the whole affair enabled the apparatus to
be assembled in a flash. As one watched, benches were carried from the waiting room of the Mairie down the steps and onto the green, where two of the circus men tugged them into a crude circle with the caravan set, like an open gate, at an angle to the only gap in the seats. The circle seemed small, séance-small, waiting for night to bring reality.

   And so on that August evening, when Aristide was ten years old,
a passer-by would have seen a red-haired boy and an old man, deep in earnest conversation, walking towards the open door of a barn. Aristide was showing his grandfather round the farm that was intended as his inheritance, his lips buttoned, afraid that at any moment he would let slip that he intended to leave St Véronique next day with the circus.

   It was not yet dusk as they entered. The sun lay low, its beams
running horizontally into the barn, shining on the things nearest the floor so that it appeared as if the upper half of the door had been shut against it. Aristide’s cousin and a small man with a glass eye laboured side by side in the dust which swirled round them so that their bodies, though turning rhythmically with their labour, seemed almost still by comparison.

   The man with the glass eye shovelled grain from the fields into a
pit sunk in the barn floor. Beside him, on a pedestal, a small petrol motor shivered and whined, driving a belt, which drew the grain up through a pipe that overhung a hopper in the loft. This hopper was not static but shook constantly so that the good grain sank to a central hole through which it was sucked away from the lighter chaff, descending again through another pipe in intermittent rushes and pauses to where Aristide’s cousin waited with sacks. He stood beside the glass-eyed man and occasionally their shoulders touched, completing a perfect circle. When one sack was full he would move it to one side and replace it with another which in turn grew wide-bellied with golden drops.

   From time to time Glass-eye would pour water into a depression
at the top of the motor to replace the thin column of steam that rose
constantly from it. Neither man spoke; Glass-eye because he could not and the other because Glass-eye could not. The visitors acknowledged them silently.

   Aristide climbed the ladder into the loft. He put his hand into the stream that fell into the hopper and it sprayed fountainwise, the chaff
drifting in the stillness and the hard grains stinging his arm as they
bounced off and were lost in the heap, disappearing beneath the soft film on top of it, where black corn-insects panicked and scurried. In the loft the motor sounded distant. Nearer was the sibilance of the seeping grain below and the clattering rush of more from above. It sounded to Aristide like the roar of applause, hard and staccato from the front rows, changing to a soft hiss from the crowd at the back. The excitement welled up in him. He picked up a handful of grains like tiny people in his hand and threw them into the air. Soon tomorrow would come.

   Then the sounds stopped one by one. First the motor dying away,
then the shovelling, leaving only the rush above to slow to a fine shower and be still, the last of the drops falling only because they had been sucked up and left suspended. Aristide caught these last in his hands and carried them down the ladder to throw them into the lower trough again.

   His cousin was whistling softly, to break the silence. They clambered into the trailer behind the softly chugging tractor, Aristide helping the game old man. The cousin heaved his jacket onto his shoulders, spreading his arms like eagle’s wings and stretching the garment across his back as if it were another sack. Then he leapt nimbly onto the driver’s seat and they moved off, leaving Glass-eye to lock up the barn.

   As they bumped along the cart track beneath the apple trees the old man half stood in the trailer, reaching up with his stick at a loaded bough. He grasped and held it as they went forward so that the tree, weaker, was forced to yield up this whole branch, tearing a white hole in the green wood. When it was secured, the old man turned and handed it like a bouquet to the boy, and they laughed and chewed the damp fruit all the way back to the house.

   
   Fires were lighted on the green at nightfall and the village gathered. The Mayor was already seated in his own high-backed chair, dragged out onto the grass. It still lent dignity, despite the change of context. The Mayor was in total shadow since he had drawn the chair back from the flames to preserve the veneer so that it would return unscathed to its rightful place when the time came. A man was leaning, side-twisted over a cabinet on the grass, leisurely painting his face into ugliness. The black-rimmed eyes, painstakingly unnatural, were made human again by the tender light of the fires, while the face of the boy who watched him silently was made gaunt and hollow by the shadows and his brown hair had become a wig of seraph-gold.

   Aristide and his grandfather had been waiting at the green to ensure good seats and had seen these two, the man and the boy, and watched them. In the fading daylight the man had struck the boy. In dragging one of the benches the boy had upset a bucket of horse-fodder. It had scattered in the grass and the loose chaff had drifted in the wind. The chase had begun, man after boy, among the mad-spinning fragments, over the bench that was lying where the boy had let it fall, and the blows had ended it. The boy was left kneeling in the last of the sun, his face upturned and his pale jaw hanging, reddening from the blows. Tears had flowed silently, as silently as the two of them stood now against the gathering sound, the firelight taking the anger from the eyes beneath the paint and defining the hurt on the smaller, sallow face.

   Now all were gathered, bent forward on the benches, staring into
the space that was still empty, pretending that they would not care if it were not filled, waiting and watching, pretending to know all that would take place, pretending intimacy with the circus people themselves so that they might forestall the dull feeling of apartness, the sense of being the entertained that manifests itself as jealousy of the entertainer and is disguised, but never hidden, by spoken admiration.

   First they saw dogs, laboriously taught to do things that are of no
value to dogs. Their act began before a silent host but soon a murmur began as the man they had seen painting his face made ready to enter the ring. He was completely changed, his white face pearlescent in the firelight. The parents said to their children and the children to each other “Now we will see Monsieur Achille”.

   They laughed at him even as he entered the ring, walking as all
men walk, one foot in front of the other. Aristide held his breath. The
village remembered him from the last time, and from all the other last
times. He had not changed his act.

   First he stood on one leg, searching exaggeratedly for the other
and the children shouted, “it’s behind you!” Then he mimed all kinds of tragedy and misadventure, falling, always falling, and afterwards he aped the men and women sitting around him though without their knowledge, for if they found out he would cease to be a clown and become an actor and in St Véronique they mistrusted actors.

   Next he brought chairs, one by one until there were seven, tripping
over his feet as he brought each one, rolling and sliding and piling them one on the other until there was a pyramid of chairs in the middle of the ring. This was the climax and the people waited, laughing. He stepped back from the structure, paused ran, leapt, poised on the pinnacle and uttered a howl of triumph which turned to mock-despair as the pile of chairs tottered and collapsed in deliberate slow motion. Their fall swung the painted figure outwards and downwards, howling, freefalling to the ground where he lay still. All the while the people laughed, rocking and swaying.

   Now a masked, red-nosed doctor hobbled into the ring, laid a
tricolor over the white face and announced that Monsieur Achille was dead. He stood with his head bowed until a roar of applause signalled that Monsieur Achille was alive, resurrected, and he chased the charlatan round and round and out of the ring, returning for his customary bow to the assembly. Aristide seemed already to share in the applause that followed and it seemed he also was out there, painted and breathless, and he was happy.

   It was as Monsieur Achille stood bowing low that the boy they
had seen earlier ran from the caravan and climbed onto a chestnut horse. It was the cries of the stooge and the dog-man that made him turn to see the boy urging the animal forward into the ring. The people watched. “Ah!” they said, “Monsieur Achille’s son has an act of his own,” and they applauded.

   The horse was in the ring now, unsaddled, unbridled, and the
boy leaned forward clinging to its neck. It circled Monsieur Achille who tried to catch it as the onlookers laughed and then it lunged forward, many-coloured in the firelight; red in its gleam and purple in its shadow. The people scattered in ragged fear as it approached the benches, cleared them with a leap and made off into the darkness, bearing the fire-gold child. In the moment’s silence after, they heard again Monsieur Achille’s howl of despair before their own sounds began and a dozen men ran forward in the direction the horse had taken.

   The two Aristides had been among those nearest to the point
where the horse had leapt the benches and had heard the gasping sound of the boy, louder than the horse whose beat was muffled by the grass. It was louder than the hushed spectators, louder even than the howl of despair for it was nearer to them and the old man wondered whether this was the echo of the tears that had earlier been soundless. The two of them followed the group that had followed the horse.

   The horse stood still on the beach, its hoofs deep in the sand.
It had leapt the stone wall and could go no further because of the sea. Nor could it turn back because the beach was lower than the level above. It stood still and the boy lay beside it, face down, shaken with long sobs. One of the men mounted the horse and another passed the boy up into his arms. They moved to a place where the ground was lower and the horse picked its way up the bank with its burden.

   Monsieur Achille was waiting for them, a little apart from the
circle on the green. He took the boy from them and carried him into the caravan.

   This was the last time that Aristide visited the circus and as they
walked home the old man squeezed the boy’s hand and said in answer to his unspoken question, “perhaps he wanted to be a farmer”.