Bertrand Bunny and the Gravedigger’s Tooth – Part 1
Tootie had been barker at the out-of-town funfair’s novelty performance for some fifteen years. For almost the full duration of his tenure the routine had been with little variation: Tootie would caw, and jig, and play an up-tempo rendition of Scott Joplin’s Binks Waltz on his accordion, and prat-fall about until sufficient attention had been garnered that he could legitimately begin his spiel, well rehearsed enough to sound completely spontaneous.
Energetic as he ever was, he was older now and conscious of it. His stomach was fattened and tunic-straining and he was habitually discovering hair, unlovely bristly strands, sprouting in the nasal and lug-holes, and his eyebrows too, he was suddenly aware, were alive and unkempt. Weekly he’d snip and yank out tufts that were stuck and encrusted with lumps of the face-whitening greasepaint he smeared on nightly before taking to the platform.
Tonight the organisers had laid on a special theme and programme of events, as it had been dispassionately billed: FR THE KIDS.
Kids. Not KidZ – just for the kids. Toot didn’t much give a shit here or there what or whom it was for, but that eve at eightish he got his chalk on and got into character as he always did. He was caking on his blood red lip paint and his crackly stereo was playing Dire Straights’s Industrial Disease, to which Tootie was swaying somewhat absently.
“Goodness me,” he mimed wordlessly to it, bobbing his made-up head about. Then entered from behind the master, the boss of all, compere of the pre-show, whom Tootie didn’t much care for at all. Cal was his name.
Cal was a spindle of man, like a needle in a suit. No weight was on Cal, and he had a nasty point of a moustache to compliment, or otherwise, his chiselly face. He was tanned – God knew how. Little about him that wasn’t dried up and a husk. Cal flourished through the curtain that partitioned Toot’s little dressing-dive from the rest of the sorry show, and let it flap and lap about his waist languidly. He looked like a magician who’d make clumsy advances on the minors at a birthday party. The two men had a stare-out for a quarter minute before a brash word was said.
“Low simmered t’nite,” Cal said succinctly, as if this were supposed to mean much more than the little it did.
“Uhh??” Toot vocalised a particularly thick sort of tone. He wanted Cal to find him thick. Then one day, perhaps, he could fuck him and do him over good and for keeps, and he wouldn’t expect a Goddam thing. That’d be a Day, alright.
“Y’heard,” Cal said shortly, wearily. “Look. The kids. S’laid on tonight to… Well, d’you want to go into it? No? Hah.”
Toot was fed up already. Uppity, he shuffled and looked annoyed. Cal reacted – he knew what Tootie was like, the temper. Of the temper he’d rather not think. He trod carefully:
“A word before you’re on’s all,” he continued, tender of voice.
“Uhah?”
“It’s kids, Toot, okay – just t’bear in mind. That’s all.” And Cal went just like that. As if his fragmented spiels had meant anything.
Perhaps they had. Toot looked at the curtain long after it’d stopped swishing and long after Cal’s voice, philandering and being slapped about by some angry showgirl nearby, had faded into the ether. He was thoughtful. Cal had berated and bitched and griped before now – honestly he’d bitched – but never so earnestly. Toot was truly taken. ‘It’s kids, Toot’. Toot scratched his mop and had a think about when the sap Cal had been quite so sappy as to gripe on account of the kids. So what if Tootie scared a kid or so into nightmarish palpitations? Surely that was what the Cal-man was referring to.
One night back in a December carnival shenanigan, Toot had run amok after a whisky and vinegar sesh with a couple of so-an-sos at an auction in the afternoon, coming out of his tent and taking the platform violently, pent-up drunken nastiness inside of him. The kid had been a fourteen year old Brett Nietzsche, or so he’d been called. The philosopher’s surname hadn’t done anything for Toot-Toot, who’d proceeded to grapple around wildly whilst whooping, grabbing the nearest thing – that being Nietzsche – and knocking him flying as he stomped through the crowd. Little Brett had been maimed in two places: the cheek and the elbow. Grazes and cuts. Nothing broken. Toot had received shouts and Cal had given him a striking on the cheek, maiming him too.
Now, Toot had generously overlooked the fact that Cal himself was an unhinged bastard at times who had himself roughed up a couple of weak ones in the times gone by. But Toot was drunk, and hanging out his arse, and in no state to argue, and had taken the abuse. Now Cal still held it against him, but that was fine, the water was under the bridge. Still, though, it intrigued the Tooter that Cal had given it such attention. Such attention he’d given it. It bemused. But ah well, resigned Toot the Barker. That was for speculation and barking was for now. So it was that as the clock struck the time, Tootie gathered up his inflatable mallet, swigged his courageously Dutch whisky back and went out about his business.
Out in the dust and tussle of the kids night was a great furore of lots of shrill shouts and unbroken voices getting alternately excited and naffed off at this and that. Toot didn’t care for the kids any more than he cared for Cal, but both would mean money in his pocket tonight, and that would be enough. On his plinth he cawed and shouted, exceptionally bright tonight as there was to be a special show put on just FR THE KIDS: Tynan the Elephant (broken leg just mended) was to splurt a load of black ink over a series of targets, hopefully accurately. What a show it’d be. Tootie gave not a shit for Tynan, but shrilled away to his slowly gathering audience anyway.
“Roll up t’yer fAAAAVE-ritt enclosure,” he spaffed to the uncomprehending eleven and twelve year olds, “inside! inside! An’ ya won’t see the like of it again come years after; YEARS!!”
A fool he might’ve looked, but he was used to this. On and on it would go. What he wasn’t used to was the sudden sight of a boy, no more then eight, making his sedate way up and onto the platform whereon the Tooting clown stood yelping his wares.
Toot didn’t quite know what to do for a moment. He stood and eyeballed the boy (Dan was his name, as Toot would soon unfortunately learn), and the noise died a little as all wondered what would happen next. Dan was holding something, a cloth sort of object – perhaps a small toy or the like. Not knowing where else to look or what else to say, Tootie extended his bony arm toward the boy in some brittle gesture.
“Lessee,” Toot cacked, forming a wide and rather frightening grin as he drew closer. Both sets of eyes met and their locked gaze lingered. Then, at the sensation of Toot’s nasty rough finger brushing against his lapel, the curious boy drew back and scampered off the platform, his manner perplexing, neither fearful nor courageous. His concentration broken, Tootie stared after the fleeing figure for a small moment before shaking himself back to the situation at hand and barking away into the night.
***
When all was done and the show was packed and heaving with young and old bodies, Toot wiped the chalky dust from his forehead and ambled slowly back around the big top and to his hovel of a dressing room around the side. He banked on drinking and swearing at his reflection in the glass for an hour or two before going to rough sleep. What he hadn’t banked on was a big, angry Mad Marsten and his troops of about three or four very rough looking men waiting out back of the big top to give him the pounding of his life.
Now, Mad Marsten was about forty in years and Toot, even having never set eyes on him, knew him from his haircut and demeanour no as soon as he saw him. Mad had a sort of smooth Action Man doll haircut that was jet black and blended into the shape of his cranium and looked generally shitty and unpleasant. All who had heard of Mad Marsten knew he ran the chicken shed dances that rivalled these carnival night, and that the chicken sheds were full of nasty rough men and their beer, and that Mad had his hand in a lot more than pushing some pills and pilsners at a barn dance.
Anyhoo, Mad’s men beat Tootie up good and thoroughly. Toot was kicked in the shin first (which floored him) and then he got a spikey boot toe jabbed harshly into his side and before long he was wheezing and choking back a warm sicky vomit. Mad said very little save for some shouts about “GIT IM” and “STICKITTIN!!” …That was of course ‘til the beating was done and Toot’s breathing was all but a scratchy whimper, like a match struck against sandpaper.
Mad Marsten squatted in front of Toot and spoke into his ear. His voice was very soft and practised at being deadly and quiet. A drizzle had started which punctuated his every syllable very well like some noir thriller from the God-knows-when.
“When he’s back,” Mad breathed, “then if there’s more on you, you’ll get twice more. Boys like that aren’t to be touched,” and Toot groaned horribly then for he could at once place the face of the boy with the man now in front of him. What a nasty thing to have happened and it was about to get worse.
“This time we’ll leave a mark – we’ll take a tooth, or something that you’ll miss a bit. Yes – that’ll be it,” Marsten said succinctly, thinking on the spot. “A whole lot of pain for you and a lesson learned. Boys – my boys – not to be stroked by grubby clowns at fairs.”
Toot’s blood pressure raced and hot panic flared through his nostrils as the rough men turned him onto his back at the command of the smooth bastard now on his feet. Then one drew something evil and shiny from his hip and suddenly the instrument was in Toot’s gob, jabbing around before it clamped home on one side of the flailing head. Toot could hear himself thinly shrieking as what felt like a nail burrowing itself from inside his jaw and out through blood soaked gums exploded.
When it was done the clown was nearly unconscious and Marsten had had the tooth pocketed by one of the rough men, saying coolly that he’d keep it ‘to remember’. He was mad, alright. Poor Tootie was beginning to regain a bit of consciousness and sense when the sky cracked and the rain really came down. Mad and his troops had to rush off to seek shelter, calling back abusive things to the broken barker.
And with that they were gone, and Toot was left in a sudden world of pain, rolling over in the wet dirt so that his left side was all sludged up and he looked not dissimilar from Br’er Rabbit’s tar-baby jerking in agony around in the wet, yelling “Ahhhrrrraaaahh! Ye fuckAAAARRROOOOOHHGH, God tha’sh … feckarrhh … ah God-schtrewthin-SCHAKE …”
***