AUSTRALIAN AUTHOR | Free Book | 'Clown Club: Chapter 1' by D. M. Wright
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VOLUME 1
CHAPTER 1. >>
I.
The first rule of Clown Club: if this is your first night, you WILL wear a nose or paint your nose.
The second rule of Clown Club: if you return, you WILL volunteer to wear a nose or paint your nose.
I was fifteen when I first heard those rules.
I’d like to say I was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed back then, but that wasn’t the case.
I was quiet as fuck.
Skinny. Timid. Nervous about everything.
A proper mummy’s boy living in a single-mother household where Dad got to see me once a fortnight and only then on weekends.
Mum would pull up outside his place, kiss me on the cheek, then practically shove me out the door with tears in her eyes – every time – as if she were sacrificing her firstborn to a dragon.
The way she carried on, you’d think there was a fifty-fifty chance I wouldn’t come back.
Either Dad would eat me alive or I’d return hopelessly corrupted by inherent toxic masculinity which the world had warned her about.
And I believed every word.
By the time I was fifteen, I was a right mess. Terrified of confrontation. Terrified of looking stupid. Terrified of being the sort of bloke which she’d been warning me about.
And it was that anxious, little mess of a teenager that ended up being the reason those Clown Club rules existed.
Sure, I didn’t want to wear a clown nose.
Who the hell would?
What teenager would in their right mind assent to such degradation?
But that’s not really how it went down.
In fact, I can summarise the whole thing in five simple words:
Taytum Neveah Haze Edga-Ray Brooks-Wheatcroft.
II.
But let’s back up a little.
Or forward.
Honestly, I have no idea where we are in the timeline anymore.
One of those weekends, anyway, Dad dragged me along to Clown Club.
If Misery were to redo its movie poster, my face would’ve sufficed.
There I was, squished between two burly blokes who were talking shit about each other, their wives, their jobs and anything else unfortunate enough to exist within conversational range.
I sat wedged on a bench between them with my thighs pressed hard against theirs and so little elbow room that I’d spent most of the evening hunched over, while their shoulders practically met behind my head.
Me.
Fifteen years old.
Still in my school uniform because Mum had dropped me straight at Dad’s after Friday knock-off. Being late as usual, after stopping at the shops, talking to her girlfriends and buying useless ornaments for the house like a bower bird, she’d eaten away most of the afternoon. Dad had raced us straight to the pub without giving me time to change.
But also sitting on my face was a bright red clown nose so ridiculously large I could kiss the underside of the thing without even trying.
Across the table sat a bloke somewhere between thirty and forty with his own red nose squeezed onto his face. Without missing a beat in the conversation, he grabbed a tube of face paint, squeezed a dollop onto two fingers and dragged it across his lips.
One stroke.
A thick red frown.
He looked directly at me and asked:
“Why the sad face?”
He giggled at his own joke and took a swig of his beer.
III.
The urge to sink and disappear beneath the table grew stronger by the second.
Then the lights went out.
At least, that’s what it seemed like.
Something had smacked into my face.
For a brief, odd moment, I thought I’d gone blind.
I grabbed at the material covering my eyes and pulled it away.
Dad stood there grinning. Somewhere between the bar and the table, he’d acquired a half-yellow-half-blue clown shirt and launched it at my head.
“Wear that, Jimbo,” he said.
I looked down at the thing.
It somehow managed to be more humiliating than the nose.
Dad’s grin widened:
“Trust me. You’ll cheer up because of it, not in spite of it.”
He reached into an open box sitting on a chair beside the bloke opposite me and pulled out a clown shirt of his own.
Dad slipped it on without hesitation. Then he stole the tube of face paint, dabbed a red blob onto the end of his nose and dropped into the vacant chair on the other side of the box.
I ignored the shirt he’d thrown.
Instead, I reached across the table for one of the two drinks Dad had brought back from the bar.
“Uh-uh-uhhh.” Dad snatched it away before my fingers got there. “Shirt first.”
I glared at him.
He pointed around the long table.
“Look around, mate. You’ll look stupid without it, not with it.”
I did.
Every bloke along the table was wearing at least something.
Shirts.
Noses.
Face paint.
Nobody seemed remotely bothered.
Dad shrugged:
“See? We’re not lighting up in flames with embarrassment.”
Ugh!
Why was he right?
Nobody looked embarrassed.
Which somehow made me embarrassed!
IV.
I was more embarrassed wearing school uniform than those men were in bright shirts, baggy overalls and red noses.
I eyed Dad’s bribe and seriously considered joining them for the sake of a drink. My mouth was drying out fast, and it felt like every pair of eyes along the table was locked on me.
The bloke to my right slowly turned in his seat.
His torso bulging beneath his oversized shirt looked like it had been carved out of a brick wall.
As he rotated toward me, his sleeve rode up and exposed a forearm black with tattoos and thick enough to have its own postcode.
Behind his painted nose, he fixed me with a stare.
A shiver crawled down my spine.
I could feel a bead of sweat forming on my temple.
I swallowed what little saliva remained in my mouth.
My tongue felt like sandpaper.
Then Dad’s phone pinged.
He glanced down at the screen.
“Ryker’s outside,” he said. “His tyre’s fucked itself.”
Dad sculled the rest of his beer in one go and slammed the empty glass onto the table:
“T-ahhh.”
Like a starter pistol had gone off, the rest of the men got to their feet and, one after the other, they followed him out.
Much to my relief.
Alone, I slumped against the bench backrest.
For about thirty seconds, it was magnificent.
I sat there by myself, surrounded by empty chairs with an untouched clown shirt on the table in front of me and wearing a clown nose I’d almost forgotten I had on despite being big enough to receive satellite signals.
Then I looked around.
Everybody was sitting with someone.
V.
Everywhere else in the pub, people sat with their mates, their wives, their girlfriends, their families.
Everyone belonged to someone.
I figured ditching the nose and throwing it into the box along with the shirt would make me feel less stupid.
But loneliness hit harder than the embarrassment.
Before I realised what I was doing, I grabbed my soft drink and drained the whole thing.
I dropped the empty glass onto the table:
“T-ahhh.”
Like father, like son.
Then I got up and headed outside.
Ryker was one of those early-forties blokes whose life looked like he’d been assembled from spare parts in a workshop.
He drove a generic V6 sedan that spent weekdays pretending to be sensible and weekends trying very hard not to be.
He had the physique of a boxer and enough skills to convince most people he actually was one.
Truth be told, his boxing was more for fitness than competition, so any boxing wisdom he handed out should probably be taken with a cup full of salt.
But that never stopped him showing off against Dad, which is exactly what he was doing when I arrived at the carpark.
There I found Ryker’s front tyre had completely given up on life.
The alloy rim sat low against the bitumen while the tyre spread out around it like a dead jellyfish.
Bouncing beside it, Ryker and Dad were bare-knuckle sparring as though they hadn’t seen each other in years.
Which was ridiculous!
I’m pretty sure they’d seen each other the day before.
Getting more taps in, Dad was winning. He seemed to take Ryker’s lack of professional skills as something of an advantage.
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