Bruno

Bruno

Bruno’s son was having a birthday.

Bruno was an abusive man, named for the dog, foaming and shaking his cheeks the moment he came out the womb. He used to crawl on the floor against an invisible chain, his neck bulging as he strained, shrieked until his face bottled red and burst into wet, shaking sobs. His mother used to call him ‘the angry clown’, not her angry clown, just an angry clown that was. He fought like a bitch with the other children and demanded they laugh at his ‘funny jokes’, punched and pulled at them – their noses, like fake red noses which smarted and coloured at his roughness.

He hardly mellowed as he grew, adding girth to his means of intimidation. A swelling man, he held his weight in his stomach and wore shades of black to cast him eternally in a dark and serious light. He would be taken seriously, dammit, as the others laughed at him. At his ‘funny jokes’. He went prematurely grey at 18 and started dying his beard to match, an embarrassing act of vanity which he was constantly aware of and constantly daring the world to unveil, though no one cared. He would hold the world by its collar and shake it, yell at it, fleck spit in its eyes so that it ran down its cheek. And the world would laugh back at him, because he was funny, because he was big and funny.

His wife was the woman who had worn glasses in college and done her work, but allowed herself to be carried to social occasions despite knowing that she would spend the evening standing in a corner with a drink clutched in her hand, making conversation with the other fellow from the Gilbert & Sullivan society. Talking of how they were both enjoying themselves, but really shouldn’t be out too late, unfortunately, for they both had class in the morning – the work never ended, ay! The question of whether or not she could handle Bruno was ambiguously answered. He did not conquer her in the way a dominant conquers a submissive. Their relationship resembled more a child trying clumsily to catch a butterfly. She floated always just out of his reach, and he ceaselessly scrambled to close a fat cage of fingers around her – both agreeing to keep dancing for the brief moments of contact which kept the chase alive, kept them panting. He had two ‘runts’, a son and a daughter, roughly the same age. He saw them as usually clean but with teeth like gremlins and a suspicious intention to crack at him with the brutal hammers of youth.

For his birthday, the little boy had invited all his little friends round for a party. Bruno had been far from thrilled, but the boy’s mother insisted. And like a bull in a party hat he sat at the head of the table and watched the lot of them scream at each other and drag food down their faces, rolling in it like faeces as they hooted and beat at the table with their fists. He was repulsed, and a little scared.

The exhaustion after backyard games had been effectively counteracted by a steady supply of pizza, finger sausages and mini corn on the cob – not to mention the lump of candy fallen from the belly of the piñata, which now lay on the ground with child-flies buzzing around its carcass. Now they sat tribal-like around the table with children calling to his son with the plight of a condemned man for him to open their gifts first, to give them back the wrapping, to hand over the toy so they could show him how spectacular it was.

His wife tried to quiet the crowd, checking her watch and at the same time holding her daughter in place by the head beside her, a mother’s multitasking. “Guys? Guys! Hang on a - you can open them in just a minute, hang on a minute – because I think, I think, there’s someone at the door.” She grinned, that impish grin which paints itself stereotypically over a secret. She got her reaction. The confusion of the boys as they looked from one another with dumb faces, the disinterest of the girls as they plucked at the leftover mush on their plates or wrestled a present for inspection. Bruno looked to the hallway, where a statuesque figure was emerging.

It was about 6’4”, dressed all over in a white jumpsuit made from, it looked like, tarpaulin or lacquered plastic. Its shoes were large, yellow and red, with a bulbous nose. White paint smeared itself over the head, exposed neck and face, where blues, greens and purples lit up the eyes with a horrifying explosion of colour. The cheeks glowed red, the lips were painted and outlined in that quasi-apocalyptic smile which looked constantly on the verge of melting. Its wig was red, knotted and the texture of old yarn, fluffed into an afro which stretched half a foot in every direction.

The children shrieked at the clown with an indistinguishable noise of either delight or bone-shattering fear. For the moment, the gifts were forgotten as they ate him up and spat him back out for whatever tricks he had brought, what horns or whistles he might have on him, the critters he might be hiding in the depths of his parachute pockets.

“HeLLO kids! Did I hear someone was having a BIRTHDAY?” The affected voice of a cartoon character, somewhere between Barney and the patronizing parent, made the clown seem to Bruno even more a villain who had somehow snuck into his house to blatantly, and so much the worse, terrorize his home.

“Cynthia, what the fuck is this?” A growl beneath the fluff of moustache, his eyes burning finger presses into her arm. She didn’t seem to notice. She continued with that plastered smile, floating over towards the clown, batting Bruno away. The children had seized this opportunity to single out the birthday boy with malicious venom, hoping to see carnage. He half-beamed and half-cowered in his seat, bug-eyed staring at the clown who had now begun to pull dead worm balloons out of its pockets and quickly blow them up into see-through sausages. “What would ya like, eh Tony? Tommy?” He glanced sideways at Cynthia then back to the boy, already mangling this mash-up of colours with a horrific squeaking like a dying animal, creating some sort of hybrid giraffe and poodle which he handed over to the slightly repulsed child.

Bruno stamped over to his son, wrenching the animal out of his grasp, inspecting it with rage and horror. “What the hell is this supposed to be?” he demanded, shoving it back in the face of the clown, whose smile widened to the point where painful creases dug into its lacquered cheeks.

“Well, well, it looks like someone doesn’t know how to use their i-mag-in-a-tion!” The clown tossed back his head and gave a ridiculous laugh, jigging his stomach up and down with his hands. Bruno felt something inside him quake, and he grabbed a knife from off the table, stabbing it viciously into the animal. It popped with a sound like a gunshot, a few children shrieking while others clapped their hands in delight and begged for him to do it again. The clown’s brow wrinkled, almost threateningly, their eyes locked in a show-down for a brief moment. His face cleared, the smile and the laughter were back, and more tricks and treats were coming out of his pockets.

They brought the children into the other room for the show. “How much are we paying for this bum, exactly, Cynthia?”

The performance was something of a sham, a mash-up of cheesy jokes and bright flashes which consisted of fistfuls of glitter being tossed in the air and engraining themselves forever into carpet and hair. When the clown was nearly finished a pile of tricks lay beside him like a heap of dead bodies: rings miraculously connected and then separated, handkerchiefs that self-produced, oversized cards that jumped to the front of the deck and water glasses which couldn’t spill. The grand finale consisted of bringing Tony, or Tommy, in front of everyone.

“And how old are you going to be, Tommy?”

“7.”

“Uh-huh, and what do you think you think you want to be when you get much older? Do you think you might want to be a clown?”

“What kind of fucking bullshit is this?” Bruno didn’t need some crackpot failed child’s entertainer filling his son’s head with plans to be as much of a social waste as he was.

Tommy shrugged his shoulders noncommittally, but looking the clown over, seemed unconvinced.

“Well I’ll tell you what, if you do want to be a clown, there are a few things you’re going to need first!” He reached down and pulled up a bag from the floor, holding it open and pulling out first a wig identical to his own, though the matted hair seemed lopsided and of even cheaper make than its larger counterpart. He snugly fitted it on Tommy’s head, the red curls bouncing over the boy’s eyes. He capped a red plastic nose on his face and stood back, surveying him. “What do we all think? Does he seem like a clown?”

A cry of indistinguishable emotion arose from the rest of the children. The clown nodded. “Well, now that you look the part, you’re going to need some training! I’m going to teach you a trick – the most important trick of all clownery!” (“Clownery? Gimme a fuckin’ break…”) Tommy seemed to perk at this, eager to absorb the attention that this gift would garner him. Bruno, on the other hand, didn’t need to see this clown teach his son some probably half-assed attempt at magic which would no doubt result in dead animals turning up in their kitchen or some motherfucker’s mother calling them up crying because her precious daughter had agreed to watch Tommy’s magic trick and had her eyebrows singed off. He made a move as if to intercede, but his wife cut him off with her fingers on his hand, like a newspaper to the snout.

The clown pulled a handkerchief off of a cage behind him, and a bird, white and large, squawked at him irritably. The chidren bawked, giggled, lunged with their asses rooted to the carpet. “Meet my friend Talia! She’s a pretty bird, isn’t she?” The clown’s voice had fallen into something disgustingly like baby talk, and he reached forward to unlatch the cage. The door creaked open and just then one of the children burped, low and loud. The bird, obviously startled, launched from the cage like a torpedo of feathers and razor-sharp beak, Tommy directly in the way, the bird’s wings unfolding and flapping him over and over in the face. It was all fast, and tragic. When the scene cleared cleared, the bird swooping in high circles around the room, a million eyes craned to look at it and a million fingers followed shouts. The tension was high, but when someone shouted, “You’re hurt!”, everyone’s looks were yanked right back – to Tommy.

Tommy gasped, staring down at his arm which now had a thin slice in it from the bird’s talons, blood eeking out of it. Even the mild gore seemed, at a children’s party, horrifically out of place. Bruno felt his blood pressure escalate at an alarming rate, no longer held back by the subtle control mechanisms of his wife as he stormed through the crowd, scattering the children and leaving a path of their discarded bodies in his wake.

“What the HELL have you done to my son?” The boy in question was consequently shoved aside absent mindedly as his mother hurried to get a plaster from under the sink.

“Sir, it was only an accident.” The smile was still glued onto his face, sunken into the flesh like melted candle wax.

“An accident? I’ll show you a fucking accident!” He grabbed the clown by the collar, shaking him roughly, rattling his bones like a limp baby. The clown’s white hand closed over Bruno’s fist and Bruno felt the sting of sharp needles in his skin, the clown’s nails, long and pointed like daggers. It alarmed him, this quality on a man.

The children had gone completely silent, except for Tommy, who had one arm held out by his mother, carefully cleaning the cut with antiseptic, and otherwise was trying to get at the bird which had momentarily perched itself on top of the door.

“Listen up - ” Bruno had only just begun, a cathartic peace spreading over him at this rush of emotion, this legitimization of the rage he felt constantly brewing inside his tight lungs.

“I think you’re making an unnecessary scene!” The forced excitement of the clown rang shrilly in every word, his head cocked to the side merrily, his nails threatening to draw blood. For a moment a quick shiver ran down Bruno’s spine, which made him all the more irate, all the more virile.

“He’s alright, Bruno, just a cut.”

“I DON’T CARE if it’s just a cut, Cynthia. Bringing in your fucking bird with its fucking rabies, injuring MY son after we pay you - !”

“I’m sure we can get this sorted out. Let’s not ruin our son’s birthday, in the meantime, alright? Alright?” Her voice was a mixture of the well-practiced soothing of a child and the underlying tones of a snap should he put up much resistance. He could have fought her, could have backhanded her and sent her flying into the wall, but he had other plans – other plans which almost calmed him with their sweet monstrosity.

He released the clown who was looking from him to his wife not in fear, but with that same smile and something like cold contemplation in his eyes.

“Mom, look, watch!” Tommy had pulled the attention from the room onto himself, balancing the stack of plates held on a metal rod in his hand with mock concentration, his tongue punctured between his teeth. They were, of course, Styrofoam plates stuck firmly together on top of a sharpened, plastic bar, but the effect was had nonetheless. The children clapped, a couple asked for a turn, and the slimy tension of the room broke just slightly, like a trickle of fresh air running through the heat.

“Alright, I think it’s time for…cake!” Her cry was seconded by a chorus of children, once again tribal members, all hopping in transic dance. “Please stick around for the cake, I’m sure he’d love to have you stay.” There was no need to specify which ‘he’ she referred to, her words a blanketed apology to the clown for her husband’s behaviour, his silent smile an obliging return.

The children were herded into the kitchen with Bruno and the clown lingering just behind.

“Get your damn bird down from there.” Bruno muttered, glancing up at the nesting pigeon, a bloody thirst in his eye.

“Watch it, buddy.” The clown spoke, and though Bruno hungered for any change in his countenance, any sign that his pathetic veneer was breaking, the voice never even slightly altered, as though it was all one big running joke with Bruno snarling at the centre. The clown followed the others in and they were cascaded in darkness, Cynthia shutting the light in the kitchen as she got the cake from the other room and carried it in like a burning chocolate candelabra. The jangled singing of children half celebrating and half mocking the well-known song was an eerie soundtrack to an already twisted afternoon. It was no longer the light-hearted children’s party it appeared to be, but a suspended moment of tension before the next blood vessel broke, before someone was bitten. Or at least, that was how Bruno saw it. That was the hungry way in which he chose to live his life, bringing down those around him with teeth sunk into their ankles. He joined them in the kitchen after a few minutes, their yammering quiet for now as they sat around the table and shovelled forkfuls of chocolate cake into their mouth, licking sticky green and purple icing off their fingers.

Even the clown stood against the counter with a paper plate balanced on his open palm, carefully digging little bites out of his cake, the mastication of cake and over-sugared icing almost befitting to his already finger-painted mouth. Bruno watched him with a smug smile, taking a piece of cake from his wife, a self-satisfied bite. It was clear something had changed. Something inside of Bruno had released, a coil had sprung.

He smiled at his wife, and she back at him – a beautiful moment she could remember later when he was charging at the TV and throwing things in the air; he thrilled to make their lives, and their home, in disarray. They managed to get through the remainder of the party peaceably. The rest of the presents were opened, the donkey pinned. Parents began to show, collecting their children who lolled about in their seats like fat caterpillars, holding their stomachs and smilingly blearily. Bruno bid each one adieu with the same grunt and flutter of his moustache, a curt wave, a twinkle in his eye. Each child left with their own balloon animal, a further comfort to Bruno that they were getting their money’s worth.

It was then, with Cynthia in the corner pulling money from her purse and handing it to the ever-stoic entertainer, that a scream rang out from the living room like shaking keys. Bruno picked at his second piece of cake and looked up in faux alarm, fork poised. A little girl careened into the kitchen, sobbing, in hysterics. Her face was a mess of tears and red blotches, her nails raking down her cheeks. “It’s – it’s – it’s dead!” she howled, gasping back a rattle of breath and breaking with another round of racking sobs.

The face of every parent in the room went paper-white, chalk-white, at the word ‘dead’. Every parent, that was, except Bruno, who quietly ate another slice of cake. “What’s wrong, honey? What is it?” Cynthia took the girl’s face in her hands and attempted to sift through the tears for some kind of answer.

“The-the-the-the bird is dead! It’s dead!”

And it was. A collection of them herded into the living room, standing like animals at the water-hole as they observed, slumped in the corner, the body of the dead bird. It lay on the ground, wings akimbo and skeleton cracked from where it had been thrown, violently, against the wall. Its tiny head was flung to the side and a bone poked a dent through its pale white neck. It was not at all beautiful, only strange and alarming.

“I don’t understand…” Cynthia murmured, crouching over the bird and touching a finger to it which quickly flew back to her side in childlike disgust. She turned her head around to the heavy-breathing crowd and forced a smile. “I’m so sorry, Jane, could you take the kids into the other room?” Tiny onlookers had begun to creep in and swoop through the legs of the adults, their mouths gaping at this unfamiliar exposure to death.

With a little effort the room emptied, and Bruno watched from the doorway as Cynthia and the clown stood with their necks craned down at the dead bird, held like a limp baby in Cynthia’s hands. He looked at her and then at his fallen creature. His smile had finally descended, yet still was held in tact by the crusty paint so that his frown seemed in combat with that and the weight of his cheeks which wanted to lift right off his face.

“I’m so sorry,” he heard her say, quietly promising to pay him extra, double, quietly repeating in bewilderment that she had no idea how it could have happened, that it seemed to have flown straight into the wall.

Bruno chose this moment to slump in, clapping a hand firmly on the shoulder of his wife and confronting the clown with no trace of the uncomfortable fear of before. On the contrary, he was positively gloating. “Well, just goes to show you ought not to bring bloody birds in ‘less you’ve got them under control, am I right?” No one agreed with him. The clown’s eyes seemed to gleam with a burning malevolence, the colour of his hair exploding into an inferno, the knuckles of his gloved hands cracking. Bruno didn’t budge, merely gripped Cynthia’s shoulder a little harder, returning the challenge.

“Ow, Bruno, that hurts.” Cynthia frowned, crawling out from under his hand and glancing to the backyard. “Do you…well, do you want him?” She frowned almost pityingly. “No, I don’t suppose you do. I’ll bury him. I’ll give him a proper burial out back, just as soon as everyone’s gone, alright? Like I said, we’ll pay you double. I just don’t understand how it could have happened…” She muttered this to herself as she left the room, leaving the bird in repose on the coffee table and Bruno and the clown in their frozen stand-off.

“You killed my bird.”

Bruno blinked, prepared for the scene. He shook his head, laughing.

But the clown didn’t let him speak. Immediately two gloved hands were around the bigger man’s throat, his mirthful eyes bugging out in surprise and horror as the air-flow to his lungs was cut. He scrabbled with blunt nails at the wrists of the clown, hacking and spitting as his face grew purple. Far from letting up, the clown’s grip grew tighter, his lips in congress with his painted face now, twisted in a horrific mask of glee.

At last Bruno managed to shove the clown to the side, landing him against the TV which tipped back like a drunk and nearly fell over. As the clown righted, Bruno held his neck with ratcheting moans, getting back his breath, eyeing the clown in unbelieving fury. “You – you - ” His voice was like grainy metal, rubbed and flaked raw from disuse. The clown had his back to him, and at the sound of his voice turned, something glinting in his hands. It was the rings.

In a split second he had one wrestled over Bruno’s neck, yanking back on it to get him in a sort of chokehold. Bruno gagged, elbowing furiously til he caught the clown beneath his ribs. He stumbled forward, attempting to free himself from the ring but unable, the two ‘miraculously connected’ disks still swinging from his neck. He groped wildly for some kind of a weapon, his eyes landing on the tub of glitter standing on the folding table. He grabbed it, turned and chucked the lot of it into the face of the clown. Stardust exploded in the room, the clown swiping at his eyes furiously and scrabbling to get the tiny flecks of light out of his vision, Bruno still hoovering air and hacking out the fragments of glitter he inevitably inhaled. The clown gripped two plastic bowling pins and begun to wield them as nunchucks, battering Bruno about the head. Bruno held a rubber chicken by the neck and flung it back and forth, its sagging body helplessly thwacking at the clown wherever he could reach, a dull ‘fwuck’ sounding with every impact.

Bruno was cursing, spitting incomprehensible words at the clown who merely heaved from the efforts of his attack and kept on, rendered incapable of speech, driven only by the maniacal vengeance he had harboured since first entering the home and encountering his rival. They fought like children, squabbling at one another with clumped fists and nails when weapons failed them, knocking into walls and crashing down pictures, paintings, vases full of fake flowers and water just for show. The room was littered in soil, glass and the shredded remains of the clown’s magic act. Their combat carried on with the bird watching silently from the coffee table, perplexed, its head still bent sideways.

“Oh my GOD!” This time the shriek came from Cynthia, and raised a few decibels. She stood in the doorway with her mouth slack, clutching an empty shoebox. “BRUNO! WHAT IS GOING ON HERE!” Her voice rocketed up to a tone like the screaming creak of a screen window in a summer storm.

He gave a primal roar, spurred on by this sudden intrusion, launching himself against the clown and slamming the both of them back onto the couch. The strangeness of his response sent his wife into hysterics, and she ran to them both, beating them about with the shoebox and screaming at them to stop. Now it was Bruno with his hands around the neck of the clown, slamming his head over and over into the couch cushions, shaking senselessly as he stared down into that face, that stickered grin. The wig shook off and onto the floor, an even creepier man beneath him now with paint that ended at a line on his forehead and hair held down by a clear plastic cap which gave him the look of a drag queen or a serial killer prepared to clean up the mess. Bruno felt his stomach go queasy and in his moment of weakness, the clown fought back, the two reeling up off the couch, stepping through the coffee table which splintered, broke down the middle, and sent the bird flying. It smacked into Cynthia’s stomach, causing her to spasm mid-air in wild alarm, the cardboard box flying and she landing hard on the ground, the bird strewn across her belly desperately like a frightened child.

The clown and Bruno were still moving backwards, grabbing each other’s necks and knocking knees. They didn’t stop when they hit the sliding glass door, but instead went straight through it. The glass was no match for Bruno’s girth; he flew backwards and after a moment of bending out with a screech, it shattered completely.

He heard Cynthia howling, he heard somewhere the wailing of his daughter who had walked in and immediately erupted in tears, holding her brother back by his middle and angrily yelling into his chest. He felt the cold cement beneath his skull when it smacked and bounced up like a basketball. Strangely, however, he did not feel the cold pierce of glass slice up through his stomach, its unnatural point gouging both his own body and that of the clown’s, their wombs joined inextricably.

The glass had gone through Bruno’s liver, and the lung of the clown. The pain felt almost magical, echoed by the soft gurgle of the Clown spitting blood and the slow, warm drip of the blood between them. By the time sirens were wailing, they were both dead, bled-out, – their bodies slumped on one another as though locked in a lover’s embrace.