Reference Ends

After Sandy and I left the restaurant, he was stonily silent. I tried to engage him again by saying something profound, so I told him how we're all topologically tubes - you know, with the mouth and the anus, we're essentially tubular, topologically speaking.

"What about the nostrils?" he asked, and I had to explain that, broadly speaking, I meant sort of functionally tubular, really, that was the point.

"What about the eyes? What about the urethra, then? Did you think about the urethra?"

I didn't answer him but just carried on in a sulk as he was clearly not entering into the spirit of the conversation.

As we walked along, we went past a street entertainer dressed as a clown who was doing a comedy juggling act. He had a crowd around him and I had to step in front of some of them to get by on the pavement, so I had to pass right by the clown on his pitch. As I walked by, he deliberately dropped all the balls in an exaggerated fashion, throwing his arms up in the air and taking off his hat to collect money. He stepped up right in front of me and wouldn't let me pass, shoving the hat into my tummy for a donation. He was smiling and nodding and people were laughing at him while he did it but I didn't like it. I wanted to just push him out the way but he was a huge guy. He had a big body but his head was small. It was small and painted white and looked shrivelled like it had been pickled and bleached in a vat of vinegar for a month. I could see that he wasn't wearing a stick-on clown pate but that it was actually his own painted, bald head with his own long strands of greasy dyed-red hair over his ears. He had yellow teeth and his wide eyes were bloodshot from the make-up that had run in to them and were coloured light blue, almost white like a bright cloud-filled sky.

Uneasily, I tried to shuffle around him but he kept jostling and blocking me. Then, suddenly, he cocked his head quizzically over my shoulder to look at Sandy. In an instant, there was a look of mutual recognition on the two men's faces as their eyes met, the clown's smile narrowing to a snarl of malicious contempt, an expression of slowly comprehending horror growing on Sandy's face. "Oh f-ck..." was all he could mutter before the clown, with a furious roar, had hurled himself at Sandy, knocking him to the ground and raining down blows.

I stumbled back a few steps, not knowing what to do. Sandy was lying on the ground, I think already unconscious, his lips cut open, with the clown squatting over the prone body and hitting him still. The clown had taken off one of his big outsize-shoes and was using it as a weapon. Petrified, I watched each stroke in what looked like slow motion as he used his full arm length to deliver all his strength in long arcing blows across Sandy's face with the shoe - each blow spurting up a fountain of red-black blood and making a funny squeaking sound from the elongated clown-shoe - like the high-pitched squeaker in a squeezy toy.

At first, I think the crowd thought it was part of the act and carried on laughing. But as the blood started to flow, they realised, recoiling with horror, that the act was over. So I guess, in that respect, Sandy certainly had his point proved about some level of the delusional narratives we spin ourselves.

Over and over he pounded Sandy and, with each vicious impact, that bright-red baguette-shaped clown shoe sounded a bleakly comedic squeezy squeak. Eventually he stopped, gasping heavily from the exertion before starting to laugh, a deep booming laugh coming up from his huge lungs, through his yellow-toothed mouth held open in a wide 'O' shape like a ghastly clown megaphone. At that moment, he looked up and saw me. A blood lust was in his wide, exultant eyes. The movement triggered the switch of his clown bow-tie which started up - whirring around and spattering fine flecks of blood over his white face.

I lost my nerve. I turned and ran, ran like misty buggery.

I've still got Sandy's card with me. I keep thinking I should call him to see how he is but I'm ashamed to. I didn't do anything to help him at all. I just ran.