11th September, 1997
There was a time when the funfair used to bring me joy and happiness. It was a time when we could get together as a family and spend the day riding the rides and taking in the smells, sights and sounds of a great event, which we could remember forever.
It was… Until the day Rachel brought the clown home.
I had taken them out to Auntie Morag’s at ten that morning and she had been more than willing to take the two of them out to the fair. By the two I meant Rachel and Tom. Rachel was eight and Tom was twelve and when the fair came to Haddington (small that it was), it always brought wonder to their eyes and for that at least I am eternally grateful.
Dawn (my wife) had been involved in a horrific accident a couple of years before and that had been a devastating blow to the children. Dawn was a great mum and an even greater wife, who always seemed to be there for me during my recovering alcohol addiction in the late 80’s. She stuck by me in the good and bad times and I loved her for that, and love her still. She had been shopping in Tesco supermarket and a car had swerved too fast and too hard around the corner towards the car park, knocking her to the ground.
I was devastated (well, who wouldn’t be?), and blamed myself for her death for weeks afterwards. Thank God for Auntie Morag (she was on my wife’s side), and my older brother – Bill. The two of them had helped me through the worst times, when I was crying in the darkest hours of the night, having woken up from terrible nightmares of my dead wife. She was coming to get me, coming for our children and then me, but mostly me, wanting me to know and feel the pain she had felt and was feeling right now. Her arms were outstretched pale and blue, fingernails sharp and white. Her sunken white eyes glared hideously at me and her mouth was open in a snarl showing razor sharp teeth. Of course it was a dream, but it felt so real, her cold breath on my back and the touch of her dry cracking skin.
It was Rachel who was crushed the most by the death of her mother. She would also wake up from bad dreams, screaming for her mother and not at her mother, so at least it wasn’t as worse as mine, which came as a blessed relief. The nightmares had stopped about a month ago; Tom seemed to come out of it at a fairly early stage. It was the quietness that filled the air when he had been around my worst moments that haunted me and it wasn’t until much later that I found out he had had several bad dreams of his own. Not as bad as I thought, but still…
Damn that clown! If it hadn’t come into our lives, then maybe what I am about to tell you would never have happened! It was the thing Rachel had won at the shooting gallery post. There had been many fish and a few cuddly toys, but there was a clown.
It was slumped in the darkened area of the woman’s stall, and it had been grinning up at me with those big, staring eyes unblinking but seeming to know that I was there. The face seemed all too evil. That red nose, so real… those green tufts of hair out of each side of the otherwise bald, white head so real… The grin… The eyes… God, the eyes were the worst. Those glassy marbles… black staring pupils. It seemed to look at me, knowing my existence. Take me home, I heard it say. Take me home so I can take you to your dead wife… So here it is, folks. The day the clown came to Haddington. The day that would haunt me for the rest of my life.
11th August, 1997
“Daddy!” I turned and saw Rachel running towards me. She wore the yellow Pickatu rucksack, and carried a lollipop in her hand. She was grinning from cheek to cheek, and rushed towards me, her red summer dress that Dawn had given her one Christmas covered with sand from the beach. I picked her up and brushed the brown hair from her face. She was still grinning and kissed my cheek. I smiled and put her down. “Hi, hon,” I said. “What are you grinning about?”
