My grandad brought me to the circus once...

When I was nine, I saw a trapeze artist die. I imagine this might sound like the opening to an intensely morbid account, but I encourage you to bear with me. I had just watched this man run through a series of increasingly dangerous acts without any of the hundred or so present realising that they would be his last. I’d say I wonder how that feels, but the point is that it doesn’t feel like anything unusual until it’s too late.

There is a certain grace and elegance to trapeze. I don’t know enough about it to tell you if this man performed to most death-defying feats, or even the higher side of average. All I know is that a nine year old is quickly spellbound by these kinds of performances. The simple grace, economy of movement, intense concentration, fantastic dexterity and absence of a net combine to shape a performance practically outside of human experience. It is a wonder the mind can barely encompass; the excitement is palpable.

Again, I don’t know enough about trapeze to tell if this were a long show or not, but from my child’s perspective, it was an unending event, stretching out to fill a whole evening. Every time someone released the bar, arms tensed to meet the chalked hands and weight of another performer, backlit by the low summer-evening sun through the red of the tent, I felt my breath meet the unexpected solidness of the back of my throat. There’s a twinge of not-quite-pain that can only be the frightened anticipation of someone else’s risk.

My granddad had brought me to the circus and, ancient and wise as he seemed then, when I look back on it I realise that he can only possibly have had limited experience of circuses himself. My father had spent his school years as a street performer and so was intimately acquainted with the circus – it having long been the source of stolen tricks, deconstructed, reverse engineered for careful and profitable redeployment). My granddad just wasn’t really a circus person; his love was reserved for snooker

He leaned over to me, during a break in the performance, and confided that he could never have been a trapezist. He faced me with a wide grin, left hand held up to show off the fact that he was missing the best part of the last two fingers of his right hand. He smiled and pointed his abbreviated hand towards the tent’s ceiling’s centre – a one-ring circus; this was the countryside, after all.

I suppose it’s ironic that we watched the whole tireless performance so long without anything going wrong. It wasn’t until they turned to give their bows that anything seemed remotely amiss. As the three performers turned to address the thin crowd, spread as far from one another as I imagine only an Irish crowd can manage without organisation, one left foot slipped from its seemingly secure perch on the bar.

It would be a more thrilling account of how my life changed when I saw a man die if he had locked eyes with me in the precise fraction of second that he realised he would fall, but he didn’t. That’s not really how life works. Instead, he cast his eyes around and in his face you could read the transition from shock that he had slipped, to the grasping of his right hand thrust towards the wire supporting the bar and then, in the wide sweep of his eyes around the tent, a kind of sad and grudging acceptance.

This is where it ends. In a one-ring circus outside a town nobody has ever heard of, by a beach that’s become part of our national consciousness because of an oil spill. Images of terns drowned, feathers too slick with oil to keep above the waves. This is who you are, falling thirty feet, in a sloppy turn, towards a plastic sheeting across a packed earth floor in front of scattered handfuls of people.

The saddest part isn’t even that… it’s that nothing of his life translated into his death. He, whoever he was, had made a career of grace and elegance, of doing things practically outside human capacity, and in his end his finest achievement was to make a room full of people realise how frighteningly fragile human beings are… and how shock-absorbent a body can be. You might have expected a bounce or, the human body being more than sixty percent liquid, a splash. Certainly I did. Instead there’s just the dull thud. The same response as of a sandbag dropped from twenty feet in the air.

I’m not sure what message you’re supposed to take from something like that when you’re nine. I think if there’s one thing I learned, it’s that however you do die, go out either happy with what you’ve achieved or try to go out on your own terms. If you must die by falling from a height, in front of a scattered assemblage of people too young or old to be relevant, try as hard as you can to lock your eyes onto someone who looks both young and impressionable.

If you’re lucky, you’ll make one penultimate impact.

Last work-related update, I promise

I work in an office in the business equivalent of those terrifying suburban labyrinth housing estates. I have no idea how many “units” there are in our “business park” but I know that we’re in the 280s, which is disconcerting. Moreover, I know that surprisingly little goes on in the offices around us.

The office opposite our own, for example, appears to have been bought pretty much just for the warehouse space attached to it. This means that during the afternoon, if I look out the window, there is a row of offices facing my own that are empty, unused and unadorned but for carpet. There are no cables dangling from the lights or layers of dust, nothing to indicate that people haven’t just gone out for lunch… except that there’s never been anyone there. I imagine that once a week the cleaners go up and make sure the place is all spic and span

When I’m not staring out the window distractedly, trying to keep myself from achieving anything noteworthy, I walk downstairs and across the road to the garage to get a snack. The office I pass on my left is a bit like the office across the road, only stranger. Rather than just being empty, the curtains are either drawn or pulled back every day, seemingly at random. Looking inside you can see a long, rounded table, with some conference calling kit in the centre, powered off always. The desk is ringed by high-backed leather chairs, but there’s never anyone sitting at them.

As I walked by today, I noticed that the chairs were missing, and the desk was covered in tiny scraps of paper, scissors and the kinds of tape dispensers we use to close big boxes in the warehouse… but there was nobody there. Nor was there any sign that the place had been opened over the last few days. I asked around, because some of our people don’t leave work until 1900, but they hadn’t seen anyone enter or leave in ages.

I wonder what kind of business could there be that has to work under those conditions. Is there any business that would have to open only at night and be closed by the next morning? It’s hard to think of any.

Vampire crèche. No doubt about it. The paper must have been from the teachers making the little vamplets make their parents cards.

Nothing else makes sense.