The Nonesuch and Others Read Online Free Page B

tubular neons and coloured balloons; the rumble of generators versus a calliope; the smell of grease, friction, sawdust; the hoarse-voiced Loreleis at hoopla stalls and coconut-shies, all of them vying with each other to lure you to financial doom; the penny slots, Ghost Train, Freak House, Hall of Mirrors—the whole bit.
    I say the fair was “in town” but in fact it was in a field on the outskirts, the same field every year. For several weeks I’d been noticing (barely) the big bright posters. They hadn’t made much of an impact; wrapped up in my work, everything else was peripheral. But last Friday morning on my way into town on the bus, as I passed the field in question, I saw the first of the artics starting to arrive. Down the road there was a long string of them. And not a cloud in sight. It made a change.
    Saturday morning, a friend of mine called me. Just out of bed, I answered the phone. “It’s George,” he told me. “Haven’t seen you in a month of Sundays! Watcha doing these days? Still tied up with your big-deal, high-pressure job? Still doing the cub reporter bit—that ‘Superman’s pal, Jimmy Olson’ sort of thing?”
    “If you mean am I still a journalist? Yes. No big deal; I just like to write, that’s all.”
    George was an interior decorator…that’s what he called himself, but all he did really was patch over cracked ceilings with wavy-patterned, quick-drying cement stuff, and then paint it to make it look good.
    “Me?” George answered. “I’m free this weekend, and I wondered if you were, too.”
    As it happened, I was. “So what do you have in mind?”
    “There’s this girl I’m seeing,” he said. “She’s really sort of nice. Has a nice friend, too. So what do you say to a double date? The big fair’s in town, out my way, and I was thinking we could get together with the girls. Maybe have a few drinks, buy them some candy floss, win ’em a fluffy toy on the rifle range, maybe take ’em for a ride, and then—who knows? Take ’em for another ride? Know what I mean, nudge, nudge?”
    I knew George and his girls of old. “You want to fix me up with a girl? Does she wear a collar? Is her bark worse than her bite? Has she won a prize at Crufts? Know what I mean—nudge, nudge?”
    “Hey!” He tried to sound hurt. “That’s not nice. Gloria’s a really sweet girl. Also, a little bird told me she does a terrific horizontal snake dance.”
    “What little bird?”
    “My little bird, Gladys.”
    I had seen George’s Gladys, and she really was quite a good looking girl. “So how does this Gloria compare—with Gladys, I mean?”
    “They could be sisters.” (The liar!) “So, what do you say?”
    “As to the girls: why not? As to the drinking: you know I’m off it.”
    “So drink something non-toxic! I mean, it’s not like you’re a genuine, died-in-the-wool alcoholic, now is it?”
    I still liked to pretend I wasn’t, or hadn’t been, and so I said okay.
    We all make mistakes, Diary. And you know me. I make really big ones…
     

     
    Sunday the fairground was all set up, ready to roll that night. I met George and the girls at eight o’clock at a little pub not a quarter mile from the fair. Pausing on the street just before I entered the place, I could hear a low near-distant rumble and the shrill squeals of people on the rides. The fair’s rotating, zigzagging, strobing lights were plainly visible in the gathering dusk.
    Apart from George and the girls the pub was almost empty. I joined them in a small booth at a grubby table where a pint was sitting waiting for me, the froth still fresh and deep. No good to reproach George; after all, I was the one who had told him I could take it or leave it, that I was only a social drinker. In fact it was something of a relief to take that first sip and to lick the foam off my upper lip. And despite that they knew they shouldn’t, my spirits were lifting even as I sighed a paradoxically reticent yet appreciative