Trained Clowns

I sit across from Nick on the crowded 2am train and listen as he engages in a serious conversation about the advantages of rent-free garages with a clown, giant shiny red shoes and all. Her boyfriend is wearing a top hat and has black crosses painted over his eyes, and he’s throwing twisties at her from a crumpled packet on the seat beside him. They catch in her fluoro coloured wig and she snatches one from a tangle of green and chomps on it, yellow crumbs on smeared white face-paint.

The African guy opposite me rolls his eyes at the pair and as he gets off a group of Australian girls, arms locked with an equal number of Irish boys, wobble onto the train and take his seat. They argue about the legal standing of the “pinkie pact” and whether it would stand up in court. I realise I am staring at them, and look away.

I wonder if there’s a theoretical limit to absurdity, beyond which the human brain ceases to function, and I wonder whether different people have different thresholds before they snap and start gabbling at the night sky. Right now it would probably take a penguin in sunglasses flying past the window of the train to unnerve me, and even then, only for a moment.

We decide we’ll run home from the station. It’s only as we cross Beaufort street and I realise that Nick is in a suit, that I wonder what people in cars are thinking at these two white boys belting up the middle of the road. Perhaps we can be their penguin.

Posted in Oz on Sunday June 15, 2008.