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wagging fit to tip him over. Then, a mistake. Someone trod on his paw and Woofy, overexcited, snapped much too close to an ankle.
    A cry of outrage, followed immediately by a swift kick that grazed Woofy’s rump, causing him to yelp. In a flash his little mistress was there to snatch him up out of harm’s way.
    Someone yelled, “Get that bloody dog out of here!” And flying to the back of the crowd, the young girl (who for the first time I saw to be a scruffy, raggedy child with a stubborn, pouting mouth) turned with Woofy in her arms and shouted, “Fuck you, shit-face!” Ah, childhood! Ah, innocence! Ah, bollocks!
    Someone cried, “Smile, please!” And a flashbulb went off in a brief, brilliant starburst. I blinked in sympathy; and on his stilts, waving his arms before his face, the clown backed off a pace. He’d had his picture taken, but my after-image was one of the Fat Lady looking distinctly nauseous, pulling a face as she wiped her hand on her taffeta tutu.
    My vision cleared. The crowd had thickened. A man was holding his obese child—the one with the toffee-apple—up to the clown on stilts. The child was giggling, kicking, and trying to lick all at the same time. The apple fell off its stick and the child quickly sobered. Deprived, its expression changed, became anxious; its mouth trembled, puckered up, shaped a grating wail of distress that rapidly built to a shriek.
    Oh no, no, no! Tut-tut-tut! The clown took the child in two hands, bounced it in mid-air, a gentle vertical shaking motion, almost as if he were weighing that small, fat, crappy bundle on a pair of sprung scales. Then, cocking his head at that curious angle again, he leaned forward and returned the screaming child to its father; while a woman—the mother, maybe?—scrambled to grab up the now filthy apple and ram it back on its stick.
    The smell— that smell—hit me again, stronger this time, and suddenly, out of nowhere, a whole string of pictures, vivid as life, went flashing across my mind:
    Ploukie Stanley, head down and sobbing into his pullover as his Flying Chair slowed to a halt; the mole cricket’s squirming as it emerged from its burrow; Barmy Bill’s flattened face on a perfectly compacted eighteen-inch cube of flesh.
    And again I felt sick as a dog, a volcanic surge of liquids rising in my gut, threatening to erupt. Out of the now thinning crowd I stumbled—out between a pair of wagons vibrating with the rumble and roar of their generators—out into the darkness and the night and the open field.
    I lurched against a fence; the top bar was hanging loose; I sat on the center bar and leaned forward, knowing from my heaving guts exactly what was going to happen—and exactly why it would happen. It was my pills, of course! It wasn’t just that I shouldn’t drink, but that I couldn’t drink! For eighteen months now I had been taking this medication, just one pill each morning, to prohibit my drinking. There are no side effects, unless you drink. If you drink you throw up, horribly! But in eighteen months it had become a habit in itself—and I’d forgotten all about it. This morning, as usual, I had taken a pill, and right now I was about to pay for my forgetfulness, for having drunk a forbidden drink. What, just one little drink? Hell no, at least four pints of beer! On top of the pill and the day’s meals…and everything burning like acid, searing my insides as it came surging for the surface. Oh, joy!
    Diary, I’m not going to describe the next fifteen minutes. It was probably no more than that, but it felt like an hour and a half. And the fairground throbbing away to match my throbbing head; and halfway through, something at my feet that wagged its stumpy tail and sniffed tentatively at the mess that lay steaming on the grass down there.
    And I thought, God, don’t eat that, little fellow !
    Time passed unnoticed…
    And while I sat there on the broken fence—propped against a post with my head down, shoulders