The purpose of a clown is not to be funny. It is to make you laugh. They can achieve this by being funny, scary, unsettling, or- at their best- all three.
What’s the difference between a scary clown and an unsettling clown? Scary clowns spring up out of nowhere and give you a quick fright, get your blood pumping. Unsettling clowns seem to be playing by a set of rules that keep changing and that you don’t understand. That becomes unsettling instead of funny when you’ve got the sneaking suspicion that one of those mercurial rules is about how much they can hurt you.
I have this theory that basically everyone who’s ever gone and done something illegal is pretty much being a clown. You’ve got your funny clowns, dragging you along and getting you into all sorts of scrapes. You’ve got your scary clowns, who lose their tempers and then make no effort to find them again until they’ve been restrained, suddenly confused by missing teeth and bruised knuckles. Then, finally, you’ve got your unsettling clowns, your creepy clowns, the clowns that live not under your bed (that’s scary clown territory) but at the end of a dark hall, standing stock still and staring at you. My unsettling clown was called Richard Williams, and I knew him when we were nine years old.
Richard Williams was a Will, not a Rich or a Dick or a Richie, on account of having an older brother who was also called Richard and who answered to pretty much every variant on that name he had yelled at him. On first glance he looked like me, like an average little white kid, with a couple of milk teeth gone and that aura of scruffiness that seems universal among children of that age.
There was something wrong with Will, and every kid on the playground knew it straight away. It’s almost like there’s some sort of smell to psychopaths that adults can’t really sense, or at least can explain away better. As a result, he didn’t really get picked on and he didn’t really have any friends. The bullies just rolled their eyes at him when he was doing something weird, something that would normally scream for a beating or a round of solid mockery, because they just knew he wasn’t worth it. He was the sort of kid who would bite and scratch and worse, the sort of kid who didn’t know the difference between fighting back and gouging your eyes out. So they never got into fights with him, never provoked him. Everyone just sort of knew Will and didn’t want to know him any better.
We just knew.
I remember when I was proved right, though. Will had been a twitchy little bag of energy all day, so unable to keep still everyone thought he was going to wet his pants. After class finished, most kids had their parents come and pick them up, but I lived close enough to home that I walked. Will did too, but thankfully in the other direction, so we never had to spend any time together. I’d just turned out of the gate when he finally piped up in his squeaky little voice.
“Hey. Come with me.”
“I gotta get home, Will,” I said. I was lying, of course. I’d intended to take the long way back, looking for magpies to count. Now I’d said it, though, I was going straight home. It didn’t feel safe to lie to Will.
“No, come on.” Will picked up a stick from the ground, almost absently, but there was something contrived to it. He’d not just seen the stick, I realised- there was something too casual to his movements. I think he’d found it earlier and left it by the gates, so he could fetch it now. Will did stuff like this all the time, “discovering” things in front of you, or having a bunch of facts about frogs to talk about the day someone- and the school administration could never prove who- had jammed a frog behind the radiator. He performed his conversations like he’d rehearsed them.
It was a pretty big stick.
“It’ll be fun. I want to show you something.”
“My mum’s going to be waiting-“
“It won’t take long. Don’t be a baby.” His voice was unnaturally high-pitched even for him, excited to the point of breaking. He trailed the stick along the railings, and his knuckles were white where he held it.
"Okay. Sure. Lead the way.” If I ever have to write down a list of regrets- actually, I suppose that one won’t make the cut. Whatever Will wanted to show me didn’t freak me out as much as the idea of telling him no and going home. I’d have to turn my back on him.
He grinned, too wide and too long. He’d never learned to smile properly. It doesn’t sound like something you actually have to learn, but that’s just because if you’re normal you learn it so early on that you forget. You learn to smile in the way other people like, in the way that makes them smile back. Will didn’t smile for anyone but himself- when he smiled, it was a raw expression of his personal joy. I’d only seen it on him before when he’d got a magnifying glass and a line of ants.
“It’s this way. Keep up.” He started out in the direction towards his home, and I trailed after him. Will walked like he was gliding, no up-and-down to it. He slid his feet just above the ground, silently and carefully placing them on the pavement in a neat line like he was creeping up on someone. I was about to say something to break the silence when he started dragging his stick noisily on the pavement and after a few wordless minutes he took a sharp left through a crack in the stone wall, into the field on the other side. I caught up and when I turned the corner he was waiting there, standing in the crack in the wall, staring at me.
“I like you,” he said, thoughtfully. He was holding the stick in both hands. “I don’t think you’ll tell anyone about this. It’s my special place. If you tell anyone about it I’ll know, because you’re the only other one who knows.”
I let out a nervous little giggle and tried to convince myself he was just being nice in his own bizarre way. He turned around, sharply, and walked out across the field towards the thick, overgrown hedge on the other side. As he went, he twirled the stick, rolling it over the back of his hand and catching it again in one smooth motion.
“Hey, that looks really cool,” I said, and I meant it. It was a neat little trick. “Can you teach me how to do it?”
Will stopped without turning around and I swear he thought about it for a moment; thought about spending an afternoon playing normal kid games and teaching me how to roll a stick over my hand. Then he set off again, shaking his head and twirling the stick from hand to hand.
“You wouldn’t think it was cool if you knew how to do it. We’re nearly there.”
We were aiming for a thick knot of undergrowth where the hedge had grown out into the abandoned field, and as we got closer I could smell a weird, sweet scent that made my lunch rise in the back of my throat. That was enough for me to finally ask.
“Will, what’s that smell? What are you showing me?”
“Don’t be a baby.” He said it exactly like he had before, delivering it in one sing-song breath as though it were a single word. I don’t think he really thought about what it meant- I think he’d learned that you could use it to make people do what you wanted them to.
“You have to see it. It’s through here.” He ducked under a rough hole in the hedge and waited for me to follow him. I didn’t want to and when I did the thick brush of the hedge grabbed at my hood and backpack. I had to force my way in past the outer layer of growth, and inside there was a space between the hedges, dead leaves soft on the ground and nearly enough room to stand up. That sickly sweet smell overpowered everything else there and I thought Will would be mad that I looked so disgusted, but he didn’t seem to notice.
“It’s just through this bit,” he said. He smiled his broken smile again and indicated a direction with his stick. I was evidently supposed to go first and I couldn’t think of any way out of it.
So I went first.
I think I’d known what it was going to be as soon as I smelled that putrid sweetness. I’d just hoped I was wrong. I wasn’t, though. It was a dead old man, ripe in the late summer heat, yellow vomit caked in his ratty grey beard. His clothes were old, torn and filthy, and the stale sweat mixed with the rot made my stomach roil.
“I found him,” said Will from behind me, and there was real wonder in his voice. “I found him here, in my special place. For me.”
“You’ve got to tell the police,” I said, my head spinning. The dead man had a blue spiderweb tattoo between his thumb and forefinger, faded with age. “You’ve got to tell them you found a body.”
“I don’t got to do anything. This is my place. I’ll tell the police when I want.” Will’s voice was cold and quiet, much lower than normal. I didn’t want to turn around and see his face.
“Don’t you think it would be better,” Will said in his new low voice, “if he was a criminal? Maybe he found someone and killed them first, before he died. Then I’d be a hero for finding him.”
He rested the tip of the stick on my shoulder.
"Who do you think he might have killed?” he asked softly.
“Will, I-“ I turned round and threw up, spattering the ground and his shoes and my trousers with the damp remnants of my lunchtime sandwiches.
“No!” he screamed, and his voice was high again now. He grabbed me by the hood of my coat and pushed me back towards the exit from the hedge, scratching my face on the branches when I stumbled.
“You’ve ruined it! You’ve ruined everything!” He shoved me out into the field before stamping through the hedge after me, all his practiced grace forgotten. I pulled myself to my feet, shaking and terrified. There was lightning in his eyes but even when he tightened his grip on the stick I remember thinking that at least he wasn’t using that awful low voice any more. He was just shudderingly angry, impossibly angry.
“Go home. Just go home, you puking cunt,” he said, spitting the word. I was more shocked by that than I would have been if he’d hit me with the stick; it was an impossibly rude word, one I’d heard only once or twice and knew was at the very top of the list of bad words that lived in the back of my head.
I didn’t need to be told twice. I was on my feet and running for the crack in the wall in seconds. Behind me I heard a horrid, sharp crack and for a moment I thought he’d caught up to me, that he’d hit me in the head with his stick, and I looked over my shoulder to see that he was shouting incoherently, smashing the stick against the ground again and again, splintering it into pieces with the full force of his frustration.
I went home the short way, but I had to stop for a rest halfway there. I was sobbing and running so hard I was breathless, and my body couldn’t tell whether I was exhausted or terrified or really amused. After a while I couldn’t tell either. It took a long time to calm back down.
When I finally got back, I was swept into a rush of activity. My mother was waiting for me and knew that Will and I had found the dead man. Will’s parents had called her after Will had solemnly shown them the dead man in the hedge; he’d been showing me his special hiding place and we’d found a body there and I’d thrown up and run away home, I found out. Everyone was so glad to have me home and safe and I just went along with it. It turned out in the following days that the man had been homeless and sick, that he’d gotten too drunk and he’d crawled into the hedge to die the day before Will showed him to me. I felt sorry for him after we found that out and he stopped playing the starring role in my nightmares. I went back to school after about a week.
Will stared at me at breaktimes and lunchtimes for a few days, and then started to ignore me. For the most part. Sometimes we’d all be working quietly and I’d look up from my book and he’d be glaring at me, eyes like thunder, and I’d have to look away. Three months later his dad got a new job and his whole family moved to Nottingham, and I breathed a huge sigh of relief.
The problem is that it all happened a long time ago, and Richard Williams is not an uncommon name. I don’t really remember what he looked like. I just remember the broken grin, the warped voice that was too squeaky or too low, the silent, careful footsteps. So every time there’s a Richard Williams in the paper, every time there’s a Richard Williams on the board of directors or at my dentists or on the PTA I wonder.
I wonder if he’s standing out there, stock still. I wonder if he’s staring at me.