Care-ou-sell

At the Funfair Your parents tousle your often-kissed hair. Oh gosh! The sun is so bright and the sweat streams down your neck but the warmth and humidity feels welcoming somehow. The ice cream drips and trickles down your hand-- a light brown stain amidst fair, soft hands. The tinny music (boosted by yells and shrieks of over-excited, well-sugared children) feels even authentic for once. What you look for is the carousel, the spinning island of garish painted horses. You wait in line, the impatience building as the other kids get their turn, their laughter almost an affront to your impatience. But all this evaporates as soon as you clamber on. Strange, though, that there’s this stain on the fibreglass horse. It just seems to radiate this power. Your head suddenly starts spinning. You call out, wanting to get off the horse. But it is too late. It has already started rotating. The children’s cries blur into something harsher altogether, something that sounds very much like machinery. In a Factory You huddle deeper into your sparse clothing. The flickering fluorescent lights mingle with the bitterly cold low temperatures to suck every iota of hope and energy out of the room. You take a sharp breath in shock. (Where have your parents gone? Where is this place?) You choke on the fumes of drying paint. Everywhere around you are half-finished fibreglass horses painted and assembled, runny paint trickling slowly down the grey flanks, like pus out of an ignored sore. Listless workers put the pieces together, every movement economical, their faces a practised mask of indifference (or could it be just tiredness?), pale yellow. Machines whisper, conspiring God knows what. You look down, your hands – they’ve changed. Scarred, scuffed, painfully seized. You look down at the dull aluminium table. Someone else’s face stares back at you. Someone whose eyes show pain way beyond anything conceivable. A giant gaunt figure looms behind you. “Where’s youn gorn? Get back to yer place ye lettle punk!” ​ And with that, he drags you by your ear back to your “place”, a smaller alcove in the side of the factory. Children testing fairground guides, faces permanently adjusted in a rictus of happiness. You clamber onto the carousel. The tinny music takes on a more sinister air. It starts rotating – slowly but more progressively more quickly. Shouts of panic merge with the music. You’re dizzy at first, reflexively you hold on to the plastic mane, but slowly you realise the futility. You (almost willingly) slip. Your head connects with the plastic forcefully. It hurts, but the pain slowly fades. Along with everything else. So that’s what the stain was.