The Comedian and Rain

"Sometimes I'm up, sometimes I'm down, sometimes I'm almost to the ground..."

African-American Spiritual












Content Warning:
Strong Language

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The Comedian and Rain

I

Rain was The Comedian’s daughter. She was a big girl, in her nineteenth year, rather masculine, hyperactive, fierce. Her manner didn’t demand affection, but it did elicit it from some people. And it palpably did not from others. It was quite possible to be charmed by her brisk antics and improvisatory flair and frenzy. But it was a human spell- a spell of personality that did not wait for you to adjust to it, and many, particularly the not quite so pure in heart, found themselves simply and immediately repelled by Rain. Badly behaved children sometimes responded to her, attended to her, saw themselves in her, and followed her zealously. But children- more generally, were frightened of her, and parents at the playground felt that fright vicariously through their progeny as they played, and were angered by it. Rain loved to play in the playground, loved to clamber over every item of play equipment, and put to use- any way she knew or could conceive- each and every inch of apparatus that there was. If children were already playing on something coveted, (whatever was next on her lusty list)-, forced to wait, she could barely contain herself twenty seconds before beginning to bark or scowl in canine fashion at the children ahead of her, in an effort to disperse them. In this endeavour, she was usually successful, so disquieting the voice of her discontent. Up she would climb, and swing, and curl airborne, cawing a joyful fanfare of “Thermometer!” as she did so.            

            Rain was scared of the dark, despite her brazen bravery about so many other things: knives, fireworks, freezing cold bodies of water, rollercoasters, horror films- what a pull of allure! with what curious religiosity she devoured hauntings, phantoms, entities, possessions; and relished, with giggles and squeals of excitement, acts of spasmodic evil, flailing family members and beloveds made monstrous, demonically developed…priests flying farcically across the room. Her father had a great love of such things as well. He had even created and been head-writer on a Channel 4 series which combined the frightful and the funny, in which he had also had a recurring role. But Rain wasn’t much of a fan of the series- or perhaps she just found it strange seeing her dad on the familiar screen of their old, square, podgy Phillips television.   

         Rain’s father, a comedian of great repute, adored this indivisible energy, this kinetic craziness. By neurology, a noble science as far as The Comedian was concerned, her social maladjustment, sensory issues, her learning and linguistic difficulties had been termed Autism, and her nervous ticks and impulsive vocalisations, behaviours, spasms Tourette’s Syndrome. In a way, Rain’s fearsome nature was the result of a battle within. These two diagnoses wrestled inside her, sometimes one would be the aggressor against which the other fought to defend her, and sometimes the inverse would be true. But what was “her”? Her, the thing she was defending from the assault of freezing Autism with the courageous motion of Tourette’s, or the attack of frenzied Tourette’s with the cool, distancing powers of Autism, existed but not extricably from these two warring entities. This was almost certainly what lay behind her love of possessions, what explained her affection for tigerish, fiery energy, of the Pentecostal flame, received and emitted by the self-same receiver, the intensity that runs through all things, what might be encountered in the paintings of Munch and Van Gogh, the verse of prophetic, not-quite-Protestant Blake and Milton, and the prose of Lawrence. She was a tyger, tyger, burning bright! Works by these authors lay among the spines that lined her father’s bookshelves.

         Rain’s Autism was evidenced quite obviously in certain behaviours which had been with- and would likely continue to be with her all her life, but they formed quite an unlikely counterpoint with her Tourette’s. Human or animal noise she loved, hers or anyone else’s, but certain artificial, mechanical, or electronic sounds she found almost debilitating. She had a great sensitivity to emotional atmosphere, nearby rage or upset would inevitably provoke a storm of the same in her, many times amplified. To say she was a creature of habit would be an understatement. Apparel, diet, activities- quotidian aspects about all of which she was selective, idiosyncratic, and to whose details she was unswervingly observant- were replicated more or less exactly from day to day. Shorts, never anything below the knee; the same pasta sauce and the same pasta shape- and brand; bedtime at 10.30 precisely. One trait which had changed quite dramatically in Rain was the more standard autistic penchant for lining up or stacking objects and toys. The orderly labours of the little, pre-verbal Rain could once be glimpsed all over the house, back when the summers seemed very long indeed, and when her mother was still alive…before “Thermometer!” came along, that tetrasyllable which Rain had made her own ever since it was first imprinted upon her awareness, and which resounded from her lips a thousand different ways at a thousand different volumes, painted a thousand different emotional colours, every single day. Vertical, magnetised to the fridge, mercury in the glass, that red rising pin of heat… It was the perfect word in which to plant the ferociously flapping flag of her identity. She had also an imaginary friend called “Mr. Laugh”, an entity of erotic joy, the father of all expulsions.

         The Comedian took Rain to the playground every day. All the children who lived on the estate, those who lived in the few, costly detached houses with their fronted willows and monkey-puzzles and blossomy pear trees, and the majority from the long incline of many-coloured terraced homes, played regularly in the estate playground, and had done so ever since the playground had been born, which might as well have been in time immemorial. It was a green, hallowed island of play equipment, bordered in park lawns with benches dedicated to wealthy deceased, and a few special bowers, consecrating the winding powdery path to the central playground with something almost Edenic- (at least, seemingly so, if you allowed your imagination to reach such heights and you were not bothered by the sounds of children’s laughter, and the occasional screaming baby). The park- the playground more specifically- served the little ones of the estate like a church for children, a bouncy, sportful parish. Children from elsewhere in the city, from elsewhere in the land, from other countries even, were most welcome, but it was an essentially intimate space, a community space, and all those on the loopy rails and wobbly slides and sailing swings (rope swings, log swings, swingbaskets and swingsets of all kinds) and spinning, roundy-roundy things, and assault-course of big rubber toadstools, closely watched all the while by their amused, occasionally anxious, but rarely distant guardians, were closely knit and generally known well to one another.

         So, everyone at the playground knew Rain, and they knew her father. It came at a difficult time in her father’s life, the communal decision that nineteen-year old Rain was no longer welcome. It was generally accepted by the residents it served, that their playground was a sanctuary. But it was a sanctuary that children had to leave behind at some point. There was no definite or unanimously determined age at which children were required to do so, but it was a ritual exit, politely atavistic, that generally took place at around twelve. If it had not yet occurred by thirteen, neighbours would gently and tactfully encourage their neighbours to begin considering a date, and perhaps steer their spiritually-delayed thirteen-year-olds in the direction of a recession from that beautiful place. When these children had children of their own, whenever that might be but not before, they could come back. In nineteen-year old Rain’s case, all concurred that enough exception had been made for her and it was, at last, time to leave.

         “Rain…” The Comedian ventured, knocking on his daughter’s door.

         As he entered, no further than the threshold of the jamb, she cocked her head like a fox, or a badger, spooked by his presence. But her surprise was not taciturn, as those creatures’ is.

         “Daddy no!” she cried out. “My bedroom- girl’s bedroom- Thermometer! Downstairs- fuck off, Saville…”

         “Can I have chat with you downstairs then, Rain?”

         “Delighted, but five minutes!” Rain enthusiastically replied.

         “Can we chat now actually, Rain, then it’s done and…”

         “NO!” and she leapt up and slammed the door in his face. “Five minute Thermometer!”

         From outside the room her father conceded with a concealed giggle. He shook his head, allowing his chortle to grow a little as he plodded down the stairs. He had never stopped finding his daughter funny, and surprising, and unusually inspiring. His own comedic style was quite different to his daughter’s not quite coherent, staccato bursts of life, but her spontaneity, her indelible addiction to impulse, inspired him nonetheless. His solo shows centred his slow, grandfatherly, deadpan delivery. There was a touch of Bohemian gruffness, alcoholic poetry, beggarly adrift-ness, a calm, baleful disarray out of which he would conjure incredible observational insights, and mind-bendingly macabre paraprosdokians…something like that: he had just about- although not quite- memorised The Guardian’s review of his first Edinburgh Festival show “No eyes in her face”. His sense of humour was dark. Though he uttered much on the subject of grief- he was somehow unutterably marked by the two great griefs of his life, the death of his wife and the suicide of his mother. Such losses...two reservoirs of static silence: anything enlightening or honest or humorous- however dark- that he could possibly say always seemed to him to skate across them like a quick gleaming impulse of light that then went swiftly silent, leaving the reservoir dark and sunless again. This was why he embraced darkness, why his characters lived in darkness.

         He avoided profanity but welcomed blackness. He only ever curtly alluded to his daughter during his act. He was scrupulously, almost punishingly honest…but he was selective with regard to what he was honest about. He was successful and he took pleasure in his success because it was deserved. His shows and his unique schtick were drawing bigger and bigger audiences. A Netflix special was on the cards. Although, he wondered if perhaps that were no longer the case, as he poured an approximate double Dalwhinnie into a tumbler, from the decanter on the bookcase. The bookcase was full of classic spines, novelists and poets he loved- a few already mentioned- but also the memoirs and guidebooks and critical appraisals of great and much-admired humourists. Originally, it was Buster Keaton made him want to be a comedian; then Emo Phillips, during the 1980s who helped him to become a better comedian; then Andy Dick who made him want to stop being a comedian; and finally Chris Morris who made him want to resume wanting to be a comedian. He regularly had to defend liking Bernard Manning, and was ever having to defend hating Billy Connolly. He had recently fronted a segment for BBC 2 about the comedian Joe Pera (whom he greatly admired), which was a fairly technical analysis of his timing, delivery, affect, and material, singularly gentle and mundane.

          But, as The Comedian waited for Rain to come downstairs, it was his great recent disaster which held his mind in its flinching thrall and jailed his memory: there was so much good to remember, but all he was allowed to remember for the time being, by his own mind, was this recent failure. His opening monologue at the Baftas had been critically and commercially panned, and Ofcom had received complaints about a few pieces of material. More than he regretted his failure (sometimes unavoidable in the risky, rough, and changeable realm of stand-up comedy), he regretted accepting the job out of nothing but his own vanity, knowing he wasn’t the right candidate for awards presenting. He loved film and television, and had viewed the screeners of work he had not already seen in the cinema or on TV with great pleasure. But he had not been able to very successfully craft the year’s pop-cultural filmic and televisual moments, those reputed islands of scurrilous, comic, or potentially iconic screen genius, into a monologue, faithful to his own comedic voice, found and honed with considerable difficulty, he wasn’t going to betray it for the sake of the BAFTAS. So, he had struggled to weave together such disparate strands, his own mode insufficient and undelighting as it reached for a comedic truth about this that and the other piece of nominated work. The result was an unbalanced monologue which was only ever too earnest and obsequious, or too dismissive and acerbic. His remark about a particular female director being “charmingly mediocre and insufferably ungrateful”, regularly outspoken on gender issues, (the reported gender pay gap, so-called toxic masculinity, the infamous male-gaze in film…), went down particularly badly, and got him splashed on the front of The Guardian with a fairly scathing caption, with, beneath, upsettingly elegiac inches which used abstrct nouns like “disappointment” and the idiomatic simile “like a lead balloon” and even, most disturbingly, at one culminating point, the phrase “a potential fall from grace”. Pictured, inset: a far younger, slimmer, more beautiful version of The Comedian, his clothes crow-black, a loose waistcoat just slightly antiquating and amplifying his form, his hair gelled-smooth in early twentieth century brill-creamed fashion, and on his right hand: Brett Marshall, his old dummy, a peculiar and grotesque character he used to very sparingly unleash in his early shows. He had sold Brett a long time ago.

         The Comedian was woken from his recollections by urgent, jovial, avid footfalls on the stairs. There was a great crescendo of thumps and then Rain appeared before him. She seated herself on a sofa opposite to the one on which her father was seated. In a very childlike way, she folded up her legs, stowing them away beneath her, severing, quite completely, all contact with the ground. She twitched a few times: a curious motion in which she put her right-hand index knuckle to her right temple and rotated it back and forth a few times. This tic would always culminate in a mouse-like squeak. The intensity of her physical mannerisms was kept under control with a soft sedative medication, Rifampin. She also took, daily, the antidepressant Zoloft, and the anti-psychotic drug Clozapine. The one comforting constant, whatever the concentration of foreign agents in her blood, and whatever stage of the fraught, almost seasonal cycle of moods they caused in her each day, Thermometer…Thermometer, Thermometer…  The day’s last pill had been administered.

         “Rain, I’ve got something I need to tell you…”

         She was almost sleepy but there was still an ember in her, an ember primed to blaze should something excite her, or upset her in which case she would probably flap her hand at her father, a gesture which was lucidly able to communicate distress.

         “Yeah, what?” she said, almost irritated at the deceleration leading up to whatever announcement he was about to make. 

         “Rain…erm…” He was suddenly inarticulate. A few twitches, a tremor of her knees, and three fairly quiet Thermometers filled the silence. Only a short space of time elapsed before he went on speaking, but it was a hiatus focused enough and intense enough that he caught sight of something in his daughter’s face that surprised him: a fleeting, seldom acknowledged, and lastingly stamped sense of beauty. She looked out of her fair, distant, freckled complexion at him, her cheeks a little chubby with the water retention caused by her tablet intake. But there was a further layer of surprise, or a deeper one at any rate, coming more palpably to the fore with each passing moment: she was a woman, a nineteen-year-old woman, the trapped features of both he and his dead wife, visible from the first in the infant Rain’s grimacing agonies and her big-eyed awe and her seizures of laughter, now lay complexly adorned, the child before him wearing upon its head, its creased temples, nineteen more summers and nineteen more winters. Sure in some knowledge, some confirmation pertinent to the task in hand, he continued. The matter might be expressed in only a few words:

         “Rain, tomorrow will be the last day you play in the playground.”

         She didn’t react. She reacted as little as if he had said nothing at all. This was preferable, The Comedian concluded, to the reaction he had received at various points during the Baftas.

         “We’re going to play in the park tomorrow, okay…and then: Never again.” Never: such a terrifying, angular word, a stroppy dictator of a word, a histrionic harpy screech, a horrible guillotine of a word…with that huge, miserable proclaiming N and that bladed, central V, like a genital wound. She understood nothing better than the killing sadness of that Never.

            Rain’s muttering hastened, but also softened in volume so it was almost entirely unintelligible. It died down entirely and then all was still. A Thermometer! burst from her, sudden, loud, a cry and rallying mantra that sounded, very much alone, and ineffectual. She knuckled her temple concludingly, and then stood up, briskly but bleakly departing the room for bed without a word.                                                                                                 

II

After a day at college, mostly in the company of her pastoral assistant June, The Comedian collected Rain and accompanied her to the playground. She insisted that she knew the way perfectly, could complete every bit of the procedure alone, travelling ticketed, underground. But they just weren’t yet at the stage where she could do that safely, her father ruled, and she accepted that. Perhaps that would change. From tomorrow she would never again be permitted to play in the park, perhaps this would precipitate growth in other areas. But it continued to seem unlikely that she would ever have children of her own.

            The Comedian had been preoccupied all day, his spirits unlevel, his soul unquiet. An overwhelming sense of rejection filled him. He had hoped to be able to do some writing, but life weighed him down and kept him inactive, a nasty habit of life’s, he had come to understand…it had literally kept his hands flat and wordless upon the table, like a paperweight not for paper but writer’s hands. He did not feel worthy to turn his distress into comedy, his pain into art, to laugh at his pain. Not yet.

            They walked very slowly and silently. Rain was never silent but her father had grown so used to the various gradations of her ever-vocal states that her arbitrary movements and jerks and frequent Thermometers became her own version of silence. She had nothing to say to him. She continued to interact with the world, with frenetic enthusiasm, but her father might as well have been invisible. As far as she was concerned, she walked alone.

            The sun emerged as they entered the park and marched knowingly, quite fluently to its foliate middle, where the playground was. The voices of play and pleasure seemed unreal, unbearably distant, auditory hallucination in the lit green trees, the thin steeples of birches, and the bolder architecture of oaks and limes. The sun intensified. The clouds had parted willingly, the beams had been given no cause to break their way out.   

            The Comedian sat on a bench at the border of the playground. He carefully and sadly surveyed his daughter’s avid sally towards the climbing frame. Rain shimmied with great muscular alacrity up the fireman’s pole and onto the first platform of the frame. A very little pair of twins in dungarees worriedly evaded the approach of sizeable Rain, and looked confused and frightened as she thumped down with a clang, ruffled both their mops of blond hair, (unable to resist the softness), and cooed a trio of jovial Thermometers at them. Along the same edge of the playground’s quadrangular perimeter where he was seated, a few other parents acknowledged her father’s presence with a heavy awareness, a solemnity: whether smug or sympathetic, The Comedian could not quite determine. A mother spoke to him:

            “Rain’s last day?”

            “Yes,” he said, in a soft, sad grunt.

            “I’m sorry she can’t keep playing here a little longer but we all knew this day would come.”

            “Yes,” The Comedian replied, coldly, dryly. He concurred but without a trace of enthusiasm.

            “She’s too big now really…and, you know, she’s always been a bit of a wild thing, and we’ve got to think about all the other children, you know.”

            “Yes.” He did know.

            “Oh! Look at the Pembrake twins, bless them, the little dears! They’re attempting the fireman’s pole.”

         The twins, one at a time, were very tentatively attempting a descent of the pole. The ground was about one adult away from the daunting precipice on which they stood, the drop measured almost exactly the height of The Comedian. The pole is frightening if you’ve never done it before.

         Rain surpassingly vaulted the practiced length of the monkey bars, swinging below from them as they were intended. Then she reversed her progress, still hanging from them, heaved herself up, and tackled them from above. She could not fall, so adept was her footing as she clambered up and over the little steel incline. Her father had been there to catch her, support her, counsel her when she was small. Now she could do it alone. She could do it all alone and she simply could not fall. Her abilities had run their course and yet she played on everything, climbed, swung from, slid down, sat on everything without any sense of an ending, any sense that this was the last time.

         “Are you well?” the mother asked The Comedian.

         “You know, good days and bad days,” he answered.

         “Has all that noise calmed down now?”

         “How do you mean?”

         “After the Baftas, the papers and that…”

        “Oh, yes. It was fairly painless, really. Could’ve been worse.”

         Reaching the see-saw, Rain only found herself alone for a few moments. A boy, older, rougher, slightly less genteel than the park’s general population, jumped onto the other end. He was younger than Rain, probably about fourteen, but heavier-set, and he was equal to if not slightly heavier than Rain’s weight. He demanded her name a little abruptly, and he was taken aback when she cried out Thermometer! She was strange but she was female, visibly older than him but still young, uncommonly accessible, approachable. He was taken with her strong, sunned legs, and the small reply made by her two breasts, only loosely garmented, to each of her quick, vivacious movements. He laughed at Thermometer!, assuming she was making an eccentric joke, and she laughed with him, magnifying his laughter. Their two slightly unhinged, manic laughters, his slightly mocking, hers more frenzied, resounded in the park, a little flammable duple source: a sort of caution, so one knew to approach their situation with care. And all the while the see-saw creaked. The sound was a double-syllabled protest, a scratchy Cree-crock! Cree-crock!

         From the spot where he sat, The Comedian regarded the scene warily but contentedly. The woman next to him continued to gossip, a little too idly for his preference. He wanted to ask her to leave him alone, but he was just too polite.

         “How’s she doing, at…what’s the place?”

         “Bishopwood…yes, fine. Better. Not so bad,” he said. Pretty badly, and I’m terrified about her future, he thought. He tried to think his anxiety and his dissatisfaction as emphatically and audibly as possible, tried to make the truth stare at this woman through the translucent and pallid mask of his words as blatantly as he could.

         Rain and the boy went from the see-saw to the roundabout. Rain had an age-old fondness for things that went around and around, cycles, the cyclic and the circular in general, a love which began when she began. She set off at a run, in a kind of sweaty devotion, spinning her new acquaintance as fast as she could. She knew that it would run out, that centi-circular force, but once she’d given all she could to it, she let it fly, hopped on board, and allowed herself to be turned by as many revolutions as it was able to give back to her. Giddy, only unwittingly disguising the act in the blurred motion of the rotating roundabout, she reached towards the boy’s crotch, and gleefully touched his penis.

         “Mister Laugh!” she enigmatically cried.

         Flaccid and insubstantial, there was no definite shape to be felt, nothing except a kind of sacred, contraband, general tenderness. Rain laughed and the boy hardly comprehended what had happened. She had slightly pressed, almost shaken quick perfervid hands with that vulnerable, meaningful area.

         Nobody saw anything, nobody said anything. Once Rain had swung on not only the log swing and the swing-basket in the knotted dip of which she curled up into a ball, but on each of the four single swings, back and forth in big symmetrical, enthusiastic arcs, it was time to go home. The Comedian knew when Rain was ready to leave the place, and he knew that she would leave only when she desired. Nonetheless, in an illusion of command, he called, and she came. 

III

Three weeks later, and Rain was not coping. So, one day, in the after-weeks, The Comedian and Rain waited until it was night. They waited for the streets to quieten, the park to clear, the playground to become utterly deserted. The gate was locked each day at seven but the outer railings were not high, and easy to scale. Normally, it was only the adrift, and those in great disarray that entered this way, only those without a home, those who couldn’t yet go home, those running from home, those who had some need of the stars, had any cause at all to enter the park- which was a very decent spot from which to look at the stars- (though the city, a hubbub of synthetic luminosities, stole from the unclouded and scattered constellations most of their power, lazily reflecting it back at them).

            Rain was scared of the dark. She did not like to be out of the house when it was dark. The dark made her sleep, most days. She actually relied upon the repellent nature she associated with the dark. Those crosscurrents: fear of the outside, love of the inside, they dropped her into exhausted slumber, let her fall asleep, just as soon as the sky was dark.

            Out in the world’s darkness, she felt very timorous. Each step, she trembled, and threw furious, shivering Thermometers at the floor and the sky and the passing nocturnal folk; occasionally she even sent to her shadow, or her father, a Fuck You! She did not stride ahead but clung close to him, imitated quite exactly the rhythm of his familiar tread, dragged on his familiar weight, made difficult his progress. She had taken that known and soft enveloping warmth of her father’s hand, as soon as she had stepped out the door. She wouldn’t let it go. And every time she felt his love, the slow, masculine, fathering warmth in the velvet firmness of that hold, she felt herself fill up like a balloon with a feeling of safety, and happiness, and love made double, and it made her cry out Fuck you! Thermometer! Fuck you! Thermometer! a refrain that was like the initiating notes of a weird waltz, a sweary incantation.

         There was no rule, no known stipulation that said Rain couldn’t play in the park at night. All she had to do was to brave the dark. If she could just brave the dark, she could play again, just as she used.

         Within the ambits of the park, it was darker than without. There were fewer sources of light, the lamps lit low and sparsely spaced; the surfaces of lawn, and the wide-and-high out-raying bulks of trees like huge, embalmed corpulent heads, were a darker darkness in the night, a solider, more matted darkness. Rain knew they were green, but in the night their greenness was a baleful, unbroken, uncompromising black. The sky was tinged with violet, the edges of the clouds gleamed, their titanic weights and vast extents told in the moonlight, though so much was obscured within the vague and nebulous fog of skyey darkness: Night’s ubiquity.

         The Comedian and Rain passed through those significant bowers, a familiar journey, but the silence breathing there was arresting and chilling. There was a palpable noiselessness at the passage’s end, not a single bird-like note of child-voice. And Rain would more normally gallivant ahead, seize, with great avidity, upon the playground waiting for her at the end of the pleached avenue. But this time she was bound by trepidation, the darkness, the unfamiliar silence, the arcane black-greenness of all verdancy. She clung close to her father’s trembling hands. Neither father nor daughter could tell whose hands were trembling, their two hands, his left, her right, were one entity while his hand lay lodged so tightly in hers, though hers was the slighter. She was afraid, both explicably- on account of the dark, and inexplicably- on account of something she could not name.  

         But, entering the playground, through the creaking gate, she found that there was nothing to be afraid of. The park was deserted and she was free to do whatever she liked, play on whatever she liked as many times as she liked, every swing, one after the other, and never any cause to wait, never any necessity to bark away those ahead of her in the queue as she used to do.

         For the most part, her father watched, eyed her play from a distance. As soon as she had freed herself from him and gone rushing off towards the frames and climbable courses and monkey bars and swings, made newly unafraid of the unfamiliar dark by the familiarly accoutred compass of the playground, he retreated to one of the benches and sat there, quite alone. He bore unfunny witness to the scene, this scene of life in darkness. Gradually, his face fell, and his gaze became downcast. In the vagueness of the dark, the night’s slumberous improbability, The Comedian was able to half-believe that a presence sat beside him. He was unable to face it. Only while his gaze stared down into the earth, where his dead mother and his dead wife lay corrupted and supine, could he believe in the figure beside him on the bench. He knew that as soon as he glanced right in confirmation the illusion would be over. There would be nothing there.

         Cree-crock! went the see-saw, but only once. The Comedian looked up. Facelessly looking at him, her expression obscured but her form lucid, Rain sat seated on one end of the see-saw, the seat at her end of that inelegant horizontal almost to the ground. Sometimes I’m up, sometimes I’m down, sometimes I’m almost to the ground. The Comedian was seized by a sudden memory of song. That old spiritual. Louis Armstrong’s voice, (and his horn hardly a thing apart), sprang both from a forgotten surface of banded vinyl. No-body knows the trouble I’ve seen. At Rain’s mute appeal, the Comedian rose up and began to walk towards his daughter, under the stars, more visible it seemed with every passing minute, despite the light pollution ascending from below.

         It was an almost sinister sound, a pair of notes with a feeling of great isolation about it: Cree-crock…cree-crock…cree-crock, as up and down the sea saw went. Their weights were different and so Rain’s rise and her father’s rise, her father’s fall and her own fall could not be replicated precisely like for like on either side. But there was nothing unsatisfactory in the brief soar and drop, soar and drop enjoyed by each party: the purposeless repetitions made by a father and his daughter, on a see-saw. Over the see-saw’s unoiled accompaniment, Rain melodised strange, drawn-out, plaintive moans, wheedling sing-song wails of Theeeermooooometer!

         “I love you Rain,” The Comedian said, as he rose into the air. He didn’t tell her so often enough. 

         “Cock!” Rain barked as he dropped to earth. And then: “Thermom- Mr. Laugh did it…”

         And in that moment, from the bottom of the see-saw’s unfixed and unlasting diagonal, he glanced up, and there his daughter was, airborne, powerful against the stars, looking down at him from the top of that iron incline that his own weight had erected. Time stood still for a short while, the flux and alternation of the see-saw, in its inexorable, uninterruptable momentum lay somehow paused. Thus suspended, The Comedian heard from the clouds, from the firmamental blackness starry not with astral beauty, but with a kind of optic vigilance, a terrible laughter.