The Great and Secret Show. Clive Barker

He was a loner; his only company two dachshunds. These, the absence of female visitors, and most particularly his penchant for colour co-ordination in his dress (handkerchief, neck-tie and socks always in matching pastel) led all to assume he was homosexual. But naive as Carolyn was in the particularities of intercourse she knew Lott better than her elders. She’d caught his eye several times, and hindsight told her his looks had meant more than hello. Intercepting him as he took the dachshunds for their morning constitutional she got to talking with him, then asked – when the dogs had marked their territory for the day – if maybe she could come home with him. Later, he would tell her that his intentions had been perfectly honourable, and if she hadn’t thrown herself upon him, demanding his devotion on the kitchen table, he would not have laid a finger on her. But with the offer there, how could he refuse?

      Mismatched in years and anatomy they nevertheless coupled with a rare fury, the dachshunds sent into a frenzy of jealousy as they did so, yapping and chasing their tails ’til they exhausted themselves. After the first bout he told her he hadn’t touched a woman in the six years since his wife’s death, which had driven him to alcohol. She too, he said, had been a substantial creature. Talk of her girth made him hard again. They set to. This time the dogs just slept.

      At first, the match worked well. Neither was the least judgemental when it came to the removal of clothes; neither wasted time with declarations on the other’s beauty, which would have sounded ridiculous; neither pretended this was forever. They were together to do what nature had designed their bodies to do, careless of the frills. Not for them the candlelit romance. Day in, day out she went visiting Mr Lott, as she referred to him in her parents’ company, only to have his face between her breasts seconds after the door was closed.

      Edgar could hardly believe his luck. That she’d seduced him was extraordinary enough (even in his youth no woman had ever paid him that compliment); that she came back, and back again, unable to keep her hands off him until the act was thoroughly performed, verged on the miraculous. He was not surprised therefore when, after two weeks and four days, she stopped visiting. A little saddened, but not surprised. After a week of her absence he saw her on the street and he asked her politely if – quote, unquote – we could resume our hanky-panky? She looked at him strangely, then told him no. He hadn’t sought an explanation, but she offered one anyway. I don’t need you any more, she told him lightly, and tapped her stomach. Only later, sitting in his stale house with his third bourbon in his hand, did he realize what the words and the gesture meant. It drove him to a fourth and a fifth. A return to his old ways all too rapidly followed. Though he had tried very hard to keep sentiment out of the exchange, now – with the fat girl gone – he realized she had broken his heart.

      Arleen had no such problems. The path she chose, pressed by the same unspoken dictate as the rest, took her into the kind of company which wore their hearts not on their sleeves, but on their forearms, in Prussian blue ink. It had begun for her, as it had for Joyce, the day after their near-drowning. She’d dressed up in her finest clothes, got in her mother’s car, and taken herself off down to Eclipse Point, a small stretch of beach north of Zuma, notorious for its bars and its bikers. The occupants of the area were not all that surprised to see a rich girl in their midst. Such types regularly drove down from their fancy houses to taste the low-life, or have the low-life taste them. A couple of hours was usually enough, before they beat a retreat, back to where the closest they got to rough trade was the chauffeur.

      In its time the Point had seen some famous faces come, incognito, looking to suck on its underbelly a while. Jimmy Dean had been a regular in his wildest times, seeking a smoker who wanted a human ash-tray. One of the bars had a pool table sacred to the memory of Jayne Mansfield, who had reputedly performed on it an act even now spoken of only in reverential whispers. Another had carved in the boards of its floor the outline of a woman who had claimed to be Veronica Lake, and had passed out dead drunk on that spot. Arleen, therefore, followed a well-trodden path from luxury’s lap to the squalor of a bar she chose for no better reason than its name: The Slick. Unlike many who had preceded her, however, she didn’t need a drink to give her an excuse for licentiousness. She simply offered herself. There were any number of takers, amongst whom she made no distinction whatsoever. Nobody who came seeking failed to find.

      The next night she came back for more, and for more the night after, her eyes fixing on her paramours as though she were addicted to them. Not all took advantage. Some, after that first night, viewed her warily, suspecting that such largesse was only offered by the mad or the diseased. Others found a streak of gallantry in them they’d not suspected, and tried to coax her up off the floor before the line had reached the runts of the pack. But she protested loudly and ripely at any such intervention; told them to leave her be. They withdrew. Some even joined the line again.

      While Carolyn and Joyce were able to keep their affairs to themselves, Arleen’s behaviour could not go unnoticed indefinitely. After a week of her disappearing from the house in the middle of the evening and returning as dawn came up – a week in which her only reply to questions about where she was going was a quizzical look, almost as though she herself wasn’t sure – her father, Lawrence Farrell, decided to follow her. He considered himself a liberal parent, but if his princess was falling in with a bad crowd – footballers, maybe, or hippies – then he might be obliged to give her some advice. Once out of the Grove she drove like one demented, and he had to put his foot down just to keep a discreet distance. A mile or two shy of the beach he lost her. It took him an hour of scouring the parking lots before he found the car, parked outside The Slick. The bar’s reputation had reached even his liberally plugged ears. He entered, fearing for his jacket and his wallet. There was great commotion inside; a howling ring of men, beer-gutted animals with hair to the middle of their backs, gathered around some floor-show at the far end of the bar. There was no sign of Arleen. Satisfied that he’d made a mistake (she was probably simply walking the beach, watching the surf) he was about to leave when somebody began chanting his princess’s name.

      ‘Arleen! Arleen!’

      He turned back. Was she watching the floor-show too? He dug through the crowd of on-lookers. There, at the centre, he found his beautiful child. Somebody was pouring beer into her mouth, while another performed with her that deed he, like all fathers, hated to think of his daughter performing, except – in dreams – with him. She looked like her mother, lying beneath this man; or rather, as her mother had looked that long ago when she’d still been capable of arousal. Thrashing and grinning, mad for the man on top of her. Lawrence yelled Arleen’s name, and stepped forward to pull the brute from his labour. Somebody told him to wait his turn. He hit the man on the jaw, a blow which sent the slob staggering back into the crowd, many of whom were already unzipped and primed. The fellow spat out a wad of blood, and launched himself at Lawrence, who complained as he was beaten to his knees that this was his daughter, his daughter … my God, his daughter. He didn’t give up his protests ’til his mouth was no longer capable of making the words. Even then he tried to crawl to where Arleen was lying, and slap her into recognition of what she was doing. But her admirers simply dragged him out and dumped him on the edge of the highway. There he lay for a while, until he could muster the energy to get to his feet. He staggered back to the car, and waited several hours, crying sometimes, until Arleen emerged.

      She seemed quite unmoved by his bruises and his bloody shirt. When he told her he’d seen what she’d done she cocked her head slightly, as though she wasn’t entirely certain what he was talking about. He ordered her into his car. She went without protest. They drove home in silence.

      Nothing was said that day. She stayed in her room, and played the radio, while Lawrence spoke to his lawyer about closing down The Slick, to the cops about bringing his assailants to justice, and his analyst about where he’d failed. That night she left again, in the early evening, or at least tried to. He intercepted her in the driveway however, and the round of recriminations postponed from the previous night erupted. All the time, she just stared at him, glassy-eyed. Her indifference inflamed him. She wouldn’t come inside when he asked her, nor would she tell why she was doing what she was doing. His concern became fury, his voice rising in decibels and his vocabulary in venom until he was calling her a whore at the top of his voice, and there were drapes being twitched aside all around the Crescent. Eventually, blinded by tears of sheer