Jemma Forte - When I Met You

‘You gave me a shock,’ I accused, when in fact the hysterical noise I’d made was far more shocking than anything.

Pete didn’t bat an eyelid. I don’t think his pulse works in the same way as other peoples. Neither did he react to the way I was dressed, which to be fair he’s seen many times before. Instead he merely skulked through to the bathroom, still in his pyjamas.

I haven’t really told you about Pete yet, have I? He’s my brother, well, my half-brother. My mum’s ‘precious prince’. I don’t mind Pete. He’s pretty easy company, made even more so by the fact that he hardly ever comes out of his room. He’s obsessed in a pretty unhealthy way with Elvis and spends the majority of his time listening to The King’s albums on full volume while playing Xbox. Pete’s a funny boy really. He lives in a world of his own. He’s nineteen and if I’m honest I don’t really know him very well at all.

After a life-saving cup of tea, piece of toast, couple of headache pills, pint of water and a Berocca I left the house. Fresh air was good and as I started piling bags of clowning equipment into mum’s Rover – or ‘Tina’ as she likes to call it, Mum has a habit of naming inanimate objects – I decided I might be OK today after all.

As I slammed the boot shut my phone beeped telling me I had a text. I had butterflies as I went to check it. Ridiculously I was hoping it might be from Simon, despite the fact it was far too early to expect to hear from him. Dating etiquette dictated that it would be at least a couple of days before I did. However, it was from him wishing me good luck with the shoot … He’d signed off with hope to see you soon sexy.

As I pulled away I grinned at myself in the mirror. A white face, black eyes and red nose beamed back at me. Thank Christ he couldn’t see me now.

The party was the usual version of hell on earth once it got going. I get paid a lot for being a clown, but I earn every penny of that money, let me tell you. Little Jack, who was actually exceedingly cute, was trembling with the excitement of it all when I arrived. He was four today and he and his merry band of twenty friends wanted to celebrate hard. It was down to me to show them how. Understandably, when a parent’s forked out so much money for an entertainer, they want their money’s worth. They want to be able to stand back, mainline white wine and let the person they’re paying deal with the hysteria.

Before the party began, while I was setting up in their conservatory style kitchen, Jack’s mum was busy cutting crusts off sandwiches so Jack’s dad took the opportunity to take lots of photographs of the birthday boy. At a certain point Jack grew bored of posing and his dad suddenly swung his excited son around in the air before giving him a giant bear hug. It was a touching scene and I experienced, not for the first time, a pang for the childhood I didn’t have. It wasn’t the party and fuss I yearned for when I felt like this. My mum certainly couldn’t have afforded to do big parties like this. Our treat was always to take a friend to McDonald’s for tea, which we loved. It was witnessing such a close family unit that made me sad, because for a few short years I know it’s what I had. I wish I could remember what it felt like to feel so complete. Growing up I missed my dad so much on special occasions, particularly on birthdays. I longed for him to be there. Always. And every year when I blew out my candles I wished he’d come back. I’d close my eyes and imagine him turning up, full of joy to see us and with an explanation that would make me understand why he’d left.

Still, it wasn’t to be, and gradually over the years I’d started to accept that I’d never know and that he obviously didn’t care.

Jack was a lucky boy.

Once the celebrations got going the noise was incredible. It always is. It’s like an inverse equation. The smaller the person, the more noise they create. My hangover was only made bearable by the fact that as I went through my clowning motions I kept remembering how gorgeous Simon was, and how into me he’d seemed. I couldn’t believe he’d already been in touch too. It was the boost I needed, so summoning up the energy from the bottom of my size fourteen clown shoes I supervised games, performed tricks and made lots of jokes about bottoms. This does the trick every time. Jack wet himself laughing. I mean actually wet himself laughing. Still, after a change of trousers, for Jack not me, just as I was beginning to run out of steam, the kids were sat down for twenty minutes on the floor, around a Spiderman plastic tablecloth where paper plates of sandwiches, sausages and carrot sticks were displayed. These were all largely ignored but, when the biscuits and cakes came out, it was like vultures descending as the children scrambled to consume their body weight in sugar. Once the white stuff had penetrated their veins, and they were one Haribo away from full-blown diabetes, the kids went crazy. With lunch over I knew I was on the home straight but that still didn’t stop me from praying hard for it all to be over soon. After they’ve eaten is always the point when the kids feel familiar enough with me to start climbing on me, kicking me and punching me in the face, all in the name of fun of course, while demanding complicated balloon puppets and more lavatorial humour. Today was no different.

Fortunately, the majority of kids at this particular party were pretty sweet and a couple even made me yearn to breed. A handful of others, however, had the opposite effect and made me want to perform an immediate hysterectomy on myself with no anaesthetic. The worst offender was a girl called Maisie. Maisie was, frankly, a little cow. This sounds strong I know, but I do not buy into the view that all children are delightful beings. They’re not. Some are, but others are most definitely hideous and will undoubtedly grow into mean-minded, horrid adults.

Anyway, the party was drawing to a close so I started to hand out treats and to squirt them with my plastic flower. Hilarious … But Maisie, the little charmer, kept wriggling round me so that she could delve into my bag herself and grab more sweets than she was really entitled to.

‘Can you put those back please, angel?’ I asked nicely between gritted teeth for about the twelfth time. By now I was really hanging in rags, my headache had returned and I was desperate to get into something more comfortable. This wouldn’t be hard. I was wearing a hot, heavy, itchy clown suit for goodness sake. I could have slipped into an eighteenth-century crinoline and it would have felt like leisure wear.

‘No,’ Maisie answered defiantly, looking deep into the bowels of my soul in the way that only the most brattish of children are capable of doing.

‘Please Maisie, otherwise there won’t be enough for all the other boys and girls.’

Unblinking, Maisie put her hand back into the bag and extracted yet another handful.

‘But I haven’t had any sweets yet,’ said another little girl, who’d been waiting patiently for ages and who was watching the scene in horror. This little girl was of the cherubic variety. She was small, cute and very polite.

‘I know. You’ve been waiting very nicely,’ I said. ‘So listen Maisie, you need to give some of those sweets to Georgia here, because she hasn’t had any and you’ve had loads.’

‘No,’ said Maisie.

‘Yes,’ I replied. My tone was icy. My patience was wearing thin and I was so weary that at this point I just needed her to do as I’d asked.

‘Please Maisie,’ begged Georgia rather pitifully, her blue eyes brimming with tears at the sheer injustice of the situation. At this rate I’d be crying with her soon. ‘Just let me have one.’

I looked at Maisie and nodded hard, indicating that she should do the right thing – though admittedly it’s hard to be taken seriously when dressed as a clown, unless someone suffers from a phobia of them, which a surprising amount of people do, then it’s easy – but Maisie ignored me and simply shoved nearly every single one of the stolen sweeties into her precocious gob. ‘Can’t have them now,’ she lisped meanly, syrupy dribble pouring out of the sides of her engorged cheeks.