Joke day

Guy has come to see me at my dwelling, which means it must be joke day. Every year on joke day, we tell each other a gentle joke, usually a word play type joke, or something he has seen that he found amusing. Today, he has brought a carrot that looks like a farm animal wearing trousers, and walking purposefully. We laughed a lot at where the animal might be going – Guy said it looked like a sheep who was going to parents evening, but because of shared custody, he felt nervous and detached from his kids’ education.

He had prepared a sort of voice and stressed facial expression for this, which we both laughed at. He was gentle with it, as I said, so we laughed in the soft kind way of this situation.

When our laughter had abated, I took my turn. I said the animal could be a goose, late for a meeting with a loan advisor at the bank, and even though the loan advisor had been encouraging and promised to do all he could, the goose knew deep down that there was no hope. The poor credit rating, the debt from the marriage.

We laughed for a long time, because that’s exactly how the legs seemed: like the goose was walking like that because in reality it had no idea what was going to happen tomorrow, or how they would get by.

The laughter died away. We had hit a lull, and it was time to put the amusing carrot to one side. This is part of the way of things. After laughing for a while, we find ourselves with nothing much to say. I often just look at Guy during these moments, he has very sad long eye lashes, he looks directly at the ground. It reminds me that he came here - to the village itself - on Joke day.

I was one of the first to greet him as he emerged into the clearing area. He was walking slowly, smiling but not seeming to know why. This is a common facial expression in those who arrive in the clearing. There is a way the light strikes through the frilled mist that is both beguiling and reassuring.

Guy told us, as we offered him a shawl and a sip from the tea flask, that it felt good to trust his feet again. Before leaving, he had been suffering a great deal because he was not sure about a joke that had been playing out.

That morning, after reading several reports in the news that turned out to be jokes, he discovered that the bed he had been sleeping in had been moved to a different part of the room. Rising unsteadily, confused about who could have done this, he found that the door of the room also had been tampered with. Both the door and the bed were, somehow, a joke.

On opening the joke door to go down for breakfast, he found that the corridor on the other side of the door was also a joke. He did not understand the joke of the corridor, as he walked to the stairs he found himself losing all confidence in his contact with the ground. He felt like the joke he didn’t understand was understood by everything else in the house. Everything else in the house was riffing off the joke of the corridor, the door, and the relocated bed.

The stairs took the joke and somehow made it into a song which had lyrics and a self-propelling laugh within it. Guy had to cling to the bannister with both arms and rest as the stairs turned the musical aspects of the joke into a kind of caricature of authority – at least, that’s what Guy thought it was doing. The joke was so lost on him, that it’s possible none of what he thought was meant to be funny was the actual point at all.

In the kitchen all the tiles were a new version of the old joke in the corridor. By this time, Guy was having physical reactions to the joke. His feet were entirely numb. He could not be sure if he was touching the floor at all. His hands and face were numb also, the kettle was a terrible groaning joke and he had to abandon all ideas of tea or coffee.

His clothes were a sequence of jokes that caused him to experience the feeling of being trapped in a world of sacking. He spent what felt like several weeks inside that joke, unable to see the source of the light that haunted him, even as he struggled to make his head emerge through the head-hole of his jumper.

The street was a screaming joke. He was not sure if he was wearing shoes. He did not trust air – the air was a floating mockery. He did not know whether he had breathed in – he knew nothing. The entire joke was lost on him. There were other people too, who had no idea what the joke was. A neighbour he saw often, a good neighbour who was always pleased to see him, she was there across the street, unable to fully sit on the bench. The bench was a joke and she could not be sure if she was in contact with it. She seemed to be in terrible distress, but there was nothing Guy could do. He had his own problems.

Eventually he boarded a shaded bus - a bus nobody else was boarding. There was no driver, but he felt, somewhere in the distance below him, that his feet were in contact with the solid floor of the bus. He was able to cling to the pole. He felt a stirring of peace and reassurance. After several comforting minutes, the bus rocked. The engine started and the bus moved off. As the bus carried him away from the town, Guy felt the physical effects of the joke start to subside.

He looked around him, taking in the strange darkened bus. The seats rocked gently, echoing the patient, friendly passengers who might once have sat in them. The town was gone - an impossibility after such a short journey, he thought, but he had not travelled in all directions from his home, so it was possible, he conceded to himself, it was possible that this route was the fastest out of the urban landscape and into the natural realm.

Out the front window a grey expansive sky bloomed white veins, regressed outlines of moving bulk mooched slowly into a vast and wondrous distance. The shape of a bus driver, cut from the shadows of the grey sky, seemed to smile easily. He knew it was not a real bus route – not licensed by the city authorities. Perhaps not licensed by the authorities of anywhere. He did not feel surprised when the bus stopped suddenly at the side of a deserted road.

The bus door opened onto a wall of thick mist.

Guy peered out. In the mist he saw the glow of lamps. He heard the start of a reassuring voice, in the near distance. A voice speaking in lovely straightforward sentences, loaded with only one meaning. Saying only what it intended to say.

He followed the light and the voices without question, and was overcome with joy, of course, some hours later when we found him and wrapped him in the shawl and gave him the tea.

Guy has just asked me if I want to see his other vegetables. There’s a potato, he says, that looks just like a bee. It’s not exactly funny funny, he says, unless you imagine a bee as heavy as a potato, trying to dance. Trying its absolute heart out to fly.