Part Three: Come One, Come All, Just Don’t Come Today!

What did I just do?! As I watched the fizzling red ball shoot up into the clear blue sky, glancing nervously over at the distant cruise liner and hoping alternately with increasing frequency that someone and no one would see it, something incredible began to happen. The flare kept rising and expanding in an impossible way, until it had blocked out the sun altogether, casting an eerie red glow across an ocean suddenly stricken with unnatural calmness. As the daylight faded around this smouldering crimson giant, reminiscent perhaps of what our sun will look like in another five billion years, give or take a few tens of thousands of millennia, it began to intensify, burning into bright orange, then yellow, and finally into a flash so brilliant that it completely blinded me.

Only a few moments had passed, and yet as my sight began to return I now found myself standing beneath a starlit night sky, a crescent moon already nearing its apex. My eyes slowly adjusted to the gloom and I saw an empty field stretched out before me, softly lit by a strange, warm glow. Music began to play behind me, starting from a single, almost static note then whirring up to its proper tempo like a music box wound into operation. A cheerful organ tune piped out, instantly reminiscent of the funfair, and as the aromas of popcorn and candy floss wafted carefree into my nostrils, I turned to see the red and white stripes of a big top towering over me, a rainbow of fairy lights twinkling and dancing with playful glee. Still very disoriented, I reached suddenly upwards to find a top hat on my head, and as I glanced down I saw that I was adorned in the starchy white shirt, immaculate red waistcoat and sleek black trousers of a circus ringmaster.

Gaping for a moment at the scene unfolded before me, I was distracted by a new source of light and sound; I turned back around to see the headlights of a car pulling into the field and drawing closer, coming to a halt in front of the low wooden fencing that delineated the boundary of the parking area. Patrons! But hold on, I’ve only just got here… I have no idea what’s inside the tent! Are we ready to put on the show? What is the show even about?

Whipping around and dashing through the main entrance and into the big top, I screeched to a halt when I came once more upon an empty field stretching out ahead of me, turning back in horror to see that somehow this gigantic, authentic, and very three-dimensional tent was a mere cardboard cut out, an enormous prop held up by wooden beams set diagonally into the dirt. There was no show! And yet people were coming! I could hear more cars arriving, people exiting them, animated chatter getting closer and closer.

The rising panic was now peaking within me and attempting to hold me paralysed in its grasp, but I slipped through its clasping fingers – stopping only to catch my hat as it toppled from my head – and rushed back towards the entrance. The people were coming, and somehow I had to make this façade real in the next few moments. I prepared to focus every last shred of will that I had, because if there is one thing I know about the performing arts, it is this:

The show must go on.