The Humour Sect had been formed seven years earlier, when they were all still younger. Dale was still fifteen, Pierson was eighteen, Tristan was twenty, Michael was twenty-two and Barry was twenty-three and the tale of them meeting could only be a matter of destiny. Fate.
Michael had started the performances in a tavern along Crawdown during the nights, singing the most popular rock songs in a different, more eccentric way that entertained the customers. He was only seventeen and he had just left high school. It was his first job and he had dabbled into it not as a hobby but as a result of necessity, for survival, to be able to breathe above the murky waters of poverty that his family suffered from. He earned twenty-five Dexter groats per night and some other nights when there were more people, they dropped more money and he earned a peak of fifty Dexter dollars. His childhood friend, Barry who was working menially at a soap factory left and soon joined Michael in the business.
Barry seemed better at it though, more people loved him, he had a different style to the songs, a more ludicrous way of singing it and yet an awesome voice. It remained like that for about four years. They got an apartment in which they both lived in, ready to cater for themselves.
While they had both faced problems of wretchedness for most of their lives, the rest of them had faced different predicaments, equally as weighty. Pierson had been a victim of child abuse, he had stayed in an orphanage for the first ten years of his life until he found a way to escape. He was taken off the street again by a couple who wouldn’t provide him a better condition than from where he had run away from. They used him as a slave. He escaped again and he decided to use his talent of telling jokes to earn money. However, comedy was the vaguest profession in Gollogher. No one was ready to pay for such an unserious service as telling jokes because most people might not find even find jests funny. Virtually everyone in Gollogher was a sadist, there was no one man who didn’t have a serious problem he was struggling with. Later on, he met Barry and Michael and they agreed for him to join them. Throughout Pierson’s life where all had seemed so wintry and bleak and all the people he had met had appeared so austere, shutting him up, not caring if he existed or not, he met two people that happened to be the nicest people he had ever met in his entire life.
Tristan’s case was worse. His father was a dipsomaniac, drinking so badly every day that no matter what time of the day one walked past him, the smell of fresh, strong alcohol stung one’s nostrils. The alcohol didn’t seem to be the problem when it was weighed with the effects of his drinking, he had beat Tristan’s mother every day and then at the climax of it, when Tristan was fourteen years, he had watched him kill her. Just as it had happened every time they fought, he hid in the closet peeping at them, utterly frightened and stunned that all of his body shook with his lips clipped, with his gaze set on his father’s huge fists coming down on his mother’s face, knowing very well that his father would not stop beating her anytime soon. That day, his mother had decided to fight back, yelling at him despite the fact that there was blood leaking from the side of her mouth already. Tristan’s father was totally pie-eyed and he got a heavy stick in his hand with which he smashed her head endlessly. She seemed to have grown immune to those hits, she wasn’t evading it at all, she kept repeating those words that were rekindling his father’s anger. As he hit her, he pushed her and now she had her back to the stairs, one more push and she lost her balance. She went down and her head hit the edge of one of the stairs and then what followed was silence. Tristan was still in the wardrobe, watching what was going. His eyes unblinking and he held his breadth. He could see his mother’s eyes shot open, her mouth shut and then the confirmation of her death came forth. Dark blood flowed out from under her head, colouring the rest of the stairs.
‘Karen, Karen’, His father had called with a wobbly voice. The alcohol effect had cleared from his face. There was that one look on his face that showed regret but it only lasted for one second. He knew it had been done and he just had to face it. He looked around the living room and Tristan crept behind the wardrobe door, hoping that he didn’t see him. His father then carried his mother with her head still dripping blood all over the floor and then he had returned with a mop, cleaning everywhere hastily with his heavy breathing audible to Tristan. Tristan wondered where he had disposed his mother’s body but he didn’t wait to find out. He found his way out of the sitting room and ran out of the fire exit of the house, he didn’t stop till he got out of the whole street. Sweat filled his face and his heart was beating too fast.
Yet again, Barry and Michael had found him but unlike Pierson, he hadn’t joined the band then, he had just lived with them.
It wasn’t until they found Dale that the five of them decided to name their band The Humour Sect, making humour their principal entertainment scheme rather than music or magic.
Dale, who was the youngest among them had being born in Baskers and had lived there for the first twelve years of his life. He had quite a comfortable childhood. His father was one of the top infantrymen in the army and since he was usually not home all the time, his mother took it upon herself to care of her four sons. She was a full housewife. Dale was the last of the four boys. Everything seemed smooth, the village in which they lived was pretty colourful and interesting and quiet. However, it only took one day to make the difference.
Some men had visited their home one afternoon in dark masks and they were dressed in black, they were about twenty-five of them. Dale was the only child present there, the rest of his brothers were working in the neighbour’s farm that had tall forget-me-nots, feeding the horses of one of their father’s friends. They shot numerous times and they killed his mother too. Dale ran away, almost escaping but they had caught him and abducted him in a large black van. They drove and drove until they reached a place that he would later find to be Gollogher. They had brought him out in the middle of the road and they had all removed their masks. One of them had an hammer in hand. They moved in a circle around him and then they hit him on the top of his head, destroying a part of his brain, inflicting him with partial amnesia.
Still laying on the ground, he could unconsciously hear the faint zooming off of their vans. Later on, he heard the sudden screeching of another car just right in front of him, the headlights shining bright into his eyes. The people in the vehicle were drunk and they would have hit him.
They carried him into their car and drove him to an hospital. By the time he opened his eyes and looked to the side of his bed, he saw four men, all smiling at him. It seemed they had been there for a pretty long time. One of them had a seamed fair face, thin lips with such a lively expression that he smiled back.
One of them who was really tall and seemed like the oldest of them, whispered to him. ‘Are you okay, kid?’
Dale had nodded even though he could still feel the throbbing of the headache, eating up his head.
They had left the hospital two days later. ‘I am Michael’, the tall guy had introduced himself when they reached their house. ‘And these are my friends. This is Barry, this is Tristan and this is Pierson’, Pierson was the one with the lively face. ‘What’s your name?’, he asked Dale, they were all still smiling.
Dale kept staring at their faces, wishing he could answer those questions.
‘What’s your name, bud?’, Pierson had said and walked up to him, touching his shoulder to make him feel comfortable.
I should know my name, what’s my name, Dale thought. ‘I..I don’t know’, he said.
‘Oh, okay. That’s okay. There’s no problem’, Michael said and he had whispered something to the rest of the guys, reminding them of the doctor’s report on him, that the impact of whatever he had been hit with would make him have a partial loss of memory.
‘You see this’, Michael said stretching his hand to a wallpaper that showed the picture of someone. ‘That’s the former president of our great nation that made us know peace and you see this person’, he pointed to another wallpaper showing another person. ‘That’s the former governor of Gollogher. None of us had been born then. She had made everything great. She is the greatest leader we ever had’
Dale kept staring at him, not understanding anything they were telling him. He kept wondering what his real name was but no clue came to his head. ‘His name was Dale Guaghan and her name is Kylie Eagan. Your name is going to be Dale Eagan’, he said and the rest of them had clapped. Dale kept looking, utterly confused, his mind in another dimension. He was trying to figure out everything that was going on. He knew there was something he was supposed to know, something that was coming and going, not staying. He knew something had happened to him, something wrong and that he wasn’t supposed to be here. He had a family. Did I? He thought. No, I don’t think so, he refuted.
‘Don’t worry. You are safe. Come here. You’re looking hungry. Are you hungry?’. No reply. ‘It’s okay. We’ve got eggs and bacon with milk’, Tristan said with his hand over the shoulder of this frail-looking kid who had a sore in his head that was wrapped around with bandages.
The five of them lived together for the next three years and never for once had there being any course to get sad or depressed.
Only that sometimes the past could appear again in its most demonic form and make you shut your eyes against the torments. Sometimes, Dale remembered what had really happened to him and the few times he did left him vulnerable and gobsmacked. Other times, he remembered that he actually had a real family, he had real loving parents that had been gunned down, he had brothers that he played rough with and he had lived in a beautiful bright neighbourhood with good-meaning people. He remembered the day everything had come to an end, he had struggled with those men. He had hid in the basement with one of father’s shotguns in his hand, he was laying silently behind the door waiting for them to come in. It was time to use all his father’s teachings well. He came out at once and he had shot about ten times repeatedly. Once the pistol was devoid of bullets, he threw it across the room and ran. It only took about ten minutes before he found himself in front of their van with a gun pointed to him.
They had all shared their stories, their ugly stories and just had Michael usually said, their depression became their motivation.
‘We all have sad backgrounds and we have seen really terrible things throughout our lives, just like everyone here. Nothing seems right, the system isn’t but we don’t have to dwell on it. There is still a lot of joy out there to harness from and make light out from our lives to that of others’, Michael said. All their hands were joined together in a circle, a sign of united brotherhood. ‘We all can go out there and make people smile and make people forget all their worries, the way we have done to ourselves’, he said and that day, The Humour Sect was born.
‘What do we call ourselves?’, Pierson asked Michael one night before their first performance together.
‘We don’t need to…’
‘The Humour… Sect?’, Dale suggested.
‘Hmm. The Humour Sect. That sounds a little welcoming and also a little notorious’, Tristan said and nodded.
So, it was. They walked in and their first performance was the beginning of many experiences that the city of Gollogher were going to be blessed with.
Dale didn’t get to perform on that first day or the first week, he was too scared despite the push the rest of the group gave him. The only time he tried telling jokes, he flopped. They found out that the talent of Dale was telling jokes at all. Later on, Dale found his hands on some set of cards and then he found out what he was supposed to be doing. He came fully made as a magician and the first people he tricked were the rest of his band.
‘Wo! Who taught you that?’
Dale had laughed and was fully exhilarated at their reaction. ‘I don’t know’. At that point, he didn’t know who had thought him but he was sure someone had showed him magic in the past. His brain was playing that whirling game again. He could see his younger self with a smile on his face watching someone perform tricks to him and just when the entire picture was about to get clearer, his memory blurred out and locked up, his memory had lost its ability to hold on to something for long. Its stretching ability only reached its peak in his sleep and it was then the image had come completely framed out. Everything was happening in slow motion; he could see himself with his gaze fixed and his white, little teeth out as the cards were being shuffled in the hands of whoever it was. Then, he had looked up and he had seen the smooth face of his father, he was in his soldier clothes just about to leave for the barracks.
‘I want you to watch these cards very well.’, his father said and then pressed both of his hands on it after shuffling it. As he set his palms apart, the deck of cards had disappeared.
Dale had shouted and ran around the sitting room in amazement. ‘Hey, come. That’s not all. Do you know where they went to?’, he asked.
‘No’, he had said.
Then, his father had called. Another boy had run out of the room and come to his father. ‘I want you to put your hand into your trouser pocket. You see anything there?’
His brother had nodded and to the awe of everyone, he would bring out the deck of cards from his pocket.
Just then, they would hear the loud horn of the soldier van just outside the house.
‘It’s time to go’, his father said and then strapped his bag to his back.
‘How did you do it?’, Dale asked
‘I will teach you when I am back’
Dale’s mother would run out of the kitchen with his food flask bag. He would collect it from her and put it in his soldier bag.
‘I will miss you’, she would say.
He would simply smile, put his hands around her waist and hug her. ‘I will miss you too’, he would whisper in her ears. ‘Goodbye’
‘Goodbye, daddy’, they would all shout and follow him until he was out of the door. When he reached the van, he gave one last wave and then he would leave.
Everything had come clearly in his dreams.
So it was. Dale joined the group to entertain people with insane tricks from his deft hands. With the comedy of Pierson, the musical style of Michael, the sharp wit of Tristan, the sleight of hands of Dale and the sleek good looks of Barry that he was more loved for than his singing; The Humour Sect kept to their vision of making people smile and dropping their fears. Momentarily, their fan base increased and from where they performed in a clubhouse, they were broadcasted on every local TV in Gollogher and some other stations in the rest of the People states.
After each night performance, they had all settle in a bar, talk and laugh, as happy as a lark because making people laugh was the happiest thing to do, it made them forget their own sorrows. Then they had drunk a lot each night, spending about fifty Dexter dollars on their favourite Green Bear rum, they had take a collective amount of fifty drinks each day and Tristan was the main consumer. Whether it was said to his face or not, his drinking wasn’t just for fun, it was still an aspect of his past. His father was a bitter dipsomaniac and rather than turning away from it, he embraced with more intensity, drinking uncontrollably each night. Dale drank the least however about a bottle or two and even the few times he did, he felt really guilty believing that his father was watching him somewhere. His father had always been against alcoholism, despite the fact that he was in the military and most of his peers preferred to be intoxicated before they went for a battle.
One other thing that they did was women. They were big entertainers, as big as you could be in the People state of Gollogher and so they were highly desired. Each night they had a lot of women to themselves. Of course, Dale refrained from that and Tristan too. All the pleasure that Tristan was supposed to derive from women, he made sure he got enough from drinking. His father’s behaviour made him discover that women and alcohol were a terrible, cataclysmic combination and rather than misogyny, it was sheer weakness. He didn’t want to be like his father in anyway and although females threw themselves to him, he stayed away from any interactions at all.
The only woman he ever loved in his life was his mother, Karen Klyce. She had been strong and even after his father had bruised her head and blood was bleeding all over her face, she would walk up to him in the wardrobe. ‘Common out, are you okay?’, she would ask.
He would nod and look over her face, then sometimes out of pure compassion for her or absolute hatred for his father, he would burst into irrepressible tears. ‘You know mommy doesn’t like you crying’, she would say and clean off the tears from his eyes. She would have smiles on her face. Then, Tristan would try to wipe off the blood from her head. ‘No, it’s okay. I think you should go out and play with Silas’, she would say.
‘No, I don’t want to. I want to stay here. With you’, he said amidst tears. She would hug him and then he would cry more over her shoulder.
‘It’s okay. It’s okay’, she had said but after all, it wasn’t. The final day had been like any other day, his father bursting into the house and then finding something to get provoked about, then finding a rod and meting out his anger on her. Only that she hadn’t survived this one.
It remained like that and he had drunk over and over again. Sometimes, drinking helped him to get into trances. Trances where he could see his mother’s face, smiling at him with all the beauty he had known her with.
However, the rest of them will dance with girls until the next morning and then take some home to increase their body counts. Everything had changed for Tristan when he met with Samantha. She had just being employed as a worker in the bar at the clubhouse and then he had seen. She looked so beautiful and so calm, so unmoved no matter the amount of work pushed to her or the amount of advances that she was faced with from the male customers there. She was like Cinderella, like his mother. He loved her right away but he kept to his rule, he had to pick between alcohol or females.
Later on, things seemed to be gel for her and Tristan. She loved The Humour Sect and the funnier the better. Samantha was a living proof that the fact that funny men were attractive was true. His jokes, as lame as they could get most times, got Samantha smitten.
They got together and instead of alcohol, he spent the whole night speaking to her at a different table away from The Humour Sect and their hordes of bottles.
Then on one of their hang-outs, he asked her out and her reply was a chuckle. They were lovers like none other and every moment they spent together meant a lot to them. Each night, Tristan would always slip in the name of Samantha into his jokes, making her blush each time.
Just four months before Tristan and the rest of The Humour Sect got an appointment to have an appointment in Reckdette, Samantha got pregnant. Tristan had never felt more responsible for something in his life and he knew he needed to make the appointment in Reckdette count. His dream was about to happen and then…
In any case, the dream of the ordinary people of Dexter didn’t just count.