In the tunnel under the Round House we encountered a large and boisterous family of semi-Australianized Italians. There were about sixteen of them in all – the women multi-coloured and coquettish in strappy high-heeled cocktail shoes, dodging the puddles and potholes, the men barrel-chested and sonorous. There was one little boy in the party, five years old at the most, who was already a fully developed Italian male. He wore a gold chain around his podgy neck, a gold bracelet around his flabby wrist, and a gold ring on his fat forefinger. As we passed he winked confidently at me and confidentially at my wife.

The Fremantle market was as lively as we’d heard it to be. You could buy hand-painted frocks from Bali, you could eat any one of twenty flavours of gelato, you could have your palm read, or you could watch a Jewish stallholder suckling her baby. I believe we would have found plenty more things to do as well had we not been frightened away by a persistent street clown. I have an aversion to clowns anywhere. As a boy at the circus I found them mystifyingly unamusing and as a man on the streets I find them wholly dispiriting. This one seemed to sniff my distaste. He followed us around Fremantle, snapping his nose at me when I made the mistake of catching his watery eye. He materialized on the jetty at the same time we were there. His reflection mocked us in shop windows. And at last he caught up with us again on the terrace of Papa Luigi’s, where we’d gone for a quiet capuccino. He was an especially virulent version of the type: difficult, determined, self-conscious, hiding his own self-dislike and awkwardness in motley in order to discountenance the rest of us; to strike where he’d been struck. The staff at Papa Luigi’s tried to move him on but he wasn’t prepared to go without putting up a clown’s fight. Under his make-up you could see that he was hurt and embarrassed; so twenty more innocents had to get it in the neck. He mimicked people’s walks, he peered into their milkshakes, he did inscrutable mimes to tables of elderly Italians. There is no blackmail more potent. Everybody laughed though nobody was amused.