Carnivalesque Read online

  19

  Dany slept the sleep of angels, swaying backwards and forwards in the hammock with the movement of the convoy as it made its way through the mysterious night. The ache for the old home had gone and a strange new sense of belonging had replaced it. The gentle outbreaths of Paganina and Mona filled the air around him. They did nothing so vulgar as snore. They were wrapped in their own sleep, a spicy sleep with its dreams of millennia and aeons.

  So when the convoy stopped and the boy staggered out to meet the pale dawn, he was well and truly rested. His dreams lost themselves in the memory of sleep, a sleep that was full, to which the new world outside presented a refreshing contrast.

  He saw the convoy of vehicles around him making their odd figures of eight, separating one from the other, gouging their back wheels into the deep, oak-coloured earth. There was no grass here. There were just endless open fields of brown earth, nothing to break the horizon but large conical chimneys in the distance, and huge stacks of turf, at odd intervals, between them.

  The carnival was already reassembling itself in this wasteland of manufactured bog. He was getting used to the process: the assemblage of the very large from the impossibly small.

  He threw himself into the business, as if he had found his perfect space, his holiday from life. He was a runaway now, and he had run to here. To this strange field of dried earth, the cabins circling round it, in search of the perfect indentation, the soft bowl beneath the low hillock where those stanchions can be set, where the sideshow can unfold itself. And the roustabouts in their torn dungarees rousted about, guiding the mechanical wagons belching smoke and oil, their leather belts swinging with wrenches, clamps and vices, drills, pliers, sockets, ratchets, claw, tack and squirrel hammers, all of the tools necessary to reassemble this caravan of the unexpected that will expand, melodeon-like, into pleasure domes and ghost trains and whirligigs of manufactured terror.

  And by mid-morning, with the sweat pouring off his naked torso and the hot sun turning his shoulders red, it was almost fully constructed. The small maze of haphazard stalls, the giant maw of the ghost train, the pennant of the big top looming above them, and the neon sign of Burleigh’s Amazing Hall of Mirrors glittering uselessly in the early-afternoon sun. But above them all loomed those conical chimneys, far off, sending their volcanoes of industrial smoke into the blue sky above. His only question was, who would attend? Where would the punters come from, the families, to wander the stalls, buy their tickets to the multiple carnival delights, pay for the sticks of sugary candyfloss? There seemed to be no houses in this wasteland around them, not to talk of villages and towns. But then, to his further amazement, he saw figures were already trickling in. Rough-faced youths and children, boys mostly, dressed in tattered jeans and T-shirts, with scraps of torn cloth tied round their heads. Nut brown, all of them, as if they had emerged from the dried turf beneath their feet.

  ‘Bogmen,’ one of the squats muttered to him, proffering a half-smoked cigarette that Dany felt loath to accept. But accept it he did, as, again, it seemed to be expected of him. He inhaled and did his best not to cough, handed the butt back as soon as it seemed appropriate.

  ‘Bogmen,’ he repeated and tried to hide the fact that it was a question.

  ‘They work the turf fields, sleep in the tents beyond the smokestacks. They have little enough to spend their money on.’

  The flat turf desert hid its own inhabitants, it seemed. And Dany, now that his part in the assemblage seemed finished – it was difficult, if nigh impossible, he was realising, to know the beginning and end of certain tasks here – took an empty seat on the Big Wheel to get some better idea of the landscape all around him. And he was amazed to see, once it had taken him to the apex of its circle, that what he had thought to be empty bogland was in fact alive with lines of bent, labouring figures. All stripped to the waist, burnt brown by the punishing sun, feet awkwardly moving through the fields of already cut turf, assembling it into tidy stacks. Further off, huge rectangular vehicles moved, with long mechanical blades cutting whatever turf remained on the topsoil. They cleaved through the brown earth like a knife through butter, chopping it into rectangular sods, which would be assembled, he assumed, by the lines of bent bogmen into regulation stacks. Which would be ferried to the smokestacks beyond and burnt, to pollute the heavens and keep the earth below electrified. And for the first time he got the sense of what would become his abiding intuition. That the world outside the carnival was harsh, cruel, a saga of endurance from which the carnival alone provided some respite. He heard a huge, industrial horn blow; his chair began to curve below its apex. He could see the crowds below were thickening now, into what could well become a flood of visitors.

  A riot, almost, as it turned out. They came from the empty, denuded fields, from whatever factories huddled beneath those smokestacks, with the brown stains of peat still on their hands and the smoke of industrial grime on their faces. Hair tied back with scraps of tattered cloth, queueing up to be thrilled by vertigo, appalled by gravity, terrified by darkness as the Big Wheel spun them upwards, the rollercoaster hurtled them downwards and the ghost train accepted them into its dark, unknowable maw. And to be tickled, after the sun went down, by the aimless tumbling of clowns, entranced by the sight of Paganina, balancing on a circus pony, her naked toes clutching its manicured mane, while the other leg arched upwards to bow the violin she held under her tilted chin; awed by the spectacle of Mona, ascending with too much ease on the rope he once more pulled. Peals of laughter, he found, were liberating, like a door opened to a fresh wind. But the inhaled breaths and the gasps of wonder were indicative of transports to quite a different realm. She seemed gravitationless again as she spun on his rope, sailed from trapeze to trapeze with no protective net beneath her. And she was gravitationless, he realised now, barely human, and had to remind herself to catch the arms of leotarded youth, swinging upside down on the trapeze bar, on the other side of the vertiginous top.

  The laughter, the gasps of shock and awe, the gazes of rapture and enchantment, seemed more innocent out here, in this boggy wasteland, as if the wonder of quite another universe was being brought to their backwater. And as Dany watched them file out into the night, he heard phrases that could have been uttered more than a century before.

  ‘Mighty.’

  ‘A wonder.’

  ‘A feckin’ marvel.’

  They made their way through the darkening stalls, with their freckled faces, their windswept hair, the girls with their kerchiefs tied at the back in a style that he found wonderfully, almost erotically foreign, and they gazed at him as if he was part of this thing they had paid for and been privileged to witness, but that would be forever foreign to them, this mighty, this marvel, this wonder, and he began to wonder himself – was he a carnie now?

  He had dreamed of running away from home, when the tension in the household grew so fetid that he could hardly breathe. He had begun to think of this mood as he would of the weather and longed for a forecast that would warn him of it. But he had had no such mood barometer available to him and so only recognised the chill when it was already there. With it came the urge to run, to escape, to cross fields he had never seen before, touched with early-morning frost, to walk down a railway track that pointed to some far-off infinity. But he had always known that when the real weather began to work on him, when the night came down and the rain fell or the cold wind whipped up, he would find it impossible not to return. The thought of his mother’s face, sad with its inexpressible anxiety, would have been too much. So he had never tried. He had listened to his father’s tales of preserves and condiments yet to be invented and endured the huge silences between them. He had buried himself in his games: Dungeons and Dragons, Dwarf Fortress, Assassin’s Creed.

  And now here he was, in a carnival that no gamer could have dreamed. He listened to the retreating laughter from the brown fields beyond and the possibility of returning was just a dim flicker, barely moving inside of him. Whoever that
boy had been, walking out with his parents from the infinite reflections of the mirror-maze, he was a perfect solution to what one could have called the Huckleberry urge. To escape, on a raft of hopes and dreams, on a river of the unknown. And even if he had allowed himself to be overtaken by that crippling sense of loss that he knew he had to keep at bay, he had no way back.

  He was leaning against the metal scaffolding that bore the weight of the helter-skelter. He could hear a thin, scraping sound, like the chirp of grasshoppers. And it wasn’t a chirp, he remembered from his days in school; it was a rustling, of their elongated legs against the armature of their bodies. He wandered inside then, following the sound, into the armature of the great beast above him. There was rust everywhere inside, on the old metal struts and scaffolding, the bolts and screws that held the groaning thing above together, with its lost screams of terror and its faded hurtling gasps. But there was more than rust; there were strange wafer-thin mushroomy growths, like the scabs that grow on an open wound. And one of the small, broad-shouldered roustabouts was scraping them off, with infinite care, into an ancient, cracked earthen vessel that should have belonged to a museum if it belonged anywhere.

  ‘Do you collect them?’ Dany barely raised his voice, afraid his breath might upset the delicate process.

  ‘My job, my duty, my pleasure,’ said the tiny one.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Now that would be telling,’ he replied. His voice was surprisingly deep for one of such tiny stature. It was as if the sound of a trumpet had erupted from a penny whistle.

  ‘For cooking?’ Dany hazarded.

  ‘Now come on. Would you ever sink your teeth into this?’

  And he held up something that looked like a flattened toadstool, squashed and mangled, that had been passed through the bowels of an extinct creature.

  ‘Although,’ the little one mused. And Dany figured then that the less he said, the more chance he had of hearing.

  ‘Although?’ he echoed. Echoes were good, he had learned. These carnival folk had secrets to hide, but couldn’t help talking. So direct questions got you nowhere, but good things come to all those who wait. ‘There are other modes of consumption.’

  He had a scalpel, shaped like a thin, curved Arabian dagger, with which he scraped the growth, whatever it was.

  ‘Mildew,’ he said, and handed Dany the implement, pulling another one from his roustabout belt.

  ‘You can help if you want.’

  So Dany began to scrape.

  ‘Scraping away,’ the little one half-whistled and half-muttered, between browning teeth. ‘But don’t lose a scratch of it.’

  ‘A scratch?’

  ‘A shiver. An atom. And you might need one of these.’

  He held up another small, earthen vessel. Dany took it in his hands. It had a mouth like a tiny open trumpet, and a decoration of years – generations, it seemed – of miniature cracks.

  ‘Mildew?’ Dany asked. Again, the repetitive question seemed like the best mode of enquiry into this mystery, whatever it was.

  ‘It has a different quality,’ the roustabout continued, ‘from the helter-skelter. Rough; some would say nutty. The ghost train, now, renders dollops of hard grain. The best mildew of all comes from the circus bleachers.’

  ‘I work in the circus.’

  ‘You do, bedad. Then you’ll know what I mean.’

  Dany nodded, as if he knew what he meant. But of course, he had no idea.

  ‘The thinnest, the most refined. Which is why those circus folk can get above themselves betimes.’

  ‘Aha.’

  ‘But if it’s quantity you’re after, and quantity, let’s face it, is what we carnies need, go for the rougher stuff.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘The squeals of fright, terror, the oh-my-God-I’m-falling feeling brings out the mildew in all of them. The ghost train now, that’s a factory for the stuff. You would disagree, I’m sure.’

  And Dany wasn’t sure if agreement or disagreement would reveal more of this mystery to him, so he took the option of nodding in a non-committal kind of way. ‘Refinement is all very well, but there are times when bulk is called for.’

  They scraped for a while in companionable silence, and Dany’s mind began its tumble-dryer movement again. Mildew. Fright. Terror.

  ‘And there we go,’ the roustabout said, with another toothy whistle. ‘The helter-skelter can consider itself done.’

  He ambled out then, and didn’t have to bend as low as Dany, underneath the rusting struts. There was a harvest moon shining over the empty carnival. Where was Mona, Dany wondered, Virginie, Paginina, all of the artistes? But none of them seemed to be about. Moonlit emptiness. And then he heard it. More of that tiny scraping, as if from a field of crickets. He could see bowed shapes in the underneath of every carnival ride and structure, the same tiny bowls held aloft, the same curving scalpels doing their job.

  ‘Nightwork,’ the roustabout muttered, as if Dany shared the same knowledge as he. ‘Much more delicate than daywork. But by no means unnecessary.’

  By no means unnecessary. Dany considered repeating that, but it seemed too much of a mouthful.

  ‘Why don’t we try the big top?’

  ‘Why not?’ Dany asked again, and followed him past the shuttered stalls to what he imagined would be the empty sawdust floor.

  ‘Laughter,’ the roustabout murmured, as if he had to keep his voice low, ‘delight and – what do you call it? wonder – give rise to the thin, refined mildew. closest, some would have it, to the original spice.’

  And Dany remembered the phrase ‘the Land of Spices’, and had the wisdom to keep his mouth shut.

  ‘The wafery stuff, for the more refined amongst us, of which,’ and he lifted the fallen flap of the circus tent here, gesturing Dany inside, ‘I believe you might be one?’

  Inside then, in the silent tent. The great pole, soaring up towards the darkened top. But not so silent after all, Dany realised then, since the same cicada-like scraping emanated from beneath every bleacher.

  ‘Let me show you,’ the roustabout whispered, and led him round the sawdust floor to where the bleachers raised themselves in serried rows. And beneath every wooden seat there hung wafer-thin strips of the same mildew. Of the same substance, indubitably, as the growth beneath the helter-skelter. But as the roustabout had intimated, so much more refined.

  ‘Quite the harvest,’ the roustabout muttered. ‘And let us now join the circus scrape.’

  The circus scrape turned out to be much more arduous. The long, thin strips of mildew had the substance and fragility of a communion wafer, but a wafer that had been shredded and drawn into something that had the lack of substance of a spider’s web. Though there was a definite point of clinging at the top, a tiny bead of moisture that kept the diaphanous structure in place. And the trick, as he observed from the other roustabouts working beneath the bleachers, was to pass the scalpel delicately along the wood, above which child or bogman had sat, and cause, by a process almost as delicate as osmosis, the beads of moisture to cling instead to the curved scalpel, and to delicately drip the resultant harvest into the tiny vessel. Although drip was the wrong word in this context, since the mildew was moistureless; indeed it wafted in whatever breeze there was inside the big top, a wafting that made the harvesting all the more difficult. But Dany mastered the process, keeping a weather eye on the other harvesting roustabouts, the squats bent beneath the low bleachers and the talls stretching up their seemingly expandable arms to reach the highest. In fact, Dany realised, between the tall roustabouts and the squat roustabouts there should have been multiple other classifications, since some of these roustabouts were so small as to do their scraping under the bleachers nearest the sawdust, without any necessity of a hunched or bent back; in fact, standing upright, with the curved scalpel in their tiny, reaching hands. And some of them again were so tall as to stand stretched beneath the very highest bleachers, as if the very act of stretching and of scraping h
ad provided the necessary elongation of their roustabout form. Mysterious, he thought, and felt his mind tumble-drying again, but he had to stop himself trying to work the mystery out, since the mildew scraping needed all of his concentration.

  His tiny bowl was soon full. Could it fit more, if he squashed the harvested mildew down? He had barely formed this thought when his trumpet-voiced roustabout companion answered it for him.

  ‘Of course it could.’

  But Dany found his finger could barely fit in the conical, earthenware mouth.

  ‘And no need for squashing either. Just give the little bleeder a shake.’

  So Dany shook. And the gossamer-like substance he had harvested fell gradually to the bottom, as if to the bottom of a very deep well. He sighed then with exhaustion, as he put his scalpel to work once more on the fronds of mildew hanging from the bleachers above his crouched head.

  ‘What’s that sigh about?’

  ‘What sigh?’ said Dany, irritated now, since even his private emotions seemed to be shared by this harvesting companion.

  ‘I heard a sigh. Did anyone else hear a sigh?’

  And scraping was suspended for a moment in that strange, beneath-the-bleachers amphitheatre. Every one of them, tall and squat, elongated and miniature, had heard a sigh.

  ‘A wheeze.’

  ‘More like a moan.’

  ‘Sighing’s not on. One thing about the harvest, it won’t stand the sigh. The moan.’

  The roustabouts in general seemed to concur.

  ‘The groan.’

  ‘The whine.’

  ‘The sough of despond.’