Carnivalesque Read online

  The tear was dripping down the outside of the glass. It hung there, like a small pear-shaped piece of reflective silver, and itself reflected all of its multiple reflections. He reached out to touch it and realised he couldn’t. It was on the outside of the mirror, and he had somehow put it there. He tried to work out how, and wondered was it something to do with the emotion he had felt when he closed his eyes. He began to hope then that if he could do that with a tear, he could do it with the rest of himself; his hands, his feet, his face, even his eyes could lose those tiny silvery cracks and get outside the mirror and could become what he was when he first walked in there – the thing that reflected instead of the reflected thing.

  And he saw the tear then begin a slow slide down the glass and saw something reflected in it, other than himself.

  It was a girl.

  She had come through the entrance and her multiple reflections followed her as she walked. She was a carnival girl, he knew that without knowing how. Something to do with her clothes: the smock she wore, the spangled tights beneath the smock, the shoes like ballet pumps, the braid that held back her brown hair, which was tied into a ponytail behind the crown of her head.

  She walked through the mirror-maze without a glance at him and he grew really terrified now.

  If there was anything worse than being nothing but a reflection, he realised, it would be a reflection that couldn’t be seen. By others, by anyone, in particular by this carnival girl who had a quality to her that he desperately needed to be seen by. He waved his arms as she passed right by him, but she didn’t look sideways or stop. She had a large bunch of keys in her hand and vanished then, through the other end of the mirror-maze. He heard the sound of a shutter being pulled down and saw some of the reflected carnival lights vanish as the sound of the shutter hitting the floor echoed around him. She walked back in then and pulled a switch and the lights went off and the maze was plunged into darkness. The darkness was absolute and the boy wondered for a moment had she vanished with the light. But he could hear breathing then, and could feel a face close to his, and when his eyes accustomed themselves to the darkness they began to distinguish something – a soft, warm oval with dangling hair framing each side of it.

  And he realised she was looking at him.

  ‘Goodness,’ she said.

  It was an old-fashioned word for so young a person. She was about his age, he surmised, or maybe just a little bit older.

  ‘Help,’ he said, ‘I’m stuck.’

  ‘Kcuts mi pleh,’ she said and he wondered what language she was speaking, until he realised she was repeating what he said, backwards. But he felt a strange relief, knowing that she could hear him, at least.

  ‘In the mirror,’ he said.

  ‘Rorrim,’ she said.

  She vanished from his sight then and he could hear her footsteps traversing the glass floor and he heard a switch being pulled and the lights came on again.

  He saw her reflections moving back towards him before he saw her herself, her pert smiling face and her brown hair with the ponytail and the smock thing she was wearing.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Andy,’ the boy said. But his name didn’t come out as Andy. Because he was in a mirror now. It came out as Ydna, which he realised, with a growing sense of unease, was Andy, only backwards.

  ‘Ydna,’ the girl said. ‘That’s an odd name.’

  And the boy tried again. He spoke carefully this time, enunciated what he knew were the vowels and syllables.

  ‘Nyad.’

  ‘That’s even less of a name. That’s a girl thing, a kind of nymph.’

  And it was, the boy realised. He remembered illustrations in his Greek and Roman mythology books, of the water creatures who didn’t look too unlike the girl herself. And the brown eyes that faced him were reflected endlessly in the multiple mirrors, an infinity of nymphs or naiads. So he took a breath and bravely tried again. But he could feel the letters already rearranging themselves, between his intention and his voice, as if they had a will of their own. Or as if he had suddenly been afflicted with some form of dyslexia.

  ‘Dany.’

  ‘Dany. At least that sounds like a name. Nice to meet you, Dany.’

  And it was useless for him to try again, to rearrange the letters back to the name his mother had given him. He would be Dany, for a while at least, if it helped the strange rearrangement of things that seemed to be happening.

  ‘I can get you out of there,’ she said, ‘but you have to realise that once I do, it will be nose to the grindstone, all the way.’

  And the boy repeated what she said, knowing it came out backwards, but he was beyond caring. Nose to the grindstone. He had heard of the phrase, but never bothered to think about it before.

  ‘Shoulder to the wheel,’ she said. ‘The carnies need all of the help they can get. And you do look like a capable lad.’

  ‘Dalelbapaca?’

  She had that old-fashioned way of phrasing things again. And he felt vaguely stupid, repeating what she had said to him. Backwards. Like an echo. It sounded like some kind of spell, from a magician’s handbook. But he was only a reflection after all, and maybe it was silly to want things to make proper sense.

  ‘We always need a pair of strong hands,’ she said.

  And she reached her hands out towards the glass. To his utter amazement and relief, her hands moved through the glass as if it was rippling water and he saw her hands, with the tiny mirrored cracks all over them, reaching for his. He grasped those hands and felt a living surge go through him, like a wave of electricity.

  ‘You’re coming in,’ she said.

  It was a statement, not a question. And again it had that old-fashioned thing about it.

  ‘Ningimoc reyou,’ he echoed. And it wasn’t even backwards now, it was jumbled up as if the syllables had been tossed into some kind of a blender. A sound blender.

  ‘From outside?’

  This one was a question. Or it sounded like a question, to him.

  ‘Suditoe?’ he echoed again. Or kind of echoed, since the blender was doing its thing.

  ‘Don’t want to get caught there again.’

  ‘On.’ That was easy. Even she seemed to get it. No.

  ‘You have to say yes, now.’

  He tried to say yes but it came out garbled.

  ‘Or nod your head.’

  So he nodded, furiously. Yes yes yes.

  And her small, strong hands pulled.

  4

  Her hands were small and strong and indescribably ancient. They had criss-crossing lines, not so much lines as indentations that had once been circles and were trying, somehow, to be circles again. Dany spent days, in later years, thinking about those hands. How a series of concentric waves went through him when they first touched his. How before they pulled him he was one thing and afterwards, quite another. But that thinking would take place in a much different time when all of these events have become part of memory or myth or the space that is occupied between them, where one gets lost in the other. Because this is a story of losing and finding, amongst other things. How one child gets lost, and quite another one finds himself; how memory gets lost, how a whole race managed to lose itself, then found itself again in the great dreamy corridors of the mythical lost and found.

  Anyway, her hands. They were a young girl’s hands, his age, but stronger than any young girl he had ever met. Their strength seemed to come from old practices, like kneading dough and pulling the udders of cows and goats, or rummaging in the earth for hidden tubers, tearing away the roots of certain trees. There was something either very old, that should have died a long time ago, or something very new, that had not yet been born, about those hands. The nails were scuffed and bitten and looked like they had never known nail varnish. There was a decidedly unwashed quality to them and the lines on the palms as she reached through the glass were like maps to an unknown ocean. This he could see, despite the distortion of the glass, and the tiny mirrored crack
s all over. And when he touched her hands, he felt the full force of their strength. He would find out later that it came from quite another dimension, and its immediate heft came from grasping the down-hanging circus rope and the wood of the trapeze bar. Because she was an aerial artiste, among other things.

  Anyway, he was pulled by those hands and came in from the outside, or outside from the in, back through the glass and found himself standing in the mirror-maze with the girl who had just pulled him. The shutters were down and the lights were still on and the multiple reflections shimmered around them both, but to his immense relief he was the reflected one now, as was she.

  ‘What on earth—’ he began to say, and then stopped himself. What he would have said normally was ‘what the hell’ or something like that but the ‘what on earth’ just came out of him.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘It must be strange for you.’

  ‘I was stuck in a mirror.’

  ‘Not stuck. You were confined. It’s a different thing.’

  ‘How did I get—’ and he tried the word she had used, ‘confined?’

  ‘The other one walked off, am I right or am I wrong?’

  ‘You’re right.’

  ‘Well, there must be a reason. We’ll find out about it later.’

  ‘Can I go home now?’

  ‘Oh,’ she murmured and he saw a half-smile on her face. ‘We’ll have to see about that.’

  ‘I kind of have to.’

  ‘Why?’

  The question came out of her beautiful, rich mouth. And he couldn’t immediately think of an answer.

  ‘My mum and my dad. They’ll be missing me—’

  ‘Are you sure about that?’

  And when he thought about it, he wasn’t sure. The one that wasn’t him had walked towards his mother, embraced her as if he was him, and could still remember the relief on her face.

  ‘Anyway,’ she said, and took his hand again in hers, ‘there’ll be time enough to think about all that. All the time in the world.’

  The feel of her hand again in his seemed to still all of his questions. For the moment, at least. It was a different clasp this time, a sideways one, as if she didn’t need to pull him anywhere now, through any glass or reflections, as if all she needed to do was keep him calm, by her side.

  And an immediate calm did come over him. It was like falling into a warm bath that he never knew he needed, pulling a familiar blanket round himself that he never knew he had missed. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked her. It seemed odd, asking ordinary questions like that in these extraordinary circumstances, but he needed to fill the silence. And the silence in there was huge and immeasurable; it seemed to reach, like the multiple reflections, into some kind of infinity.

  She told him her name was Mona. He had never met anyone called Mona before – the only Mona he knew was the one in the painting, Mona Lisa – and when she repeated the name she had somehow pulled from him, he felt the need to correct her.

  ‘Dany,’ she said. ‘And you’re called Dany.’

  ‘Not Dany,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, that came out wrong when I said it. And I was inside the mirror. My name is Andy.’

  ‘You said Dany,’ she replied, and gave his hand a comforting squeeze, ‘so Dany it is.’

  ‘Is there a rule here?’

  ‘There are many rules here.’

  ‘So you’re called the first name that comes out of your mouth?’

  ‘Don’t worry about rules, for the moment. You said Dany, so that’s who you are. Dany Dan Dandy.’

  ‘And what happened to Andy?’

  ‘Andy is,’ she whispered, ‘where Andy is. But Dany is here now, with his new friend Mona. And we have to hurry.’

  ‘What’s the hurry?’

  ‘The hurry is,’ she whispered again, ‘that they’re packing up.’

  5

  He could hear a jumble of sounds from outside as she led him back through the maze of infinite reflections. A clatter, a wallop, a litany of instruction: ‘grab a hold would you’, ‘throw her down here’. And outside of Burleigh’s Amazing Hall of Mirrors, sure enough, he saw that they were packing the whole carnival for the business of moving on.

  And it was a very strange business.

  Small, squat men walked between the carnival fixtures, wrapping the coils of light bulbs around their arms, their necks, their chests until they looked like bulbmen. Lithe, agile boys not many years older than himself crawled up the skeletons of the rides and unpicked them, girder by girder, tossing them like matchsticks down to a strongman below. They were tall and impossibly thin, these boys, and could twist themselves into all sorts of improbable shapes and squeeze their limbs into all sorts of inaccessible places. They wore dungarees, like the short and squat ones, but where the dungarees of the short squat ones bubbled round their ankles as if they were for a much bigger human, the dungarees of the tall thin ones barely reached below their knees, as if they were for a much smaller boy. The bits of the dungarees that went over the shoulder, which Andy searched for a name for and couldn’t find – he thought of the word ‘braces’ but it didn’t seem quite right – always seemed to pull much too tight, so the tall ones walked stooped, while the small ones walked with exaggerated steps that dragged, as they were afraid to trip up over the useless yards of denim around their ankles. Someone should get them to switch dungarees, so at least they had a chance of fitting, Dany remembered thinking, at the same time as he thought he had to at least pretend to be Dany now. But things in this carnival, like his name, didn’t make absolute sense, as he would gradually discover. A bunch of clowns pulled up the guy-ropes of the circus tent and it billowed downwards, like a deflating mushroom, leaving the centre pole like a skewer in the earth, with a half-moon above it. And by the light of this half-moon a trapeze artist twirled like a spinning top, wrapping the various ropes around the pole before it was gently lowered to the ground on to the giant soft petticoat of the canvas tent.

  And Andy, or Dany, as his new friend introduced him, turned out indeed to be a capable pair of hands. He dragged metal hawsers across the crushed grass, packed dodgem cars into crates that seemed impossibly small to hold them; he rolled the circus tent with numerous other and stronger hands into a long white tube that slid magically into a longer canvas bag. In fact everything, he found, every facet of the seemingly endless carnival, fitted into something smaller than itself, as if its instinct was to shrink and almost vanish.

  And vanish it gradually did, in to a series of crates that were roped on to a line of waiting vehicles, old tractor trailers with exhaust pipes that pointed upwards and billowed dark smoke into the moonlit night.

  The last thing to be packed was the Hall of Mirrors. The Burleigh sign first, into a deep wooden crate that was filled with wood shavings, then on top of that the fat and thin mirrors, then the multiple panels of the mirror-maze, more than a thousand of them, it seemed to him, into a separate wooden container that was stamped, in industrial lettering, with the legend ‘Mirror-Maze, Handle With Care’. He felt sad for a moment, as all of the reflections vanished into the container of sawdust, for those mirrors that had nothing to reflect, but then he felt relieved that he himself wasn’t being packed in with them. He was no longer a reflection, he was a carnie now, and he felt, irrationally, that he had been a carnie all of his life, that the life of Andy, with his mother and father and the thing that had started with his father sleeping downstairs and his mother weeping as she chopped the vegetables and blamed it on the onions, was part of another, imagined life that he was glad to escape from. He felt giddily released from all of those only-child duties and hoped the one who had walked home with them would do a better job than he did at being the perfect son.

  And the moon was sitting in the sky over the flattened glass and the pale disc of the sun was shining, threatening to obliterate it, when Mona thanked him for his services and his capable hands and lifted the canvas flap of a lorry and told him to creep inside and get his fill of sleep.


  He climbed up gratefully, for he was as tired as he had ever been, and curled himself up on a bed of straw that smelt of some kind of animal, not unpleasantly at all, and she let the flap fall and as the carnival convoy began to move he allowed the rocking of the lorry to lull him into a deep, deep sleep.

  6

  Andy, which seems the best name for him now, since having appropriated the shape, the sound, the smell of the reflected one he would appropriate the name too, travelled back mostly in silence with his new-found parents. The windows of the Cortina kept misting up, since the defogger wasn’t working so the outside world became a kind of blur except for the small wedge of clarity that his father kept wiping clean on the front windscreen.

  ‘Too late now,’ his father muttered.

  ‘I suppose,’ his mother replied.

  ‘What do you think?’ his father asked.

  ‘What do I think of what?’ asked Andy, with an odd kind of directness.

  ‘The Roebuck Centre. The film. Too late for all of it.’

  ‘I suppose.’ Andy echoed his mother’s tone.

  ‘But the carnival was better than any old cinema.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘So home again home again jiggety jig.’

  ‘Why jiggety jig?’

  ‘Oh, you know. The market. To buy a fat pig.’

  The old Andy would have smiled at the recognition of a childhood rhyme. But the new Andy just blinked as if to say, silently, whatever. With that neutral, clear-water kind of feeling. He was definitely growing up, his father thought. Get ready for it. The silences. The locked bedroom door. The teenage face lit by the iPhone screen, the thumbs clicking.

  He glanced at Andy’s mother. She was lost in thought, staring out at the streetlights and the strange halations they made in the fogged-up windscreen. Well, he thought. At least she isn’t— And he didn’t want to finish that thought, about all the things she wasn’t.