Carnivalesque Page 4

  She washed her feet in the sandy shallows of the river. She walked back, then, barely making the next train. She managed her appointment in the clinic and slept, after the treatment. She dreamed of mossy arms embracing her, the bark caressing her face while leaves above her shifted, like faery fingers. And two weeks later, the pregnancy stick turned pink.

  And maybe that was what the darkness was about, she thought, as she retrieved the half-burnt bread from the yellow toaster, stuck in two more pieces and slathered the burnt ones with butter. She could never quite free the memory of her pregnancy from a niggling, subterranean feeling of guilt. The salesman, with his mirrored scarves and his absurd mirrored ball. She had done something, and wasn’t quite sure what it was. She had paid him, for services rendered, for a prediction that she knew he had made from the mantelpiece brochure. But still, she had paid him, as if his nonsensical patter had some hidden value, unexpressed. That afternoon nap, in the train that led to her childhood station. She had departed from the normal progression of things in some shocking, unwarranted way. She had never told Jim, with his naive, bland hopes for a family, about that lost afternoon in the Taw Wood. And when her child was eventually born and the quite wondrous Andy arrived, she always felt undeserving of him, as if he was an unwrapped parcel, an unwarranted gift that would someday be snatched away from her.

  He had grown, though, quite happily, and not at all unlike normal boys. Grimly attached to her, and vaguely tolerant of his father, with his odd obsession with the different varieties of marmalade.

  ‘What will it be this morning, son? Thick-cut tawny? Or the lemon-zested thin Seville orange slice?’

  He could be forgiven this obsession, since he worked as a sales rep for Intercontinental Preserves, travelled widely and often, plugging their wares. His absences weren’t unwelcome to her. They would make quite a comfortable, shadow-wrapped pair while he was away. Andy would help her cut the privet hedges back, which always seemed about to overwhelm the gardens of their little bungalow. He would abandon his group of rough neighbourhood friends and spend every moment with her. What kind of boy is it, she sometimes wondered, that would walk the streets clutching his mother’s hand, clinging to her bathing things while she swam in the river, nurturing every possible moment they had alone together? And that closeness would retreat then, back into invisibility, when his father returned.

  What kind of boy, she wondered again, cutting the slices of Edam neatly on to each buttered piece of toast and placing the finished sandwich under the grill.

  He was standing in the darkened hallway, not quite looking at her every time she looked at him. But every time her gaze left him, she felt his gaze return. He had always welcomed her matching glance before. Whenever their eyes had met, while her husband dozed by the fireplace or nattered on about marmalade sales, it was as if on an agreed signal; they had looked at each other just so, just then, from an instinct that only they understood, that only they shared.

  Whatever that closeness was, it had vanished now. And something about his stillness told her it had vanished for ever. There was just dark and light in that hallway, as if all of the shadows had defined themselves clearly, all too clearly.

  Had something happened, during those lost hours in the mirror-maze, something that could never be spoken of? She thought of carnivals and predators, of the upturned face of the smiling clown, how the smile was painted over his lips and could well have concealed the grimace of . . . the kind of man that lurked around fairgrounds, she supposed, around children’s playgrounds. And she thought of other things that couldn’t be spoken of: her lost hour in the Taw Wood, for instance; was it similar to her son’s lost hour in someone’s amazing Hall of Mirrors? What was the name on the neon sign? Burleigh, she remembered. She imagined a Hall of Mirrors then, diminishing her child into infinity. There was a question she should ask, she felt, but she couldn’t find the words. And then again, she thought, and felt the tears welling in her eyes once more, every boy grows up. And she couldn’t stop the tears flowing and couldn’t blame the onions.

  8

  It was dark night by then, all across the land, with one of those gentle summer mists, created by that small difference between the heat of the day and the chill of the evening. The convoy of carnival flatbeds and trucks appeared out of this mist and vanished back into it, the headlamps scouring the suburban wastelands. Like lighthouse beams, distress flares, gigantic glow-worms.

  Mona had repaired to her hammock that swung gently with the convoy’s movement and every now and then bumped into the adjacent hammock, Paganina’s.

  ‘You want me to braid your hair?’ Paganina asked, drowsily.

  ‘I don’t mind.’

  So Paganina reached her feet across the hammock spaces and began untangling Mona’s ponytail. She did it deftly, big toe, little toe, all of the tiny digits working like fingers. With her free remaining foot she massaged Mona’s temples. They loved each other dearly and it was a love that expressed itself in toe braiding and foot-to-head massages.

  ‘I’ve found a boy,’ Mona murmured.

  ‘Yes, I noticed. In fact, we all of us noticed.’

  ‘In the mirror-maze.’

  ‘Aha. So it happens still.’

  ‘This one did.’

  ‘That mirror-maze,’ Paganina mused. ‘We should have let it go with that Burleigh.’

  ‘But we didn’t. And I can’t say I’m sorry.’

  ‘It could be called snatching.’

  ‘But it was no snatch. All that’s long gone.’

  ‘But at times, the urge is overwhelming.’

  ‘He’s so sweet. Strong and sweet. He was a reflection, you understand. Until I pulled him out.’

  ‘And the real one?’

  ‘Well that’s the question, isn’t it? The question Burleigh never answered. Which is the real one?’

  ‘All right. The other one, then. Where did it go?’

  ‘Where did it go? Where other ones go. Back with his parents, I suppose.’

  ‘Poor thing.’

  ‘Poor thing? I’m not sure. Would it be so bad? The same bed to sleep in every night. All those comforting childhood things.’

  ‘So what’s he like?’

  ‘My boy?’

  ‘Already yours, is he?’

  ‘Finders keepers. And I’m not letting him go.’

  ‘How did you find him?’

  ‘The strangest thing. I was pulling down the shutters and I had the uncanny feeling of being looked at. I turned off the lights and there he was, behind the glass.’

  ‘So you—’

  ‘Yes, I helped him out. I could only imagine the feeling. Trapped behind that glass.’

  ‘Terrifying.’

  ‘Well, blame that old Burleigh.’

  ‘Must we blame everything on Burleigh?’

  ‘He made it. He built it. He found that old Rotterdam gold.’

  ‘He had a plan.’

  ‘Probably still has. So if he ever turns up, keep mum. About Dany.’

  ‘Dany?’

  ‘Andy, Ynad, Nyad. I took the letters, turned them into Dany.’

  ‘Burleigh won’t turn up. And if he does, I’ll skewer him.’

  ‘Skewer him? How?’

  ‘With an arrow.’

  ‘Like in the old days. But they’re long gone now.’

  And Paganina’s toes commenced a head massage and a delicious languor spread through Mona, from the crest of her ponytailed crown.

  Paganina’s feet had achieved this level of dexterity more years ago now than she could count. It had begun with archery. The kinds of truculent bows that required a Mongolian giant to bend yielded, quite easily, like a sapling just threaded by a teenage boy, to those pneumatic digits, the balls and arches of which could curl and twist like a newborn baby’s palm. She would lie backwards, the bow clutched by her amazing feet, the arrow steadied by her teeth, the string pulled back by one or both hands, and send the missile flying to skewer one or many of whatever adversari
es faced them on the faraway steppes. But those days were long gone. The kinds of wars that demanded strength, sinew and such uncanny dexterity had been replaced by mechanised affairs of industrial carnage. She had realised this one afternoon, on a Greek isthmus churned into mud by the toy-like silhouettes of grey battleships beyond the reach of arrows, on a horizon marred by small puffs of smoke, the crushing booms of which reached her many seconds later, along with the whistle of the huge airborne projectile. She would duck, anticipating the explosion and the cone of mud thrown heavenwards, and one hot, smoke-filled deafening afternoon, she ducked and fell into a blasted trench. There was a dead Turkish officer with a violin in his cold hands and she busied herself with this instrument while the bombardment continued above her, unabated. She plucked out Persian tunes she had learned from her mother, who herself had lived more years than she could remember. And when night came down and the bombardment faded, the ghost-like, shellshocked figures of Turkish, Armenian, Georgian and Scythian troops rose from their fox-holes, followed the hesitant scratching of the violin and were amazed to see the mud-smudged beauty lying back in the trench, bowing the violin, which was tucked into her midriff, with her feet. The scratched sounds emerging could barely be called a tune, but maybe it was this very lack of recognisable melody that made them imagine they remembered it. And so the slow, mournful chant began, around the blasted fox-holes and the collapsed cemeteries of trenches, of the anthem that had brought them here:

  Inside Cannakale

  In the mirrored bazaar

  Mother, I am going against the enemy

  Aaah, alas, my youth!

  And thus her career as Paganina began. She picked up the melody, embossed upon it, travelled from camp to camp, improved her technique so she could play standing, one foot perched stork-like, the other clutching the bow in its dexterous digits, the instrument itself tucked beneath her chin, while her left hand flew over the fingerboard. Paganini, she was told, was a violinist of such brilliance the devil himself was rumoured to have accompanied him, so she chose the name Paganina. The war ended, she joined a travelling Romanian circus troupe, and when rumours of war circulated once more, two decades later, she retreated to the rocky outpost that had declared itself neutral and found a carnival that needed her talents. She learned jigs and reels, with titles that always bemused her: ‘Banished Misfortune’, ‘The Mason’s Apron’, ‘The Priest in the Barley Field’, ‘The Windy Gap’. And so she travelled now, massaging Mona’s head with those same feet, rocking gently with the trailer’s passage through the mysterious night.

  It was thirty vehicles strong, the carnival convoy, and it obediently did what ordinary vehicles do. It stopped at traffic lights and level crossings, but anyone who had seen it pass would have no memory of it. It was happiest in the shadows, belonged to them and only retreated from them when it had set up its next, public reiteration. And when it stopped, all the vehicles braked as if by common accord, as if a secret signal had been given. But no secret signal had been given, since, as the carnies would have told anyone who asked, they set up where they had to, in whatever abandoned piece of waste ground was available.

  9

  Dany was rocked backwards and forwards by the swaying movement of the lorry that trundled through the misted night. The straw pricked against his cheek, tiny spikes of it crept up his shirtsleeves and even small microbes of it crept into his nostrils. This bed was most unlike his own at home, with the dormer window peering down on the silent garden, through which every now and then he glimpsed a fox, strolling towards the other gardens of the other bungalows, all alike, in the little cul-de-sac that led to nothing in particular. That bed was always cold, no matter how much warmth his mother implanted in the goodnight kiss; the telegraph wires outside his window would moan softly with an unseen wind, etching a tangled scrawl against the night sky, a message in a dead language he could never decipher. So there was much to be said for his new situation. There was definite life here, in the low throb of the distant engines, in the shifting straws underneath him, in the strange, feline odour that seemed to hang in the air around him. If he ever had a grandmother, he imagined she would smell like that. And while he knew he must have had a grandmother – in fact he had seen pictures of her dim and smiling black-and-white face in the family album – he had never known her, and more to the point, never smelt her.

  So he slept, eventually, and happily. And the animal odour that he had noticed seemed to wrap itself around him as he slept, cocooning him in the sweetest of dreams. He dreamt he was walking through a forest with giant slender trunks and a huge panoply of leaves overhead and he was with a grandmother; indeed he was holding her hand and the straw skirt she wore, like those Polynesian islanders, kept rubbing off the back of his hand. Her other hand wrapped around a sleeping cat. She had a kind of necklace of dried flowers and was explaining the varieties of jungle flora to him – and flora meant flowers and plants, he was proud to remember, while fauna meant rocks and shells and other dead things – when they were both rained upon from above. He raised his face to the panoply of leaves above and found it washed in eucalyptus-odoured drops.

  And he awoke then to find a lion pissing on him. There was no cause for alarm, the lion being separated from him by rusting iron bars, and Dany, whose eyes had become accustomed to the gloom, noticed for the first time that the trailer was neatly divided in two. He occupied one straw-filled half, while the lion occupied the other and gazed at him with dim, grandmotherly eyes. But it was no grandmother, it was a lion, no doubt about it, one leg lazily raised to direct a stream of urine on to the bed of straw upon which Dany had been sleeping.

  ‘Come on,’ the boy objected and shifted in the straw, away from one last, contemptuous spurt.

  But the lion didn’t reply and the boy was oddly relieved. So many strange things had happened, a lion that replied would have been much too much. So he rolled himself in the bales of unurinated straw and considered himself lucky. And he laid back his head, to wrap himself in one more precious swathe of sleeping.

  Meanwhile, and it’s a word one should never use, meanwhile, since there is no meanwhile, there is only time, doing its mysterious thing in its infinitude of ways. But, as Dany was sleeping, the other we call Andy now lay in what used to be his bed. The telegraph wires made soft, rhythmic clicks against each other, moved by the wind outside that created an eerie mechanical hum. He seemed to be waiting for something, rather than sleeping; his eyes blinked occasionally, as if to keep time with the scraping music of those wires outside.

  10

  Dany was awoken by a shuddering that felt as if the earth itself was coming apart. His bed of straw bounced underneath him, the cage between himself and the sleeping animal trembled and the air was filled with dust that shimmered in the wheeling rays of the sun that came in thin beams through the holes in the canvas cladding.

  The truck had stopped, quite suddenly, and was now reversing over uneven ground, bouncing over the pavement kerb first of all, then over a field tilled with nothing but old cement blocks, discarded bicycles and other detritus of suburban living. It was heading for a long swathe of hardened grass, called by the locals, for some reason, ‘the Tuileries’, an oasis of flat ground by a disused promenade beyond which was a long rocky beach and the grey swillings of the Irish Sea.

  And it was suddenly all business, inside the lorry’s trailer. The echoing trundle of roustabout feet overhead, the blinding sunlight searing in as the canvas flaps were untied from above. Dany was wide awake in an instant, up on his feet, jumping out on to the Tuileries grass, where the flatbeds were performing all sorts of grinding manoeuvres, like circling wagons in a western, a small roustabout waving his block-like palms, the fingers of which seemed like detachable screws, shouting, ‘Lock her hard!’And soon the greased hydraulic stanchions were raising the trailers.

  It was all activity and roustabouts bellowing, the short squat ones uncoiling huge mounds of light bulbs and wires and the tall thin ones throwing down scaffol
d poles, frames, huge wooden trunks with screws attached, trapeze wires and cables, unrolling of whole acres of dirty white canvas and the huge mechanical arms that carried the chairoplanes angling their way towards the dusty blue sky. He felt some odd responsibility for Burleigh’s Amazing Hall of Mirrors, since, after all, he had come from there. So he did his best to help as it was manhandled out of its protective boxes and slotted into place piece by reflective piece. And he proved himself so busy with this that time performed one of its odd tricks again; the sun was well up in the sky and diminishing its shadows by the time he discovered it was finished, the neon sign above the entrance, useless in the midday glare, reading, for those who squinted their eyes, ‘Burleigh’s Amazing Hall of Mirrors’. And he turned then to see the carnival once more in place, in another piece of waste ground he knew not where, the rollercoaster curving above the horizon line of the sea, the distant cone of the circus tent beyond it, and the ghost train and the shooting range and the other carnie delights he didn’t yet know the names of creating a maze of what were very like little streets, caravans with their flaps open, tents with their flaps closed, advertising strange and clairvoyant revelations for those who had the courage or the coin to venture in to the gloom inside.

  It was a village, he decided, more than a carnival, a miniature town indeed, and he wondered should somebody, maybe even him, give these ersatz streets proper names. Then he remembered that it would someday, maybe someday soon, pack up and move again and what good would street names be for a travelling village that had to periodically reassemble itself? And he was thinking imponderable thoughts like this when Mona came up behind him and asked, ‘How’s she cutting?’