Carnivalesque Read online

  She had been observing him for some time. Watching her Dany, and she felt the name bubble inside of her as if he was truly hers, her chosen one, already roustabouting with the roustabouts in the chaotic business of assemblage. He was proving himself indeed a capable lad, a useful pair of hands. Her chosen one, she thought again. And the term, the name, seemed both wrong and right. She had chosen nothing; she had found his reflection and pulled him into the real world, the carnie world, the only world she had ever known. And yet when she watched him make his way among the stunted roustabouts, hardly bigger than them himself, as yet unsure in his new environment but adorable, simply adorable, in his oddness, his unfamiliar gait, he could only be her chosen one. If she had ever been given a choice, she would have chosen him. And any panic he felt – and there would be panic, she was sure of that, no one leaves a mother of fourteen years without some sense of displacement – she would make it her job to soothe it, to quell it, to put it to rest. She would place a comforting hand on his, catch his turbulent gaze and reassure it with those azure eyes of her own. If she had ever wanted a child – and that was a want she never allowed herself to entertain; she knew how impossible it was – it would have been that one, there, unpacking the same mirror-maze that had brought him here, as if he knew the drill and had always known it, his thin, gazelle-like form working hard to keep up with the dungareed roustabouts, and she resolved then and there never to let him wear dungarees; he was made for better things. So she came behind him and felt his body feel her approach, his shoulders tensing and his eyes in a panic meeting hers, and she said the first thing that came into her head: ‘How’s she cutting?’

  Easy, her eyes said, easy, it’s only me, you’re at home now. And she saw the shoulders relax, saw the tiny shiver of acceptance come into those flecked brown eyes, or were they green? Brown, she saw now, brown and the flecks were green.

  Maybe it was luck, in the end. Luck that brought him here to be her chosen one. Burleigh’s expulsion had been a long, loud and painful affair, his cries of anguish had seemed to echo round the empty carnival long after he was gone: why me, why me. He knew of course why him, the Rotterdam gold was only part of it. His absurd claim, to provide a solution to the changeling problem. You broke more than the rules, old Jude had told him and would have shattered his Hall of Mirrors into a million tiny pieces had she not been reminded that it would bring a million years’ bad luck. So they cast him out, like old Adam or the one in the vineyard whose name always escaped her. And Burleigh’s Amazing Hall of Mirrors had lain fallow for years, until yesterday’s miraculous event. As you sow, so must you reap. Or something like that. What was this with the biblical stuff? And why was she bothered about Burleigh? Let him wander in the cold world outside, with the moan of the winds of sin and death and the clouds of nonbelonging with no hope of return to the Land of Spices, and let me deal with my chosen one.

  So she smiled, with all of the winsomeness that only she could put into a smile, and she was happy to see him smile back. She took his hand and felt the tingle ripple through it, felt the adolescent hairs stand to attention, as if at her command.

  ‘You did well with the rousties.’

  ‘Did I, indeed?’

  Indeed. The old-fashioned tenor to the word. The archaism, the use of a question to answer. And she felt a surge of irrational hope, was it, or promise, that maybe he could be one of them after all. But then she banished the thought, as they had banished old Burleigh. Better not, as the young ones tell it, go there.

  ‘And rousties can be hard to keep up with.’

  ‘That’s what you call them? Rousties?’

  ‘Roustabouts. And a good roustie can balance a circus pole on his chin.’

  ‘His chin?’

  ‘No women allowed. But you, young Dany, were made for greater things.’

  ‘I was?’

  ‘No dungarees for you.’

  ‘No?’

  She caught the sound of disappointment in his voice. Of course, she thought, the sweat, the muscle, the boy-mannishness of roustabouts. ‘What is for me then?’

  ‘Sawdust and tinsel and a touch of greasepaint.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  And he didn’t. It was all a mystery to him. This small, pert girl – almost a woman, really – with her perfect posture, toes constantly stretching from the ground as if she wished to be airborne. She was wearing a dirty gabardine coat that hid something that glittered. Behind her a mélange of carnival activity – huge metal pegs being driven into the unwilling earth by hammer-wielding, muscled arms.

  ‘Come with me.’

  She tightened her hand on his. Pulled him gently away, from this masculine world. She was determined. No dungarees for Dany. She traced a route through the alleyways of sideshows as if she had known it all her life. As, of course, she had. She knew every atom of this carnival, no matter how it rearranged itself, and she greeted the stallers as she went.

  ‘Good morning, Zaroaster’.

  Zaroaster gasolened a bubblegum of flame back at her.

  ‘Virginie, what a divine setting.’

  ‘Alaister, my dear, no tricks, it’s far too early.’

  ‘Monniker, how goes it?’

  It was going well, it seemed, as Monniker was already squeezing his agile frame through a tangle of ventilation tubing.

  ‘Jude, my love—’

  She passed the aged lion, being led by what looked like a dog lead, towards an assortment of cubes and hoops laid out in one of the few empty spaces left.

  ‘—oh my goodness, they already know each other—’

  And they did. The lion nuzzled his tawny forehead against Dany’s hip, while Jude, his ageing mistress, pulled him gently away.

  ‘Dorothea, I don’t want to know.’

  But Dany did. He saw Dorothea in the triangular gloom of her stall, a gleaming ball in her hand. He very much wanted to know what the future held. But they were already moving on.

  Past Bulgar, flexing his muscles in a leopardine one-piece.

  ‘Oh all right, Bulgar, we will oil you if we must . . .’

  Oil. From a small, twisted jar, he noticed. Tangled, as if wound into many circles by a four-dimensional hand. He had never seen a jar like it. And the oil that Mona shook from it had a smell like camphor, a sweet stinging sensation that flared the nostrils and teared the eyes. Like the onions that made someone cry. Someone? And he was spreading this oil over the mounds of muscle that were Bulgar’s back when he remembered who. His mother. The tears streamed freely then, and mingled, when all of a sudden Mona dropped the jar in the stunted grass by the odd-shaped assortment of weights and drew him on.

  ‘The oil,’ she said, ‘not sun cream, can’t buy it, grade it, trade it, but the small tincture of spice can make the eyes stream.’

  ‘Spice?’ he asked, and she looked at him as if she wished she could swallow the word.

  ‘You’re crying,’ she said.

  ‘I was thinking of my—’

  But before the word ‘mother’ emerged, she clutched his hand once more, drew him, step by step, over the enormous guy-ropes that led like parallel strings on a concert harp to a canvas entrance beyond. Some words were forbidden here, it seemed. Mother and spice amongst them. And he was remembering a nursery rhyme, when the curl of her hand diverted him once more. Mother and spice and all things nice. No, it wasn’t mother, he fretted: sugar – sugar and spice – when her fingers rubbed off his palm and he felt that tingle again and was confronted with yet another reality.

  This carnival kept doing that. First one thing, then another.

  And this reality was – a triangle of dark exposed by two flaps of pinned-back canvas. Head-height. A sound, from inside, of a lonely trumpet. He had never heard anything sadder than that trumpet. It made him think of onions again, and flowing tears and that word he was struggling to pull back to his brain, when he felt a hot breath close to his ear and another word took over.

  ‘Tango.’

  ‘Tango?
’ he repeated. It seemed safest, again, to repeat things. There were so many things he didn’t know.

  ‘I swing,’ she said, ‘to a tango. Come inside. Have a look.’

  And she led him in, into that dark triangle, where his eyes gradually accustomed themselves to the gloomiest of glooms. The trumpet still played, and as the darkness slowly became visible, he distinguished a small man, far far off, in a spotted white suit, with a conical hat on his head. Something gold to his lips, which must have been a trumpet. Because the sound of it soared now, all around him, and he could detect just the hint of a dance in the air. As she had whispered, a tango.

  ‘A dance,’ she said, ‘is best with a touch of swing to it, because that’s what I do, after all. Dance.’

  He could distinguish the shape now, the huge conical funnel, leading to an apex of thin sunlight at the top. So there was light in here after all, he thought. Quite a lot of it. Early-morning light, coming through the various blighted holes, in trembling, hesitant fingers. He could see hanging wires, trapeze bars in the upper gloom, a small platform, circling the central pole.

  ‘You be my hauler,’ she said and withdrew her curled fingers from his. ‘Hauler today, maybe catcher tomorrow.’

  He said nothing. He was becoming adept in these transitions. Pretend to understand, he was thinking, and understanding just might come to you.

  And she raised her two hands to her shoulders and, with two deft flicks, threw the canvas-coloured garment to what he now realised was a sawdust floor. He watched it fall, some kind of gabardine, and it seemed to descend in slow motion, to raise a whorl of misted dust from the curls of old woodchip. It fell beside her two dark pumps, which he saw now were sparkling with tiny specks of diamanté or glass. Spangled slippers, he would have called them. His eyes followed her ankles, her thin, muscular calves, clad in fishnet tights, up to the body-hugging tutu with its golden bustier, stays and angled shoulder pads. Circus garb.

  Of course, he realised. There had always been something airborne about her.

  She pressed upwards on her toes again, as if stretching towards the narrow beam of sunlight at the apex. Then she walked on those spangled slippers across the sawdust floor to where two ends of rope dangled down from some beam in the heavens. They swung gently, neither touching the other.

  She wrapped an arm around one, deftly, making a snake of it, and looked back at him.

  ‘The hauler pulls,’ she said. ‘Pulls the artiste.’

  ‘You’re the artiste.’

  She nodded. She had a small dimple, he realised for the first time, below her smiling lip.

  ‘Be my hauler.’

  ‘I could never hold your weight,’ he said.

  ‘Aha,’ she said and she smiled and her green gaze swooped to meet his. ‘You’ve a lot to learn.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About carnies. About Mona. About tangos.’

  And she wrapped the rope around her body in one feline move, crooking her slim knee above it, snaking it round her waist and upwards towards her breast, her left hand twisting above her like an open-mouthed cobra.

  ‘Now pull,’ she said.

  And the boy obeyed her. He would always obey her, he realised, whenever she wrapped the rope around herself like that. He gripped the other end and pulled.

  She seemed weightless. More than weightless: she seemed to have an inner force that propelled her upwards. She soared with the force of each tug of his, up, up and up into the blaze of that beam of light that spilled down from the centre hole.

  ‘Now loop it.’

  He began to swing the rope, in successive loops that grew ever more large, widened in that element, that term of measurement that he could never remember from school. Although school felt very far away now. And as the trumpet soared, in its tangoing dance, he remembered. Circumference.

  And up above she began to spin.

  And down below, he was reminded of many things.

  Of the silver angel on the Christmas tree that his mother unpacked every December.

  Of a toy windmill, whipped by an invisible wind.

  Of a devil stick he used to play with in the garden of the privet hedges, which he would practise twirling until it became an indeterminate blur.

  He whipped the rope around, saw it widen above him into a similar blur. The shape of Mona, her leg and arm crooked around the rope, seemed to lose itself from any sense of the real world. He was spinning a top, the handle of which was a spinning girl, Mona, and as she spun she became a feather-like thing and he felt, as he spun her, that the twirling rope was some kind of pretence and its real purpose could have been to keep her earthbound.

  He dismissed this thought as soon as it occurred to him. It seemed absurd, and somehow forbidden. And he felt his mother’s absence with a real pain, as if some strange animal was sifting inside him. He missed his mother then so much, he felt the pain so keenly, he had to forget her. And the only way to forget her was to look upwards once more at the blur of those twirling legs.

  The tune ended and he saw the small spotted figure across the sawdust circle remove the trumpet from his lips. He pushed the conical hat back on his head, and shook the spittle from the golden bowl. Dany stopped his twirling but the rope didn’t. Its momentum kept her going, far above him, and its circumference only gradually lost its bloom.

  11

  His mother, meanwhile, missed him. But it was a peculiar kind of missing, because Andy was there in front of her, sitting on the wooden chair that was half sofa, the light of the television whitening his face, with a fly swatter in his left hand. Where the fly swatter had come from, she had no idea. Probably the garage, she imagined, where her husband’s condiment samples and the empty jamjars he used to experiment with mixing tended to attract flies. And now that she thought of it, too many things in there were coated in an invisible, sticky essence, even Jim’s carpentry table, which was one of the reasons she rarely ventured inside. But she resolved to do so now, and give the place a thorough cleaning. She had been neglecting things of late, and obviously had taken her eye off her growing boy, given the evidence of this apparent stranger in front of her. They don’t develop in an ascending curve, she remembered the teacher saying, they tend to make quantum leaps, from one state to the next. But what was a quantum leap? she wondered. She had been bored by physics and tended to think of scientific parallels with life itself as so much mumbo-jumbo. She had not done badly, she hoped, given the stresses of conception. And she shivered a little at this memory, and looked once more at the fly swatter, banging against the upturned sole of his shoe with an annoying persistence and a persistent regularity. It was like a metronome, set to a fast rhythm, too fast for whatever tune should have accompanied it. Her boy seemed to have vanished, and yet there he was. And she thought some more about quantum leaps then, something to do with particles that didn’t behave the way they should have, but jumped from one level to the next. Like the stairs that led to the dormer bedroom. Was the movement always upwards? she wondered. Could he take a quantum leap back, to the state she so loved?

  Because she had always relished these moments, just with the two of them, kneading dough or washing dishes, when whatever spell the television had cast was broken and her son would turn and join her at the sink and take the sudsy dishes in his hands, washing them clean with the damp towel, or cutting the pastry into starfish that would later become baked biscuit, both of them covered in flour from fingertip to elbow. She would never have to vocalise it, the invitation to join her and help, at the dough-covered table or the sink; she would do her thing patiently, knowing the rhythm of her work would gradually draw him in, make him turn and utter the magic phrase: ‘Hey Mum, let me help you with that.’

  She switched her attention from the fly swatter to a panel show with those witty comedians, which only tired her brain, but he would watch, even while thumbing his phone or his game console. ‘Mongolia,’ the dickie-bowed host was saying, ‘is famed for many things, but rarely for its popular
singers. And can anyone give me the Mongolian name of the following member of the boyband—’

  She moved past him, through to the kitchen, expecting a word, at least. But none came. A glance was all she got, and a brief grimace which could have been a smile.

  And she knew then she wouldn’t hear that phrase, ‘Hey Mum’, maybe not that evening, or the next. Mother was what he had called her, coming home from the carnival. It seemed a word from a different boy, in quite a different home. In fact she knew something worse. She knew she didn’t want to hear that word, mother, and again that foreboding licked at the edges of her consciousness, where understanding lay over the illogic of dreams. Night would fall, sooner or later, and the shadows would be all the darker for it. And the only respite would be the return of her husband, the rattle of his briefcase off the front door, the metallic series of clicks he made as he tried to extract his front-door key.

  There was a sound at the door now, and she saw the boy’s head turn. Not the sound of a key, or a briefcase, but the rat-tat-tat of the doorknocker and the drumming of fingers on the door that only a boy’s hands could make. And she had to remind herself that Andy had friends. Friends that she could see through the hallway, their faces pushed against the bubbled glass. She recognised the tousled head of Darragh, the short spiked hair of the one they called, for some reason, Drum. She walked down the hallway, opened the door and saw four of them there. ‘Is Andy in, Mrs Rackard?’

  ‘Yes, he’s watching television.’

  ‘Get him to come out, Mrs Rackard, he’d kill us if he missed this.’

  ‘Missed what?’

  ‘The rats. They’re pulling down the trees, below the football pitch.’

  ‘Rats?’

  ‘Rats everywhere, coming out of the roots.’

  And he was behind her now. She felt this, without turning. She saw their eyes register him.

  ‘Come on, Andy. They’ll be all done if you don’t hurry.’

  He walked past her to join them. She observed the slaps, the high-fives, the knuckles meeting knuckles.