Carnivalesque Read online

  So he clambered down to the roadside below and he knew where he was immediately: not in his street, not in his suburb, but in the suburbs that led to his street, through identical red-brick houses, a public park, a series of football pitches and the last one, across the roadway from the bungalow with the privet hedges.

  He walked. Past the tangled shadows of old beech trees, down a long avenue, across small forests of bamboo and holly, to a bus stop, by a row of small bungalows along a road that descended towards the sea.

  And there it was: his house. There was no moon above it, just the brown clouds of the night, lit by an orange glow from the city beyond. He knew every feature of it, every detail of it, like a toy house that he had built with a carpentry set and inside this toy house was another carpentry set in the tiny garage through the window of which he was gazing now. He could see all of the details inside, the Cortina beside the worktable and he could even imagine the patch of oil below it, where the sump wouldn’t stop leaking, but they were the features of somebody else’s house now, a house he knew intimately without knowing why. And he climbed on the garage roof then, walked over it to the dormer window and looked inside his bedroom and suddenly knew, or remembered, why. Why he knew it so well and why it couldn’t ever be his house again. Because there he was, beneath the canvas-coloured coverlet he had chosen himself, sleeping in his own bed as if the boy outside, fingers clutching the cement windowsill, toes stretched upwards to get a better look, was being dreamed by the boy, fast asleep on the bed inside.

  Did it make sense to him? No. And he knew, somehow, standing on the tar and gravel surface of the garage roof, a surface that he had helped his father clad the roof in, with much bubbling of tar and asphalt and a sulphurous smell that the masks over both of their faces couldn’t quite dispel, that nothing would ever make proper sense again. He was sleeping inside on his wheaten-coloured pillow, and he was standing outside on the garage roof. The wind was by now scudding clouds over the waning moon. One of them was an interloper and he didn’t know which. One of them was unreal, and the other wasn’t. One of them could even have been part of the other’s dream, or nightmare, but if he was being dreamed by the sleeping head inside his bedroom window, why did the goosebumps covering his arms and hands feel real, why did he shiver in the cold wind coming from the neighbour’s yard? And suddenly his home felt most unhomely to him. It was someone else’s home, no longer his. He felt a vast ache inside him for a home of his own, any home, and he jumped, in one supple move, from the garage roof on to the grass below, and began to run, blindly, in the direction of the carnival he had left.

  He ran past endless cement shelters that he seemed to remember, past dockland derricks that reflected in the sea waters below them, over the metal bridge that he had crossed in the train, and he ran then alongside the same tracks, with a power and a force he never knew he had before, as if he was running from something he could never again think of, talk of, or truly imagine. He found himself back at the unkempt fields of the Tuileries before the sun came up and followed the creaking sound of an old rusting metal container door and crept back inside.

  15

  It had been a pleasant enough day, all in all, she thought, lying beside the sleeping mound of her husband. And with any luck, tomorrow might be just as good. But she had woken, suddenly, in that godawful time of night that could have been ten minutes after your head touched the pillow, or ten minutes before dawn. So she lay there, fretting, praying for that blessed wash of oblivion, her only trouble being that she never knew when it would come. The least small sound, the tiniest of distractions, and sleep would be a forlorn hope for her, without the help maybe of a couple of Kalms, or in the worst of circumstances, a Stilnoct. And she could hear something now, behind the soughing rise and fall of her husband’s breath. It was a banging, gentle maybe, but loud enough to keep her awake if she didn’t investigate its source. So she rose, and wrapped her dressing gown round her and edged the door open. The hallway was quiet, as was the kitchen, so it must be from Andy’s bedroom, the one facing the cherry tree on the lawns, with the football pitch across the road from them. God forbid it would keep him, like her, awake.

  So she climbed the stairs softly, opened his bedroom door and could see the curtains blowing from there, and hear the rhythmic banging of the loosened window, like the introductory beats before one of those metal tracks he played so often. She walked quietly through, careful not to wake him, and it was only after her feet had touched the patch the streetlight left on the carpet that she turned, realising there were no sounds from his bed. There were no sounds, because there was no one in his bed. She turned in panic, back to the window, and was about to pull it closed when she saw a figure, through the gently blowing curtains, at the far-off goal of the football pitch, making a stark silhouette against the dawn sky, where the beech trees once had been. So it was almost morning. It shouldn’t have been, but it was. And there was her son Andy, in the hour before dawn. Alone, vanishing from sight now, down the slope towards the waste ground and the sea.

  He had slipped out, of course. Opened the window for some adventure in the dark wood beyond the pitch and the waste ground below it. Through some arrangement with his friends, maybe, or perhaps, God forbid, a girl. All behaviour to be expected; age-appropriate, as the developmental books said.

  But still. And here she was moving back down the stairs, towards the hall. She wouldn’t wake Jim: he had to work in the morning. But still. There were strange men in the park beyond. And a night-time woodland was a place to be feared. She remembered the childhood legends about the Taw Wood and knew none of them would dare to approach it, let alone enter into it at night. So she opened the door and walked in her bare feet across the street, through the line of sad poplar trees that divided the street from the football pitch. A neighbour could see her, maybe even the early-morning driver of the 30 bus, but she didn’t care. If something was wrong, and her common sense told her nothing was, but if something was wrong, she had to know. She could feel the dewy grass beneath her feet now, and was amazed it felt so fresh, so natural and good. And maybe it was a girl he was meeting, a local girl, and she thought of notes exchanged and text messages and she felt wistful, and a little sad, at the thought of both of them lying in the same damp grass. He could catch cold, she thought, as she passed the goalpost and made it to the rougher, uncultivated grass beyond. Where the discarded cider bottles and the Heineken cans resided. And she felt something rustling past her bare feet and knew she should take care, as some of this glass was broken. She looked down and saw brown shapes burrowing through the grass. There was one, followed by another, then another. Rats, she realised, and almost screamed, but however terrified she was, she didn’t want her son to hear it. And she needed to find him now, desperately, because something untoward was happening. Something not to do with calm moonlight, bare feet and dewy grasses. She walked to the edge of the lip of ground, where once she could have reached and touched the upper leaves of the now-vanished trees, and she looked down and saw them everywhere. Rats, scurrying down the broken slope, up from behind the upturned roots of the once-great beeches. Rats, displacing the earth in small flurries, as they squirmed down. Rats, advancing across the caterpillared tracks of the earthmover. They were returning home. And home was the great gaping wound beneath her, with the exposed tunnels the sycamore tree had once lived in. The huge root loomed above that hole, tendrils quivering in the night air. There was a boy sitting with his back to it, his feet idly swinging above the surging rats below. And that boy was her son.

  ‘Andy,’ she called, with a kind of chill, wondering did he need another name now.

  ‘Mother,’ he answered, as if his presence there was the most natural thing in the world.

  ‘What are you doing, out like this?’

  ‘Watching the rats,’ he said.

  ‘Why are you watching the rats, Andy?’

  ‘Why not?’ he answered. ‘They’re coming home.’

  ‘And would you
come home now, Andy?’ She asked this question fearfully, as if his answer might be to slither down amongst them, and lose himself for ever in that squirming mass. But he stood, obediently, and walked up towards her.

  ‘Sure.’

  He reached out for her as he climbed upwards. She gripped his cold hand.

  ‘Everyone needs a home.’

  16

  ‘Does he have it in him?’ Virginie wondered aloud.

  They were sitting in the awning of Virginie’s caravan, their eyes shielded from the late-afternoon sun. He was playing football with the roustabouts now, before the evening rush and influx, and they could see him appear and disappear in the gaps between the tents as the ball took him hither and thither.

  ‘An bhuil an sult aige?’

  Had he got the stuff, the shine for it, the guts for it, the blood for it; there were many ways of asking the same question, all of them old, almost dead now, as it was so long since the question had been asked.

  Mona didn’t reply. It was so long since she’d dreamed of a child, she had almost forgotten what the want was like. And now there he was. A son, on the cusp of his teenage years, the down barely formed on his cheeks, with that lightness in his step, that way of pressing up his arches as he walked, as if he was stretching already to be airborne, to be higher than he was. There was a grace to him, like a gazelle, a sudden darting quality in the eyes and an exquisite sense of sadness, even loss, as if the full melancholy of the world would never be felt as strongly again. There are tears in the heart of things, she had heard once, a saying from long long ago, and Dany reminded her, almost painfully, of that phrase. She could never imagine bearing a child, the way women of the world were so anxious to do; the weight of another in her precious stomach, the blood pulsing, the pushing, then the mewling infant that hungered for the breast. No, her breasts were her own, always had been, always would be. But the arrival of a fully fledged son was a gift too perfect not to grasp, to keep, to have and to hold.

  ‘Will he have the shine for it?’ Mona repeated the question now and wondered. Or would he be thrown into that all-too-human panic by the knowledge, when it came?

  ‘That depends,’ Virginie hazarded.

  ‘On what?’ murmured Mona.

  ‘On what he’s made of.’

  ‘Only that?’

  ‘And on how he hears it. All at once, or in bite-sized stories.’

  ‘Like bible stories?’

  ‘Kind of. If there was a carnie bible that we all could agree on.’

  ‘Good luck.’

  ‘In the beginning, kind of thing.’

  ‘No one agrees on the beginning.’

  ‘But we all agree, there was a beginning.’

  ‘We do that, because we have to.’

  ‘Bad cess to the beginning then. Take it back to the Hunger.’

  ‘That did change things.’

  And yes, they both thought, and for a long summer moment they had the rare carnie pleasure of sharing the same thought, the same long surmise, turning round in their minds like a daydreaming apple, the Hunger did change things. After that, nothing was ever the same.

  They could do that bible trick with it, BC and AC. BH and AH. Before the Hunger and After the Hunger. in the BH times they had been the stuff of legend, myth and fairy tale; they had hardly needed a name, so many names were thrust upon them. Ghoul, pooka, gnome, fairy, golem, banshee, nymph and dryad; the list goes on. Any hint that there was a separate race, living and breathing amongst the mortal ones, was covered by a fiction, a tale of otherworldly wonder and horror that was given the status of legend, remembered, retold, but hardly ever invented. So they cloaked themselves happily in these absurd tales, went about their lives, collecting their precious spices, were content to let any sighting be attributed to whatever legend fitted, golem, pooka, troll or banshee. In fact they were never averse to playing along; when a crop went bad or the milk turned sour or a drunken farmer happened upon one of them, at night on the lonely road home, or by a moonlit graveyard, they inhabited the legends and in time the legends inhabited them. There was a word for it, Mona remembered, a complicated word, that her Dany, with his predilection for many-syllabled words, would probably know: symbiosis. In fact there was a theory among the original carnies that they invented the legends, even propagated them, to explain their presence, but that was one too far-fetched for Mona.

  But then the Hunger came and changed things. Changed everything, in fact. It was the carnie biblical flood, the great rupture, after which nothing would ever be the same again. With the deaths, the scattering, the coffin ships, the half-living ones blown like useless chaff so far beyond their homeland, the legends, inevitably, faded and died. And they were scattered in turn, without the cornucopia of myths and legends to hide behind. They hid themselves instead in sideshows, circuses and fairgrounds, stages on which wonders, monstrosities of height and girth, death-defying balancing acts, feats of inhuman strength and contortion would be seen to be the norm. The gravitationless ones had to pretend to be earthbound, to be obeying all of the tiresome Newtonian laws. Their feats of impossible torque and balance had to be seen to be, just as the term implied, feats.

  He flies through the air

  With the greatest of ease

  That daring young man

  On the flying trapeze.

  And so the carnival began and the term carnie came, and stuck. Mona slowed her passage through the air to catch one more trapeze handle. Virginie teetered on the pole balanced on Monniker’s ample chin when she could have simply stood. Dorothea murmured platitudes about dark strangers and government men and pretended she didn’t see every detail of the future in the glass bowl beneath her painted fingers.

  Mona rose now and walked through the channel of stalls to the roustabout game and, as she stepped through it, caught the ball on one angled back heel, tossed it from head to toe and back again, and as the ball made one parabola, she made another, twirled into a cartwheel kick and made the ball soar towards her Dany, who headed it into the space between the orange-painted trailers that the roustabouts called the goal. There was an ironic roustie cheer, and she bowed and walked on.

  She made her way through the zigzagging maze of the trailers to the rusting door that Dany had lately thought of as home.

  She opened it and saw the dust wheeling in the evening sunlight. The lion padded backwards and forwards beyond the bars, on the other side. There was hardly a need for those rusting bars, she thought, as this lion was beyond anything now but dreaming. And she lay down in the mound of hay that must have been her Dany’s bed, because it still held something of his shape. And of that sweet adolescent smell too, she realised. A young boy’s sweat, stronger than the odour of new-mown grass. She nudged her head against the old lion’s mane, looked into those yellow eyes and again asked the question. Does he have it in him?

  The lion soughed gently and seemed to think he had.

  17

  She had the car to herself the next afternoon, since Jim would take the train to a conference in Drogheda, so she asked Andy did he want to visit the Roebuck Centre.

  ‘The what?’ he asked.

  ‘The whaddya kids call it – new mall.’

  ‘What mall?’ he asked her and once again she wondered what universe he’d gone to. What kid doesn’t want to know about the new Starbucks with the whipped-cream lattes, the 3D screens, the shining escalators, and for a moment she was transfixed by an image of one, a glittering silver thing, ascending into some heaven or descending into hell.

  ‘The Roebuck Centre,’ she repeated. ‘We were on our way there when we got diverted by the carnival. The one with the new cinema. Sixteen screens.’

  So she drove with Andy, but her real intention was to revisit those carnival fields. She had a knot in her stomach as she drove, a feeling of dread. She remembered the clown with the painted face, calling out, last chance to see Lydia on the high wire, rattling his half-empty plastic bucket. She could see the neon sign against the late
-summer sun, somebody’s amazing Hall of Mirrors, and she tried again to remember whose. She asked Andy, beside her, as she drove across the river, ‘What was the name, love, of that Hall of Mirrors?’, and he shrugged, as if nothing could be less important.

  ‘Where are we going?’ he asked her, as the Pigeon House sped by.

  ‘I have to pull by the carnival,’ she said.

  ‘Why?’ he asked.

  ‘I might have lost something there,’ she lied.

  ‘What?’ he asked, and she invented a story.

  Why she was inventing it, she had no idea. Other than that to reveal the true purpose of her journey would have been impossible for her. She came up with a tale of a ride they had both taken while their darling son was in the Hall of Mirrors. One of those whirling things that turned you upside down, which she had always dreaded, and now she knew why. Because Jim’s wallet and coins had tumbled from his pocket, along with his membership card to the Lions Club. And while they had retrieved the wallet and coins from the grass underneath after the ride, they hadn’t noticed the missing card until later.

  ‘The Lions Club,’ Andy repeated.

  ‘Yes,’ she lied, and blushed, realising she had no idea what a Lions Club was. She had been invited to a dinner-dance once, on behalf of it, but had no idea what the club was, or did.

  ‘And you think they might have it?’

  ‘Why not?’ she said brightly. ‘Even a carnival has to have a lost and found.’

  So she drove back with him towards where the carnival had been, behind the large industrial container park behind the train tracks. She sat in the car by the level crossing as another train trundled by, and waited until the barrier was lifted and then drove through the tiny streets behind, but she could hear no cries of mock terror and delight and she could see no pennant fluttering above the tiled roofs, so she already knew, before they reached the fields behind the container park, with the crushed grass and the muddied tyre tracks, that the carnival was over, here, at least.