The Carnival at Bray

by Jessie Ann Foley

  He stepped closer and squinted at her. He smelled of laundry detergent, and he was cute. Extremely cute, actually.

  “Was Dan Sean the one pouring drinks?”

  She nodded and hiccupped again. He smiled a little so she saw a crooked set of teeth that gleamed white in the darkness.

  “The man’s dangerous with the pours,” Eoin said. “You’re not the first visitor to get lost on the way home from a night up the hill at Dan Sean’s. If you’re living up on the Strand, what you need to do is head back where you came and turn right at the water pump. That’s Strand Road.” He placed a hand on her back, a warm pressure beneath her shoulder blades, and nudged her gently in that direction.

  “Thanks,” she said, already beginning to walk, concentrating on her sobriety and the water pump. “Thanks, Eoin.” Her tongue felt grotesquely thick in her mouth.

  The fog thinned at the bottom of the hill, breaking off into ethereal wisps that snaked around her shoulders as she neared home. Home. It was the first time she had thought of Colm’s house, which stood white and inviting at the end of the gravel road, in that way. She went in through the unlocked back door. The house, as usual, was empty—Colm and Laura had probably made a pit stop at the Quayside, while Ronnie was over at one of her many new friends’ houses. But Maggie was grateful, because now her stomach, knowing that she was safe, staged a revolt. She barely made it to the bathroom before spraying the toilet with burgundy red port puke. Afterward, she brushed her teeth, peeled off her smoky clothes, and got into bed. The headache that crippled her felt like a pulse in her temple: “Eoin. Eoin. Eoin.” It bothered her, the way he’d touched her without being asked. Is that what boys did in this country—just touched you moments after they met you? She pulled the pillow over her head, embarrassed for herself. Why did she even care? It’s not like it had meant anything. It was as meaningless as a handshake or a stranger bumping into you on the bus.

  But meaningless as it was, as Maggie lay in bed before drifting into the heavy black block of sleep, the imprint of that hand, the spread fingers on the sodden cotton of her jacket, was all that she could feel.

  By November, Maggie had struck up a friendship with Aíne, a bookish girl from her French class who had perfect handwriting, organized notebooks, and an obsession with getting maximum points in her leaving cert and moving to Dublin to study pharmacy at Trinity College. For the time being, though, she was stuck sharing a bedroom with three younger sisters in one of the damp, shabby estate houses that butted up against the carnival grounds. Aíne’s mother was a haggard, lumpy woman with rosacea and veiny legs, and her father drove a taxi, selling loose cigarettes from the trunk that he’d bought for cheap on a trip to Romania. It was clear from the start to Maggie that Aíne was ashamed of her blue-collar family, and that she was fiercely determined not to grow up to become like them. She wore her brown hair tied tightly at the nape of her neck in a stern, pretentious bun and her face was forgettably pretty save for the thin white scar that ran from her left nostril to the top of her lip, from a cleft palate surgery she’d had as a baby. Maggie wondered how Aíne felt about the scar, which wasn’t detectable from far away but which a boy in kissing distance would be sure to notice. She couldn’t ask, but she was sure that Aíne, too, had never been kissed. The thought of this plain, serious girl allowing her mouth to be explored by the worming tongue of a Saint Brendan’s boy seemed somehow profane. Theirs wasn’t a friendship that involved giggling over boys.

  But even if Aíne wasn’t exactly a lifelong soul-mate kind of friend, Maggie was glad to have someone to escape with when her sister’s eleventh birthday rolled around. For the occasion, Ronnie had invited five of her new friends over for a “slumber party,” an American phrase that had enchanted her classmates and terrified Colm, who had fled to the Quayside shortly after the first eye-shadowed pre-teen knocked on his door, leaving Laura alone to deal with the pack of national school girls who, by nightfall, were hopped up on chocolate bars and Club Orange and shrieking along to the 4 Non Blondes. Just after they finished their sing-along to “What’s Up,” a redheaded girl in a hot pink tracksuit, her cheeks awash in glitter, sashayed past them on her way to the bathroom. Laura began rummaging for a wine opener.

  “You sure you want to leave me here with all this?” She raised a dark eyebrow at Maggie, cranked open the wine, and filled her glass nearly to the brim while treble-pitched arguments about what to play next drifted from the sitting room. The synthetic crooning of pop radio indicated a decision had been made.

  “Can you imagine if Kevin were here, what he’d say about this dance party?” Laura said.

  “Oh, he wouldn’t say anything,” Maggie laughed. “He would’ve left for the bar with Colm the minute this thing started.”

  Laura paused, took a sip of wine. “No,” she said finally. “Kevin and Colm wouldn’t be going anywhere together. There’s no love lost between those two.” She peered into her glass, avoiding Maggie’s eyes: a classic Laura Lynch evasion tactic.

  “Care to explain?”

  Her mom shrugged, lit a cigarette, and shook out the match. The smoke curled into the corners of the kitchen ceiling.

  “Not particularly.” She looked at her watch. “You better get a move on, sister. This Aíne character sounds like the punctual sort.” As she crossed the footpath over the river Dargle, Maggie found her bearings by scanning the sky for the Ferris wheel. It hovered above the pubs and hotels and the sea to the east, and to the west, on the other side of Main Street, stood the stony hulking tower of Saint Paul’s Church. Maggie knew that if she stayed between these two landmarks, she was on the right track to HMV. She had always been terrible with directions: earlier that summer, when she’d taken the wrong train home from the dentist and ended up marooned out in Oak Park, she had to call Kevin to come pick her up. He didn’t make fun of her cluelessness, as Maggie had expected. Instead, as he pulled up to the el station, he declared, “Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime.” They got a bagful of cheeseburgers at White Castle and spent the rest of the night driving around the city so he could teach her the grid system. AG BULLT rumbled up and down the length and breadth of Chicago as Kevin pointed at street signs and barked out their coordinates: “Western Avenue, 2400 West! Kedzie Avenue, 3200 West! Belmont Avenue, 3200 North!” Up and down and up and down they went as the Clash blasted from the beleaguered speakers and the cheeseburgers dwindled.

  “When a city has a grid system and you take the time to learn it, it’s impossible to get lost,” he explained. “But Ireland is old and mountainous, and it’s probably going to be a bitch to find your way around there. Before you go, I’ll give you the compass I have left over from my Cub Scout days. For a Magellan like you, it might be your only hope. Now: Division Avenue is located at what-hundred north?”

  “1200!” Maggie shouted. “Wait a second—did you just say you were a Boy Scout?”

  “No, I said I was a Cub Scout,” he said, tossing a cheeseburger wrapper out the window. “I quit before attaining the level of actual Boy Scout. And you can laugh all you want, but there’s only one person in this car who knows Morse code, and it certainly ain’t you.”

  Maggie reached into her jacket pocket now and held the scratched little brass compass. It was nearly twenty years old, and when Kevin had fished it out of the recesses of his closet, they’d discovered that it no longer worked. But she’d brought it with her to Ireland anyway. She didn’t know why. She guessed maybe because it was one of the only gifts Kevin had ever given her, and just having it in her pocket, holding its cool, round weight in her palm, always made her feel less lost. She was still angry at her mom for locking him out of the going-away party and denying her a chance to say good-bye, but in the course of three months the anger had calcified into a dull, throbbing resentment—a resentment that was only part of a larger anger at her mom’s flightiness and immaturity, for the way heartbreak never seemed to teach her anything, for the way her
search for romance was always disrupting their lives. For their part, Laura and Kevin, like many brothers and sisters, could forgive each other as quickly and easily as they condemned each other, and both seemed to have forgotten about the incident at Oinker’s. He called the house fairly regularly, and Maggie had talked to him about once a month since they’d arrived in Bray. The last time they’d spoken, Nirvana had just announced its European tour dates, and Kevin frothed with excitement about the prospect of the band from Seattle tearing their way through the staid cities of Western Europe.

  “Maggie,” he said, his voice shrill and trembling, “if you ever listen to my advice on anything, listen to me about this, okay? You. Must. Go. See. Nirvana. In. Rome. It’s a two-hour flight from Dublin, and it’s at the Palaghiaccio di Marino, and it’s going to be transcendent.”

  “You know I’m sixteen, right?” Maggie said. “Mom would never in a million years let me go to Italy for a Nirvana show! Maybe she’d take me to see them in Dublin. But Rome? No way.”

  “First of all, what are you talking about?” He was yelling now. “You can’t go see Nirvana with your mother. Second of all, did you hear what I said? Rome! The Eternal City! Julius Caesar! Crossing the Rubicon! The Coliseum! It’s like, the giants of the present colliding with the giants of the past. It’s like two thousand years of civilization coming full circle. Can you imagine Kurt Cobain’s voice drifting across the fucking Tiber? Echoing off the goddam piazzas?” On the other end of the phone, she could hear him plucking compulsively at the strings of his guitar. “Don’t you understand, Maggie? This would be like President fucking CLINTON playing the fucking saxophone at the—”

  His calling card ran out of minutes and the call clicked off. Maggie looked out the kitchen window at Ronnie, who was running in jagged circles around the yard with a school friend, trying unsuccessfully to fly a blue kite. She placed the phone gently back in its receiver and stepped away from it as if it was leaking toxins. It wasn’t so much the lecture she had just received—Kevin had been lecturing her all her life about politics, literature, art, and music—but the way he had delivered it. He had not sounded just passionate, but actually unhinged, strung out, crazy. She looked forward more than ever to Christmas, a month away, when he and Nanny Ei were coming. It was so hard to gauge a voice over a phone line.

  Aíne, ever punctual, was checking her watch in front of the HMV when Maggie approached. She was dressed in the same nondescript gray coat she always wore, but had slicked on a sad bit of lip gloss. This dollop of pink made Maggie hopeful—maybe her friend did care about what boys thought—and as they wandered among the aisles of the store, flipping through stacks of CDs, she considered telling Aíne about the night she’d met Eoin. But, ultimately, what was there to tell? That she met a guy and he gave her directions? That for a brief moment he had touched her back, and all week Maggie had been thinking of that touch? Pathetic. If she told Aíne that this minor incident actually counted as news, as progress, in her romantic life, it would only reveal her inexperience.

  In the dance music aisle, they stopped in front of a large cardboard cutout of Kylie Minogue in turquoise hot pants and pigtails.

  “Seriously, the pop music over here is even worse than the crap back home,” Maggie observed. She felt, then, under the corporate lights of HMV, a subtle change in atmosphere. Somewhere nearby, a crotch was being readjusted, eyes were appraising, testosterone was surging. She turned around just as the store clerk approached. His glasses made him appear older, scholarly; but a glaze of small, bursting pimples scattered across his forehead indicated that he was about their own age.

  “You need some help?” he asked, his eyes hidden behind the thick window of his glasses.

  “We’re fine,” said Maggie, glancing at him briefly. “Just looking around.”

  “You girls go to Saint Brigid’s?” The boy ran his fingers nervously along Kylie Minogue’s cardboard arm. He was looking intently at Aíne, whose pale skin was now burning red.

  “Yes,” Aíne said, crossing her arms and smiling shyly, the delicate white line of her palate scar folding neatly in half. “We’re in our junior cert year.”

  “I thought so!” the boy said brightly. “I’ve seen you during open lunch.” He moved forward a bit, stepping almost between the two girls. It was clear that, like a basketball player rolling a pick, he was trying to block Maggie out. She took the hint and wandered away, fleeing to a listening booth where she nestled into a giant pair of headphones and PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me. As she stole glances at the two of them over the racks of CDs, she wondered about Eoin. Had he really been as handsome as she remembered? Or had he been transformed in her memory by the gauze of the nighttime and her loneliness, the glasses of port and the heat that burned from his palm to her back?

  “Did you see that?” Aíne demanded, lifting a headphone from Maggie’s ear. “How he just came up to me like that?”

  Maggie turned down the music and smiled. In the short span of their friendship, she’d never seen Aíne so excited about something that didn’t involve her grade on a math quiz.

  “He’s got a friend—another lad who works here. They want to meet us at the carnival after they finish work.”

  “What friend?”

  “I don’t know. Some fella that works here.”

  Maggie looked at Aíne’s flushed, hopeful face. In her ear, PJ Harvey panted, did you ever wish me dead? Oh lover boy, oh fever head?

  “But what do they want to do with us?”

  Aíne took out her pink lip gloss and began smearing on a fresh layer.

  “What do you mean, do with us? He was decent. He goes to Saint Brendan’s. It can’t hurt, can it?”

  Maggie was unconvinced, but the alternative was going home to help supervise a mob of sugar-crazed eleven-year-old girls, so an hour later she stood with Aíne under the dark metal hulk of the Ferris wheel, squinting through the darkness at the approaching boys.

  The carnival, which had been depressing enough at the end of the summer, was now flat-out ghostly. Most of the larger rides were covered in heavy white tarp that flapped in the salty wind like some frightening art installation. Walking through it felt like walking through a collapsible city of billowing white buildings. Corrugated doors covered the gaming booths, some of which were scrawled with orange graffiti. To the east, the sea was calm and abiding, rippling, watching.

  Aíne’s boy was named Paddy. He was stork-like and jittery, pulling at his pockets and walking in quick, jerky steps. He had a plated, ceratopsian nose, which, along with the thick glasses, made him look like he was wearing a Groucho Marx mask. The light wash of his jeans was outdated and his shoelaces were untied.

  “Ever seen the view from Bray Head?” he asked, the long, wispy hairs on his upper lip stirring in the wind.

  “Would you believe I’ve lived my whole life looking at that thing but never actually climbed it?” Aíne said. “I hear it’s lovely, though.” Her voice was giggly and effusive; she was nearly unrecognizable from the serious girl who wore her uniform skirt unfashionably long and always did the extra practice sentences in the back of their French textbook. Maggie had witnessed this strange occurrence in her mother many times over the years: the transformative power of attraction.

  While the two new lovebirds walked ahead toward the hill, Paul, who had been recruited as Maggie’s date, sidled up alongside her. He was short and wiry, with jutting brows that overhung his dark eyes like invasive ivy. He reeked of Lynx Dark Temptation cologne.

  “So, how do you like Saint Brigid’s?” he began. “I heard the nuns there are bitches.”

  “It’s okay,” Maggie shrugged. “Pretty much the same as back home, I guess.” He looked over at her, his thick eyebrows hitching up as he tried to place her accent.

  “Boston?” “No, Chicago.”

  “Oh, right. The windy city.”

  “Yeah.”

  Although he seemed perfectly polite, his hooded eyes and ropy neck muscles hinted at a future of bar braw
ls and cardgame fistfights. Maggie wouldn’t go so far as to describe him as attractive, but he wasn’t heinously ugly, either, and as they walked through the hulking tarp figures that flapped in the sea wind, she wondered if maybe, when the night ended, she should kiss him. She felt none of the jittery happiness that trembled from Aíne ten feet ahead of her like a heat mirage on an asphalt road, but she was halfway through sixteen, and wasn’t there something to be said, at this point, for just getting it over with?

  “You always remember your first kiss,” her mom had advised before the freshman year homecoming dance as Maggie sat on the toilet waiting for her curlers to set and Nanny Ei painted her eyelids a frosty silver.

  “Yeah, you do always remember it,” Nanny Ei acknowledged, “but it usually doesn’t mean anything.”

  Now, Paul walked close enough to her that Maggie could smell his cherry gum, a cloying smell that told her he’d been promised a girl who would make out with him. Was this the kind of night that Maggie wanted to remember forever: the November wind, the neon aisles of the HMV, the chipper where she and Aíne had shared a greasy plate of fries to pass the time before the boys got off work? It had been a pointless, meandering night, Maggie thought, like so many other teenage nights where you sit around, so bored that it actually hurts, waiting and waiting for something to happen. Most of these nights, nothing ever did.

  There was a path that sloped upward from the sand, twisting like a castle turret, so that if you made it all the way up, past an abandoned rusty set of railroad tracks, you would reach the top of Bray Head. From there, the two boys explained, you could look down to see the white-covered tops of the carnival rides, the roofs of the town, and even, on a clear night like this, the lights of Dublin over the hills.

  Maggie shivered in her jacket. It wasn’t that she minded Paul at her side, necessarily. It was just that, given the choice between climbing the hill with him or going home to read a music magazine, she’d already be halfway up the Strand Road. But Aíne, who’d been swept up in Paddy and the newfound confidence that comes from a boy’s attentions, was already on the onward march, and Maggie had no choice but to follow.