The Carnival at Bray

by Jessie Ann Foley

  She found an unclaimed mattress near the windows and sat down. Scattered about the room were travelers poring over guidebooks or drinking beer, young people from all over the world. A few beds down from where she sat, a heavyset man with a perfectly shaped bald head and skin so smooth and gorgeously dark it was nearly blue—Maggie finally understood why the Gaelic term for black man was fear gorm, which translated to “blue man”—was sitting before a small audience, ankles crossed, his back curved over his guitar. He was playing “Brokedown Palace,” a Grateful Dead song Maggie recognized from Kevin’s hippie phase. She sat on her lower bunk with her bag in her lap and listened. Fare you well, my honey, / Fare you well, my only true one …They’d had to dig his grave with pickaxes, once the funeral party had been shepherded away to the warm banquet hall. Terrible enough if it had been visited upon him by fate, by a failed heart. But how could he have wanted that for himself? All the birds that were singing have flown / except you alone …

  “Are you okay?”

  Maggie looked up into the face of one of the most beautiful women she had ever seen. The accent was American, and hearing that nasal enunciation after months of Irish lilt gave Maggie a jarring flash of homesickness.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I was just listening to that guy play.” The woman, who looked five or six years older than Maggie, had long blond hair that hung in tangles down to her waist, with pieces loosely braided throughout. She wore a soft-knitted sweater, the kind everyone back home called a drug rug. She glanced in the direction of the music and sat next to Maggie on the bed.

  “That’s Ehi,” she said. “He’s a friend of mine. Pretty good, huh? You play music?”

  Maggie shook her head. “But my uncle does.” Did.

  “Well, Ehi can probably teach you some chords, if you’re interested.” She stuck out a hand, the fingers long and tapered, elegant. “I’m Ashley.”

  “Maggie.” She shook the soft hand.

  “I’m from California. Santa Cruz. Been traveling all over. Asia, Eastern Europe, North Africa—that’s where I met Ehi. He’s from Ghana, but when I met him he was a student in Cairo on semester break. I convinced him to extend it. We’ve spent the last six months backpacking Europe. Ireland’s one of our last stops—we’ve got a couple more days here—then it’s over to Scandinavia. Then, I guess, home.” She looked over at Ehi, smiled absentmindedly. “I suppose that’s where he and I will part ways.”

  “Is he your boyfriend?”

  Ashley shrugged.

  “As much as either one of us has ownership of the other, I guess. I haven’t told him I’m headed home yet.” She sighed dramatically. “I’m dreading it.”

  Ashley pulled a pack of Silk Cut Blues out of her sweater pocket and offered one to Maggie. Maggie didn’t really want one—she’d grown up in a house of smokers, so the act had never seemed particularly rebellious—but Ashley, with her beachy hair and debutante’s nose, had a quality about her that made you want to accept whatever it was she offered. Maggie took the cigarette and Ashley pulled out a Zippo and flicked open the flame. The foul taste filled Maggie’s lungs, but with an iron will—and a lifetime of secondhand smoke—she suppressed a cough and exhaled in a gray cloud.

  “So. What’s your story?” Ashley asked, lighting her own cigarette.

  “Me?” Maggie’s mind raced, pausing on several different lies before settling on one that she thought Ashley would believe. “Well, I’m from Chicago. But I live here now—I’m just down in Dublin for a couple nights to look at colleges.”

  “Colleges!” Ashley laughed, exhaling smoke like a mod girl from a sixties movie. “You look like you’re about twelve!”

  “No, actually I’m eighteen.” The cigarette had made the air buzz, and Maggie felt giddy and sophisticated. She felt eighteen.

  “Well, I’m probably not the right person you should be talking to,” Ashley said. “I dropped out. I thought I’d get my education through travel. I’ve been to over forty countries.”

  “What was your favorite?”

  “Morocco, without a doubt. I grew up watching Casablanca and being there, I actually felt like Ingrid Bergman, you know?”

  Maggie didn’t, but she nodded encouragingly. It was so nice to have somebody to talk to—an American, no less—and she didn’t want Ashley to leave.

  “So, you here by yourself?” Ashley stretched her legs, which were long and tanned and covered with downy blond hair, and put them on Maggie’s lap. She had chipped red paint on her toenails and a gold ring around her middle toe that tinkled with tiny bells.

  “Well, for tonight,” said Maggie. “But my boyfriend’s going to meet me in a couple of days.” She liked the way the word boyfriend felt on her tongue, even if it was a lie.

  “Well, you should come out with us tonight, then,” Ashley said. “There’s nothing more depressing than sitting alone in an empty hostel on a Saturday night.” She ran a hand through her tangled hair. “Meet us downstairs at the bar in an hour, okay? I’m going to go take a shower. I just had sex and I need to freshen up down there, you know?” She winked and sauntered off toward Ehi’s bed, and in her departure Maggie was left to process this stunning bit of candor.

  Maggie had an hour to make herself look eighteen, and the concealer and eyeliner she’d brought in her Ziploc bag weren’t going to cut it, especially not with this crowd. She rushed down the stairs and out onto the street, where she found a small pharmacy a couple doors down from the hostel. She bought some cheap black mascara, a compact with blush and eye shadow, red lipstick, and a little vial of drugstore perfume.

  Back at Nora Barnacle’s, she stood before a shattered mirror in the communal women’s bathroom and attacked her teeth with a glob of toothpaste. She tarred her lashes in the mascara, rubbed the gray shadow along her lids, swiped blush along her cheekbones and painted her lips a deep red. She put on the black cotton dress she’d packed for the Nirvana show and pulled on her boots, stuffing her money and her concert tickets into the ankle. On her way downstairs, she paused to look at herself in the bathroom mirror again. The makeup and the tight black dress made her appear not just older, but dangerous and urban. She felt that this was a self that she could inhabit, a person she could become. She tied Kevin’s flannel around her waist. Her pilgrimage had begun.

  Ehi and Ashley were already drinking at the hostel bar with a small, eclectic crowd of Europeans.

  “Beer?” Ehi offered, his voice booming over the thin pop music that streamed from a speaker above the bottles of whiskey and rum. Maggie nodded shyly and he called to the bartender, who put a Heineken in front of her. She’d tried wine and port before, and even whiskey, but this was her first-ever sip of beer. It was awful.

  Ashley appeared at her side. She’d wrapped her hair in some sort of red printed scarf, and she looked like a gorgeous gypsy from a Grimm’s fairy tale.

  “So, Chicago, tell me the truth. I know you’re not here to look at colleges. Europeans don’t do that. You’re a runaway, aren’t you?”

  Maggie, to bide her time, swigged from the Heineken. It made her eyes water.

  “Not exactly,” she said finally. “It’s more of a temporary thing.”

  Ashley smiled, flashing a perfect set of white teeth, and put a slender arm around Maggie’s shoulder.

  “You can tell me,” she said. “I’m a runaway, too.” She laughed, a light sound like the tinkling of her toe ring. “Do you know my dad is one of the most successful movie producers in LA? I mean, I went to the Buckley School. You’ve heard of it, I’m sure.”

  Maggie hadn’t, but Ashley was not in the habit of waiting for people to answer her questions.

  “And I know you might be thinking, poor little rich girl,” she continued. “But honestly, having everything—it numbs your mind. So one day, I just decided to say fuck it! And I took a leave of absence from UCLA. My parents said they’d bankroll me for a year, help me find myself or whatever. First, I went to London, called up some people I knew. It didn’t feel all that
different from California, except for the rain. But then, I went to Poland. At Auschwitz, I felt—well, I felt a lot of things, obviously. But what I felt most: it was this feeling of neutered existence, like I’d been locked away in a castle all my life. Not that I envy people who have suffered. But don’t you think that never suffering at all—is its own form of suffering?”

  Well, you’ve obviously never lost someone you loved, Maggie thought. But she nodded politely and sipped her beer.

  “The thing about traveling,” Ashley continued, leaning her elbows on the bar, “is that it doesn’t cure your wanderlust. Tennyson says that ‘all experience is an arch wherethrough gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades forever and forever when I move.’ And that’s exactly what it’s like. The more of the world you see, the more insatiable the desire to see more becomes. You’re always reaching for the next place. You want more and more and more and soon enough you realize that you can’t ever go home.”

  “I know what you mean,” Maggie said. “I don’t even know where my home is right now.”

  “Right?” Ashley tucked a loose blond strand back into the folds of her headscarf. “So, anyway, my parents gave me a year but I’ve been gone eighteen months. I’m actually fending for myself for once—I haven’t spoken to my family in four months. And each day that goes by, I feel less and less like I can ever go back. I was studying fashion merchandising when I dropped out. Can you imagine? How can I go back and major in fashion merchandising when I’ve walked the slums of Calcutta?”

  She paused, picked up her beer, closed her eyes, and took a long drink. Ehi came over, clapped an arm around each of them. His guitar was slung over his back.

  “Who’s this?”

  “Ehi, this is Chicago! She’s a runaway. She’s a big fan.”

  Ehi grinned down at Maggie from his impressive height. His eyes, like Ashley’s, were bloodshot and dreamy.

  “Well, perhaps I will play for you later tonight,” he said. His accent managed to sound both sophisticated and approachable. He waved an arm and the entire group finished their drinks and followed him out into the Dublin night.

  The pack of them—Ashley and Ehi and the people who’d sounded like they were blowing bubbles (Dutch, as it turned out)—walked down through Temple Bar, where the nightclubs pulsed and spilled drunk, done-up teenagers onto the street, lining the curbs like finely plumaged birds. Ashley marched through them with the purposeful way of the beautiful, her face a sneer.

  “This is where the amateurs hang out, the college kids from Boston who think they’re all international because they got their very own passport last week,” she explained. “You won’t meet anyone interesting here.” She linked her arm through Maggie’s as they traversed the city, past the flower stands and street performers on Grafton Street and into McDaid’s because one the Dutchmen, who was getting his PhD in Irish literature, wanted to sit at the barstool where Brendan Behan drank and perhaps in the process get some good vibes to help him finish his dissertation, which had stalled halfway through, at five hundred pages. He sat next to Maggie, lurching into her, his breath reeking of onion crisps and Guinness, and confided, “The whole thing is actually a heaping pile of shit: a reflection, really, of my entire grad school experience.”

  Eventually, they made their way back to Saint Stephen’s Green. They walked past the Shelbourne Hotel, its tall, grand windows and curling staircase, and in the failing light Maggie could see elegant couples leaning together over glasses of red wine, finely dressed old women sitting in plush velvet chairs sipping champagne from crystal flutes.

  “That’s the kind of place I’d be staying if I was with my father,” Ashley said as they walked past. “Only the finest for David Green. But don’t you think the way we’re living now—cheap hostel, cheap beer, good company, strangers who become friends by the end of the night—don’t you think this is better? This, here, is real life!” She squeezed Maggie’s arm in the crook of her elbow and guided her across the street and through the northeast entrance of the park while Ehi, the Dutch contingent, and a trio of Greek college students followed behind.

  The park had fallen into shadow, the swans floating in the pond like white buoys. In the little gazebos, small groups of flannelled runaways huddled against the cold. Ashley found a spot beneath a circle of bare trees in the north end of the park. Ehi took a bright wool blanket from his guitar case and spread it on the ground. He picked at the instrument for a minute and strummed a few chords. Someone began passing around a joint, and when it came to Maggie, streaming smoke, she inhaled once, delicately, and held the sweet smoke on her tongue. Then she tried again, this time puffing harder. A heavy heat rolled down her throat, and she burst into a coughing fit. Ashley laughed and gently kneaded her shoulder.

  “Not so hard,” she whispered, her voice honey heavy. The joint came around again sometime later, and Maggie felt the sensation of limbs both heavy and weightless. The swans trailed silently in the water and the air beat around her like a pulse. Her hair blew in the wind, and bits of trash skittered by on the walking path. Ehi bent over his guitar, his fingers strumming a G chord.

  “Any requests?” Ashley said. Her voice sounded far away. “Ehi can play whatever you want.”

  “Do you know ‘I Know You Rider’?” Maggie spoke for the first time since they’d sat down. “It’s, like, a folk song. My uncle used to sing it for me.”

  Ehi’s fingers moved over his strings while he thought.

  “I don’t think I do,” he said. “Sing a little bit of it for me.”

  “I can’t sing,” Maggie said.

  “Come on!” Ashley said, handing her the joint. “Everyone can sing a little bit!”

  The small band of Dutchmen and Greeks sat cross-legged on the bright blanket, making room for the runaways who had fluttered over like moths to the flame of Ehi’s guitar. The pot had inhabited Maggie’s brain and everything around her felt gauzy and pleasant, even the faces of staring strangers and the cold, cutting wind.

  “Okay, why not?” She leaned her head back, her hair brushing the grass, her throat white and exposed in the moonlight, and began to sing.

  I know you, rider, you’re gonna miss me when I’m gone

  I know you, rider, you’re gonna miss me when I’m gone

  I love you, rider, and I know you must love me some

  I love you, rider, and I know you must love me some

  You put your arms around me like a circle round the sun

  Ehi had taken up the melody on his guitar and the runaways and Dutch PhD students stood up, bobbing their heads like the swans on the pond. Her voice was nothing special, but it didn’t matter. She’d never sung for anyone before, had never even wanted to. Now, raising her voice above the wind, it felt like she’d been doing it all her life.

  I laid down last night and I tried to take my rest

  My heart was ramblin’ like wild geese in the west

  I wish I was a headlight on a northbound train,

  I wish I was a headlight on a northbound train,

  I’d shine my light through cool Colorado rain.

  The city at night was a blooming thing, come to drink at the Liffey and the life spiraling from its banks, spreading all the way out to the battered rock at the edges of the country, the black mountains of Donegal, the rainy coasts of Kerry, the shores of Wicklow. They all called her Chicago, and that’s who she became—a nameless nomad of Dublin, unmoored from her family and her past, from any life she’d known. A fine snow of downy confetti sifted from the sky, coating Maggie’s eyelashes and hair as Ashley grabbed her hands and spun her around the blanket. They were both laughing. More joints were passed, small bottles of brown liquor. Hours or minutes later they meandered back to Nora Barnacle’s along the narrow streets paved in bumpy cobblestone, the shooting stars of neon signs, singing Janis Joplin while their wild voices reverberated off the emptying streets. Maggie remembered climbing the rickety hostel stairs, Ashley’s warm grip on her arm. She remembered Ash
ley’s sweet breath over her, pulling off her boots and placing them next to her bed, helping her out of her clothes, peeling off her dress and tights and folding Kevin’s flannel into a pillow beneath her head. She remembered feeling tired and sweetly anonymous. And then she was asleep.

  She awoke in late morning, the rain beating on the thin roof of the dormitory. Her head throbbed. She was in her underwear, covered by someone else’s sheet. Ashley’s, she thought. That girl is so cool. She sat up slowly, rubbing the dried mascara from her eyes. There were a few other strangers scattered around the dormitory, sprawled in their sleeping bags, but the room was mostly abandoned. Ehi and his guitar were gone. Ashley’s things, her bright green sleeping bag and North Face backpack, also gone. Maggie pulled on her jeans and reached into her boots to retrieve her money and her concert tickets.

  They were gone, too.

  Maggie dumped the contents of her duffel bag onto the bed and began clawing through them. Her brain rung from the liquor and the beer and the weed. She yanked up the mattress, got on her hands and knees, and crawled along the floor around her bed. What she found, through the blur of her tears, were dusty clumps of lint and strangers’ hair, a half-melted tube of purple lipstick, and a scattering of mouse droppings. She shook out her Doc Martens again and again, knowing, even as she did this, that she was wasting her time. Had anything Ashley said been true? The rich girl stuff? The fashion merchandising? But then, no true street urchin would have teeth that nice. So maybe Ashley had just done it for the thrill. Or maybe this what she had meant by “fending for herself.” How could I be so stupid? Maggie gagged, tasting the bile in her throat. She ran to the bathroom and kneeled on its cold tiles. She puked violently, saliva swirling lazily in the toilet. She wiped her mouth and straightened up to go look at her swollen face in the mirror. Her eyes were bloodshot, crescented by pink bags, “like two piss holes in the snow,” as Nanny Ei used to say to Kevin when he came home from a drinking binge. She brushed her teeth and begged twenty cents off the Slavic girl at the front desk who, seeing the tears trembling in the corners of Maggie’s eyes, dropped her Cold War act and slid the coins across the counter with a sympathetic smile.