by Neil Jordan
CARNIVALESQUE
‘Come away, O human child!’
W. B. Yeats
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Night in Tunisia
The Past
The Dream of a Beast
Sunrise with Sea Monster
Shade
Mistaken
The Drowned Detective
CARNIVALESQUE
NEIL JORDAN
CONTENTS
By the Same Author
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Forty-One
Forty-Two
Forty-Three
Forty-Four
Forty-Five
Forty-Six
Forty-Seven
Forty-Eight
Forty-Nine
Fifty
Also available by Neil Jordan
1
It looked like any other carnival, but of course it wasn’t. The boy saw it from the car window, the tops of the large trailer rides over the parked trains by the railway tracks. His parents were driving towards the new shopping centre and he was looking forward to that too, but the tracery of lights above the gloomy trains caught his imagination, as did the cries of mock terror of the children under the gravitational pull of the rollercoaster or the centrifugal force of the spinning carousel. He was good at school and enjoyed thinking of terms like gravitational pull and centrifugal force. So he asked them to stop and they of course did. All of their concentration was on him these days and any utterance of his seemed like a welcome respite from their wary silences. So when he spoke they listened avidly, anxious to talk to each other through him, or just anxious to say anything at all to break the hush between them. He could never work it out. He knew things had changed. There had been a time when things were better but he could never work out when that time had stopped and the present thing had started.
The present thing was to do with his father working late at night on the carpentry bench in the garage and his mother crying when she chopped the vegetables and blaming it on the onions.
He was an only child, so he sometimes wondered was it his fault. Maybe a little sister would have helped. But as his mother told him, she was beyond the age for little sisters, or even little brothers, now.
Anyway they were happy enough to stop, to wait by the level crossing for the mechanical arm to rise and to drive on to the waste ground where the carnival had parked itself.
And the first thing he noticed was how large it was, but at the same time how contained. He knew that spot of waste ground; he had played on it when they first moved here and could measure the extent of the field by his running feet. But the carnival that filled it now seemed endless, somehow. It had its own little backstreets, its alleyways of hanging bulbs and ghost trains and Punch and Judy stands and caravans with painted carnival folk sitting on the steps smoking and laughing with each other like his family once used to laugh, he seemed to remember. It had its bumper rides and its old-fashioned carousel and even a small circus tent where he could glimpse athletic girls in tutus twirling on ropes that seemed to vanish into the gloom above them. But there was a queue outside that so he gave it a miss. He played the dodgems with his father while his mother bought candyfloss and it was sometime after the ride on the old-fashioned carousel with his mother, his face buried in that same candyfloss, that he noticed the Hall of Mirrors. His mother couldn’t take gravitational pulls and centrifugal forces and the crashing of bumper cars so the gentle up and down movement of the painted horses suited her fine. So when he tired of it his father took his place behind her, with his arms around her waist, and the boy left them both to it and hoped for the return of happier times and went wandering down the bulb-lit alleyways that had filled what was once waste ground.
And at the end of one of them he saw the Hall of Mirrors. There were looping strings of carnival lights leading towards it on either side, and a large sign written in mirrored glass reading ‘Burleigh’s Amazing Hall of Mirrors’ and the sign reflected the lights in all sorts of magically distorted ways. There was a mirrored entrance beneath the sign and it looked lonely, somehow, with no one queuing up to get in. A Hall of Mirrors didn’t seem like the most exciting prospect, after all, given the distant screams of delighted horror he could hear from the ghost train and the helter-skelter. But he was drawn towards it, like a fly towards a light bulb. Maybe it was the emptiness that drew him. Maybe it was that weird name, Burleigh. Burleigh who, he wondered, Burleigh what, and what could be so amazing about this Burleigh’s Hall of Mirrors?
So he went through the mirrored entrance and sometime later, it could have been minutes, it could have been hours – his parents would later punish themselves with worrying over that fact – quite a different boy walked out.
This boy looked the same, wore the same clothes, the same jacket, frayed at the elbows, the same scuffed trainers; he had the same curl of browny-blond hair falling over his freckled forehead. He even spoke the same, with that slight girlish lisp when he said his S’s, but everything inside of him was different. And perhaps it was a measure of how things had changed between his mother and his father that it took them so long to realise that everything inside of the new boy was different. But by that time the carnival had long moved on.
What happened was this. Roughly, although there was nothing rough about the happening. It was smooth and soft-edged and mysterious and had a gliding quality to it but it was an immense happening so to describe it in rough detail would be to save many pages of description. It had a strange temporal quality to it as well, meaning time was stretched and bent and turned in on itself, so to delineate the beginning and the end of the happening would be difficult, if well-nigh impossible. It would be like describing a butterfly’s wings in measurements used for a milk bottle, which wouldn’t make any sense at all, really. So, roughly what happened was this:
He walked through the entrance to Burleigh’s Amazing Hall of Mirrors and could see a small, squat version of himself coming towards him. It frightened him at first. It looked like a small fat brother he had lost along the way there. But he had no brother, small or fat, so he knew it must have been him. It moved a fat arm to scratch its fat head when he moved his arm to scratch his own, quite normal one. Then he realised of course it was a particular quality of the mirror he was facing and began to laugh. He saw the fat one laugh in time with him. And the strange thing was – the first of many strange things on that long afternoon – that he heard a fat, booming laugh coming back towards him. He knew his own voice, his own laugh, and he was a good laugher, he had to admit, he had a loud guffaw that erupted when anyone told a joke that he found funny, which somehow managed to make the joke funnier. But the laugh that came back at him was nothing like that laugh. It was a fat and round laugh that seemed more appropriate to a policeman. And then he remembered that h
e had passed a laughing policeman on the journey there and he wondered was this policeman somehow laughing back at him. But no, it was the fat version of him laughing back at the real version of him and both laughs echoed around that strange interior. He stopped laughing then, placing a hand over his mouth, and saw the fat version of himself do the same. And he heard both laughs echoing as if they were running away from him, down the different mirrored halls. He turned then, following the echoing laughter, and saw a long, thin version of himself turning too. This thin version didn’t seem to suit laughter at all. Again it moved when he moved, it paced forwards with his gradual footsteps into the strange interior. I am in Burleigh’s Amazing Hall of Mirrors, he thought to himself, and of course there will be many different versions of myself in the differently distorted mirrors. But this thin version of himself seemed to demand something other than laughter. It was pale and somehow sad and had a kind of a lantern jaw that when he opened his mouth seemed to reach down to the belt that held his trousers up. His mouth became an elongated circle that seemed to droop downwards, as if it was made of dripping water. And when he stretched his hands up above his head, they stretched like rubber bands and vanished into the ceiling. He followed those elongated hands with his eyes and saw that the ceiling itself was a mirror, as was the floor beneath his feet, and he saw an oddly stretched head staring back at him, with the rest of his body yawning away from it as if it wanted desperately to vanish into the mirrored floor below. There was a weeping quality to his thin self and he wanted it to go away, fast.
So he closed his eyes and walked.
When he opened them again he found himself in a mirror-maze. There were multiple versions of himself wherever he looked. He found this mildly amusing and smiled, but was careful not to laugh because he didn’t want to hear that fat-policeman laugh echoing his own. He smiled, raised his hands above his head and twirled, like a ballet dancer. Now he hoped this twirling wasn’t observed, by anybody, least of all anybody his own age. But all he saw was the multiple versions of himself twirling in turn so he tried a small airborne leap, and clicked his heels together before they hit the glass floor again. He saw an infinity of versions of himself twirl and click their heels and twirl and click as he tried it again. And it was then that the music began.
It was a waltz, if you can imagine a waltz being played by a rushed waterfall with the buzzing of bees to accompany the swirling melodies the water made. It soared and looped and repeated its melody though the melody always seemed fresh, as if repetition was a new kind of invention. It seemed to bear his weight as he leapt once more and found that his landing was as light as a feather, or as if a hive of invisible bees had somehow borne his weight and taken the curse of gravity from his feet. So he leapt again and again and clicked his heels like a crazed version of Michael Jackson and each leap took him higher and the frothy surging of the melody enveloped him and took him upwards, or was it sideways, he couldn’t be sure since the mirror-maze seemed to be revolving with him now, he had lost all sense of where the ground was or the ceiling, there was no north or south or up or down, he was in an anti-gravitational dance and the only bearing he had was the melody like a waterfall that took him in its wake.
And then the music stopped. Not suddenly, since there was nothing sudden, where he was now. It rippled and it echoed and grew more distant with each echo until it was gone entirely, and there was just silence and it began to dawn on him what had happened. He was inside the mirror now, and there was somebody else outside that looked like him but that couldn’t have been him since he was just this one’s reflection, inside the mottled glass.
Yes, he realised for the first time, the glass was mottled. Those little silvery bits, those mirrored cracks were all over his hands, his shirt, his face, everything that was him. And the thing that wasn’t him was there, outside the mirror, staring back, turning, at the sound of his mother’s plaintive voice.
‘Andy,’ she was calling. ‘Andy, where are you?’
And the thing that was not Andy turned and said, ‘I’m here, Mum,’ and his multiple reflections turned too, and he was one of them.
And the thing that was not Andy walked outside to be swept up in his mother’s arms, and he was in the mirror now.
2
The thing that was not Andy – or the Andy that was not him, for it was a him more than it was a thing, it had a definite himness to it – didn’t seem that interested in Burleigh’s Amazing Hall of Mirrors or in the carnival in general. When his mother asked him what he was doing in there, he said simply, ‘walking’, ‘looking’.
‘We thought we’d lost you,’ she said, not realising the truth behind her words. Because she had lost him, for ever. Or for ever and a day, as they say in fairy tales, of which this could well be one.
‘We searched for hours, we almost called the police.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but it takes time to get your head around that mirror-maze. It goes on for ever.’
And his mother clutched his hand and walked him through the muddy ground of the carnival stalls to the small circus tent where his father was waiting.
The queue had diminished outside the canvas entrance for the one last performance. A clown stood there with a painted smiling face in the fading light with a plastic money bucket in his hand. ‘Thank God,’ said his father and the boy that was not Andy could tell that for a moment he had believed in God, had said a confused prayer after his son had gone missing. The boy that was not Andy had a way of knowing things like that, the private thoughts of others that he kept very much to himself.
‘He got lost,’ his mother said, ‘in the mirror-maze. Because he—’ And here she turned to him once more, ‘how did you put it, Andy?’
‘I said that mirror-maze goes on for ever.’
‘Yes, that’s what he said,’ she said.
And his father smiled at him, puzzled, and relieved. The reason for his relief was obvious, since the boy that was not his son looked like his son in every possible detail. But his puzzlement came from the strange lack of colour in his returned son’s speech. From the phrase ‘goes on for ever’. But he was growing up, he imagined, and would be well able to look after himself soon.
He bent down to his returned son and tousled his head and asked him had he had enough of the carnival by now.
The boy that was not Andy nodded and said, ‘Yes, I have.’
And again the father noted the strange colourless inflection of his speech. As if his words were water that had been fed through a filter of some kind. And the filter had drained out all of the minerals.
He said there was time for one last visit to the circus.
And the father saw a sudden flash of panic in the boy’s eyes.
He remembered how he himself, as a child, had been terrified of clowns.
He saw the clown raise a battery-powered megaphone to his painted lips and appeal to the departing crowds.
‘Your very last chance – to see Lydia on the high wire—’
The crackling tones of the amplified voice echoed round the darkening stalls.
But the boy didn’t seem to want to see Lydia, whoever she may have been, on the high wire.
‘To see Paganina play the violin with her feet—’
Nor did he want to see Paganina playing the violin with her feet.
‘Enough of the carnival?’ his father asked.
And the boy that was not Andy nodded. He had had his fill of carnivals and circuses, for a long, long time.
3
The boy that had once been Andy was not so much stuck in the mirror-maze as confined to the glass. It was a strange feeling. His hands with those tiny silvery cracks all over them, his face – and he could see his face – in the mirror opposite, repeated endlessly, growing smaller and smaller as it retreated towards infinity. He found he could move, in a gliding motion, to the left and the right, up and down, and the infinity of him moved with him, whenever he did. He wished the music hadn’t stopped then because there was a
kind of music to the repetitions of himself, like an echo or that strange tremor certain opera singers added to their voices, as if to give their voice more of a listenable quality. It had always annoyed him, that tremor, when his father listened to classical music in the car. His father always hated the music he listened to, in his room or on his headphones, and he knew better than to fiddle with the car radio to find the stations that played it. The car was the zone for tremorous voices with orchestras behind them and now he himself had become something like that tremor. That silvery up and down, as if an old-fashioned needle was trembling on a piece of vinyl. Then he remembered the word for it. Vibrato.
But he wasn’t even a vibrato, he realised, looking at himself in the mirror opposite. He had no sound. When he opened his mouth to shout ‘help’, no words came out. He was a reflection. And the thing that reflected him had walked out with his mother some time ago now. He could see the light was darkening outside and noticed for the first time the strip lights that were hidden in the upper corners of the mirror-maze. This new light gave his reflected face an unreal, pasty quality; like a ghost, actually. And he wondered had he actually become that, a ghost. And for the first time, he felt real terror.
He could see the looped bulbs of the carnival outside reflected in the distant corners of the mirror-maze and realised it would soon be night. There were fewer and fewer people wandering through the carnival ways now. He wanted to cry out, long and hard, but he knew now that he couldn’t, that if he did, nobody would hear. He wanted to smash his fingers through the mirrored glass, but he couldn’t, since his hands were themselves part of this strange mirror thing. He could punch outwards, and saw the multiple reflections of himself punching outwards too, but it was as if the thing he reflected was punching towards him and he was reflecting it, confined to the mirror, but the thing that had reflected him was gone.
He tried crying then. He squished his face up like a lemon and thought of the bitter taste of the lemon and felt a tear gather in his left eyelid. And he opened his eyes then, to see the tear fall, and he was amazed at the result.
