Carnivalesque

by Neil Jordan

  They were home within a half-hour. The small house, overlooking the dark park. The railings, the razor wire around the football field and the gleam of empty Coke and beer cans on the grass. He had walked that grass with Andy many times, before it was a football field, when it was a forest of small saplings, before the mechanical diggers came to raze them. They had hoped the football field would work its magic on the neighbourhood, but the grass grew quickly overgrown and became mostly a home for late-night cider parties.

  There was the glint of a sputtering fire behind the razor wire, the sound of tinny music and laughing, adolescent voices. Andy was always a good boy, his father thought, as he swung the car between the gateposts, into the garden with the overflowing privet hedge, had kept himself to himself and had let those cider parties keep their distance. And he hoped that that at least wouldn’t change, what with this new thing between them both and this strange tension in the air.

  What was it?

  He couldn’t put his finger on it, as he turned off the ignition and listened to the car whirr itself into silence.

  ‘Shall we go in, love?’ he asked her.

  He used the word more in hope than in expectation. And she smiled briefly, as if grateful for the gesture.

  The house was dark when they entered it. All houses are dark, of course, before the lights are turned on, but this house, this sweet little bungalow with the single stairs up to the dormer bedroom, had grown a particular kind of darkness around it that was accentuated – or thickened, in a way – by the new Andy’s entrance. It hung around the walls like an invisible cloak and wasn’t at all dispelled by the lights coming on.

  Eileen – for that was the mother’s name, and Jim was the father’s – recognised this darkness with the immediacy of caught breath. And she knew it had grown, in their absence, had thickened with Andy’s entrance. And she didn’t want to explore why. So her breath grew softer, her slight asthmatic sough became more prominent, as if there was a small bird dying inside her.

  ‘Tea,’ she said, as if the small household chores would put everything back to right. ‘I can make a Welsh rarebit with some coleslaw.’

  She moved through the hallway towards the small, dim kitchen.

  ‘Would we all like that?’

  ‘Yes, Mother,’ Andy replied. And Jim nodded, as he divested himself of his coat.

  ‘Dear me,’ she said, ‘how we’re growing up. It’s Mammy no longer?’

  ‘I suppose that makes me Father,’ Jim said. ‘Not Dad?’

  And the boy repeated the word softly to himself, as if it was the first time he had heard it.

  Father.

  They had tried hard for a child, she remembered, as she placed the bread inside the yellow toaster, too hard maybe. And when Andy had finally arrived it had seemed like the end of one thing, and the beginning of something else. The end of early-morning thermometers, visits to the clinic on the other side of town, all of that ovarian-stimulation business, egg retrieval, test tubes, et cetera et cetera. She had always wondered how she had become surrounded by Latin terms, in vitro, in utero, et cetera et cetera, and so Jim greeted the news of her pregnancy as if it was a miracle, a miraculous delivery from an arduous clinical process, and what she had never shared with him was the fact that it actually was. A miracle. An intrusion of something else on the here and now.

  The miracle had been foretold, though, somehow prophesied, by some odd, eccentric John the Baptist, who seemed to be preparing the way. A man with a shabby suit and a shapeless beret had knocked on the door one bleak afternoon, a travelling salesman, not too unlike her husband, though she hoped Jim would never have to stoop so low as to go house to house. This man was selling what she would have called geegaws, which was as good a word as any for the useless object he presented to her on her doorstep, just as the fumes of the number 30 were seeping through the privet hedge. The bus shuddered, out of sight, its engine still ticking despite the fact that it would be parked there for ten minutes at least, and she resolved one more time to write a letter to the bus company, about the waste of fuel, the pollution of diesel fumes, and most annoying, the noise; the noise of the Bombardier engine, which almost drowned out the salesman’s patter, as he pulled a succession of scarves and mirrors from his sad cardboard case. Why he imagined she wanted mirrors, she had no idea – hand mirrors, small heart- and wing-shaped ones that could have hung on a bathroom wall – and she realised, with an odd sense of revulsion, that the scarves were decorated with mirrors too, tiny ones, like perfectly broken bits of mirrored glass. And she felt guilt, then, because of the strength of her feeling of revulsion, and told him softly that she had no need of them, gently, as the bus began to move down towards the seaside road.

  But he was saying something now that she couldn’t quite hear. The bus ground its gears as it rounded the corner, redoubled its acceleration into an enormous bellow or whine. There was disappointment in his voice, she knew that, although she couldn’t hear what he was saying, and a rather furtive, pleading quality to his eyes, and she distinguished one word, above the departing bus’s whine: the word ‘futures’.

  ‘Futures?’ she asked. ‘Of course. You don’t only sell useless knick-knacks and geegaws, you tell—’

  ‘Fortunes. Only in certain, and very specific, cases.’

  ‘And I am, no doubt, one of those?’

  ‘Each of us is specific, Madame. You, however, are more specific than most.’

  And I would bet you say that to all the ladies, she thought. But what she said was different.

  ‘There’s a housewife in every bungalow behind me. And I’m sure you’ll find one more . . . specific . . . than me.’

  It was an odd word, that ‘specific’. But it seemed at one with his face, which was neither pale nor dark, but had a decided foreign quality to it. ‘I most seriously doubt it, Madame.’

  And yet there was an English tint to his words, something that said ‘pool’ to her: Liverpool, Hartlepool, Blackpool. And she began thinking about the word ‘pool’, then, and it rippled backwards and forwards uselessly in her mind, like a pool itself, and before she knew it, and she would never quite know why, she was inviting him inside.

  She led him towards a seat by the empty fireplace, since she never bothered lighting it until her husband was half an hour away from home. And the salesman placed his cardboard case upon the floor, opened it and from underneath the plethora of mirrored scarves took a perfectly round glass ball, like ones she used to find as a young girl, on a sandy or a stony beach, next to the drying frames on which fishing nets hung.

  ‘Madame,’ he said, ‘is missing something.’

  Indeed Madame was, she thought, as she watched his short, stubby fingers ripple over the glass ball, with a deftness and agility that surprised her. Madame was missing many things.

  ‘But if I can be more specific, Madame is missing something specific.’

  That word again.

  She could sense his eyes flitting over the walls, registering the decorations hung there, and thought to herself, indeed, he is perceptive, would there be a madame in this small cul-de-sac who wasn’t missing something? And when the next statement came, although she could have anticipated it, nevertheless it struck her like a hammer from an invisible hanging cloud above.

  ‘Madame is missing, and has a longing for, a child.’

  Now, anyone could have told, she remembered thinking, from the absence of childhood things in this room, that a child had been discussed, considered, imagined, if not quite longed for. ‘A child,’ she repeated uselessly.

  ‘And Madame will be blessed, soon and quite unexpectedly,’ Burleigh said. For it was Burleigh, into whose Hall of Mirrors her child would one day wander; Burleigh, who had been expelled from his carnie heaven for infractions too numerous to enumerate or count. Burleigh, whose shoulders were bowed with a sense of impending doom that kept him wandering; Burleigh, whose beret concealed a balding pate and a fringe of uncut hair beneath it. Burleigh, who could see far
more in his orb of glass than he would ever reveal to her. For luck had finally returned to Burleigh’s luckless days; he had happened, in the strange small bungalow surrounded by privet hedges, on the unexpected surrogate, the vessel that would churn the past into a future that he had feared would never arrive.

  ‘There is a wood,’ he said, ‘that you knew in your childhood days. And you will see that wood again, before you are blessed with child.’

  And the term ‘blessed with child’ somehow unnerved her. It had biblical connotation, it was old and gnarly, it was itself a tangled wood.

  She stood, suddenly and spikily. She reached for her purse.

  ‘You’re a charlatan,’ she said. ‘And you want money, am I right?’

  ‘Money is beside the point,’ Burleigh said, although he was perilously low in funds.

  ‘So I shall have a child, then?’

  ‘And soon,’ said Burleigh, ‘in a way most unexpected.’

  ‘I’m attending a clinic,’ she said, and at that moment took the brochure from the Auberge Fertility Clinic from the mantelpiece, ‘as I have no doubt you’ve already noticed.’

  ‘Whether I noticed or not, Madame, is irrelevant,’ Burleigh continued. ‘The fact is that your efforts will be blessed with fruition, all of the chickens will come home to roost, you will hit the bull’s-eye, the oranges and lemons will fall into line, you will hit the jackpot.’

  ‘As in a slot machine?’

  ‘Or a carnival. The great slot machine that governs your future is all gearing up to—’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said then, standing, burrowing in her purse for whatever coins she could find. This talk of carnivals and conception was suddenly distasteful to her. She shivered, and had the odd, foreboding sense that this man knew more than he was admitting to. She wanted him gone, suddenly, and wanted to pay him to be under no obligation. She found a pound coin, and placed it on his cardboard case, beside the glass ball, which enlarged it and bent it, in reflection.

  ‘Don’t insult me, Madame—’ Burleigh began, although he knew her name, Eileen, and could have used it. He had seen many things about her, in his small orb of bubbled glass.

  ‘You want more?’ she asked, and tried to find incredulity in her tone. She didn’t know what he wanted, but would have paid him twice as much to get rid of him now.

  ‘I want thanks, maybe,’ Burleigh said, sadly. But his hands closed around the coin. Because he could make use of it, his needs were many and his purse was almost empty, always.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, and made sure she walked behind him towards the door. This man could steal things, things she hardly knew were there.

  ‘The bus?’ he asked, with a kind of dignified forlornness. And another great hulk was belching there, she saw, behind the privet hedge.

  ‘It leaves every fifteen minutes,’ she said, ‘for town.’

  ‘For town,’ he repeated, and walked directly towards it, his gabardine coat billowing and his cardboard case swinging by his side.

  He didn’t once look back.

  7

  The Auberge Fertility Clinic was some forty minutes to the far north of the ever-expanding city.

  She had grown exhausted by the thought of eggs and ovaries and had lately discontinued her visits there. But the odd travelling salesman with his ludicrously transparent predictions somehow renewed her interest. She was between jobs then, with too much time on her hands. So she called once more to make one more appointment and was told they could fit her in on 22 June. And on the way there she had grown once more exhausted by the thought of eggs and ovaries and in vitro and all of those Latinate terms and had fallen asleep on the train. She woke in a panic then, seeing clear bright sea outside where there should have been the manicured gardens of the new industrial estate. She saw the old fencing of an approaching station against the blue-green sea, neglected and bleached of all of its paint, sagging in places. Then she saw the small wooden house above the platform coming towards her, with its quaint, storybook simplicity, and her feelings of panic subsided. Because she recognised it, from her childhood. The blue and white eaves of the station roof, each with its tiny droplet of water. It must have rained, she realised, while she slept. There were pools of water along the old-fashioned platform. They would holiday here, each summer, in a time that seemed part of another century now. In fact, she realised, stepping from the train, it was part of another century. They would descend with their cases, bags and boxes to be met by a charabanc, which would transport them to the small wooden bungalow – more of a hut, really – with the corrugated-iron roof amongst the sand dunes, which probably no longer existed.

  She stepped from the train now, as she had done then, full of excitement and mystery and a queasy sense of expectation in her stomach. She saw from the digital display that the next train back was due in an hour, so she decided to take a walk.

  By the sandy path along the tracks at first, which ran along a slight rise above the metal-green sea. It had been trodden into hard sand by generations of feet, some of them bare, some of them sandalled, like hers. The path departed from the tracks then and she descended gradually into a lowland landscape, towards a small glistening river threading its gentle curves through unkempt fields. The sandy path gave way to wooden girders that were once railway sleepers, which led her towards a handrailed walkway beneath a bridge, which carried the tracks above her over the river. She crossed that walkway, remembering her footsteps as a child, into the flatlands between the river and the sea.

  There were herons there, picking their way along the mudflats. A kingfisher darted, its blue wings close to the brown muddy waters.

  She remembered every detail from her childhood holidays, but assumed the tiny, tin-roofed cabin her family had shared would have long been destroyed. By wind and rain and tidal erosion. There had been high dunes, where there was now a flat, rocky shore. She saw a copse of trees then, among the lowland fields and a ruined monastery or farmhouse, and remembered with a shiver the stories told about it. The Taw Wood, they had called it, inhabited by Captain Mildew, a figure made out of the furred bark of trees and the strange mushroomy growths around their roots and clad in dead mildewed leaves with moulding twigs for hands and a mouth of old man’s beard. Those mildewed webs that were his would entangle the careless ones; the roots dragged only downwards, towards the toadstool growths beneath. He was a shapeshifter, though, and some of the stories had him in a more forgiving light, a resplendent youth this time, lithe and muscular, naked but for a covering of green moss all over his mysterious skin. Girls would tease each other about him, daring the bravest among them to enter the Taw Wood, lie on the dead leaves and suffer the Captain’s embrace. And when once a local girl fell pregnant, rather than point the finger at a local boy, the rumour grew that Captain Mildew was to blame. She stared at it now, from the mudflats, and wondered at the fact that they had called it a wood at all. It was a thick, unsightly gathering of trees, hedged round by a ruined wall. She remembered the terror she once felt, her friend Daisie May’s hand curling round hers as they approached it, daring each other to enter. A boy had enticed her in there once and once only; Jimmy Banks was his name and he used her terror of the Captain to make sure she clung relentlessly to him, her arms tight around his waist while his hand played with the elastic band of her summer skirt. He drew a kiss from her by a tree with long curling shreds of bark and she could still remember the ecstasy before she broke free and ran back out through the Taw Wood, leapt the wall and only felt safe again when the wet sand of the mudflats curled between her naked toes. She went barefoot the whole summer then.

  And she took her shoes off, an adult now, the young girl just a memory, and felt the sucking damp of the mud between her toes. She made it to the grassy bank by the crumbling wall and entered the dark copse of trees. And once inside there the world seemed to have fallen away; she could have been a young girl again. Nothing had changed. The curling shreds of bark were still hanging from the tree trunks. The overhanging
foliage still worked its dark magic, creating an umbrella of deathly quiet while the breeze from the river soughed outside. She rubbed her shoulder blades against the bark and arced her head back and stared upwards, at the gnarled ascent of the tree trunk that grew ever more slender, like a long uncertain finger, reaching towards the foliage above. The sunlight came through it, in shimmering darts of silver. She saw a bank of moss against an old fallen log. It had an indentation in its crest, as if a hand had scooped out the hard wood hidden by the moss, or as if generations of wanderers, like her, had lain there. She sat down on it, and felt the moss give way beneath her buttocks, like a soft cushion. Then she laid her head back, and imagined her hair, dangling backwards towards the dark grass below, as if she was outside herself, hidden amongst those shaded trees, observing. Where the bee sucks there suck I. In a cowslip’s bell I lie. Were there cowslips around, she wondered, hidden in the thick, lily-like grasses that must never have caught the sunlight? That was a quote she remembered from a school play, and she had played Ariel and the same Jimmy Banks had played Ferdinand and she remembered now the passion with which she had hated his Miranda. Geraldine was her name, Geraldine Dukes, a small, too-well-shaped girl with a much-envied bosom. And it was the same Geraldine, she remembered, that had dared her enter here with the same Jimmy Banks, and as she felt her body now ease into its bed of moss she remembered the childhood wonder of it all, only marred by his incessant attempts to pull at her underthings, attempts that she never quite rebuffed, since the ripple of his uncertain fingers was after all part of the thrill. She must have fallen asleep then, lulled by the gentle winds through the late-spring foliage. And the last thing that ran through her dreamy mind was the word that the strange salesman had repeated: specific. The salesman from Blackpool, Liverpool, Hartlepool, though he didn’t look like he came from any of them.

  When she awoke, everything had changed. It could have been minutes, it could have been an hour later. There was a hard wind ruffling the foliage above her. Her hair was dirty with moss, her head was splitting with an ache and there were goosebumps of cold along her naked arms. She felt all of the terror of childhood and gathered her shoes and ran and only stopped running when she felt the mud squishing once more between her toes.