Carnivalesque

by Neil Jordan

  She watched them run, like a gaggle of boys again, along the cement path past the privet hedges, and out of sight. He quickened his pace, to keep up with them.

  What was this about rats? And she heard the groan of a great earthmover, and found herself following.

  Down the pathway, to the right by the creaking gate. He seemed to be the son she had known again, running with the bunch of them. There was another posse of kids coming up from the sea road. And from the end of the football pitch she saw the top of a huge, gnarled beech tree quiver and tumble out of sight.

  She walked past the bus stop, down the slope past the other bungalows that she knew so well, each not too dissimilar to her own. There was a fresh wind blowing, and the distant caps of white showed on the horizon. She hardly noticed them today, though, since the groan of unseen machinery and a slight trembling in the earth – she had crossed from the bungalows to the grassy edge of the pitch – seemed to herald what was the event, as yet out of sight. She followed the smudged white line, the crushed cider bottles lying in the longer grass, and only when she reached the sagging goalpost could she see what all of the excitement was about.

  The tangled slope of undergrowth and ancient trees was being cleared. One huge beech tree was down, and the others would soon follow. There was an immense earthmover, with metal cables running from it to the next tree trunk, on the slope. A man with a high-vis jacket and a yellow hard hat was clambering down to the base, spikes on his reinforced boots. He stood back and gave the earthmover the all-clear. The rusted chimney belched smoke, the tracks churned up the ground beneath them and the beast moved. The trunk began to give way, not in a regular curve, she noticed, but in jerked stages, like the quantum leaps the teacher had mentioned. Eventually the huge beech tree fell and was dragged towards its companion, on the safe, flatter ground. It wrenched its huge roots from the earth and from the dark wound left behind came the surge of rats.

  There must have been hundreds of them. A seething mass that could have been grasshoppers from her high vantage point. She had to suppress a wave of nausea. They seemed to foam from the jagged hole like maggots leaving a cadaver. But there was no doubting what they were, as the adolescents all around reverted back to unruly, childhood, chasing them with sticks, broken pieces of branch, concrete blocks, held aloft, ready to crush the squirming rodents below. And among them was Andy, who seemed just like a boy again.

  12

  A woman stood watching in the triangle of blazing light by the entrance, as Dany slowed the circumference of his twirling rope to something near zero and as Mona began her feather-like descent. As the trumpeter, whose name was Piertro (his name had once been Pierrot – appropriate, given his spotted costume and his conical hat – but names tended to get mangled in carnieland), pressed soundlessly on the valves of his trumpet, still shaking the last drops from the mouth. This woman smiled wistfully at the spectacle of Mona floating down, as if on gossamer wings, almost into the arms of the puckish figure that stood waiting below. The rope joined them, an umbilical cord in everything but name, and Virginie felt a pang, of longing and remembrance. She had done her share of snatching in her time, but many decades ago, when children were mostly unwanted and much more numerous than now. In fact some of her swains inhabited the carnival and one of them, Cederick, kept jealous and watchful suzerainty over the ghost train, a stance more understandable when one considered the fact that several of his siblings resided inside. But that was a long time ago and memory had done its thing. If she took her seat on one of the ghost-train rides, Cederick would barely return her glance, and once inside, in the enveloping darkness, when the wraiths of the apparently dead ones loomed forward to terrify, to chill, to amaze, she recognised faces she had touched with an affection that surprised her, many, many years ago. But there was little of that now; time had done its blundering work and what it didn’t do to hands and faces, it did to memories, and memories of memories.

  And she was experiencing just that now, a memory of a memory. She saw the boy hold out a quite unnecessary hand to aid Mona back on to the solid ground of the sawdust floor. She was on a ship, more like a floating city, remembering a boy she had left on the crushed grass of a Kerry fairground. She had left him, knowing the time for fairgrounds was almost over, for summer races by the strand at Inch, for the tick-tack men and would you grace my palm with silver, sir. With a variety troupe, on the Cunard Line, more burlesque than variety if Auberon Smythe had his way, the actor-manager who had enticed her from the booth at the Listowel Races with promises of a season on a place called Broadway. She last saw him at New York Harbour disembarking with the first-class passengers while she was bundled with the rest of steerage on a barge bound for Ellis Island. She had never been as close to human bodies as then, their gaseous odours, their tooth-rotted breath, their phlegmy coughs and open sores. She received a swift and singularly clean bill of health, and on the ferry to Manhattan, as she saw the towers of the city pitching towards her, she was filled then with a longing she had never experienced before; a longing for a home she never knew she had had, and a longing for that boy, almost grown enough to be inducted, that she had left on the Waterville shore. If she had a heart, she remembered thinking, it would have broken then.

  Then, and maybe now. She saw his hand grip Mona’s, she saw Mona’s arched feet touch the sawdust floor in their black spangled pumps; she saw that moment of gladness, of pride, even, with which he greeted her, pride in a job apparently well done.

  She clapped. Two small, unblemished hands striking off each other. The sound echoed round the voluminous tent. She saw Mona turn and curtsy, gesturing at her charge to do the same. ‘Then, the bow,’ she said.

  ‘The what?’ He knew what she meant, but the repetitions were becoming a matter of rote.

  ‘The nod, the bob, the curtsy, the hand salaam—’

  Mona gestured, her right hand tracing invisible arcs in the air.

  ‘Why?’ he asked.

  ‘Because,’ said Mona, ‘the applause will be thunderous. And as my hauler, you’re part of the show. Am I right, Virginie?’

  ‘Mona’s right,’ said Virginie, walking forwards. ‘And you should let him know there’s no why, there is no because, there is just the show and he’s part of it now.’

  And he turned towards her, inclined his head towards the sawdusty floor, traced an invisible coil with his boyish hand, as if he had been doing the same all of his boyish life.

  How many mothers could a boy have? Virginie wondered. But she already knew the answer. Mona would keep this one bound to her like a newborn kangaroo; if she had a marsupial pouch she would have kept him in it. The best she, Virginie, could hope for was the privilege of sisterhood. So she wound one arm around Mona’s as they left the inside for the bright outside air, as if she had always been a soul sister to Mona, and an aunt of kinds to him. He had parents, she assumed, but if he was missing them it was yet to show. And when the time came that he missed them, she could put her sisterly virtues and her auntish instincts to work.

  ‘Have I met you before?’ the boy asked, as they threaded their way through the fairground caravans.

  ‘Virginie,’ said Mona, a little unwillingly, since she already sensed the incipient rivalry for his affections. ‘She’s an equilibrist, of some note and fame.’

  And Virginie was that, and more. She could balance many things; she could balance decades in her posture and continents in her soul. Like Mona, she could defy the laws of gravity and, like Mona, she had long managed to keep it secret.

  They negotiated the warren of stalls and tents through which the trickle of punters was already beginning to stroll. They moved from the waste ground of the carnival on to the promenade, where the salty wind began to whip their faces, and on the way, almost without him noticing it, Virginie had managed to change places. Her arm threaded through his arm now, whereas before it had linked Mona’s. So he walked with two girlish women on either side of him, through the promenade crowds. There was an unmistaka
ble aura to them, he felt, something eastern, something old, something gypsy, as if all three of them had stepped out of the pages of Arabian Nights. He saw another boy walk towards them, hand in his mother’s dowdy pocket, turn his head backwards until his mother chucked him onwards, muttering, ‘Leave them be, they’re carnies.’ He felt a flush of strange pride, to have become so noticeable all of a sudden. And then he remembered it wasn’t sudden at all; it had been two days at least since he’d walked into Burleigh’s Hall of Mirrors. He realised he hadn’t eaten and as he realised that he got the whiff of chips and saw a fish and chip stall up ahead, with an ice-cream vendor beside it. He had no coins in his pocket and to ask either of them would have seemed indelicate, but as he passed it he couldn’t help looking back.

  ‘Either he’s hungry,’ Virginie said, ‘or he misses his carnival already.’

  Was it already his carnival? the boy wondered. But she was right about one thing: he was hungry. And he was more than thankful when Mona turned, drew their small threesome back to the chip stall. More of a van, really, with the car that drew it missing, with the axle perched on a stack of breezeblocks. They bought him chips, and a fresh cod and batter, and when they raised their eyebrows at the ice-cream vendor adjacent, he shook his head. He had his hands full as it was. They sat then, on the concrete parapet, and watched the silhouetted figures of the strollers passing by.

  So Dany ate, staring at Virginie’s small, pixie face, with the brown hair falling in old-fashioned ringlets round her cheeks. As the chips and battered cod did their work on his hunger, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he had seen her before.

  The truth was that he had, he had seen her before, many times and always on a television screen. His father’s favourite Sunday-afternoon indulgence, old reruns of black-and-white movies on the Turner channel. The small tramp, with his twirling stick and his bowler hat, the pitiful waif on the pavement, the look of wonder and longing, the pratfalls then, the car and constabulary chases, all designed to keep them apart and eventually bring them together. The waif had Virginie’s pale face and brown ringlets. Because, for a time, Virginie was her, and she was Virginie.

  Mona watched him watching her and knew the feeling. They were a watchful bunch, these carnies, they had to be. And Mona remembered her own reacquaintance with Virginie, in one of the new-fangled theatres in the old St Louis, where she saw the staggering clown with his bandy legs and his twirling stick and his lovestruck gaze for the blind girl at the busy street corner, and, like the boy now, she recognised Virginie. The same pale face, the same twists of hair nudging the cheekbones, the hand in which she had once read no future, begging for spare change.

  But that was many years ago, in another country. Another continent, indeed, divided from this one by the ocean she had first crossed in a coffin ship. She would journey over it many times, always in different guises; indeed she would become a fixture on Atlantic crossings, performing in the floating theatres of first-class decks of the White Star Line. But she would never forget the first.

  Mona had memories, too many memories, a whole cacophony of them, that in the carnie way she did her best to forget. At times she felt like the keeper of a whole genealogy of memories stretching back to the Land of Spices itself. But that was impossible because Mona herself had been snatched, at a time when snatching was not yet an issue, when children were so plentiful they were given away. Could she remember Keem Strand, seventeen of them packed into a limestone hovel with a straw roof? Hardly. All she could remember was the feeling of loss, when the caravan packed and trundled on its journey to God knows where. And the feeling of relief, of pure, unadulterated joy, when a shawl wrapped round her, when the dark hands lifted her into their painted, shuttered carts. And that joy became confused, over her subsequent carnie decades, with the original memories of the Land of Spices. A girl, wrapped in a cocoon of dreams, rocked back and forwards by the carnival horses. But like most carnies, she did her best to keep memory at bay. Memory was treacherous; it was a shapeshifter, and to be entertained by it would be to admit that she herself had lived so long and to admit in turn the Fatigue, which as a carnie it was her duty to keep at bay. But she could never forget that first crossing.

  The Hunger had scattered the carnies like chaff, though they weren’t called carnies then. It had scattered the people too, into ditches and byways until those that didn’t die in bogs with the paste of green grass on their mouths, or get work on the Meitheal, creating roads that went nowhere through the selfsame bog, crowded on to the coffin ships. They brought with them their pitiful rags, their starving bairns and their native beliefs, which they clung to like sacred talismans, so the carnies, naturally, clung to them. It was a strange kind of clinging. There were no eggs to be despoiled, no milk to be soured, nothing of the land they had left but the fevered imaginings of their hosts, so they survived, barely, kept alive by the bible of superstitions they brought to the unbelieving shore. Mona’s coffin ship lived up to its name. It literally became that, a coffin, after the deck hands that consigned the skeletal bodies to the waves came down with scurvy, dysentery, a whole host of diseases that she had known, in earlier times, simply as ‘the flux’. So it was a lifeless ship that drifted into New Haven Harbour in late September of the year of Our Lord 1847. The ship was isolated, quarantined, and Mona slipped ashore before it was scuttled and its melancholy load consigned to the deep.

  She found herself wandering those cold New Haven streets among wave after wave of immigrants, from corners of the world she had barely known existed. But they all had one thing in common: they abandoned the old and embraced what they thought was the new. She could have died from lack of belief, the absence of a superstitious cloak to coat herself in, but like those new-minted humans, she found new ways to survive.

  A stint in a vaudeville theatre, where she had to keep her airborne possibilities in check; several long winters in an uptown brothel, until, like most of her kind, she found her most comfortable hiding place in a travelling sideshow. She endured the gaze of random city folk, looking for freaks and wonders. She befriended gigantic furred ladies, perfect miniature families, and when the travel west became inevitable, the sideshow travelled too, among that vast movement of humanity. There was always the need, she found, for a pirouette, a cartwheel, a backflip, on the windy corner of whatever half-built western town. San Francisco, when she reached it, was in one of its boomtown phases, and she spent most of that boom in a mirrored honky-tonk, as the city around it grew, sucking in money like yeast. She tired of the tinkling piano and the clutching hands and the clanging cash register and drifted southwards, telling fortunes in a carnival booth, into which one day walked Virginie.

  Something about the voice in the darkness made her spine tingle, told her she had met another of her own. But she couldn’t be sure, so she rattled through the normal rigmarole, a man was waiting, a child would come, when the question seemed to leap out of her painted lips. ‘Why have your future told when you know it already?’

  ‘What do I know?’ the breathy voice asked back, and Mona elaborated. ‘You know already what I’ll tell you, time goes on, the years pass away, but for you, nothing changes.’

  And Mona felt her own palm turned in the darkened booth and heard the voice she would come to treasure tell her, ‘I could say the same for you.’

  ‘Don’t cross my hand with silver, then. Buy me a drink.’

  So they repaired to the one bar in that one-horse town in the corn-filled wilderness that would some day be a dust-bowl. They drank sharp rye whiskey, two young women who drew glances but knew well how to buffer them. Two carnies, with silk stockings, blocked heels and coloured skirts that revealed too much of their always- adolescent legs.

  Virginie was her name, and she was headed for the flatlands of Los Angeles.

  ‘Whatever for?’ Mona asked, and felt the Irish cadence immediately flooding back. ‘This new-fangled thing,’ her new acquaintance said, ‘making carnivals and sideshows history. The cinematograph
.’

  Mona had already noticed them. The flickering shimmer in the darkened tent, the crowds lining up outside while the bearded lady sat alone and unnoticed. She was getting used to change, redundancy, being cast aside like an out-of-fashion coat.

  They parted ways that night, and while Mona knew their paths would cross again, she could never have imagined how.

  She was in St Louis, in a sideshow amongst the decaying skeleton of what was once the World’s Fair. There was a theatre across the way, showing the early two-reelers. A life-size poster of a tramp, with a half-bent cane and an odd top hat. She paid her twenty cents and walked inside.

  The theatre was empty that afternoon. She sat alone, with the fake Egyptian pillars all around her, and watched the antics on the screen and only paused her laughter when she saw Virginie, in black and white and ten times larger than life.

  She remembered the feeling, as odd, as distant and yet as intense as the feeling the boy must have now. He sat on the promenade parapet, the last piece of battered cod held to his lips, still staring at her. Virginie caught his glance, finally, and acknowledged it, with an intimate smile. Take your time, that smile said, it will come to you. And you have all the time in the world.

  The truth was that Virginie enjoyed her time with the Little Tramp and Arclight Pictures. She would work all day and vault back in over the lot perimeter at night. She’d make her bed in the rigging way above the stages, to be woken in the morning by the rattle of chains, the strange whine of the arclights as they came up to heat. It had the added advantage of always making her on time, for if there was one thing the Little Tramp insisted on, it was punctuality. She made the imagined world her real one and wandered the backlots at night, finding herself now in an ancient Egyptian city, in an Elizabethan dungeon, then in a fairy-tale castle, all turrets and portcullises and elaborate ascending staircases that went nowhere in particular. She had found a home of kinds, like her carnival home but with its own predicaments, too. And the predicaments were these: the Little Tramp, first of all, and his insatiable need to bed any female that came within his range of vision. She would hear the sounds of his passionate engagements in the make-up trailer, in the vast office he had made his own, in the barn of the Ruritanian village with its quaking geese and mooing cows, everywhere in fact, except on the stages where he twirled his comical cane and photographed his gags. She knew that his wet brown eyes would one day fall on her and prepared herself. The space between her legs had almost forgotten what penetration was, so long had it been. But with the help of a lubricant, and an oratorio of delighted sighs, she managed the experience when his eyes did make their landing. The small moustache was wet around her lips, the baggy pants crumpled round his ankles, the event itself happened on his overflowing desk soon after lunchtime, and his postprandial bowl of fruit was trodden to a pulp by his patent-leather shoes. Ah, he muttered, my dear, in that voice, mellowed by the streets of east London, which his public would never hear. Because with the arrival of sound, his career ground to its inevitable halt.