Carnivalesque

by Neil Jordan

  ‘It’s moved on,’ she said.

  ‘That’s what carnivals do,’ the boy said. ‘They move on.’

  ‘I wonder where?’ she asked him, abstractedly, walking round the muddied field, wondering how he knew so much about carnivals.

  ‘Does it matter?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ she answered, ‘I suppose it doesn’t.’ But she knew inside that it did. It mattered hugely, and she didn’t know why. She felt such a sense of loss, in that crushed field, that she reached out and gripped his hand. She noticed a crane or a heron picking its way through the muddied pools the carnival lorries had left behind. And he pulled his hand away, out of natural embarrassment, and she had to remind herself that he was no longer a child; he had become this thing, this adolescent stranger, and if there was a moment where the change became apparent, that moment had been here.

  ‘Clothes,’ she said, absurdly, ‘you’re growing so fast. We must get you some clothes.’

  ‘In the Roebuck Centre?’

  ‘TK Maxx.’

  So she drove towards the centre, which, for a time, seemed even more elusive than the missing carnival. A gaudy shopping sign led her one way, then a road sign another, and eventually it loomed up before them in the windscreen, so unexpectedly that she almost missed the turn. She drove in hard then, through another barrier into an underground car park with separate caverns painted orange, green, blue and red, and she parked in one of them, took a series of escalators upwards into a gleaming interior and found herself among crowds of adolescents, a little older than him, but in their air of removal, abstraction, in their constant glances at the glowing screens of their telephones, just like him. It was a communal virus, she realised, that came upon beloved children suddenly, removed them from whatever emotional realm they had inhabited, with no hint that they might ever return. So she did what mothers all around her seemed to be doing: she bought him things. A pair of jeans that would accommodate his stretching limbs, a dozen T-shirts with incomprehensible slogans printed on them, a pair of new, gunmetal-grey pyjamas, since his old ones, with the grinning dinosaurs, were part of a vanishing childhood. And afterwards they ate hamburgers in a neon-lit American-style diner, before heading back to the car park, and home.

  She paid her ticket, and realised she had no idea where her car was. And she understood, too late, the significance of the caverns of red, green, orange and blue. One was meant to memorise them, the colour and the number, and she was lost now, in a colour-coded maze.

  He walked away from her without a word. Down a pathway banded with orange, down a small slope, which headed down a curving slope to another level. She watched him go, clutching her purchases, sweating and angry at him, shopping malls, car parks, everything. ‘Andy!’ she shouted, and he replied, ‘Just follow me.’ So she followed, and saw the orange band give way to a band of red, then a band of green, then in another level below, to a band of blue. He stopped by a number, 7,462, and there was her car, behind a concrete post.

  ‘You have to remember these things,’ he said, ‘Mother.’

  ‘Of course,’ she said, wondering how he did. ‘I do, and I will.’ She drove out again, hearing her tyres squeal on the rubberised surface of the car park. She knew she should be thankful, that one of them remembered. But once again, she missed the term ‘Mum’.

  ‘Burleigh,’ the boy said, at dinner that night. Jim had cooked it, coming home earlier than both of them.

  ‘Burleigh who?’ Jim asked, his mouth half-full of spaghetti.

  ‘Burleigh’s Amazing Hall of Mirrors,’ the boy said, and forked some bolognaise sauce on to his pasta.

  ‘We went back to the carnival,’ Eileen told him.

  ‘To look for your—’

  ‘But it was gone,’ Eileen interrupted.

  ‘That’s what carnivals do,’ the boy said. ‘They move on.’

  ‘So we went to the Roebuck Centre, instead.’

  ‘Ah,’ her husband murmured. ‘Where we were headed, the first day.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I bought him jeans and T-shirts and—’

  ‘We got lost in the car park,’ the boy said.

  ‘And if it wasn’t for you, we’d still be there . . .’

  The boy stood later in his darkened room. He could hear voices from his small room above. He knew the voices were discussing him. He knew it was true. If it wasn’t for him, they would still be there. Wandering through the car park, looking for a lost Cortina. Or locked into a giant carnival arm, in some endless gravitationless swing. The only light came from a streetlamp through the soft window curtains, from a lamppost across the L-shaped garden beyond. There was a threadbare rope tied to a leafless tree, a rickety bird hut on a pole and the ochre-coloured roof of another bungalow beyond the privet hedge. How alone he felt, how estranged from everything that should have made him feel at home. A vast turbulence inside of him, the turbulence of waves, slapping off against each other, reflecting each other’s ceaseless movement, in broken infinite shards that never seemed to settle into a circle or a curve, that peaked and troughed and went on forever. He was Burleigh’s triumph, Burleigh’s creation, even, and was made of stuff that even he, when he would come into his full and awful glory, could never have imagined: the Rotterdam gold that gleamed somewhere within him, that enabled that dreadful and final separation of reflector from reflected. He was someone else, he felt, as he brushed something with his toe from the carpet beneath him and recognised the remnants of mud and rat shit from some nights before. He stepped out of his clothes, pulled on his new pyjamas and dropped his old clothes on his reflector’s old pyjamas, and the dinosaurs grinned up at him, reflecting some childish world that he should have known. He felt a shiver, and wondered did others of his age feel like that. As if they were someone else, someone they didn’t know; they were growing towards a shape, a definition of themselves that they would only recognise when they met it, in some distant future. And the future is always distant, he realised; tomorrow morning could well be a tomorrow two years hence, since neither of them had yet arrived. But one thing he did know. There was something out there that he would recognise when he finally met it. Some shape, some destiny, some avatar that would be familiar, instantly knowable as his own. But for the moment, he was this thing, whatever it was. This boy, and his name was Andy.

  He pulled the curtains over the streetlights, crawled into bed and tried to lose himself in someone else’s dreams.

  He dreamt of his thumb, severed. It was severed very neatly, with very little evidence of blood, and as to who had severed it, he had no idea. But he dreamt he woke, then, in that bungalow, which seemed stranger than ever to him in his dream, and walked from his bedroom to the living room where the gauze curtains looked out on the front garden with the privet hedge and the bus stop, the streetlamp beside it surrounded by a penumbra of mist that seemed absent from the street below. The streetlamp alone gave evidence of the mist that he knew cast its pall over everything: the football pitch beyond, the ancient beech trees (they were still there) beyond the far goalpost, the cherry tree in the garden with its circle of absent lawn around it. Everything was absence, he knew, and only the mist gave the illusion of presence. He also knew that the cherry tree that had been planted on the day of his, or someone’s, birth, would one day lie on that lawn severed, like his severed thumb. He saw his bloodied father, the loose skin clinging to his face like some badly made Frankenstein’s monster, digging methodically where the cherry-tree roots once were. There was another father inside his father, a far more urgent, primal one that had coated himself in his father’s bloodied pelt like an otherworldly breath that needed a human skin. The mouth opened as if it had just learned speech and the whole of human history was compressed into the words that came out. But there was a dissonance behind the words that thrilled the boy’s soul. It was an echo from an infinite well. It was a sonic boom, across time. And there was a screech of tyres then and his mother was backing the Cortina towards them both. He reached out with his hand
and lost his thumb in the knuckle of the rear-view mirror. And he was looking at his thumbless hand now, wondering where the pain should be.

  And he wondered then, had he ever truly woken up?

  18

  Dany made his debut on 14 September 2016, or on carnie day 347,683, year 166. But to call it a debut is to imply a glamour that was hardly there, given that the audience consisted of fourteen random families and a raucous party of seven-year-olds. The carnies didn’t seem to mind. Did carnivals always have circuses attached? he wondered, as he walked through a warren of stalls towards the fluttering pennant of the big top. A circus was one thing, he remembered from what he was already beginning to think of as his distant childhood, and a carnival another. But it made sense, he supposed, given that the carnie personnel could double from one to the other. And as the daytime business of the carnival wound down, the night-time business of the circus wound up, so to speak. He allowed Mona to lead him through the maze of haphazard carnival attractions, the old gabardine coat wrapped round her circus garb. They had dressed him, Mona and Virginie, in a kind of glittering boiler suit, a one-piece that zipped right up to his Adam’s apple. He had cringed with embarrassment at first, until Mona led him back through Burleigh’s Hall of Mirrors and he felt a shiver of déjà vu, entering the mirrored womb where it all began. He saw the long and the short of himself, the squat and the thin, the multiple reflections of himself, and he had to agree with her that it didn’t look bad at all. And a costume was essential, some kind of costume since it was a show, after all, and a glittering boiler suit could well be the best option – much better, he felt, than the body-hugging leotards that the gymnasts wore. They were involved, he saw, as they entered the dark tent with their acrobatics and their tumbles, in quite amazing feats of physical agility and each time they arched their backs to take a bow, he could see the pitiful protuberances between their legs, like ballet dancers in a version of Swan Lake he had seen on television, and he muttered a silent prayer of thanks that he had been spared embarrassment like that. So when his time came, after Alaister the clown had exhausted the peals of laughter he could wring from the children, he didn’t feel too bad at all in his choice of costume. He followed Mona out to a drumroll, was surprised by the glare of a spotlight from above, and, to the sound of Piertro’s mournful trumpet, began the strange business of pulling her to the heavens.

  He pulled and she soared, though at times her upwards trajectory seemed to burn his fingers with the rope. And his hands did feel scalded, as if he was bringing them too close to a secret flame, something that burnt white-hot, with none of the attendant colours flame seemed to need to go about its business – pale orange, red, yellow and that flickering, fluttering blue. No, she was propelled upwards by some mysterious inner heat, the way a fragile piece of ash rose with its own displacement of the air around it and somehow retained the shape of the page or the scrap of paper it had once been. Thoughts like this turbined around his brain as he worked that rope. His mind became a veritable tumble-dryer, one image whirling, cascading downwards and wrapping itself around another thought that had barely begun its flutter towards clarity. All the time her legs, jutting out above him in their fishnet tights, one forming a V at the knee of the other, ascended from things that were thigh-strong and muscular into small, infinitely tender things, far far above him. And at this time he was glad of the bulky boiler suit; those feminine leotards would have given too much of him away. A drumroll then and he began to twirl. The rope bellied outwards into a cone or a gyre, which increased in its circumference the more she twirled above him. He thought of the devil stick again, of a heliotrope, and of a girl that he was in the habit of holding hands with, blowing a dandelion pod. She would blow towards him, he would blow back towards her, and the miniature feathered helicopters that flooded her face would bring a peal of laughter from her cherry-coloured lips. Then the drumroll ended and the rope went slack and he saw that Mona, far above him, had already gripped the trapeze bar and was carving delicate parabolas through the upper air. One of the leotarded ones had gripped another bar by the knees and was swinging towards her, arms outstretched. And Mona released her grip, made three backflips in the air, and gripped those same arms, so that this doubled creature doubled the momentum on the swinging trapeze. And another leotarded one had wrapped his knees around her first trapeze, begun a complementary swinging, and she was soon flipped, from one to the other and back again, like a pass-the-parcel in a birthday game. Would the music stop, he wondered, and would she be left up so far above him, frozen, like a fragile butterfly, pinioned by an invisible pin? Or would she fall to the sawdust down below, suddenly burdened by mass and weight and all of those bothersome Newtonian rules he had once learned about in his physics class? Then he realised, in a panic, that there was no net underneath her. If she did fall, some broken, bloodied thing would end up at his feet. Surely an aerial artiste needed a net? And he was resolving in his tumble-dryer of a brain to bring this issue up with her, when he saw the leotarded catcher farthest from him release her, flinging her towards the other pair of outstretched arms, which missed her own clutching hands, to a desperate gasp from the crowd below. She missed, but seemed unconcerned and continued on her trajectory, through the weightless air, tracing a parabola that seemed to defy gravity entirely, and ended up wrapping herself once more in the rope above him. It curled around her like an enveloping snake. The gasps turned to applause and she bowed her head, and he knew without being told that the display was over and it was his duty to bring her back to earth once more.

  Which he did. The spotlight followed her downwards until it enveloped him as well in its circular glare. She took his hand, made two steps forward and began the business of what she had called the curtsy, the bow, the hand salaam. Which he did too.

  Something changed after his first performance. Something subtle, barely noticeable, but yet something important, permanent and definite. If he was to compare it to something else – and comparisons to other things, he was beginning to realise, were often the only way to understand this carnival, this circus and these carnie folk – he would compare it to the secret understanding that the gang of boys in his cul-de-sac would have about a new arrival on their street. There would be an off-handed refusal to make eye-contact at first, then a ball that was kicked in his direction might one day be kicked back, and the moment would come, during a game of marbles or conkers or McKenzie’s Raiders, when the new one was somehow ‘in’. There would be no discussion about this fact, no secret handshake, just a common understanding that was palpable now amongst them. He felt the same, as the spotlight swung to another segment of the sawdust floor, as a team of jugglers whirled plates, a tea set and an assortment of wicked-looking knives in the air above them, and as Mona took his hand, led him through the darkness of the bleachers and back to the small canvas flap that opened to the night-time carnival outside.

  ‘You did well,’ she said, and then mysteriously added, ‘Maybe you have it in you.’ He felt a small glow of pleasure and gave her hand a sudden squeeze, and she then led him, as if she was a girl of his own age, or barely a year older than him, to the spinning bowl of a candyfloss machine, and asked the white-hatted operator to ‘whirl him up one’. Now candyfloss was child’s stuff to him, and he was certain it must be to her as well. He knew her looks told lies about her age; she was older than him, far older, yet somehow seemed of an age to wait, with delighted anticipation, for a ‘whirl’ of candyfloss. ‘And make it spicy,’ she said, to the white-hatted one, with a familiar wink. The thought of spice seemed odd to him, with its suggestions of pepper and salt; how would spice of any kind go with the whorl of pink sugar that was already assembling itself around the candyfloss stick? And the tumble-dryer took over his thoughts again, staring at the dull-green metal bowl around which the pink candy seemed to be materialising, as if out of nothing. It looked like the beginnings of clouds, like the flecks of pink wool he once found around a briar tree, and surmised it had been left there by a r
ed-branded sheep. It looked like the dyed hair of a girl who wanted to seem to be a teenager, but didn’t quite know how. It looked like the threads of his mother’s pink scarf, hanging from the washing line, blowing in the early-spring wind. And with the thought of his mother, a rush of melancholy flooded him once more; he thought of her, standing here with him, watching the pink cloud assemble itself, impossibly upside down, around the thin lollipop stick held in the meaty hand with the smudged sleeves of a chef’s coat and he knew, somehow, and with terrible certainty, that that could never now be.

  ‘Here we go,’ the flossman said, ‘spicy as requested,’ and Dany took the stick handle and brought the cloud of pink to his mouth and felt the sudden, overwhelming explosion of taste. It was more than taste, it was a whole world of sensation that pushed the thought of his mother to a distant horizon, where she seemed to perch, with her coloured handbag in her hand and her going-out coat blowing softly in the thermal breeze of whatever ocean she had been spun away to. And even though she was distant, barely a speck on that horizon, he could recognise every detail of her: the brown hair blowing in front of her grey eyes, the rather sad, lost smile that played upon her lips. ‘I understand,’ that smile seemed to say, ‘everything is different now,’ and he knew it was different; not only different, all of his feelings of loss and separation were manageable, because, for some mysterious reason, they had to be. Things were as they had to be and his mother sailed off as if she had grown sails that fluttered and billowed in those thermals, and soon she was not even a speck; she was gone, quite gone. Mona was leading him through the circus and carnival stalls towards the promenade, which was quite empty now, apart from night-time couples, most of whom were holding hands, and the others who huddled in the curved cement shelters, wrapped in their overcoats and their embraces.