by Neil Jordan
‘We should walk a little,’ Mona told him. ‘You’ve been through a lot.’
So he walked, relishing the candyfloss. It was gathering round the perimeters of his mouth in a kind of sticky paint, which would make kissing Mona, he realised, quite out of the question. And why the thought of kissing her popped into his head, he had no idea. Maybe it was those shadowed pairs they passed in the cement shelters. Or maybe it was floss itself, with its taste of something unfamiliar, quite at odds with the texture of spun sugar. It was the taste of something old, something that was beyond age, even, something that Mona knew everything about and that he knew nothing.
‘But you’ll learn, soon enough,’ he heard her say and realised, since he was looking at it, trying to catch the fleeting thought of kissing it, that she hadn’t moved her mouth.
‘What will I learn?’ he asked, aloud, since if there was a carnie talent of communicating without opening lips and tonguing syllables, he hadn’t mastered it.
‘Everything,’ she said out loud this time, and he wondered had he imagined the earlier, silent communication.
‘Or not quite everything,’ she continued, ‘since none of us know everything.’
Of course, he realised and didn’t say, since it seemed unnecessary, none of us know everything; knowing everything is impossible and who would want that kind of knowledge anyway?
‘And I don’t mean everything in that sense,’ she continued, just as if he had vocalised that thought. ‘I mean everything about circuses and carnies and the original ones and the Land of Spices and—’
‘The Land of Spices?’ he asked, aloud this time. It was safer to vocalise things, he felt, since it saved him the confusion of trying to work out whether she had read his thoughts or not. He didn’t like the idea of reading thoughts; in fact it made him blush to the roots of something, something way deeper than whatever was going on between his hips. And, besides, what mad world had he entered where reading thoughts was even a possibility. He had finished the whorl of candyfloss now, and had licked the stick clean of its residue of pink, and dropped it in a nearby rubbish bin.
‘You’re finished?’ she asked, and turned towards him, and he became aware of the night-time sea undulating behind her.
‘You enjoyed?’
‘Yes,’ he told her, although enjoyment wouldn’t really be his word for it. It had felt more like an explosive pop in his mouth, leaving a taste of something like cough syrup.
‘You covered your face in pink,’ she said, and licked her own fingers and began to wipe his cheeks clean.
‘The spice,’ she said, and licked her own finger then as if she didn’t want to waste an atom of it.
‘What is this spice?’ he asked.
She smiled then, took his arm and led him towards the dark grassy slope beyond the promenade.
‘Oh, it’s nothing really, an old wives’ tale, one of those stories nobody remembers where they came from—’
‘One of those urban legends,’ he said, and tried to think of some examples.
‘That’s it,’ she said, ‘the kind of thing one person heard from another that grows and changes beyond all recognition and nobody can claim in the end. Carnie folk,’ she continued, and she mouthed the work ‘folk’ in an old-fashioned, deliberate way, ‘can be full of superstitions. Because we move so much, so often, these scraps of stories come to seem like the only real home we have.’
‘Home,’ he said, ‘as in house, place you came from, familial hearth,’ and where the word ‘hearth’ had come from he had no idea, but it had the same resonance of her use of the word ‘folk’.
‘Exactly that,’ she said, and slipped her arm through his and led him towards the darkness beyond the promenade lights. ‘Where most folks have a memory of a place they come from, us poor carnies have a story. A whole raft of stories that keep changing, growing as they change, like a—’
‘A bacteria,’ he said. ‘Or a protozoa. Binary fission.’
He had been good at biology at school, and school, he realised, was as distant a memory to him now as all of the others. And that was his tumble-dryer of a mind at work again; he had to stop this, he realised, and clarify his thoughts. But clarity didn’t seem desirable at this particular moment; what was most desirable was the continuing conversation with her, which he didn’t want to end.
‘Something like that,’ she said, ‘where the real world has life, we have stories.’
‘So tell me the story,’ he asked her, ‘of the Land of Spices.’
‘The land of what?’ she asked, and he felt a sudden abruptness in her tone, as if the road they were walking on had come to a hedge.
‘Spice,’ he said. ‘You said there was spice in the candyfloss, you talked about the Land of Spices; in fact, I’ve heard the word on and off ever since I . . .’
‘Ever since you what?’ she asked.
And he had to think then. Ever since what? Since he got locked in that mirror, since her small, strong hands entered the cracked field of the glass and pulled him from it.
‘Since you became part of the story?’ she asked, and her gentle, rather inviting tone of voice had returned. He could listen to that voice for ever, he realised; he could sink into it, he could float around in it like a pair of silk stockings in a tumble-dryer; and he realised his thoughts had begun their tumbling again, and shook his head to clear it.
‘You can be part of the story,’ Mona was saying, ‘and never know the whole of it. Do you think that Rumpelstiltskin, for example, or Snow White knew they were in a fairy tale?’
‘I’m quite sure they didn’t,’ he said, but why he was quite sure, he wasn’t certain, since the question didn’t really make sense. And besides, fairy tales were children’s stuff. Like candyfloss, he realised.
And once again, she iterated what he had just been thinking, so he wasn’t certain he had spoken the thought or not.
‘And don’t you go saying these stories are just children’s stuff, like candyfloss and twirligigs and why is the sky blue.’
Had he thought it, or had he actually said it? He couldn’t be sure now, since he had thought of candyfloss and children’s stuff, but twirligigs and blue skies hadn’t come into it. He was suddenly so exhausted by the confusion that he felt the need to lie down.
‘And if you want to lie down,’ she said, ‘I second that thought, and there’s a mound of heather over here which we can sink into, if it doesn’t turn out to be too scratchy.’
She seemed to know the terrain, even though the light was almost non-existent. Almost, because he could see her pale face and lips by the light of the half-moon above, and when she turned, to sink into what she already knew to be heather, he could see her figure silhouetted against the amber lights of the promenade and carnival below. Then she lay backwards, in one simple, supple move, and he was amazed by the fact that she didn’t feel the need to use her arms to determine the lie of the land beneath her.
‘Not scratchy at all,’ she said, delightedly, he felt, ‘in fact, just think of it as a cushion of moss.’
So he allowed himself to sink backwards and felt her arm guide his elbow downwards and sure enough was soon enveloped by a cushion of kinds, not prickly at all and with a delicious odour of heather.
‘Now where were we,’ she went on, as if their conversation had occupied a particular space, ‘yes, how would Rumpelstiltskin know if he was in a fairy tale; well he wouldn’t and that’s the point, because the story is only there to give him a kind of existence.’
‘He has no existence,’ countered Dany and felt proud of himself for engaging in such a conversation, ‘since he is not really real.’
‘So, Rumpelstiltskin isn’t real?’ she asked. ‘What is he, then?’
‘He’s part of a story,’ Dany said.
‘And am I not part of a story, no more than you? In fact, how can you be sure that at this precise moment, your story is not being related by someone else, some time, in some place, some part of the present or future?’
‘Those stars, for example,’ she continued, and he wondered if Mona had been a teacher in a former life. But no, he realised, if she ever had a former life, and if former lives were admissible, she would have been very far from a teacher. ‘Can you name some of them for me?’
He was happy to find himself on firmer ground. And the stars did seem unnaturally bright that evening, sitting in their canopy above the pale half-moon.
‘Well, there’s Orion’s Belt, there, and the Pleiades across from it—’
‘So there was someone called Orion who had a belt and some other one, long long ago, called that arrangement of stars after him?’
‘Well, that was just a story they used before . . .’
‘Before what?’
‘Before Galileo invented the telescope, I imagine.’
He was quite proud of that. The Galileo reference and the rather superior ‘I imagine’. His mind was slowing its tumble-drying and getting back to proper thinking business. But the heather beneath him still felt comfortable and the smell of pollen and purple and pods of all kinds was heady and delicious.
‘But there was a story there before the telescope.’
‘Well, they had to find some way of explaining things.’
‘And the story was the easiest.’
‘I suppose.’
‘So when you look at those stars you think of the story.’
‘But the story isn’t necessary any longer.’
‘It just hangs about, like a name no one has any use for.’
‘I suppose.’
‘So when you look at the night sky you’re looking at a million, maybe a gazillion stories that people have forgotten?’
‘Maybe.’
He was getting tired of the night sky, and the talk about it. He knew she was going somewhere, he knew she was going to win whatever the argument was, and he was almost on the point of forgetting what the argument was.
‘So you’re looking at a universe of lost stories. But there’s no telescope to define them. There’s no kind of astronomy to sort them out. They’re wandering in their dark space, wondering why no one remembers them. All of the characters, the heroes and the villains, the lost princesses and the evil stepmothers and the changelings and the Rapunzels and the Rumpelstiltskins . . .’
‘Stop,’ he said. ‘Please, you’re confusing me.’
‘I know,’ she said, smiling. ‘And my goodness, look—’
She leaned her face over his so he could feel her breath on his. And her breath smelt of heather.
‘They’re wrapping up the carnival.’
He turned, and saw that they were. The amazing sight of the takedown, almost in miniature, so high they were above it. The tent billowed downwards, like a deflating skirt. The roustabouts, the talls and the squats, were breaking up frames, folding lean-to shutters, crawling over the rollercoaster like ants, consuming it, so they took it to pieces as they moved. And Burleigh’s Amazing Hall of Mirrors was becoming a dance of reflecting beams, as each piece of mirror was moved, catching the lights of the streetlamps above. The lorries began belching their exhaust pipes, shifting forwards and backwards, churning up the dried grass so the whole miniature spectacle became gradually dimmed by a pall of smoke.
‘Would they leave without us?’ he wondered aloud. And for an entrancing moment he relished that prospect. He could have happily spent the evening in that heather.
‘Do you want to find out?’
She was already standing, brushing the tiny leaves from her gabardine coat.
He did, actually. He would have loved to find out. He would have loved to have arrived at the acres of crushed grass with just the odour of petrol fumes left, as evidence of the carnival and circus, long gone. He would have turned to her and said, ‘We’re walking home now.’
But he knew, as he saw the tiny spangled pumps she wore and the fishnet tights and the glitter of the body-hugging thing above them, that she wouldn’t survive without it. She would wither and die, or maybe be condemned to wander in her own private darkness, the black hole of forgetting, like that Orion, whoever he was. She was a carnie, and had to make it back there. He knew this, but he didn’t know how or why.
But whatever she was, she was his friend, he felt, descending from the gentle slope of dark hillside back towards the promenade and the rapidly diminishing carnival. It was amazing, he thought, how it telescoped into itself, as if its mode of expanding in the first place had its diminishment already built into it, programmed, so to speak. Huge structures folded, like three-dimensional geometric puzzles, into cuboids, anhedral octagonal blocks and strange geodesic pyramids that could be carried, manhandled by several roustabouts, the talls balancing the tangled structures with their elongated arms while the squats bore the weight on their broad shoulders. Pushed then, with much groaning and grab-a-hold-there-would-yous, up the retracted back panels of the waiting trailers. One massive heave after another, the cuboids, the anhedral and the octagonal and the geodesic pyramids were rolled into the gaping maw of the interior, snugly fitting together into a mysterious complicity as if volume and space were collapsing in on each other, no longer at odds, as if the hard-edged was becoming round and the angled, curved.
Could she be more than his friend? he wondered. He felt that strange attraction that he recognised but had never really known, and remembered walks along the wooden bridge with its massive barnacle-encrusted staves, vanishing into the dark water, the girl Georgie from the last but one bungalow at the cul-de-sac’s end, her hand clutching his, as if the very pressure of her fingers on his palm signalled the beginning of a new adventure. He let Mona walk ahead of him then on the night-time promenade and saw the strength of her calves under the gabardine coat, the ancient litheness of her gait, and knew that no, that kind of adventure would never be theirs. So what was the attraction then, he wondered, what was this whorling in the pit of his stomach? He would discover in time, he hoped.
Would he make the grade, Mona wondered, or would he be thrown into that all-too-human panic by the knowledge, when it came? Had she snatched him from his loving mother – and Mona couldn’t imagine her otherwise, couldn’t imagine Dany giving rise to anything but love – only to be wrong-footed, forever waiting for the changeling to emerge? She thought of Walter then, the stillborn one that had followed Jude for two sad decades or more, appalled by his own body as it insisted on ageing. Walter the unfortunate.
She walked ahead of Dany, and felt his glance from behind. Did he have the thing, the sult, the shine? It was odd, she knew, to have Burleigh’s Hall of Mirrors deliver them one last specimen, many years after its decommissioning. Burleigh’s aims may have been true, but his design was far from perfect. It had delivered too many mutant variations; the talls and the squats turned out to be acceptable as roustabouts, but she shuddered, now, thinking of the variations in between. His banishment had been a long and painful episode, one of the many carnie memories that had to be banished in turn. But every dog has its day, she supposed, and it’s a long road that has no turning, and out of every parched desert a flower can bloom. And he had the elegance, not so much of a flower as of the thin, almost too-delicate stem that bears it. It was a delicacy that could turn into strength, that could grow with surprising sinew, she felt this already, but would he, no matter how strong his development, have it in him? That might be for others to decide. Because she was already compromised, she knew, in her feelings; her hard carnie edge had been softened by his presence and the promise of his possibilities. So she waited while he caught up behind her, took his hand and as they stepped down from the promenade’s edge to the flattened field beneath it and made their way towards the massed vehicles that were already, so to speak, uncircling their wagons. The billowing exhaust pipes could well have been the flaring nostrils of mythical horses, dragons, magical beasts of burden prepari
ng to drag their mysterious load. He deserves better than a lion truck, she thought, and ran across the crushed grass, leapt up a set of aluminium steps, pulled open the side-door of a trailer, just as its tractor redoubled its exhausting roar. ‘In here, Dany,’ she said, and as the caravan began its trundling departure he ran to catch up with her outstretched hand, past the illustrated panels of the wonders that the trailers enclosed, a giant caterpillar that bore screaming minions on its hollowed spine, a screaming, distended mouth that promised entry to a ghost-train tunnel and an elegant, gilded horse with its mane blown back in a stiffened, golden whirl.
His hand reached hers and gripped and he felt all gravitational reality suddenly vanish. She pulled him up and inside and once more had the sense that he definitely had it in him.
Inside, they swayed for a moment in the darkness. Mona pulled shut the aluminium door, and in the ensuing gloom all he could distinguish was a small pipe glowing, like a shifting firefly. There was a smell in the air, like bitter almonds.
‘Put it out,’ whispered Mona, ‘I’ve got the boy with me.’
‘And welcome he is too,’ a female voice murmured. He could hear a knocking as the pipe was extinguished, and he got the sense of a foot quenching the ensuing embers. The smell of something like burnt almonds was soon overpowered by the acrid flare of a match and a slowly yellowing oil lamp. He could see then, several hammocks gently swaying in the caravan-like space of the interior. Virginie lay in one, her long hair dangling backwards from the curve of the netted rope. The one he would come to know as Paganina swayed in the other, her bronze legs crossing the dark space between them. Her toes seemed to be caressing Virginie’s crown, but when the lamp grew brighter, he saw they were pulling out strands of the brown hair, knotting them into delicate braids with a fluidity that astounded him. The toes he had known to date were never as dexterous. But he was tired now, and longed for a bed, and when Mona gestured him towards another hanging tangle of rope, he realised that it was a hammock and that this hammock was his. So he gripped the knotted rope at the top with both hands and twisted his body upwards, so it fitted inside. And he was amazed at how comfortable a hammock could prove itself to be. So what with the smell of burnt almonds and of the burning oil lamp and the soft murmur of voices below him and the gentle swaying of the convoy as it gathered speed, he was soon asleep.
