Carnivalesque

by Neil Jordan

  Burleigh had by now tired of chemical processes. The thought of nitrates and silver and aluminium coatings made him almost physically ill. But in the window of this antique store there was a small, gnome-like statue that would look to the untrained eye to be made of copper or bronze. It had a patina of dust over it, with barely a sheen to its metal surface. But the tortured face that glared back at him through the glass window had a scrape on its metal nose, and in the indentations of that scrape, Burleigh recognised the gleam of gold.

  He thought of alchemy, the philosopher’s stone, the transmutation of base metal into something infinitely more precious. He looked down at his fingers, stained by the oxides of baser metals, and must have shrugged, and said to himself, why not?

  He walked in and heard the tiny bell above the entrance door make its petulant announcement. The tinkle echoed through the empty interior, past rows of abandoned statuary, bronze nymphs holding bulbless bowls to the ceiling in frozen, supplicant arms, the whole array of them covered in many months of undisturbed dust. It reached the ears of a bent figure in a mottled shop coat, not unlike Burleigh’s own, who seemed to register it not at all, and only gave the merest hint of the recognition of another’s presence when Burleigh had reached the desk over which this figure was bent. Two ink-stained fingers brushed a lock of hair from a pair of wired-framed spectacles and an asthmatic voice sounded out, as if to accompany the dying echo of the bell.

  ‘Kan ik u helpen?’ this voice asked, and as this was Holland and as Burleigh had not a word of Dutch, a ponderous mime followed.

  Now Burleigh lacked almost entirely the mimetic graces of the other carnies. He had the roustabouts’ strength, but without their compact stature, and whatever carnie elegance may have once enhanced his frame had been lost in that crab-like stoop he had come to adopt, bent over his bubbling pots, his quietly hissing batteries, his infinitely expanding coils of hooped copper wire. So he was a bad mimic and a worse linguist, but he tried and somehow managed, through a succession of jabbing fingers and monosyllabic grunts that he hoped were beyond language, a kind of Esperanto of need and desire, finally to communicate what he wanted. So the antique-shop assistant finally raised his elongated head until the flat discs of his wire-framed glasses came into Burleigh’s field of vision and he saw himself reflected there, above two pale whitish eyes.

  ‘Ah, de aardmannetje!’

  Burleigh nodded furiously, in an affirmation which the assistant took to be another mute question, and elaborated.

  ‘De geest, de elf, de hobgoblin!’

  ‘Indeed,’ muttered Burleigh, ‘the hobgoblin.’

  Hobgoblin my arse, he thought. It looked more to him like one of those pudgy Cupids that adorned Valentine cards; in fact could well have been a Cupid, were it not for the deformed shape, the hunched shoulders, the outstretched and muscled arm clutching what he now recognised as a bow with a blunt arrow tip, quite fearsomely spiked. But all he cared about was its constituent metal. So he lumbered behind the shop assistant through the various dust-covered caryatids and held out two trembling carnie hands into which, after much sliding of glass panels, displacement of the displays behind them, a small hunched figure made of some precious metal was placed.

  Burleigh was so surprised, initially, by its weight that he almost dropped it on the foot that stood directly below his clutching hands. And it would have hurt, he knew that somehow; the prodding arrow might have pierced his boot, causing a pain that would have been sudden, sharp and probably lingering. Because there was a lingering quality to this creature, this thing, shoulders bent like an old crow’s wings, behind a head that hunched forward as if to hide from the watching world all of its secrets. All its effort seemed bent on the bow, from the arms to the downturned mouth, to the eyes, crinkled and ancient. A small cap adorned with feathers or wings sat above the immobile hair and the whole thing was clad in a robe that seemed windblown, despite its dusty, metallic folds. And Burleigh perhaps should have asked more questions, but all he could think about was, is it gold or is it not, so that froze any further enquiry as he brought the creature to his lips and bit into the arrowhead. And a taste then flooded his mouth, metallurgic, ancient and amber; he saw a liverish, lapping river for some reason, crowded with boats like sampans, and a full gibbous moon reflected in the waters, and he shivered, closed his eyes, saw steppes, vanishing into the distant distillation of a setting sun. He opened them again and saw the marks his teeth had left in the tiny spikes of the arrowhead, and saw, beneath the dust, the unmistakable gleam of gold.

  So Burleigh haggled, Burleigh extended his repertoire of mimetic gestures and eventually Burleigh bought, not knowing what he had bought, caring only for that gleam of gold. He walked down the Rotterdam dockfront, past battleship after battleship, the already massive trawlers dwarfed by their immensity. A war was coming, but Burleigh didn’t care; all he thought about was this weighty, golden burden between his roustabout hands.

  (And Walter here went into Miltonic overdrive, pondering the origin of this mysterious aardmannetje, geest, hobgoblin. Was it Thammuz? Belial? Azazel? Or Mammon himself, who

  dig’d out ribs of gold. Let none admire

  That riches grow in Hell; that soyle may best

  Deserve the precious bane.

  He was close, Walter, but would have got no cigar. Paganina would have won it, had she ever been given a glimpse of this thing, this geest, this aardmannetje. Paganina, who had known those Hyperborean steppes, had fired arrows not unlike that one, would have recognised Abaris and his golden arrowhead, given to him by her soul sister in those fanciful legends, the chaste huntress Artemis. But even Paganina would not have known that precious metal’s source: the golden tears of the mildewed ones.

  The carnival thrived, those few months in the Rotterdam waste ground, under the shadows of the giant derricks, which tracked their dark shapes around the helter-skelter, the infinity of stalls, the circus tent, like a series of giant sundials. Something was ticking, the whole world knew; armies were massing, ships were stacking, sailors were gathering with nothing to assuage the anxiety of waiting but carnival, and so the carnival thrived.

  All but Burleigh’s Hall of Mirrors, which managed only desultory returns. And Walter found a function for himself at last, to the immense relief of the carnies at large, who had grown tired of his incessant enquiries. He managed the entrance till, while Burleigh busied himself in the hall’s fathomless depths. For the Hall of Mirrors was like that, Walter found, a dimensionless space, with ever more tiny corners to get lost in:

  Thus incorporeal Spirits to smallest forms

  Reduc’d their shapes immense and were at large,

  Though without number still amidst the Hall

  Of that infernal court.

  Walter saw Burleigh enter each morning with his hammers and his measuring tapes, his lens grinders and his planes of glass. Walter managed the drunken sailors who wandered through with their afternoon doxies on their arms, talking in their incomprehensible Friesian or Dutch. He could hear a distant tinkling, behind the squeals of mock delight and pretended horror as the ladies saw themselves elongated to the lengths of ninepins or squashed into gigantic sixpences. The distant tinkling was Mulciber, the fallen architect, building a Pandemonium that would only come to fruition many years later after the war to end all wars had spent itself and surprise surprise another war began; it was Burleigh, hammering the gnomic shape he had no name for into infinitely thin, infinitely febrile and infinitely sad sheets of gold. He had sliced the aardmannetje into sections and set to hammering them down, the winged hat first of all, then the silver hair beneath it, the crown, the face, the nose, the clutching hands, the bow, the arrowhead . . .

  Walter would live long enough to see what he termed ‘that Pandemonium’ built. But before he would experience its full transformative power, he would be transformed himself by a 250-kilogram Luftwaffe bomb on the tracks of a motorised railway on quite a different dockside. Sic, as Walter himself might well have p
ut it, transit gloria mundi.

  27

  The function of a crook, Eileen surmised, was to act as a kind of sheepdog in the hand. When Bo Peep’s beloved flock found themselves tangled in briars, or wandered too closely to a cliff’s edge, she could reach out her crook and hook it around their tiny collars and gently ease them to safety. But then she began to wonder, and all the while wishing she could think of something else, do sheep have collars? Perhaps in fairy tales, with little bells attached, but in real life? Collars that dogs and cats wear, which could be hooked by that rather unlikely staff, with not so much a hook at its apex, but with something more like the decorative end of a curtain rail. And now that she began to think of it, still wishing that she could stop, that Bo Peep crook couldn’t hook anything, even a compliant sheep with a convenient collar. It curled outwards towards the tip, and if it was made for anything, it was most definitely not made for hooking. And, besides, did Bo Peep give even a thought to catching or hooking her errant flock? No, she let them alone and they came home, wagging their tails—

  And this point her truly maddening conjectures were brought to a welcome halt by the door opening and the benign face of Dr Grenell entering her vision once more. His hair was unchanged, as of course it would be, that kind of corkscrew hair defied any brush, but it was unruly more than unattractive, now that she came to think of it. And she thought for a mad moment of asking him to clarify the issue of Bo Peep and her shepherdess’s crook, but stopped herself just in time. Because he was inviting her inside now, so ‘they could all have a chat’.

  Eileen rose to her feet and stumbled, realising her leg had fallen asleep with the waiting. Dr Grenell caught her by the elbow, raised those capacious eyebrows of his and smiled with reassurance. ‘My leg,’ she said. ‘A little numb.’ And she stamped her left foot off the floor to make the blood flow. ‘We did rather throw things about,’ he said, in that chocolatey voice of his.

  ‘Things?’ Eileen asked, as he helped her towards the office.

  ‘The issues you mentioned on the phone. Not so much issues, really, as the normal concerns of a transitioning adolescent—’

  ‘Transitioning?’ Eileen asked. It was a word she had heard before, on the radio talk shows, but she was inside his office now, and he was closing the door and Andy was standing by the window, still digging the nails of one hand into the skin of the other.

  ‘What I want to do,’ the doctor began, and he had lowered his voice, so it had the quality of cocoa more than chocolate, a tone that was definitely designed to soothe, ‘is to prescribe a short course of medication that would help with all of these feelings of anxiety . . .’

  He had that habit, this doctor, of inviting you to finish his sentences for him. So Eileen, dutifully, complied and felt a brief flash of optimism, at last.

  ‘Medication?’ she asked softly, as if this consultation room demanded its own hush. And then, she felt obliged to ask, ‘You feel he needs that, doctor?’

  ‘Oh, it’s not for him,’ the doctor said, already pulling a pad from one of the drawers in his desk. ‘It’s for you.’

  ‘For me?’

  He formed his lips into a gentle, meant-to-be-reassuring smile. And Eileen saw at that moment her son turn towards her from the window, with a version of that smile on his lips.

  ‘Look, the boy is on a normal, healthy, but inevitably turbulent journey to adolescence. And there’s no stigma in that. Nor in admitting to the stress of it all.’

  Just what had transpired in that room, Eileen wondered. And she wished then she could go back to her cogitations on Bo Peep’s crook.

  ‘Yes,’ Eileen heard herself saying, ‘it has been quite stressful of late—’

  ‘Children can prove themselves remarkably resourceful. But the wear and tear on the parents’ nerves often leaves a hidden cost. And these rather delusional conclusions about your son are a decided worry.’

  ‘Should I be worried, doctor?’

  ‘For him? No. For yourself, maybe . . . just a little . . .’

  He scribbled on the notepad and tore off a page. He smiled then, with a nauseating presumption of understanding.

  ‘He was not responsible, Eileen – can I call you Eileen?’

  At which, she nodded.

  ‘And I can’t believe I’m saying this—’ He drew a deep breath, and exhaled in a bemused smile. ‘He could not have been responsible for an infestation of flying ants.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘So you admit it? I’m glad. It was reported on the news. One of those Saharan winds. From Somerset to here. But the fact that you thought he was—’

  ‘I thought he was?’

  Eileen felt defenceless. She couldn’t bring her eyes to the window, where she knew without seeing that Andy was smiling too.

  ‘Didn’t you?’

  ‘I have to admit – I did, for a little while—’

  ‘So as a family, you need to take a deep breath, and calm down. And these might help.’

  She reached out and took the prescription. She never asked what the medication was. ‘Three times a day, with water. Always after meals.’

  As he led them both back to the waiting room, Eileen wondered in a panic had she imagined the Bo Peep wallpaper as well. So she was strangely relieved to see the bonneted head, with its crook angled beside it, repeated endlessly over the walls.

  28

  ‘Curiosity,’ Jude said.

  ‘Killed the cat,’ Mona replied.

  ‘Still,’ Jude murmured. ‘The cat is a necessity, betimes.’

  ‘What are you saying?’ This from Mona, who was resting her pert head on the circus guy-rope. She could see Dany on the sawdust floor inside the canvas flap, exercising the Arabian. It was that hot, restful hour before whatever crowds would come. He barely stroked the horse with the whip. A backwards flick, and it reared on its heels.

  ‘He’s asked me,’ Jude said. Her mouth barely moved. ‘How the mirror did its thing.’

  ‘A bit like Walter.’

  ‘Poor Walter. Did curiosity kill him?’

  ‘It made him old before his time.’

  And the truth was, it exhausted him. The attempt to rationalise the fundamentally irrational. To trace the untraceable. For the carnival, by the time Walter experienced it, was such a mélange of changelings and Ur carnies, that if a proper genealogical study had been made (and no such study was ever likely to be made, because carnies would have scarpered long before such a study got close to beginning; Walter’s codex is the closest one comes to one) it would have been well-nigh impossible to distinguish between the original and the ersatz, between the one true inherited link to the Land of Spices and the interlopers, the wannabe carnies (of which Walter himself was one) and the changelings. Walter was writing before the discovery of DNA – and here the question arises: did carnies have such a thing as DNA? But any such study would have told the same mongrel tale. Denied all of the benefits of reproduction – and most carnies felt this infertility to be a blessing, the ultimate distinguishing factor between themselves and the outside world – they replenished their ranks by abductions of various kinds. A process, as Walter observes, like most carnie realities, obscured, mythicised, dramatised in the most charming of allegorical tales, but which he himself defines as the ‘changeling process’. Now the snatching of a child may have had a logic, may have even constituted a virtue in a world where children were many, and mostly unwanted. But in the middle years of the twentieth century, when the images of missing children were posted in news-papers and on street lampposts (this was long before the rash of ‘Have You Seen This Child?’ legends on plastic milk cartons) and created what in the eighteenth century would have been known as a ‘universal hue and cry’, abduction was no longer an option. So the carnie ranks went through a gradual depletion as the inevitable Fatigue thinned their numbers.

  Burleigh’s efforts with his Hall of Mirrors, therefore, would have led to a solution of kinds. To wit, a steady stream of changelings (‘reflectiv
es’) who could be observed, monitored (or to use the repellent current usage: ‘groomed’), while their reflected others happily returned to the human fold. And those that were found fitting could be inducted into the mysteries of the spice. But, as always with Burleigh, there were problems. Native ingenuity is one thing; mechanical, not to say optical, perfection, quite another. And Burleigh’s first efforts with what came to be known as the Rotterdam gold led to the most extraordinary aberrations. The moment of separation of the reflection from its bearer proved arbitrary, to say the least. And the first unfortunate reflective came out long and thin, a pitifully stretched version of the original that had viewed himself, surprise surprise, in the elongated mirror. Still, he was welcomed by the carnies, given various in-appropriate nicknames (‘Stretchy’, ‘Indiarubber’) and put to work with the roustabouts. His long, thin fingers proved invaluable in the tightening of barely reachable nuts, bolts and sprockets that would otherwise have gathered dust and rust in the inaccessible scaffolding beneath the carousel and the helter-skelter. They could now be oiled by Indy with his stretchable, pneumatically agile arms. And so, eventually and happily, he became one of them.