by Neil Jordan
More thins emerged through that carnival season, before the carnies had to call a halt. And Burleigh pleaded his case, begged to be let go back to what he called ‘the drawing board’.
But the next reflectives came out with a shape even more alarming. Short, squashed versions of their originals (like the Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz, a film the carnies first viewed in the autumn of that fateful year, 1939). A positive bevy of them emerged from the mirror-maze on successive hot July days. Their voices were squished, as if they breathed laughing gas instead of air, and they proved addicted to the most charmless practical jokes – most of which involved belching and farts of stupendous reach. The carnival had to call another halt to Burleigh’s efforts (and Walter writes, in a scribbled footnote, that this latest mishap led to the first whisperings about his banishment).
But the squats, as they came to be called, proved as useful as the thins. With unnaturally broad shoulders, stupendous muscle mass and a centre of gravity lower than most, they could lift many times their own body weight and took their place with the thins amongst the roustabouts. But by that time, sadly, Burleigh’s banishment was almost complete.
Rotterdam began it and Rotterdam ended it. Jude, always a light sleeper, was woken by a loud, sad foghorn from the North Sea. She crawled from her hammock, clenched her pipe between her teeth and took a walk around the sleeping caravans. There was an intermittent moon shining, turbulent clouds scudding over it, and she could see the dim shapes of a new generation of battleships on the night horizon. Even without her crystal ball, she could envision the carnage they would soon create, for Jude had lived long enough on this human shore to know there was never a weapon designed that hadn’t been used. And was it that sense of endless futility that led her to the half-open door of the mirror-maze and to venture inside? Carnies rarely looked in mirrors, hated to view themselves, since they feared they would catch a glimpse of the years they had lived. They reserved that pleasure for humans. Burleigh had laboured alone in his reflective workshop; carnies had seen the questionable results and been happy to leave him to it. But some premonition of the imminent end of things led Jude inside. And she saw herself, in the barely perceptible darkness, a long, thin, emaciated ancient thing, with more years etched on the face than anyone, human or carnie, could count. Jude recognised herself, with a shudder of the Fatigue that she barely managed to keep at bay. She took the deepest of breaths and continued wandering through the Hall of Mirrors, into the gathering darkness, and saw the same image squashed, like a Neanderthal toadstool, the same ancient version of her repeated, then, an infinite number of times. All of this amused her, saddened her, filled her with an ennui that grew inescapable, and for some reason Jude kept going. And there, in the bowels of Burleigh’s Amazing Hall of Mirrors, she finally glimpsed something that chilled her to the bone. The mirror-image of all carnie selves, as if the Land of Spices had never been abandoned, an image that had the elusive quality of hoar frost, of fungus on an ancient wound, of hanging tendrils of curdled whey: the Dewman.
Had Burleigh purchased more than he bargained for when he haggled his way to possession of that aardmannetje in that antique store on the Rotterdam docks? Had Burleigh himself some demonic design when he beat it meticulously into ever thinner sheaves of gold? Had forces beyond his ken – and Burleigh’s ken was as stiff and quasi-scientific as all of his optical efforts: he had little of the true carnie insight or talent for evasion – led him through that pinging door? No clarity was reached on any of these questions during the proceedings for Burleigh’s subsequent banishment. And, to be fair, the thought of carnie judicial proceedings is a contradiction in kind. As Walter records, it was more of a bear-baiting than a court, a carnie pillorying, a babel of blame and accusation, which had two recorded results. Burleigh was to be banished and his Hall of Mirrors was to be shuttered and scraped. Scraped of its Rotterdam gold, and the job of scraping fell to the roustabout children of the mirror, the squats and the thins. So they re-entered their womb of mirrors and scraped them back to clear glass, replaced the Rotterdam gold once more with dependable silver. Why not destroyed? Walter asks, and adds an asterisk, and explains in a footnote: ‘Carnies were hoarders. They would happily bleed rather than let anything go.’
Burleigh’s long banishment began. And the new-minted Hall of Mirrors took its place among the other carnival sideshows in the shadow of Edinburgh Castle, in the spring of 1940. But the scraping and the silvering left much to be desired. Among the swathes of mirrored silver there remained some tentative threads of gold, a kind of palimpsest of the original intention and design. And Andy’s emergence from the mirror-maze, many generations later, would have been the culmination of all of Burleigh’s ingenuity, had he only been there to witness it. A perfect reflective, a true child of the mirror, of the Rotterdam gold, identical in every possible way to its source, all of his features intact and each of his limbs in accordance with what should have been. In fact, Burleigh’s ingenuity, as we shall later learn, had surpassed even his hopes for it. Because in Andy’s case, the difference between reflector and reflected was reversed. And the Rotterdam gold had finally and impeccably worked its magic.
29
The journey west was a return of kinds. From the low flat bogs of the midland and the indistinguishable parishes beyond, the convoy trundled through village after village, obeying some long-forgotten instinct, like a version of a homing pigeon or a salmon that would cross an ocean for the ritual of dying. Not that the carnival was dying, by any means. But it maybe needed a respite. So it headed west towards those legendary cliffs from which generations of carnies had leapt when the Fatigue became irresistible. Through the late-night one-street hamlets, long after the pubs had closed and the chip shops had disgorged their revellers, the occasional barely sensible drunk would see it, truck after truck passing by with the baroque illustrations adorning the trailers, lurid, gorgon-haired women with barely concealed breasts, frozen in the act of a whirl, a swing, a downwards plummet. And this drunk would maybe shake his head, wonder what caravan was passing, what mysterious goods being transported from parish to parish; he or she would maybe search in a pocket for a cigarette or a light, the light always extinguished by an invisible wind. The caravan was no sooner gone than it was forgotten; it brought forgetting with it.
Although the carnival itself remembered. This memory was not so much lodged in any of its constituent carnies, as distributed amongst the whole. So Jude, had she been awake, had she been bothered to observe one passing village, flickering under the night-time clouds, might have been able to peel back the encrustation of new-built suburbs and industrial parks and see again what once was there: a church perched over an ancient bridge, under which flowed a river of memory. Beyond it a rath, with a jagged, broken comb of whitethorn.
But Jude slept, with the bitter whiff of burnt mildew about her, gently rocking in her hammock. Dany slept in the hammock beside her, Mona in the hammock above. Maybe some common thread in their dreams propelled the convoy forwards, gave it a direction that they couldn’t have, in their waking hours, defined. Whatever the case, by daybreak it was crawling through an ancient limestone landscape each carnie would have known, whether they had seen it before or not. Cracked ridges of stone, where there should have been grass. Fields of undulating rock, amongst which occasional flowers, unaccountably, bloomed. The white wash of the Atlantic beyond, spent after a night of futile thundering. The caravan moved through these ancient roads, and seemed at once too weighty, too wide and too colourful for them. There was only one possible destination. Downwards, on a gentle curve towards a town square that glittered in the distance. Other villages showed themselves, perched on the Atlantic shore, through the morning mist. But this one, with the yucca trees and the odd Edwardian wooden verandas attached to the grey façades of the hotel fronts, was the one the caravan chose. It soughed through the mist of the morning square, passed a barking dog, and turned by a castellated façade of old cement block. It had once been a cinema,
then a dance hall and was lately a petrol station, with two disused and rusting pumps listing towards each other in the gravel forecourt. The caravan raised a quiet tornado of dust around them as it headed towards the acreage of dead field behind.
There was the usual roustabouting, unpacking, uncleaving, unwinding, distending, unfurling, telescopic poles untelescoped, widgets driven into long-forgotten ground, pistons pneumatically raised, stanchions greasily unstanched, old generators belched and whipped into motorised life; there were many clangs and kerrangs of chains and hawsers and metal shutters unshuttering and by breakfast time it was done, magically or not. A school-going child would have seen the pennant of the big top fluttering above the fuchsia hedges on the old Ennistymon road.
Dany stretched back on a set of metal stairs that led up to the dodgem cars. A film of unodorous sweat covered his muscled torso. He wore an unbuttoned denim shirt and a roustabout’s belt, with an array of implements hanging from it that he wouldn’t have been able to name three months before. But he wouldn’t have been able to function without them now. Monniker pulled himself lithely, upwards and downwards, upwards and down from a lip of metal jutting from the dodgem-car floor. Every muscle had its own distinct shape, its own particular ripple on his ancient, adolescent body. Monniker never tired. In fact, Dany rarely tired either these days. And that muscled carapace that could be called the true carnie form was beginning to clad his own boyish limbs.
‘Where are we?’ Dany asked.
‘Lisdoon,’ Monniker replied with one of his exhaled breaths.
‘You know it?’ Dany asked.
‘Too well,’ Monniker was inhaling this time. He pulled himself up and down, up and down like a mechanical toy.
‘What happened to the big world out there?’ Monniker continued. ‘We used to travel all over. Been stuck in the old country for how long now?’
‘Who decides?’ Dany asked. He would love to have known, though he didn’t expect an answer.
‘Let us just say, it is decided,’ Monniker answered, on an exhale this time. Then he hung from one arm while he brought the other palm close to his face.
‘Powder it for me, will you?’
He gripped an open tin with his feet, and brought it to the level of Dany’s face. Dany took the tin and sprinkled a small cloud of whitened dust over his calloused palm.
‘Thank you,’ Monniker said and resumed his pull-ups.
Dany decided to walk then and was almost surprised that he could. He half expected, if not an invisible force-field to prevent his exit, at the very least an enquiry as to where he was going. But none came. It would be midday, he supposed, before the first punters trickled in, so a stroll to the world outside must have been, if not expected, at least unremarkable. So he strolled, past the pinioned guy-ropes of the circus tent into the riot of nettles in the fields beyond. There were a few masticating cows there, and he followed the path their hooves and their dried cow-pats had left among the dock leaves and the nettled grass. He could see the triangle of a church spire peeking above the grey slate roofs of the town beyond. It awakened a strange sense like memory inside him, though a memory of what, he couldn’t fathom. He had never been to this town – Lisdoon, Monniker had called it – so he couldn’t have remembered it. But he had been alive with strange instincts lately that he couldn’t really comprehend. He passed from the fields to a broken-down gate and a small, decrepit alley of half-ruined cottages that led to a sloping square. The wooden verandas, almost like lean-tos, against the grey cement of the hotel fronts. Posters, faded by the weather, tied to the wooden lampposts. None of them for the carnival, which never had to advertise itself, he realised now. For some kind of matchmaking festival. He crossed the empty square, ascended a series of wooden steps and glimpsed a large empty bar inside, with stools and chairs upturned on tables, a young girl in a white blouse and a dark skirt sweeping the floor.
‘You up for the weekend?’ the young girl asked and Dany nodded. He was indeed up for the weekend. Maybe more than the weekend.
‘A bit young for it, aren’t you?’
Dany smiled briefly and said nothing. But he stayed, leaning against the wooden doorframe. There was something pleasing about watching her, the rhythmic movement of her plastic brush.
‘No more than myself. Old drunken farmers, looking for a squeeze. Have they never heard of the internet?’
And the mention of the internet caused a slight pang in Dany. He remembered playing Dungeons and Dragons under the inattentive eye of his sleepy father. He stared at the pendulum-like movement of her brush, sweeping over the boards of the floor. But that sight brought another pang. He remembered his mother sweeping the cement patio by the kitchen door. Her pink slippers.
‘So what brings you here?’ the girl asked. She glanced at him slyly, under the bobbing swish of her hair. He registered a pair of blue, flashing eyes.
‘The carnival,’ he said.
‘You’re going to the carnival?’
‘No,’ Dany said. And he felt a sudden rush of shyness, for some reason. He was an outsider now, to her everyday world.
‘I came with it.’
‘A carnie?’ she asked, and stopped her brushing.
‘Yes, I’m a carnie,’ Dany replied. And it felt odd, saying it, as if he had never until that moment known quite what he was.
‘Look at you there, all I’m a carnie and leaning against the door with the sun behind you.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You think it makes you special? All special and mysterious?’
‘No, I don’t think anything, really—’
‘Have pity on us poor souls who have to sweep floors and clean up the vomit of drunken bachelors.’
If she was joking, she was very good at hiding it. But she smiled then, as if to let him know that she was.
‘My auntie told me the carnival came through here once. But I’d be too young to remember it.’
She set aside the brush then and walked closer to him. He was overwhelmed by the smell, of shampoo and soap and the faintest tang of sour milk. A human smell. It was all he could do not to reach out and touch her.
‘Do y’need tickets to get in?’
He shook his head. ‘No tickets.’
‘But you have to pay for the rides.’
‘A bob or two.’
‘A bob or two? What century are you in?’
And he wondered, what century was he in?
She smiled again, and he saw the gleam of silver braces. Her teeth were protruding slightly underneath her full red lips. She reminded him of every girl he had ever known, before what he realised were now his carnie days. Georgia, Carmen. They had braces, too.
‘Would you do a girl a favour? Give her a free ride? Or two?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Only maybe? What kind of carnie are you?’
‘Maybe, definitely.’
‘Definitely maybe?’
She raised her palm. ‘Come on, gimme five.’
She meant him to raise his. Of course. He remembered. And he did it.
‘OK, carnie.’
They touched hands. Her fingers lingered on his, ever so briefly. Then slipped away.
30
There was a rumble in the Taw Wood. A subterranean shift, as if some element beneath was looking for release. The tides came in and retreated on the mudflats around it as they had done for centuries. But when the water sucked its moisture back to the eternal sea again it left strange sandhoppers clinging to the webs of muddy cracks the sun was busy drying. And as the sun dried these meiofauna, to use the word Dany would have loved, had he known it, they grew tiny wings and fluttered, so small as to be barely visible, towards the knotted, broken umbrella of the wood beyond. The locals who passed by had long got used to barely glancing at it. Superstition was part of their poorly remembered past, although it still clung, like a mild hangover, around the fringes of their everyday thoughts. But if they had looked, they would have noticed a blur around that wood,
a Vaseline-like visual smear, as if the wood itself was out of focus. And in truth, it was. A penumbra of airborne sandhoppers, flying meiofauna, weevils, gnats, midges and winged ants was providing the Taw Wood with its own mist, its own apocalyptic blur. It was odd: these winged creatures awaiting the arrival of a wingless one. For if carnies had wings to burn, Captain Mildew had none. The Captain had neither wings, nor flesh, nor form; his only substance was in the nightmares of others. And in the two sons, he had, through some miracle, fathered. He needed a body now, to reclaim them, and any body would do.
So Vladic, the homeless, was truly unfortunate. He hadn’t always been Vladic the homeless, he had once been Vladic ‘The Dozer’ and had journeyed here from Łódź in Poland to find work and send money back to feed his growing family. And for a time he did work, in tiny villages the names of which meant nothing to him – Dunboyne, Tara, Mornington, Loughshinny, Naul. These villages were spreading into whole suburbs and he had bulldozed old pastures for more suburban developments than he could count. He was not unappreciative of the landscape he was obliterating, the hordes of memories and customs, good bad or indifferent, that he was cladding in what he was learning to call, from his Irish colleagues, ‘two up, two downs’. But if he did know, as he flattened another grassy knoll, that this was the mound from which the whole townland once watched Termonfeckin destroy Loughshinny in a hurling match, he could not have truly allowed himself to care. He was here to do a job, a job that put food on the table in the small apartment where his family waited, in the shadow of the abandoned carpet plant, back in Łódź. One day, however – and although he could never understand the source of his misfortune, he could pinpoint the day – he found his huge, mechanical beast facing a mound that no other ‘dozer’ would touch. On the mound was a small, wizened tree, with a few scraps of faded cloth tied to its leafless branches. And Vladic, more concerned with his ongoing paycheck than with talk of holy wells and whitethorns, fairy raths and ringforts, shifted his gear stick downwards and drove the toothed maw towards the pitiable tree. He crushed it in one sweep, buried its branches with their thorns, their scraps of faded cloth, their scapulars, their miraculous medals, their scribbled prayers and wishes, in a chaotic mess of roots, earth and stone. Two more reversals, two more shifts of the gear stick forwards, and the job was done.
