Carnivalesque

by Neil Jordan

  The other predicament was success. She had no sense of it, no knowledge of it, since she rarely, if ever, ventured outside the back-lot gates. But it arrived all the same, like a small glittering tributary to the raging torrent of his global fame. With it came requests, for publicity, for public gatherings, for a place in that huge, pulsating world outside that she knew never could be hers. So one day, after the last reel on the last picture she would make with him, she quite simply vanished. She packed her few small belongings in a diaphanous bag, and made her way, under cover of darkness, to the carnival wastelands round the beach they called Venice. She wandered through the stalls, the circus tents, the rollercoaster, searching for one of her own kind. And she found them, as she knew she would. She adopted a new name, Indira, wore a gypsy headscarf with a diadem of thin gold coins, and read the palms of those whose future was a readable map to her, a map she tried to keep hidden from them.

  Their paths would cross again, many years later, on the craggy Atlantic coastline of the West of Ireland. The little tramp, by now a revered, white-haired clown, came to her circus tent with a daughter and three grandchildren. She was a contortionist that day, and twisted her lithe, still-young body on a glass table above him. She bent backwards, caught a rose with her teeth and caught those brown eyes again, everything around them bent and arthritic, a gleam of awakened lust still there. Did he remember? she wondered. She opened her mouth to the stem of the rose, and brought one lithe, adolescent leg in a straight line towards the ceiling of the bell tent. She heard the crowd gasp; her balance seemed barely human, and inhuman it certainly was. She saw his moustacheless lips open, and the clown’s ancient tongue emerged, to moisten them. She remembered that tongue on hers and wished she didn’t.

  She saw the boy now, licking the last shreds of batter from his lips. How much did he need to know? she wondered. She could see Mona wondering too. Between them, maybe, they could write a carnie bible, an epic list of happenings, from the first day to this. If they could only remember them. And she must do it, she thought, before the Fatigue took hold, and she made the plunge, from the vertiginous cliff into the white churn below. How would she begin it? In the Land of Spices, she imagined. Was that the beginning? Or was there a beginning before the Spice? In the beginning was the Spice and the Spice was its own garden before the Dewman came.

  13

  Eileen left her son playing with the scarpering rats, as the man in the high-vis jacket wound the cable round the trunk of yet another beech tree. The rats disturbed her, but every boy in the cul-de-sac was involved in the chase. And playing, after all, was what boys were meant to do, even boys who were crossing the threshold into something else. He was growing, a little taller now than the others of his gang, but it was sweet to see him become the boy she remembered once more, even if it took the game of Rat Catcher, Rat Pulveriser, whatever they would call it, to do that. She crossed back over the football pitch to her bungalow, among the privet hedges by the number 30 bus stop, and began to prepare dinner.

  She started to peel potatoes to cut them into chips. She thought chips might work the same trick, remind him of the boyhood he was so obviously moving past, bring him back to it, albeit just for an hour or a day or two. Beef stew was the normal dinner on a Thursday, but she knew that chips, beans and sausages were the boy’s favourite, and thought to surprise him with just that dinner. And if the wind died down, perhaps after dinner they would both of them walk down to the bathing place by the concrete wall and swim. The day was hot enough, the sun was shining; it was only the wind that gave that unseasonal feeling, brought the white caps to the sea on the horizon. They had always enjoyed the closeness of that ritual of theirs, the stroll down by the inlet, the walk over the wooden bridge, then the strange business of undressing, she in the women’s shelter, he in the men’s. She kept a watchful eye on him there, since she had heard stories of the adult males who swam there. Some of them she knew by name, hardy perennial types like her who swam throughout the winter, but others came and went, sat in the shadows of the curved concrete shelter, and seemed more intent on gazing on lithe young bodies than immersing themselves in the waters. She had heard stories; she didn’t fully believe them, but yet. But yet. Grown men could do strange things, things that were unwritten in her book of life. A neighbour’s child, for instance, had transformed from a charming freckle-faced boy into a sullen, withdrawn adolescent, and it was only after his death, in a stolen car crashed on the way towards the West, that rumours spread about ‘the incident’. Eileen didn’t know, and didn’t want to know, the details of the incident, but it involved the sand dunes beyond the shelter, and some acquaintance that started here, inside it. Some acquaintance with what was termed a ‘stray man’. The word ‘stray’ affected her deeply, so deeply she refused to think about it. So whatever the pleasure of their swimming rituals, she kept a watchful eye on him at all times.

  Jim wasn’t one for swimming, she reflected, as she heated up the corn oil for the chips, and sliced the cellophane wrapper on the Denby’s sausages. A little self-conscious about his pale skin, he would cover his body in a veritable burka of towels before emerging in the old-fashioned Speedos he would never let go of, the red bolts of lightning decorating the sides of the hip. He would stand in the shallows, contemplating things, before finally making what he called the ‘corpus immersus’, splashing around in one or two strokes, then retreating to the cement steps, where he would begin a series of Boy Scout stretches.

  So you can imagine her surprise when, after Jim had returned and Andy blundered in from his waste-ground antics, after all three of them had consumed the unexpected treat of chips, beans and sausages and Eileen suggested a walk down by the sea wall and maybe a swim, Andy nodded gravely and Jim took a last gulp of tea and came out with an enthusiastic, ‘Absolutely!’

  So, absolutely it was. She removed three towels from the hot press and wrapped their swimming things separately in each of them, handed each of them their rolled bundle and in no time at all, all three of them were walking down the gentle slope from the 30 bus stop to the vista of sea below.

  The wind had died a little, the sea was an uncertain sea-green, but there were no white caps, thank God. She could do a slow breaststroke without those flurries of blinding spray in her eyes.

  She took Jim’s arm and slipped her hand through the elbow of her growing son and found that, to her quiet surprise and delight, he didn’t flinch or withdraw in that adolescent horror she had read so much about. No, he allowed her arm to sit there, quite happily in the crook of his, the only resistance being the gentle rocking of his gait, the soft scrape of his hoodie.

  So they were a family again, a proper family, she was gladdened to think, and she wondered how she could have imagined it otherwise. He was a growing boy; some kind of withdrawal was what Jim would have termed ‘par for the course’.

  So they walked. Jim talked about oranges from Seville, apples from New England, strawberries and raspberries from Donabate and Balbriggan, about a new contract Intercontinental Preserves was managing for the SuperValu chain. And it was odd, Eileen thought, the attachment he had forged with his employers, as if their brand, their values, their future even, was interconnected with his. They were just his employers, after all, and she could even now remember a time in which he didn’t go on so much about marmalade. Marmalade and jam and various brands of fruit curd. If he had found employment in a bank, she wondered, would all the talk be about interest rates and negotiable loans? And she had to smile wryly to herself then and think that, knowing Jim, it probably would. She looked down at his brown shoes, beside her coloured espadrilles, and noticed Andy’s boots, moving in time with both of them, and saw flecks of blood on the toecaps.

  She had a mental image then, and she couldn’t escape it, of a rat crushed beneath his Doc Martens. He had chosen those boots himself, olive-green leather with the wine-coloured stitching. He had wanted the green ones, not the black. Another image came, of a boot flailing through the air, sending
a bloodied, broken-backed rodent back to the hole it had scurried from. She shivered, with almost a wave of nausea, wondering what happened to his pride in his Doc Marten boots, the toecaps more than flecked, streaked with lumps of blackish goo.

  ‘They were pulling the beech trees down,’ she said, ‘below the football pitch—’

  Andy finished for her.

  ‘And you’ll never guess what came out of the roots?’

  ‘What?’ Jim asked.

  ‘Rats,’ Andy said.

  ‘Rats?’

  ‘Rats,’ Andy repeated. ‘Hundreds of them.’

  ‘I suppose it makes sense,’ Eileen murmured, ‘when you think of it. Those old roots, buried in the ground for a hundred or so years. They would grow their own colonies, wouldn’t they?’

  And another involuntary image came. Of subterranean tunnels, burrowing rats scraping their way beneath the football pitch, underneath the bus stop, carving a honeycomb of rat-holes beneath the bungalow itself.

  ‘Is colony the word,’ Jim asked, ‘for a collection of rats?’

  And her heart sank for some reason. She recognised the didactic tone. Jim was too old when she’d had Andy. Maybe they were both too old.

  ‘I mean, Andy, you can talk of a flock of geese, a murder of crows, a charm of larks. Collective nouns, actually, are an interesting study, in and of themselves.’

  At least he had moved on from preserves.

  ‘But rats? A pack? A plague?’

  She imagined tiny feet scraping beneath the kitchen floor.

  ‘It was a whole city of them down there.’

  This, from Andy. And his voice had positively deepened lately. Maybe it had dropped, with his other bits and pieces.

  ‘Not only a city. A whole race of them. Big ones, small ones, baby ones . . .’

  ‘The boys had fun, chasing them. But I have to say, Andy, I hope you never touched one of them—’

  ‘With my boot, only. I tried catching them, but Jesus, they were fast.’

  ‘Andy—’ Jim remonstrated. And Eileen had to admit, he did give excellent example.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Jesus has nothing to do with rats.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘And I know we don’t go to mass, but there are people who do.’

  ‘Oh. I see.’

  ‘Good. So, back to the rats.’

  ‘Each time a tree came down, they swarmed out—’

  ‘Maybe that’s it,’ Jim enthused. ‘A swarm of rats. We can check when we get back.’

  ‘Check?’

  ‘In the OED.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Come on, son, you know what that is. Porcupine, portcullis, Portumna. The Oxford English Dictionary.’

  And Eileen bit her lip as she walked. She hoped Andy’s appetite for reading wouldn’t sink and lose itself in this adolescent swamp, which she knew, instinctively, was approaching.

  The swim, when they arrived at the shelter, was uneventful. She didn’t have to worry about Andy in the men’s since she could hear his father huffing and puffing his way through his ritual of disrobing. And when Andy emerged, skinny and light-footed, with the baggy swimming trunks she had bought for him in TK Maxx, she marvelled once more at how this element had entered her life. He had an elegance all of his own; he stood, ankle-deep in the water, with his free foot touching his knee, like a thin stork. And he sank that magical body slowly, the way he always had, one or two intakes of breath, then a rush of rapid strokes that took him far out into the centre of the bay. It was all she could do to keep up with him. But she did manage it, and soon they were both treading water, their backs to the great dockland derricks behind, their faces towards the string of cement shelters, where Jim was only now making his way into the water.

  She turned, looked at her son’s sleek head disappearing like a seal beneath the waves, and thought she should do her utmost to treasure moments like this. The more the boy grows into adulthood, the rarer they become.

  14

  Dany went to sleep on the same mound of straw, wondering how the strangest things could seem so natural. The lion snoring gently behind the rusted bars, smelling of old fur and faraway toilets, like a tawny grandmother. Though he had no idea, he remembered thinking dimly, how grandmothers smelt. But he awoke then, minutes or hours later, and nothing in the trailer seemed natural at all. The lion smelt of acrid urine; its wheeze was the rumble of a savage beast. The pricking of dried grass on his cheeks, the scent of hay in his nostrils, the irritation down his spine, where the shards of whatever he’d slept on had gathered; all of it itched and none of it seemed right. He stood, and angled his back towards the metal handle of the doorway to scratch it at the places his fingers couldn’t reach, and the lion shifted and the door creaked, and he realised his spine must have shifted the handle to whatever was the open notch.

  He looked outside, at the oily, downtrodden grass, and felt a sudden pang of homesickness, as if a door to a lost memory had opened of its own accord. And as the lion’s eye opened lazily he cracked the door open further. The door creaked, the way his own kitchen door at home once creaked. And the eye watching him had a dull certainty about it, as if the lioness grandmother knew about that kitchen door, saw in its inner eye the lozenged pattern of the tablecloth, the living room beyond, with the embers still burning in the fireplace. Does a lion have an inner eye? This one seemed to, an eye inside the eye that watched him now, that knew everything about him, as he put one foot on to the metal step outside and gently closed the door behind him and saw her eyelid close as well before the door handle clicked home.

  Home. He was going home. This carnival adventure suddenly seemed like a dream to him, a dream from which he had now woken. And when Dany walked through the shuttered carnival, he had that half-awake feeling, that yawning stretch about his body, and he shivered, as if to dispel the admittedly pleasant dream he had been in. The sliver of moon above the pennant above the big top, a fox slinking between the empty alleyways. It had all of the transience of a dream, all of the unreality, all of the shimmering quality, dispersing now, with the mist around the caravans. The real him needed to be back where it always was, in the small bed beneath the dormer window, with the sweaty wheat-coloured pillow that he used to think of as his own.

  For that was his plan now, to find his way home, back to that proper bedroom, to the mother with the flour-dusted apron that he missed as he would a missing limb. So if his plan was a return, why did he feel that he was running away from something already like a home? It was confusing, the pangs he felt, for a return and an exit, the image of a mother that drew him and of the moonlit carnival that he was somehow betraying by his leaving.

  He ran when he came to the tangled grass before the lip of cement that divided the caravan fields of the Tuileries from the road. One slow car coughed down it, headlights illuminating the road before it like a melting cone. He ran past the car to the train tracks, since he knew the tracks would take him back towards the city centre, the river and somewhere beyond it, the northside suburb he had grown up in. A train ambled past him, a long clunk of orange and black, and he ran behind the last carriage, grabbed the metal buffer of the end, felt his hands slip in the grease around it, his shoes scuffing the gravel between the sleepers. He hauled himself up then and sat as the train gathered speed and the sleepers flashed by. Small squat grey buildings flew by, and then an empty station and more sagging concrete posts and chicken and razor wire, and then an abandoned baths, a Victorian pier reaching out to curve its granite arm around the sea and another empty station, and he realised he was seeing the city he had lived in from another perspective, the perspective of a speeding goods train. Then came the vertical and angled hawsers of the bridge across the river; he had only ever seen it as a tunnel of rusted metal that his mother or his father drove through and here he was inside its armature, as the towering cage of girders thundered above. If she missed him the way he missed her she must be hurting terribly, he realised. And he felt anothe
r pang of guilt, of panic. He thought of his father, working the carpentry bench alone, saying, ‘It’s all right, love, I’m sure he’ll turn up,’ as if he were a set of car keys that had unaccountably gone missing. He saw his mother’s hands pushing the buttons on the phone, making call after call to his round of friends. And his friends, what about them? Did they notice his absence in their forays through that bank of daffodils that led to the scum-covered artificial lake? He saw his feet dangling over the railway sleepers flashing beneath them and he wondered would they be kicking a ball again tomorrow, against the cement wall behind the cul-de-sac, or would he be confined to his room.

  The train stopped at a level crossing and he took the opportunity to reacquaint his feet with the gravelly ground between the sleepers. It felt strange and weighty somehow to be walking once more and as he was getting used to the feeling the train pulled off again, too quickly for him to scutch back on.