Carnivalesque

by Neil Jordan

  ‘And other forms of complaint more pernicious—’

  ‘Deleterious—’

  ‘More capricious—’

  ‘Meretricious—’

  ‘And if not done with capernosity and function, is it worth doing at all?’

  The question remained unanswered. And Dany, as he wisely decided against any riposte, remembered the word for such a question. A rhetorical question. They enjoyed their multiple-syllable words, these roustabouts, and might have relished that one. But he kept it to himself, for another day, or another harvesting night. He sensed, somewhere inside himself, that there might be many of them to come. So he continued with his methodical scraping of the hanging stuff that they called mildew, into the tiny receptacle which, it seemed to him now, might possibly never be filled.

  But it was filled, eventually. And as he wandered through the canvas entrance, into the hesitant roseate glimmers of another day, he felt an almost mechanical tiredness overtaking his limbs. He dropped his earthenware jar and his curved scalpel into one of the many wheelbarrows that were ringed in a semicircle on the brown, heavily trodden earth and made his way back to his sleeping quarters. He could hear a roustabout harvest song echoing through the sleeping carnival, as they too made their way to their roustabout hammocks.

  ‘Your hay is mowed

  Your harvest reaped

  Your barrows full

  Your trailers heaped

  The mildew’s jarred

  The spice is hard

  And the rousties gone to sleep.’

  He would do well to learn it, he imagined, as he opened the trailer door, crept silently between the two hammocked figures, gripped the web of his own ropy bed and pulled himself up.

  20

  Mona, of course, heard him enter. She heard the rustle of his hammock, the soft wheeze as sleep took him over and the odour of harvested mildew filled the cabin. She knew that smell and she wished him well with it.

  The spice, the gum, the glue, the sap, the resin, the mildew, whatever the correct word for it, and there was, in the end, no proper word for it. there were things before there were words for them; there was emotion before the mildew; there was the void before there were things to fill it; there was the gasp before the void and the gasp filled it. The gasp was the breath and the breath was the mildew and the mildew was the spice and the spice just was.

  She would one day have to tell him all she knew. But then, as she lay there in her unrocking hammock, what did she know? The mildew was, she knew or thought she knew, the only remnant of the breath that made them. Why it congealed in those wafer-thin, undulating fungal layers of stuff, as if one had spun a mushroom or a toadstool in those drums that spun the candyfloss, she could never tell. Perhaps carnies knew once, but the race itself has been spun so many ways – mingled with the snatched and the changed, not to talk about the cousin and mongrel carnies from other parts – that if they knew, they had long ago forgotten. So, like most of the rules and rituals that governed their lives, it was left unexplained and all that was left was the habit, the need to harvest it wherever it gathered, and it gathered in the strangest places. Beneath the bleachers and the circus stalls, underneath the rollercoaster, in the floors of the ghost-train cars and like a fine-spun spider’s web around the pole that kept the big top afloat. They all knew that laughter, terror, shock and fear and awe and joy – emotion, in a word, human emotion – left the mildew as its residue, which is why, in effect, the carnival existed. But how to explain its presence under the table on which Dorothea read her fortunes, clinging, like a diaphanous web of furred parchment, to the dragon claws of the table legs? And how to explain Virginie, who would wake some mornings covered in it? Was it because Virginie dreamed sometimes, with such astonishing intensity, of the Land of Spices? The only remnants of those dreams would be the webbish accretions of the mildew that clung to her naked body, wrapping her like a cocoon to the hammock beneath her? She would ring the small bell that hung from the rope above her and Mona would gather her ancient bowl and brush and harvest that precious gossamer of mildew while the coffee boiled. And having gathered each atom of the sacred crop, they would sometimes spice their coffee with a few filched strands of it, which undulated in the brown liquid before they finally disappeared.

  Maybe Virginie should tell him, instruct him in the carnie mysteries, since Virginie knew more. But then they were changelings, both of them. Mona’s inductor – her mother, in effect – was an original and could have enlightened her before the Fatigue took hold. And she herself had that carnie idiom of talking in evasions, diversions, stories that entranced and enchanted, but the enchantment took over and the point, if point there was, was never arrived at, let alone explained. Why they had to hide their essential natures, why so much had to be forgotten, erased, hidden in webs of obscurity, why clarity was a vice, never a virtue, why things were as they were. To know nothing, to her, seemed to be the sweetest thing. And carnies, on their best days, seemed to relish knowing nothing. On their worst, they knew some great reality had to be hidden, some truth that itched them like a scab they knew they should not scratch, lest the wound beneath revealed itself. As if to live, it was necessary to forget. But all of that they did, and here was the rub, was a form of remembering.

  Ursula, the only mother Mona remembered, her carnie original, who always seemed younger than her, with a never-ending spring in her step, woke up one day tired. The Fatigue, she answered, when Mona questioned what was wrong, and if anything was to be explained to her it should have been that. But no, the Fatigue, like most carnie things, just was. And if there was one memory Mona wished she could erase, it was the memory of her stepping off that cliff into the churning seas below. The body that fell was as young as it always had been, but the body that plunged through the water and was tossed back up, only minutes later, was that of an ancient, wizened crone. As if age had been kept in abeyance and would only take its tribute when the Fatigue took hold.

  She had gone, Mona knew, to the Land of Spices. That place that carnies sometimes dreamed of, always whispered of as a place of return, when the Fatigue took over, a homecoming, which didn’t make sense, since none of them, even the originals, could ever claim to have been there. Even Jude, Jude who could well be the last original, with no memory of anything other than a carnie life; Jude only knew of it as a rumour, the ghost of someone else’s memory, familiar to her only from occasional dreams, or from whatever tinctures of the mildew she allowed herself. And Jude remembered as far back as the first scattering, long before the Hunger, when the Adzed Heads came over the Eastern Sea with their hollow-headed cloaks and their curved staffs. They chanted false religion, as the carnie lore went, sat on stones facing east, with their cries of amen. So be it. And so it was, as the old world turned grey with their chanting and the new, disenchanted world took over. So the Fatigue claimed, not one, not several, but whole clans of carnies and they took the leap that legend had it would bring them back to where they had once belonged, their Land of Spices. It was a communal Fatigue that Jude described and Mona could only imagine the terror, having seen just one take the leap. Whole swathes of her kind, with their perfect bodies, walked to the edge of that huge, curved cliff and didn’t hesitate at the sight of the churning western waters so far beneath.

  One by one they stepped off the cliff and consigned themselves to the waves. They knew what awaited them once they had pierced the water; the sudden splash, the rush of foam, the explosion of brine up the sinuses and then life would hit them, make a kind of return, with all of its delayed anger intact. The years, which had been waiting, like those coiled dimensions string theorists go on about, exploded inside them in a pure rush of interrupted time, compacted into microseconds, and old age withered them before their downward plummet had been interrupted by the brine. And Jude, on the cliffs above, who had neither the courage nor the inclination to take the leap, suddenly knew that carnie life was what she would learn to call, many centuries later, an oxymoron; it was life suspe
nded, with all of those inchoate longings held in check. She saw body after body bob up in the uncaring foam; ancient, twisted, convulsed by more years than any human had to ever live through. And she hoped against hope that their carnie selves had made it to the promised Land of Spices.

  But of that Land of Spices, even she had no memory. It was one of those rumours, heard about so often, told of in tales round a rath or a fireside and of late round a carnival bonfire, that one felt one knew, one felt one should know, one never thought or dreamed of questioning. In her dreams she seemed to know it, and she couldn’t deny her dreams. Nor could she deny the mildew that all their carnival delights and terrors gave rise to in humans. They left it behind them, quite blissfully unaware of their leavings, like snails leaving a gossamer trail. They didn’t need it, carnies did. And if carnies harvested it, carnies gathered it, carnies hoarded it in their ancient carnie jars and left in tribute at the sacred places on the sacred equinoxes, surely there must be a land that was worthy of all of this spice? Jude was the oldest, and perhaps her memory was faulty. And how could the others, the half- and quarter-blood ones who over generations attained pure carnie characteristics, the changelings, the snatched and the thatched; how could they deny a homeland which they were told was theirs but which none of them had ever directly ex-perienced? But what none of them could deny was the effect of it, the heady odour, the rush and the transport back to somewhere which should have been, must have been, and must still be. When they imbibed, inhaled, tasted on their carnie tongues on the ritual occasions allowed (and on those odd times they indulged in an illicit tincture), they could glimpse the hazy outline of their lost paradise. The mildew did things to them, the purified spice did more, so the Land of Spices, by that strange logic, surely had to be?

  Mona breathed deeply then, into the odour of mildew the boy had brought with him and felt herself falling back, once more, into a delicious, familiar dream. She must explain things to him, she thought, as the warp of sleep took her over. She remembered Walter, the wannabe carnie, with his ink-stained fingers and his sad copybooks. Walter the Unfortunate, who never made the grade. Walter, who would have explained nothing and everything.

  In the beginning there was two, Walter would have said. There was two, oddly enough, before there was one. In the beginning was a reflection, one of another, which made two. In the beginning, therefore, was a mirror, which reflected a world which didn’t know it was reflected . . .

  21

  School was coming up. The long summer was approaching an end. But the weather was still hot; Eileen relished her walks along the wooden bridge, down from the sprawling suburb and the grid of bungalows beside the football pitch. Andy’s friends were returning too, from whatever summer pleasure grounds their families had dragged them to. She had a strange shock of recognition when she encountered a group of them on the corner of Bayview Avenue. They had grown, their shoulders were hunched, their faces leaner and browner. It was reassuring, in a way, to think that whatever changes the onset of adolescence had wrought in him, he was not alone. They were all of them growing up.

  The girls, too. The differences in the girls were, if anything, more severe, more pronounced, more flamboyantly displayed. Some returning with tans that seemed to boast of hours spent on beaches in hotter climes, though they could well have been bought, Eileen surmised, over the counter. An almost orange glow came from their faces, their exposed midriffs, their long legs and their painted toenails, peeking out from that fashionable oxymoron, sandalled high heels. She remembered transformations from her own schooldays. Luxuriant hair cut into punkish spikes, ripped jeans and safety pins and piercings. But they at least had the virtue of ersatz rebellion: the Clash, the Ramones, Iggy Pop and ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’. It had to be better than this Barbie-doll aesthetic.

  She passed Carmen then, by the chip shop adjacent to the bridge, and saw, with grim satisfaction and a hint of regret, the transformation in her. The same fake tan, Oompa Loompa orange. With one significant difference. Carmen was smoking.

  ‘Hello, Mrs Rackard. Is Andy about?’

  Carmen had the grace to attempt a desultory concealment of the cigarette behind her spandex tube of a dress.

  ‘You’ve been away, Carmen?’ Eileen asked. She had liked Carmen in her prepubescent childhood, and hoped she would still like her, under the force of this current transformation. But, she thought, and felt a little guilty at the supposition, Carmen and Andy had always been close, like brother and sister, in a way, and Carmen might provide some map to the changes evident in her son.

  ‘Gorey,’ she said, ‘then two weeks in Majorca.’

  ‘Lucky you,’ said Eileen. ‘And Andy’s around. I’m sure you’ll bump into him. He’ll be glad you’re all back.’

  ‘Tell him I was—’ but her next words were lost in a flurry of wind from the sea and the squawk of a seagull, foraging after a discarded bag of chips. Eileen presumed the words were ‘asking for him’, or something like them, and smiled, nodding her farewell, not before she noticed Carmen’s high-heeled sandal, propping itself against the red-bricked wall behind her, the better to display, Eileen supposed, that long expanse of suntanned thigh to the passing world. So it goes, Eileen thought, as she crossed the Clontarf Road towards the bridge; it’s as if some strange creature had taken root inside them. Some second self, all muscular silences and hunched shoulders, and in the case of the girls, exposed navels and enhanced cleavages. Or something in the water, she mused, after discarding her clothes in the cement shelter, taking a few languorous strokes through the bay, towards the horizon line and the Pigeon House towers. She wondered what it would be like, in her lazy, water-dreaming way, to keep swimming, to leave all of her concerns, her almost mute son and her inattentive husband to themselves in that bungalow bound by the oppressive privet hedge, like a figure in a movie; that’s what they would do, keep swimming and leave it all behind. They would find her clothes, her summer skirt and her flat heels and construct a mystery around it, to do with adultery and emptied bank accounts, sallow strangers she may have been meeting in city-centre cafés. And all the time the simplest of solutions would be staring them in the face, but never occur to any of them, least of all to her shellshocked, caring husband Jim, whose only relief from his ever-present grief would now be his carpentry table in the back garage and condiment samples. That she had just kept swimming, all the way to Wales. How long would it take to reach Wales, she wondered, and at what random stretch of beach would she finally walk ashore, the water cleaving from her frozen flesh like one of those models in bodywash commercials? Something beginning with Llan, she thought, Llandudno, Llangollen, pronounced with a ‘C’, for some reason, like Clan. Then she turned and was hit by a wave of panic, realising how far out she was. She took a deep breath to calm herself, and thought, slow down, Eileen, less of the dramatics, and if that hyperventilating panic takes over, just float for a while. And she saw them then, two figures on the cement walkway that led to the long spit of sand that was Bull Island. He was walking, hands in his pockets, shoulders bent forwards as if avoiding a question she had just asked. And she held one of his hands, buried in his own pocket, the slut. The girl’s legs looked even longer from her watery vantage point; there was a bank of grey clouds building up behind the hill of Howth which lent a dramatic backdrop to their silhouetted figures. Eileen was calmer now, and began the long swim back. She saw their figures vanish as they headed towards the dunes. One breaststroke after another, she thought, and if you get out of breath again, just tread water. As if some strange creature had taken root inside them, she thought again. But how would it take root? And she imagined then a conger eel, sliding between her own thighs, taking root inside her. A small one, like a grass snake, before it had developed those loathsome teeth and those greyish gills. She had heard it could happen; all sorts of odd things take residence under the skin, the fingernails, the hair, the nostrils, the ears, the mouth. Any orifice could act as a conduit, offering a host to the invader. And the word
invader made her mind wander again, from conger eels and grass snakes to Viking sails on the horizon; they were the first invaders, before the English, weren’t they, or were there others before them? The Tuatha de Danaan, the Firbolgs, lost in the grey mists of time. Fairview Park, Jim had told her, was where the Battle of Clontarf happened, Sitric the Viking cleaving Brian Boru with his broadsword. When he was kneeling, at prayers, she remembered. And there were other swimmers puffing around her now; she was closer to the shore and the panic was gone. She began a traversing stroke then, in close reach of the shore. She would loll here for a time, in the water that wasn’t quite warm, but that had lost the cold bite after the long summer. Was loll the right word? she wondered. One didn’t loll in the water, one gambolled. Or one cleaved through it, like that muscular creature that passed her, with a steady, mechanical stroke, broad shoulders and a blue swimcap, heading back towards the concrete steps. He steadied himself at the lowest step underwater and rose then, himself like a Viking, broad, sculpted shoulders and a narrow, hour-glass waist. Men have smaller hips, she reminded herself, and continued her lolling or gambolling movement, enjoying the spectacle, as he headed back towards the dark shadow the sun threw in the men’s cement shelter. So close to the women’s, yet so far away. He pulled his trunks off, in one fluid, busy movement, and she saw the flash of nakedness before he drew the towel round him. A bronzed body, with two white buns for bum cheeks. And she couldn’t help comparing the spectacle with her husband Jim. The long white underwear he favoured, and the braces, since he couldn’t stand any pressure across his stomach. His tummy, as he called it. She had to widen the girth of each of his trousers, and wondered would this widening have to go on, as his girth continued its bloom. It probably would, she concluded. It would expand into the shape of a pear or one of those lemons that made his lemon curd and his entire wardrobe would have to expand with it.