Carnivalesque

by Neil Jordan

  22

  Walter could have tutored Dany in the mysteries of the spice, Mona mused to herself, the spice, the mildew, the lost lore of carnies, back to the beginnings of what he insisted on calling time. It was odd to be missing Walter, with his niggling questions, his windy explanations, his inability to accept that carnie things just were. Walter had been Jude’s project, a sadly stillborn one, a hopalong, a wannabe carnie that never made it through to the other side. But if explanations were needed at this stage of the game, Walter would have provided them, and more.

  Walter, a lonely schoolboy with ink-stained fingers, absconded from his Somerset boarding school and made his way to Weston-super-Mare. He soon grew tired of the lonesome delights of the Weston Pier and wandered through the strange maze of carnival tents that had plonked itself in the fields above the mudflats of the Bristol Channel. He became entranced, as any runaway would, and when the carnival finally had to move, under pressure from the worthy proprietors of the Grand Pier pavilions, he stowed himself away in Jude’s tent. Now, how anyone could hide themselves in Jude’s frugal tent, even a boy as fragile, as unwanted and as colourless as Walter, was a mystery to the other carnies who, when the carnival reassembled itself in some unpronounceable Welsh seaside town, saw him wandering the stalls as if in need of a home, any home, a carnival home being obviously preferable to the cold halls of Clifton College, from whence he had fled. He became a fixture of kinds and Jude, being kind, became a sort of mother to him. So to call him one of the snatched would be to Jude a disservice, since, if anything, he had attached himself – like a limpet, like a mollusc, like a tick that burrows under the skin and feeds on what it can find there – generally blood – to Jude, to the carnival, and the carnie thing. And being of a bookish bent, this Walter began to catalogue everything he found there. The cataloguing process began, oddly enough, with Jude’s navel. Or, to be more precise, with Jude’s lack of one. How he discovered this lack remained unexplained and, carnies being reticent types, reluctant to enquire into embarrassing matters, never really asked. Did he see her naked at her toilette, her still-lithe body that needed the same care and nurturing as a young nineteen-year-old, and notice the flat, taut, unbuttoned expanse of her stomach? Or did Jude allow his boyish fingers to play across the same surface? Did he take a peek at night, as Jude’s chemise fell free in her hammock, with Jude herself in the arms of Morpheus, or, more likely, wrapped in the embrace of mildew? However it happened, he found that Jude lacked what most people had: a belly button, a navel, any evidence of attachment to one who would have given birth to her. And so his enquiries began. With the first fact, so to speak. Jude, one of the last of the originals (possibly, he was to hazard later, the last) of the Ur carnies, the unsnatched, the unchanged. She was born, apparently, of nothing. And the question began to plague him. What was that nothing? If there was no womb, no amniotic fluid, what was there? A primeval slime, a cluster of gas, even, and as his enquiries progressed, he began to think this was closer to the truth, a carnie Garden of Eden? Jude turned out to be the last one to answer such questions. But so began his enquiries into carnie nature and reality. And while this enterprise was to remain unfinished, he had a clear sense of it himself before it all went sideways. It was to take the shape of a treatise, a summa, if you will, which he himself considered calling, rather pretentiously, but given his minor-public-school background, not surprisingly, De Rerum Carnivalis. He struggled mightily over several years with this tome, hindered by the intractable fact that carnies themselves were the most unreliable of narrators. So he began with one pivotal supposition, obvious, unoriginal, but impossible to deny: that carnies knew little of themselves. In fact, the more they knew of themselves, the more they had to unknow. Thus carnie dialogue, which he called, variously, cant, Shelta, argot, klang, was constituted almost entirely of elisions, evasions, obscuranticisms, hints that assumed they were understood but were designed to be impenetrable, whole cornucopias of allegory and fable that never came to a conclusion or a point. For them, understanding was a form of occlusion. Now these were heady concepts for a young boy, but at least he had a grounding in classics, and Walter saw himself as a chronicler of kinds, almost medieval, of this strange breed he had happened among. His chronicle would create sense where now there was nonsense. It would be a carnie bible, a grand, heraldic, genealogical saga, among other things. It would, and this would eventually lead to his undoing, let in the light. And carnies, as he saw it, badly needed ‘light’. Anytime they approached clarity, they breathed on the mirror of sense and made it nonsense once more.

  Which led to Walter’s second supposition: carnies needed to know little of themselves. There was an interiority to carnie existence that would be an enigma to humans. For them, knowledge and experience could never be separate. Moment by moment, they knew. Not for them the emotional event, the reflection on it, and the getting of wisdom, be it in the long maturation of subsequent thought, or the blinding, sudden, clarifying ‘epiphany’. Their very being, their experience of the world, was epiphany, and for them thought, language, metaphor, culture, was an escape from that fact. They saw something clearly, too clearly, by the mere fact of their existence. And this clarity was only made bearable by the evasions, the digressions, the fables they created to occlude it.

  Now these are hardly the reflections of a runaway from the junior form of a minor public school. No, they are the thoughts of a mature, unbearably lonely chronicler, unmoored from his natural habitat, attached and obsessed by a brood that never quite welcomed him into its bosom. Walter followed the carnival in all of its peregrinations between two world wars, and found himself beset by an issue that never affected them: ageing. Which led to his third, and some would say, most critical supposition: carnies experienced time in a radically different way. In fact, one could argue they hardly experienced time at all. For them time was a mangled circle, a balloon twisted into a donkey shape, a series of interconnecting doughnuts to be prodded, licked, tasted, but never consumed.

  Now Walter’s treatise, being unfinished and unpublished, only ever existed in scrawls on school copybooks; half-developed theories, various attempts at thesis without any antithesis and nary a hint of synthesis. But his scribbled queries and annotated insights provide invaluable hints as to the broader realities that Dany found himself confronted with. And Dany, given the sad outcome of the Walter saga, should consider himself lucky. The questions he asked were internal, acceptant and without any hint of intrusion. When answers were offered, he accepted them; when the demands of natural logic were contradicted, he allowed the tumble-dryer in his mind begin its job. Contradictions, in a word, didn’t bother him too much and he was already halfway to being a carnie, one of the changed, a condition and a consummation that was denied to the unfortunate Walter. Or Walter the Unfortunate, as he perhaps should be known. For while carnies don’t mind a question, an enquiry, the odd probe into what we could call their psyche, what they cannot stand is the persistent niggle. The vain and foolhardy, and, not to put too fine a point on it, impossible urge to ‘let in the light’. Carnies lived in light. And so as the years passed, as the caravan moved, from Scunthorpe to Liverpool to Blackpool, to Hull on the Humber, over the North Sea to Rotterdam, through the countless capitals of the remains of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, back to the waste ground in the shadow of the huge derricks on the River Clyde, from Stranraer to Belfast and the shadow of a whole new set of derricks, Walter found himself gradually excluded. And with his exclusion came premature ageing, in a grotesque contrast to the agelessness of what he had come to regard as his subjects. Thus it was a stooped, grey-haired thirty-two-year-old who crossed the cobbled train tracks outside the gates of Harland and Wolff and was blown to bits by the Luftwaffe raid of 6 April 1941. The carnival felt the ground shake, saw the sky ablaze and buried its head for the evening. It travelled west the next day, towards Coleraine and Londonderry. It only noticed Walter’s absence on its journey south, several weeks later. It presumed he had
found some avenue of enquiry more forthcoming than carnies. The shipyard builders, maybe, in Harland and Wolff. Then it forgot about Walter. He was, in truth, easy to forget. But it carried with it, unknown to itself, a dog-eared pile of school copybooks which, for lack of a better term, we must call the Walter Codex (from the Latin, caudex: tree trunk, tablet, book).

  23

  Eileen couldn’t have been sure how long she spent in that shelter after her mid-morning swim. She had sunbathed for a while, making a cushion for her head from her towel, letting the sun do the job the towel should have done. She had then draped the towel over her bare shoulders and shared a flask of coffee, offered to her by one of the old-timers in the men’s section.

  ‘You immersed the corpus,’ he said, the kind of statement that didn’t need a reply.

  ‘Nothing like it,’ he added and she saw the Viking, now clothed in one of those Velcro bicycle suits, fixing a helmet, awkwardly, to his cropped head. Oh dear, she thought. How disenchanting. And she realised, with a whimsical, inner smile, that her husband Jim would never be seen dead in leisurewear. Small mercies.

  It must have been a while, though. A good half an hour, at least, maybe even an hour. Long enough for that dreadful thing to happen, whatever it was, on the dunes behind. Anyway, after her thanks to the old-timer for the coffee, after peeling off her swimsuit underneath her towel, after dressing and drying her hair into what she hoped was a fetching tangle, she finally emerged from the shelter to see the figure of a girl staggering from the sandy dunes on to the cement pathway, one heel on her sandal broken, her body covered in patches of damp sand, and what seemed to be a personal cloud of midges swirling round her head. For a moment Eileen thought she was wearing a veil, or a hijab, one of those Muslim headscarves. But then she recognised Carmen, who was swatting the air desperately with her hands, hands that had visible streaks of blood on them, as if to ward off an attack of bees, or hornets.

  ‘Carmen!’ she called, and saw her turn, eyes wide with a strange kind of horror.

  ‘No,’ Carmen was saying, ‘Oh God—’

  Carmen staggered then, and almost tripped over one of the cement blocks designed to stop the cars. Eileen reached out and gripped her elbow to steady her.

  ‘His fucking mother – get away from me—’

  And that’s when Eileen heard it. the buzzing, or the pulsing, like the intermittent drone of cicadas in a horror movie. But they weren’t cicadas, they were midges, or some kind of flying ants, and Carmen was flailing with her bloodied hands at her own barely visible cloud. She ran then, tripping on her broken heels, towards the bridge beyond, crashing into a cyclist on the way. It was the velcroed swimmer with the hourglass waist. Eileen turned from the splayed bike and the clacking heels to see the silhouetted figure of her Andy, walking from the dunes.

  There were many rumours, afterwards, about what had happened. About a clinch, an adolescent embrace on the dunes, that turned into ‘something else’. But what this something else might have been changed in the telling, as in one of those courtroom dramas, where the victim herself is the least reliable of narrators, where the trauma suffered leads to exaggerated fantasies that create other traumas in turn. it didn’t help that as the legends blossomed, the infestation of flying ants began.

  ‘What’s wrong with Carmen?’ Eileen had asked, when her son finally reached her, only to be shocked into silence by his terse reply.

  ‘How would I know?’

  ‘Something happened, Andy. You have to tell me—’

  ‘Nothing happened, Mother. She just doesn’t like me – did she ever?’

  Was that a question? Eileen wondered. Surely he would have known, would have remembered. She took his arm, as they crossed the wooden bridge, and remembered passing them both on the same walkway as children. There was a dusting of sand all over his shirt. She brushed it off. She saw a flutter then, from the folds of the cotton, and realised it wasn’t sand. It was tiny, winged creatures, like ants. She felt them brush against her face, and rubbed her face, her hair; she felt an itching in her scalp and shook her head, looked up and saw a cloud of them around her, like fine, Saharan sand, blown in the summer wind, but it wasn’t sand, it was an infestation of those winged things, filling the air, all glittering in the late-morning sun. She felt afraid, suddenly, the hyperventilating surge of panic she had felt out in the water, and wanted to cling to his arm for comfort, but then she realised she felt afraid of that too. She took a deep breath and realised she was inhaling them, and almost gagged on the dark sleepers of the walkway, beneath her feet.

  And as the rumours circulated in the small grid of bungalowed streets adjacent to the football pitch, the clouds of flying ants circulated as well. There were reports on the news, something about Mediterranean winds and alates, females that create a sexual attraction, bringing the males in swarms, creating clouds that block the sun and moon. For they swarmed at night too and after them came flocks of seagulls, gorging on the swarms of flying ants.

  Carmen avoided her glance in the subsequent days. Brushing her face to clear it of the clouds of tiny predators, mouthing a cigarette, turning to the chip-shop window to manage a light, out of the persistent breeze. Andy stayed locked in his room, watching the piles of dead creatures build against his windowpane like blown sand. And Eileen, on the few occasions she ventured outside, felt shunned. Something had happened on the dunes. No one would tell her what it was. Neighbours would cross the street ahead of her, as if she herself had brought this strange infestation with her. And one evening when she entered his bedroom and saw him standing by the open window, enveloped in a dark cloud of minuscule flying creatures, she knew that, somehow, he had.

  What had happened on the dunes, as Carmen confided to Georgie, Georgie who had once been Andy’s friend before all the mad stuff began, was that a simple snog or shift became something different, something other, something way beyond what the American TV shows called first, second or third base, what the local boys called a wear, a feel, a ride.

  Carmen lay beside him first of all in the long grass and offered up her lips for a kiss. She has learned things on her summer holidays that she wants to teach him. How to kiss with her mouth open, how to tangle her legs around his, how to press her hips into his and get things moving. She learned this from a Protestant boy in Kilrush who walked her down by a different set of dunes. The boy had a packet of condoms, but she never let him get that far. And she had just begun her instruction here in the Dollymount dunes when she felt something stroking the stocking of her leg. She had been careful about those socks, rolled them down behind her knees, just so, and when she felt fingers rumpling the edge of one of them and creasing the skin behind she smiled to herself and whispered, ‘Where did you learn that?’ He answered, ‘Nowhere in particular,’ and she thought to herself, saucy, saucy as the stroke of the fingers continued upward, underneath the flap of the kilted skirt she was wearing, and she thought, oh dear oh dear, no Protestant boy ever got that far, and she tries to remember a song her father used to sing about Protestant boys and an old orange flute and she felt another touch then, around her blouse on the right side, probing beneath the summer bra she was wearing for the nipple, and another on the left side, and he was all hands suddenly; she wondered how many hands a boy could have to find a way to nuzzle closer and saw when she opened her eyes, that they were not hands but creatures, creatures she didn’t have a name for, furred creatures, with ears like probing brown-haired fingers, and she pulled her face away from his then, so rapidly she almost bit his tongue, and she saw a larger one between her outstretched knees, staring at her, the same colour as the sedge grass behind it, its brown furred ears erect, as if surprised by suddenness. And she remembered the name then, hare, a hare, this was the father of hares and the tiny furred family were burrowing all around her. As if she was the earth, she thought, to be probed, tunnelled, penetrated. ‘Get me out of here, Andy,’ she murmured and that was when she heard the buzzing. Of tiny things like ants, obscuring the ha
res in a wave of wings and she pushed him off and stood and the hares leapt – that was the only word for it, leapt – like a surprised phalanx of furred spears, and they ran, obscured by the clouds of flying ants. And she knew then something was wrong, very wrong, but she couldn’t put her finger on what.

  24

  Walter’s codex. Or as Mona knew it, Walter’s collection of dog-eared copybooks. Where were they now, Mona wondered, when another boy might have need of them? And how odd that one so obsessed with histories and genealogies, Edens lost and found, should have let them vanish into thin air. Had they been vaporised with him, in those bombs they were told fell on the Harland and Wolff shipyards? Probably. And she remembered him then, intoning some kind of nursery rhyme, as he scribbled.

  Of man’s first disobedience and the fruit

  Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste

  Brought death into the world and all our woe . . .

  An odd kind of doggerel that didn’t even properly rhyme. But she had no knowledge of Walter before the carnival took him, sitting at his oak and iron desk, turning the pages of Paradise Lost with his cane-rapped fingers. And she had no sense of the crucial insight he gleaned from those pages.

  There was an Eden from which carnies fell. A mirror of the biblical one, and as with mirrors, the question once more arises, what was the real and what was the reflected? And Walter the Unfortunate would have it that we cannot be sure.

  Was it a paradise as we would understand it? Walter demurs. He knows there was trouble in paradise, there was a flight, but was it a flight from or towards? And here we have to allow Walter another crucial insight: it was both.

  Everything was doubled in this carnie hermeneutic. The flight was from and towards, it was a flight and a fall, it was a fall and an airborne exodus; the feathered wings that bore them were burnt in turn, by the flight, the fall, the scattering; the air that welcomed them singed them and changed them for ever.