Carnivalesque

by Neil Jordan

  He describes little of this paradise, for which we must be grateful, as prelapsarian descriptions can border on the tedious. There simply was a place, a state, a paradise. He tries out a string of names, Avalon, Hy-Brasil, Tír na nÓg, but settles on the one that carnies favoured, the Land of Spices. And here Walter allows himself some relief from Miltonic bombast, into the quieter measures of George Herbert:

  Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,

  Exalted manna, gladness of the best,

  Heaven in ordinary, man well dressed,

  The milky way, the bird of paradise,

  Church bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,

  The land of spices; something understood.

  . . .‘something understood’. It should have been enough for him, but of course it wasn’t. It might have been enough for carnies, but not for Walter. He will elaborate, annotate, elucidate. How the spice was the essence of the mildew, how the carnies fed on it. How the Mildewmen consumed the unrefined mildew from the furred roots of the caverns they inhabited, how consumption became the order of their paradise, how the Land of Spices became the Land of Few Remaining Spices, how the Dewmen emerged from their loamy places with their hoary mouths and their mouldering teeth and asked for more, and more was not forthcoming and battle commenced in the Land of Spices. And on a day without any sun and moon, without any light at all but the glow of decaying mildew, the carnies as a genus, as a race, a species, fled.

  It began as a flight, but became a fall.

  The fall. Walter describes the fall. He grows rhapsodic, as if the very idea of descent releases something in him. It was like the waft of autumn leaves, the slow collapse of the deciduous cover on the sycamore trees around the cricket and football pitches of the public school he ran from. Like the delicious downward drift of those pink cherry blossoms on the front avenue he could see through the library window, hoping against hope that his parents would soon drive down it. But the cherry blossoms fell silently, never in autumn, in the late spring, a diaphanous downward undulation that carpeted the dull, mud-coloured grass of the front lawns in a blaze of pink. Pink, like the rose-coloured Bentley that always promised to arrive, bearing his mother in the rear; pink, like the kisses she planted on the occasional letters she remembered to write. The fall was magical and brief, and left the dark etchings of the cherry-tree branches isolated against the April sky. And the carpet of pink told a story that he could never bear to think of ending, because the story was about life, about how beautiful things could be and how fragile was the life of those beautiful things. So the carnies, he imagined, fell to earth in the way of those cherry blossoms.

  But before the fall there was the flight, with a whizz-bang fury of propulsive escape, with a noise, a thunderclap, a sonic boom that shattered their universe and the arrows of the Dewmen that pursued each one of them created its own terrifying roar. These projectiles were hooked and spiked and taloned, and forged of the metallurgy of the Land of Spices, every lamppost, every crom rath, every gold- or silver-mirrored surface, every vein of ore, all of those hunched and blasted statues so beloved of the mildewed ones having been melted in the boiling pot of their dewless fury for that very purpose. But the carnies outflew them; singed almost to nothing by their speed of flight, they crossed the dimensional barrier and floated to earth, like beautiful burnt blossoms, almost like faeries, indeed, their singed wings outspread, guiding their fall, the last feathers of which were burnt to nothingness by the time their feet touched the surface they would come to call home. And the arrows that followed them melted as they met the atmosphere and fell to earth as molten drops, so for a moment, if anyone had cared to view it, it would have seemed the heavens were weeping tears of melted gold. And this residue from the Land of Spices touched the turfy earth and sizzled its way downwards, to make its home among the ancient fallen oaks, the dead bog-dwellers with their leathery skin and inert limbs and the slithering things that fed on them.

  So the carnie flight was from, and towards. From the paradise that was no longer theirs, towards the cold world of sin and death, where they had to survive as wingless ones. Where they searched for the mildew spice and found none. Until one day a carnie made a child laugh (unintentionally, Walter adds, since carnies up to then didn’t know they were funny) and that carnie found a tiny furred residue on the branch the child had leant upon. More a gossamer than a residue, an echoing web left by the child’s ringing peal of laughter. This carnie smelt the mildew and knew that it was good. The carnie wove a tale then, of joy and wonder, and more children gathered, and with each outpouring of wonder and joy the mildew grew and so the circus was born and then the carnival and the carnies made it their lot to trade in emotions, of wonder, laughter, terror, joy, and to harvest their payment in spice. They left their denuded paradise to Mildewmen, whom they hoped against hope could never take the journey they did. But what if they somehow managed? Then the carnies put their faith in their gravitational freedom, knowing that they were creatures of the air; Mildewmen, on the other hand, being creatures of roots and bark and everything that grows upon them. And so superstition was born. The magpie, the owl, the moonless night, the milk soured, the egg gone rotten, the cowless calf, the number thirteen all became emblems (metaphors, Walter adds, sagely) of that carnie fear: that the Mildewmen would somehow manage that flight to their new-found home. And so the carnies paid the unseen race of Mildewmen a ritual tribute, a kind of talismanic tithe. They gathered the excess spices in ancient jars and at intervals, decided by the movement of the sun and moon, they left the Mildewmen their spicy luckpenny. Spring, summer, autumn, winter, all of the equinoxes included, on circular mounds, drumlins, whitethorn copses and forests of ash and elder. Was this tribute ever collected? Ever consumed? Carnies never asked that question. Because, and here we encounter another of Walter’s insights, this very tribute was a tacit acknowledgement of their deepest fear: that something of the Dewman was already here.

  That it was goes without saying. Those golden arrows, melting in the sun’s rays, fell to earth. The burning tears of the mildewed ones.

  And yet the carnies thrived, condemned to travel the earth, to keep their origins secret, to pay their mildewy tribute, never to return to their Land of Spices. But all of their dreams were of that land, as it once was, and all of their nightmares were to do with that buried fear. A strange tale indeed, and a cautionary one, but probably the best account of carnie origins available. And Walter, being the numerate creature he was, beloved of classifications of all kinds, here adds a chart, of the relative yield of mildew and spice to the different human emotions. He grades the yields on a scale of one to ten. Laughter had a spice ratio of two point three, on his admittedly haphazard calculations. Joy yielded a five, wonder a six point two. And terror, unfortunately, yielded a crop that went off Walter’s chart. But carnies, being a gentle race, used terror judiciously, confined it to the manufactured fears of the rollercoaster, the Big Wheel and the ghost train. God forbid, he adds as an addendum, that they would ever realise terror’s true potential.

  25

  The therapist’s office was small and shabby and there was a sense that nothing went on in it, that it was rarely used, as if therapy was a cover for one of those money-laundering scams that Eileen had read about in detective novels, or seen on the afternoon television shows. Eileen didn’t know why she thought of this, she just knew she had to think of something other than the sequence of almost biblical plagues that had brought her here. The clouds of blown ants had persisted until the September rains came, and that her son was personally responsible for the infestation was an accepted fact in the rumour mills that congregated around the 30 bus stop and the vegetable shop at the junction of Lavender Terrace and the Sutton Road. On Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter and whatever else substituted for corner-shop gossip. But for the natural decency of Carmen, whose parents ritually crossed the roads when Eileen passed them, and her understandable embarrassment, the authorities would have been cal
led in to investigate whatever happened in the dunes that morning. So the rumour mill went, anyways (as the mothers would have put it). Eileen had shared her memory of the rats with nobody, not even her husband Jim, but school was coming up and they had both discussed their worries about the return of their incommunicative son to that raucous establishment in St Anne’s Park. Another explosion of gossip would be almost as intolerable as the explosion of flying ants, and they had both decided to consult the child psychiatrist that helped the young McEntee down the road, when his adolescent moods had developed into a condition called bipolar, which was once termed depressive, or manic, or both, and affected close to 10 per cent of growing teenage boys. Although, as the reassuring voice on the phone said, when Eileen had rung to make the appointment, there is so much happening in youths of that age, so many hormones coming to bursting point, so many physical and mental changes, that a touch of what parents perceive as ‘moodiness’ is only to be expected. As Jim was, naturally, busy, it fell to Eileen to accompany Andy to the old Georgian building by the Five Lamps, and Eileen sat there examining the features of this drabbest of rooms, trying to occupy her mind with anything other than the absence that sat beside her.

  He was rubbing one hand off another, the nails scouring small white streaks along the skin, and she had the awful sense that if he pushed the nails in a slight bit harder, those streaks would turn red. So she looked at the carpet, which had a pattern of interconnecting circles, brown upon green. Was it brown, she wondered, or had it once been black, the severity of the circular whorl smudged brown by feet? Then she had no more to think about this, and in a fit of panic wondered what else she could think about, what else would take her mind from the boy beside her, and she looked at the wallpaper. It was equally unpromising, but had a strange set of repetitive illustrations, a fading shepherdess with a staff that curled at the top and spread across the wall to the unlit fireplace, above which a framed diploma hung, that read ‘Gerard Grenell’ beneath the copperplate logo of a therapeutic institute. And as she couldn’t read the name of the institute, so ornate was the print, she set her mind to trying to remember the name of the shepherdess. And when she couldn’t remember that, she tried to remember the term for the staff that rose above her bonneted head. A crook, she remembered, a shepherdess’s crook. And then the inner door opened, and the name suddenly, and uselessly, came to her.

  Bo Peep was the shepherdess’s name, of course. Little Bo Peep.

  A man was walking towards her, through the open door. He had a kind face and corkscrew red hair that rose unbidden above his crown, no matter how carefully it was combed. And as he introduced himself, Eileen wondered did he know what a crook was for.

  But she knew that was the last question she should ask him. There was only one question she was here for, and it was to do with her son beside her, who, to her shock and surprise, was already standing, shaking hands with the kindly Dr Grenell, or was he even a doctor, she couldn’t be sure. Until he was gracious enough to shake her hand too and ask the question ‘Mrs Rackard?’ Well, it wasn’t a question really, but it was phrased like one, and Eileen nodded as her right hand was angled up and down by his and tried to smile when he said Dr Grenell and would have even curtseyed like Bo Peep on the wallpaper, she was that anxious.

  He brought them inside, to a smaller office with more plaques on the plain wallpaper of the wall, and here Eileen noticed it had two doors. One door to lead patients out, she assumed, and another, through which all three of them had come, to lead people in. Did men in white coats ever manage the transition between the two, she wondered, and then said to herself, you have to stop, Eileen, being so dramatic.

  Because her son, oddly enough, had perked up in front of the therapist. And Eileen, who could think of him more clearly now that her thoughts were mediated through another, wondered was that because he was at the age where he needed role models of men, and not of women. Was that why his eyes crinkled with something like pleasure when he saw the smudged ink-blot drawings the therapist held up, answering rapidly in a stream of word association that surprised even her?

  Until suddenly he stopped dead.

  ‘Is there a problem?’ the corkscrew-haired therapist asked. And Eileen thought to herself, he really ought to have it cut before it grew like a plover’s crest above those luxuriant eyebrows. ‘I find it hard to concentrate,’ Andy was saying, smiling at the therapist in a way that seemed to imply: if I hadn’t got a friend before, I have one now.

  ‘And why is that?’ the therapist asked, equally brightly.

  ‘Too many people,’ the boy said, and they both exchanged a glance and Eileen thought, well thank God someone can make eye-contact.

  ‘Well,’ the therapist said, smiled at Eileen a little too brightly and asked her softly, ‘Will you give us some time alone together?’

  So Eileen found herself back in the waiting room, alone now, looking at the Bo Peep wallpaper, wondering what on earth a crook was and however did she lose her sheep?

  26

  Mona, pirouetting on the twirling rope, whirled by Dany, far below, for some reason thought of Mulciber.

  What did Mulciber do?

  He fell.

  How did she know this?

  Walter told her.

  And she remembered, as her pirouette became a blur like a hummingbird’s wing, Walter scribbling in his schoolboy copybook, tongue angled through his damp lips, quoting what he wrote:

  From morn

  To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve,

  A summer’s day . . .

  Could she fall, she wondered, like Walter’s Mulciber? No, if she unfingered this rope, she would soar, a weightless burnt feather, to the confusion of the punters down below. And as she softened her twirl and reached one hand out to grasp the trapeze bar, she remembered something else. It wasn’t Walter’s Mulciber. It was somebody else’s. Somebody called Milton.

  Perhaps she should have indulged him more, perhaps the whole carnival should have forgiven him a little. For all poor Walter was doing was putting his spotty learning to a purpose. He had no guidelines for the unmoored environment he found himself in; he was using the only references he had. Milton, Lucretius, a touch of Virgil, the odd Shelley quote. And from them he drew another crucial insight. For if the carnie fall was a mirror of kinds to the biblical one, what was Burleigh but the carnival’s Mulciber? Mulciber, who had ‘found out the massie ore’ and built the halls of Pandemonium? Architect, thief of precious metals, confounder of the very large with the very small? And Burleigh’s Amazing Hall of Mirrors was to become the carnies’ Pandemonium, the great confuser, the creator of two from one and of infinity from both of them.

  Was it always a quality of mirrors that they separated children from their reflections, sent one home, the reality robbed of all of its substance, and sent the other, the substance robbed of all of its reality, off on a carnival journey? No, of course not. Mirrors did what mirrors did. They reflected, acted as a conduit for vanity of all kinds, captured an image, but relinquished it willingly; in fact, relinquished it inevitably, the moment the observer departed. But Burleigh, as Walter came to discover, was a born tinkerer.

  Burleigh had begun his critical experiments with mirrors after viewing the first public screenings of the Lumière brothers in the Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris. The caravan had set up its tents on the rattier end of the Bois de Boulogne, among the ice-skating pimps and their prostitutes, and Burleigh had taken the afternoon off and was amazed to see projected, on the flickering wall of the Grand Café, a series of living images. Men and women leaving a brightly lit factory entrance. Walking from what seemed to be a moored canal barge. Exiting a train, which magically began to move, and to almost overwhelm viewers with its mass. And what stunned him was not what stunned everyone else – the apparent and shocking reality of the image. No, it was the simple fact that the image had been separated from its reality. There had been an exit, in a factory in Lyons, the year before. And here, before him, was the
same exit. There had been a pier, somewhere, anywhere, jutting out over crashing waves. A succession of figures, diving in, swimming back out. And here now, before him, was the same event. And what, he wondered, in his half-demented way, if the same trick could be replicated with his Hall of Mirrors?

  He was a tiresome type, this Burleigh, half-carnie, half-oddjob man, but wholly and unfortunately himself. A lumbering, slope-shouldered tinkerer, in his grey shopman’s coat, with odd, greasy coils of battery copper spilling out of his pockets. But he had one particular talent, amongst his oddities. He was a genius with mirrors. Their arrangements, their distortions, their repeated curves and multiple reflections, back, if he arranged them correctly, as far as infinity itself. And with his Hall of Mirrors, which was doing a tolerable business on the unkempt fields of the Bois, he had set himself one simple task. To distort reality in as many ways as he could. To enlarge it, squash it, multiply it, flatten it, thin it and fatten it; to make the beautiful ugly and the ugly beautiful, in other words, to give the reflected as much life of its own as was optically possible. But, he wondered as he wandered into the cold December air and saw the freezing globules of breath emitted by the Parisian crowds, what if he could separate them entirely? What if he could, either through the construction of the mirrored surface itself, or the arrangement of mirrors and their mutual reflections, give the reflection life? An impossible task, you might say, a paradox, but Burleigh revelled in impossibility and paradox.

  And so began his exhausting, tiresome and ultimately fruitless reconstruction of his Hall of Mirrors to find that particular arrangement of angles, that magic placement of mirror on to mirror that would allow reflection separate from reality. That he failed goes without saying. And when the magic possibilities of rearrangement had been exhausted, he extended his experiments into the shapes of the mirrored surface themselves, concave, convex, conical, parabolic. And when these in turn yielded no fruit, he concentrated his efforts on the silver-backed surfaces of the same mirrors. He scraped and resilvered, experimented with tin and mercury, sputtering aluminium, other alloys and spraying techniques. He wasn’t helped through his years of experiment by the development of the cinematograph, from crude images of an oncoming train to the first one-reelers, to the riotous ballets and horse operas that became known as Westerns. If they could perfect their mechanical processes, why couldn’t he? Thus it was a disappointed and melancholy Burleigh that wandered down a shadowy laneway in old Rotterdam, before the bombs flattened it and long before the music festivals made it unbearable. The carnies were assembling on adjacent waste ground and Burleigh’s Amazing Hall of Mirrors was now the least of their attractions. So Burleigh did what Burleigh always did when bored: he wandered. And he turned a corner, on to a cobbled dockside with a mooring rope as wide as his torso that bound a ship to the dock as big as any street he had ever been in, and stopped outside an old antique shop with an object made of a certain metal in the window.