by Neil Jordan
Dany held, tight. He saw the foamed surface hurtling towards them and still he held. They hit the waves and, in something like a long, slow exhale, kept plummeting downwards. But he felt the contours of her waist contract then, into something thin, skeletal, hardly there. He saw her hair, grey and then white through the foaming bubbles that moved above them on their descent. Her face became a wizened map of tiny lines, until the skin became parchment thin, so the bones showed through. She was ageing as they plummeted downwards. As if the fatigue of years had come, with a vengeance, to take all of its toll. There was seaweed around them then, tendrils of it from the ocean’s floor, entangling his ankles. He kicked himself upwards and kept his hands gripped fast to her skeletal waist. He saw the surface again, impossibly far off; the broken moon forming and re-forming with the water’s movement. There was something like body returning to her cinched waist. There was flesh on her watery face again, the lines were diminishing, youth was returning as the slivers of moon-silver came back into view. And he broke the surface again, was tossed amongst the roiling foam, with Mona, as young as he had known her, still in his arms.
‘It makes no sense,’ she whispered, or murmured, or sputtered, ‘I should have never come back.’
‘Glad you did.’
‘The Fatigue, now, you’ve seen it. We carry all of our years inside of us. But you, you pulled me back.’
‘Was that some kind of test?’
He felt angry for the first time in all of this strange evening. To have been played with like that. He felt exhausted, as if the crashing waves could achieve what she did not.
‘Those hands, my boy love, lovely one, come straight from the Land of Spices. You were born a carnie. And there was never a need to be snatched.’
She drew him back up then, like two dripping fish drawn from above by an invisible line. He saw the water cleave off his boots in successive drips to the disappearing sea. He saw puffins and gannets, perched on their spotted niches in the cliffs.
‘Can you explain it?’
‘I wouldn’t try. Might spoil it. We are carnies, after all.’
32
Fourteen dead birds fell out of the sky and landed at the outer circle of twisted oaks. They were jackdaws, surprised from their perches in the upper branches. And as the shadow of something moving within made its way towards the soft light outside, there was a rustle, as of falling leaves. But they weren’t leaves falling, they were more dead birds. The tiny, woodland kind, sparrows, robins, tits, and a woodpecker, its tawny feathers stiff with rigor mortis before it hit the roots above the loamy earth. The leaves came afterwards, with the huge wind he brought with him. He was his own tempest, this Captain Mildew, and he stripped clean whatever bits of nature he happened across. So the wind, which normally happened upon trees from the outside, happened from the inside. It propelled from inside the circle, the little wood, the copse of oak, every leaf that had fallen and was yet to fall, and after this flock of oak leaves came the flock of dead and dying birds.
There was a boy with an improvised fishing rod hanging over the marshy waters and as these leaves whipped by him, the boy turned to see a quite ordinary man emerge, one hand clutching his tattered hat to his head. Then the wind died round him, and he let his hand fall and walked on, the hat perched at an odd angle. There was greasy hair hanging beneath it. His eyes caught the boy’s eyes and something in them made the boy turn away, back to the marshy water, where the weight of a dying fish had bent the tip of his rod.
The boy pulled the fish in, didn’t reel, since he had no reel; the rod was just a piece of bamboo with some catgut tied to the top. But he pulled the fish in, a small carp of some kind, and tore the hook from its mouth and laid it out on the flattened grass beside him. He was amazed to see a worm slowly sliding from its dead mouth. Three dead birds fell then, in quick succession, on the flattened grass beside the dead worm, the dead fish. The boy turned then and saw what he somehow knew was a dead man, walking with a shambling gait, from the border of the Taw Wood towards the Nanny River.
Captain Mildew (or an fear drúcht, spiorad spiosra, the Dewman) was getting used to walking. He had lived in an immaterial zone for so long and was just getting used to the body he had filched. Filleted might be a more appropriate word (after being grossly mildewed and powdered), for the tramp had been truly gutted, from the crotch to the sternum, and if it were not for the ancient stains of sweat around his denim shirt and his tattered trousers, the drying blood resultant would have been immediately obvious to anyone passing. To the young boy who had seen him emerge and now stared in perplexed horror from his perch above the salt-water pool. To the widow Maguire, taking her morning constitutional along the path made of abandoned railway sleepers through the marshes. She saw him emerge over a low dune, like a walking scarecrow, boots shambling through the unfamiliar sea grass and sand with what seemed to be his own personal rain cloud behind him. But of course it wasn’t a raincloud, it was a vaporous swarm of flying ants with a fluttering penumbra of dying birds. Larks, meadow pipits, greenfinches, gulls of various kinds and the ever-present jackdaws and crows. They fell dead from the sky as he passed beneath them, as if dead from a lightning bolt.
He would have made an excellent scarecrow. As it was, he merely puzzled the widow Maguire as she ploughed down the sleeper path regardless, her arms flailing in the manner her heart-specialist advised. She would make it to the mouth of the Boyne, round the Maiden’s Tower and back again, and neither an errant tramp, nor the golfers driving towards the eighteenth hole, nor the couples flagrantly embracing in the long grasses, were going to stop her. So she gave him a quizzical glance and registered neither the dying birds around the path he took nor the apron of blood from his collar to his crotch. She was bent on her constitutional, no matter what.
He made his way southwards, parallel to the line of sleepers and through the golfcourse, towards the sandy road. The fury of birds around him died after a while, as if he had emptied the skies immediately above him. And all the golfers saw was a vagrant like any other, an anonymous tramp, crossing their line of vision, seemingly deaf to their cries of ‘Fore!’
33
Dany spent the rest of that night in the Hall of Mirrors. Whether he needed to process whatever he had learned, or to return to the mirrored womb from which, apparently, he had been in some way born, he wanted to lay his head somewhere other than the hammock, next to Mona’s. So he placed his head on the scuffed mirrored floor, gazed up at the sky above him, where he saw his own reflected face and realised how much time had passed. Not that much, really, but the face that gazed back down at him looked somewhat older than the boy that gazed up. Four weeks, six weeks, eight? And the boy below was a different creature now. How different, he wondered, and was it a difference he could ever eliminate, so as to make the journey back to what he once was? He tossed and turned that night, remembering the cherry tree in the hedged garden that turned magically pink each spring. He remembered raking the fallen cherry leaves into the burlap sack his mother held open. He remembered the hair falling round her face. He remembered his father’s quote, as he sat behind, under a sun umbrella, on a canvas chair, his schoolboy copy of A Shropshire Lad open before him:
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now,
Is hung with bloom along the bough
And stands along the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Why white, he wondered, why not pink, as he shifted his head backwards and forwards on the glassy floor and gradually fell asleep.
He awoke to a reflected dawn, bounced from the entrance through a series of mirrors to appear like pink cherry blossom in the mirror he faced. He watched that blossom grow and seemingly wither into pale, whey-coloured clouds. Everything will change now, he realised, except for him until, apparently, the Fatigue took him over. And he wondered, was he feeling that fatigue already in the strange lassitude that flooded his limbs, when he noticed another reflection. Tucked between two mirrors, another reflecti
on, lost somewhere in the avenues of reflections all around him, was what seemed to be the well-thumbed edge of a school copybook. He stood then, walked through hall after mirrored hall, until he finally found the reality. It was in a tiny gap beneath a low sloping mirror that angled towards the most inaccessible part of the floor. He edged the copybook out, then saw another, and again, one more. He edged them all out, with infinite care, between the mottled slats of glass and examined the copperplate handwriting of what, many years ago, had been a schoolboy not too far from his age. And he began to read then, page by unstructured page, the Walter Codex.
He read of Burleigh, the carnival’s fallen angel; Burleigh, whose Hall of Mirrors had somehow spawned him.
He spent the whole day there, crouched in the depths of the mirror-maze, reading. He heard the carnival wake up outside, the sounds of another day beginning. He saw figures then, like shadows on Plato’s cave, warped, enlarged, distended, multiplied many times. He heard the laughter of reflected bachelors, the giggles of their bachelorettes; he saw them clutch and tickle and initiate waltz moves, hand on hand, heel and toe, to the tinny distant music from the carnival tannoys. He registered some of them kissing, their faces enlarged by pleasure or hope or desire, but most of all by the mirrors that distorted them briefly before they went on their ways. Their ways, he knew, might lead to romance, children, birth and death. But those ways were not for him. He read until the sun was setting, making another, more lurid explosion of blossom in the sloping mirror above him.
And by the time darkness took over he was done. He knew more, now, of carnie ways than anyone in the darkening carnival outside. He had read the addendum to Walter’s codex. Walter’s prediction, scribbled on to those schoolboy notebooks, drawn from the fractured legends of half-remembered carnie lore. That a Captain Mildew would one day find a way to traverse those dimensions, travelled aeons ago, on burnt carnie wings. That before he usurped some poor human’s form, he would engender two sons, each a mirror of the other. And Dany wondered, as he wandered back out of those mirrors, into the darkness, whether he himself was one of them. He felt barely human; all carnie with a tincture of something else that, however much it might thrill and terrify, would be very dangerous to know.
34
Burleigh was waiting by a plate-glass window under a flashing neon sign, in a rubbish-strewn street. He had been waiting for years for some deliverance from his banishment. He had done wrong, he knew, and would have begged to set that wrong to rights, but they wouldn’t talk to him. He was excluded from that tribe and he had never known he would miss it so much until his exclusion. He had thought, years ago, that time would dim the ache he felt, but being a carnie – and he was still a carnie, despite his banishment – once a carnie, always a carnie – time meant something different to him and didn’t heal all wounds. So he would lurch – and lurching was the correct word; Burleigh moved with a lumbering gait that seemed to remember some happier state, and his lurching grew with his unhappiness – from one funfair to another, in whatever dismal burgh he found himself. But funfairs, with their flashing indoor lights, their mechanical joys, and lately, their deafening video games, were no substitute for the one, the true, the hidden carnival. Like a beast that hungers for the stable it once knew, he slid from one to the other, the ghost train in Southend, the bingo halls through the north of England, the shooting ranges and laughing-policemen booths in Blackpool. Most times he would make his home inside them, tucking his bulk beneath the Call of Duty table, while the proprietor, unaware of his existence, pulled down the metal shutters for the night.
Money was never a problem. He had long ago perfected the three-card-trick stunt, his only issue being the expertise with which he could manipulate the hidden Jack of Diamonds. So he fleeced even the most adept of ordinary conmen and often had to run, with his portable table, his three cards and his pockets jingling with coins.
After Rotterdam he had joined a gypsy troupe and travelled with them to Vienna. They had plied their trade along the pavements and cafés, with the whiff of poodle dogshit in their noses and the echoes of Strauss waltzes in their ears, until they came to realise that the banknotes thrown at them, in ever-increasing dimensions, were worth nothing but their weight. And when they saw the stormtroopers march down the Ringstrasse, they realised that any entertainment they could provide would be dwarfed by the staggering fantasy in front of them. They moved south, and found the borders blocked, and tried to lose themselves in the crush of would-be exiles: Jews, gypsies, suspect politicals. They used their sacks of Viennese currency to buy a place on a Roma barge, which moved at a canal-horse’s pace, up the Danube, through the remnants of what once was the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But even rivers have borders, they discovered, and fast-moving, steel-bottomed barges that police them. They were stopped by a flotilla of these, emblazoned with the swastika that Burleigh now saw everywhere and had known before in its old, Zoroastrian incarnation. And Burleigh, with his carnie’s second sight, knew their time had come. He hid himself beneath the canvas matting that covered the engine room. He elbowed his way through the crawlspace beneath it, through the intoxication of the diesel fumes, and slipped over the side, into the cold, foul Danube waters. And as he sank beneath the surface, into that half-world of rusting hulks of blasted vessels, old bicycle frames and abandoned tractor tyres, he wondered should he grow himself a pair of gills, and wait out the coming apocalypse.
But the water was cold and as his lungs came close to bursting, he surfaced, far from the sordid little drama in the oily waters downstream. He saw the distant shapes of stormtroopers on the barge, the hands dolefully raised, the fleeting shapes of figures diving to the side and a quick succession of flashes. The sound of the gunfire came some moments later as the current was strong, already bearing him away.
Burleigh made it to Berlin and spent the subsequent years of the Reich in the Babelsberg Studio, his expertise with mirrors proving invaluable to the Reichsfilmkammer. He could multiply a platoon into a division for the studio cameras. He could fabricate a mountain backdrop behind whatever Aryan starlet needed it, snow-capped peaks and misted alpine vistas echoed to infinity, with their yodelling contralto or soprano voices. But nothing could quench the ache he felt inside for his lost carnival.
And he felt it now, outside Funland in O’Connell Street, the streetlights glittering off the spire that rose in front of him, and the neon flashing from the emporium behind. There had once been a pillar there, but he didn’t care. The ache still remained, over all of those years, but had changed, subtly, like a grand old wine into something bitter, tart and vinegary. The ache was now the ache of hatred, of an old wound that finally knew what it all along should have been. His exclusion was final, he knew, final and for ever, and he was waiting for whatever final reckoning the Dewman would bring.
He had been waiting for this Captain Mildew too many years now, it seemed. And he had, like a slouching John the Baptist, done his bit to pave the way. He had made his contribution, he had played his part, done the Captain no small service. He could remember the belching fumes of the Bombardier bus, the low privet hedge, the sad cherry tree on the lawn in front of the bungalow door. The housewife who answered, an unlikely vessel for the Captain’s progeny, but pretty, nonetheless. He had gone through the motions of his routine, mirrored scarves and bracelets, objects of distinct value, oriental in provenance; taken in the ornamental details of the living room as he did so. The smiling photographs, the brochure on the mantelpiece, fertility clinic, called something like Auberne. Audabe? Auberge. So even before he removed that spurious ball of crystal from his battered cardboard case, she was already softened putty in his hands. Madame is missing, has a longing for, there is a wood Madame knows from her childhood days. The loss of carnie company was so acute inside him, he could bear it no longer. The thought of a child, outlandishly born, no need for snatching; the thought of a recompense, a reward, a reacquaintance with the lost Land of Spices almost made his soft hands shake. And what if it was
the warped mirror of the true carnie shape, the only Captain Mildew; any company was better than none. So he had left that small bungalow, taken the bus back along the glittering seascape, past that bridge with its staves vanishing into the mirroring water, his only concern being how long he would have to wait.
Years, as it turned out. There was a buzzing round his face, tiny flies, ants, mosquitoes, but what were mosquitoes doing on this windswept Dublin street? He brushed them away and noticed the passers-by swatting, as if at invisible veils around their faces. And the strange thing was, with all of his carnie’s insight and prescience, he still had no idea what to expect. A lumbering beast, making its way down the tawdry street? A thing, made of roots, moss, of that strange hoary fungus that passes for mildew? A monster that would clear this street finally of humanity? Then he heard the sound, the inhale, exhale, of a badly played mouth-organ. Two or three notes, with a hint of ancient melody. He turned and saw the tramp squatting by the spire, the battered cap on the pavement, in front of his open-soled boots. Then the voice, and when he heard it, he knew the Dewman had already mastered the miracle of Dublin speech.
‘Any odds, mister?’
35
The bus was the same. The once-white panels dulled by years of exhaust fumes, the melodeon doors opening with an exhausted hiss. It was already moving as they made their way up the circular stairwell and Burleigh noted how his companion had to grip the rusted rail to steady himself. Bodies are strange things, he thought to himself, prisons of a kind that must take some getting used to. The main difference was the absence of tobacco smoke. He seemed to remember choking in it, on that journey he had taken a decade or so ago. Small blessings, he thought, and watched the streets pass by through the breath-fogged window. Then, gradually, a sense of the sea overcame him. He didn’t need to see it through the dark anterior windows, but he knew it was there.