by Neil Jordan
There was little need for speech between them. He could see the calloused, bricklayer’s hands gripping the seat in front of him, the dried bloodstains on the denim shirtfront that he knew would have to go. The body was ill-chosen, Burleigh knew that already without having to ask, but beggars can’t be choosers after all. And which of us is happy with our physical shape? Burleigh, alone among carnies, had spent decades unable to avoid the sight of his. That dreadful posture, sloped shoulders, slouching around his Hall of Mirrors as he worked on his optical improvements. He came to hate it in time, wished he never had to see it, but mirrors were his expertise, his destiny, and now, it finally seemed, his salvation. So maybe it would have been worth it after all. Maybe those years of effort, those unbearable years of exile, would prove to be – what? he wondered, as he stole a glance at his travelling companion. The face was buried in a grubby collar, as if loath to be seen, the hat sloped over the forehead, occluding the eyes, which maybe was a good thing, Burleigh pondered, given the mode of transport they had adopted. No one should see those eyes unless they had to, and if they had, some game was up.
‘I quite fancy,’ Burleigh heard, somewhere deep inside him, and knew the Captain was addressing him, ‘the cut of that one.’
There was a youth up in front, his shapely head framed by gigantic earphones, his muscular tattooed arms stretched across the metal frame of the top of the seat.
But Burleigh heard again and saw the mouth move this time, ‘There is someone else waiting. And every son needs a father, after all.’
And that’s when Burleigh knew there would be more blood spilt. And in the dim recesses of what we must call his soul, he remembered the housewife bent over the reflecting ball, and hoped that whatever blood was spilt, it would not be hers.
The bus juddered to a halt then, at its final stop. They both rose, as if with one instinct. And Captain Mildew, an fear drúcht, the Dewman descended the stairs with considerably more agility than he ascended them. As Burleigh followed him, past the driver who, just as he did all those years before, kept the engine running, he realised he had neglected to pay either of their fares.
36
The bus idled for a time, releasing a cloud of exhaust, as if to provide a misted backdrop for a melodrama. The two principals walked from it, through the creaking gate and past the cherry tree in the front garden. They paused by the front door and seemed to reflect for a moment before the more lumbersome of them moved to the small half-gate to the left of it, past the garage. One hand reached over, a latch clicked back and they both walked through and out of sight. Then the bus drew off on the last run of its shift, leaving an even denser cloud of exhaust, which took its time to disperse in the still night air.
There was a long interval of silence. Then the sound of a circular saw, one of the small table-top kinds, used for home carpentry. A symphony of extended, agonising screams then, which gradually changed to a diminuendo of whimpers and groans and eventually reverted to silence once more.
And the last wisps of exhaust fumes dispersed then, as if exhausted themselves.
37
Dany was deep in carnie dreams. But these dreams were not of carnivals. They were of a small privet hedge that led past a manicured garden lawn towards a half-gate, which a calloused hand reached behind to release a latch. He recognised the gate, the hedge, the house, but not the hand. The house was a bungalow and was now sliding past his vision, towards a scuffed back door he knew only too well. The same calloused hand tried the door handle, then reached down to a well-trodden mat, which it lifted aside to reveal a key. Now why his mother left the key under that mat, which was the first place any intruder would look for it, was a thought that had hardly time to divert Dany’s dream, since the same hand was inserting the key in the lock and turning. The door slid open, scraping over another mat, a sound he recognised, and that, had he been awake, would have brought his whole childhood back, and the kitchen itself came into view. A simple kitchen, its furniture a little tawdry, its decorations perhaps kitsch, with its red-lozenged tablecloth and its framed view of Amalfi on the wall, but a beloved kitchen, nonetheless. But this dream had no place for nostalgia or fondness, and was now plodding its way through an even smaller dining room into a hallway, where the streetlight gleamed on the brown carpet, through a half-open door where the sound of adolescent breathing came from, urgent, occupied in a drama of some intensity, and Dany found himself looking with sudden and unexpected emotion at himself. His Bose QuietComfort headphones were silhouetted by the screen in front of him and his hands were tweaking the game console.
38
Andy was playing Assassin’s Creed, swooping over the turrets of Renaissance Florence, unleashing a fearsome array of sharpened weapons at his cowled pursuers. A spiked bolero round the neck of one, a crossbow bolt through the heart of another. Shaven-headed prison guards, their muscled torsos wrapped in chainmail, did fearsome things to prisoners in prison cells, unseen, but not unheard. Andy had the option of releasing the tortured ones or continuing his flight, and he had just chosen the latter, when he pressed the starred Stop button. The cries of pain still echoed in his headphones. He removed the headphones, gently, and the cries continued. Although they were not cries now, more like a drawn-out sob, a dying whimper. And he recognised his father’s voice.
The door was open behind him. A sliver of streetlight shone on the hallway carpet. He heard another sound then, the high-pitched whine of a carpentry saw. It, too, was dying, like a long-extended breath.
He stood up. He walked from the hallway to the dining room and through to the kitchen, where a man sat, his shoulders sloping over the red and white tablecloth.
‘He’s in the garage,’ this man said.
‘Who?’ Andy asked.
‘Your father,’ the man replied. ‘But I wouldn’t go in there just yet.’
‘Why not?’ Andy asked.
‘Some things,’ the man said, ‘are best left alone.’
Andy waited a while and when he tired of waiting made his way through the back door to the garden outside.
The garage door was open. As was the small wooden gate that led to the front lawn. Whatever the thing was that should not be seen must be in here, Andy thought as he pushed it open further and saw, with the help of streetlight that came through the windows of the double-doors, the detritus on the cement floor.
It was underneath his father’s carpentry table. And whatever that detritus was, it had been carved and gouged and sliced on the table above. There were pools of stuff that could have been part of his father’s condiment samples. But Andy knew blood when he saw it. This stuff was blood, not jam.
Blood, and screeds of flesh and something like bone, stuck to the circular saw in the gap in the table’s centre, through which more blood dripped on to the detritus below it. There was one body there, in the remains of a denim shirt, which seemed scooped out from the inside, and the remains of another, which seemed to be those insides scooped out, but which Andy knew couldn’t really be. It was as if someone had gutted an animal, used the hacksaw and the small array of chisels and the circular saw to remove the insides of something, because the outer core was all that was needed, all that was desired.
‘Your father,’ the man had said.
And he had the strange sense then, somewhere in the unfathomable depths of himself, that he was being watched. Whoever was watching was part of him: family, friend and blood. He had felt alone for so long, he realised then, unmoored like one lone starling, beating its way through unfamiliar skies; even the least desirable of us has to be wanted, he thought, or he felt, and he knew in his heart of hearts that he was as undesirable as this mess that had been left on the garage floor.
He turned and saw a figure in the garden outside, dark against the shrouded apple trees, wearing his father’s suit. This figure also wore his father’s hands, his father’s expression round the mouth; in fact, this figure was like his father in every respect except for the eyes, which let Andy know in no
uncertain terms that this figure was wearing his father, like a suit.
‘Call me Father,’ this father-figure said.
‘I will,’ said Andy. ‘Gladly.’
And Andy felt like the starling reaching its old familiar telephone wire, and wondered why he had used that word, ‘gladly’. It was an old-fashioned word but it sounded the way he felt. And he felt glad.
‘I should bury all this,’ he said, ‘somewhere.’
‘Where?’ the one who was now his father asked. And the boy registered another fact: that he didn’t question the need for burial. The mess on the cement floor was unsightly, dead, and had once been human.
‘Under the cherry tree,’ Andy said.
‘Fine,’ his father-figure said. ‘Even, if I may say so, perfect.’
The speech was rusty as yet, the boy noticed. This process of becoming human must be like entering a new country, learning an entirely new set of rules. But he felt a thrill of anticipation when the father-figure took the old shovel, threw open the double-doors of the garage, headed for the soft ground around the cherry-tree roots and began immediately to dig.
This figure dug furiously, with an extraordinary and repetitive strength. It demolished crabbed roots and resistant shards of stone, cut right through an old bicycle wheel buried in the earth, and within minutes a gaping grave had been opened, with the cherry tree sagging pitifully above it.
‘That tree,’ the boy said, ‘was planted the year I was born.’
‘Not you,’ the father-figure said. ‘You were born much, much later. In fact, given certain considerations, under some jurisdictions, in the opinion of certain parties, you have yet to be born.’
And the boy felt another thrill, hearing these odd, legal archaisms. And he wondered what being born would entail.
39
Eileen enjoyed her evening, driving her husband’s car. She was a hesitant driver, prone to hogging the outside lanes at far too moderate a speed, but had needed the car for her various errands that night. Jim, she knew, would relish his time alone at his carpentry table and maybe even, wonder of wonders, Andy might join him for a few hours of much-needed ‘quality time’. And besides, the drugs Dr Grenell had prescribed had the strange side-effect of giving her an odd sense of nausea in his presence. She had put this down to acid reflux, a common enough occurrence in mothers of her age, and a by-product of all sorts of pharmaceutical treatments, if the sites she consulted on the internet were to be believed. So if truth were to be told, she enjoyed her time alone. She had attended a PTA meeting at Andy’s school and discussed the possible hurdles of the coming year. She hardly raised her voice, but was grateful to hear the other parents voicing concerns similar to her own, if not quite so extreme. Familiar words like ‘puberty’ and ‘testosterone’ were mentioned, together with unfamiliar ones, like ‘hypothalamus’, ‘gonadotropin’ and ‘pituitary’. She wished she could take these issues with a pinch of salt, the way some of the other mothers seemed to, until it occurred to her that maybe they themselves were on medication, similar, if not better, to her own. But her gratification came with a significant residue of guilt. Why should she feel relief, even pleasure, at the very real troubles of others? So after the PTA meeting she had driven across the familiar bridge that she had walked over so many times, always in daylight. She swung left, past the cement bathing shelters, and parked in the hardened sand amongst the darkened dunes. She saw the movement of shadows among the distant humps of sand grass, and remembered the reputation of these dunes, as a lovers’ hideout. And she wondered once more what could have occurred between Carmen and Andy on that afternoon of the flying ants. Something that could not be named. Whatever it was it belonged to the shadows, a shadow somehow deeper than all of the shadows about her. She turned her attention to the sea then, to calm her teeming brain. a crescent moon sat in an expanding halo of clouds and was reflected in the quiet September waters. Was it September already? she wondered, and she realised her thoughts were rambling again, turning and turning in some echo chamber of the mind, when she heard the rap of knuckles against the passenger window. There was a man there, in a leather jacket, and he was fumbling with the buttons of his trousers. Eileen reached for the keys, pushed the car into gear, too quickly, far too quickly, she realised, since the car began to buck and shudder like a horse suddenly confined to a box. She found first gear then and the car roared towards the shoreline, leaving her unknown Casanova in a veritable cloud of risen sand. She heard a howl as she drove, and could see through the rear-view mirror him hopping on one foot, and she had to allow herself a smile at the thought that she had somehow driven over the other. Serves him right, the weirdo, she thought. She turned right then, when the indented sand nearest the shoreline began to rattle the car once more, and headed back for the wooden bridge, and home.
Her sense of guilt returned, though, when the empty bus stop came into view. Had she broken his foot? she wondered. Pervert or not, he hardly deserved that. And was guilt to become her constant companion now, guilt at her relief that the sons of others were faring no better than her own, guilt at the loss of the son she had been so close to, guilt at all of the secrets she had kept from her dear husband, and she was turning through the cement pillars into her driveway, when she saw them both, Jim for some reason with a shovel in his hands and Andy, stamping a rough circle of exposed earth around the cherry tree.
Jim began to walk, in an odd series of uncoordinated movements, across the lawn, to the hard cement of the driveway itself. She heard the loud scrape of the shovel, as it moved from the surface of the lawn to the surface of the drive. Andy did what he had been always doing lately, just stood by the cherry tree and stared. Her eyes flashed from her son to her husband, whose face flared like a ghoul in the headlights, and another came behind him, from the small half-gate by the garage that led to the back garden. Something about the sloped shoulders, the down-angled head, brought a memory flooding back. A cardboard case, out of which came a ball of silvered glass. As the one that was her husband staggered towards her, she knew nothing would ever be the same again. She knew, in fact, as she pushed the gear handle down, that things had not been the same for quite some time now. He took one ghoulish step more and she drove the car forwards, caught him somewhere between the knees and midriff, and sent him spinning back towards the garage doors. She put the car into reverse then, and saw Andy, blocking her exit. She spun the wheel, and felt the sickening crunch as the back bumper hit the cherry tree. She saw Andy stretch his arms out towards his father, who, although it seemed not possible, was rising again, and she carved up half-circles of tyre-marks in the lawn, heading once more towards her son, the only obstacle between her and the street beyond. He jumped away as she drove forwards, gripped her wing-mirror with his hand, but she continued onwards and screeched the car to her left when she reached the street. She glanced in her rear-view mirror to see the place she was leaving and saw a severed bleeding thumb, caught in the knuckle of her wing-mirror. And when she reached the sea road, she finally understood something. She had heard no howl of anguish, or pain.
40
Dany woke with a long slow gasp of something like terror. He held his left hand up against the webbed curve of his hammock. He had dreamed of an explosion of pain there, as if his thumb had been severed. It throbbed now, where the joint met the hand, with sudden, sharp pangs of pure-white agony. Then the pain gradually dispersed with the memory of the dream.
But Dany was awake. Wide awake. He could hear the gentle snoring of Mona above him, Jude to his right. He gripped the webbed net with his unpained hand and slid himself, deftly and silently, from the hammock. He felt sleep had abandoned him. He padded quietly on bare feet to the door and pushed it open. The carnival sat under a bank of low September clouds with the faintest outline of a moon behind them. The crowds had long gone and the only sound was a gentle, familiar scraping from the frame that held the dodgem cars.
Dany walked then, easing the door closed behind him, knowing sleep was ha
rdly an option now. He followed the sound and saw three squat roustabouts, bums to the hard ground, feet spread-eagled, while they judiciously scraped the scaffolding above them of its filigree-like tendrils.
‘Slim pickings,’ said the nearest.
‘But,’ said Dany, ‘every little helps.’
He knew the conversational mode by now.
‘Ah now,’ said the roustie, ‘who are you tellin’?’
Who else but you, Dany thought but didn’t vocalise.
‘Though with the holiday coming, we should be drownin’ in the stuff.’
He heard a soft creaking then, the sound a metal pole makes in a rusted socket, and at first thought it was coming from the empty carousel.
‘There’s a townie girl,’ the roustie said, ‘been asking for you.’
And Dany thought oh no, or oh yes, and his mind began to turn with that slow, tumble-drying motion once more.
‘Trouble and strife,’ the roustie said.
‘Meaning what?’ Dany asked.
‘Oh, I said nothing,’ the roustie muttered, and returned to his diligent scraping. ‘A shut mouth catches no flies.’
And there were flies about, Dany noticed now, tiny airborne ant-like creatures, catching what was left of the moonlight in their transparent wings. They brushed off his face, like barely visible hands, as he left the harvesting of the dodgem cars and headed for the empty carousel, and that sound of rusted creaking.
The carousel was silent, the horses gleaming with the colours of lost party balloons. Not a whisper of movement. But the rusted broken whine continued and Dany followed it round the curve of the carousel to where a series of white swans hung beneath triangular poles, the metallic wings concealing a children’s seat inside. silent empty swings, and only one of them was moving.