Carnivalesque

by Neil Jordan

  There was a girl’s leg crooking down from the metal wing, with green leather shoes and a block-like heel. Above her the suspension pole shifted in its metal socket. Dany recognised the shoe, and remembered the sweeping brush that moved around it, and the shoe seemed to recognise him, because it began to swing, lazily, as he approached and a brown head of hair lifted from the sleeping swan and he heard the same voice saying, ‘Been looking for you, carnie.’

  ‘Are your brothers about?’ he asked, and he didn’t know why, but he felt the same darting pain suddenly in his thumb.

  ‘I should say I’m sorry, shouldn’t I? They’ve only one sister; they can be a bit protective. But you—’

  And her leg stretched out here, so the green leather toe of her shoe stroked the back of his hand.

  ‘—you showed them what was what.’

  ‘I wish I hadn’t.’

  ‘I’m sure,’ she said. ‘And I’m still wondering how you did that. Little slip of a thing like you.’

  ‘Don’t ask,’ he said.

  ‘Why not?’ And she stretched one hand out as if waiting for his to grasp it, which of course he did.

  ‘What use is a dead metal swan,’ she asked, ‘if it doesn’t fly?’

  ‘It’s for children,’ he said. ‘They can imagine it does.’

  ‘And I was imagining, lying here, thinking of you. I was imagining all sorts of things.’

  ‘I should take you home,’ he said. ‘The carnival’s over.’

  ‘I can see that,’ she said. ‘Over for the night. So I was lying here, all on my lonesome, wondering about it.’

  ‘Wondering what?’

  ‘It has secrets,’ she said. ‘You have secrets, carnies have secrets, even this metal swan thing has secrets, and the only way to get me out of here will be to let me in on some of them.’

  She released his hand then, and stood up in the creaking swan. She looked at him, six feet below her, and held her small white arms out.

  ‘Catch me, carnie,’ she said, and she fell.

  He reached out and caught her in one fluid move, and she sank, like a large human feather, into his arms.

  ‘You did that well,’ she said, and kissed him.

  He could feel braces round her tiny teeth. Her tongue darted over his and he felt a rush of blood and of that hidden sap that seemed to hold his carnie muscles together and, without meaning to, he began to rise.

  ‘Again,’ she said, pulling her lips away and meeting his again, and they both rose, over the rusting swans, over the poles that held them, over the wooden frames that held the poles, over the carousel and the idle pennant of the big top until the carnival seemed to huddle below them, with its tiny canvas streets and its strange crushed geometry in the limestone fields that stretched away to the town beyond.

  ‘I knew,’ she said, ‘you were something else.’

  ‘And I’m taking you home.’

  He left her on the town square with her head full of questions by the shuttered hotel where he had met her first. There were, thankfully, no brothers about.

  ‘Can we do that again, tomorrow?’ she asked. Although she was already uncertain what it was they had done.

  And he said yes, they maybe could, and thought it better to walk his way back.

  41

  Eileen’s driving was erratic at the best of times, but the sight of the bleeding thumb in her rear-view mirror did lead to some major traffic infractions. She ran a red light at Dollymount Avenue and crossed the double-white line so many times that a traffic policeman flagged her down before the lights at the Bull Wall Bridge. Her attempts to explain the severed digit in the knuckle of her wing-mirror led to suspicions of intoxication by the arresting officer, so she was blowing into a breathalysing condom when she was unfortunately recognised by a limping male in a black leather jacket, making his painful way across the bridge. Accusation followed counter-accusation, an ambulance arrived, a forensic team assembled, and the last to be called was Dr Gerard Grenell, who eventually accompanied her to the public ward of Beaumont Hospital. Her insistence that the severed thumb belonged to one who had somehow infiltrated the body of her beloved son and that her husband was no longer her husband and that, by the by, the broken foot of the limping pervert was a well-deserved punishment for an attempted sexual assault on the dunes of Bull Island didn’t help her claims to veracity or sanity. The end result of which was that Eileen was prescribed a new round of medication and, when she protested, forcibly confined to a temporary stretcher, since there were no hospital beds available. She succumbed eventually, swallowed the pills with the regulation glass of water, and soon fell into a fitful sleep, as the late-night drunks began to spill over into the corridor from the emergency ward.

  42

  They walked, the three of them. They had no sense of time. They were headed west, they knew, following a carnival they knew, and of all carnivals on the small island there was one that was of particular interest to them. The one parked in the field behind the abandoned petrol station servicing the matchmaking festival of Lisdoonvarna. Andy, after the bloody burial and the chaotic exit of Eileen, had tapped on the computer with his thumbless hand and tracked it down.

  So they walked, past the Five Lamps in the early dawn, towards what Burleigh had once known as Kingsbridge Station, now Heuston. They were early for the trains heading west but they didn’t mind waiting.

  Something about train tracks endeared them to the Captain. Or was it to the corpse he now inhabited, the hapless Jim, who seemed amazed by every new step he took, as if performing tasks that in his own, recently terminated lifetime would have seemed impossible? This incarnation of Jim didn’t mind jostling; in fact, he liked pavements to himself, thrust passers-by violently to one side or the other without consideration of age or sex. He had yet to learn the art of the blend, an art carnies had mastered aeons before. So when he crossed Burgh Quay, straight into the path of one of those new green rubbish trucks, he stopped it with an outstretched hand that brought a spider’s web of cracks to the windscreen as the truck shuddered to a halt and left the driver wondering if he had hit the brakes rather than the accelerator. But when the Captain reached the grimy Victorian façade of Heuston Station, a veneer of calm descended. The tracks that threaded their way along the Liffey seemed to promise a route to something new and old, something west and quite outside of time. And the empty train, when they boarded it, seemed to have its own peculiar geometry. The sun poured through the right-hand windows and made strange rectangles of the light and shade. And the rectangular swathes of light that hit the floor were themselves moving with a shimmering cloud that looked like dust, but that, to the observant eye, would have revealed itself to be a host of tiny winged creatures, almost smaller than dust themselves.

  The train gradually filled, and filled more with every station it passed. Teenagers in ripped jeans and T-shirts with collapsible tents and backpacks, families with buckets and spades at the ready, the odd lost farmer in a pinstriped suit, shiny with age, looking like an implant from another era. Which is how the three of them must have seemed, to anyone who took care to look and examine them closely. But Burleigh saw that none of them did. The Dewman stared at the tracks whirring by, as if they had a hypnotic power all of their own. His ersatz son reached out a hand every now and then as if to catch that ungraspable dust. When he opened his thumbless palm, Burleigh noted it to be covered in tiny wings, the fluttering of which was barely perceptible. It could have been chaff, it could have been harvest dust, from some strange, unearthly harvest reaping. Burleigh reached his own hand out and clutched a handful of what seemed to be air, and opened his palm to view the same fluttering harvest. But he knew, and he had to contain his excitement here, that it was just a harbinger of the reaping to come.

  The train took them so far, then a bus took them further, and when the bus turned on its turnaround they had the option of hitch-hiking or Shanks’s mare. The possibility that the kindness of strangers would extend to their unlikely and probabl
y visually off-putting trio seemed remote so they walked. There was no discussion about this choice; they just tramped on. The Dewman could have taken to the air had the body he had adopted been more adaptable, but Jim’s ample girth, with a body mass index of 32.5, on the cusp of obesity, made that highly unlikely.

  Over tarmacadam roads first; then, when the roads departed from their sense of how the crow flies, over small drystone walls on to what were once called boreens and when the boreens curved away beneath the imaginary crow’s path, they blundered through hedges on to the limestone fields that stretched towards a landscape of low, stone-capped moon-like hills.

  Time was no problem, in the beginning. The Captain, the Dewman, an fear drúcht collapsed it, stretched it, condensed it at will. Thus it came to pass that the early-morning train deposited them in the western hinterland when it was still early morning and the bus, renowned for its lack of punctuality, arrived late and departed long before its advertised departure. Once they left the road, the boreen, the drystone walls, time became a problem, compounded. For the Dewman whorled it with him as he walked. So he dragged the ancient landscape – or moonscape, Burleigh would have called it – into a strange kind of motion and caused ancient things to wake with each footfall.

  These ancient things were without shape, unlike him. They had found no host as yet. But they were all need, these remnants of old forgotten whispers, and latched on to whatever crossed their paths. A hare found itself transfixed in a sudden mid-dash rigour, jumped on its hind legs, twisted horribly in an airy freeze-frame and came to ground possessed. Its eyes streamed red, its fur bristled with sudden grey and it spun itself around them, Burleigh, Andy, the Dewman, searching for whom it might terrify, if not consume. And the Captain whispered, in a language the hare understood, ‘Fan beagan,’ wait a little.

  And so as they crossed the limestone floor a host of reawakened repossessed things slithered with them. Stoats, voles, mice, freshwater eels and crabs, and all of the barely visible winged things.

  ‘Wings,’ Burleigh rhapsodised, ‘miraculous constructions, from the swooping crane to the tiniest midge, they did what no invention could, kept their constituent bodies airborne.’

  Could he have done as well? No, he thought, some deity or some demiurge with powers of thought and mechanical construction way beyond his paltry capabilities. So they hummed, they buzzed, they slithered their way forward behind the three lumbering bipeds like a cloud and a carpet all at once.

  43

  It was a clear day, the Friday of the holiday weekend, and as such, a red-letter day for carnies. The whole caravan had been ‘staunched’ for four days beforehand without any noticeable flow of punters. But it did its thing, if not happily, at least with a patience born out of five thousand years of practice. And yes, carnies were almost Roman in their reservoirs of endurance. The crowds may have been desultory, the income frugal, the mildew harvest only appropriate for home consumption, but that patient breed knew they had the bank holiday to look forward to. And it was odd, Mona pondered, as the Friday morning trickle threatened to become a flood, how often the mistermed ‘bank’ holidays fell on the same day as far older, long-forgotten feast days. Swithin, Brigit, Patrick, Lugh, whatever impulse those banks followed, when they deemed a day appropriate to holiday, they followed, like carnies themselves, old forgotten patterns that they didn’t care to understand, or examine. Did it matter what they called it, she asked Jude, who herself had a holiday named for her, as she helped her prepare her stall and saw reflected, in one of her many crystal balls, a figure from her own long-forgotten past. She recognised the sloping shoulders, the grey gabardine flapping in the summer heat, and remembered the tedious, never-ending and ultimately self-defeating enquiry into all things carnie. Burleigh? Could it possibly be he? Under what rush of insanity would he attempt a return? She turned quickly, on instinct, and saw a pair of heels vanish, round a canvas tent.

  He would never, she thought, and made her way through the jumble of stalls to the big-top entrance. Inside, in the lazy mid-morning gloom, she saw Monniker exercising a pair of Arabians in a cinched jacket and a pair of riding chaps. There was a discarded gabardine coat lying on the bleachers beside a diamanté-studded caparison. It must have been left by one of last night’s punters, she thought, and returned to Jude’s tent and her preparations for the coming weekend.

  44

  They had entered the carnival separately. One from the south, one from the east and one from the north. There was a rapid surge through the well-trodden grasses, as if a wind of renewal had suddenly blown them to life. But it was no wind it was the deathly unseen carpet of voles, stoats, mice and freshwater eels, seething through the grassy roots, with the odd crazed bound of a maddened hare cresting the now undulating and awakened wave of green. And any carnie who had seen it might have known some doom was coming, for carnies knew too well what hares brought with them.

  But their entry would have been blurred to anyone who saw them, as if they had brought their own lack of focus with them. For accompanying each was a wavering cloud of tiny winged harvesters, each of them more efficient than the most diligent roustabout, needing neither scalpel nor bowl for the reaping that would soon commence. They would soon swell with mildew, grow fat like a blood-consuming tick until their wings could no longer bear the weight of their harvest, and they would flutter to the ground like exhausted grey parrots, to be harvested in turn.

  Burleigh’s entrance brought, to him, the most conflicting of emotions. He recognised the disused, sagging petrol pump and the field of crushed grass beyond. He had been there before, he couldn’t remember how many times. But any tiny flutter of sentiment was nothing to the rush of ennui that flooded him when he entered the carnival stalls. He had missed it, and he now felt the full force of his missing. With the missing came anger, a kind of fury and more than fury, a full-blooded, overwhelming urge for revenge. They had come for the mildew, he knew, the full harvesting, the reaping that would refine it into spice, and he remembered the sorry classifications the unfortunate Walter had made in his school copybook all of those years ago with his ink-stained fingers. Every emotion the carnies evoked rendered its quotient of mildew. But of all those emotions, terror rendered a crop that was quite off Walter’s scale. So in his confused welter of ennui, anger and subdued revenge, almost as confused as the buzzing of wings around his bent head, Burleigh realised the dreadful reckoning was coming. Burleigh thought to savour this moment of anticipation. To relish it. To engorge himself in this cloud of impending. So he moved through the stalls and each stall brought a different memory back. Past his Hall of Mirrors, which he couldn’t bear to enter, since the sight of himself might bring him to bursting. Into the mid-morning shadows of the circus tent, down through the bleachers, where he saw Monniker cracking the whip, putting his Arabians through their paces. He saw stains on his gabardine coat, and realised it was drenched in sweat. He slipped it off, and slid out, knowing there would be many more reasons to sweat on this day.

  45

  Maggie had paid for a ride on the Ferris wheel. How she had got home last night was a blur to her now, but something magical had happened, some kind of airborne swoon. She remembered the taste of the thin carnie’s lips, his tongue searching out the interstices of her teeth braces; she had begun the kiss, she knew, but he had continued it, and somehow transported her to a realm she couldn’t quite understand. It was to do with soaring and great height; she had woken with the thrill of anticipation, done her morning clean-up in the hotel bar and changed, from her black skirt and white blouse into this summery dress, with a pair of polka-dotted socks over the same green-leather block-heeled shoes. He had noticed these shoes, she knew, as she wandered through the carnival stalls without any sight of him and decided on the Ferris wheel. She might recognise him from up here, she thought, and the lazy motion of the airborne chair seemed to suit her mood. It bore her up, slowly, with much creaking of joints and ratchets. She saw the carnival stalls descend below her, the cone
of the big top to her right, the fluttering pennant of which seemed so close that she could almost touch it. Then there were the limestone fields stretching out beyond the town, the threads of tiny drystone walls delineating them, the thin, misty lines of the ancient cliffs and the white foam of the Atlantic beyond. And then the Ferris wheel jerked.

  It shuddered forwards, in a stomach-crunching lurch. Jerked backwards then, with a sound of grinding metal, and an accompaniment of terrified screams. Then shuddered forwards again, and began a sickening whirl.

  Maggie’s first, absurd and irrelevant thought was for her dress, which the sudden wind sent fluttering round her face. She pulled the dress down then, covering her exposed legs, and wondered was this a new carnie thrill, a speeded-up Ferris wheel, and for a moment did her best to enjoy the accelerated ride. But the screams from all about her caused her to scream in turn, in mock alarm and enjoyment at first, and then, when the sounds of straining metal and whipping wind threatened to drown out the scream, she screamed a scream of pure, unadulterated terror. The protective bar was digging into her ribs, her cheeks were hollowed by the whirling wind and tiny winged ants were filling up her nostrils and her mouth, which she tried to keep closed but which each new gust of terror opened in another scream.

  46

  The ghost train, meanwhile, was on a track to some strange hell. It lumbered, it ground its way into greater horrors than it had ever been designed for. There were ghosts, sure enough, for those unlucky enough to have paid their fares, ghosts of long-dead parents, stillborn infants, dead and rotting pets, but something more, some buzzing, moaning Neanderthal and buried dread, the horror of which could only be measured by the howls that made it to the surface, at the entrance, where the queues stumbled back from the turnstile with another kind of dread, or the exit, where the Dewman and his ersatz son, Andy, waited for the harvest reaping. Tracks, the Dewman loved tracks, and he stared at them now, two grease-covered railway tracks with half-buried sleepers, over which the horrors far inside reached them in a dying kind of moan. A buzzing then, always the buzzing, and the cloud of winged things, bigger now, their quantum-like random movement slowed by the weight of mildew they had gorged. These things that had grown to the size of bluebottles, from fragments hardly greater than dust, fell in a dying curtain around the feet that bore the shoes once worn by Dany’s father. Then a grinding of gears, a progressive crunch of metal chain on rusty sprockets, and the first car of the ghost train emerged, the four unfortunates who had proudly paid for the very first tickets huddled unmoving, buried skeleton-like in a cocoon of their own mildewed terror.