He could hear a jumble of sounds from outside as she led him back through the maze of infinite reflections. A clatter, a wallop, a litany of instruction: ‘grab a hold would you’, ‘throw her down here’. And outside of Burleigh’s Amazing Hall of Mirrors, sure enough, he saw that they were packing the whole carnival for the business of moving on.
And it was a very strange business.
Small, squat men walked between the carnival fixtures, wrapping the coils of light bulbs around their arms, their necks, their chests until they looked like bulbmen. Lithe, agile boys not many years older than himself crawled up the skeletons of the rides and unpicked them, girder by girder, tossing them like matchsticks down to a strongman below. They were tall and impossibly thin, these boys, and could twist themselves into all sorts of improbable shapes and squeeze their limbs into all sorts of inaccessible places. They wore dungarees, like the short and squat ones, but where the dungarees of the short squat ones bubbled round their ankles as if they were for a much bigger human, the dungarees of the tall thin ones barely reached below their knees, as if they were for a much smaller boy. The bits of the dungarees that went over the shoulder, which Andy searched for a name for and couldn’t find – he thought of the word ‘braces’ but it didn’t seem quite right – always seemed to pull much too tight, so the tall ones walked stooped, while the small ones walked with exaggerated steps that dragged, as they were afraid to trip up over the useless yards of denim around their ankles. Someone should get them to switch dungarees, so at least they had a chance of fitting, Dany remembered thinking, at the same time as he thought he had to at least pretend to be Dany now. But things in this carnival, like his name, didn’t make absolute sense, as he would gradually discover. A bunch of clowns pulled up the guy-ropes of the circus tent and it billowed downwards, like a deflating mushroom, leaving the centre pole like a skewer in the earth, with a half-moon above it. And by the light of this half-moon a trapeze artist twirled like a spinning top, wrapping the various ropes around the pole before it was gently lowered to the ground on to the giant soft petticoat of the canvas tent.
And Andy, or Dany, as his new friend introduced him, turned out indeed to be a capable pair of hands. He dragged metal hawsers across the crushed grass, packed dodgem cars into crates that seemed impossibly small to hold them; he rolled the circus tent with numerous other and stronger hands into a long white tube that slid magically into a longer canvas bag. In fact everything, he found, every facet of the seemingly endless carnival, fitted into something smaller than itself, as if its instinct was to shrink and almost vanish.
And vanish it gradually did, in to a series of crates that were roped on to a line of waiting vehicles, old tractor trailers with exhaust pipes that pointed upwards and billowed dark smoke into the moonlit night.
The last thing to be packed was the Hall of Mirrors. The Burleigh sign first, into a deep wooden crate that was filled with wood shavings, then on top of that the fat and thin mirrors, then the multiple panels of the mirror-maze, more than a thousand of them, it seemed to him, into a separate wooden container that was stamped, in industrial lettering, with the legend ‘Mirror-Maze, Handle With Care’. He felt sad for a moment, as all of the reflections vanished into the container of sawdust, for those mirrors that had nothing to reflect, but then he felt relieved that he himself wasn’t being packed in with them. He was no longer a reflection, he was a carnie now, and he felt, irrationally, that he had been a carnie all of his life, that the life of Andy, with his mother and father and the thing that had started with his father sleeping downstairs and his mother weeping as she chopped the vegetables and blamed it on the onions, was part of another, imagined life that he was glad to escape from. He felt giddily released from all of those only-child duties and hoped the one who had walked home with them would do a better job than he did at being the perfect son.
And the moon was sitting in the sky over the flattened glass and the pale disc of the sun was shining, threatening to obliterate it, when Mona thanked him for his services and his capable hands and lifted the canvas flap of a lorry and told him to creep inside and get his fill of sleep.
He climbed up gratefully, for he was as tired as he had ever been, and curled himself up on a bed of straw that smelt of some kind of animal, not unpleasantly at all, and she let the flap fall and as the carnival convoy began to move he allowed the rocking of the lorry to lull him into a deep, deep sleep.