Andy, which seems the best name for him now, since having appropriated the shape, the sound, the smell of the reflected one he would appropriate the name too, travelled back mostly in silence with his new-found parents. The windows of the Cortina kept misting up, since the defogger wasn’t working so the outside world became a kind of blur except for the small wedge of clarity that his father kept wiping clean on the front windscreen.
‘Too late now,’ his father muttered.
‘I suppose,’ his mother replied.
‘What do you think?’ his father asked.
‘What do I think of what?’ asked Andy, with an odd kind of directness.
‘The Roebuck Centre. The film. Too late for all of it.’
‘I suppose.’ Andy echoed his mother’s tone.
‘But the carnival was better than any old cinema.’
‘Maybe.’
‘So home again home again jiggety jig.’
‘Why jiggety jig?’
‘Oh, you know. The market. To buy a fat pig.’
The old Andy would have smiled at the recognition of a childhood rhyme. But the new Andy just blinked as if to say, silently, whatever. With that neutral, clear-water kind of feeling. He was definitely growing up, his father thought. Get ready for it. The silences. The locked bedroom door. The teenage face lit by the iPhone screen, the thumbs clicking.
He glanced at Andy’s mother. She was lost in thought, staring out at the streetlights and the strange halations they made in the fogged-up windscreen. Well, he thought. At least she isn’t— And he didn’t want to finish that thought, about all the things she wasn’t.
They were home within a half-hour. The small house, overlooking the dark park. The railings, the razor wire around the football field and the gleam of empty Coke and beer cans on the grass. He had walked that grass with Andy many times, before it was a football field, when it was a forest of small saplings, before the mechanical diggers came to raze them. They had hoped the football field would work its magic on the neighbourhood, but the grass grew quickly overgrown and became mostly a home for late-night cider parties.
There was the glint of a sputtering fire behind the razor wire, the sound of tinny music and laughing, adolescent voices. Andy was always a good boy, his father thought, as he swung the car between the gateposts, into the garden with the overflowing privet hedge, had kept himself to himself and had let those cider parties keep their distance. And he hoped that that at least wouldn’t change, what with this new thing between them both and this strange tension in the air.
What was it?
He couldn’t put his finger on it, as he turned off the ignition and listened to the car whirr itself into silence.
‘Shall we go in, love?’ he asked her.
He used the word more in hope than in expectation. And she smiled briefly, as if grateful for the gesture.
The house was dark when they entered it. All houses are dark, of course, before the lights are turned on, but this house, this sweet little bungalow with the single stairs up to the dormer bedroom, had grown a particular kind of darkness around it that was accentuated – or thickened, in a way – by the new Andy’s entrance. It hung around the walls like an invisible cloak and wasn’t at all dispelled by the lights coming on.
Eileen – for that was the mother’s name, and Jim was the father’s – recognised this darkness with the immediacy of caught breath. And she knew it had grown, in their absence, had thickened with Andy’s entrance. And she didn’t want to explore why. So her breath grew softer, her slight asthmatic sough became more prominent, as if there was a small bird dying inside her.
‘Tea,’ she said, as if the small household chores would put everything back to right. ‘I can make a Welsh rarebit with some coleslaw.’
She moved through the hallway towards the small, dim kitchen.
‘Would we all like that?’
‘Yes, Mother,’ Andy replied. And Jim nodded, as he divested himself of his coat.
‘Dear me,’ she said, ‘how we’re growing up. It’s Mammy no longer?’
‘I suppose that makes me Father,’ Jim said. ‘Not Dad?’
And the boy repeated the word softly to himself, as if it was the first time he had heard it.
Father.
They had tried hard for a child, she remembered, as she placed the bread inside the yellow toaster, too hard maybe. And when Andy had finally arrived it had seemed like the end of one thing, and the beginning of something else. The end of early-morning thermometers, visits to the clinic on the other side of town, all of that ovarian-stimulation business, egg retrieval, test tubes, et cetera et cetera. She had always wondered how she had become surrounded by Latin terms, in vitro, in utero, et cetera et cetera, and so Jim greeted the news of her pregnancy as if it was a miracle, a miraculous delivery from an arduous clinical process, and what she had never shared with him was the fact that it actually was. A miracle. An intrusion of something else on the here and now.
The miracle had been foretold, though, somehow prophesied, by some odd, eccentric John the Baptist, who seemed to be preparing the way. A man with a shabby suit and a shapeless beret had knocked on the door one bleak afternoon, a travelling salesman, not too unlike her husband, though she hoped Jim would never have to stoop so low as to go house to house. This man was selling what she would have called geegaws, which was as good a word as any for the useless object he presented to her on her doorstep, just as the fumes of the number 30 were seeping through the privet hedge. The bus shuddered, out of sight, its engine still ticking despite the fact that it would be parked there for ten minutes at least, and she resolved one more time to write a letter to the bus company, about the waste of fuel, the pollution of diesel fumes, and most annoying, the noise; the noise of the Bombardier engine, which almost drowned out the salesman’s patter, as he pulled a succession of scarves and mirrors from his sad cardboard case. Why he imagined she wanted mirrors, she had no idea – hand mirrors, small heart- and wing-shaped ones that could have hung on a bathroom wall – and she realised, with an odd sense of revulsion, that the scarves were decorated with mirrors too, tiny ones, like perfectly broken bits of mirrored glass. And she felt guilt, then, because of the strength of her feeling of revulsion, and told him softly that she had no need of them, gently, as the bus began to move down towards the seaside road.
But he was saying something now that she couldn’t quite hear. The bus ground its gears as it rounded the corner, redoubled its acceleration into an enormous bellow or whine. There was disappointment in his voice, she knew that, although she couldn’t hear what he was saying, and a rather furtive, pleading quality to his eyes, and she distinguished one word, above the departing bus’s whine: the word ‘futures’.
‘Futures?’ she asked. ‘Of course. You don’t only sell useless knick-knacks and geegaws, you tell—’
‘Fortunes. Only in certain, and very specific, cases.’
‘And I am, no doubt, one of those?’
‘Each of us is specific, Madame. You, however, are more specific than most.’
And I would bet you say that to all the ladies, she thought. But what she said was different.
‘There’s a housewife in every bungalow behind me. And I’m sure you’ll find one more . . . specific . . . than me.’
It was an odd word, that ‘specific’. But it seemed at one with his face, which was neither pale nor dark, but had a decided foreign quality to it. ‘I most seriously doubt it, Madame.’
And yet there was an English tint to his words, something that said ‘pool’ to her: Liverpool, Hartlepool, Blackpool. And she began thinking about the word ‘pool’, then, and it rippled backwards and forwards uselessly in her mind, like a pool itself, and before she knew it, and she would never quite know why, she was inviting him inside.
She led him towards a seat by the empty fireplace, since she never bothered lighting it until her husband was half an hour away from home. And the salesman placed his cardboard case upon the floor, opened it and from underneath the plethora of mirrored scarves took a perfectly round glass ball, like ones she used to find as a young girl, on a sandy or a stony beach, next to the drying frames on which fishing nets hung.
‘Madame,’ he said, ‘is missing something.’
Indeed Madame was, she thought, as she watched his short, stubby fingers ripple over the glass ball, with a deftness and agility that surprised her. Madame was missing many things.
‘But if I can be more specific, Madame is missing something specific.’
That word again.
She could sense his eyes flitting over the walls, registering the decorations hung there, and thought to herself, indeed, he is perceptive, would there be a madame in this small cul-de-sac who wasn’t missing something? And when the next statement came, although she could have anticipated it, nevertheless it struck her like a hammer from an invisible hanging cloud above.
‘Madame is missing, and has a longing for, a child.’
Now, anyone could have told, she remembered thinking, from the absence of childhood things in this room, that a child had been discussed, considered, imagined, if not quite longed for. ‘A child,’ she repeated uselessly.
‘And Madame will be blessed, soon and quite unexpectedly,’ Burleigh said. For it was Burleigh, into whose Hall of Mirrors her child would one day wander; Burleigh, who had been expelled from his carnie heaven for infractions too numerous to enumerate or count. Burleigh, whose shoulders were bowed with a sense of impending doom that kept him wandering; Burleigh, whose beret concealed a balding pate and a fringe of uncut hair beneath it. Burleigh, who could see far more in his orb of glass than he would ever reveal to her. For luck had finally returned to Burleigh’s luckless days; he had happened, in the strange small bungalow surrounded by privet hedges, on the unexpected surrogate, the vessel that would churn the past into a future that he had feared would never arrive.
‘There is a wood,’ he said, ‘that you knew in your childhood days. And you will see that wood again, before you are blessed with child.’
And the term ‘blessed with child’ somehow unnerved her. It had biblical connotation, it was old and gnarly, it was itself a tangled wood.
She stood, suddenly and spikily. She reached for her purse.
‘You’re a charlatan,’ she said. ‘And you want money, am I right?’
‘Money is beside the point,’ Burleigh said, although he was perilously low in funds.
‘So I shall have a child, then?’
‘And soon,’ said Burleigh, ‘in a way most unexpected.’
‘I’m attending a clinic,’ she said, and at that moment took the brochure from the Auberge Fertility Clinic from the mantelpiece, ‘as I have no doubt you’ve already noticed.’
‘Whether I noticed or not, Madame, is irrelevant,’ Burleigh continued. ‘The fact is that your efforts will be blessed with fruition, all of the chickens will come home to roost, you will hit the bull’s-eye, the oranges and lemons will fall into line, you will hit the jackpot.’
‘As in a slot machine?’
‘Or a carnival. The great slot machine that governs your future is all gearing up to—’
‘Thank you,’ she said then, standing, burrowing in her purse for whatever coins she could find. This talk of carnivals and conception was suddenly distasteful to her. She shivered, and had the odd, foreboding sense that this man knew more than he was admitting to. She wanted him gone, suddenly, and wanted to pay him to be under no obligation. She found a pound coin, and placed it on his cardboard case, beside the glass ball, which enlarged it and bent it, in reflection.
‘Don’t insult me, Madame—’ Burleigh began, although he knew her name, Eileen, and could have used it. He had seen many things about her, in his small orb of bubbled glass.
‘You want more?’ she asked, and tried to find incredulity in her tone. She didn’t know what he wanted, but would have paid him twice as much to get rid of him now.
‘I want thanks, maybe,’ Burleigh said, sadly. But his hands closed around the coin. Because he could make use of it, his needs were many and his purse was almost empty, always.
‘Thank you,’ she said, and made sure she walked behind him towards the door. This man could steal things, things she hardly knew were there.
‘The bus?’ he asked, with a kind of dignified forlornness. And another great hulk was belching there, she saw, behind the privet hedge.
‘It leaves every fifteen minutes,’ she said, ‘for town.’
‘For town,’ he repeated, and walked directly towards it, his gabardine coat billowing and his cardboard case swinging by his side.
He didn’t once look back.