Dany was awoken by a shuddering that felt as if the earth itself was coming apart. His bed of straw bounced underneath him, the cage between himself and the sleeping animal trembled and the air was filled with dust that shimmered in the wheeling rays of the sun that came in thin beams through the holes in the canvas cladding.
The truck had stopped, quite suddenly, and was now reversing over uneven ground, bouncing over the pavement kerb first of all, then over a field tilled with nothing but old cement blocks, discarded bicycles and other detritus of suburban living. It was heading for a long swathe of hardened grass, called by the locals, for some reason, ‘the Tuileries’, an oasis of flat ground by a disused promenade beyond which was a long rocky beach and the grey swillings of the Irish Sea.
And it was suddenly all business, inside the lorry’s trailer. The echoing trundle of roustabout feet overhead, the blinding sunlight searing in as the canvas flaps were untied from above. Dany was wide awake in an instant, up on his feet, jumping out on to the Tuileries grass, where the flatbeds were performing all sorts of grinding manoeuvres, like circling wagons in a western, a small roustabout waving his block-like palms, the fingers of which seemed like detachable screws, shouting, ‘Lock her hard!’And soon the greased hydraulic stanchions were raising the trailers.
It was all activity and roustabouts bellowing, the short squat ones uncoiling huge mounds of light bulbs and wires and the tall thin ones throwing down scaffold poles, frames, huge wooden trunks with screws attached, trapeze wires and cables, unrolling of whole acres of dirty white canvas and the huge mechanical arms that carried the chairoplanes angling their way towards the dusty blue sky. He felt some odd responsibility for Burleigh’s Amazing Hall of Mirrors, since, after all, he had come from there. So he did his best to help as it was manhandled out of its protective boxes and slotted into place piece by reflective piece. And he proved himself so busy with this that time performed one of its odd tricks again; the sun was well up in the sky and diminishing its shadows by the time he discovered it was finished, the neon sign above the entrance, useless in the midday glare, reading, for those who squinted their eyes, ‘Burleigh’s Amazing Hall of Mirrors’. And he turned then to see the carnival once more in place, in another piece of waste ground he knew not where, the rollercoaster curving above the horizon line of the sea, the distant cone of the circus tent beyond it, and the ghost train and the shooting range and the other carnie delights he didn’t yet know the names of creating a maze of what were very like little streets, caravans with their flaps open, tents with their flaps closed, advertising strange and clairvoyant revelations for those who had the courage or the coin to venture in to the gloom inside.
It was a village, he decided, more than a carnival, a miniature town indeed, and he wondered should somebody, maybe even him, give these ersatz streets proper names. Then he remembered that it would someday, maybe someday soon, pack up and move again and what good would street names be for a travelling village that had to periodically reassemble itself? And he was thinking imponderable thoughts like this when Mona came up behind him and asked, ‘How’s she cutting?’
She had been observing him for some time. Watching her Dany, and she felt the name bubble inside of her as if he was truly hers, her chosen one, already roustabouting with the roustabouts in the chaotic business of assemblage. He was proving himself indeed a capable lad, a useful pair of hands. Her chosen one, she thought again. And the term, the name, seemed both wrong and right. She had chosen nothing; she had found his reflection and pulled him into the real world, the carnie world, the only world she had ever known. And yet when she watched him make his way among the stunted roustabouts, hardly bigger than them himself, as yet unsure in his new environment but adorable, simply adorable, in his oddness, his unfamiliar gait, he could only be her chosen one. If she had ever been given a choice, she would have chosen him. And any panic he felt – and there would be panic, she was sure of that, no one leaves a mother of fourteen years without some sense of displacement – she would make it her job to soothe it, to quell it, to put it to rest. She would place a comforting hand on his, catch his turbulent gaze and reassure it with those azure eyes of her own. If she had ever wanted a child – and that was a want she never allowed herself to entertain; she knew how impossible it was – it would have been that one, there, unpacking the same mirror-maze that had brought him here, as if he knew the drill and had always known it, his thin, gazelle-like form working hard to keep up with the dungareed roustabouts, and she resolved then and there never to let him wear dungarees; he was made for better things. So she came behind him and felt his body feel her approach, his shoulders tensing and his eyes in a panic meeting hers, and she said the first thing that came into her head: ‘How’s she cutting?’
Easy, her eyes said, easy, it’s only me, you’re at home now. And she saw the shoulders relax, saw the tiny shiver of acceptance come into those flecked brown eyes, or were they green? Brown, she saw now, brown and the flecks were green.
Maybe it was luck, in the end. Luck that brought him here to be her chosen one. Burleigh’s expulsion had been a long, loud and painful affair, his cries of anguish had seemed to echo round the empty carnival long after he was gone: why me, why me. He knew of course why him, the Rotterdam gold was only part of it. His absurd claim, to provide a solution to the changeling problem. You broke more than the rules, old Jude had told him and would have shattered his Hall of Mirrors into a million tiny pieces had she not been reminded that it would bring a million years’ bad luck. So they cast him out, like old Adam or the one in the vineyard whose name always escaped her. And Burleigh’s Amazing Hall of Mirrors had lain fallow for years, until yesterday’s miraculous event. As you sow, so must you reap. Or something like that. What was this with the biblical stuff? And why was she bothered about Burleigh? Let him wander in the cold world outside, with the moan of the winds of sin and death and the clouds of nonbelonging with no hope of return to the Land of Spices, and let me deal with my chosen one.
So she smiled, with all of the winsomeness that only she could put into a smile, and she was happy to see him smile back. She took his hand and felt the tingle ripple through it, felt the adolescent hairs stand to attention, as if at her command.
‘You did well with the rousties.’
‘Did I, indeed?’
Indeed. The old-fashioned tenor to the word. The archaism, the use of a question to answer. And she felt a surge of irrational hope, was it, or promise, that maybe he could be one of them after all. But then she banished the thought, as they had banished old Burleigh. Better not, as the young ones tell it, go there.
‘And rousties can be hard to keep up with.’
‘That’s what you call them? Rousties?’
‘Roustabouts. And a good roustie can balance a circus pole on his chin.’
‘His chin?’
‘No women allowed. But you, young Dany, were made for greater things.’
‘I was?’
‘No dungarees for you.’
‘No?’
She caught the sound of disappointment in his voice. Of course, she thought, the sweat, the muscle, the boy-mannishness of roustabouts. ‘What is for me then?’
‘Sawdust and tinsel and a touch of greasepaint.’
‘I don’t understand.’
And he didn’t. It was all a mystery to him. This small, pert girl – almost a woman, really – with her perfect posture, toes constantly stretching from the ground as if she wished to be airborne. She was wearing a dirty gabardine coat that hid something that glittered. Behind her a mélange of carnival activity – huge metal pegs being driven into the unwilling earth by hammer-wielding, muscled arms.
‘Come with me.’
She tightened her hand on his. Pulled him gently away, from this masculine world. She was determined. No dungarees for Dany. She traced a route through the alleyways of sideshows as if she had known it all her life. As, of course, she had. She knew every atom of this carnival, no matter how it rearranged itself, and she greeted the stallers as she went.
Zaroaster gasolened a bubblegum of flame back at her.
‘Virginie, what a divine setting.’
‘Alaister, my dear, no tricks, it’s far too early.’
‘Monniker, how goes it?’
It was going well, it seemed, as Monniker was already squeezing his agile frame through a tangle of ventilation tubing.
‘Jude, my love—’
She passed the aged lion, being led by what looked like a dog lead, towards an assortment of cubes and hoops laid out in one of the few empty spaces left.
‘—oh my goodness, they already know each other—’
And they did. The lion nuzzled his tawny forehead against Dany’s hip, while Jude, his ageing mistress, pulled him gently away.
‘Dorothea, I don’t want to know.’
But Dany did. He saw Dorothea in the triangular gloom of her stall, a gleaming ball in her hand. He very much wanted to know what the future held. But they were already moving on.
Past Bulgar, flexing his muscles in a leopardine one-piece.
‘Oh all right, Bulgar, we will oil you if we must . . .’
Oil. From a small, twisted jar, he noticed. Tangled, as if wound into many circles by a four-dimensional hand. He had never seen a jar like it. And the oil that Mona shook from it had a smell like camphor, a sweet stinging sensation that flared the nostrils and teared the eyes. Like the onions that made someone cry. Someone? And he was spreading this oil over the mounds of muscle that were Bulgar’s back when he remembered who. His mother. The tears streamed freely then, and mingled, when all of a sudden Mona dropped the jar in the stunted grass by the odd-shaped assortment of weights and drew him on.
‘The oil,’ she said, ‘not sun cream, can’t buy it, grade it, trade it, but the small tincture of spice can make the eyes stream.’
‘Spice?’ he asked, and she looked at him as if she wished she could swallow the word.
‘You’re crying,’ she said.
‘I was thinking of my—’
But before the word ‘mother’ emerged, she clutched his hand once more, drew him, step by step, over the enormous guy-ropes that led like parallel strings on a concert harp to a canvas entrance beyond. Some words were forbidden here, it seemed. Mother and spice amongst them. And he was remembering a nursery rhyme, when the curl of her hand diverted him once more. Mother and spice and all things nice. No, it wasn’t mother, he fretted: sugar – sugar and spice – when her fingers rubbed off his palm and he felt that tingle again and was confronted with yet another reality.
This carnival kept doing that. First one thing, then another.
And this reality was – a triangle of dark exposed by two flaps of pinned-back canvas. Head-height. A sound, from inside, of a lonely trumpet. He had never heard anything sadder than that trumpet. It made him think of onions again, and flowing tears and that word he was struggling to pull back to his brain, when he felt a hot breath close to his ear and another word took over.
‘Tango.’
‘Tango?’ he repeated. It seemed safest, again, to repeat things. There were so many things he didn’t know.
‘I swing,’ she said, ‘to a tango. Come inside. Have a look.’
And she led him in, into that dark triangle, where his eyes gradually accustomed themselves to the gloomiest of glooms. The trumpet still played, and as the darkness slowly became visible, he distinguished a small man, far far off, in a spotted white suit, with a conical hat on his head. Something gold to his lips, which must have been a trumpet. Because the sound of it soared now, all around him, and he could detect just the hint of a dance in the air. As she had whispered, a tango.
‘A dance,’ she said, ‘is best with a touch of swing to it, because that’s what I do, after all. Dance.’
He could distinguish the shape now, the huge conical funnel, leading to an apex of thin sunlight at the top. So there was light in here after all, he thought. Quite a lot of it. Early-morning light, coming through the various blighted holes, in trembling, hesitant fingers. He could see hanging wires, trapeze bars in the upper gloom, a small platform, circling the central pole.
‘You be my hauler,’ she said and withdrew her curled fingers from his. ‘Hauler today, maybe catcher tomorrow.’
He said nothing. He was becoming adept in these transitions. Pretend to understand, he was thinking, and understanding just might come to you.
And she raised her two hands to her shoulders and, with two deft flicks, threw the canvas-coloured garment to what he now realised was a sawdust floor. He watched it fall, some kind of gabardine, and it seemed to descend in slow motion, to raise a whorl of misted dust from the curls of old woodchip. It fell beside her two dark pumps, which he saw now were sparkling with tiny specks of diamanté or glass. Spangled slippers, he would have called them. His eyes followed her ankles, her thin, muscular calves, clad in fishnet tights, up to the body-hugging tutu with its golden bustier, stays and angled shoulder pads. Circus garb.
Of course, he realised. There had always been something airborne about her.
She pressed upwards on her toes again, as if stretching towards the narrow beam of sunlight at the apex. Then she walked on those spangled slippers across the sawdust floor to where two ends of rope dangled down from some beam in the heavens. They swung gently, neither touching the other.
She wrapped an arm around one, deftly, making a snake of it, and looked back at him.
‘The hauler pulls,’ she said. ‘Pulls the artiste.’
‘You’re the artiste.’
She nodded. She had a small dimple, he realised for the first time, below her smiling lip.
‘Be my hauler.’
‘I could never hold your weight,’ he said.
‘Aha,’ she said and she smiled and her green gaze swooped to meet his. ‘You’ve a lot to learn.’
‘About what?’
‘About carnies. About Mona. About tangos.’
And she wrapped the rope around her body in one feline move, crooking her slim knee above it, snaking it round her waist and upwards towards her breast, her left hand twisting above her like an open-mouthed cobra.
‘Now pull,’ she said.
And the boy obeyed her. He would always obey her, he realised, whenever she wrapped the rope around herself like that. He gripped the other end and pulled.
She seemed weightless. More than weightless: she seemed to have an inner force that propelled her upwards. She soared with the force of each tug of his, up, up and up into the blaze of that beam of light that spilled down from the centre hole.
‘Now loop it.’
He began to swing the rope, in successive loops that grew ever more large, widened in that element, that term of measurement that he could never remember from school. Although school felt very far away now. And as the trumpet soared, in its tangoing dance, he remembered. Circumference.
And up above she began to spin.
And down below, he was reminded of many things.
Of the silver angel on the Christmas tree that his mother unpacked every December.
Of a toy windmill, whipped by an invisible wind.
Of a devil stick he used to play with in the garden of the privet hedges, which he would practise twirling until it became an indeterminate blur.
He whipped the rope around, saw it widen above him into a similar blur. The shape of Mona, her leg and arm crooked around the rope, seemed to lose itself from any sense of the real world. He was spinning a top, the handle of which was a spinning girl, Mona, and as she spun she became a feather-like thing and he felt, as he spun her, that the twirling rope was some kind of pretence and its real purpose could have been to keep her earthbound.
He dismissed this thought as soon as it occurred to him. It seemed absurd, and somehow forbidden. And he felt his mother’s absence with a real pain, as if some strange animal was sifting inside him. He missed his mother then so much, he felt the pain so keenly, he had to forget her. And the only way to forget her was to look upwards once more at the blur of those twirling legs.
The tune ended and he saw the small spotted figure across the sawdust circle remove the trumpet from his lips. He pushed the conical hat back on his head, and shook the spittle from the golden bowl. Dany stopped his twirling but the rope didn’t. Its momentum kept her going, far above him, and its circumference only gradually lost its bloom.