‘Does he have it in him?’ Virginie wondered aloud.
They were sitting in the awning of Virginie’s caravan, their eyes shielded from the late-afternoon sun. He was playing football with the roustabouts now, before the evening rush and influx, and they could see him appear and disappear in the gaps between the tents as the ball took him hither and thither.
‘An bhuil an sult aige?’
Had he got the stuff, the shine for it, the guts for it, the blood for it; there were many ways of asking the same question, all of them old, almost dead now, as it was so long since the question had been asked.
Mona didn’t reply. It was so long since she’d dreamed of a child, she had almost forgotten what the want was like. And now there he was. A son, on the cusp of his teenage years, the down barely formed on his cheeks, with that lightness in his step, that way of pressing up his arches as he walked, as if he was stretching already to be airborne, to be higher than he was. There was a grace to him, like a gazelle, a sudden darting quality in the eyes and an exquisite sense of sadness, even loss, as if the full melancholy of the world would never be felt as strongly again. There are tears in the heart of things, she had heard once, a saying from long long ago, and Dany reminded her, almost painfully, of that phrase. She could never imagine bearing a child, the way women of the world were so anxious to do; the weight of another in her precious stomach, the blood pulsing, the pushing, then the mewling infant that hungered for the breast. No, her breasts were her own, always had been, always would be. But the arrival of a fully fledged son was a gift too perfect not to grasp, to keep, to have and to hold.
‘Will he have the shine for it?’ Mona repeated the question now and wondered. Or would he be thrown into that all-too-human panic by the knowledge, when it came?
‘That depends,’ Virginie hazarded.
‘On what?’ murmured Mona.
‘On what he’s made of.’
‘Only that?’
‘And on how he hears it. All at once, or in bite-sized stories.’
‘Like bible stories?’
‘Kind of. If there was a carnie bible that we all could agree on.’
‘Good luck.’
‘In the beginning, kind of thing.’
‘No one agrees on the beginning.’
‘But we all agree, there was a beginning.’
‘We do that, because we have to.’
‘Bad cess to the beginning then. Take it back to the Hunger.’
‘That did change things.’
And yes, they both thought, and for a long summer moment they had the rare carnie pleasure of sharing the same thought, the same long surmise, turning round in their minds like a daydreaming apple, the Hunger did change things. After that, nothing was ever the same.
They could do that bible trick with it, BC and AC. BH and AH. Before the Hunger and After the Hunger. in the BH times they had been the stuff of legend, myth and fairy tale; they had hardly needed a name, so many names were thrust upon them. Ghoul, pooka, gnome, fairy, golem, banshee, nymph and dryad; the list goes on. Any hint that there was a separate race, living and breathing amongst the mortal ones, was covered by a fiction, a tale of otherworldly wonder and horror that was given the status of legend, remembered, retold, but hardly ever invented. So they cloaked themselves happily in these absurd tales, went about their lives, collecting their precious spices, were content to let any sighting be attributed to whatever legend fitted, golem, pooka, troll or banshee. In fact they were never averse to playing along; when a crop went bad or the milk turned sour or a drunken farmer happened upon one of them, at night on the lonely road home, or by a moonlit graveyard, they inhabited the legends and in time the legends inhabited them. There was a word for it, Mona remembered, a complicated word, that her Dany, with his predilection for many-syllabled words, would probably know: symbiosis. In fact there was a theory among the original carnies that they invented the legends, even propagated them, to explain their presence, but that was one too far-fetched for Mona.
But then the Hunger came and changed things. Changed everything, in fact. It was the carnie biblical flood, the great rupture, after which nothing would ever be the same again. With the deaths, the scattering, the coffin ships, the half-living ones blown like useless chaff so far beyond their homeland, the legends, inevitably, faded and died. And they were scattered in turn, without the cornucopia of myths and legends to hide behind. They hid themselves instead in sideshows, circuses and fairgrounds, stages on which wonders, monstrosities of height and girth, death-defying balancing acts, feats of inhuman strength and contortion would be seen to be the norm. The gravitationless ones had to pretend to be earthbound, to be obeying all of the tiresome Newtonian laws. Their feats of impossible torque and balance had to be seen to be, just as the term implied, feats.
He flies through the air
With the greatest of ease
That daring young man
On the flying trapeze.
And so the carnival began and the term carnie came, and stuck. Mona slowed her passage through the air to catch one more trapeze handle. Virginie teetered on the pole balanced on Monniker’s ample chin when she could have simply stood. Dorothea murmured platitudes about dark strangers and government men and pretended she didn’t see every detail of the future in the glass bowl beneath her painted fingers.
Mona rose now and walked through the channel of stalls to the roustabout game and, as she stepped through it, caught the ball on one angled back heel, tossed it from head to toe and back again, and as the ball made one parabola, she made another, twirled into a cartwheel kick and made the ball soar towards her Dany, who headed it into the space between the orange-painted trailers that the roustabouts called the goal. There was an ironic roustie cheer, and she bowed and walked on.
She made her way through the zigzagging maze of the trailers to the rusting door that Dany had lately thought of as home.
She opened it and saw the dust wheeling in the evening sunlight. The lion padded backwards and forwards beyond the bars, on the other side. There was hardly a need for those rusting bars, she thought, as this lion was beyond anything now but dreaming. And she lay down in the mound of hay that must have been her Dany’s bed, because it still held something of his shape. And of that sweet adolescent smell too, she realised. A young boy’s sweat, stronger than the odour of new-mown grass. She nudged her head against the old lion’s mane, looked into those yellow eyes and again asked the question. Does he have it in him?