She had the car to herself the next afternoon, since Jim would take the train to a conference in Drogheda, so she asked Andy did he want to visit the Roebuck Centre.
‘The what?’ he asked.
‘The whaddya kids call it – new mall.’
‘What mall?’ he asked her and once again she wondered what universe he’d gone to. What kid doesn’t want to know about the new Starbucks with the whipped-cream lattes, the 3D screens, the shining escalators, and for a moment she was transfixed by an image of one, a glittering silver thing, ascending into some heaven or descending into hell.
‘The Roebuck Centre,’ she repeated. ‘We were on our way there when we got diverted by the carnival. The one with the new cinema. Sixteen screens.’
So she drove with Andy, but her real intention was to revisit those carnival fields. She had a knot in her stomach as she drove, a feeling of dread. She remembered the clown with the painted face, calling out, last chance to see Lydia on the high wire, rattling his half-empty plastic bucket. She could see the neon sign against the late-summer sun, somebody’s amazing Hall of Mirrors, and she tried again to remember whose. She asked Andy, beside her, as she drove across the river, ‘What was the name, love, of that Hall of Mirrors?’, and he shrugged, as if nothing could be less important.
‘Where are we going?’ he asked her, as the Pigeon House sped by.
‘I have to pull by the carnival,’ she said.
‘Why?’ he asked.
‘I might have lost something there,’ she lied.
‘What?’ he asked, and she invented a story.
Why she was inventing it, she had no idea. Other than that to reveal the true purpose of her journey would have been impossible for her. She came up with a tale of a ride they had both taken while their darling son was in the Hall of Mirrors. One of those whirling things that turned you upside down, which she had always dreaded, and now she knew why. Because Jim’s wallet and coins had tumbled from his pocket, along with his membership card to the Lions Club. And while they had retrieved the wallet and coins from the grass underneath after the ride, they hadn’t noticed the missing card until later.
‘The Lions Club,’ Andy repeated.
‘Yes,’ she lied, and blushed, realising she had no idea what a Lions Club was. She had been invited to a dinner-dance once, on behalf of it, but had no idea what the club was, or did.
‘And you think they might have it?’
‘Why not?’ she said brightly. ‘Even a carnival has to have a lost and found.’
So she drove back with him towards where the carnival had been, behind the large industrial container park behind the train tracks. She sat in the car by the level crossing as another train trundled by, and waited until the barrier was lifted and then drove through the tiny streets behind, but she could hear no cries of mock terror and delight and she could see no pennant fluttering above the tiled roofs, so she already knew, before they reached the fields behind the container park, with the crushed grass and the muddied tyre tracks, that the carnival was over, here, at least.
‘It’s moved on,’ she said.
‘That’s what carnivals do,’ the boy said. ‘They move on.’
‘I wonder where?’ she asked him, abstractedly, walking round the muddied field, wondering how he knew so much about carnivals.
‘Does it matter?’ he asked.
‘No,’ she answered, ‘I suppose it doesn’t.’ But she knew inside that it did. It mattered hugely, and she didn’t know why. She felt such a sense of loss, in that crushed field, that she reached out and gripped his hand. She noticed a crane or a heron picking its way through the muddied pools the carnival lorries had left behind. And he pulled his hand away, out of natural embarrassment, and she had to remind herself that he was no longer a child; he had become this thing, this adolescent stranger, and if there was a moment where the change became apparent, that moment had been here.
‘Clothes,’ she said, absurdly, ‘you’re growing so fast. We must get you some clothes.’
‘In the Roebuck Centre?’
‘TK Maxx.’
So she drove towards the centre, which, for a time, seemed even more elusive than the missing carnival. A gaudy shopping sign led her one way, then a road sign another, and eventually it loomed up before them in the windscreen, so unexpectedly that she almost missed the turn. She drove in hard then, through another barrier into an underground car park with separate caverns painted orange, green, blue and red, and she parked in one of them, took a series of escalators upwards into a gleaming interior and found herself among crowds of adolescents, a little older than him, but in their air of removal, abstraction, in their constant glances at the glowing screens of their telephones, just like him. It was a communal virus, she realised, that came upon beloved children suddenly, removed them from whatever emotional realm they had inhabited, with no hint that they might ever return. So she did what mothers all around her seemed to be doing: she bought him things. A pair of jeans that would accommodate his stretching limbs, a dozen T-shirts with incomprehensible slogans printed on them, a pair of new, gunmetal-grey pyjamas, since his old ones, with the grinning dinosaurs, were part of a vanishing childhood. And afterwards they ate hamburgers in a neon-lit American-style diner, before heading back to the car park, and home.
She paid her ticket, and realised she had no idea where her car was. And she understood, too late, the significance of the caverns of red, green, orange and blue. One was meant to memorise them, the colour and the number, and she was lost now, in a colour-coded maze.
He walked away from her without a word. Down a pathway banded with orange, down a small slope, which headed down a curving slope to another level. She watched him go, clutching her purchases, sweating and angry at him, shopping malls, car parks, everything. ‘Andy!’ she shouted, and he replied, ‘Just follow me.’ So she followed, and saw the orange band give way to a band of red, then a band of green, then in another level below, to a band of blue. He stopped by a number, 7,462, and there was her car, behind a concrete post.
‘You have to remember these things,’ he said, ‘Mother.’
‘Of course,’ she said, wondering how he did. ‘I do, and I will.’ She drove out again, hearing her tyres squeal on the rubberised surface of the car park. She knew she should be thankful, that one of them remembered. But once again, she missed the term ‘Mum’.
‘Burleigh,’ the boy said, at dinner that night. Jim had cooked it, coming home earlier than both of them.
‘Burleigh who?’ Jim asked, his mouth half-full of spaghetti.
‘Burleigh’s Amazing Hall of Mirrors,’ the boy said, and forked some bolognaise sauce on to his pasta.
‘We went back to the carnival,’ Eileen told him.
‘To look for your—’
‘But it was gone,’ Eileen interrupted.
‘That’s what carnivals do,’ the boy said. ‘They move on.’
‘So we went to the Roebuck Centre, instead.’
‘Ah,’ her husband murmured. ‘Where we were headed, the first day.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I bought him jeans and T-shirts and—’
‘We got lost in the car park,’ the boy said.
‘And if it wasn’t for you, we’d still be there . . .’
The boy stood later in his darkened room. He could hear voices from his small room above. He knew the voices were discussing him. He knew it was true. If it wasn’t for him, they would still be there. Wandering through the car park, looking for a lost Cortina. Or locked into a giant carnival arm, in some endless gravitationless swing. The only light came from a streetlamp through the soft window curtains, from a lamppost across the L-shaped garden beyond. There was a threadbare rope tied to a leafless tree, a rickety bird hut on a pole and the ochre-coloured roof of another bungalow beyond the privet hedge. How alone he felt, how estranged from everything that should have made him feel at home. A vast turbulence inside of him, the turbulence of waves, slapping off against each other, reflecting each other’s ceaseless movement, in broken infinite shards that never seemed to settle into a circle or a curve, that peaked and troughed and went on forever. He was Burleigh’s triumph, Burleigh’s creation, even, and was made of stuff that even he, when he would come into his full and awful glory, could never have imagined: the Rotterdam gold that gleamed somewhere within him, that enabled that dreadful and final separation of reflector from reflected. He was someone else, he felt, as he brushed something with his toe from the carpet beneath him and recognised the remnants of mud and rat shit from some nights before. He stepped out of his clothes, pulled on his new pyjamas and dropped his old clothes on his reflector’s old pyjamas, and the dinosaurs grinned up at him, reflecting some childish world that he should have known. He felt a shiver, and wondered did others of his age feel like that. As if they were someone else, someone they didn’t know; they were growing towards a shape, a definition of themselves that they would only recognise when they met it, in some distant future. And the future is always distant, he realised; tomorrow morning could well be a tomorrow two years hence, since neither of them had yet arrived. But one thing he did know. There was something out there that he would recognise when he finally met it. Some shape, some destiny, some avatar that would be familiar, instantly knowable as his own. But for the moment, he was this thing, whatever it was. This boy, and his name was Andy.
He pulled the curtains over the streetlights, crawled into bed and tried to lose himself in someone else’s dreams.
He dreamt of his thumb, severed. It was severed very neatly, with very little evidence of blood, and as to who had severed it, he had no idea. But he dreamt he woke, then, in that bungalow, which seemed stranger than ever to him in his dream, and walked from his bedroom to the living room where the gauze curtains looked out on the front garden with the privet hedge and the bus stop, the streetlamp beside it surrounded by a penumbra of mist that seemed absent from the street below. The streetlamp alone gave evidence of the mist that he knew cast its pall over everything: the football pitch beyond, the ancient beech trees (they were still there) beyond the far goalpost, the cherry tree in the garden with its circle of absent lawn around it. Everything was absence, he knew, and only the mist gave the illusion of presence. He also knew that the cherry tree that had been planted on the day of his, or someone’s, birth, would one day lie on that lawn severed, like his severed thumb. He saw his bloodied father, the loose skin clinging to his face like some badly made Frankenstein’s monster, digging methodically where the cherry-tree roots once were. There was another father inside his father, a far more urgent, primal one that had coated himself in his father’s bloodied pelt like an otherworldly breath that needed a human skin. The mouth opened as if it had just learned speech and the whole of human history was compressed into the words that came out. But there was a dissonance behind the words that thrilled the boy’s soul. It was an echo from an infinite well. It was a sonic boom, across time. And there was a screech of tyres then and his mother was backing the Cortina towards them both. He reached out with his hand and lost his thumb in the knuckle of the rear-view mirror. And he was looking at his thumbless hand now, wondering where the pain should be.