Dany made his debut on 14 September 2016, or on carnie day 347,683, year 166. But to call it a debut is to imply a glamour that was hardly there, given that the audience consisted of fourteen random families and a raucous party of seven-year-olds. The carnies didn’t seem to mind. Did carnivals always have circuses attached? he wondered, as he walked through a warren of stalls towards the fluttering pennant of the big top. A circus was one thing, he remembered from what he was already beginning to think of as his distant childhood, and a carnival another. But it made sense, he supposed, given that the carnie personnel could double from one to the other. And as the daytime business of the carnival wound down, the night-time business of the circus wound up, so to speak. He allowed Mona to lead him through the maze of haphazard carnival attractions, the old gabardine coat wrapped round her circus garb. They had dressed him, Mona and Virginie, in a kind of glittering boiler suit, a one-piece that zipped right up to his Adam’s apple. He had cringed with embarrassment at first, until Mona led him back through Burleigh’s Hall of Mirrors and he felt a shiver of déjà vu, entering the mirrored womb where it all began. He saw the long and the short of himself, the squat and the thin, the multiple reflections of himself, and he had to agree with her that it didn’t look bad at all. And a costume was essential, some kind of costume since it was a show, after all, and a glittering boiler suit could well be the best option – much better, he felt, than the body-hugging leotards that the gymnasts wore. They were involved, he saw, as they entered the dark tent with their acrobatics and their tumbles, in quite amazing feats of physical agility and each time they arched their backs to take a bow, he could see the pitiful protuberances between their legs, like ballet dancers in a version of Swan Lake he had seen on television, and he muttered a silent prayer of thanks that he had been spared embarrassment like that. So when his time came, after Alaister the clown had exhausted the peals of laughter he could wring from the children, he didn’t feel too bad at all in his choice of costume. He followed Mona out to a drumroll, was surprised by the glare of a spotlight from above, and, to the sound of Piertro’s mournful trumpet, began the strange business of pulling her to the heavens.
He pulled and she soared, though at times her upwards trajectory seemed to burn his fingers with the rope. And his hands did feel scalded, as if he was bringing them too close to a secret flame, something that burnt white-hot, with none of the attendant colours flame seemed to need to go about its business – pale orange, red, yellow and that flickering, fluttering blue. No, she was propelled upwards by some mysterious inner heat, the way a fragile piece of ash rose with its own displacement of the air around it and somehow retained the shape of the page or the scrap of paper it had once been. Thoughts like this turbined around his brain as he worked that rope. His mind became a veritable tumble-dryer, one image whirling, cascading downwards and wrapping itself around another thought that had barely begun its flutter towards clarity. All the time her legs, jutting out above him in their fishnet tights, one forming a V at the knee of the other, ascended from things that were thigh-strong and muscular into small, infinitely tender things, far far above him. And at this time he was glad of the bulky boiler suit; those feminine leotards would have given too much of him away. A drumroll then and he began to twirl. The rope bellied outwards into a cone or a gyre, which increased in its circumference the more she twirled above him. He thought of the devil stick again, of a heliotrope, and of a girl that he was in the habit of holding hands with, blowing a dandelion pod. She would blow towards him, he would blow back towards her, and the miniature feathered helicopters that flooded her face would bring a peal of laughter from her cherry-coloured lips. Then the drumroll ended and the rope went slack and he saw that Mona, far above him, had already gripped the trapeze bar and was carving delicate parabolas through the upper air. One of the leotarded ones had gripped another bar by the knees and was swinging towards her, arms outstretched. And Mona released her grip, made three backflips in the air, and gripped those same arms, so that this doubled creature doubled the momentum on the swinging trapeze. And another leotarded one had wrapped his knees around her first trapeze, begun a complementary swinging, and she was soon flipped, from one to the other and back again, like a pass-the-parcel in a birthday game. Would the music stop, he wondered, and would she be left up so far above him, frozen, like a fragile butterfly, pinioned by an invisible pin? Or would she fall to the sawdust down below, suddenly burdened by mass and weight and all of those bothersome Newtonian rules he had once learned about in his physics class? Then he realised, in a panic, that there was no net underneath her. If she did fall, some broken, bloodied thing would end up at his feet. Surely an aerial artiste needed a net? And he was resolving in his tumble-dryer of a brain to bring this issue up with her, when he saw the leotarded catcher farthest from him release her, flinging her towards the other pair of outstretched arms, which missed her own clutching hands, to a desperate gasp from the crowd below. She missed, but seemed unconcerned and continued on her trajectory, through the weightless air, tracing a parabola that seemed to defy gravity entirely, and ended up wrapping herself once more in the rope above him. It curled around her like an enveloping snake. The gasps turned to applause and she bowed her head, and he knew without being told that the display was over and it was his duty to bring her back to earth once more.
Which he did. The spotlight followed her downwards until it enveloped him as well in its circular glare. She took his hand, made two steps forward and began the business of what she had called the curtsy, the bow, the hand salaam. Which he did too.
Something changed after his first performance. Something subtle, barely noticeable, but yet something important, permanent and definite. If he was to compare it to something else – and comparisons to other things, he was beginning to realise, were often the only way to understand this carnival, this circus and these carnie folk – he would compare it to the secret understanding that the gang of boys in his cul-de-sac would have about a new arrival on their street. There would be an off-handed refusal to make eye-contact at first, then a ball that was kicked in his direction might one day be kicked back, and the moment would come, during a game of marbles or conkers or McKenzie’s Raiders, when the new one was somehow ‘in’. There would be no discussion about this fact, no secret handshake, just a common understanding that was palpable now amongst them. He felt the same, as the spotlight swung to another segment of the sawdust floor, as a team of jugglers whirled plates, a tea set and an assortment of wicked-looking knives in the air above them, and as Mona took his hand, led him through the darkness of the bleachers and back to the small canvas flap that opened to the night-time carnival outside.
‘You did well,’ she said, and then mysteriously added, ‘Maybe you have it in you.’ He felt a small glow of pleasure and gave her hand a sudden squeeze, and she then led him, as if she was a girl of his own age, or barely a year older than him, to the spinning bowl of a candyfloss machine, and asked the white-hatted operator to ‘whirl him up one’. Now candyfloss was child’s stuff to him, and he was certain it must be to her as well. He knew her looks told lies about her age; she was older than him, far older, yet somehow seemed of an age to wait, with delighted anticipation, for a ‘whirl’ of candyfloss. ‘And make it spicy,’ she said, to the white-hatted one, with a familiar wink. The thought of spice seemed odd to him, with its suggestions of pepper and salt; how would spice of any kind go with the whorl of pink sugar that was already assembling itself around the candyfloss stick? And the tumble-dryer took over his thoughts again, staring at the dull-green metal bowl around which the pink candy seemed to be materialising, as if out of nothing. It looked like the beginnings of clouds, like the flecks of pink wool he once found around a briar tree, and surmised it had been left there by a red-branded sheep. It looked like the dyed hair of a girl who wanted to seem to be a teenager, but didn’t quite know how. It looked like the threads of his mother’s pink scarf, hanging from the washing line, blowing in the early-spring wind. And with the thought of his mother, a rush of melancholy flooded him once more; he thought of her, standing here with him, watching the pink cloud assemble itself, impossibly upside down, around the thin lollipop stick held in the meaty hand with the smudged sleeves of a chef’s coat and he knew, somehow, and with terrible certainty, that that could never now be.
‘Here we go,’ the flossman said, ‘spicy as requested,’ and Dany took the stick handle and brought the cloud of pink to his mouth and felt the sudden, overwhelming explosion of taste. It was more than taste, it was a whole world of sensation that pushed the thought of his mother to a distant horizon, where she seemed to perch, with her coloured handbag in her hand and her going-out coat blowing softly in the thermal breeze of whatever ocean she had been spun away to. And even though she was distant, barely a speck on that horizon, he could recognise every detail of her: the brown hair blowing in front of her grey eyes, the rather sad, lost smile that played upon her lips. ‘I understand,’ that smile seemed to say, ‘everything is different now,’ and he knew it was different; not only different, all of his feelings of loss and separation were manageable, because, for some mysterious reason, they had to be. Things were as they had to be and his mother sailed off as if she had grown sails that fluttered and billowed in those thermals, and soon she was not even a speck; she was gone, quite gone. Mona was leading him through the circus and carnival stalls towards the promenade, which was quite empty now, apart from night-time couples, most of whom were holding hands, and the others who huddled in the curved cement shelters, wrapped in their overcoats and their embraces.
‘We should walk a little,’ Mona told him. ‘You’ve been through a lot.’
So he walked, relishing the candyfloss. It was gathering round the perimeters of his mouth in a kind of sticky paint, which would make kissing Mona, he realised, quite out of the question. And why the thought of kissing her popped into his head, he had no idea. Maybe it was those shadowed pairs they passed in the cement shelters. Or maybe it was floss itself, with its taste of something unfamiliar, quite at odds with the texture of spun sugar. It was the taste of something old, something that was beyond age, even, something that Mona knew everything about and that he knew nothing.
‘But you’ll learn, soon enough,’ he heard her say and realised, since he was looking at it, trying to catch the fleeting thought of kissing it, that she hadn’t moved her mouth.
‘What will I learn?’ he asked, aloud, since if there was a carnie talent of communicating without opening lips and tonguing syllables, he hadn’t mastered it.
‘Everything,’ she said out loud this time, and he wondered had he imagined the earlier, silent communication.
‘Or not quite everything,’ she continued, ‘since none of us know everything.’
Of course, he realised and didn’t say, since it seemed unnecessary, none of us know everything; knowing everything is impossible and who would want that kind of knowledge anyway?
‘And I don’t mean everything in that sense,’ she continued, just as if he had vocalised that thought. ‘I mean everything about circuses and carnies and the original ones and the Land of Spices and—’
‘The Land of Spices?’ he asked, aloud this time. It was safer to vocalise things, he felt, since it saved him the confusion of trying to work out whether she had read his thoughts or not. He didn’t like the idea of reading thoughts; in fact it made him blush to the roots of something, something way deeper than whatever was going on between his hips. And, besides, what mad world had he entered where reading thoughts was even a possibility. He had finished the whorl of candyfloss now, and had licked the stick clean of its residue of pink, and dropped it in a nearby rubbish bin.
‘You’re finished?’ she asked, and turned towards him, and he became aware of the night-time sea undulating behind her.
‘You enjoyed?’
‘Yes,’ he told her, although enjoyment wouldn’t really be his word for it. It had felt more like an explosive pop in his mouth, leaving a taste of something like cough syrup.
‘You covered your face in pink,’ she said, and licked her own fingers and began to wipe his cheeks clean.
‘The spice,’ she said, and licked her own finger then as if she didn’t want to waste an atom of it.
‘What is this spice?’ he asked.
She smiled then, took his arm and led him towards the dark grassy slope beyond the promenade.
‘Oh, it’s nothing really, an old wives’ tale, one of those stories nobody remembers where they came from—’
‘One of those urban legends,’ he said, and tried to think of some examples.
‘That’s it,’ she said, ‘the kind of thing one person heard from another that grows and changes beyond all recognition and nobody can claim in the end. Carnie folk,’ she continued, and she mouthed the work ‘folk’ in an old-fashioned, deliberate way, ‘can be full of superstitions. Because we move so much, so often, these scraps of stories come to seem like the only real home we have.’
‘Home,’ he said, ‘as in house, place you came from, familial hearth,’ and where the word ‘hearth’ had come from he had no idea, but it had the same resonance of her use of the word ‘folk’.
‘Exactly that,’ she said, and slipped her arm through his and led him towards the darkness beyond the promenade lights. ‘Where most folks have a memory of a place they come from, us poor carnies have a story. A whole raft of stories that keep changing, growing as they change, like a—’
‘A bacteria,’ he said. ‘Or a protozoa. Binary fission.’
He had been good at biology at school, and school, he realised, was as distant a memory to him now as all of the others. And that was his tumble-dryer of a mind at work again; he had to stop this, he realised, and clarify his thoughts. But clarity didn’t seem desirable at this particular moment; what was most desirable was the continuing conversation with her, which he didn’t want to end.
‘Something like that,’ she said, ‘where the real world has life, we have stories.’
‘So tell me the story,’ he asked her, ‘of the Land of Spices.’
‘The land of what?’ she asked, and he felt a sudden abruptness in her tone, as if the road they were walking on had come to a hedge.
‘Spice,’ he said. ‘You said there was spice in the candyfloss, you talked about the Land of Spices; in fact, I’ve heard the word on and off ever since I . . .’
‘Ever since you what?’ she asked.
And he had to think then. Ever since what? Since he got locked in that mirror, since her small, strong hands entered the cracked field of the glass and pulled him from it.
‘Since you became part of the story?’ she asked, and her gentle, rather inviting tone of voice had returned. He could listen to that voice for ever, he realised; he could sink into it, he could float around in it like a pair of silk stockings in a tumble-dryer; and he realised his thoughts had begun their tumbling again, and shook his head to clear it.
‘You can be part of the story,’ Mona was saying, ‘and never know the whole of it. Do you think that Rumpelstiltskin, for example, or Snow White knew they were in a fairy tale?’
‘I’m quite sure they didn’t,’ he said, but why he was quite sure, he wasn’t certain, since the question didn’t really make sense. And besides, fairy tales were children’s stuff. Like candyfloss, he realised.
And once again, she iterated what he had just been thinking, so he wasn’t certain he had spoken the thought or not.
‘And don’t you go saying these stories are just children’s stuff, like candyfloss and twirligigs and why is the sky blue.’
Had he thought it, or had he actually said it? He couldn’t be sure now, since he had thought of candyfloss and children’s stuff, but twirligigs and blue skies hadn’t come into it. He was suddenly so exhausted by the confusion that he felt the need to lie down.
‘And if you want to lie down,’ she said, ‘I second that thought, and there’s a mound of heather over here which we can sink into, if it doesn’t turn out to be too scratchy.’
She seemed to know the terrain, even though the light was almost non-existent. Almost, because he could see her pale face and lips by the light of the half-moon above, and when she turned, to sink into what she already knew to be heather, he could see her figure silhouetted against the amber lights of the promenade and carnival below. Then she lay backwards, in one simple, supple move, and he was amazed by the fact that she didn’t feel the need to use her arms to determine the lie of the land beneath her.
‘Not scratchy at all,’ she said, delightedly, he felt, ‘in fact, just think of it as a cushion of moss.’
So he allowed himself to sink backwards and felt her arm guide his elbow downwards and sure enough was soon enveloped by a cushion of kinds, not prickly at all and with a delicious odour of heather.
‘Now where were we,’ she went on, as if their conversation had occupied a particular space, ‘yes, how would Rumpelstiltskin know if he was in a fairy tale; well he wouldn’t and that’s the point, because the story is only there to give him a kind of existence.’
‘He has no existence,’ countered Dany and felt proud of himself for engaging in such a conversation, ‘since he is not really real.’
‘So, Rumpelstiltskin isn’t real?’ she asked. ‘What is he, then?’
‘He’s part of a story,’ Dany said.
‘And am I not part of a story, no more than you? In fact, how can you be sure that at this precise moment, your story is not being related by someone else, some time, in some place, some part of the present or future?’
‘Well, I can’t be,’ Dany allowed. But the complexities of the thoughts were now tiring him, and he would soon, he realised, allow her anything.
‘Those stars, for example,’ she continued, and he wondered if Mona had been a teacher in a former life. But no, he realised, if she ever had a former life, and if former lives were admissible, she would have been very far from a teacher. ‘Can you name some of them for me?’
He was happy to find himself on firmer ground. And the stars did seem unnaturally bright that evening, sitting in their canopy above the pale half-moon.
‘Well, there’s Orion’s Belt, there, and the Pleiades across from it—’
‘So there was someone called Orion who had a belt and some other one, long long ago, called that arrangement of stars after him?’
‘Well, that was just a story they used before . . .’
‘Before what?’
‘Before Galileo invented the telescope, I imagine.’
He was quite proud of that. The Galileo reference and the rather superior ‘I imagine’. His mind was slowing its tumble-drying and getting back to proper thinking business. But the heather beneath him still felt comfortable and the smell of pollen and purple and pods of all kinds was heady and delicious.
‘But there was a story there before the telescope.’
‘Well, they had to find some way of explaining things.’
‘And the story was the easiest.’
‘I suppose.’
‘So when you look at those stars you think of the story.’
‘But the story isn’t necessary any longer.’
‘It just hangs about, like a name no one has any use for.’
‘I suppose.’
‘So when you look at the night sky you’re looking at a million, maybe a gazillion stories that people have forgotten?’
‘Maybe.’
He was getting tired of the night sky, and the talk about it. He knew she was going somewhere, he knew she was going to win whatever the argument was, and he was almost on the point of forgetting what the argument was.
‘So you’re looking at a universe of lost stories. But there’s no telescope to define them. There’s no kind of astronomy to sort them out. They’re wandering in their dark space, wondering why no one remembers them. All of the characters, the heroes and the villains, the lost princesses and the evil stepmothers and the changelings and the Rapunzels and the Rumpelstiltskins . . .’
‘Stop,’ he said. ‘Please, you’re confusing me.’
‘I know,’ she said, smiling. ‘And my goodness, look—’
She leaned her face over his so he could feel her breath on his. And her breath smelt of heather.
‘They’re wrapping up the carnival.’
He turned, and saw that they were. The amazing sight of the takedown, almost in miniature, so high they were above it. The tent billowed downwards, like a deflating skirt. The roustabouts, the talls and the squats, were breaking up frames, folding lean-to shutters, crawling over the rollercoaster like ants, consuming it, so they took it to pieces as they moved. And Burleigh’s Amazing Hall of Mirrors was becoming a dance of reflecting beams, as each piece of mirror was moved, catching the lights of the streetlamps above. The lorries began belching their exhaust pipes, shifting forwards and backwards, churning up the dried grass so the whole miniature spectacle became gradually dimmed by a pall of smoke.
‘Would they leave without us?’ he wondered aloud. And for an entrancing moment he relished that prospect. He could have happily spent the evening in that heather.
‘Do you want to find out?’
She was already standing, brushing the tiny leaves from her gabardine coat.
He did, actually. He would have loved to find out. He would have loved to have arrived at the acres of crushed grass with just the odour of petrol fumes left, as evidence of the carnival and circus, long gone. He would have turned to her and said, ‘We’re walking home now.’
But he knew, as he saw the tiny spangled pumps she wore and the fishnet tights and the glitter of the body-hugging thing above them, that she wouldn’t survive without it. She would wither and die, or maybe be condemned to wander in her own private darkness, the black hole of forgetting, like that Orion, whoever he was. She was a carnie, and had to make it back there. He knew this, but he didn’t know how or why.
But whatever she was, she was his friend, he felt, descending from the gentle slope of dark hillside back towards the promenade and the rapidly diminishing carnival. It was amazing, he thought, how it telescoped into itself, as if its mode of expanding in the first place had its diminishment already built into it, programmed, so to speak. Huge structures folded, like three-dimensional geometric puzzles, into cuboids, anhedral octagonal blocks and strange geodesic pyramids that could be carried, manhandled by several roustabouts, the talls balancing the tangled structures with their elongated arms while the squats bore the weight on their broad shoulders. Pushed then, with much groaning and grab-a-hold-there-would-yous, up the retracted back panels of the waiting trailers. One massive heave after another, the cuboids, the anhedral and the octagonal and the geodesic pyramids were rolled into the gaping maw of the interior, snugly fitting together into a mysterious complicity as if volume and space were collapsing in on each other, no longer at odds, as if the hard-edged was becoming round and the angled, curved.
Could she be more than his friend? he wondered. He felt that strange attraction that he recognised but had never really known, and remembered walks along the wooden bridge with its massive barnacle-encrusted staves, vanishing into the dark water, the girl Georgie from the last but one bungalow at the cul-de-sac’s end, her hand clutching his, as if the very pressure of her fingers on his palm signalled the beginning of a new adventure. He let Mona walk ahead of him then on the night-time promenade and saw the strength of her calves under the gabardine coat, the ancient litheness of her gait, and knew that no, that kind of adventure would never be theirs. So what was the attraction then, he wondered, what was this whorling in the pit of his stomach? He would discover in time, he hoped.
Would he make the grade, Mona wondered, or would he be thrown into that all-too-human panic by the knowledge, when it came? Had she snatched him from his loving mother – and Mona couldn’t imagine her otherwise, couldn’t imagine Dany giving rise to anything but love – only to be wrong-footed, forever waiting for the changeling to emerge? She thought of Walter then, the stillborn one that had followed Jude for two sad decades or more, appalled by his own body as it insisted on ageing. Walter the unfortunate.
She walked ahead of Dany, and felt his glance from behind. Did he have the thing, the sult, the shine? It was odd, she knew, to have Burleigh’s Hall of Mirrors deliver them one last specimen, many years after its decommissioning. Burleigh’s aims may have been true, but his design was far from perfect. It had delivered too many mutant variations; the talls and the squats turned out to be acceptable as roustabouts, but she shuddered, now, thinking of the variations in between. His banishment had been a long and painful episode, one of the many carnie memories that had to be banished in turn. But every dog has its day, she supposed, and it’s a long road that has no turning, and out of every parched desert a flower can bloom. And he had the elegance, not so much of a flower as of the thin, almost too-delicate stem that bears it. It was a delicacy that could turn into strength, that could grow with surprising sinew, she felt this already, but would he, no matter how strong his development, have it in him? That might be for others to decide. Because she was already compromised, she knew, in her feelings; her hard carnie edge had been softened by his presence and the promise of his possibilities. So she waited while he caught up behind her, took his hand and as they stepped down from the promenade’s edge to the flattened field beneath it and made their way towards the massed vehicles that were already, so to speak, uncircling their wagons. The billowing exhaust pipes could well have been the flaring nostrils of mythical horses, dragons, magical beasts of burden preparing to drag their mysterious load. He deserves better than a lion truck, she thought, and ran across the crushed grass, leapt up a set of aluminium steps, pulled open the side-door of a trailer, just as its tractor redoubled its exhausting roar. ‘In here, Dany,’ she said, and as the caravan began its trundling departure he ran to catch up with her outstretched hand, past the illustrated panels of the wonders that the trailers enclosed, a giant caterpillar that bore screaming minions on its hollowed spine, a screaming, distended mouth that promised entry to a ghost-train tunnel and an elegant, gilded horse with its mane blown back in a stiffened, golden whirl.
His hand reached hers and gripped and he felt all gravitational reality suddenly vanish. She pulled him up and inside and once more had the sense that he definitely had it in him.
Inside, they swayed for a moment in the darkness. Mona pulled shut the aluminium door, and in the ensuing gloom all he could distinguish was a small pipe glowing, like a shifting firefly. There was a smell in the air, like bitter almonds.
‘Put it out,’ whispered Mona, ‘I’ve got the boy with me.’
‘And welcome he is too,’ a female voice murmured. He could hear a knocking as the pipe was extinguished, and he got the sense of a foot quenching the ensuing embers. The smell of something like burnt almonds was soon overpowered by the acrid flare of a match and a slowly yellowing oil lamp. He could see then, several hammocks gently swaying in the caravan-like space of the interior. Virginie lay in one, her long hair dangling backwards from the curve of the netted rope. The one he would come to know as Paganina swayed in the other, her bronze legs crossing the dark space between them. Her toes seemed to be caressing Virginie’s crown, but when the lamp grew brighter, he saw they were pulling out strands of the brown hair, knotting them into delicate braids with a fluidity that astounded him. The toes he had known to date were never as dexterous. But he was tired now, and longed for a bed, and when Mona gestured him towards another hanging tangle of rope, he realised that it was a hammock and that this hammock was his. So he gripped the knotted rope at the top with both hands and twisted his body upwards, so it fitted inside. And he was amazed at how comfortable a hammock could prove itself to be. So what with the smell of burnt almonds and of the burning oil lamp and the soft murmur of voices below him and the gentle swaying of the convoy as it gathered speed, he was soon asleep.