Walter’s codex. Or as Mona knew it, Walter’s collection of dog-eared copybooks. Where were they now, Mona wondered, when another boy might have need of them? And how odd that one so obsessed with histories and genealogies, Edens lost and found, should have let them vanish into thin air. Had they been vaporised with him, in those bombs they were told fell on the Harland and Wolff shipyards? Probably. And she remembered him then, intoning some kind of nursery rhyme, as he scribbled.
Of man’s first disobedience and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world and all our woe . . .
An odd kind of doggerel that didn’t even properly rhyme. But she had no knowledge of Walter before the carnival took him, sitting at his oak and iron desk, turning the pages of Paradise Lost with his cane-rapped fingers. And she had no sense of the crucial insight he gleaned from those pages.
There was an Eden from which carnies fell. A mirror of the biblical one, and as with mirrors, the question once more arises, what was the real and what was the reflected? And Walter the Unfortunate would have it that we cannot be sure.
Was it a paradise as we would understand it? Walter demurs. He knows there was trouble in paradise, there was a flight, but was it a flight from or towards? And here we have to allow Walter another crucial insight: it was both.
Everything was doubled in this carnie hermeneutic. The flight was from and towards, it was a flight and a fall, it was a fall and an airborne exodus; the feathered wings that bore them were burnt in turn, by the flight, the fall, the scattering; the air that welcomed them singed them and changed them for ever.
He describes little of this paradise, for which we must be grateful, as prelapsarian descriptions can border on the tedious. There simply was a place, a state, a paradise. He tries out a string of names, Avalon, Hy-Brasil, Tír na nÓg, but settles on the one that carnies favoured, the Land of Spices. And here Walter allows himself some relief from Miltonic bombast, into the quieter measures of George Herbert:
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well dressed,
The milky way, the bird of paradise,
Church bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,
The land of spices; something understood.
. . .‘something understood’. It should have been enough for him, but of course it wasn’t. It might have been enough for carnies, but not for Walter. He will elaborate, annotate, elucidate. How the spice was the essence of the mildew, how the carnies fed on it. How the Mildewmen consumed the unrefined mildew from the furred roots of the caverns they inhabited, how consumption became the order of their paradise, how the Land of Spices became the Land of Few Remaining Spices, how the Dewmen emerged from their loamy places with their hoary mouths and their mouldering teeth and asked for more, and more was not forthcoming and battle commenced in the Land of Spices. And on a day without any sun and moon, without any light at all but the glow of decaying mildew, the carnies as a genus, as a race, a species, fled.
It began as a flight, but became a fall.
The fall. Walter describes the fall. He grows rhapsodic, as if the very idea of descent releases something in him. It was like the waft of autumn leaves, the slow collapse of the deciduous cover on the sycamore trees around the cricket and football pitches of the public school he ran from. Like the delicious downward drift of those pink cherry blossoms on the front avenue he could see through the library window, hoping against hope that his parents would soon drive down it. But the cherry blossoms fell silently, never in autumn, in the late spring, a diaphanous downward undulation that carpeted the dull, mud-coloured grass of the front lawns in a blaze of pink. Pink, like the rose-coloured Bentley that always promised to arrive, bearing his mother in the rear; pink, like the kisses she planted on the occasional letters she remembered to write. The fall was magical and brief, and left the dark etchings of the cherry-tree branches isolated against the April sky. And the carpet of pink told a story that he could never bear to think of ending, because the story was about life, about how beautiful things could be and how fragile was the life of those beautiful things. So the carnies, he imagined, fell to earth in the way of those cherry blossoms.
But before the fall there was the flight, with a whizz-bang fury of propulsive escape, with a noise, a thunderclap, a sonic boom that shattered their universe and the arrows of the Dewmen that pursued each one of them created its own terrifying roar. These projectiles were hooked and spiked and taloned, and forged of the metallurgy of the Land of Spices, every lamppost, every crom rath, every gold- or silver-mirrored surface, every vein of ore, all of those hunched and blasted statues so beloved of the mildewed ones having been melted in the boiling pot of their dewless fury for that very purpose. But the carnies outflew them; singed almost to nothing by their speed of flight, they crossed the dimensional barrier and floated to earth, like beautiful burnt blossoms, almost like faeries, indeed, their singed wings outspread, guiding their fall, the last feathers of which were burnt to nothingness by the time their feet touched the surface they would come to call home. And the arrows that followed them melted as they met the atmosphere and fell to earth as molten drops, so for a moment, if anyone had cared to view it, it would have seemed the heavens were weeping tears of melted gold. And this residue from the Land of Spices touched the turfy earth and sizzled its way downwards, to make its home among the ancient fallen oaks, the dead bog-dwellers with their leathery skin and inert limbs and the slithering things that fed on them.
So the carnie flight was from, and towards. From the paradise that was no longer theirs, towards the cold world of sin and death, where they had to survive as wingless ones. Where they searched for the mildew spice and found none. Until one day a carnie made a child laugh (unintentionally, Walter adds, since carnies up to then didn’t know they were funny) and that carnie found a tiny furred residue on the branch the child had leant upon. More a gossamer than a residue, an echoing web left by the child’s ringing peal of laughter. This carnie smelt the mildew and knew that it was good. The carnie wove a tale then, of joy and wonder, and more children gathered, and with each outpouring of wonder and joy the mildew grew and so the circus was born and then the carnival and the carnies made it their lot to trade in emotions, of wonder, laughter, terror, joy, and to harvest their payment in spice. They left their denuded paradise to Mildewmen, whom they hoped against hope could never take the journey they did. But what if they somehow managed? Then the carnies put their faith in their gravitational freedom, knowing that they were creatures of the air; Mildewmen, on the other hand, being creatures of roots and bark and everything that grows upon them. And so superstition was born. The magpie, the owl, the moonless night, the milk soured, the egg gone rotten, the cowless calf, the number thirteen all became emblems (metaphors, Walter adds, sagely) of that carnie fear: that the Mildewmen would somehow manage that flight to their new-found home. And so the carnies paid the unseen race of Mildewmen a ritual tribute, a kind of talismanic tithe. They gathered the excess spices in ancient jars and at intervals, decided by the movement of the sun and moon, they left the Mildewmen their spicy luckpenny. Spring, summer, autumn, winter, all of the equinoxes included, on circular mounds, drumlins, whitethorn copses and forests of ash and elder. Was this tribute ever collected? Ever consumed? Carnies never asked that question. Because, and here we encounter another of Walter’s insights, this very tribute was a tacit acknowledgement of their deepest fear: that something of the Dewman was already here.
That it was goes without saying. Those golden arrows, melting in the sun’s rays, fell to earth. The burning tears of the mildewed ones.
And yet the carnies thrived, condemned to travel the earth, to keep their origins secret, to pay their mildewy tribute, never to return to their Land of Spices. But all of their dreams were of that land, as it once was, and all of their nightmares were to do with that buried fear. A strange tale indeed, and a cautionary one, but probably the best account of carnie origins available. And Walter, being the numerate creature he was, beloved of classifications of all kinds, here adds a chart, of the relative yield of mildew and spice to the different human emotions. He grades the yields on a scale of one to ten. Laughter had a spice ratio of two point three, on his admittedly haphazard calculations. Joy yielded a five, wonder a six point two. And terror, unfortunately, yielded a crop that went off Walter’s chart. But carnies, being a gentle race, used terror judiciously, confined it to the manufactured fears of the rollercoaster, the Big Wheel and the ghost train. God forbid, he adds as an addendum, that they would ever realise terror’s true potential.