The crowds began to trickle in around midday. Bachelor farmers mostly, hungover, dressed in last night’s sweat-stained shirts, some in twos and threes, some with female partners already on their arm. There were squeals on the rollercoaster, buried shouts of terror from the ghost train, peals of innocent laughter from Burleigh’s Amazing Hall of Mirrors. Oh my God, look at the cut of you. Dany watched, winched, collected coins and twirled his rope in the big top with a strange sense of abstraction, of listlessness, even. He watched Mona twirl, fly and soar with a feeling inside him he didn’t recognise. The rope in his hands seemed disconnected from her for once. He was waiting for something and he didn’t know what. And walking back then, past the carousel, silent, because all the children had long gone, he saw her. Sitting on a carousel horse with a golden wooden mane, idly rocking it backwards and forwards, her brown chunky-heeled shoes barely reaching the trodden grass.
‘You promised me a ride, carnie.’
‘But you seem a bit old for that one,’ he said.
‘So what do you recommend?’
‘The rollercoaster?’
‘I could never stand heights.’
‘The ghost train, then?’
‘Oooh, scary stuff, Mr Carnie. Can I hang on to your arm?’
And it suddenly struck Dany that it was the oddest thing. He had assembled that ghost train more times than he could remember. Taken it apart the same. But he had never been inside it. In fact, he had given hardly a thought to any of the carnival rides, apart from the mesmerising business of their construction and reconstruction. What did that mean? And again came the same strange sense, of waiting for something. Had he been waiting for her?
He lifted her down then, from the carousel horse, and was surprised to find her weight like that of a diminutive doll. How long had it been since he had touched someone? And not just someone: a girl in tight jeans and a cut-off T-shirt that said SOCK IT TO ME over her bouncing breasts. He placed her on the grass then, carefully, as if any untoward movement of his would cause her to shatter and break.
‘What strong hands you have, carnie.’
‘Have I?’
‘Not the right answer.’
‘What is the right answer?’
‘All the better to—’
And she stopped, and smiled at him, exposing her silver-braced teeth.
‘To what?’
‘Don’t ask me. You’re the wolf. I’m the granny or – or whatshername – Little Red Riding Hood.’
‘All the better to feel—?’
‘Altogether too wolfish now—’
‘—yours?’ He phrased it like a question. And took her freckled hand in his own.
‘Oh, how sweet. Even nice.’
And she drew her hand from his then, and slipped it through the crook of his arm. He could feel the push of her breast against his elbow.
‘Come on then, carnie. Show me this ghost train. And tell me your name, I can’t keep saying carnie.’
‘Dany.’
‘Can I call you Dan? And since you didn’t ask mine, call me Maggie.’
And he walked then, thinking of too many things, towards the wide-open mouth with the graveyard teeth that was the entrance of the ghost train.
There was a creaking of old machinery, the groaning of a rusted chain, and she sat in the small wooden car unnaturally close to him, her face pinched and smiling until it was consumed by darkness. Then there was a swoop downwards through plastic ivy, a succession of graves that opened their skeletons to the moonlight, ghouls that materialised from above and below, and hands, gripping his neck, his throat, his chest, his waist, that he gradually realised were hers. There was a kiss then and the taste of her saliva in his mouth and her tongue on his, the taste of sharp metal of her braces that he didn’t like at all. Then they were illuminated by neon light and the ride was done and there were three youths watching him from the end of the tracks.
‘Found yourself a carnie?’
One of them lit a cigarette, a large freckled face under a shock of red hair.
‘Scuttin’ off on us?’
‘He just took me for a ride—’
‘Took my sister for a ride, did you?’
‘She asked me to—’
‘Is that true, Maggie, you asked him?’
‘What if I did?’
‘Well now. I wonder—’
He walked forwards, large Doc Marten boots on the well-trodden grass. And Dany saw the blow long before it came. He reached one hand out, caught the large, reddened wrist in his smaller hand. He bent it then, on instinct, and saw the red-haired one crumple suddenly to the ground in a strange kind of agony.
‘Let me go, you carnie fucker—’
He sensed another fist swinging towards him, ducked his head to one side and caught it with his left hand. There were two now, squirming in the shadows by the ghost-train tracks. A third aimed a head-butt towards him, and Dany met it with his upturning forehead. A loud crack, a gush of red from a broken nose.
The girl behind him screamed, ‘Jesus, there’s no need for this!’
And Dany realised there wasn’t. He released both hands. He saw the bleeding one rise, one hand held to his streaming nose.
‘What the fuck was that?’
Dany didn’t know what it was. He stood there, lithe, electric, confused, as he sensed her leaving the protection of his shadow to help her brothers.
‘Didn’t I tell you never to mess with carnies?’
‘You started it.’
‘Will I finish it now?’
The freckled one rose then, and swung again. Dany saw this one coming but let it arrive. A fist of knuckles to the face bobbed his head back. It hurt, but it wasn’t pain as he remembered it. The other two came forwards, emboldened, and the rain of blows began. He let himself suffer them, like a pneumatic rag doll, thrown back and forwards between them. He rose in a strange arc with the final blow, and then let himself lie crumpled in the grass. He felt the kicks come then, while the girl exhausted herself with screams of protest. And then it was over almost as quickly as it began. He heard phlegm coughed from a mouth above him and a gobeen of spittle hit his cheek. He heard their feet retreating, the tears of the girl, confused whimpers now with the word ‘carnie’ scattered between them. And then there was silence.
He lifted his head, slowly, wiped the spittle from his face. And he saw a figure move from the shadow underneath the scaffolding and he recognised Mona.
‘Are you learning?’ Mona whispered.
‘I must be,’ Dany answered. He got to his feet, felt all of his limbs intact; the pain of the beating fluttered round his body like an electric charge.
‘We don’t cross over.’
‘No?’
‘We can do things, but we don’t advertise it.’
‘I see.’
‘I heard the rumpus, I saw you catch the first one and the second. I wondered what the outcome would be. Then you settled back and took it. Wisdom, I thought.’
‘I could have killed them. Now why was that?’
‘But you didn’t, and that’s the point.’
She took a handkerchief with an ancient fringe of lace from her pocket, and dipped it in a tiny jar and wiped his face with it. The feeling of relief was delicious.
‘That’s good.’
‘It’s mildew. Heals all ills. Now come here with me.’
She took his hand then, the way the girl had, and led him through the scaffold to a small mound, a perch really, on the broken grass beneath it. It smelt of engine oil and heather and crushed buttercups. Tinny music drifted from above, from the triangular metal tannoys on carnival poles.
‘We can’t do what they do,’ she said, lying her girlish cheek on the heathery mound. ‘But we don’t talk about it. The way they endlessly talk about breeding, making money, whatever that thing is they call work, retirement and, at the end of it all, “giving up the ghost”.’
She plucked two pieces of succulent grass from among the heather and offered Dany one. They both chewed there, for a while, as Mona cogitated.
‘Though that phrase never made any sense to me since the ghost wasn’t being given up, was it? The ghost was what they were becoming.’
She turned to him and prodded his blade of grass with hers. She spoke through a half-closed mouth.
‘You still with me?’
‘I suppose.’
‘Good. Because it’s tempting to envy them. The way time hits them, the way they grow and change and, most of all, their breeding habits. But are they for us, Dany?’
‘No,’ he gave the expected answer. ‘They’re not for us.’
‘Not for us all the stuff they sing about, with their sighs and their kisses and their lipstick and their tears and their lover man oh where can you be, I’ve been around the world and I–I–I can’t find my baby—’
And oddly enough, it was playing now from the tannoy speakers, the rich tobaccoey Barry White voice, ‘I don’t know how, don’t know where she can be.’
‘And sometimes I see them underneath the scaffolding fumbling with buttons and zips, curled underneath the flap of the circus tent, and I think here we go again, the same old round with its honey child and its baby loves and the night I met you baby I needed you so. I could wish I was that thing and maybe I wish because I was that thing once, but it’s the great seducer, that feeling, the one you have to watch out for, even more than the Fatigue—’
And here she turned to him.
‘And you know what the Fatigue is, Dany?’
Fatigue, he knew. But the Fatigue? He shook his head. It was the first he’d heard of it. ‘Your hands,’ she said to him. ‘Show me your hands.’
He held them out to hers. As if she expected what the sweeping girl expected, a high-five. But no, she examined them with her fingers in the neon light that came from the carnival beyond.
‘It’s what I noticed, the first time I saw you in Burleigh’s mirror. You have what Jude has, the hands of an original. Now how can that be, Dany?’
He felt proud for a moment, to have something beyond her own attributes. But of course he answered dutifully, ‘I don’t know, Mona.’
Mona. The sound on his tongue was old, enticing, full of promised knowledge.
‘Is that the first time you’ve used my name? Called me Mona?’
‘Mona.’
‘I had no want for a captured one, for a changeling. No desire whatsoever. But when I saw those hands, I knew they were special. I had to touch them. Whether you were to come out tall or squat, another roustabout, no matter. And out you came, perfect in form. I almost whispered, “Burleigh, all is forgiven.”’
Dany looked at his hands. They were ordinary hands, as far as he could work out. Then he held them up against hers, to check.
‘High-five.’
She held hers up, the way Maggie had.
‘Jude read them, when you were sleeping. And I could tell she knew something, though she was loath to share it.’
And Mona closed her fingers round his.
‘Come with me, Dany.’
‘Where?’
‘The circus, where else.’
She took his hand and walked, and led him through the emptying stalls, the way the other girl had. But there was more, here. Her steps became longer, lighter. She led him through to the covered flap of the circus-tent entrance. She unclasped it and gestured him inside.
There was a huge pool of darkness and the diminishing central pole, heading towards the circular gap above, through which silvered clouds could be seen.
‘You know you don’t need a rope, Dany, to take me up?’
‘I always suspected.’
‘Like this.’
She held two palms out and rose, softly, gently, into the gloom above, where she gripped the swing of the redundant trapeze.
‘Come and join me.’
He gripped the rope then, and began to climb.
‘I said join me.’
She reached one hand downwards, towards him, and he dared to take it. He felt himself weightless for a moment, swinging below her.
‘Now reach for that.’
She swung him in a gentle arc, towards the trapeze across the gloom, and then let go.
And he was weightless, tracing a parabola away from her. He reached out, caught the opposite trapeze, and allowed his momentum to swing him back and forth.
‘Now, back, to me.’
He angled his legs, making his weight double his momentum, and at the moment of letting go wondered, if weight can swing me, why doesn’t weight drag me down? but he sailed, as if carrying on an invisible melody, back towards her hands.
‘Now, you want to high-five?’
She wrapped her fingers round his and soared, dragging him upwards as if gravity had been reversed. She wound her knees around his, guided him past the diminishing pole, through the circular hole above it towards the silver clouds outside.
‘We need to journey, you and me.’
‘Journey to where?’
‘Over the limestone fields. To the cliffs.’
It was strange, to journey with her and see her released from what he knew never held her down anyway. Gravity, weight, mass, all of those terms he had learned in school, which seemed almost inaccessible to him now. He followed, of course, gravitationless himself. It felt not so much a flight as a continuous fall that just never pitched itself downwards. They moved past the gradually quenching lights of the carnival, over the town, where the festive crowd were spilling from pubs, over the limestone fields that seemed to have a luminance all of their own, to the cliffs beyond. They came to rest on the edge of one, and he could see the Atlantic waters, pitching and roiling far below.
‘Will you show me what you’re made of, Dany?’
Her face was tilted towards him and a cloud shifted above them and the silver ghost of moonlight crossed it.
‘How would I do that?’
‘Hold me.’
So he held her waist. He felt substance there, under her tiny cinched jacket, a strength that matched his own.
‘I’m holding you.’
‘Hold me for good.’
And she pitched herself forwards then, off the cliff edge, down the cliff-face towards the dark waters below them.
Dany held, tight. He saw the foamed surface hurtling towards them and still he held. They hit the waves and, in something like a long, slow exhale, kept plummeting downwards. But he felt the contours of her waist contract then, into something thin, skeletal, hardly there. He saw her hair, grey and then white through the foaming bubbles that moved above them on their descent. Her face became a wizened map of tiny lines, until the skin became parchment thin, so the bones showed through. She was ageing as they plummeted downwards. As if the fatigue of years had come, with a vengeance, to take all of its toll. There was seaweed around them then, tendrils of it from the ocean’s floor, entangling his ankles. He kicked himself upwards and kept his hands gripped fast to her skeletal waist. He saw the surface again, impossibly far off; the broken moon forming and re-forming with the water’s movement. There was something like body returning to her cinched waist. There was flesh on her watery face again, the lines were diminishing, youth was returning as the slivers of moon-silver came back into view. And he broke the surface again, was tossed amongst the roiling foam, with Mona, as young as he had known her, still in his arms.
‘It makes no sense,’ she whispered, or murmured, or sputtered, ‘I should have never come back.’
‘Glad you did.’
‘The Fatigue, now, you’ve seen it. We carry all of our years inside of us. But you, you pulled me back.’
‘Was that some kind of test?’
He felt angry for the first time in all of this strange evening. To have been played with like that. He felt exhausted, as if the crashing waves could achieve what she did not.
‘Those hands, my boy love, lovely one, come straight from the Land of Spices. You were born a carnie. And there was never a need to be snatched.’
She drew him back up then, like two dripping fish drawn from above by an invisible line. He saw the water cleave off his boots in successive drips to the disappearing sea. He saw puffins and gannets, perched on their spotted niches in the cliffs.
‘Can you explain it?’
‘I wouldn’t try. Might spoil it. We are carnies, after all.’