Dany woke with a long slow gasp of something like terror. He held his left hand up against the webbed curve of his hammock. He had dreamed of an explosion of pain there, as if his thumb had been severed. It throbbed now, where the joint met the hand, with sudden, sharp pangs of pure-white agony. Then the pain gradually dispersed with the memory of the dream.
But Dany was awake. Wide awake. He could hear the gentle snoring of Mona above him, Jude to his right. He gripped the webbed net with his unpained hand and slid himself, deftly and silently, from the hammock. He felt sleep had abandoned him. He padded quietly on bare feet to the door and pushed it open. The carnival sat under a bank of low September clouds with the faintest outline of a moon behind them. The crowds had long gone and the only sound was a gentle, familiar scraping from the frame that held the dodgem cars.
Dany walked then, easing the door closed behind him, knowing sleep was hardly an option now. He followed the sound and saw three squat roustabouts, bums to the hard ground, feet spread-eagled, while they judiciously scraped the scaffolding above them of its filigree-like tendrils.
‘Slim pickings,’ said the nearest.
‘But,’ said Dany, ‘every little helps.’
He knew the conversational mode by now.
‘Ah now,’ said the roustie, ‘who are you tellin’?’
Who else but you, Dany thought but didn’t vocalise.
‘Though with the holiday coming, we should be drownin’ in the stuff.’
He heard a soft creaking then, the sound a metal pole makes in a rusted socket, and at first thought it was coming from the empty carousel.
‘There’s a townie girl,’ the roustie said, ‘been asking for you.’
And Dany thought oh no, or oh yes, and his mind began to turn with that slow, tumble-drying motion once more.
‘Trouble and strife,’ the roustie said.
‘Meaning what?’ Dany asked.
‘Oh, I said nothing,’ the roustie muttered, and returned to his diligent scraping. ‘A shut mouth catches no flies.’
And there were flies about, Dany noticed now, tiny airborne ant-like creatures, catching what was left of the moonlight in their transparent wings. They brushed off his face, like barely visible hands, as he left the harvesting of the dodgem cars and headed for the empty carousel, and that sound of rusted creaking.
The carousel was silent, the horses gleaming with the colours of lost party balloons. Not a whisper of movement. But the rusted broken whine continued and Dany followed it round the curve of the carousel to where a series of white swans hung beneath triangular poles, the metallic wings concealing a children’s seat inside. silent empty swings, and only one of them was moving.
There was a girl’s leg crooking down from the metal wing, with green leather shoes and a block-like heel. Above her the suspension pole shifted in its metal socket. Dany recognised the shoe, and remembered the sweeping brush that moved around it, and the shoe seemed to recognise him, because it began to swing, lazily, as he approached and a brown head of hair lifted from the sleeping swan and he heard the same voice saying, ‘Been looking for you, carnie.’
‘Are your brothers about?’ he asked, and he didn’t know why, but he felt the same darting pain suddenly in his thumb.
‘I should say I’m sorry, shouldn’t I? They’ve only one sister; they can be a bit protective. But you—’
And her leg stretched out here, so the green leather toe of her shoe stroked the back of his hand.
‘—you showed them what was what.’
‘I wish I hadn’t.’
‘I’m sure,’ she said. ‘And I’m still wondering how you did that. Little slip of a thing like you.’
‘Don’t ask,’ he said.
‘Why not?’ And she stretched one hand out as if waiting for his to grasp it, which of course he did.
‘What use is a dead metal swan,’ she asked, ‘if it doesn’t fly?’
‘It’s for children,’ he said. ‘They can imagine it does.’
‘And I was imagining, lying here, thinking of you. I was imagining all sorts of things.’
‘I should take you home,’ he said. ‘The carnival’s over.’
‘I can see that,’ she said. ‘Over for the night. So I was lying here, all on my lonesome, wondering about it.’
‘Wondering what?’
‘It has secrets,’ she said. ‘You have secrets, carnies have secrets, even this metal swan thing has secrets, and the only way to get me out of here will be to let me in on some of them.’
She released his hand then, and stood up in the creaking swan. She looked at him, six feet below her, and held her small white arms out.
‘Catch me, carnie,’ she said, and she fell.
He reached out and caught her in one fluid move, and she sank, like a large human feather, into his arms.
‘You did that well,’ she said, and kissed him.
He could feel braces round her tiny teeth. Her tongue darted over his and he felt a rush of blood and of that hidden sap that seemed to hold his carnie muscles together and, without meaning to, he began to rise.
‘Again,’ she said, pulling her lips away and meeting his again, and they both rose, over the rusting swans, over the poles that held them, over the wooden frames that held the poles, over the carousel and the idle pennant of the big top until the carnival seemed to huddle below them, with its tiny canvas streets and its strange crushed geometry in the limestone fields that stretched away to the town beyond.
‘I knew,’ she said, ‘you were something else.’
‘And I’m taking you home.’
He left her on the town square with her head full of questions by the shuttered hotel where he had met her first. There were, thankfully, no brothers about.
‘Can we do that again, tomorrow?’ she asked. Although she was already uncertain what it was they had done.
And he said yes, they maybe could, and thought it better to walk his way back.