Carnivalesque by Neil Jordan

Author:Neil Jordan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781408881361
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2017-02-15T11:07:42+00:00

20

Mona, of course, heard him enter. She heard the rustle of his hammock, the soft wheeze as sleep took him over and the odour of harvested mildew filled the cabin. She knew that smell and she wished him well with it.

The spice, the gum, the glue, the sap, the resin, the mildew, whatever the correct word for it, and there was, in the end, no proper word for it. there were things before there were words for them; there was emotion before the mildew; there was the void before there were things to fill it; there was the gasp before the void and the gasp filled it. The gasp was the breath and the breath was the mildew and the mildew was the spice and the spice just was.

She would one day have to tell him all she knew. But then, as she lay there in her unrocking hammock, what did she know? The mildew was, she knew or thought she knew, the only remnant of the breath that made them. Why it congealed in those wafer-thin, undulating fungal layers of stuff, as if one had spun a mushroom or a toadstool in those drums that spun the candyfloss, she could never tell. Perhaps carnies knew once, but the race itself has been spun so many ways – mingled with the snatched and the changed, not to talk about the cousin and mongrel carnies from other parts – that if they knew, they had long ago forgotten. So, like most of the rules and rituals that governed their lives, it was left unexplained and all that was left was the habit, the need to harvest it wherever it gathered, and it gathered in the strangest places. Beneath the bleachers and the circus stalls, underneath the rollercoaster, in the floors of the ghost-train cars and like a fine-spun spider’s web around the pole that kept the big top afloat. They all knew that laughter, terror, shock and fear and awe and joy – emotion, in a word, human emotion – left the mildew as its residue, which is why, in effect, the carnival existed. But how to explain its presence under the table on which Dorothea read her fortunes, clinging, like a diaphanous web of furred parchment, to the dragon claws of the table legs? And how to explain Virginie, who would wake some mornings covered in it? Was it because Virginie dreamed sometimes, with such astonishing intensity, of the Land of Spices? The only remnants of those dreams would be the webbish accretions of the mildew that clung to her naked body, wrapping her like a cocoon to the hammock beneath her? She would ring the small bell that hung from the rope above her and Mona would gather her ancient bowl and brush and harvest that precious gossamer of mildew while the coffee boiled. And having gathered each atom of the sacred crop, they would sometimes spice their coffee with a few filched strands of it, which undulated in the brown liquid before they finally disappeared.

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