Birchwood (12 page)

SILAS LOVED
the pale twins, and they loved Mario, but Mario's only love was his left hand. He explained his passion to me the day we left the town behind. I rode beside him on the last caravan, which at night I shared with him. It was a gleaming morning, washed clean by the storm in the night. Mario wore his black britches and a loose white shirt. A yellow scarf was knotted tightly around his slender neck. He cut a romantic figure there, with his bandit's black eyes and his angry mouth. In his lap sat Sophie the baby, a solemn watchful child with curly hair.

‘I fuckada woman one time, right?’ he said, chopping the air with the edge of his hand. ‘One time, no more, then she'sa mine, see? You know what I mean? I got her in my head, alia them in here'—he tapped his forehead—'and when I wanta the
real
woman, who do everything, you know? I justa think about one and—ratta tat
tat I
See?’

He laughed. Mario's laugh was something to hear, a sharp humourless snicker like the sound of something chipping nicks out of glass. The baby looked up at him with her saucer eyes. He tickled her fondly. On one of his specimen-gathering expeditions he had, to his intense surprise, fathered Sophie on blonde Ada. Delight, yes. His daughter was the one thing which could strike through his congenital beastliness and touch a faint and otherwise concealed vein of tenderness in him. That such a bright warm toy could spring unbidden out of that joyless gallop, there was something to wonder at. Ada's feelings, on the other hand, were quite untouched. She carried her load for as brief a time as possible before she spat out the brat and thrust it on Mario, and forgot about it.

The twins were alike only in appearance. Spiritually they were as different as dark and light. Ada, for all her golden beauty, was one of Mario's kind, sullen, given to incoherent rages, dark laughter, careless cruelty, yet one who, with her wanton ways, displayed a certain vicious splendour. She was a voracious eater. While the rest of us made do with potatoes and bread in various ingenious combinations, she always managed to find meat or fruit, some delicacy, supplied mostly by Magnus, who had a way with snares and things, and who also, I suspect, nursed a secret longing for Ada's wild flesh. Lolling with that negligent grace on her bunk, she would tear in her small white teeth the roasted leg of a rabbit, or a salmon's tender pink flank, greedy, and at the same time indifferent. Her life she lived at the tips of her five senses, and yet if one were foolish enough to strike one's will against hers there came back immediately a startling clang, for there was steel at her centre.

Ida, now, ah, our gentle Ida. She came to us when we stopped at noon, bringing our food, and sat with Sophie on the grass at the side of the road while we ate. The girl and the baby watched us with the same intent gaze, as though they were witnessing the celebration of some outlandish rite. The spectacle of two fellows eating their dinner was as mysterious and baffling today as it was yesterday, and all the days before that, but whereas Sophie would, like the rest of us, cease to seek the meaning of human gestures once she had learned to perform them, Ida would never lose her childlike vision. The world for her was a perpetual source of wonder. She had never recognised the nature of habit, the ease which it brings, and therefore it was the continuing oddity of things that fascinated her. It was not innocence, but, on the contrary, a refusal to call ordinary the complex and exquisite ciphers among which her life so tenuously hovered.

A figure approached up the road we had travelled, a tall woman in a long dress carrying a big stick. She strode along at a fast clip, swinging her arms, a mighty creature. Mario, hunched over his plate, chewed slower and slower the nearer she drew, and his eyebrows climbed up his forehead. There was indeed something exceeding strange about her. On she came, her swinging gait expressing, even at that distance, a pent-up driving irascibility. She drew level with the caravan, and flounced past, fixing us with a sullen glare. On her large head sat a frilly bonnet. Her big black boots made the stones fly. She marched past, halted, abruptly swung around, came back, and planted herself in front of us. I stared at the square blue jaw, the horny hands and thick wrists, the swollen muscles doing violence to the arms of the dress. It was a man.

‘I could do with some of that grub,’ he growled, and tossed the stick menacingly from one hand to the other. Mario, with his mouth full of bread, cast a cautious look up the road. Our caravan was parked on a bend, and the others were out of sight. He shrugged, and nodded to Ida, who rose and gathered together what was left of the food, two cold spuds and a lump of bread. The fellow in the dress dropped his stick and snatched the plate out of her hands and, folding his legs like a pair of scissors, plopped down in the middle of the road and began to stuff the food into his mouth, watching us the while from under his black brows. Sophie chortled, and pointed her little fat finger at him. His jaws stopped working and he scowled, and slowly began to chew again as Ida silenced the baba. He swallowed the last potato whole and threw the tin plate aside, heaved a sigh, and suddenly with an angry grunt snatched the bonnet off his head.

Tucking yoke,’ he muttered, glaring at it with great disgust.

Now, behind him, two new figures appeared on the road, one short and fat, the other tall and thin, comical fellows in blue, jogging toward us. Mario laughed.

‘Eh, signora, look whosa coming.’

Our guest peered wildly over his shoulder, swore, and leapt to his feet and pounded off around the bend at high speed. The two policemen arrived, panting and heaving. They stopped, whipped off their helmets, mopped their brows, hauled up their sagging belts. Sophie chuckled again, delighted with them. The fat one jammed his helmet back on his head and pointed a threatening finger at us.

‘Youse crowd,’ he announced, ‘are just looking to be lifted.’ The finger turned and pointed up the road. ‘That lad is after splitting open a man's skull. Just asking for it, youse are, and I'm the man to do it. You can tell them Sergeant Trouncer said so.’

The other one, a consumptive hulk with a sheep's long grey face, who had hovered by his superior's shoulder nodding vigorous support, now said,

‘That's right, tell them that.’

We said nothing. Our apathy in the face of their threats disconcerted him. He thought for a bit.

‘Just asking to be—’

‘Come on, Jem, for Jesus’ sake,’ Trouncer roared. They galloped away. Mario laughed again, and sprang nimbly up on the ditch to watch the chkse, and Ida leaned across to me with her eyes wide and her lip trembling and whispered, as though she had uncovered some enormous secret,

‘Gabriel, it was a…a
man!

THE EXOTIC
,
once experienced, becomes commonplace, that is a great drawback of this world. One touches the gold and it turns to dross. It was not so with Prospero's band. I travelled with them for a year, borne onward always amid an always new and splendid oddness which sprang not merely from the excitement of new sights and sites, a new sea of faces every night, but was the essence of these fickle things joined with something more, a sense of strange and infinite possibilities: There was something always ahead of us, a nameless promise never reached and yet always within reaching distance. Perhaps because of this, the fixing of my gaze on a luminous and mythical horizon, I remember best not the circus proper, its halts and performances, but the travelling, the grate of wheels on stony roads, the thick scent of the horses, the voices floating back from the forward caravans, and the land, revolving in great slow circles around our slowly moving centre, the sad land, the lovely land.

Later in the day that we left the town, as we {leaded toward the distant mountains, evening sunlight broke through the clouds, and Mario, suddenly gay, began to sing. Shadows crept across the sparkling meadows. Rain fell briefly.
O mi amove, mi amove.
The road sailed down a hill toward tall sand dunes. The sun disappeared, the light around us turned a misty blue. A sulphurous glow rose and trembled above the dunes. The wind sang in the tall reeds, the unseen sea muttered. We struck away inland again, climbing now, and when I looked back I saw, in the fast-failing light, a boat with a black mast, bearing no sign of life, glide out in silence from behind a headland, a mysterious silent ship. Hill fog settled on the thorns. Night fell.

We went up into the foothills under a huge sky of stars. Black dark it was, moonless and still. Moths reeled in the glow of our lanterns. In a valley away to our left a cluster of lights bespoke a village, but the winding road we wearily followed refused to lead us there. The horses, heads bent, half asleep, traipsed on, locked in their stride. No one called a halt. A strange torpor descended on us. The air up here was thin. I sat beside Mario on the driving seat, swaying with the sway of the caravan, heedless and at peace. Vague music reached my ears. At first it seemed to come from everywhere at once, this tiny song, as though the little lights and vivid stars, the far small noises, as though the night itself were singing, but then ahead I saw at the side of the road the glow of lamplight on the undersides of leaves, and I identified the wail of pipes, the skirl of a bodhran, and Mario sprang awake and swore as the caravan ahead of us halted abruptly. A pub!

We gathered on the road. Silas stamped his feet and vigorously rubbed his backside, and the golden children yawned. Sybil, rocking Sophie in her arms, muttered under her breath. The pub was a low dingy place with a thatched roof. There was a brown opaque window dimly lit, a lantern hanging beside a crooked door, and a suggestion of turf smoke up in the darkness. Tall poplars glimmered. The wild music issued forth along with a gush of porter fumes through an open vent above the door. Silas entered, and the uproar inside ceased immediately. We shuffled in behind him, pushing and shoving sleepily. He stuck his hands into his pockets and considered the upturned faces of old men and boys, flushed youths, wild-eyed women. He grinned.

‘Good evening, friends.’

None replied, but at the back someone laughed, a glass chimed, and the piper, a cadaverous fellow with a shock of lank black hair hanging over one eye, struck up another tune, the bodhran joined in with its truculent booming, and the conversation started up again. We made our way to the bar. The publican was a tubby little man with a red nose and a long apron.

‘Grand evening.’

‘Indeed it is,’ said Silas. ‘I think, ah, a glass of porter all round, and a small one for myself, to oil the j oints. And you'll have one yourself?’

‘Ah no.’

‘Ah do.’

‘Well…’

‘Your health.’

‘Good luck to you, sir.’

That was my first taste of porter. Frightful stuff, I must admit, for I am no hard-drinking broth of a boy, but, taken there, that brew, black and bitter, harbinger of a wild mordant gaiety, seemed to me, and still seems, to carry the savour of the country itself, this odd little land. I stood with an elbow on the bar behind me and a heel hooked on the footrail, trying to make the glass look at home in my unpractised hand, and surveyed the room. The topers were dressed in their Sunday best. It must have been a holiday, or a holyday, perhaps some feast of the Queen of May. Much raucous laughter tumbled out of gap-toothed mouths, and the voices and the strange macaronic talk clashed in the smoky air like the sounds of battle. A fat woman with a red face was copiously weeping, rocking back and forth on a stool between two sheepish, speechless men. The cadaverous piper, hunched over his reeds, swung into a gay dance tune, but his long face registered only a deeper melancholy. There is in the happiest of that music a profound thread of grief, never broken, equivalent to but not springing from the sustained drone note, an implacable mournful-ness, and so, although the jig made the glasses sing, the fat woman wept and wept, rocking her sadness to sleep, and the two old men, with their hands on their knees and their jaws munching, sat and stared, with nothing to say.

Maybe I was already drunk, no telling what a sip of porter will do to you, but one minute Silas and the rest were standing beside me, the next they were scattered about the room, joining the party. Silas was engaged in what, from the angle of his chin, appeared to be a furtive conversation with a red-haired boy or small man whose face was hidden from me. Ida had borrowed the bodhran from its master, a boy with buck teeth who hovered awkwardly behind her, shuffling his feet, his face clenched in a grin of embarrassment. Mario, on the whistle, joined the piper in his song. Magnus and Sybil, with the sleeping and swaddled Sophie wedged between them, were huddled on a crowded bench in the corner where a decrepit little old man with no teeth and extraordinary knees was dancing, capering and prancing wildly, his boots banging the flagstones. Rainbird conjured cards out of the air to the delight and fright of two wide-eyed, pretty, painfully shy little girls. The golden children were, ominously, nowhere to be seen. Only Ada, in a sulk, stayed by me, slumped against the bar.

I began to play a game, idly at first and then with some excitement. I would close my eyes and then, every few seconds or so, blink rapidly. Not much of a game? Each time I blinked I carried back into the gloom an image of arrested movement, the old man frozen in mid-air, Silas with his arm uplifted, the fat woman with a finger stuck in her red eye, and it came to me with the clarity and beauty of a mathematical statement that all movement is composed of an infinity of minute stillnesses, not one of which is exactly the same as any other and yet not so different either. It was enormously pleasing, this discovery of fixity within continuity. I elbowed my way outside, and out there in the fragrant darkness and the silence, yes, it was the same, I mean the same principle of continually fluctuating stasis held good, but the shifts and stillnesses here were vast and difficult to distinguish, but I distinguished them. And I saw something else, namely that this was how I lived, glancing every now and then out of darkness and catching sly time in the act, but such glimpses were rare and brief and of hardly any consequence, for time, time would go on anyway, without
my
vigilance.

Soon my rhapsodising under the glimmering poplars was interrupted when the others came tumbling out of the pub. The children, I gathered, had been found doing something frightful in the jakes, and they and their keepers were ejected. Silas peered at me in the dark, swaying and belching.

‘Come along, Caligula, come along.’

Later, lying in my bunk in the caravan, with Mario near me emitting a kind of low hum as he sorted through his file of phantasmal ladies, I thought about the pub and the people, the piper, the weeping woman, the ancient dancer, and I felt stirring deep within me a strange and unexpected emotion which as yet I could not name, which soon settled back into hiding, and then in drowsiness my thoughts wandered afar over the dark fields and lakes, the rivers, the murmuring woods. On the point of sleep my mind made a last effort to stay awake, and my foot jerked, my teeth clenched themselves, and the essence of all I had seen that day, spring rain on the road, a black ship, curlews crying, the residue of all this spun on the last remaining tip of wakefulness like one of Mario's discs on its stick, and as I sank down into the dark I carried one word with me, that word which gives me so much trouble, which is, time.