Days Like Today (28 page)

‘Especially not if they tell you something like that,’ he said. ‘If they try to get you to go with them for any reason at all, you just run away. And if they grab you: kick, bite, and yell as loud as you can.’

The children nodded. They remembered what had happened to their mother: a man had come to their house and he’d made her say that their father had walked out on them, taking the old woman with him for the sake of the aid money. The real truth was that the man had killed the old woman and burned her in the stove. Then he’d beaten up their mother so badly that her face was covered with bandages; he’d said that their father had done it, but they didn’t believe that. Their mother had given them a hot drink and put them to bed. She’d told them that everything would be all right in the morning. And that was true, because in the morning their father was back. The man had tried to kill him and then he’d taken their mother away as a prisoner, probably to a different country so that she could never return. But their father was going to bring them up himself, with the help of Anna and her daughter, Maria, so at least they’d have somebody to look after them: somebody who loved them. And they were never to tell anybody about that
other man killing the old woman. They should say that she died of old age and they’d buried her in the orchard; because if they didn’t, the aid people weren’t going to give them their food allowance and the authorities might even accuse their father of getting rid of her himself.

Maria counted out the spending money for each child. ‘If you buy any food,’ she said, ‘try not to eat it too fast. And be careful of that ride over there – the one that goes up and down and tilts while it spins. It makes you feel horrible. I remember that one from my first trip to the fair. You feel awful for days.’

Anna said, ‘I’ll take the little ones to see the baby animals.’ The smaller children shouted: yes, baby animals.

‘What are the baby animals?’ he asked.

Anna shrugged. ‘Lambs, piglets, baby chicks.’

‘Yum-yum,’ Maria whispered.

He laughed. Maybe that was what had happened to the tigers.

‘Remember, everybody,’ Anna repeated. ‘When you hear the whistle.’ The children ran, breaking into groups before they were out of sight.

‘They’ll all be sick this evening,’ he predicted.

‘Sick, but happy. And with nice memories. We’ll see you later.’ Anna moved away, the three smaller children clinging to her.

‘Isn’t she wonderful?’ Maria said. ‘If only my mother had been like that. God, it’s strange. All the best things in my life happened within twenty-four hours of being shoved into the pit of hell. What a comedy.’

‘Happy endings. That’s what I like. To survive and to live well, knowing that you’ve deserved it.’

They set off hand in hand to investigate the shows. He looked around at the other parents and their children, all of them trying, and failing, to do simple tricks that had once been so easy for him: throwing a hoop over a wooden stake, hitting a moving toy bird with a ball, shooting down a target. He still had a good eye, but that wasn’t enough.

Maria said, ‘I was always told those places were rigged: the stake is angled away from you and it’s just a little too big for the hoop to fit it. And the ducks over there are on a supporting piece that never moves unless you complain, and then they flip a switch that releases the spring and they show you that you can knock the thing over easily: you’re just missing it every time.’

‘I guess so. They get away with what they can. On some of these things they probably have a way of letting a few people win, so the others can see it.’

‘Their friends and relatives.’

‘But if you don’t win at one, you try the next. Or you can ride on one of the cars, or have your future told.’

‘Oh. Do you want to do that?’

‘Not for anything. It’s hard enough dealing with the past and the present. Come on.’

They saw Anna a long way ahead. She was kneeling in the middle of her bevy of children and using a handkerchief to take a speck of dirt out of a child’s eye.

He looked up at the big wheel and at the smaller, slower merry-go-round with its painted horses. ‘How about
that?’ he suggested. ‘It wouldn’t be too fast.’

‘No, thanks. I seem to remember that it starts slow and speeds up. And then it’s too late to jump off.’

‘All right. Where to?’

‘How about the House of Horrors? That’s pretty tame.’

‘The House of Horrors. Definitely. Unless you don’t think it’s a good idea.’

She put a hand on her belly, and said, ‘If this child can thrive on everything it’s been through already, I don’t think a haunted house or two is going to hurt it.’

They couldn’t find the House of Horrors. They trailed around the stands and cages, wondering what they could do with their time until the whistle blew to mark the hour. They passed the seals and the bears, the table where there was a glass jar full of pebbles whose number could be guessed. Maria wanted to sit down. ‘Here,’ she said.

They entered a tent inscribed with the name
Professor Miracolo
. The show was about to begin. There wasn’t time to bother with tickets; as soon as he’d paid at the desk, they were waved ahead into a small, semi-circular theater already crowded with other customers. They were barely in their seats when the side lights dimmed and the stage was flooded by a dazzling glare from above.

Two men stepped into the field of brightness. One told the members of the audience what they were going to see: ‘The world’s greatest … the most renowned … expert in the arts of contortion … the foremost practitioner of magic transformations learned through years of study in the fabled schools of the mystic East … The one and only Professor
Miracolo will now perform his internationally celebrated repertoire of astounding magical acts, concluding with the incredible, supernatural finger-balancing exercise, a feat so hazardous that only the Professor himself has been able to master it.’

They watched the Professor – who was dressed in a top hat and tails – remove his hat and go through the colored ribbon trick, the flags and the rabbit. Further well-known mystifications called for audience participation: children were chosen from the crowd to cut a piece of paper with scissors that had been functioning perfectly well for the Professor but, as soon as he handed them over, wouldn’t open for the child. Much laughter ensued at the expense of the young volunteers, who were utterly confounded by the business. ‘That’s so mean,’ Maria murmured. ‘It’s just a knob he flicks to the side every time he takes the scissors back to look at them. It locks the blades, like a safety catch.’ She applauded loudly as a child stepped back and rejoined its parents.

Professor Miracolo set up a display that included four candles. He was helped by a woman in her forties who was dressed in a spangled costume with a skirt like a dancer’s tutu. Her hair was piled up in a glistening mound, her shoes were high-heeled gold sandals. As she retired behind the curtains with the announcer, the Professor lit the candles by pointing a wand at them, one by one.

Maria turned her face away at the sight of the flames. She looked for the way out. He pulled her closer and ran his hand over her hair.

Professor Miracolo waved his wand again. The row of lights sank from sight. He repeated the action and they all came back. He singled out the candle at the end, the one at the beginning. It was easy to see that the flames were live fire; how did he do it? The audience applauded, even Maria.

For the last, the culminating show of skill, the barker rolled a large, heavy-looking ball into the spotlight. He told everyone that this magical demonstration was the best of all, saved to the last, and only the professor – the highest genius in the world of magic – could carry out this extraordinary proof of mind over matter.

Professor Miracolo emerged from between the dark curtains. He approached the ball, which reached above his knees. He bent over it, put his hands on it and then lifted himself up into a handstand. An outbreak of clapping stopped as he began to take one hand away. There was silence while everyone watched. He brought back the hand, placed it so that only one finger touched the ball and – in a move that looked both naturally easy and strangely untrue – put all his weight on that one finger and took away the other hand. He was balancing upside-down on top of a round rubber ball and using only a single finger of one hand. The audience was so astonished that for a while everyone simply sat and looked. Then people began to realize that no matter how impossible it seemed, the trick was worth a show of appreciation. They went wild.

At the height of the cheering and stamping, the lights blinked out and came back almost immediately. The ball
had disappeared and the professor was revealed standing between the announcer and the female assistant. All three of them bowed.

They came out into the sunlight and he repeated what he’d already said several times: ‘It’s impossible.’

‘I don’t understand it, either,’ Maria said, ‘but I had it explained to me once. Apparently you can give the illusion of practically anything if you cut off the real thing by a reflection from a mirror.’

‘But he was right in front of us.’

‘I know. It’s amazing.’

‘I really liked that,’ he said. ‘If I were ten years old, it would drive me crazy, but I think I’ve reached just the perfect age for magic.’

‘Look,’ she said. ‘The House of Horrors. We were going in the wrong direction.’

‘And some of our bunch coming out of it.’ He whistled. The children turned their heads. He called to them. They came running to tell him about their adventures. Two of the girls admitted that they’d been scared in the House of Horrors but the two older boys said it was nothing – just kid stuff: not a single good thing; you could see the wires everywhere, like a puppet show.

One of the younger boys didn’t say anything. He stayed behind when the others went on to the next entertainment.

‘Did you see Professor Miracolo?’ Maria asked him.

‘Oh, that was the best.’ He flushed with eagerness to talk about the magic. They walked together to the entrance of
the House of Horrors. Another thing he’d liked, he told them, was the princess in the thimble, who could dance to the music of a guitar even though she was so tiny that you had to look at her through a magnifying glass.

‘You didn’t like the haunted house?’ she said.

‘Not as much. Everybody was screaming and it was dark.’

‘Want to try it again?’ he asked. ‘You can come with us. If you’ve already been through once, you’ll remember when things are going to jump out, so you’ll know what to expect. And you can tell us about the really bad ones ahead of time. I don’t want Maria to be upset.’

The boy nodded. It was impossible to tell whether he was reluctant or overjoyed, but the answer came a few minutes later, after they’d taken their seats in the open carriage – the boy behind and he and Maria in front. His son’s voice filled with confidence as he began his commentary.

I’ve got a rival,
he thought.
The boy’s hardly more than a child
and he’s fallen in love with his father’s woman.

The track was full of curves, sudden twists and bumps. As they creaked around the corner, ghosts wavered into their faces from the sides of the tunnel. All around them people burst into shouts and laughter.

‘There’s a very noisy skeleton next,’ the boy informed them.

He was glad of the warning. The sound took him back to the days when he was in uniform. With almost the same boom and crunch, followed by a loud crack, a skeleton shot towards them, seeming at the last moment to fly over their heads. Shortly afterwards a shoal of smaller skeletons
danced in a moving archway, giggling and gibbering above and beside the train; one of them had part of a skeletal arm in its mouth, with blood dripping down the sides of its bony jaws and blood smeared across the captive hand.

He laughed, but his son didn’t.
Out of consideration for me.
Because of my lost hand. But one hand is like another once it’s bare
of flesh; one corpse is like the others when it’s turned to bones.

Every day he had to resist the urge to go out to the quarry. The temptation was almost unbearable, but he knew that that was the way people wrecked their lives: by picking at the details, over and over again, trying to cover their tracks and get everything right. It was better, even if you’d made mistakes, to leave it and not go back – to let the world move on. Time would overtake the past.

He had to keep repeating the good advice he’d decided to abide by: not to go back there for at least a year and not to admit anything, ever. He’d report the disappearance after it was too late to tell one person from another; and then they’d have the incident officially closed. His wife had run off with an aid worker: that was all, unless somebody went down there and started to identify people, in which case it would appear that the man had probably tried to kill her but in the act of pushing her into the quarry, he’d fallen in too. Or maybe her assailant had succeeded in killing her and somebody from his gang of crooks had pushed him over the side later; the state of his head could be attributed to that, or even to something done to him by other people down there in the pit. That was as much as anyone would be able to guess.

The train ran through cackling monsters, witches, cauldrons of boiling oil and bright, crawling things that appeared to be falling from the tunnel roof and landing all over the passengers: those were the most effective of all. Everyone tried frantically to brush the things off.

The boy crowed with delight. He said, ‘There isn’t anything there. It’s like pictures. They don’t stay there when you’re in the light.’

Laughter overcame the sounds of distress. What had they been worried about? Maria too laughed heartily, secure against the arm he held around her. As the horrors came faster and with an ever greater excess of grotesque detail, the enjoyment increased. Everybody loved the ride, even the small children who had been brought in with parents. He remembered that his initial acquaintance with the place had been different, but it seemed to him that what made the difference was probably his own subsequent experience rather than any of the elaborate props and tricks of lighting added by the owners. Some of the dusty and faded monsters that worked on wheels or springs might have been the very same ones he’d met years ago. Yet they still had an effect on their audience. And on him. He was charmed. At the same time he was aware of how strange it was that – having lived through so many horrors – anyone should want to subject himself to this gallery of artificial terror. Was it a kind of protection, like a prophylactic medicine? The answer wasn’t that no one knew the difference between the true and the false; they knew. But they still needed magic. The delights of illusion were similar to the
pleasure of imagining a thing true when you knew that it couldn’t be, or hoping for a marvelous event when you didn’t really think it could happen. The workings of memory too, like the magician’s sleight of hand, made you believe. You couldn’t go on living if you didn’t believe that through the power of heart and mind you could keep whatever you lost: that the part of you that was good could transform and outlast even the chaos of war – that there could still be love and that love didn’t die.