Carol Birch - Orphans of the Carnival

‘Yeah. Give’s a hand.’

They dragged two out. They were hauling another two when someone yelled (afterwards, no one could say who), and they gagged on fear, freezing in their tracks. The light shot up to the blank ceiling, bounced off shapes suddenly monstrous and unearthly, quavered about queasily till it came once more to rest on the ghastly face of an ape thing with big staring eyes.

After the shock, they laughed.

‘It’s a waxwork!’

Hearts still thumping, they approached.

‘Must be from the House of Horrors.’

It stood in front of a fancy carriage in a big glass case, an ape with a great jutting mouth, an ape in a dress. A baby one stood next to it.

‘Does it open?’

It did, with a long slow creak so classically scary it made them laugh some more.

‘Get her out.’

It wasn’t heavy. The little one came off its stand. It was rotten underneath and all its hair was gone.

‘Put her by the door! Scare the shit out of someone.’

‘This is falling to pieces.’

‘What is it?’

‘Look — if I put her arm up like this—’

It came off.

A great guffaw.

‘Woo-woo, it’s coming to get you!’

The arm, bent at the elbow, still wearing a gold bracelet, waving about, chasing faces.

Someone must have seen the light.

When the police car came winking up from Rommen, they fled on their bikes. The one with the torch still had the severed limb, tucked under his arm as he skimmed his bike one-handed down the hill. When he got home, he laid it down on the kitchen table and started examining it. His older brother came in to get something from the fridge.

‘What the hell’s that?’

‘Wood. Wool,’ said the boy, poking the gaping wound where it had ripped from the body. ‘It’s from a waxwork.’

‘Where d’you get that? Where’ve you been?’ His brother bent down, a look of concentration on his face.

‘Sorry, kid,’ he said when he looked up again, ‘this is no waxwork. I have to ring the police,’ and went out to make the call.

There was not too much of a fuss. The police put the big mummy along with its arm in their basement. The identity was established without much difficulty; after all, this thing had a history. No one claimed it and no one seemed to want it. And there was, of course, no crime to answer for so the police had no need to hang onto it. The university took it and put it in the vaults. The rats had been at the baby and he was in such bad shape they stuck him in a bin at the back of police headquarters. Sometime in the early hours a cat nosed the bin open. Later, a stray dog on the scavenge took him in her mouth and ran away. She chewed on him enthusiastically, tearing bits off, then dropped him in a stairwell, where a young man picked him up and, taking him for some sort of voodoo fetish, hung him over the door of his room, which was painted purple and black and decorated with animal skulls and esoteric symbols. A year later, one of his friends, drunk, removed it. It was thrown over the wall of an empty house and lay in the yard till the clearance people turned up and dumped it with a load of other bits and pieces into one of several boxes that ended up in the back room of a junk shop. A dealer, seeing that the wheat and chaff was hopelessly mixed, bought the boxes as a job lot, stuck them in the back of a van, drove them onto a ferry, crossed the North Sea, and hauled them down to London to his bric-a-brac shop in Camberwell. He cleaned up the good stuff. The rest he chucked in a big yellow skip down the road.

Theo Junior lay on top of a pile of rubble in the skip, legless, armless, one-eyed, till a woman called Rose came along, felt sorry for him and took him home.

Dreamlike, silent, the island drifted into view like an absurdist painting, a profusion of small faces, blind eyes, sweet lips, smiles, serenity, blight. The roots of the willows reached out, clutching the bank like dragon claws, seeming to anchor it in its place. Cane grew high. The soil was alive, growth was lush. Apart from oak and horse chestnut and silver birch, Adam knew nothing at all about trees, but there was an abundance of type and shade, a richness of sap and leaves and bark, and the water smelled of green darkness.

A man in a snow-white shirt and straw hat met them on the ramshackle landing stage, accepted their money and gave them a small talk in Spanish. Adam didn’t understand a word. Anyway, he knew the story. The quiet middle-aged Spanish couple who’d shared his trajinera on the long drift from the city listened intently, laughing once or twice when the guide made a joke. Adam laughed too to be polite, but his eyes, irresistibly drawn to the dolls, would not stay on the man. Faces emerged from the foliage wherever the eye rested, revealing themselves in greater and greater numbers. Even though he’d known exactly what to expect, the whole island disorientated him, and it had nothing to do with fear or superstition. It was the sheer defiance of the place. I am mad and pointless, it said. Here I am.

The guide led them to a scattering of wooden shacks and shelters with corrugated roofs, most of them broken-down and half open to the elements. One had the word ‘Museo’ in large coloured letters painted above the door. They went in. The shrine was tacky. The hermit’s smiling face beamed out from a framed colour photograph. The doll in the centre had the pretty bespectacled face of a plain schoolmarm in an old Hollywood film, the kind revealed to be a beauty by the time the credits roll. Her eyes looked down on the heap of gifts in front of her, the tat people leave, the sad appeasements and compassionate offerings. To comply with the custom, Adam had bought a couple of candy bars before getting on the boat, and these he added to the mix, wondering if the guide would take them home later for his kids. Walls, ceiling, beams crowded in, a fly-buzzing bazaar of mis-shapes and mutations. And oh, how time had feasted on the old ones, cobwebs rampant, dirt triumphant. Young shiny new ones hung side by side with their own future selves. He reached up to touch the face of a friendly little girl with plump sweet cheeks, missing an eye and a leg. The holes that had once held the knots of her hair made dotted lines that zigzagged back and forth across the greying pink of her bald skull. Small crossed pink feet nestled beside her ear. He looked up. A baby face smiled back.

The guide had gone outside to give them more room. Adam and the Spanish couple, quiet, almost reverential, stood, looked, walked about. He was glad he didn’t have to talk to anyone. When their eyes met, he and the Spanish couple smiled at one another. The husband, a small fat man with a handsome face and flat grey hair, said something to his wife in Spanish, half whispering, and she said something back, half irritated, half laughing. Adam went out and wandered in and out of the other shacks. All were doll-strung. One had an old bed with a rotten mattress. Was that where he’d slept, the hermit? Imagine the old guy, living here alone all those years, the dolls becoming more and more each year. Crazy. He played with them, she said. They didn’t scare him.

She’d have loved this.

The Spanish couple had wandered away, seeming uninclined to explore much further than the immediate area around the shacks and wooden shelters. The guide had gone down to the landing stage and was talking to the boatman. Adam wandered alone around the island, looking for a place to leave Tattoo. Wild flowers grew here and there. The high thin shriek of a bird cut the air. The sun was hot and high, and where the foliage thinned, it made the clear places almost blinding. Under the trees, the interplay of black shade and bleached-out white stung the eyes. Sun and rain had worked on the dolls, and worked still. Adam’s progress was slow and random, and he stopped constantly, compelled to study at length. Each hand, each limb, each face, ravaged as though with a terrible illness. But there were too many. Had anyone ever counted? Probably not. You could have a competition, like guessing the number of sweets in a jar.