The Carnival at Bray (6 page)

“Maggie,” he said, his voice shrill and trembling, “if you ever listen to my advice on
anything,
listen to me about this, okay? You. Must. Go. See. Nirvana. In. Rome. It's a two-hour flight from Dublin, and it's at the Palaghiaccio di Marino, and it's going to be transcendent.”

“You know I'm sixteen, right?” Maggie said. “Mom would never in a million years let me go to Italy for a Nirvana show!
Maybe
she'd take me to see them in Dublin. But Rome? No way.”

“First of all, what are you talking about?” He was yelling now. “You can't go see Nirvana with your
mother.
Second of all,
did you hear what I said? Rome! The Eternal City! Julius Caesar! Crossing the Rubicon! The Coliseum! It's like, the giants of the present colliding with the giants of the past. It's like two thousand years of civilization coming full circle. Can you imagine Kurt Cobain's voice drifting across the fucking Tiber? Echoing off the goddam piazzas?” On the other end of the phone, she could hear him plucking compulsively at the strings of his guitar. “Don't you understand, Maggie? This would be like
President fucking CLINTON
playing the fucking saxophone at the—”

His calling card ran out of minutes and the call clicked off. Maggie looked out the kitchen window at Ronnie, who was running in jagged circles around the yard with a school friend, trying unsuccessfully to fly a blue kite. She placed the phone gently back in its receiver and stepped away from it as if it was leaking toxins. It wasn't so much the lecture she had just received—Kevin had been lecturing her all her life about politics, literature, art, and music—but the way he had delivered it. He had not sounded just passionate, but actually unhinged, strung out, crazy. She looked forward more than ever to Christmas, a month away, when he and Nanny Ei were coming. It was so hard to gauge a voice over a phone line.

Aíne, ever punctual, was checking her watch in front of the HMV when Maggie approached. She was dressed in the same nondescript gray coat she always wore, but had slicked on a sad bit of lip gloss. This dollop of pink made Maggie hopeful—maybe her friend
did
care about what boys thought—and as they wandered among the aisles of the store, flipping through stacks of CDs, she considered telling Aíne about the night she'd met Eoin. But, ultimately, what was there to tell? That she met a guy and he gave her directions? That for a brief moment he had touched her back, and all week Maggie had been thinking of that touch? Pathetic. If she told Aíne that this minor incident actually counted as news, as progress, in her romantic life, it would only reveal her inexperience.

In the dance music aisle, they stopped in front of a large cardboard cutout of Kylie Minogue in turquoise hot pants and pigtails.

“Seriously, the pop music over here is even worse than the crap back home,” Maggie observed. She felt, then, under the corporate lights of HMV, a subtle change in atmosphere. Somewhere nearby, a crotch was being readjusted, eyes were appraising, testosterone was surging. She turned around just as the store clerk approached. His glasses made him appear older, scholarly; but a glaze of small, bursting pimples scattered across his forehead indicated that he was about their own age.

“You need some help?” he asked, his eyes hidden behind the thick window of his glasses.

“We're fine,” said Maggie, glancing at him briefly. “Just looking around.”

“You girls go to Saint Brigid's?” The boy ran his fingers nervously along Kylie Minogue's cardboard arm. He was looking intently at Aíne, whose pale skin was now burning red.

“Yes,” Aíne said, crossing her arms and smiling shyly, the delicate white line of her palate scar folding neatly in half. “We're in our junior cert year.”

“I thought so!” the boy said brightly. “I've seen you during open lunch.” He moved forward a bit, stepping almost between the two girls. It was clear that, like a basketball player rolling a pick, he was trying to block Maggie out. She took the hint and wandered away, fleeing to a listening booth where she nestled into a giant pair of headphones and PJ Harvey's
Rid of Me.
As she stole glances at the two of them over the racks of CDs, she wondered about Eoin. Had he really been as handsome as she remembered? Or had he been transformed in her memory by the gauze of the nighttime and her loneliness, the glasses of port and the heat that burned from his palm to her back?

“Did you
see
that?” Aíne demanded, lifting a headphone from Maggie's ear. “How he just came up to me like that?”

Maggie turned down the music and smiled. In the short span of their friendship, she'd never seen Aíne so excited about something that didn't involve her grade on a math quiz.

“He's got a friend—another lad who works here. They want to meet us at the carnival after they finish work.”

“What friend?”

“I don't
know.
Some fella that works here.”

Maggie looked at Aíne's flushed, hopeful face. In her ear, PJ Harvey panted,
did you ever wish me dead? Oh lover boy, oh fever head?

“But what do they want to
do
with us?”

Aíne took out her pink lip gloss and began smearing on a fresh layer.

“What do you mean,
do with us?
He was
decent.
He goes to Saint Brendan's. It can't hurt, can it?”

Maggie was unconvinced, but the alternative was going home to help supervise a mob of sugar-crazed eleven-year-old girls, so an hour later she stood with Aíne under the dark metal hulk of the Ferris wheel, squinting through the darkness at the approaching boys.

The carnival, which had been depressing enough at the end of the summer, was now flat-out ghostly. Most of the larger rides were covered in heavy white tarp that flapped in the salty wind like some frightening art installation. Walking through it felt like walking through a collapsible city of billowing white buildings. Corrugated doors covered the gaming booths, some of which were scrawled with orange graffiti. To the east, the sea was calm and abiding, rippling, watching.

Aíne's boy was named Paddy. He was stork-like and jittery, pulling at his pockets and walking in quick, jerky steps. He had a plated, ceratopsian nose, which, along with the thick glasses, made him look like he was wearing a Groucho Marx mask. The light wash of his jeans was outdated and his shoelaces were untied.

“Ever seen the view from Bray Head?” he asked, the long, wispy hairs on his upper lip stirring in the wind.

“Would you believe I've lived my whole life looking at that thing but never actually climbed it?” Aíne said. “I hear it's lovely, though.” Her voice was giggly and effusive; she was nearly unrecognizable from the serious girl who wore her uniform skirt unfashionably long and always did the extra practice sentences in the back of their French textbook. Maggie had witnessed this strange occurrence in her mother many times over the years: the transformative power of attraction.

While the two new lovebirds walked ahead toward the hill, Paul, who had been recruited as Maggie's date, sidled up alongside her. He was short and wiry, with jutting brows that overhung his dark eyes like invasive ivy. He reeked of Lynx Dark Temptation cologne.

“So, how do you like Saint Brigid's?” he began. “I heard the nuns there are bitches.”

“It's okay,” Maggie shrugged. “Pretty much the same as back home, I guess.” He looked over at her, his thick eyebrows hitching up as he tried to place her accent.

“Boston?” “No, Chicago.”

“Oh, right. The windy city.”

“Yeah.”

Although he seemed perfectly polite, his hooded eyes and ropy neck muscles hinted at a future of bar brawls and cardgame fistfights. Maggie wouldn't go so far as to describe him as attractive, but he wasn't heinously ugly, either, and as they walked through the hulking tarp figures that flapped in the sea wind, she wondered if maybe, when the night ended, she should kiss him. She felt none of the jittery happiness that trembled from Aíne ten feet ahead of her like a heat mirage on an asphalt road, but she was halfway through sixteen, and wasn't there something to be said, at this point, for just getting it over with?

“You always remember your first kiss,” her mom had advised before the freshman year homecoming dance as Maggie sat on the toilet waiting for her curlers to set and Nanny Ei painted her eyelids a frosty silver.

“Yeah, you do always remember it,” Nanny Ei acknowledged, “but it usually doesn't mean anything.”

Now, Paul walked close enough to her that Maggie could smell his cherry gum, a cloying smell that told her he'd been promised a girl who would make out with him. Was this the kind of night that Maggie wanted to remember forever: the November wind, the neon aisles of the HMV, the chipper where she and Aíne had shared a greasy plate of fries to pass the time before the boys got off work? It had been a pointless, meandering night, Maggie thought, like so many other teenage nights where you sit around, so bored that it actually hurts, waiting and waiting for something to happen. Most of these nights, nothing ever did.

There was a path that sloped upward from the sand, twisting like a castle turret, so that if you made it all the way up, past an abandoned rusty set of railroad tracks, you would reach the top of Bray Head. From there, the two boys explained, you could look down to see the white-covered tops of the carnival rides, the roofs of the town, and even, on a clear night like this, the lights of Dublin over the hills.

Maggie shivered in her jacket. It wasn't that she
minded
Paul at her side, necessarily. It was just that, given the choice between climbing the hill with him or going home to read a music magazine, she'd already be halfway up the Strand Road. But Aíne, who'd been swept up in Paddy and the newfound confidence that comes from a boy's attentions, was already on the onward march, and Maggie had no choice but to follow.

They climbed upwards, pushing away wet branches and snapping twigs. Maggie kept slipping, her Converse useless in the
slick mud, until finally Paul took her hand. It was cold and not very comforting. She made up her mind that she would not kiss him.

As they continued their climb, breathing hard, their halting conversation petered into silence. Finally the trees fell away, the sky broke open, and they were standing on a grass bowl jutting out into the world, moonlit water stretching dizzyingly below, and stars, so many stars, crowding the sky.

It was the most romantic place possible for a first kiss. Such a place did not exist in Chicago. In Chicago, a boy might touch you for the first time under the blue line tracks, or in some hidden corner of a floodlit city park. Such water, such sky, was not possible back home.
If I can't feel any romance in this place,
Maggie thought,
then I might as well just accept my future as a lonely old cat lady.
Paul's mouth was eager but not hideous in the starlight, and he put two firm hands on her waist, leaned in, and jammed a cold, limp tongue into her mouth. She didn't know what else to do, so she opened her mouth a little wider, trying to clear a breathing passage, closed her eyes tightly and concentrated on not drooling. His tongue began waving back and forth as if a tiny drunk man was weaving his way down the hallways of her throat. Then he began moving it in circles. Clockwise. Counterclockwise. Maggie opened an eye and saw, over Paul's ear, the moon and the water spread out behind him. When would it be over? He finished with a flourish, rearing his tongue back and striking forward, like a cobra. Then he pulled away with a sharp suck. Maggie wiped her mouth. Across the moon-bleached grass, Aíne and Paddy sat at the edge of the cliff, legs dangling over the crags below. He had his arm resting on the small of her back and as she turned to receive his kiss, her features softened by the stars and the water and the wind blowing her plain brown hair, Maggie saw her for a moment the way Paddy must have seen her at the HMV. When they finally kissed, Aíne's eyes fluttered shut and her fingers spread open in the grass.

“Should we go back and leave them to it?” asked Paul suddenly. His eyebrows sagged with disappointment—it was clear he hadn't enjoyed their kiss any more than Maggie had. They made their way back down the hill, and she slipped a few times on the descent, but Paul only called, “You okay?” from a safe distance behind her.

“Where do you live?” he asked when they'd reached the edge of the carnival.

“I'm up the Strand Road about a mile,” Maggie pointed.

“Oh,” he said, relieved. “I'm straight in the other direction.” He pulled her into a stiff hug, then, and they parted ways. As she threaded her way through the maze of white tarp toward Colm's house, a storm wind kicked up. Maggie stopped for a moment to watch the wind froth the glittering expanse of water, to listen to the sand make whispering sounds as it billowed across the air. And then, with a great
whoomph,
the tarp that covered the Space Odyssey came free, blew right off the hulking machine, and propelled into the air, wavering and blowing over the open water like a low-hanging cloud, until the wind died for a moment and it floated down like a great ash leaf and splashed into the water. Maggie watched it with a sense of elation, glad that the moment belonged to her alone, that she didn't have to discuss it afterwards with Paul, that it didn't have to
mean
anything. The rain began then, a deluge that drowned out every other sound, and Maggie pulled her hood tight around her face. She took one last look at the tarp, which was now far out on the horizon, floating on the water like a great paper crane, and ran the rest of the way home.

She opened the back door quietly, kicked off her sodden shoes, and tiptoed past Ronnie's bedroom, which was teeming with sleeping bags and the glossy heads of snoring eleven-year-olds. The spillover of girls had been given her own bed, and Laura had made up the couch in the sitting room, cozy with blankets and
flannel pillows. Maggie brushed her teeth and changed into her pajamas. She did not think she was tired, but fell asleep almost immediately.