The Carnival at Bray (20 page)

Maggie, to bide her time, swigged from the Heineken. It made her eyes water.

“Not exactly,” she said finally. “It's more of a temporary thing.”

Ashley smiled, flashing a perfect set of white teeth, and put a slender arm around Maggie's shoulder.

“You can tell me,” she said. “I'm a runaway, too.” She laughed, a light sound like the tinkling of her toe ring. “Do you know my dad is one of the most successful movie producers in LA? I mean, I went to the Buckley School. You've heard of it, I'm sure.”

Maggie hadn't, but Ashley was not in the habit of waiting for people to answer her questions.

“And I know you might be thinking, poor little rich girl,” she continued. “But honestly, having everything—it numbs your
mind.
So one day, I just decided to say fuck it! And I took a leave of absence from UCLA. My parents said they'd bankroll me for a year, help me find myself or whatever. First, I went to London, called up some people I knew. It didn't feel all that different from California, except for the rain. But then, I went to Poland. At Auschwitz, I felt—well, I felt a lot of things, obviously. But what I felt
most:
it was this feeling of neutered existence, like I'd been locked away in a castle all my life. Not that I
envy
people who have suffered. But don't you think that never suffering at all—is its
own
form of suffering?”

Well, you've obviously never lost someone you loved,
Maggie thought. But she nodded politely and sipped her beer.

“The thing about traveling,” Ashley continued, leaning her elbows on the bar, “is that it doesn't cure your wanderlust.
Tennyson says that ‘all experience is an arch wherethrough gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades forever and forever when I move.' And that's exactly what it's like. The more of the world you see, the more insatiable the desire to see more becomes. You're always reaching for the next place. You want more and more and more and soon enough you realize that you can't ever go home.”

“I know what you mean,” Maggie said. “I don't even know where my home
is
right now.”

“Right?” Ashley tucked a loose blond strand back into the folds of her headscarf. “So, anyway, my parents gave me a year but I've been gone eighteen months. I'm actually fending for myself for once—I haven't spoken to my family in four months. And each day that goes by, I feel less and less like I can ever go back. I was studying fashion merchandising when I dropped out. Can you imagine? How can I go back and major in fashion merchandising when I've walked the slums of Calcutta?”

She paused, picked up her beer, closed her eyes, and took a long drink. Ehi came over, clapped an arm around each of them. His guitar was slung over his back.

“Who's this?”

“Ehi, this is Chicago! She's a runaway. She's a big fan.”

Ehi grinned down at Maggie from his impressive height. His eyes, like Ashley's, were bloodshot and dreamy.

“Well, perhaps I will play for you later tonight,” he said. His accent managed to sound both sophisticated and approachable. He waved an arm and the entire group finished their drinks and followed him out into the Dublin night.

The pack of them—Ashley and Ehi and the people who'd sounded like they were blowing bubbles (Dutch, as it turned out)—walked down through Temple Bar, where the nightclubs pulsed and spilled drunk, done-up teenagers onto the street, lining the curbs like finely plumaged birds. Ashley marched through them with the purposeful way of the beautiful, her face a sneer.

“This is where the amateurs hang out, the college kids from Boston who think they're all international because they got their very own passport last week,” she explained. “You won't meet anyone interesting here.” She linked her arm through Maggie's as they traversed the city, past the flower stands and street performers on Grafton Street and into McDaid's because one the Dutchmen, who was getting his PhD in Irish literature, wanted to sit at the barstool where Brendan Behan drank and perhaps in the process get some good vibes to help him finish his dissertation, which had stalled halfway through, at five hundred pages. He sat next to Maggie, lurching into her, his breath reeking of onion crisps and Guinness, and confided, “The whole thing is actually a heaping pile of shit: a reflection, really, of my entire grad school experience.”

Eventually, they made their way back to Saint Stephen's Green. They walked past the Shelbourne Hotel, its tall, grand windows and curling staircase, and in the failing light Maggie could see elegant couples leaning together over glasses of red wine, finely dressed old women sitting in plush velvet chairs sipping champagne from crystal flutes.

“That's the kind of place I'd be staying if I was with my father,” Ashley said as they walked past. “Only the finest for David Green. But don't you think the way we're living now—cheap hostel, cheap beer, good company, strangers who become friends by the end of the night—don't you think this is better? This, here, is
real life!”
She squeezed Maggie's arm in the crook of her elbow and guided her across the street and through the northeast entrance of the park while Ehi, the Dutch contingent, and a trio of Greek college students followed behind.

The park had fallen into shadow, the swans floating in the pond like white buoys. In the little gazebos, small groups of flannelled runaways huddled against the cold. Ashley found a spot beneath a circle of bare trees in the north end of the park. Ehi took a bright wool blanket from his guitar case and spread it on the
ground. He picked at the instrument for a minute and strummed a few chords. Someone began passing around a joint, and when it came to Maggie, streaming smoke, she inhaled once, delicately, and held the sweet smoke on her tongue. Then she tried again, this time puffing harder. A heavy heat rolled down her throat, and she burst into a coughing fit. Ashley laughed and gently kneaded her shoulder.

“Not so hard,” she whispered, her voice honey heavy. The joint came around again sometime later, and Maggie felt the sensation of limbs both heavy and weightless. The swans trailed silently in the water and the air beat around her like a pulse. Her hair blew in the wind, and bits of trash skittered by on the walking path. Ehi bent over his guitar, his fingers strumming a G chord.

“Any requests?” Ashley said. Her voice sounded far away. “Ehi can play whatever you want.”

“Do you know ‘I Know You Rider'?” Maggie spoke for the first time since they'd sat down. “It's, like, a folk song. My uncle used to sing it for me.”

Ehi's fingers moved over his strings while he thought.

“I don't think I do,” he said. “Sing a little bit of it for me.”

“I can't sing,” Maggie said.

“Come on!” Ashley said, handing her the joint. “Everyone can sing a
little
bit!”

The small band of Dutchmen and Greeks sat cross-legged on the bright blanket, making room for the runaways who had fluttered over like moths to the flame of Ehi's guitar. The pot had inhabited Maggie's brain and everything around her felt gauzy and pleasant, even the faces of staring strangers and the cold, cutting wind.

“Okay, why not?” She leaned her head back, her hair brushing the grass, her throat white and exposed in the moonlight, and began to sing.

I know you, rider, you're gonna miss me when I'm gone

I know you, rider, you're gonna miss me when I'm gone

I love you, rider, and I know you must love me some

I love you, rider, and I know you must love me some

You put your arms around me like a circle round the sun

Ehi had taken up the melody on his guitar and the runaways and Dutch PhD students stood up, bobbing their heads like the swans on the pond. Her voice was nothing special, but it didn't matter. She'd never sung for anyone before, had never even wanted to. Now, raising her voice above the wind, it felt like she'd been doing it all her life.

I laid down last night and I tried to take my rest

My heart was ramblin' like wild geese in the west

I wish I was a headlight on a northbound train,

I wish I was a headlight on a northbound train,

I'd shine my light through cool Colorado rain.

The city at night was a blooming thing, come to drink at the Liffey and the life spiraling from its banks, spreading all the way out to the battered rock at the edges of the country, the black mountains of Donegal, the rainy coasts of Kerry, the shores of Wicklow. They all called her Chicago, and that's who she became—a nameless nomad of Dublin, unmoored from her family and her past, from any life she'd known. A fine snow of downy confetti sifted from the sky, coating Maggie's eyelashes and hair as Ashley grabbed her hands and spun her around the blanket. They were both laughing. More joints were passed, small bottles of brown liquor. Hours or minutes later they meandered back to Nora Barnacle's along the narrow streets paved in bumpy cobblestone, the shooting stars of neon signs, singing Janis Joplin while their wild voices reverberated off the emptying streets. Maggie remembered climbing the rickety hostel stairs, Ashley's warm grip on her arm. She remembered Ashley's sweet breath over her, pulling off her boots and placing them next to her bed, helping her out of her clothes, peeling off her dress and tights
and folding Kevin's flannel into a pillow beneath her head. She remembered feeling tired and sweetly anonymous. And then she was asleep.

She awoke in late morning, the rain beating on the thin roof of the dormitory. Her head throbbed. She was in her underwear, covered by someone else's sheet. Ashley's, she thought.
That girl is so cool.
She sat up slowly, rubbing the dried mascara from her eyes. There were a few other strangers scattered around the dormitory, sprawled in their sleeping bags, but the room was mostly abandoned. Ehi and his guitar were gone. Ashley's things, her bright green sleeping bag and North Face backpack, also gone. Maggie pulled on her jeans and reached into her boots to retrieve her money and her concert tickets.

They were gone, too.

Maggie dumped the contents of her duffel bag onto the bed and began clawing through them. Her brain rung from the liquor and the beer and the weed. She yanked up the mattress, got on her hands and knees, and crawled along the floor around her bed. What she found, through the blur of her tears, were dusty clumps of lint and strangers' hair, a half-melted tube of purple lipstick, and a scattering of mouse droppings. She shook out her Doc Martens again and again, knowing, even as she did this, that she was wasting her time. Had anything Ashley said been true? The rich girl stuff? The fashion merchandising? But then, no true street urchin would have teeth that nice. So maybe Ashley had just done it for the thrill. Or maybe this what she had meant by “fending for herself.”
How could I be so stupid?
Maggie gagged, tasting the bile in her throat. She ran to the bathroom and kneeled on its cold tiles. She puked violently, saliva swirling lazily in the toilet. She wiped her mouth and straightened up to go look at her swollen face in the mirror. Her eyes were bloodshot, crescented by pink bags, “like two piss holes in the snow,” as Nanny Ei used to say to Kevin when he came home from a drinking binge. She brushed her teeth and begged twenty cents off the Slavic girl at the front desk who, seeing the tears trembling in the corners of Maggie's eyes, dropped her Cold War act and slid the coins across the counter with a sympathetic smile.

“Bad night?”

Maggie nodded, and the tears spilled over and splashed on the counter. She wiped them away with her finger, went to the payphone, and dialed the number of the Quayside.

An hour later, she sat, duffel bag on in her lap, at a bench at Connolly Station. When the train from Bray pulled up and she saw Eoin's dark head ducking through the crowd, she opened her mouth to call out to him but instead dissolved into tears again. She collapsed into him, the warm detergent smell of his sweatshirt reminding her of home, of chores, of her mother.

He took her to get something to eat, and it took every ounce of Maggie's self-control not to devour her entire breakfast with her bare hands. Meanwhile, with gentle questions, he got the story out of her. She told him about Kevin's letter and her mother's confession and her night out with Ashley and Ehi.

“I have to get those tickets back,” Maggie said. “It was supposed to be my pilgrimage.”

“Tell you what,” Eoin said, forking a tomato into his mouth, “why don't we stay in Dublin for another day? We'll scour the city for these two. If we find them, I'll go to Rome with you. Just like your uncle said.”

“But even if we
do
find them—then what?”

Eoin shrugged. “We kick their asses and steal the tickets back. No bother.”

“But what if they've already
sold
the tickets?”