The Carousel - A Saga

Here’s the first 17 pages worth (of over 400!) of The Carousel, A Saga. It is rather autobiographical and some have said quite gritty, which usually means that, in both literal and reading terms they’ve stuck to suburbia and have never been to a council estate! Anyway, I have been working on The Carousel for almost two years and am still chipping away at it. You will soon see that it is divided into character parts, indicating who the focus is on - this was a recent change as I felt it looked and read much more clearly and gave more to the characters, because it's about a large family and I didn't want to 'lose' any of them in the narrative, as some frequenly do in any large family. B

The Carousel - A Saga

---Part One---

Evie & Lola

The house looked stable from the outside. Orange brick, identical to the two other council houses in the row that made up Straw Man’s Walk. A few changes had been made in an attempt by the council to keep up with the times. uPVC window frames had replaced the long rotten wooden ones – even the nearby park, recently named Gartside Gardens and a sign to proclaim as much, had been bestowed with a few new benches, although upon closer inspection the benches each displayed a rectangle plaque informing all that they had been ‘kindly donated’ by Manchester University – as though keen to show that the days of Jude the Obscure were long gone. But if anyone scratched hard enough they would feel the wrath of young and old alike on the Gartside estate, a wrath often superseded by the day to day detritus of hand to mouth life. And sickness. At number one Straw Man’s Walk Evie and Lola Tully stood a step apart in the small kitchen. Their eyes were locked onto each others but their focus was elsewhere. They were frozen by a fear, the source of which was their Dad’s bedroom.

Anyone observing this scene from a few feet’s distance would have put Evie at twenty, max, and Lola at about eighteen, but they would be wrong. Evie was twenty nine, Lola, twenty seven. Yet the fear they felt was no different from that of two decades before, deep in childhood.

“Oh God Evie, what we gonna do?” Lola suddenly asked. She began to sob, tearlessly – her shoulders stiffly bobbing up and down.

Evie pressed her hand against her forehead, as if taking her own temperature, pressing harder because she couldn’t believe whether it was the heat of her hand or of her head. She continued to eyeball her younger sister, “fucking hell Lola, it’s really bad this time, we’re gonna have to get mommy.”

Lola’s shoulders came to an abrupt halt and she gave her sister’s prognosis a deep dramatic sigh, but the whinge still cloyed to the pit of her voice.

“Get mommy? What the fuck can she do? That’s if we can even find her!” She took the few steps to the window ledge and rested her head onto her elbows; thinking – trying to think.

“Well you think of something better then, there’s no point in going back round the doctor’s…” Evie lowered her tone to hush level, “I’m gonna go up and see how he is,” she said, and left her sister alone at the window ledge.

Lola listened to Evie’s footsteps on the dirty wooden steps – all fourteen of them, then to the familiar creak of her father’s bedroom door as it was pushed open with a hesitation upon which worry thrived. Lola pushed her right hand through her slightly greasy yet thick light brown hair, unconsciously feeling for the tiny pocks of dry skin she sometimes found, which she was sure were due to stress. She continued to stare through the cut out patterns of the greying piece of net curtain – just to the back fences of the houses opposite. Murphy, one of their three black cats, sauntered by until, sensing Lola’s observance, stopped. He looked up at her for a few seconds, blinked and held to a narrow slit, then licked himself, looked up at her again then resumed his saunter round to the back garden.

Minutes later Evie was back in the kitchen, staring at the floor and biting her bottom lip at the same time. The low drone of the old radio whose home was the kitchen window ledge now came into earshot – a ‘Golden Oldie’ their mother would have loved – ‘The Shadows’, proclaimed the false enthusiasm of the DJ – and on came all guitars and no gumption.

“He’s in a right mess up there Lola, the bag’s burst and… oh God! … Never thought we’d have to be doing this – at our age.”

“Our age? What about his age?” Lola asked. Their dad was fifty eight. Now facing her sister, she leant backwards against the window ledge and folded her arms across her chest, just like one of their mother’s once habitual pose. All both sisters could really think about was how on earth they were going to face, then clean, the excrement that had exploded out of their dad’s colostomy bag, get him in the bath, then bathe him and… and then… what? He had deteriorated rapidly in the past few years – had become that cliché – a shadow of his former self.

*

Conor

Conor Tully had begun work at the age of thirteen, in 1961, wringing the necks of geese, ducks and chickens in the small South Western Irish town of Bally--. These were his wringing sixties. The work was no less than what his seven or so older brothers had done before him, although his five sisters had escaped the slaughter for the usual domain of house and stove. However, like all his brothers before him there came the time when, at sixteen or seventeen years old, he could never remember which, Conor Tully lied about his age and boarded a boat – not for England, but for Scotland. It was as though by not aiming for England he was somehow being wiser. He wanted to escape the experiences brothers and friends with brothers had relayed back to the town, stories of homelessness, drunkenness, and complete fecklessness, a lot of lessness and messness anyhow. But that wasn’t meant to be.

Conor Tully arrived in Edinburgh and met up with one of his brothers who had already lived there for a couple of years, already married with two small children. Whilst Conor was lucky enough to get digs with a view of Holyrood Castle the day to day life was no different from what it would later prove to be in Manchester. Throughout all these times, however, the one constant escape were his reminiscences of nights at The Carousel.

A night club situated between several small West of Ireland towns, most of which began with Bally-, The Carousel attracted hordes of desperate and giddy teenagers tanked up on poteen, or whatever else they could get their hands on. Those nights, desperate as they were at the time, having to cadge a lift in some pick up or cattle truck, or having to walk home along miles of dark, unmarked roads in the shivering cold for hours and hours, (almost a pilgrimage in itself), took on a mythical status in Conor’s mind. ‘Sure, those were the days’, he’d often say out loud to himself.

His brother and his brother’s wife left Edinburgh for Birmingham, London, Liverpool, perhaps it was Northampton, somewhere; they were all the same, really. Conor was adamant he was going to stay in Edinburgh. But within weeks he had been laid off his labouring work, and then fell behind on the rent of his Holyrood digs. Full of shame he

crept out early one morning, like the character from some Dostoyevsky doorstopper that he would never read. He continued to look for work whilst, at nights, slept on a bench in Edinburgh’s main train station. ‘It’s going to work, it’s going to work’ he would silently chant to himself through these nights, the chant in the rhythm of an old steam train. Whenever a day’s work came along he managed to get to the launderette and the public baths. But he eventually conceded that it wasn’t going to work because he wasn’t going to work. It wasn’t meant to be, that’s also what he said out loud to himself, ‘arragh… it’s just not meant to be’, and that replaced the old chant. It was a much uttered saying that coincided with the news that another of his brothers had found a steady job with an Irish firm in Manchester. And so to Manchester he went. He had to aim for England after all.

Manchester offered no digs that matched anything remotely similar to a view of Holyrood; instead he managed to get a dinky, stale room next to another of his brothers’, in rooms above an old shop in Moss-Side.

Moss-Side was an area already known as Little Harlem, for its high population of Afro-Caribbeans, many of whom, like him, were just scratching a living, just getting by. It was as if the Caribbean men and the Irish men had made an unspoken pact – the former would go to the buses and the railways, the latter would go to the roads. And they would meet and utter a few words, or just a nod of the head, on a Saturday afternoon in the teeming bookies. And Conor was to stay on the roads, digging them up, going underneath them, fixing them, and tarring them. He did this, diligently, and with pride, for over thirty years, until struck down and fitted with a colostomy bag.

*

Evie & Lola

Evie and Lola left the house, making sure not to slam the front door behind them. Lola lit a cigarette and passed it to Evie who took a deep drag of it, watching its end blaze deep orange whilst forming a quick top hat of dark grey ash. She blew out the smoke like it was an act of defiance at the world. ‘Fuck. You!’ the smoke seemed to say. The health centre was only around a couple of corners but all Evie could think of was Evelyn, the main character of the short story of the same name in Dubliners, by James Joyce. Ever since she had read it, it had lodged itself deep into her psyche and served as a frame of reference, offering stabs of identification, leaving her hoping her own fate would not be that, not that – to which she would counter argue with herself that ‘it fucking wouldn’t’, that she was going to have a life, ‘far away from this shite hole of a Gartside estate…’ regardless of anything else. She only had two more years of her degree, then a year on PGCE then she would be a teacher and get the hell away. A pull of regret always hit her when she thought of the mindless and meaningless years spent working as a chambermaid, then a barmaid, then back to a chambermaid; always a maid, regardless, and she didn’t want to become an old maid. During the first semester of the foundation year she had soon been introduced to Marx’s concept of Estranged Labour. In the end it had brought tears to her eyes, not stabs but tears of identification.

Outside the health centre Evie and Lola took the last drags of their cigarettes and flicked them away into the distance. It was a run down two storey pre-fabricated building adorned with graffiti void of either talent or meaning. A circle of gaunt drug addicts loitered by the door, like the living dead, Evie always thought, hollow and yellow. There were a few in the foyer too. Evie and Lola recognised a number of them from their schooldays, anonymous young faces that had held no purpose, it now seemed with the luxury of hindsight. She reminded herself that she had, at least, escaped that particular fate. So far. Ce sa ra, sa ra. She had taken speed a few times whilst working as a barmaid and had gone down to six stone, which was obviously no good, and something, fortunately, that she had also quickly realised.

The waiting room was a depressing sight – just like the DHSS – kids running round the place, high on fizz and E-numbers; screaming, laughing, swearing their little fucking heads off, throwing tantrums, or worse, were silent and sullen – some of their young mums, bare legged or in track suits, waiting, always waiting. That too, Evie told herself, was another fate she had escaped. So far. It wasn’t that she didn’t want kids, she did, but not like that, alone, round there – on the estate. Any estate. They waited in line at the reception desk which had recently installed a square of Perspex for the protection of the reception staff. Lola kept on shifting her weight, all eight stone of it, from one hip to the next, and sighing dramatically, as if wanting the entire health centre to hear and acknowledge her urgency. Their turn finally came. The young, tired looking receptionist didn’t even ask ‘what?’ or ‘yes?’ but just about raised her eyebrows slightly, regally, and waited to be informed.

“It’s me Da, my Dad…” Lola began.

“Whose your dad?” the receptionist drawled.

Lola hardened her gaze. Evie stepped next to her sister.

“Conor Tully, he’s with Doctor Patel. You know damn well who me Dad is, you’ve seen us here with him enough fucking times!” Evie said.

It was the receptionist’s turn to give a dramatic sigh this time but she checked her computer as she did, tapping her fingers on the noisy, dirty click-clack keyboard.

“Right!” she said, her eyes still fixed on the screen. “So what’s the problem?”

“He’s really bad – he can’t get out of bed,” Evie said.

“Yeah, Doctor Patel needs to come and visit him this time… whether he wants to or not,” Lola added.

“He can’t get outta bed?” the receptionist repeated. “Has he tried?”

Lola looked at Evie, the exasperation crossing it like a black cloud on an already grey day.

“His colostomy bag’s leaked and…” Evie said in a lower voice.

“His what’s leaked?” the receptionist asked in a higher and suddenly more animated voice.

Lola pushed her face to within an inch of the Perspex, cleared her throat and shouted: “His colostomy bag! It’s leaked. He’s lying in his own shit and piss!!”

Evie could feel all eyes on hers and Lola’s back, but then told herself that they could bloody well look all they fucking well liked.

“Well I don’t know when he’ll be able to get away from surgery, but I’ll ask him,” the receptionist said, shrugging her shoulders.

“Right! Fine!” Evie replied.

“Fucking bitch,” Lola said as soon as they were outside.

“Whose a bitch? That woman behind reception? Nah, she’s not a bitch, she’s a proper hard faced cunt is what she is,” one of the addicts said, trying to keep pace with the sisters.

Lola and Evie gave no reply. Lola took out a cigarette and only when she had placed it in her mouth did she realise her mistake.

“Gis a fag love, yeah?” the addict said.

Lola raised her eyebrows at her sister, reached back into her cigarette packet and passed one over. Evie had already taken a few steps away – she only had a few left.

“Where we going?” Lola asked as she followed Evie in the direction of the parade of shops.

“We should try and get mommy,” she said.

“God! Great.” Lola replied.

Just before they reached the parade of shops they turned left into a maze of small two storey buildings, each housing four flats; all were overlooked by a twenty-seven storey block where most of the addicts lived, interspersed amongst rarely seen OAPs who, if they did emerge, was usually only during the hour or so after dawn.

“Which one do you think it is?” Lola asked, looking at the numbers of the first building’s flats.

“I dunno…”

Their attention was drawn to a small huddle of winos, congregated by a half collapsed wall behind the English chip shop. There were six of them – all ageing – three of whom held bags of chips, sharing with the other three. All of them either had a bottle of wine, cider or can of Special Brew, if not in their hand, then beside them. A dirty chain smoker’s cackle rose up and one of the women opened her mouth wide enough to show the world her almost toothless gums. It was Evie and Lola’s mother.

“Go and get her Lola,” Evie said, pushing her sister forward.

“I’m not going near that lot! You go!” Lola said, turning round and pushing her sister’s shoulder.

Evie tutted and strode forward.

“Evie? Where you going?” her mother called out.

“Is this one of yours then Jane?” one of the men asked.

“Yes, it’s Evie, my daughter, ooh and look, there’s perky over there. What’s the matter Lola, what you doin’ stood over there? Ashamed to be seen with your own mother are you?”

Lola sighed, shook her head and approached the group.

“It’s Da,” Evie said.

“Oh God! What’s up now?” Jane asked, her naturally narrow eyes widening, waiting.

“Ooh, it’s your old man, something’s wrong,” one of the wino women said, and waited for Evie to unfold the eagerly anticipated drama. Evie threw the woman a dirty look then back other mum.

“He needs you,” Evie said, as if she could hardly believe what she was saying.

“Me? What does he need me for?” Jane asked.

Evie looked at each of the three men, one of whom looked like a clapped out traveller/gipsy type, one of whom looked severely mental, and the other who just looked drunk and down and out. She wondered which of these men her mother was now shacked up with.

“We’ve called the doctor out, he’s really bad… we’re scared,” Evie said.

For an instant mother and two daughters shared a look. Jane picked up her can of Special Brew, took two greedy gulps, then threw the empty can across the half bald, dog shit and needle littered grass beside the wall and followed the girls back to Strawman’s Walk. All three women walked in near silence the five minutes it took them to return to the house.

Jane didn’t wait to be asked, the minute she had followed the girls into the house she went upstairs. Evie and Lola looked at each other then went back into the kitchen and waited. They stood in silence, Evie leant against the work surface, Lola against the window ledge, listening as their mother coaxed their father out of his bed, his pit, Jane would have called it. They heard the noisy boiler creak and moan into action as the water ran into the long porcelain bath that, thankfully, was yards from his bedroom.

“I’m glad she came,” Evie said.

“Yeah,” Lola said.

*

Evie spread the spare clean sheet over her father’s bed, the mattress now with no protection as even that, the protector, along with everything else that had been on the bed she had stuffed, whilst retching and heaving, into a black rubbish bag.

Jane slowly guided her husband back into the room. Their dad was barely conscious – taking small toddler steps, his hair sticking up, next to their toothless and half drunken mother. Evie and Lola began to sob at the sight before them. Jane gave no acknowledgement of her daughters’ sudden tears, as though they were doing nothing more than talking about the weather. There was no time to wipe their eyes as the front door received three short authoritative raps.

*

Jane flitted from one room to the next, surveying what, if anything, was new or different in the few months since she had left. The dining room table still held stacks of books, several piles of freshly washed clothes sat on the old welsh dresser, the dresser that Conor had found in a skip, carried back and sanded down; the living room had a few different ornaments, a big brown ceramic cart horse – ‘Conor again!’ No different from Steptoe, she had always thought – picking up useless nick nacks from flea markets the length and breadth of Manchester. Evie and Lola took up their familiar poses in the kitchen. They moved only when they heard Doctor Patel’s footsteps on the stairs.

“He’s only been up there two minutes,” Lola exclaimed.

“Ssshhh!” Evie said and went to meet him in the hallway.

“He’s just not taking his tablets,” the doctor told Evie, not bothering to hide his displeasure at having to make a home visit.

“It’s more than just that, it has to be,” Evie said.

“Listen. He’s dehydrated is all, he needs plenty of fluids and he must take his tablets,” Doctor Patel said then wasted no time in letting himself out.

“Where is he?” Lola asked as she arrived in the hallway.

“Gone? He can’t even have examined him or anything!” Evie spat the words out.

“Well. You know what these doctors are like, no time you see…” Jane said, twiddling a section of her frizzy grey/brown/bleached hair. It wasn’t long before she too had seen herself out, keen to return to her boozy playmates.

*

Conor

Conor wondered if there would be a tunnel of white light; whether his parents would be there to greet him. He had barely known either of them in this life. Would they look the same? Would he? He was just nine years old when his dad had died, but his dad had been seventy-two. He had been twenty when his mother died, but he hadn’t been told until he was twenty-one. It was 1968. Conor had been found in his Moss-Side digs in a pool of blood, by his brother, or a neighbour perhaps, he never did discover who had been responsible for saving his life. When he woke up he was in intensive care at the Manchester Royal Infirmary. A clot, haemorrhage, the doctors said. They had had to remove half a kidney. He spent his twenty-first birthday in there whilst his brothers and sisters had returned to Ireland for their mother’s funeral. She had been fifty-seven. She’d spent nearly thirty years giving new life to the world and then pneumonia took hold and carted her away.

He hated Doctor Patel, fucking useless eejit, hadn’t he always told the girls not to bother calling him out? The last time Evie had made him go round there, to the ‘health’ centre, was for his depression, but all Doctor Patel had said was that he should be grateful for what he had, a roof over his head – ‘many people do not even have that’, almost wagging a finger at him. As if that verbal slap around the head was going to take the depression away and suddenly make him interested in life again. Eejit. He knew he was talking about the homeless, not in this fucking country, but in India, or Pakistan, or wherever the fuck he was from. He was a useless eejit all the same.

Hadn’t Jane been around? Didn’t Jane just bathe him? That was a miracle if she had, considering she had long ago stopped bathing even for herself. He should never… arragh… to hell with the lot… better off dead out of it…

*