Memory Lane - by Holly Gammage
The jingle-jangle of the fairground organ summons the elders at night. While the world dreams of artifice and innovation, they migrate in noble herds, like grey wildebeest on the distant plains of the past. They stumble out of their confines in plaid slippers and stockings, nightdresses and striped pyjama shirts. They bear their meagre bones on wooden canes inherited from parents, and grandparents before that. Worth a fortune in this whirring, barren land.
The evening is thick and metallic, poisoned by the fumes of myriad machines for myriad conveniences. The elders look out into the black with routine disdain. Blackout was two hours ago, yet the town still shivers with phantom bulbs. Orbs of illumination cling to the inky fresco, polluting what cannot be polluted by day. An electric disease, a plague for our sins. It thrives like larvae in the shadows of our existence. It soils our night as we soiled the earth with our greed for light.
Something sweet carries on the ordinarily foul breath of the evening…something novel, faintly familiar to the troupes of frail wanderers. Something that beckons them deeper, still, into the bruised darkness. Something that might help them to forget the tarnished present, to reclaim the wonder of the past.
They move with a rhythmic shuffle, tap – feeling their way through the smirking, impenetrable ink…hoping their half-sight will soon reveal the meridian of their pilgrimage. They follow the organ like hounds after their master’s whistle. Rubber soles catch on bike spokes and tomato cans – the rubble that hinders every step in this wasteland. Rusted and reeking with the tang of maggots on torn flesh; a toe sacrificed to steel jaws; a finger of a child who found a penny. The elders pick their path through the gutters of scraps, paying little attention to the shards that nip at their scraggy, mauve ankles. They are driven by the calling of something more precious than is plausible in this terrible twilight of life.
Through the gas districts and engine rooms that clatter while people sleep. Through the trash of a thousand lives lived a thousand times before. We are to blame for our misfortune. We had everything and wanted more. Great minds dream in squalor because their great minds could not see that the world was falling beyond their computer screens. They could not foresee the unforeseen, they said. Great minds breed lies in the wake of great mistakes.
The elders come in crippled throngs to the opening of the entrenchments: immense caverns forged in an old landfill site. Before all land became strewn with waste. This is where the night is darkest, in amongst the debris of a time before collapse. Reminded of the whispered warnings that fell on unlistening ears. They remember it all, and long to forget.
They hurry now, like cellar rats in pursuit of spent grain. The gymnastic cadence of the organ guides them where their eyes cannot, throbbing in their wheezing chests just as it throbs in the night. The syrup runs thicker on the air now, sticking in their throats and returning joy abandoned three decades before. The saccharine sting of hot, sugared nuts and candy floss. Inhaling unseen treacle like morphine.
A causeway precariously patchworked from corrugated miscellany emerges beneath the elders’ weary steps. The hollow clang of sticks and slippers ripples through the open night, as though livestock teetering on a cattle grid. Deep-set, walnut features are braced against the gusts of stagnant air. Milky eyes squint into fine, shady pleats, like those found on the bellies of mushroom caps. Lids meet lids in a slow prayer against the present.
And across the wasteland through which the elders forge their path, the slap of a bass drum ricochets in the murk. And a halo burns white and gold in the near-distance. And there is something almost sickening, now, about the sweetness that they cannot help but guzzle down like the soup they make on Sundays. And it is there, it is there.
The elders approach the archway tenderly, as though approaching the gates of heaven. Doused in gold and boldly twined with streamers of pink and green, it beckons with the tongue of a serpent, the great teeth of a mule. Infantine figures hold lollipops and pose at the base of the structure, set in still more gold. Letters formed in opulent script are intercepted by scrolls and birds, but undeniably spell Memory Lane. Fairgrounds are a thing of a bygone time, a time the elders hold dear. A parade of escaped balloons drifts up, up, towards a large pair of narrowed eyes. One becomes a pupil, its string a trailing lash…not inhibiting, but enhancing the sight of this invisible giant. The elders look at him as though his were the eyes of god, and he looks right back. They have seen each other before, they are sure.
Within, there are pleasures and assaults for and upon every sense. Cotton candy floats through the night like a drug, propelled and dispersed with a woosh from the waltzer. Unseen vendors shout proudly about their wares: candy apples, fruit soda, sugared nuts and buttered corn. Such a commotion! Such a divine commotion. A whirligig of cream horses – all marabou plumes and pastel reins – meanders to the trill of a music-box. A lullaby sound, as though the child whose plaything this is, might grow tired any moment and cease winding the key. A helter-skelter twists like the liquorice cables sold at the stand beneath, and the omnipresent drum beat is punctuated by the clank of breaking coconuts in the shy. The eyes of the gilt giant watch the more terrible world beyond, while the elders cast off their woes and grow drunk with nostalgia. Nostalgia is both a gorgeous and dangerous spree.
The elders disperse like the blushing wisps of floss…carried into the evening, spritzed with lashings of neon and gold. Their taut, grey faces open up like the velvet wombs of pansies – brightening with the promise of the past returning. Revived, suddenly, by the halcyon lure of a retrospect-present. Several hang up their wooden canes on a panel of railing, somehow standing, unwavering, in the wake of the furore. Others make for the carousel, its hood studded with silver and peaked like a trifle top. Beyond the stationary horses lies a cacophony of electric beams: the lights from a horde of rides and stalls and the delirious funhouse. They are stunned by the display, and they wonder for a moment about the world beyond the archway, beyond the eyes of the glaring giant. They wonder if the light parade will be discovered, if it will be seen and extinguished – returned to familiar darkness. The elders know the blackout is for good reason, and a little fragment within each one disapproves of this neon wonderland. But it is so easy to forget the sorrows of one’s world when ensconced by another. Another that is so bright, so very bright and teeming with bittersweet temptations.
Canary yellow lines the seats on the dodgems; threadbare and almost eaten away in parts by some unknown, unseen mite. The bodywork is beet red and shining, the poles reaching like seaside rock from the seatbacks to the ceiling grid. It is all exactly as they would want it to be. Exactly as it was painted in their memories, as nostalgia intended it. The grid crackles as the cars whip round the floor, cast alive with leaping sparks and the incessant bite of surging current. One a car, two a car. They are raucous as they collide, smiles wide and blue hair flailing like spun sugar. This is the spirit of youth, the elixir for joy in a joyless existence.
Those unburdened by limps and sores reach the undulating waltzer before most. They watch as the booths rotate, vacant but for the nauseated ghosts of themselves. Flashing and dancing in fits of purple, orange and green, the booths grow unruly as the music whines and blares. The elders see no attendant, but perhaps he too is a ghost. They climb aboard when the ride slows, choosing each a leathered booth, pulling the metal bar to their laps with the withered hands of men who might once have been children.
A sparse, hunched crowd forms around the waltzer; an audience for the few who now fly and whirl at a pace that takes their breath away. The spectators cradle great cups of sparkling fluid, hissing from below the rim and spitting mists of cherry, grape and lime. A few hold toffee apples between sticky fingers, lifting the lacquered exterior occasionally to shrunken lips…intending wholeheartedly to bite into the fruit, but settling instead for a meagre lick. They seem to enjoy it all the same, with warm smiles thawing the severity of their countless years.
In the centre of this place of colour and charm, a grand Ferris wheel presides over all. And the organ – grander still – grinds at its base, calling through the evening to those who are willing to listen. It takes care to play only melodies formed many moons ago – ditties that summon those in need of salvation. Ladies in lavender nightgowns sit two-by-two, swinging their grossly-veined shins above the pendulum, above even, the crest of the drop-tower. They are elevated, elated. Bound to their seats with the thrill of what lies beneath, with the same intensity that the doves must feel despair for the grey waste below their wings.
The organ pulses with a divine compulsion. It is the vitality of the fair, the heart that drives it on, more vividly into the night.
While the loop-o-plane performs acrobatics in the sky, a queue forms between the barriers of the funhouse. Splattered in fruit-bowl hues, and decked liberally with flags, the funhouse stands and beckons to the crowds with black windows and the promise of havoc within. Balconies striped with electric blue extend from the front wall, while a tunnel slide – not unlike painted macaroni – juts oddly from the one side. It looks unlike any house the elders have ever seen, and yet it is achingly familiar.
Three at a time fall through the funhouse. Quaking above the shuddering boards and sudden jets of air. The women hold their nightdresses firmly to their knees. They feel their way through warped corridors – never trusting their reflections, but gazing a while upon their younger, slimmer selves. Strange echoes fill strange spaces, churning stomachs with childish suspense. They wade through gorges of technicolour balls, kicking them into the air as though they are infants revelling in September leaves. They abandon all propriety, tumbling through rotating barrels and crawling like animals over undulating floors – growing hysterical at one another’s misfortunes, laughing as they no longer believed they could. And while tears roll from their crow-footed eyes, they do not notice the walls faltering around them – growing static, hazed with the tragedy of mirage.
Out in the ruckus of the fairground proper, the Ferris wheel has faded to a spectral hologram, while the carousel horses seem to have escaped their harnesses and fled. The organ continues to play its jaunty chords, but less heartily, somehow – unnerved, quite suddenly, by the elusivity of its surrounds. The waltzer has slowed to a stop and has been cast into sorry-looking shadows, and the coconut shy has all but vanished in a galvanic fuzz. The elders stand in blank clusters, seeing everything with uncomprehending eyes, allowing their rapture to wane.
The artificial beauty that had, moments before, been alight with glee, now sags and dissolves rapidly into the black. The scent of popping corn and caramel still lingers, though the rest retreats back into the oblivion of memory. Hold it dear now, don’t let go.
Out in the waste and the filth and the insufferable murk, the operators pull at levers and take orders from a tiny screen. They sit tight in a smoked-glass booth – camouflaged, almost, against the wretched palette of night. This grand illusion is their finest work yet…a playground as solution. A lie intended to detract from the horrors of living; living in a world that no longer seems worthy of life. But, you see, we made it so.
Operators, encased in glass like deities, cannot solve a generation of malfunctioning morality. They cannot put things, already destroyed and forgotten, back together for the sake of our smiles. They cannot listen to the earth and how it pleads in so many pitches of silence, how it tries to convince us of its sorrow. Nobody listened when it mattered most. These men cannot speak of wise decisions, nor of warnings heeded, for they know nothing of either one. They paint over things that cannot be fixed, while we stand and marvel at the precision of their handy work. We beat our hands together and proclaim them geniuses, for they have given us a moment of pleasure in a hopeless world. These meddlers, poised in their glass box with the authority of god, are little more than conmen preying upon human weakness, upon the importance of the past in a world so devoid of future. But we love them, for they help us to forget what we have done.
The elders stand now, on a plain of rubble beneath a vast purple sky. Mouths are pursed, faces soured by the abruptness of their loss. Silken tufts atop their bowed heads waver impatiently in the quickstep of a breeze. Silence is so much louder than noise. They yearn for the whimsy of the organ, for the incessant thud of drums, but their yearnings are met only by the empty howl of wind caught in tin cans. They fear the grey reality that stretches before them, so severe in its contrast to the vitality of the fair. A few shed tears of anguish, consumed by the return to their plight. Others crouch amongst the maggots and trash, as though searching for some remaining morsel – a candied nut, perhaps, the core of a toffee apple.
The operators send the fairground file for further refinement. There are flaws to be addressed before it can be opened to the masses. Illusions are powerful things. They can make us feel joyous, secure – even when we seem lost in the depths of human despair. We are terribly fond of illusions: illusions of safety, of stability on earth. We are fond of these lies that satiate our guilt, that disguise grand problems so we might not burden ourselves with the unpleasantness of it all. If we can be convinced not to look around at the terrors of the present, we simply will not look. We shade our eyes with culprits’ hands and declare there is no terror.
Sober and gathered at the wake of the illusion, the elders realise. The flaws lie not within the illusion, but deep within ourselves.
Back to blog